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• You are or will be a laid off programmer - what do you do a year ago, right now, tomorrow, and next week?

  - by Adam Davis

  Many programmers, software engineers, and other technology professionals are out of work, facing layoffs, or are unprepared for layoffs though they feel secure right now. What should every programmer do right now (even if secure in their current job) to prepare them for layoffs down the road? If your boss came to your cubicle while you read this and laid you off: What would you do immediately after? What would you do tomorrow? What would you do next week? It obvious that one should always have an up to date resume, always get recommendations from people when they see you at your best (not when you're looking for a new job), etc. What are the things, step by step, that every programmer should do (or should consider doing) long before they are laid off, when they're laid off, and shortly after being laid off? This is a question with many possible facets. While I want to encourage discussion to center around programming career based answers, please reconsider before downvoting someone because they're thinking in terms of how they're going to prevent going into debt. Bonus catch-22 type question: You can study a new language or technology while out of work, but most places want you to have more than 1-2 months experience in a working environment, not just from a learning exercise. Is it worthwhile to place a priority on new (ideally in demand) skills, or should you instead hone existing skills?

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• How should I architect a personal schedule manager that runs 24/7?

  - by Crawford Comeaux

  I've developed an ADHD management system for myself that's attempting to change multiple habits at once. I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but I've tried the conventional for years & am now trying it my way. (just wanted to say that to try and prevent it from distracting people from the actual question) Anyway, I'd like to write something to run on a remote server that monitors me, helps me build/avoid certain habits, etc. What this amounts to is a system that: runs 24/7 may have multiple independent tasks to run at once may have tasks that require other tasks to run first lets tasks be scheduled by specific time, recurrence (ie. "run every 5 mins"), or interval (ie. "run from 2pm to 3pm") My first naive attempt at this was just a single PHP script scheduled to run every minute by cron (language was chosen in order to use a certain library, but no longer necessary). The logic behind when to run this or that portion of code got hairy pretty quick. So my question is how should I approach this from here? I'm not tied to any one language, though I'm partial to python/javascript. Thoughts: Could be done as a set of scripts that include a scheduling mechanism with one script per bit of logic...but the idea just feels wrong to me. Building it as a daemon could be helpful, but still unsure what to do about dozens of if-else statements for detecting the current time

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• How to approach scrum task burn down when tasks have multiple peoples involvement?

  - by AgileMan

  In my company, a single task can never be completed by one individual. There is going to be a separate person to QA and Code Review each task. What this means is that each individual will give their estimates, per task, as to how much time it will take to complete. The problem is, how should I approach burn down? If I aggregate the hours together, assume the following estimate: 10 hrs - Dev time 4 hrs - QA 4 hrs - Code Review. Task Estimate = 18hrs At the end of each day I ask that the task be updated with "how much time is left until it is done". However, each person generally just thinks about their part of it. Should they mark the effort remaining, and then ADD the effort estimates to that? How are you guys doing this? UPDATE To help clarify a few things, at my organization each Task within a story requires 3 people. Someone to develop the task. (do unit tests, ect...) A QA specialist to review task (they primarily do integration and regression tests) A Tech lead to do code review. I don't think there is a wrong way or a right way, but this is our way ... and that won't be changing. We work as a team to complete even the smallest level of a story whenever possible. You cannot actually test if something works until it is dev complete, and you cannot review the quality of the code either ... so the best you can do is split things up into small logical slices so that the bare minimum functionality can be tested and reviewed as early into the process as possible. My question to those that work this way would be how to burn down a "task" when they are setup this way. Unless a Task has it's own sub-tasks (which JIRA doesn't allow) ... I'm not sure the best way to accomplish tracking "what's left" on a daily basis.

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• Algorithm to match timestamped events from two sources

  - by urza.cc

  I have two different physical devices (one is camera, one is other device) that observe the same scene and mark when a specified event occures. (record timestamp) So they each produce a serie of timestamps "when the event was observed". Theoretically the recorded timestamps should be very well aligned: Visualized ideal situation on two time lines "s" and "r" as recorded from the two devices: but more likely they will not be so nicely aligned and there might be missing events from timeline s or r: I am looking for algorithm to match events from "s" and "r" like this: So that the result will be something like: (s1,null); (s2,r1); (s3,null); (s4,r2); (s5,r3); (null,r4); (s6,r5); Or something similar. Maybe with some "confidence" rating. I have some ideas, but I feel that this might be probably a well known problem, that has some good known solutions, but I don't know the right terminology. I am a little bit out of my element here, this is not my primary area of programming.. Any helps, suggestions etc will be appreciated.

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• TransformXml Task locks config file identified in Source attribute

  - by alexhildyard

  As background: the TransformXml MSBuild task is typically invoked in a custom build step to mark up a web.config file with per-environment configuration; its flexible directives offer highly granular control over the insertion, removal, substitution and transformation of existing configuration hierarchies. For those using the TransformXML task (typically in a Web Deployment Project) I raised an issue against Visual Studio 2010, in which the file handle on the input file was not released, meaning that following transformation the source file remained locked. As a result, the best way to transform a file was first to rename it, transform it, and then copy it back, leaving the "locked" file to be freed up later.I just heard today that this has now been resolved in Visual Studio 2012 RTM. That's good news, because Web Config Transformations offer a lot. An intelligent, automated build process will swap in the relevant transform(s), making it much easier to synthesise the Developer and Build server builds. This makes for a simpler and more exemplary build process, and with the tighter coupling comes a correspondingly quicker response to Developmental change.Oh, and don't forget -- it isn't just web.configs you can transform. You can transform app.configs, or indeed any XML file that honours the task's schema and hierarchical rules.

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• Do large number of internal broken links affect SEO?

  - by TheBigK

  We've a WordPress blog and had disqus plugin in stalled for several months. Around late August this year, the plugin created a ton of URLs that linked to non-existent location on our website. For example - Correct URL: domain.com/correct-URL/ Disqus created - domain.com/correct-URL/344322/ - Throws 404 domain.com/correct-URL/433466/ - Throws 404 So essentially, Google found a LARGE number of broken links that pointed to unknown locations on our own domain. As the count of those errors (404) rose, our site suffered massive drop in traffic and crawl rate dropped to 10% of what it was earlier. I wish to know - Can large number of (we've over 99k of them) internal broken links cause rankings to drop? I've fixed the issue in one go by creating 301 redirects for each bad URL to correct URL and removing disqus. Google however drops the count by ~1000 daily, as I mark errors as 'fixed' in Google Webmaster Tools. Is there any way to speed this up? Should I setup custom crawl rate to 'Fast' in GWT to make Google crawl our website faster? I'd appreciate your inputs and experience sharing.

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• Automatic Generalization

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have been interested in functional programming since college. I played around a little with LISP back then, but I have not had an opportunity since then. Now that F# ships standard with VS 2010, I figured now is my chance. So, I was reading up on it a little over the weekend when I came across a very interesting topic. F# includes a concept called "Automatic Generalization". As I understand it, the compiler will look at your method and analyze how you are using parameters. It will automatically switch to a generic parameter if it is possible based on your usage. Wow! I am looking forward to playing with this. I have long been an advocate of using the most generic types possible especially when developing library classes. Use the highest level base class that you can get away with. Use an interface instead of a specific implementation. I don't advocate passing object around, but you get the idea. Tools like resharper, fxCop, and most static code analysis tools provide guidance to help you identify when a more generalized type is possible, but this is the first time I have heard about the compiler taking matters into its own hands. I like the sound of this. We'll see if it is a good idea or not. What are your thoughts? Am I missing the mark on what Automatic Generalization does in F#? How would this work in C#? Do you see any problems with this?

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• Do you leverage the benefits of the open-closed principle?

  - by Kaleb Pederson

  The open-closed principle (OCP) states that an object should be open for extension but closed for modification. I believe I understand it and use it in conjunction with SRP to create classes that do only one thing. And, I try to create many small methods that make it possible to extract out all the behavior controls into methods that may be extended or overridden in some subclass. Thus, I end up with classes that have many extension points, be it through: dependency injection and composition, events, delegation, etc. Consider the following a simple, extendable class: class PaycheckCalculator { // ... protected decimal GetOvertimeFactor() { return 2.0M; } } Now say, for example, that the OvertimeFactor changes to 1.5. Since the above class was designed to be extended, I can easily subclass and return a different OvertimeFactor. But... despite the class being designed for extension and adhering to OCP, I'll modify the single method in question, rather than subclassing and overridding the method in question and then re-wiring my objects in my IoC container. As a result I've violated part of what OCP attempts to accomplish. It feels like I'm just being lazy because the above is a bit easier. Am I misunderstanding OCP? Should I really be doing something different? Do you leverage the benefits of OCP differently? Update: based on the answers it looks like this contrived example is a poor one for a number of different reasons. The main intent of the example was to demonstrate that the class was designed to be extended by providing methods that when overridden would alter the behavior of public methods without the need for changing internal or private code. Still, I definitely misunderstood OCP.

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• As a developer, how do I learn sales? [closed]

  - by Dan Abramov

  I quit the company I was working for to pursuit an opportunity as a startup, and I believe in our product. I'm sure it's going to be great if we attract some customers first to keep going. (I don't want funding.) Our product is targeted at private schools and courses, and helps organize the mess other LMSs introduce. The problem is, our team is basically just me and I have very little idea about sales and marketing. I can do reasonably good copywriting but I'm sure I can do better—and being nervous or too techy in a real world conversation with the client doesn't help. I want to get better, in fact, a lot better at negotiating with clients and pitching my product. I did look for some “sales articles” on the web, and a lot of what I found is plain bullshit on SEO-engineered websites promoting books or $5000 courses. What I need instead is a developer's perspective on how to sale a product you think is great. What are typical programmer's mistakes and misconceptions about sales, and how to avoid them? How do you evolve into a reasonably great salesman? I can't believe it's in the mindset and unlearnable. Your own experience, combined with great articles available on the web is most welcome. To Future Readers The question got closed because it is not a good fit for this site. I found some helpful tips in a similar question asked on a sister StackExchange site about startups: I'm a terrible salesperson. What can I do about it?

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• What's the best way to manage error logging for exceptions?

  - by Peter Boughton

  Introduction If an error occurs on a website or system, it is of course useful to log it, and show the user a polite message with a reference code for the error. And if you have lots of systems, you don't want this information dotted around - it is good to have a single centralised place for it. At the simplest level, all that's needed is an incrementing id and a serialized dump of the error details. (And possibly the "centralised place" being an email inbox.) At the other end of the spectrum is perhaps a fully normalised database that also allows you to press a button and see a graph of errors per day, or identifying what the most common type of error on system X is, whether server A has more database connection errors than server B, and so on. What I'm referring to here is logging code-level errors/exceptions by a remote system - not "human-based" issue tracking, such as done with Jira,Trac,etc. Questions I'm looking for thoughts from developers who have used this type of system, specifically with regards to: What are essential features you couldn't do without? What are good to have features that really save you time? What features might seem a good idea, but aren't actually that useful? For example, I'd say a "show duplicates" function that identifies multiple occurrence of an error (without worrying about 'unimportant' details that might differ) is pretty essential. A button to "create an issue in [Jira/etc] for this error" sounds like a good time-saver. Just to re-iterate, what I'm after is practical experiences from people that have used such systems, preferably backed-up with why a feature is awesome/terrible. (If you're going to theorise anyway, at the very least mark your answer as such.)

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• How to procedurally (create) grow an artistic (2D) tree in real-time (L-System?).

  - by lalan

  Recently I programmed an L-system module, It got me interested further. I am a Plants vs Zombies junkie as well, really liked the concept of Tree of Wisdom. Would love to create similar procedural art just for fun and learn more. Question: How should I approach the process of creating an artistic tree (2d perhaps with fixed camera/perspective) dynamically? Ideally I would like to start with a plant (only a stem with a leaf) and grow it dynamically using some influence (input/user action) over its structure. These influences may result in different type of branching, curves in branches, its spread, location of fruits, color of flowers, etc. Want it to be really full of life/spirit. :) Plants vs Zombies: Tree of wisdom It would be great to dynamically grow a similar tree, but with lot more variation and animations happening. My Background: Student / Programmer, have used few game engines (Ogre3d, cocos2d, unity). Haven't really programmed directly using openGL, trying to fix that :). I am ready to spend considerable time, Please let me know about the APIs? and how would an expert like you would take on this problem? Why 2D? I think it's easier to solve the problem only considering 2 dimensions. Artistic inspirations: Only the tree, with fruits and leaves, without the shrubs at the bottom The large tree (visible branches, green leaves, flowers, fruits, etc) on the left, behind monkey. PixelJunk's Eden (Art style inspiration). Procedurally Generated Apple Tree using Fractals Please let me know if it was easy for you to understand the question, I may elaborate further. I hope a discussion of various approach would be helpful for everyone. You guys are awesome.

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• Html 5 clock, part ii - CSS marker classes and getElementsByClassName

  - by Norgean

  The clock I made in part i displays the time in "long" - "It's a quarter to ten" (but in Norwegian). To save space, some letters are shared, "sevenineight" is four letters shorter than "seven nine eight". We only want to highlight the "correct" parts of this, for example "sevenineight". When I started programming the clock, each letter had its own unique ID, and my script would "get" each element individually, and highlight / hide each element according to some obscure logic. I quickly realized, despite being in a post surgery haze, …this is a stupid way to do it. And, to paraphrase NPH, if you find yourself doing something stupid, stop, and be awesome instead. We want an easy way to get all the items we want to highlight. Perhaps we can use the new getElementsByClassName function? Try to mark each element with a classname or two. So in "sevenineight": 's' is marked as 'h7', and the first 'n' is marked with both 'h7' and 'h9' (h for hour). <div class='h7 h9'>N</div><div class='h9'>I</div> getElementsByClassName('h9') will return the four letters of "nine". Notice that these classes are not backed by any CSS, they only appear directly in html (and are used in javascript). I have not seen classes used this way elsewhere, and have chosen to call them "marker classes" - similar to marker interfaces - until somebody comes up with a better name.

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• Developing wheel reinventing tendencies into a skill as opposed to reluctantly learning wheel-finding skills? [duplicate]

  - by Korey Hinton

  This question already has an answer here: Is reinventing the wheel really all that bad? 20 answers I am more of a high-level wheel reinventor. I definitely prefer to make use of existing API features built into a language and popular third-party frameworks that I know can solve the problem, however when I have a particular problem that I feel capable of solving within a reasonable time I am very reluctant to find someone else's solution. Here are a few reasons why I reinvent: It takes time to learn a new API API restrictions might exist that I don't know about Avoiding re-work of unfamiliar code I am conflicted between doing what I know and shifting to a new technique I don't feel comfortable with. On one hand I feel like following my instincts and getting really good at solving problems, especially ones that I would never challenge myself with if all I did was try to find answers. And on the other hand I feel like I might be missing out on important skills like saving time by finding the right framework and expanding my knowledge by learning how to use a new framework. I guess my question comes down to this: My current attitude is to stick to the built-in API and APIs I know well* and to not spend my time searching github for a solution to a problem I know I can solve myself within a reasonable amount of time. Is that a reasonable balance for a successful programmer? *Obviously I will still look around for new frameworks that save time and solve/simplify difficult problems.

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• Impact on SEO of adding categories/tags in front of the HTML title [closed]

  - by Mad Scientist

  Possible Duplicate: Does the order of keywords matter in a page title? All StackExchange sites add the most-used tag of a question in front of the HTML title for SEO purposes. On Stackoverflow for example this is usually the programming language, so you end up with a title like python - How do I do X? This has obviously an enourmous benefit on SEO as the programming language is an extremely important keyword that is very often omitted from the title. Now, my question is for the cases where the tag isn't an important keyword missing from the title, but just a category. So on Biology.SE for example one would have questions like biochemistry - How does protein X interact with Y? or on Skeptics medical science - Do vaccines cause autism? Those tags are usually not part of the search terms, they serve to categorize the content but users don't use those tags in their searches. How harmful is adding tags that are not used in searches in terms of SEO? Is there any hard data on the impact this practise might have on SEO? The negative aspects I can imagine, but have no data to show that it is actually a problem are: I heard that search engines dislike keyword stuffing and this might trigger some defense mechanisms against that It's a practise associated with less reputable sites, a keyword in front that doesn't fit the actual title well might look suspicious to some users. It wastes precious space in the title shown in search results.

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• Line Intersection from parametric equation

  - by Sidar

  I'm sure this question has been asked before. However, I'm trying to connect the dots by translating an equation on paper into an actual function. I thought It would be interesting to ask here instead on the Math sites (since it's going to be used for games anyway ). Let's say we have our vector equation : x = s + Lr; where x is the resulting vector, s our starting point/vector. L our parameter and r our direction vector. The ( not sure it's called like this, please correct me ) normal equation is : x.n = c; If we substitute our vector equation we get: (s+Lr).n = c. We now need to isolate L which results in L = (c - s.n) / (r.n); L needs to be 0 < L < 1. Meaning it needs to be between 0 and 1. My question: I want to know what L is so if I were to substitute L for both vector equation (or two lines) they should give me the same intersection coordinates. That is if they intersect. But I can't wrap my head around on how to use this for two lines and find the parameter that fits the intersection point. Could someone with a simple example show how I could translate this to a function/method?

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• How to divide work to a network of computers?

  - by Morpork

  Imagine a scenario as follows: Lets say you have a central computer which generates a lot of data. This data must go through some processing, which unfortunately takes longer than to generate. In order for the processing to catch up with real time, we plug in more slave computers. Further, we must take into account the possibility of slaves dropping out of the network mid-job as well as additional slaves being added. The central computer should ensure that all jobs are finished to its satisfaction, and that jobs dropped by a slave are retasked to another. The main question is: What approach should I use to achieve this? But perhaps the following would help me arrive at an answer: Is there a name or design pattern to what I am trying to do? What domain of knowledge do I need to achieve the goal of getting these computers to talk to each other? (eg. will a database, which I have some knowledge of, be enough or will this involve sockets, which I have yet to have knowledge of?) Are there any examples of such a system? The main question is a bit general so it would be good to have a starting point/reference point. Note I am assuming constraints of c++ and windows so solutions pointing in that direction would be appreciated.

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• Ubiquitous Language and Custom types

  - by EdvRusj

  Note that my question is referring to those attributes that even on their own already represent a concept ( ie on their own provide a cohesive meaning ). Thus such attribute needs no additional functional support and as such is self-contained. I'm also well-aware that even with self-contained attributes the custom types may prove beneficial ( for example, they give the ability to add new behavior later, when business requirements change ). Thus, my question focuses only on whether custom types for self-contained attributes really enrich Ubiquitous Language UL a) I've read that in most cases, even simple, self-contained attributes should have custom, more descriptive types rather than basic value types ( double, string ... ), because among other things, descriptive types add to the UL, while the use of basic types instead weakens the language. I understand the importance of UL, but how does having a basic type for a self-contained attribute weaken the language, since with self-contained attributes the name of the attribute already adequately describes the concept and thus contributes to the UL vocabulary? For example, the term person_age already adequately explains the concept of quantifying the number of years a person has: class Person { string person_age; } so what could we possibly gain by also introducing the term ThingAge to the UL: class person { ThingAge person_age; } thanks

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• Oracle Cloud and Oracle Platinum Services Announcements

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Live Webcast - Oracle Cloud and Oracle Platinum Services Announcements Wednesday, June 06, 2012 1:00 p.m. PT – 2:30 p.m. PT View your local time Live Webcast Register to watch at your desk! Don't have an Oracle account? Sign up now!  Why do I need an account? Register Now! Please join Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd for important Oracle announcements. Be among the first to learn about new developments in Oracle’s cloud strategy and game-changing advances in Oracle Support.  Register Now! Are you based in the San Francisco Bay Area? Register to attend the live event in Redwood Shores. Oracle values your privacy, and will treat the information we collect from you as a result of your registration and participation in this activity in accordance with the Oracle Privacy Policy. Event Details: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 1:00 p.m. PT – 2:30 p.m. PT Live Webcast Stay Connected:     Join the conversation: #oraclecloud #oraclesupport

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• Avoid overwriting all the methods in the child class

  - by Heckel

  The context I am making a game in C++ using SFML. I have a class that controls what is displayed on the screen (manager on the image below). It has a list of all the things to draw like images, text, etc. To be able to store them in one list I created a Drawable class from which all the other drawable class inherit. The image below represents how I would organize each class. Drawable has a virtual method Draw that will be called by the manager. Image and Text overwrite this method. My problem is that I would like Image::draw method to work for Circle, Polygon, etc. since sf::CircleShape and sf::ConvexShape inherit from sf::Shape. I thought of two ways to do that. My first idea would be for Image to have a pointer on sf::Shape, and the subclasses would make it point onto their sf::CircleShape or sf::ConvexShape classes (Like on the image below). In the Polygon constructor I would write something like ptr_shape = &polygon_shape; This doesn't look very elegant because I have two variables that are, in fact, just one. My second idea is to store the sf::CircleShape and sf::ConvexShape inside the ptr_shape like ptr_shape = new sf::ConvexShape(...); and to use a function that is only in ConvexShape I would cast it like so ((sf::ConvexShape*)ptr_shape)->convex_method(); But that doesn't look very elegant either. I am not even sure I am allowed to do that. My question I added details about the whole thing because I thought that maybe my whole architecture was wrong. I would like to know how I could design my program to be safe without overwriting all the Image methods. I apologize if this question has already been asked; I have no idea what to google.

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• How to perform game object smoothing in multiplayer games

  - by spaceOwl

  We're developing an infrastructure to support multiplayer games for our game engine. In simple terms, each client (player) engine sends some pieces of data regarding the relevant game objects at a given time interval. On the receiving end, we step the incoming data to current time (to compensate for latency), followed by a smoothing step (which is the subject of this question). I was wondering how smoothing should be performed ? Currently the algorithm is similar to this: Receive incoming state for an object (position, velocity, acceleration, rotation, custom data like visual properties, etc). Calculate a diff between local object position and the position we have after previous prediction steps. If diff doesn't exceed some threshold value, start a smoothing step: Mark the object's CURRENT POSITION and the TARGET POSITION. Linear interpolate between these values for 0.3 seconds. I wonder if this scheme is any good, or if there is any other common implementation or algorithm that should be used? (For example - should i only smooth out the position? or other values, such as speed, etc) any help will be appreciated.

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• Does the term "Learning Curve" include the knowing of the gotchas?

  - by voroninp

  When you learn new technology you spend time understanding its concepts and tools. But when technology meets real life strange and not pleasant things happen. Reuqirements are often far from ideal and differ from 'classic' scenario. And soon I find myself bending the technology to my real needs. At this point I begin to know bugs of the system or that is is not so flexible as it seemed at the very begining. And this 'fighting' with technology consumes a great part of the time while developing. What is more depressing is that the bunch of such gotchas and workarounds are not concentrated at one place (book, site, etc.) And before you really confront it you cannot really ask the correct question because you do not even suspect the reason for the problem to occur (unknown-unknown). So my question consiststs of three: 1) Do you really manage (and how) to predict possible future problems? 2) How much time do you spend for finding the workaround/fix/solution before you leave it and switch to other problems. 3) What are the criteria for you to think about yourself as experienced in the tecnology. Do you take these gotchas into account?

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• Installing Ubuntu Server 12.04 as a software RAID 1 mirror fails to boot

  - by Jeff Atwood

  I'm installing a few new Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS servers, and they have two 512 GB SSDs. I want them to use software RAID 1 mirroring, so I was following this document religiously step by step: https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/advanced-installation.html To summarize the above official documentation: to set up a software RAID 1 mirror in Ubuntu Server, you choose manual partitioning during the setup, and do this on each drive: "swap" partition of roughly RAM size "physical volume for RAID" partition for remaining drive size After that, you set up the RAID 1 mirror using the RAID partitions on drive A and B, make it ext4 and containing the root filesystem partition. Setup continues from there just fine. One caveat: I was completely unable to select the "physical volume for RAID" as bootable. When I tried to do that in setup, it had no effect: I could press enter on the "make bootable" option all day long and nothing would ever change. However, after install successfully completes, I have a big problem: the system won't boot! I get Reboot and Select proper boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key What did I do wrong? Why can't I mark that "physical volume for RAID" partition bootable during Ubuntu Server setup? Is there some way for me to make the physical volumes for RAID bootable after the fact, perhaps from a live CD or something?

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• I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

  - by kmote

  I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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• Companies and Ships

  - by TechnicalWriting

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

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• South Florida SQL Saturday 2010

  - by ScottKlein

  The South Florida SQL Server Users Group is proud to announce the 2nd annual South Florida SQL Saturday will be held Saturday, July 31st at DeVry University (the same place it was held last year). Like last year, this will be a FREE event, aimed at everyone involved with SQL Server. For those who attended in 2009, this was a great event. We had nearly 500 attendees with 6 tracks and great speakers. We hope to do it bigger and better this year, with more tracks, more speakers, and more people! Our goal is to surpass the 500 attendee mark, with tracks for DBA's, SQL Developers, plenty of BI information, and Azure! Last year I said seating was limited, but what what the heck? No limitation. If you deal with SQL, or want to learn SQL, this is the place to be. To register, click on this link: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/40/eventhome.aspx We already have a lot of registered attendees and many sessions submitted. Many SQL Server experts and MVP's will be speaking so here is a chance to learn from the BEST!

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