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• Perm SSIS Developer Urgently Required

  - by blakmk

    Job Role To provide dedicated data services support to the company, by designing, creating, maintaining and enhancing database objects, ensuring data quality, consistency and integrity. Migrating data from various sources to central SQL 2008 data warehouse will be the primary function. Migration of data from bespoke legacy database’s to SQL 2008 data warehouse. Understand key business requirements, Liaising with various aspects of the company. Create advanced transformations of data, with focus on data cleansing, redundant data and duplication. Creating complex business rules regarding data services, migration, Integrity and support (Best Practices). Experience ·         Minimum 3 year SSIS experience, in a project or BI Development role and involvement in at least 3 full ETL project life cycles, using the following methodologies and tools o    Excellent knowledge of ETL concepts including data migration & integrity, focusing on SSIS. o    Extensive experience with SQL 2005 products, SQL 2008 desirable. o    Working knowledge of SSRS and its integration with other BI products. o    Extensive knowledge of T-SQL, stored procedures, triggers (Table/Database), views, functions in particular coding and querying. o    Data cleansing and harmonisation. o    Understanding and knowledge of indexes, statistics and table structure. o    SQL Agent – Scheduling jobs, optimisation, multiple jobs, DTS. o    Troubleshoot, diagnose and tune database and physical server performance. o    Knowledge and understanding of locking, blocks, table and index design and SQL configuration. ·         Demonstrable ability to understand and analyse business processes. ·         Experience in creating business rules on best practices for data services. ·         Experience in working with, supporting and troubleshooting MS SQL servers running enterprise applications ·         Proven ability to work well within a team and liaise with other technical support staff such as networking administrators, system administrators and support engineers. ·         Ability to create formal documentation, work procedures, and service level agreements. ·         Ability to communicate technical issues at all levels including to a non technical audience. ·         Good working knowledge of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.   Location Based in Crawley with possibility of some remote working Contact me for more info: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/blakmk/contact.aspx      

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• How does datomic handle "corrections"?

  - by blueberryfields

  tl;dr Rich Hickey describes datomic as a system which implicitly deals with timestamps associated with data storage from my experience, data is often imperfectly stored in systems, and on many occasions needs to retroactively be corrected (ie, often the question of "was a True on Tuesday at 12:00pm?" will have an incorrect answer stored in the database) This seems like a spot where the abstractions behind datomic might break - do they? If they don't, how does the system handle such corrections? Rich Hickey, in several of his talks, justifies the creation of datomic, and explains its benefits. His work, if I understand correctly, is motivated by core the insight that humans, when speaking about data and facts, implicitly associate some of the related context into their work(a date-time). By pushing the work required to manage the implicit date-time component of context into the database, he's created a system which is both much easier to understand, and much easier to program. This turns out to be relevant to most database programmers in practice - his work saves everyone a lot of time managing complex, hard to produce/debug/fix, time queries. However, especially in large databases, data is often damaged/incorrect (maybe it was not input correctly, maybe it eroded over time, etc...). While most database updates are insertions of new facts, and should indeed be treated that way, a non-trivial subset of the work required to manage time-queries has to do with retroactive updates. I have yet to see any documentation which explains how such corrections, or retroactive updates, are handled by datomic; from my experience, they are a non-trivial (and incredibly difficult to deal with) subset of time-related data manipulation that database programmers are faced with. Does datomic gracefully handle such updates? If so, how?

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• GeoTrust SSL brand name used by re-sellers

  - by Christopher

  I feel like a I got the bait-and-switch from my web host provider since they advertise "GeoTrust SSL" for $99. I purchased it, thinking the certificate is issued from geotrust.com, but then I get an email from Comodo saying they are providing it. My host provider says they get a discount by using Comodo. I purchased the certificate with the understanding it would be issued by GeoTrust. I called the host provider and they said they usually expect it from GeoTrust, but someone from email support responded saying the product name is "GeoTrust SSL" but they use Comodo to get a discount. I think this is bogus and unfair trade practice. However, searching for "GeoTrust" on google brings up a ton of websites selling "GeoTrust" certificates. How can companies get away with this? Since the host provider is part of BBB I plan to inform my host to update the purchase page on their website to state clearly that... "This certicate is provided at a discount and may be issued by a provider other than GeoTrust.com, such as Comodo.com" Any feedback on this is appreciated.

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• Do Great Work

  - by user12601034

  Have you ever attended an online conference and actually had a desire to attend all of it?? Yesterday I attended the first day of the Great Work MBA program, sponsored by Box of Crayons and hosted by Michael Bungay Stanier. The topic of the day was “Grounding Yourself,” and the day featured five speakers on five different topics. I have to admit that I started the first session with kind of a “blech” feeling that I didn’t really want to participate, but for some reason I did. So I listened to the first session, and I was hooked. I ended up listening to all of the sessions for the day, and I had some great take-aways from the sessions – my highlights included: The opposite of bravery isn’t fear, it’s settling. In essence, you need to be brave in order to accomplish anything. If you’re settling, you’re not being brave, and your accomplishments will likely be lackluster. Bravery requires confidence and permission. You need to work at being brave by taking small wins, build them up and then take slightly larger risks. Additionally, you need to “claim your own crown.” Nobody in the business world is going to give you permission to be a guru in X – you need to give yourself permission to become a guru in X and then do it. Fall in love with obstacles. Everyone is going to face some form of failure. One way to deal with this is to fall in love with solving the puzzle of obstacles. You don’t have to hit it if you can go around it. Understanding purpose brings out the best in people and the best people. As a leader, drawing in people who are passionate and highly motivated about their work creates velocity for your organization. Being clear about purpose is the first step in doing this. You must own your own story. Everything about you creates a “unique you” that is distinct from everyone else. As you take ownership of this, it becomes part of your strength. It’s not a strength if you’re running away from it. Focus on what’s right. Be aware of your tendency to interpret a situation a certain way and differentiate between helpful and unhelpful interpretations. Three questions for how to think differently: 1) Why? 2) Who says so? 3) What would happen if? These three questions can help you build alternative perspectives and options that can increase resiliency. Even though this first day was focused on “Grounding Yourself,” I see plenty of application in the corporate environment for both individuals and leaders of teams. To apply these highlights to my work environment, I would do the following: Understand the purpose – of my company, of my team and of my role on the team. If I know the purpose, I know what I need to bring to the table to make me, my team and my company successful. Declare your goals…your BEHAGS (big, hairy, audacious goals).Have the confidence to declare what you and/or your team is going to accomplish.Sure, you might have to re-state those goals down the line, but you can learn from that as well. Get creative about achieving your goals.Break down your obstacles by asking yourself what is going to stop you from achieving your goals and then, for each obstacles, ask those three questions:Why?Who says so? What would happen if? Focus on what’s right.I had a manager who asked us to write status reports every week.“Status” consisted of 1) What did I accomplish; 2) What will I accomplish next week; 3) How can my manager help me.The focus on our status report was always “what’s right”(“what’s wrong” was always a conversation at the point in time it was needed). I’m normally a skeptic of online webcasts/conferences, and I normally expect to take away maybe one or two ideas. I’m really glad, however, that I took the time to listen to all of the sessions yesterday, and I hope that my take-aways inspire you to think about how you might do great work also. --

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• Should the number of developers be considered when estimating a task?

  - by Ludwig Magnusson

  I am pretty inexperienced with working in agile projects but I have tried it a few times and I always run into this problem when estimating a task. Do we bring into the estimate the number of developers that will work on the task? Let me explain: Task A is estimated to one time unit and developer 1 will work on it. Task B is also estimated to one time unit and developer 2 and 3 will work on it together. I.e. if developer 1 begins to work on task A at the same time developer 2 and 3 begins to work on task B they will all finish at the same time according to the estimate. Should the estimate for task B be twice of that for task A or the same? The problem as I see it is that when a task is received and estimated, it is not always possible to know how many people will work on it. And if you assumed that two developers would work on the task for one time unit but it turns out that only one developer will actually do it, this will not automatically mean that that developer will work on it for two time units. Is there any standard practice for this?

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• Are long methods always bad?

  - by wobbily_col

  So looking around earlier I noticed some comments about long methods being bad practice. I am not sure I always agree that long methods are bad (and would like opinions from others). For example I have some Django views that do a bit of processing of the objects before sending them to the view, a long method being 350 lines of code. I have my code written so that it deals with the paramaters - sorting / filtering the queryset, then bit by bit does some processing on the objects my query has returned. So the processing is mainly conditional aggregation, that has complex enough rules it can't easily be done in the database, so I have some variables declared outside the main loop then get altered during the loop. varaible_1 = 0 variable_2 = 0 for object in queryset : if object.condition_condition_a and variable_2 > 0 : variable 1+= 1 ..... ... . more conditions to alter the variables return queryset, and context So according to the theory I should factor out all the code into smaller methods, so That I have the view method as being maximum one page long. However having worked on various code bases in the past, I sometimes find it makes the code less readable, when you need to constantly jump from one method to the next figuring out all the parts of it, while keeping the outermost method in your head. I find that having a long method that is well formatted, you can see the logic more easily, as it isn't getting hidden away in inner methods. I could factor out the code into smaller methods, but often there is is an inner loop being used for two or three things, so it would result in more complex code, or methods that don't do one thing but two or three (alternatively I could repeat inner loops for each task, but then there will be a performance hit). So is there a case that long methods are not always bad? Is there always a case for writing methods, when they will only be used in one place?

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• Knowing state of game in real time

  - by evthim

  I'm trying to code a tic tac toe game in java and I need help figuring out how to efficiently and without freezing the program check if someone won the game. I'm only in the design stages now, I haven't started programming anything but I'm wondering how would I know at all times the state of the game and exactly when someone wins? Response to MarkR: (note: had to place comment here, it was too long for comment section) It's not a homework problem, I'm trying to get more practice programming GUI's which I've only done once as a freshman in my second introductory programming course. I understand I'll have a 2D array. I plan to have a 2D integer array where x would equal 1 and o would equal 0. However, won't it take too much time if I check after every move if someone won the game? Is there a way or a data structure or algorithm I can use so that the program will know the state (when I say state I mean not just knowing every position on the board, the int array will take care of that, I mean knowing that user 1 will win if he places x on this block) of the game at all times and thus can know automatically when someone won?

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• How to handle monetary values in PHP and MySql?

  - by Songo

  I've inherited a huge pile of legacy code written in PHP on top of a MySQL database. The thing I noticed is that the application uses doubles for storage and manipulation of data. Now I came across of numerous posts mentioning how double are not suited for monetary operations because of the rounding errors. However, I have yet to come across a complete solution to how monetary values should be handled in PHP code and stored in a MySQL database. Is there a best practice when it comes to handling money specifically in PHP? Things I'm looking for are: How should the data be stored in the database? column type? size? How should the data be handling in normal addition, subtraction. multiplication or division? When should I round the values? How much rounding is acceptable if any? Is there a difference between handling large monetary values and low ones? Note: A VERY simplified sample code of how I might encounter money values in everyday life: $a= $_POST['price_in_dollars']; //-->(ex: 25.06) will be read as a string should it be cast to double? $b= $_POST['discount_rate'];//-->(ex: 0.35) value will always be less than 1 $valueToBeStored= $a * $b; //--> any hint here is welcomed $valueFromDatabase= $row['price']; //--> price column in database could be double, decimal,...etc. $priceToPrint=$valueFromDatabase * 0.25; //again cast needed or not? I hope you use this sample code as a means to bring out more use cases and not to take it literally of course. Bonus Question If I'm to use an ORM such as Doctrine or PROPEL, how different will it be to use money in my code.

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• Will people respect a Masters of Science in IT w/software engineering concentration from RPI?

  - by twneale

  Here's my thing: I got my undergraduate degree in political science, then a law degree. Then I figured out that I love programming and I'm pretty good at it too. It's fun and rewarding enough for me that I'd prefer to do it for a living over almost any form of pure law practice. So I'm looking at getting a masters degree to put some weight behind a possible career switch. If I actually want to develop software (web, in particular), would people in programming circles respect a master's of science in IT? Specifically, consider as an example the MS in IT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (with a concentration in software engineering). Here's the home page: http://www.rpi.edu/IT/graduate/masters_program.html In particular, I mean to draw a contrast between IT as specifically contemplated by the RPI masters program (an interdisciplinary tech/business program) and other MS degrees in computer science or software engineering that focus more on the science and technical aspects. I guess I want to make sure that other programmers would respect my credentials and not consider me as different or underqualified based on the connotations of the phrase "IT". I believe RPI has an unimpeachable reputation for hard science, and the program seems excellent, but it still matters to me how people in industry would perceive it.

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• We have our standards, and we need them

  - by Tony Davis

  The presenter suddenly broke off. He was midway through his section on how to apply to the relational database the Continuous Delivery techniques that allowed for rapid-fire rounds of development and refactoring, while always retaining a “production-ready” state. He sighed deeply and then launched into an astonishing diatribe against Database Administrators, much of his frustration directed toward Oracle DBAs, in particular. In broad strokes, he painted the picture of a brave new deployment philosophy being frustratingly shackled by the relational database, and by especially by the attitudes of the guardians of these databases. DBAs, he said, shunned change and “still favored tools I’d have been embarrassed to use in the ’80′s“. DBAs, Oracle DBAs especially, were more attached to their vendor than to their employer, since the former was the primary source of their career longevity and spectacular remuneration. He contended that someone could produce the best IDE or tool in the world for Oracle DBAs and yet none of them would give a stuff, unless it happened to come from the “mother ship”. I sat blinking in astonishment at the speaker’s vehemence, and glanced around nervously. Nobody in the audience disagreed, and a few nodded in assent. Although the primary target of the outburst was the Oracle DBA, it made me wonder. Are we who work with SQL Server, database professionals or merely SQL Server fanbois? Do DBAs, in general, have an image problem? Is it a good career-move to be seen to be holding onto a particular product by the whites of our knuckles, to the exclusion of all else? If we seek a broad, open-minded, knowledge of our chosen technology, the database, and are blessed with merely mortal powers of learning, then we like standards. Vendors of RDBMSs generally don’t conform to standards by instinct, but by customer demand. Microsoft has made great strides to adopt the international SQL Standards, where possible, thanks to considerable lobbying by the community. The implementation of Window functions is a great example. There is still work to do, though. SQL Server, for example, has an unusable version of the Information Schema. One cast-iron rule of any RDBMS is that we must be able to query the metadata using the same language that we use to query the data, i.e. SQL, and we do this by running queries against the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Developers who’ve attempted to apply a standard query that works on MySQL, or some other database, but doesn’t produce the expected results on SQL Server are advised to shun the Standards-based approach in favor of the vendor-specific one, using the catalog views. The argument behind this is sound and well-documented, and of course we all use those catalog views, out of necessity. And yet, as database professionals, committed to supporting the best databases for the business, whatever they are now and in the future, surely our heart should sink somewhat when we advocate a vendor specific approach, to a developer struggling with something as simple as writing a guard clause. And when we read messages on the Microsoft documentation informing us that we shouldn’t rely on INFORMATION_SCHEMA to identify reliably the schema of an object, in SQL Server!

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• SEO - different data with same title and keywords

  - by Junaid Saeed

  here is my scenario i have a website where i redirect my users basing upon the device they were using, lets say a user is visiting from an iPad, i take him directly to the page of iPad wallpapers, the user selects iPad version & i take the user to the gallery of wallpapers where the user can select & download any wallpaper. Every wallpaper is the required resolution, i have my reasons for doing this, now the thing is there are diff. resolution. versions of an image appearing one 5 diff. sections of my website, each having their own view page Now there is only one record in db.table for the image, and basing on the my consistent naming convention of the images, i pick the required image. this means when 5 different pages are generated in 5 categorized sections of the website, due to a shared DB record, the keywords, the titles and every single detail of the 5 pages is same besides the resolution of the image, and the section specific details that the page has and yeah the pages also have different paths like wallpapers.com\ipad-1\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-2\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-3\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-4\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-5\cars\Ferrari-dino.html now this is my scenario, How do Search Engines see it and how do they rank it? Is it a Good or Normal or Bad SEO practice? If bad how dangerous it is for my sites SEO? i need your comments on my scenario.

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• Triggering Data Changes in N-Tier

  - by Ryan Kinal

  I've been studying n-tier architectures as of late, particularly in VB.NET with Entity Framework and/or LINQ to SQL. I understand the basic concepts, but have been wondering about best practices in regard to triggering CRUD-type operations from user input/action. So, the arcitecture looks something like the following: [presentation layer] - [business layer] - [data layer] - (database) Getting information from the database into the presentation layer is simple and abstracted. It's just a matter of instantiating a new object from the business layer, which in turn uses the data layer to get at the correct information. However, saving (updating and inserting), and deleting seem to require particular APIs on the relevant business objects. I have to assume this is standard practice, unless a business object will save itself on various operations (which seems inefficient), or on disposal (which seems like it just wouldn't work, or may be unwieldy and unreliable). Should my "savable" business objects all implement a particular "ISavable" or "IDatabaseObject" interface? Is this a recognized (anti-)pattern? Are there other, better patterns I should be using that I'm just unaware of? The TLDR question, I suppose, is How does the presentation layer trigger database changes?

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• proper way to creation multiple similiar buttons/panels

  - by JayAvon

  I have the below Code which i tried to do, but it only shows(the minus/plus button) on the last GirdLayout (Intelligence stat): JButton plusButton = new JButton("+"); JButton minusButton = new JButton("-"); statStrengthGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statStrengthGridPanel.add(minusButton); statStrengthGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statStrengthGridPanel.add(plusButton); statConstitutionGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(minusButton); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(plusButton); statDexterityGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statDexterityGridPanel.add(minusButton); statDexterityGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statDexterityGridPanel.add(plusButton); statIntelligenceGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(minusButton); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(plusButton); I know I can do something like I did for the Panel names(have multiple ones), but I did not want to do that for the Panels in the first place. I am trying to use best practice and not have my code be repetitive. Any suggestions?? The goal is to have 4 stats, to assign points to, with decrement and increment buttons(I decided against sliders). Eventually I will have them have upper and lower limits, decrement the "unused" label, and all of that good stuff, but I just want to not be repetitive. Thanks for any help.

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• Why can't non-admin users install software?

  - by fiftyeight

  This is probably something I don't understand since I am used to Windows and am only starting out with Ubuntu. I know that software in linux comes in packages what I don't understand is why can't non-admin users install software. I mean, every application is run by a specific user, and that user will only be able to run that applciation with his privilages, so if he has no admin privileges, the application also won't be able to access unauthorized directories etc. I want most of the time to work on my PC with a non-admin user since it seems more safe to me, most of the time I have no need for admin privileges. and even though I know viruses in linux are uncommon I still think the best practice is to work on the computer in a state that you yourself can't make any changes to important files, that way viruses also can't harm any important files, but I need to install software for programming and web-design etc. and first of all I don't want to switch users all the time. But also it sounds safer to me that everything being done on the PC will be done through the non-admin user. I'll be glad to know what misunderstanding I have here, cause something here doesn't sound right.

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• Is it common to only pay developers for the time they said a project would take?

  - by BAM

  I work at a small startup (<10 people), and I was recently assigned (along with one other developer) to a relatively small project. The project involved moving an existing iOS app to Android. The client told us they had built the app for iOS in 300 man-hours. Not knowing at the time that this figure was completely false, we naively and optimistically assumed that if they could build the app from scratch in that amount of time, we could easily "port" it in a similar amount of time. Therefore, we drafted up a fixed-price contract based on 350 man-hours, with a 5 week deadline. (We are well aware now of how big of a mistake this was... Never let the client tell you how long it's going to take!) Anyway, by week 4 we had already surpassed our 350 hours, and we estimated that there were at least 2 more weeks left on the project. We were told to continue working, but that the company could not afford to pay out on overdue projects anymore. I thought this just meant "be more careful about estimates in the future". However a few weeks later, the company president informed us that we would not be getting paid for any time past 350 man-hours. We argued over the issue for almost an hour. He claimed, however, that this is standard practice for many organizations, and that I was unreasonable for making a big deal out of it. So is this really a common thing, or am I justified in being upset about it? Thanks in advance for any advice!

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• Impact of Server Failure on Coherence Request Processing

  - by jpurdy

  Requests against a given cache server may be temporarily blocked for several seconds following the failure of other cluster members. This may cause issues for applications that can not tolerate multi-second response times even during failover processing (ignoring for the moment that in practice there are a variety of issues that make such absolute guarantees challenging even when there are no server failures). In general, Coherence is designed around the principle that failures in one member should not affect the rest of the cluster if at all possible. However, it's obvious that if that failed member was managing a piece of state that another member depends on, the second member will need to wait until a new member assumes responsibility for managing that state. This transfer of responsibility is (as of Coherence 3.7) performed by the primary service thread for each cache service. The finest possible granularity for transferring responsibility is a single partition. So the question becomes how to minimize the time spent processing each partition. Here are some optimizations that may reduce this period: Reduce the size of each partition (by increasing the partition count) Increase the number of JVMs across the cluster (increasing the total number of primary service threads) Increase the number of CPUs across the cluster (making sure that each JVM has a CPU core when needed) Re-evaluate the set of configured indexes (as these will need to be rebuilt when a partition moves) Make sure that the backing map is as fast as possible (in most cases this means running on-heap) Make sure that the cluster is running on hardware with fast CPU cores (since the partition processing is single-threaded) As always, proper testing is required to make sure that configuration changes have the desired effect (and also to quantify that effect).

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• Using nested public classes to organize constants

  - by FrustratedWithFormsDesigner

  I'm working on an application with many constants. At the last code review it came up that the constants are too scattered and should all be organized into a single "master" constants file. The disagreement is about how to organize them. The majority feel that using the constant name should be good enough, but this will lead to code that looks like this: public static final String CREDITCARD_ACTION_SUBMITDATA = "6767"; public static final String CREDITCARD_UIFIELDID_CARDHOLDER_NAME = "3959854"; public static final String CREDITCARD_UIFIELDID_EXPIRY_MONTH = "3524"; public static final String CREDITCARD_UIFIELDID_ACCOUNT_ID = "3524"; ... public static final String BANKPAYMENT_UIFIELDID_ACCOUNT_ID = "9987"; I find this type of naming convention to be cumbersome. I thought it might be easier to use public nested class, and have something like this: public class IntegrationSystemConstants { public class CreditCard { public static final String UI_EXPIRY_MONTH = "3524"; public static final String UI_ACCOUNT_ID = "3524"; ... } public class BankAccount { public static final String UI_ACCOUNT_ID = "9987"; ... } } This idea wasn't well received because it was "too complicated" (I didn't get much detail as to why this might be too complicated). I think this creates a better division between groups of related constants and the auto-complete makes it easier to find these as well. I've never seen this done though, so I'm wondering if this is an accepted practice or if there's better reasons that it shouldn't be done.

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• Storing User-uploaded Images

  - by Nyxynyx

  What is the usual practice for handling user uploaded photos and storing them on the database and server? For a user profile image: After receiving the image file from user, rename file to <image_id>_<username> Move image to /images/userprofile Add img filename to a table users containing their profile details like first_name, last_name, age, gender, birthday For a image for a review done by user: After receiving the image file from user, rename file to <image_id>_<review_id> Move image to /images/reviews Add img filename to a table reviews containing their profile details like review_id, review_content, user_id, score. Question 1: How should I go about storing the image filenames if the user can upload multiple photos for a particular review? Serialize? Question 2: Or have another table review_images with columns review_id, image_id, image_filename just for tracking images? Will doing a JOIN when retriving the image_filename from this table slow down performance noticeably? Question 3: Should all the images be stored in a single folder? Will there be a problem when we have 100K photos in the same folder? Is there a more efficient way to go about doing this?

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• Why Are We Here?

  - by Jonathan Mills

  Back in the early 2000s, Toyota had a vision of building the number one best selling minivan in North America. Their current minivan, the Sienna, was small, underpowered, and badly needed help.  Yuji Yokoya was given the job of re-engineering the Sienna. There was just one problem, Yuji, lived in Japan. He did not know the people or places that he would be engineering for. Believe it or not, Japan is nothing like North America. So, what does a chief engineer do in a situation like that? He packed up his team and flew halfway around the world. He made a commitment to drive through every state in the US, every province in Canada, and Mexico. He met the people and drove the roads that the Sienna would be driving. And guess what, what he learned on that trip revolutionized the Sienna. The innovations he made, sent the Sienna to number one. Why? Because he knew who he was building his product for. He knew, why he was there.Let me ask you this, do you know why you are building what you are building? As a member of a product team, can you tell me how your product will be used in the real world? As you are writing code, building test plans, writing stories, or any of the other project tasks, can you picture the face of a person who will be using what you are building? All to often, the answer to those questions is, no. Why is it important? Because, every day, project team members make assumptions. Over a given project, it is safe to say project team members will make thousands of assumptions about what they are doing. And all to often, those assumptions are not quite right. Its not that they are not good at their job, its just that they don’t really know why they are there.So, what to do? First and foremost, stop doing what you are doing. Yes, really. Schedule some time to go visit the people who will be using your product. Don’t invite them to you, go to them. Watch them work. Interact with them. Ask them questions. Maybe even try it out yourself. This serves two purposes. One, It shows them that you care about them. They will be far more engaged in your project if they feel like you care. And nothing says you care more that spending some time. Second, if gives you the proper frame of reference for you work. It gives you something tangible to go back to as you are building your product. As you make the thousands of assumptions that you will make over the life of your project, it gives you something to see in your mind that makes it real to you.Ultimately, setting a proper frame of reference is critical to the overall success of a project. The funny thing is, it really does not even take that long. In most cases, a 2-3 hour session will give you most of what you need to get the right insight. For the project, it will be the best 2 hours you could spend.

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• Are these advanced/unfair interview questions regarding Java concurrency?

  - by sparc_spread

  Here are some questions I've recently asked interviewees who say they know Java concurrency: Explain the hazard of "memory visibility" - the way the JVM can reorder certain operations on variables that are unprotected by a monitor and not declared volatile, such that one thread may not see the changes made by another thread. Usually I ask this one by showing code where this hazard is present (e.g. the NoVisibility example in Listing 3.1 from "Java Concurrency in Practice" by Goetz et al) and asking what is wrong. Explain how volatile affects not just the actual variable declared volatile, but also any changes to variables made by a thread before it changes the volatile variable. Why might you use volatile instead of synchronized? Implement a condition variable with wait() and notifyAll(). Explain why you should use notifyAll(). Explain why the condition variable should be tested with a while loop. My question is - are these appropriate or too advanced to ask someone who says they know Java concurrency? And while we're at it, do you think that someone working in Java concurrency should be expected to have an above-average knowledge of Java garbage collection?

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• Modernizr Rocks HTML5

  - by Laila

  HTML5 is a moving target.  At the moment, we don't know what will be in future versions.  In most circumstances, this really matters to the developer. When you're using Adobe Air, you can be reasonably sure what works, what is there, and what isn't, since you have a version of the browser built-in. With Metro, you can assume that you're going to be using at least IE 10.   If, however,  you are using HTML5 in a web application, then you are going to rely heavily on Feature Detection.  Feature-Detection is a collection of techniques that tell you, via JavaScript, whether the current browser has this feature natively implemented or not Feature Detection isn't just there for the esoteric stuff such as  Geo-location,  progress bars,  <canvas> support,  the new <input> types, Audio, Video, web workers or storage, but is required even for semantic markup, since old browsers make a pigs ear out of rendering this.  Feature detection can't rely just on reading the browser version and inferring from that what works. Instead, you must use JavaScript to check that an HTML5 feature is there before using it.  The problem with relying on the user-agent is that it takes a lot of historical data  to work out what version does what, and, anyway, the user-agent can be, and sometimes is, spoofed. The open-source library Modernizr  is just about the most essential  JavaScript library for anyone using HTML5, because it provides APIs to test for most of the CSS3 and HTML5 features before you use them, and is intelligent enough to alter semantic markup into 'legacy' 'markup  using shims  on page-load  for old browsers. It also allows you to check what video Codecs are installed for playing video. It also provides media queries  and conditional resource-loading (formerly YepNope.js.).  Generally, Modernizr gives you the choice of what you do about browsers that don't support the feature that you want. Often, the best choice is graceful degradation, but the resource-loading feature allows you to dynamically load JavaScript Shims to replace the standard API for missing or defective HTML5 functionality, called 'PolyFills'.  As the Modernizr site says 'Yes, not only can you use HTML5 today, but you can use it in the past, too!' The evolutionary progress of HTML5  requires a more defensive style of JavaScript programming where the programmer adopts a mindset of fearing the worst ( IE 6)  rather than assuming the best, whilst exploiting as many of the new HTML features as possible for the requirements of the site or HTML application.  Why would anyone want the distraction of developing their own techniques to do this when  Modernizr exists to do this for you? Laila

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• How to get feedback from the community on large chunks of code?

  - by MainMa

  Code Review.SE is great when you need feedback on a precise, short piece of code. But where to get similar feedback about the code itself when: you have thousands of LOC, don't have colleagues in your workplace ready or willing to review the code¹, don't have thousands of dollars to spend for a professional review by a third party developer?² Places like CodePlex are a good idea to get your project known³, but from what I've seen, the feedback you get on known projects are consumer feedback, i.e. concerns the bugs and feature requests, not the quality of the source code itself. What are the social way to get the community involved in the code review of the codebase of a certain size for an open source project which doesn't have the scale of Firefox or similar products? ¹ Which is the case for most personal and open source projects, or projects done in companies where the practice of regular and complete code review is nonexistent. ² Which is, again, the case for most personal and open source projects. ³ Even if too many projects published on CodePlex never get known, either because nobody cares or because they are presented not very well.

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• Question regarding Readability vs Processing Time

  - by Jordy

  I am creating a flowchart for a program with multiple sequential steps. Every step should be performed if the previous step is succesful. I use a c-based programming language so the lay-out would be something like this: METHOD 1: if(step_one_succeeded()) { if(step_two_succeeded()) { if(step_three_succeeded()) { //etc. etc. } } } If my program would have 15+ steps, the resulting code would be terribly unfriendly to read. So I changed my design and implemented a global errorcode that I keep passing by reference, make everything more readable. The resulting code would be something like this: METHOD 2: int _no_error = 0; step_one(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_two(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_three(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_two(_no_error); The cyclomatic complexibility stays the same. Now let's say there are N number of steps. And let's assume that checking a condition is 1 clock long and performing a step doesn't take up time. The processing speed of Method1 can be anywhere between 1 and N. The processing speed of Method2 however is always equal to N-1. So Method1 will be faster most of the time. Which brings me to my question, is it bad practice to sacrifice time in order to make the code more readable? And why (not)?

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• Want Google to index redirect urls

  - by Dave Goten

  I'm having issues with users who think that Google Search is the address bar. Some of the sites that link to my site use user friendly addresses with 301 redirects to pages that have less friendly URLs. So, for example if I enter www.foo.com/bar it goes to www.bar.com/page.php?some-parameters-and-utm-codes-etc usually this is done by a 301 redirect in order to keep the SEO from foo.com on bar.com and so on, which I believe is standard practice. However, lately there have been more and more people searching www.foo.com/bar instead of going to www.foo.com/bar directly and because the page /bar is nothing more than a redirect it has no SEO that I know of. Things I've thought of but haven't been able to test, because Google takes forever to update :) (and I'm lazy like that), include using Google sitemaps and having them enter their redirects as entries there. (I could see this working if they were the top search entry all the time, and it might appear as a sitelink, but I don't know if that'll make the url itself show up in searches) Using Canonical tags on my pages to the redirects they set up. Which is a nightmare in itself because of the nature of my pages. One week the www.foo.com/bar might go to www.bar.com/pageA.php the next it might goto www.bar.com/pageB.php and having to remember to take the canonical tag off of pageA, so that it doesn't get confused with pageB would be a pain. Using 302 redirects -.- So I guess the question here is, does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this? What should I do to make www.foo.com/bar show up when someone 'searches' for this redirect url?

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• Is learning how to use C (or C++) a requirement in order to be a good (excellent) programmer?

  - by blueberryfields

  When I first started to learn how to program, real programmers could write assembly in their sleep. Any serious schooling in computer science would include a hefty bit of training and practice in programming using assembly. That has since changed, to the point where I see Computer Science degrees with assembly, if included at all, is relegated to one assignment, and one chapter, for a total of two weeks' work out of 4 years' schooling. C/C++ programming seems to have followed a similar path. I'm no longer surprised to interview university graduates who have not spent more than two weeks programming in C++, and have only read of C in a book somewhere. While the most serious CS degrees still seem to include significant time learning and using one or both of the languages, the trend is clearly towards less enforced C/C++ in school. It's clearly possible to make a career producing good work without ever reading or writing a single line of C or C++ code. Given all of that, is learning the two languages worth the effort? Are they at all required to excel? (beyond the obvious, non-language specific advice, such as "a good selection of languages is probably important for a comprehensive education", and "it's probably a good idea to keep trying out and learning new languages throughout a programmers' career, just to stretch the gray cells")

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