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  • 5 Ways Microsoft Can Improve the Windows 8 Start Screen

    - by Matt Klein
    After having used Windows 8 over the past few months, we’ve found a few ways Microsoft could immediately improve the Start Screen to make it less disorienting and more usable, not only for tablets but desktops and laptops as well. It’s safe to say that the one thing Windows 8 doesn’t lack is criticism. Since the Consumer Preview debuted in February, it has proven to be one of the most polarizing Windows releases ever. But regardless of whether you love or hate it, Windows 8 is where Microsoft’s venerable operating system is headed. Portable computing is here to stay and if the company is to survive, let alone remain relevant, it has to change, adapt, embrace, and extend. Perhaps the single most universally controversial change to Windows is Microsoft’s decision to remove the Start button (or orb, if you’ve moved beyond XP) and with it, what we know to be the Start Menu. In their place we now have a Start hot corner (a workable alternative) and the newly redesigned Metro Start Screen. The Start Screen is, if nothing else, different. Beyond a doubt, there has not been such a radical redesign of Windows’ Start functionality since it went to a two-column design with a nested “All Programs” menu in Windows XP. The Start Screen can be a little jarring because it requires users to not only relearn what they’ve known for nearly two decades but to also rethink the way they interact with Windows. However, the Start Screen maintains its core elements: a Start “menu”, a place for all installed programs (All apps), and a search pane. The Start Screen is attractive, clean, bold, and very imperfect. Here are five changes we’d like to see in the Start Screen before Windows 8 goes gold … How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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  • Managing Eclipse projects in source control

    - by Matt Phillips
    I've been using eclipse for a long time to do development. One of the problems I've come across when working on other people's projects is if they come from source control, some of the eclipse project files "default.properties" and other xml config files are missing. Its usually a big pain in the butt to get the project running in eclipse. I understand the reasoning to not have certain files tracked because they may be full of specific stuff to a certain eclipse install. How do all of you manage that?

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  • Ashamed to admit using jQuery?

    - by Matt Stevens
    Something I've noticed over the past few weeks is how many big commercial websites use jQuery combined with lots of plugins - but don't admit it. They will rename the main library to something obscure, as well as the plugins. Quite a few will even remove the comments that contain the MIT/GPL license information. (just noticed today that odeon.co.uk have done exactly this) Why are they doing this? are they abashed by the face that they are using a free and open source library?

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  • Alternative ways to make a battle system in a mobile indie game more fun and engaging

    - by Matt Beckman
    I'm developing an indie game for mobile platforms, and part of the game involves a PvP battle system (where the target player is passive). My vision is simple: the active player can select a weapon/item, then attack/use, and display the calculated outcome. I have a concept for battle modifiers that affect stats to make it more interesting, but I'm not convinced this by itself will add enough of a fun factor. I've received some inspiration from the game engine that powers Modern War/Kingdom Age/Crime City, but I want more control to make it more fun. In those games, you don't have the option to select weapons or use items, and the "battling" screen is simply 3D eye candy. Since this will be an indie game, I won't be spending $$$ on a team of professional 3D artists/animators, so my edge needs to be different. What are some alternatives to expensive eye candy that you or others have used to make a non-3D PvP game more fun and engaging? Did the alternative concepts survive the release?

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  • "Oracle Certified Expert, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Java Persistence API Developer" Preparation

    - by Matt
    I have been working with Hibernate for a fews years now, and I want to solidify and demonstrate my knowledge by taking the Oracle JPA certification, also known as: "Oracle Certified Expert, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Java Persistence API Developer (CX-310-094)" There is a training course provided by Oracle: "Building Database Driven Applications with JPA (SL-370-EE6)" But this costs $1800 and I think it would be overkill for my needs. Ideally, I would like a self study guide that will cover everything in the exam. I have looked for books and these seem like possibilities: Pro JPA 2: Mastering the Java Persistence API (Expert's Voice in Java Technology) and Beginning Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3 2nd Edition (Expert's Voice in Java Technology) But these aren't checklist type study guides as far as I am aware. I found the official SCJP study guide very useful, but I think the equivalent text for the JPA exam isn't out yet. If anyone has taken this exam, I would be grateful to hear how you prepared for it. Thanks!

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  • Getting developers and support to work together

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile development has ushered in the norm of rapid iterations and change within products. One of the biggest challenges for agile development is educating the rest of the company. At my last company our biggest challenge was trying to continually train 100 employees in our customer support and training departments. It's easy to write release notes and email them to everyone. But for complex software products, release notes are not usually enough detail. You really have to educate your employees on the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN of every item. If you don't do this, you end up with customer service people who know less about your product than your users do. Ever call a company and feel like you know more about their product than their customer service people do? Yeah. I'm talking about that problem.WHO does the change effect?WHAT was the actual change?WHERE do I find the change in the product?WHY was the change made? (It's hard to support something if you don't know why it was done.)WHEN will the change be released?One thing I want to stress is the importance of the WHY something was done. For customer support people to be really good at their job, they need to understand the product and how people use it. Knowing how to enable a feature is one thing. Knowing why someone would want to enable it, is a whole different thing and the difference in good customer service. Another challenge is getting support people to better test and document potential bugs before escalating them to development. Trying to fix bugs without examples is always fun... NOT. They might as well say "The sky is falling, please fix it!"We need to over train the support staff about product changes and continually stress how they document and test potential product bugs. You also have to train the sales staff and the marketing team. Then there is updating sales materials, your website, product documentation and other items there are always out of date. Every product release causes this vicious circle of trying to educate the rest of the company about the changes.Do we need to record a simple video explaining the changes and email it to everyone? Maybe we should  use a simple online training type app to help with this problem. Ultimately the struggle is taking the time to do the training, but it is time well spent. It may save you a lot of time answering questions and fixing bugs later. How do we efficiently transfer key product knowledge from developers and product owners to the rest of the company? How have you solved these issues at your company?

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  • Should we be able to deploy a single package to the SSIS Catalog?

    - by jamiet
    My buddy Sutha Thiru sent me an email recently asking about my opinion on a particular nuance of the project deployment model in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 and I’d like to share my response as I think it warrants a wider discussion. Sutha asked: Jamie What is your take on this? http://www.mattmasson.com/index.php/2012/07/can-i-deploy-a-single-ssis-package-from-my-project-to-the-ssis-catalog/ Overnight I was talking to Matt who confirmed that they got no plans to change the deployment model. For example if we have following scenrio how do we do deploy? Sprint 1 Pkg1, 2 & 3 has been developed and deployed to UAT. Once signed off its been deployed to Live. Sprint 2 Pkg 4 & 5 been developed. During this time users raised a bug on Pkg2. We want to make the change to Pkg2 and deploy that to UAT and eventually to LIVE without releasing Pkg 4 &5. How do we do it? Matt pointed me to his blog entry which I have seen before . http://www.mattmasson.com/index.php/2012/02/thoughts-on-branching-strategies-for-ssis-projects/ Thanks Sutha My response: Personally, even though I've experienced the exact problem you just outlined, I agree with the current approach. I steadfastly believe that there should not be a way for an unscrupulous developer to slide in a new version of a package under the covers. Deploying .ispac files brings a degree of rigour to your operational processes. Yes, that means that we as SSIS developers are going to have to get better at using source control and branching properly but that is no bad thing in my opinion. Claiming to be proper "developers" is a bit of a cheap claim if we don't even do the fundamentals correctly. I would be interested in the thoughts of others who have used the project deployment model. Do you agree with my point of view? @Jamiet

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  • How to incorporate existing open source software from a licensing perspective?

    - by Matt
    I'm working on software that uses the following libraries: Biopython SciPy NumPy All of the above have licenses similar to MIT or BSD. Three scenarios: First, if I don't redistribute those dependencies, and only my code, then all I need is my own copyright and license (planing on using the MIT License) for my code. Correct? What if I use py2exe or py2app to create a binary executable to distribute so as to make it easy for people to run the application without needing to install python and all the dependencies. Of course this also means that my binary file(s) contains python itself (along with any other packages I might have performed a pip install xyz). What if I bundle Biopython, SciPy, and NumPy binaries in my package? In the latter two cases, what do I need to do to comply with copyright laws.

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  • Typing tutor games with good playablity

    - by matt wilkie
    Are there any linux typing tutor games which are enjoyable games in their own right? I'm a computer professional, but have never learned to type properly. I also don't want my kids to pick up my bad habits! The kids are okay with TuxTyping, for a time. Something like Typing of the Dead sounds great, but is Windows only, and as far as I can tell one of a kind. I also don't want the young'uns hooked on first person shooters just yet. So are there any quality typing games for a range of ages?

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  • Architecture guidelines for a "single page web-app"

    - by Matt Roberts
    I'm going to start a side project to build a "single page" web application. The application needs to be real-time, sending updates to the clients as changes happen. Are there any good resources for best-practice approaches wrt the architecture for these kinds of applications. The best resource I've found so far is the trello architecture article here: http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/ To me, this architecture, although very sexy, is probably over-engineered for my specific needs - although I do have similar requirements. I'm wondering if I need to bother with a sub/pub at the server side, could I not just push updates from the server when something happens (e.g. when the client sends an update to the server, write the update to the db, and then send an update to the clients). Tech-wise, I'm probably looking to build this out in Node.JS or maybe Ruby, although the architecture guidelines should to some extent apply to any underlying server technologies.

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  • Terminal Colors Not Working

    - by Matt Fordham
    I am accessing an Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS server via SSH from OSX. Recently the colors stopped working. I think it happened while I was installing/troubleshooting RVM, but I am not positive. In .bashrc I uncommeneted force_color_prompt=yes, and when I run env | grep TERM I get TERM=xterm-color. But still no colors. Any ideas? Thanks! Here is the output of cat .bashrc # ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells. # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc) # for examples # If not running interactively, don't do anything [ -z "$PS1" ] && return # don't put duplicate lines in the history. See bash(1) for more options # ... or force ignoredups and ignorespace HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace # append to the history file, don't overwrite it shopt -s histappend # for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1) HISTSIZE=1000 HISTFILESIZE=2000 # check the window size after each command and, if necessary, # update the values of LINES and COLUMNS. shopt -s checkwinsize # make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1) [ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)" # set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below) if [ -z "$debian_chroot" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot) fi # set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color) case "$TERM" in xterm-color) color_prompt=yes;; esac # uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned # off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window # should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt force_color_prompt=yes if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then # We have color support; assume it's compliant with Ecma-48 # (ISO/IEC-6429). (Lack of such support is extremely rare, and such # a case would tend to support setf rather than setaf.) color_prompt=yes else color_prompt= fi fi if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ ' fi unset color_prompt force_color_prompt # If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir case "$TERM" in xterm*|rxvt*) PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1" ;; *) ;; esac # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' alias dir='dir --color=auto' alias vdir='vdir --color=auto' alias grep='grep --color=auto' alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto' alias egrep='egrep --color=auto' fi # some more ls aliases alias ll='ls -alF' alias la='ls -A' alias l='ls -CF' # Alias definitions. # You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like # ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly. # See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package. if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi # enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable # this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile # sources /etc/bash.bashrc). if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then . /etc/bash_completion fi [[ -s "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm"

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  • Ubuntu 12.04 problem with E160 huawei - can't detect the device and freezing system

    - by Matt
    I have just installed 12.04 and plugged in E160 and nothing happened - modem doesn't mount. I have found this solution : Ubuntu does not mount some Huawei devices due to bugs, problems etc. See if these work: 1st option: Connect the USB modem. After 10 seconds, type this in a terminal window: lsusb The output will be like this: Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 004: ID 12d1:140b Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Bus 004 Device 002: ID 413c:3016 Dell Computer Corp. Optical 5-Button Wheel Mouse Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 005: ID 0b97:7762 O2 Micro, Inc. Oz776 SmartCard Reader Bus 002 Device 004: ID 413c:8103 Dell Computer Corp. Wireless 350 Bluetooth Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0b97:7761 O2 Micro, Inc. Oz776 1.1 Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 413c:a005 Dell Computer Corp. Internal 2.0 Hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub The device is a Huawei modem, so let's look at the output. The relevant entry is: Bus 004 Device 004: ID 12d1:140b Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd Hence, you must type: sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x140b 2nd option Download usb-modeswitch and usb-modeswitch-data packages from packages.ubuntu.com. Install them through the command: sudo dpkg -i usb-modeswitch*.deb 3rd option Try a combination of both. but with no result. The modem is still not detected. I've tried to add a new connection but the system can't see my device in setup dialogue. Also I have noticed that when I open eg. terminal and try to type sth, the system freezes for a while.. Thanks for help!

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  • Gnome Do does not autostart and save shortcut in 11.10

    - by Matt
    For some reason the autostart of Gnome-Do will not work in 11.10. I've installed Gnome-Do via the Ubuntu Software Center. Then I changed the shortcut to launch Gnome-Do and marked the option to autostart Gnome-Do within Gnome-Do. In order to verify the autostart, I checked whether it's also found in the autostart applications (which it was). However, upon every restart I have to start Gnome-Do manually via the unity launcher and change the shortcut again.

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  • Ho do I install Ubuntu on my Mac PowerPC G5

    - by Matt
    How do I install Ubuntu on my powerpc G5? which version do I download? where do I download it from? and how do I get it to install? I tried burning ubuntu powerpc 12.04 and booting from the cd and all I get is a DOS like setup prompt "boot:" I've tried 'live' and everything else listed when I push tab; but, every time I get a bunch of white text on black screen, then black text on white and then my monitor just goes black and nothing happens??? what am I doing wrong? any suggestions?

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  • KERPOOOOW!

    - by Matt Christian
    Recently I discovered the colorful world of comic books.  In the past I've read comics a few times but never really got into them.  When I wanted to start a collection I decided either video games or comics yet stayed away from comics because I am less familiar with them. In any case, I stopped by my local comic shop and picked up a few comics and a few trade paperbacks.  After reading them and understanding their basic flow I began to enjoy not only the stories but the art styles hiding behind those little white bubbles of text (well, they're USUALLY white).  My first stop at the comic store I ended up with: - Nemesis #1 (cover A) - Shuddertown #1 (cover A I think) - Daredevil: King of Hell's Kitchen Trade Paperback - Peter Parker: Spiderman - One Small Break Trade Paperback It took me about 3-4 days to read all of that including re-reading the single issues and glancing over the beginning of Daredevil again.  After a week of looking around online I knew a little more about the comics I wanted to pick up and the kind of art style I enjoyed.  While Peter Parker: Spiderman was ok, I really enjoyed the detailed, realistic look of Daredevil and Shuddertown. Now, a few years back I picked up the game The Darkness for PS3.  I knew it was based off a comic but never read the comic.  I decided I'd pick up a few issues of it and ended up with: - The Darkness #80 (cover A) - The Darkness #81 (cover A) - The Darkness #82 (cover A) - The Darkness #83 (cover A) - The Darkness Shadows and Flame #1  (one-shot; cover A) - The Darkness Origins: Volume 1 Trade Paperback (contains The Darkness #1-6) - New Age boards and bags for storing my comics The Darkness is relatively good though jumping from issue #6 to issue #80 I lost a bit on who the enemy in the current series is.  I think out of all of them, issue #83 was my favorite of them. I'm signed up at the local shop to continue getting Nemesis, The Darkness, and Shuddertown, and I'll probably pick up a few different ones this weekend...

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  • WoW lua: Getting quest attributes before the QUEST_DETAIL event

    - by Matt DiTrolio
    I'd like to determine the attributes of a quest (i.e., information provided by functions such as QuestIsDaily and IsQuestCompletable) before the player clicks on the quest detail. I'm trying to write an add-on that handles accepting and completing of daily quests with a single click on the NPC, but I'm running into a problem whereby I can't find out anything about a given quest unless the quest text is currently being displayed, defeating the purpose of the add-on. Other add-ons of this nature seem to be getting around this limitation by hard-coding information about quests, an approach I don't much like as it requires constant maintenance. It seems to me that this information must be available somehow, as the game itself can properly figure out which icon to display over the head of the NPC without player interaction. The only question is, are add-on authors allowed access to this information? If so, how? EDIT: What I originally left out was that the situations I'm trying to address are when: An NPC has multiple quests The quest detail is not the first thing that shows up upon right-click Otherwise, the situation is much simpler, as I have the information I need provided immediately.

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  • As a young student aspiring to have a career as a programmer, how should I feel about open source software?

    - by Matt
    Every once in a while on some technology websites a headline like this will pop up: http://www.osor.eu/news/nl-moving-to-open-source-would-save-government-one-to-four-billion My initial thought about government and organizations moving to open source software is that tons of programmers would lose their jobs and the industry would shrink. At the same time the proliferation and use of open source software seems to be greatly encouraged in many programming communities. Is my thinking that the full embrace of open source software everywhere will hurt the software industry a misconception? If it is not, then why do so many programmers love open source software?

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  • shader3 not enabled error in Eve Online Crucible

    - by Matt Vercoe
    I'm a complete noob at this, and have been trying everything to run Eve Online within Ubuntu 11.10. I have installed through Winetricks no problem, and have enabled the virtual windows desktop within Winetricks. My problem is that after the splash screen for Eve, I get an error message telling me that shader 3 is not enabled. I have an old GEForce 7300LE, but it does support shader 3. I have also tried a few different drivers with no luck. I have tried looking within the NVidia X setting, but can't find anything. Running Eve on Windows 7 is the only reason I'm still using windows, so any help to run it on Ubuntu would be very appreciated, as I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out something which should be simple.

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  • Configuring mouse buttons to switch between apps?

    - by Matt Gregory
    I just installed 14.04, so I'm using the default setup (Unity, I guess). I have these two extra mouse buttons on the side of my mouse. Is there any way to map these so they can switch between open apps? What would be perfect is if clicking on button 6 (or whatever it is) would cycle forward through apps, button 7 would go backwards, and holding one of the buttons would show the task list and let you click on the app you want. That's really what I want.

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  • Is it just me or is this a baffling tech interview question

    - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt
    Background I was just asked in a tech interview to write an algorithm to traverse an "object" (notice the quotes) where A is equal to B and B is equal to C and A is equal to C. That's it. That is all the information I was given. I asked the interviewer what the goal was but apparently there wasn't one, just "traverse" the "object". I don't know about anyone else, but this seems like a silly question to me. I asked again, "am I searching for a value?". Nope. Just "traverse" it. Why would I ever want to endlessly loop through this "object"?? To melt my processor maybe?? The answer according to the interviewer was that I should have written a recursive function. OK, so why not simply ask me to write a recursive function? And who would write a recursive function that never ends? My question: Is this a valid question to the rest of you and, if so, can you provide a hint as to what I might be missing? Perhaps I am thinking too hard about solving real world problems. I have been successfully coding for a long time but this tech interview process makes me feel like I don't know anything. Final Answer: CLOWN TRAVERSAL!!! (See @Matt's answer below) Thanks! Matt

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  • Blank screen after Switch User or Resume

    - by matt wilkie
    About half the time when I switch users or resume from standby or resume the screen goes blank (black). If I work the cursor keys I can hear the system bell when it gets to the end of the user list. I can also successfully login, going from memory, but screen stays black. Sometimes closing and re-opening the lid will light up the screen again. Pressing the special Function key to enable/disable external monitor connection has no effect [Fn]-[F5],[Fn]-[F6]. If none of the previous work I need to put the computer into hibernation or full power off to restore screen function. If I watch closely when switching users I think I can see the screen initially start to light up and then quickly fade to black. The computer is an Acer Aspire 3500, model ZL6, running Ubuntu 10.10 installed 2 days ago. No proprietary drivers are in use. I'll provide a list of hardware details as soon as I can figure out how to generate that (didn't there used to be an entry for hardware details under the System menu?). Possibly related questions: No resume after Hibernate or Standby When I resume from suspension - the screen is blank Switch user fails to complete successfully For what it's worth, blank after resume also used to happen occasionally when the laptop was running XP-Home, but nowhere near as often, perhaps 6 or 8 times a year. UPDATE: I found System Administration System Testing and ran the Monitor test. It went very very dark, but the window elements could be discerned, and the whole screen flashed (from very very dark to black). On the third repeat of that same test the screen went to full blaupck and stayed there. Moving the mouse, via touchpad, or touch keys did not wake it up again. I had to close the lid and put the computer into hibernate, and press the power button to restore it. UPDATE2: output of lshw: http://pastebin.com/q7n8676r, lspci: http://pastebin.com/6ujzVK4r UPDATE3: sometimes I can restore the screen by flipping to console 1 with ctrl-alt-F1 and then back to graphical with ctrl-alt-F7.

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  • How to explain to a layperson the variance in programmer rates?

    - by Matt McCormick
    I recently talked to a guy that is looking for developers to build a product idea. He mentioned he has received interest from people but the rates have varied from $20-120/hr. This project he estimates should take 3-6 months and since he is non-technical, he is confused why there can be so much variance. I understand how I would choose someone but I am a developer and can gauge other people's work. How can I explain to him (in a non-biased way, if possible, as I will apply as well) about the variance in rates? Is there any good analogy that would help?

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  • Good resources and tools for modern, heavy JavaScript development?

    - by Matt Greer
    I am interested in doing some projects that involve heavy use of JavaScript. Namely HTML5 based canvas games, potentially using node.js as well. I am interested in learning modern best practices, tools and resources for JavaScript. JavaScript is tough to research because you end up wading through a lot of really outdated material, hailing from the times that "JavaScript" was a four letter word. If you are heavily involved in JavaScript programming... What text editor or IDE do you use? What unit testing framework do you use? Do you use Selenium, or something else? What other tools do you use? What communities exist that discuss recent advents in JavaScript? What books do you read/refer to? What blogs do you read?

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  • Agile Development Requires Agile Support

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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