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  • Automatically Organize Tags in Tax/Folksonomy

    - by Rob Wilkerson
    I'm working on a process that will perform natural language processing (NLP) on one--and potentially several--of our content rich sites. What I'd like to do once the NLP is complete is to automatically organize the output (generally a set of terms that you might think of as tags given the prevalence of that metaphor) into some kind of standard or generally accepted organizational structure. In a perfect world, I'd really like this to be crowd sourced under the folksonomy concept (as opposed to a taxonomy) since the ultimate goal is to target/appeal to real people rather than "domain experts", but I'm open to ideas and best practices. For the obvious purpose of scalability, I'd like to automate the population of this tax/folksonomy so that "some guy" in the team/organization isn't responsible for looking at a bunch of words (with or without context) and arbitrarily fleshing out the contextual components of the tree. I have a few ideas for doing this that require some research to establish viability, but I have exactly zero practical experience with this sort of thing so the ideas really just boil down to stuff I made up that might perform some role in accomplishing the task. Imagining that others have vastly more experience with this sort of thing, I'm hoping that I can stand on your shoulders. Thanks for your thoughts and insights.

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  • Wicket: Where to add components? Constructor? Or onBeforeRender?

    - by gmallett
    I'm a Wicket newb. This may just be my ignorance of the Wicket lifecycle so please enlighten me! My understanding is that Wicket WebPage objects are instantiated once and then serialized. This has led to a point of confusion for me, see below. Currently I have a template class which I intend to subclass. I followed the example in the Wicket docs demonstrating how to override the template's behavior in the subclass: protected void onBeforeRender() { add(new Label("title", getTitle())); super.onBeforeRender(); } protected String getTitle() { return "template"; } Subclass: protected String getTitle() { return "Home"; } This works very well. What's not clear to me are the "best practices" for this. It seems like onBeforeRender() is called on every request for the page, no? This seems like there would be substantially more processing done on a page if everything is in onBeforeRender(). I could easily follow the example of the other Wicket examples and add some components in the constructor that I do not want to override, but then I've divided by component logic into two places, something I'm hesitant to do. If I add a component that I intend to be in all subclasses, should I add it to the constructor or onBeforeRender()?

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  • Console Application Structure

    - by Paul Fox
    I've written several .Net Console Applications over the past 6 months and we have many more throughout different projects in our organization. I generally stick to the same standard format/structure for my Console Applications. Unfortunately, many of our console applications do not. I have been looking into ways of standardizing the structure of these Console Applications. I would also like to provide a framework for the basic structure of a Console Application and provide easy access to standard ways of handling things such as argument passing, logging, etc. Can anyone suggest Best Practices for addressing these concerns? I have been reading this MSDN article on Console Applications in .Net which suggests a Design Pattern for Console Apps. The example uses a Template Method pattern to handle some of the concerns I listed earlier. Two negatives of using this approach are listed in the article. Ending up with twice as many classes Having many simple, similar classes Can anyone suggest better, or more standard, ways of handling this? What about listing additional negatives with this approach?

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  • Why use shorter VARCHAR(n) fields?

    - by chryss
    It is frequently advised to choose database field sizes to be as narrow as possible. I am wondering to what degree this applies to SQL Server 2005 VARCHAR columns: Storing 10-letter English words in a VARCHAR(255) field will not take up more storage than in a VARCHAR(10) field. Are there other reasons to restrict the size of VARCHAR fields to stick as closely as possible to the size of the data? I'm thinking of Performance: Is there an advantage to using a smaller n when selecting, filtering and sorting on the data? Memory, including on the application side (C++)? Style/validation: How important do you consider restricting colunm size to force non-sensical data imports to fail (such as 200-character surnames)? Anything else? Background: I help data integrators with the design of data flows into a database-backed system. They have to use an API that restricts their choice of data types. For character data, only VARCHAR(n) with n <= 255 is available; CHAR, NCHAR, NVARCHAR and TEXT are not. We're trying to lay down some "good practices" rules, and the question has come up if there is a real detriment to using VARCHAR(255) even for data where real maximum sizes will never exceed 30 bytes or so. Typical data volumes for one table are 1-10 Mio records with up to 150 attributes. Query performance (SELECT, with frequently extensive WHERE clauses) and application-side retrieval performance are paramount.

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  • How does an ASP.NET programmer go from working on/developing existing sites, to creating one from sc

    - by SLC
    I've been an ASP.NET developer for some time, always working on existing ASP.NET pages, modifying functionality, adding features, tweaking things etc. but have never built a site up from scratch. I've read books on ASP.NET, and they generally talk you through the various features of ASP.NET with a mock up site, but it's always very basic and they jump straight in. The time has come however, to write a site from scratch for a client. I've never done this before. There are design considerations, but like a lot of ASP.NET sites, the basic idea is, you have a site, where users can log in, and save some information like their name and password and address. The site has some functionality, but that's the basic design of a majority of (business-related) asp.net websites I would wager. I know how to program in ASP.NET already on an existing site, but I don't know how to design my own properly that meets the criteria above. I guess the main worry is security. I don't know the best way to handle a simple log-in system that stores user information like their name and password. I understand there are a few approaches to this, but the catch with this project is that it has to be absolutely bulletproof. Maximum security. All those good practices for security, it needs to have them all. I'm not asking what they are, but I am asking where to begin. What should be the first steps after I do File New Project ? Where can I look for information about setting up a secure ASP.NET website? I'll figure out the content and page layout later, it's the framework that is the big thing. Any and all advice would be welcome. I really want to get my first from-scratch project right from the beginning. Just to confuse things, it's possible I will be using MVC, I am not sure if this has any impact.

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  • Dealing with large number of text strings

    - by Fadrian
    My project when it is running, will collect a large number of string text block (about 20K and largest I have seen is about 200K of them) in short span of time and store them in a relational database. Each of the string text is relatively small and the average would be about 15 short lines (about 300 characters). The current implementation is in C# (VS2008), .NET 3.5 and backend DBMS is Ms. SQL Server 2005 Performance and storage are both important concern of the project, but the priority will be performance first, then storage. I am looking for answers to these: Should I compress the text before storing them in DB? or let SQL Server worry about compacting the storage? Do you know what will be the best compression algorithm/library to use for this context that gives me the best performance? Currently I just use the standard GZip in .NET framework Do you know any best practices to deal with this? I welcome outside the box suggestions as long as it is implementable in .NET framework? (it is a big project and this requirements is only a small part of it) EDITED: I will keep adding to this to clarify points raised I don't need text indexing or searching on these text. I just need to be able to retrieve them in later stage for display as a text block using its primary key. I have a working solution implemented as above and SQL Server has no issue at all handling it. This program will run quite often and need to work with large data context so you can imagine the size will grow very rapidly hence every optimization I can do will help.

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  • SQL Server: Why use shorter VARCHAR(n) fields?

    - by chryss
    It is frequently advised to choose database field sizes to be as narrow as possible. I am wondering to what degree this applies to SQL Server 2005 VARCHAR columns: Storing 10-letter English words in a VARCHAR(255) field will not take up more storage than in a VARCHAR(10) field. Are there other reasons to restrict the size of VARCHAR fields to stick as closely as possible to the size of the data? I'm thinking of Performance: Is there an advantage to using a smaller n when selecting, filtering and sorting on the data? Memory, including on the application side (C++)? Style/validation: How important do you consider restricting colunm size to force non-sensical data imports to fail (such as 200-character surnames)? Anything else? Background: I help data integrators with the design of data flows into a database-backed system. They have to use an API that restricts their choice of data types. For character data, only VARCHAR(n) with n <= 255 is available; CHAR, NCHAR, NVARCHAR and TEXT are not. We're trying to lay down some "good practices" rules, and the question has come up if there is a real detriment to using VARCHAR(255) even for data where real maximum sizes will never exceed 30 bytes or so. Typical data volumes for one table are 1-10 Mio records with up to 150 attributes. Query performance (SELECT, with frequently extensive WHERE clauses) and application-side retrieval performance are paramount.

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  • How To Delete Top 100 Rows From SQL Server Tables

    - by Gopinath
    If you want to delete top 100/n records from an SQL Server table, it is very easy with the following query: DELETE FROM MyTable WHERE PK_Column IN(     SELECT TOP 100 PK_Column     FROM MyTable     ORDER BY creation    ) Why Would You Require To Delete Top 100 Records? I often delete a top n records of a table when number of rows in the are too huge. Lets say if I’ve 1000000000 records in a table, deleting 10000 rows at a time in a loop is faster than trying to delete all the 1000000000  at a time. What ever may be reason, if you ever come across a requirement of deleting a bunch of rows at a time, this query will be helpful to you. Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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  • Unity: how to apply programmatical changes to the Terrain SplatPrototype?

    - by Shivan Dragon
    I have a script to which I add a Terrain object (I drag and drop the terrain in the public Terrain field). The Terrain is already setup in Unity to have 2 PaintTextures: 1 is a Square (set up with a tile size so that it forms a checkered pattern) and the 2nd one is a grass image: Also the Target Strength of the first PaintTexture is lowered so that the checkered pattern also reveals some of the grass underneath. Now I want, at run time, to change the Tile Size of the first PaintTexture, i.e. have more or less checkers depending on various run time conditions. I've looked through Unity's documentation and I've seen you have the Terrain.terrainData.SplatPrototype array which allows you to change this. Also there's a RefreshPrototypes() method on the terrainData object and a Flush() method on the Terrain object. So I made a script like this: public class AStarTerrain : MonoBehaviour { public int aStarCellColumns, aStarCellRows; public GameObject aStarCellHighlightPrefab; public GameObject aStarPathMarkerPrefab; public GameObject utilityRobotPrefab; public Terrain aStarTerrain; void Start () { //I've also tried NOT drag and dropping the Terrain on the public field //and instead just using the commented line below, but I get the same results //aStarTerrain = this.GetComponents<Terrain>()[0]; Debug.Log ("Got terrain "+aStarTerrain.name); SplatPrototype[] splatPrototypes = aStarTerrain.terrainData.splatPrototypes; Debug.Log("Terrain has "+splatPrototypes.Length+" splat prototypes"); SplatPrototype aStarCellSplat = splatPrototypes[0]; Debug.Log("Re-tyling splat prototype "+aStarCellSplat.texture.name); aStarCellSplat.tileSize = new Vector2(2000,2000); Debug.Log("Tyling is now "+aStarCellSplat.tileSize.x+"/"+aStarCellSplat.tileSize.y); aStarTerrain.terrainData.RefreshPrototypes(); aStarTerrain.Flush(); } //... Problem is, nothing gets changed, the checker map is not re-tiled. The console outputs correctly tell me that I've got the Terrain object with the right name, that it has the right number of splat prototypes and that I'm modifying the tileSize on the SplatPrototype object corresponding to the right texture. It also tells me the value has changed. But nothing gets updated in the actual graphical view. So please, what am I missing?

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  • We are hiring (take a minute to read this, is not another BS talk ;) )

    - by gsusx
    I really wanted to wait until our new website was out to blog about this but I hope you can put up with the ugly website for a few more days J. Tellago keeps growing and, after a quick break at the beginning of the year, we are back in hiring mode J. We are currently expanding our teams in the United States and Argentina and have various positions open in the following categories. .NET developers: If you are an exceptional .NET programmer with a passion for creating great software solutions working...(read more)

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  • What are developer's problems with helpful error messages?

    - by Moo-Juice
    It continue to astounds me that, in this day and age, products that have years of use under their belt, built by teams of professionals, still to this day - fail to provide helpful error messages to the user. In some cases, the addition of just a little piece of extra information could save a user hours of trouble. A program that generates an error, generated it for a reason. It has everything at its disposal to inform the user as much as it can, why something failed. And yet it seems that providing information to aid the user is a low-priority. I think this is a huge failing. One example is from SQL Server. When you try and restore a database that is in use, it quite rightly won't let you. SQL Server knows what processes and applications are accessing it. Why can't it include information about the process(es) that are using the database? I know not everyone passes an Applicatio_Name attribute on their connection string, but even a hint about the machine in question could be helpful. Another candidate, also SQL Server (and mySQL) is the lovely string or binary data would be truncated error message and equivalents. A lot of the time, a simple perusal of the SQL statement that was generated and the table shows which column is the culprit. This isn't always the case, and if the database engine picked up on the error, why can't it save us that time and just tells us which damned column it was? On this example, you could argue that there may be a performance hit to checking it and that this would impede the writer. Fine, I'll buy that. How about, once the database engine knows there is an error, it does a quick comparison after-the-fact, between values that were going to be stored, versus the column lengths. Then display that to the user. ASP.NET's horrid Table Adapters are also guilty. Queries can be executed and one can be given an error message saying that a constraint somewhere is being violated. Thanks for that. Time to compare my data model against the database, because the developers are too lazy to provide even a row number, or example data. (For the record, I'd never use this data-access method by choice, it's just a project I have inherited!). Whenever I throw an exception from my C# or C++ code, I provide everything I have at hand to the user. The decision has been made to throw it, so the more information I can give, the better. Why did my function throw an exception? What was passed in, and what was expected? It takes me just a little longer to put something meaningful in the body of an exception message. Hell, it does nothing but help me whilst I develop, because I know my code throws things that are meaningful. One could argue that complicated exception messages should not be displayed to the user. Whilst I disagree with that, it is an argument that can easily be appeased by having a different level of verbosity depending on your build. Even then, the users of ASP.NET and SQL Server are not your typical users, and would prefer something full of verbosity and yummy information because they can track down their problems faster. Why to developers think it is okay, in this day and age, to provide the bare minimum amount of information when an error occurs? It's 2011 guys, come on.

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  • Should a newcomer to Perl learn both Perl 5 and 6?

    - by M. Joanis
    Hello! I have started playing around with Perl 5 lately, and it seems very interesting. I would like to spend some time learning it more in depth when I can. My question, since Perl 6 is slowly taking place (I believe...) and is said to break backward compatibility, is this: am I better learning Perl 5 and then Perl 6, or is learning Perl 6 directly a better time investment according to you? If the changes from Perl 5 to 6 are making it hard to understand Perl 5, I should certainly start with Perl 5 to be able to read "old" scripts, then check Perl 6. There is also the "Perl 6 is not yet completely released" problem. I know there's an early adopter implementation for Perl 6, but if Perl 6 isn't officially released before some more years, I'll stick to 5 for now. I would certainly like some insight on this. Feel free to discuss related stuff. My interest in scripting languages is fairly new. Thanks!

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  • Is CUDA, cuBLAS or cuBLAS-XT the right place to start with for machine learning?

    - by Stefan R. Falk
    I am not sure if this is the right forum to post this question - but it surely is no question for stackoverflow. I work on my bachelor thesis and therefore I am implementing a so called Echo-State Network which basically is an artificial neural network that has a large reservoir of randomly initialized neurons and just a few input and output neurons .. but I think we can skip that. The thing is, there is a Python library called Theano which I am using for this implementation. It encapsulates the CUDA API and offers a quiet "comfortable" way to access the power of a NVIDIA graphics card. Since CUDA 6.0 there is a sub-library called cuBLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) for LinAlg operations and also a cuBLAS-XT an extention which allows to run calculations on multiple graphics cards. My question at this point is if it would make sense to start using cuBLAS and/or cuBLAS-XT right now since the API is quite complex or rather wait for libraries that will build up on those library (such as Theano does on basic CUDA)? If you think this is the wrong place for this question please tell me which one is, thank you.

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  • Identifier for the “completed” stage of a process: 0, 99, something else?

    - by Arnold Sakhnov
    Say, that you are handling a multi-step process (like a complex registration form, with a number of steps the user has go through in order). You need to be able to save the current state of the process (e.g. so the user can come back to that registration form later and continue form the step where they were left off). Obviously, you’ll probably want to give each “step” an identifier you can refer to: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. You logic will check for this step_id (or whatever you call it) to render the appropriate data. The question: how would you identify the stage after the final step, like the completed registration state (say, that you have to give that last “step” its own id, that’s how your logic is structured). Would it be a 0, 999, a non-integer value, something else entirely?

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  • Speaking at Microsoft's Duth DevDays

    - by gsusx
    Last week I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions at Microsoft's Dutch DevDays at Den Hague. On Tuesday I presented a sessions about how to implement real world RESTFul services patterns using WCF, WCF Data Services and ASP.NET MVC2. During that session I showed a total of 15 small demos that highlighted how to implement key aspects of RESTful solutions such as Security, LowREST clients, URI modeling, Validation, Error Handling, etc. As part of those demos I used the OAuth implementation created...(read more)

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  • Is Learning C++ Through The Qt Framework Really Learning C++

    - by user866190
    The problem I have, is that most of the C++ books I read spend almost forever on syntax and the basics of the language, e.g. for and loops while, arrays, lists, pointers, etc. But they never seem to build anything that is simple enough to use for learning, yet practical enough to get you to understand the philosophy and power of the language. Then I stumbled upon QT which is an amazing library! But working through the demos they have, it seems like I am now in the reverse dilemma. I feel like the rich man's son driving round in a sports car subsidized by the father. Like I could build fantastic software, but have no clue what's going on under the hood. As an example of my dilemma take the task of building a simple web browser. In pure C++, I wouldn't even know where to start, yet with the Qt library it can be done within a few lines on code. I am not complaining about this. I am just wondering how to fill the knowledge void between the basic structure of the language and the high level interface that the Qt framework provides?

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  • Approximating walking physics via simpler sliding physics

    - by Dave
    I am modeling walking insects. I implement them as cuboids and use forces (including friction and drag), to control motion. However, the movement characteristics of this 'sliding box' physics don't match those due to a legged creature. For example, legged creatures near-instantly accelerate to their top speed; whereas applying a force to a box takes time to accelerate it. The applied force can be increased along with the counteracting drag, giving much quicker acceleration (via force) to a max speed (via drag). However, this also means the force that creatures can exert when pushing on other objects is increased. Does anyone know of any techniques using a physics engine to cheaply model walking creatures?

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  • Error Handling Examples(C#)

    “The purpose of reviewing the Error Handling code is to assure that the application fails safely under all possible error conditions, expected and unexpected. No sensitive information is presented to the user when an error occurs.” (OWASP, 2011) No Error Handling The absence of error handling is still a form of error handling. Based on the code in Figure 1, if an error occurred and was not handled within either the ReadXml or BuildRequest methods the error would bubble up to the Search method. Since this method does not handle any acceptations the error will then bubble up the stack trace. If this continues and the error is not handled within the application then the environment in which the application is running will notify the user running the application that an error occurred based on what type of application. Figure 1: No Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); return dt; } Generic Error Handling One simple way to add error handling is to catch all errors by default. If you examine the code in Figure 2, you will see a try-catch block. On April 6th 2010 Louis Lazaris clearly describes a Try Catch statement by defining both the Try and Catch aspects of the statement. “The try portion is where you would put any code that might throw an error. In other words, all significant code should go in the try section. The catch section will also hold code, but that section is not vital to the running of the application. So, if you removed the try-catch statement altogether, the section of code inside the try part would still be the same, but all the code inside the catch would be removed.” (Lazaris, 2010) He also states that all errors that occur in the try section cause it to stops the execution of the try section and redirects all execution to the catch section. The catch section receives an object containing information about the error that occurred so that they system can gracefully handle the error properly. When errors occur they commonly log them in some form. This form could be an email, database entry, web service call, log file, or just an error massage displayed to the user.  Depending on the error sometimes applications can recover, while others force an application to close. Figure 2: Generic Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (Exception ex) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; } Error Specific Error Handling Like the Generic Error Handling, Error Specific error handling allows for the catching of specific known errors that may occur. For example wrapping a try catch statement around a soap web service call would allow the application to handle any error that was generated by the soap web service. Now, if the systems wanted to send a message to the web service provider every time a soap error occurred but did not want to notify them if any other type of error occurred like a network time out issue. This would be varying tedious to accomplish using the General Error Handling methodology. This brings us to the use case for using the Error Specific error handling methodology.  The Error Specific Error handling methodology allows for the TryCatch statement to catch various types of errors depending on the type of error that occurred. In Figure 3, the code attempts to handle DataException differently compared to how it potentially handles all other errors. This allows for specific error handling for each type of known error, and still allows for error handling of any unknown error that my occur during the execution of the TryCatch statement. Figure 5: Error Specific Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (TimeoutException ex) { // Handle Timeout TimeoutException Only } catch (Exception) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; }

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  • The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers

    - by Piet
    The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: ‘Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack’. Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a ‘knowledge worker’, often with trivial questions or distractions. In the eyes of the interruptor, the interruption only costs the time the interrupted had to listen to the question and give an answer. However, depending on what the interrupted was doing at the time, getting fully immersed in their task again might take up to 15-20 minutes. Enough interruptions might even cause a knowledge worker to mentally call it a day. According to this article interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker’s time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year. Looking for a new developer to join your team? Ever thought about optimizing your team’s environment and the way they work instead? Making non knowledge workers aware You can’t. Well, I haven’t succeeded yet. And believe me: I’ve tried. When you’ve got a simple way to really increase your productivity (’give me 2 hours of uninterrupted time a day’) it wouldn’t be right not to tell your boss or team-leader about it. The problem is: only productive knowledge workers seem to understand this. People who don’t fall into this category just seem to think you’re joking, being arrogant or anti-social when you tell them the interruptions can really have an impact on your productivity. Also, knowledge workers often work in a very concentrated mental state which is described here as: It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task. Yes, coding can be addictive and if you’re interrupting a programmer at the wrong moment, you’re effectively bringing down a junkie from his high in just a few seconds. This can result in seemingly arrogant, almost aggressive reactions. How to make people aware of the production-cost they’re inflicting: I’ve been often pondering that question myself. The article suggests that solutions based on that question never seem to work. To be honest: I’ve never even been able to find a half decent solution for this question. People who are not in this situations just don’t understand the issue, no matter how you try to explain it. Fun (?) thing I’ve noticed: Programmers or IT people in general who don’t get this are often the kind of people who just don’t get anything done. Interrupt handling (interruption management?) IRL Have non-urgent questions handled in a non-interruptive way It helps a bit to educate people into using non-interruptive ways to ask questions: “duh, I have no idea, but I’m a bit busy here now could you put it in an email so I don’t forget?”. Eventually, a considerable amount of people will skip interrupting you and just send an email right away. Some stubborn-headed people however will continue to just interrupt you, saying “you’re 10 meters from my desk, why can’t we just talk?”. Just remember to disable your email notifications, it can be hard to resist opening your email client when you know a new email just arrived. Use Do Not Disturb signals When working in a group of programmers, often the unofficial sign you can only be interrupted for something important is to put on headphones. And when the environment is quiet enough, often people aren’t even listening to music. Otherwise music can help to block the indirect distractions (someone else talking on the phone or tapping their feet). You might get a “they’re all just surfing and listening to music”-reaction from outsiders though. Peopleware talks about a team where the no-interruption sign was placing a shawl on the desk. If I remember correctly, I am unable to locate my copy of this really excellent must-read book. If you have all standardized on the same IM tool, maybe that tool has a ‘do not disturb’ setting. Also some phone-systems have a ‘DND’ (do not disturb) setting. Hide Brian offers a number of good suggestions, some obvious like: hide away somewhere they can’t find you. Not sure how long it’ll be till someone thinks you’re just taking a nap somewhere though. Also, this often isn’t possible or your boss might not understand this. And if you really get caught taking a nap, make sure to explain that your were powernapping. Counter-act interruptions Another suggestion he offers is when you’re being interrupted to just hold up your hand, blocking the interruption, and at least giving you time to finish your sentence or your block/line of code. The last suggestion works more as a way to make it obvious to the interruptor that they really are interrupting your work and to offload some of the cost on the interruptor. In practice, this can also helps you cool down a bit so you don’t start saying nasty things to the interruptor. Unfortunately I’ve sometimes been confronted with people who just ignore this signal and keep talking, as if they’re sure that whatever they’ve got to say is really worth listening to and without a doubt more important than anything you might be doing. This behaviour usually leaves me speechless (not good when someone just asked a question). I’ve noticed that these people are usually also the first to complain when being interrupted themselves. They’re generally not very liked as colleagues, so try not to imitate their behaviour. TDD as a way to minimize recovery time I don’t like Test Driven Development. Mainly for only one reason: It interrupts flow. At least, that’s what it does for me, but maybe I’m just not grown used to TDD yet. BUT a positive effect TDD has on me when I have to work in an interruptive environment and can’t really get into the ‘flow’ (also supposedly called ‘the zone’ by software developers, although I’ve never heard it 1st hand), TDD helps me to concentrate on the tasks at hand and helps me to get back at work after an interruption. I feel when using TDD, I can get by without the need for being totally ‘in’ the project and I can be reasonably productive without obtaining ‘flow’. Do you have a suggestion on how to make people aware of the concept of ‘flow’ and the cost of interruptions? (without looking like an arrogant ass or a weirdo)

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  • Python productivity VS Java Productivity

    - by toc777
    Over on SO I came across a question regarding which platform, Java or Python is best for developing on Google AppEngine. Many people were boasting of the increased productivity gained from using Python over Java. One thing I would say about the Python vs Java productivity argument, is Java has excellent IDE's to speed up development where as Python is really lacking in this area because of its dynamic nature. So even though I prefer to use Python as a language, I don't believe it gives quite the productivity boost compared to Java especially when using a new framework. Obviously if it were Java vs Python and the only editor you could use was VIM then Python would give you a huge productivity boost but when IDE's are brought into the equation its not as clear cut. I think Java's merits are often solely evaluated on a language level and often on out dated assumptions but Java has many benefits external to the language itself, e.g the JVM (often criticized but offers huge potential), excellent IDE's and tools, huge numbers of third party libraries, platforms etc.. Question, Does Python/related dynamic languages really give the huge productivity boosts often talked about? (with consideration given to using new frameworks and working with medium to large applications).

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  • How to apply programatical changes to the Terrain SplatPrototype

    - by Shivan Dragon
    I have a script to which I add a Terrain object (I drag and drop the terrain in the public Terrain field). The Terrain is already setup in Unity to have 2 PaintTextures: 1 is a Square (set up with a tile size so that it forms a checkered pattern) and the 2nd one is a grass image: Also the Target Strength of the first PaintTexture is lowered so that the checkered pattern also reveals some of the grass underneath. Now I want, at run time, to change the Tile Size of the first PaintTexture, i.e. have more or less checkers depending on various run time conditions. I've looked through Unity's documentation and I've seen you have the Terrain.terrainData.SplatPrototype array which allows you to change this. Also there's a RefreshPrototypes() method on the terrainData object and a Flush() method on the Terrain object. So I made a script like this: public class AStarTerrain : MonoBehaviour { public int aStarCellColumns, aStarCellRows; public GameObject aStarCellHighlightPrefab; public GameObject aStarPathMarkerPrefab; public GameObject utilityRobotPrefab; public Terrain aStarTerrain; void Start () { //I've also tried NOT drag and dropping the Terrain on the public field //and instead just using the commented line below, but I get the same results //aStarTerrain = this.GetComponents<Terrain>()[0]; Debug.Log ("Got terrain "+aStarTerrain.name); SplatPrototype[] splatPrototypes = aStarTerrain.terrainData.splatPrototypes; Debug.Log("Terrain has "+splatPrototypes.Length+" splat prototypes"); SplatPrototype aStarCellSplat = splatPrototypes[0]; Debug.Log("Re-tyling splat prototype "+aStarCellSplat.texture.name); aStarCellSplat.tileSize = new Vector2(2000,2000); Debug.Log("Tyling is now "+aStarCellSplat.tileSize.x+"/"+aStarCellSplat.tileSize.y); aStarTerrain.terrainData.RefreshPrototypes(); aStarTerrain.Flush(); } //... Problem is, nothing gets changed, the checker map is not re-tiled. The console outputs correctly tell me that I've got the Terrain object with the right name, that it has the right number of splat prototypes and that I'm modifying the tileSize on the SplatPrototype object corresponding to the right texture. It also tells me the value has changed. But nothing gets updated in the actual graphical view. So please, what am I missing?

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  • What features would you like to have in PHP?

    - by StasM
    Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language. By practical I mean: Something that can be practically done (not: "I wish PHP would guess what my code means and fix bugs for me" or "I wish any code would execute under 5ms") Something that doesn't require changing PHP into another language (not: "I wish they'd drop $ signs and use space instead of braces" or "I wish PHP were compiled, statically typed and had # in it's name") Something that would not require breaking all the existing code (not: "Let's rename 500 functions and change parameter order for them") Something that does change the language or some interesting aspect of it (not: "I wish there was extension to support for XYZ protocol" or "I wish bug #12345 were finally fixed") Something that is more than a rant (not: "I wish PHP wouldn't suck so badly") Anybody has any good wishes? Mod edit: Stanislav Malyshev is a core PHP developer.

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  • How could you parallelise a 2D boids simulation

    - by Sycren
    How could you program a 2D boids simulation in such a way that it could use processing power from different sources (clusters, gpu). In the above example, the non-coloured particles move around until they cluster (yellow) and stop moving. The problem is that all the entities could potentially interact with each other although an entity in the top left is unlikely to interact with one in the bottom right. If the domain was split into different segments, it may speed the whole thing up, But if an entity wanted to cross into another segment there may be problems. At the moment this simulation works with 5000 entities with a good frame rate, I would like to try this with millions if possible. Would it be possible to use quad trees to further optimise this? Any other suggestions?

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  • Mercurial Conversion from Team Foundation Server

    - by mhawley
    I’m using Twitter. Follow me @matthawley One of my many (almost) daily tasks when working on the CodePlex platform since releasing Mercurial as a supported version control system, is converting projects from Team Foundation Server (TFS) to Mercurial. I'm happy to say that of all the conversions I have done since mid-January, the success rate of migrating full source history is about 95%. To get to this success point, I have had to learn and refine several techniques utilizing a few different tools… (read more)

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