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• File descriptor limits and default stack sizes

  - by Charles

  Where I work we build and distribute a library and a couple complex programs built on that library. All code is written in C and is available on most 'standard' systems like Windows, Linux, Aix, Solaris, Darwin. I started in the QA department and while running tests recently I have been reminded several times that I need to remember to set the file descriptor limits and default stack sizes higher or bad things will happen. This is particularly the case with Solaris and now Darwin. Now this is very strange to me because I am a believer in 0 required environment fiddling to make a product work. So I am wondering if there are times where this sort of requirement is a necessary evil, or if we are doing something wrong. Edit: Great comments that describe the problem and a little background. However I do not believe I worded the question well enough. Currently, we require customers, and hence, us the testers, to set these limits before running our code. We do not do this programatically. And this is not a situation where they MIGHT run out, under normal load our programs WILL run out and seg fault. So rewording the question, is requiring the customer to change these ulimit values to run our software to be expected on some platforms, ie, Solaris, Aix, or are we as a company making it to difficult for these users to get going? Bounty: I added a bounty to hopefully get a little more information on what other companies are doing to manage these limits. Can you set these pragmatically? Should we? Should our programs even be hitting these limits or could this be a sign that things might be a bit messy under the covers? That is really what I want to know, as a perfectionist a seemingly dirty program really bugs me.

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• JSP application scope objects in Java library

  - by FrontierPsycho

  I am working on a preexisting web application built with JSP, which uses an external Java library. I want to make some JavaBeans that were instantiated with jsp:useBean tags available to the Java code. What would be a good practice to do that? I suppose I can pass the objects in question to every function call that requires them, but I'd like to avoid that.

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• Is it bad to explicitly compare against boolean constants?

  - by polygenelubricants

  Is it bad to write: if (b == false) //... while (b != true) //... Is it always better to instead write if (!b) //... while (!b) //... Presumably there is no difference in performance (or is there?), but how do you weigh the explicitness, the conciseness, the clarity, the readability, etc between the two?

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• How do I know if I'm being truly clever and not just "clever"?

  - by Covar

  If there's one thing I've learned from programming is that there are clever solutions to problems, and then there are "clever" solutions to problems. One is an intelligent solution to a difficult problem that results in improved efficiency and a better way to to do something and the other will wind up on The Daily WTF, and result in headaches and pain for anyone else involved. My question is how do you distinguish between one and the other? How do you figure out if you've over thought the solution? How do you stop yourself from throwing away truly clever solutions, thinking they were "clever"?

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• Why is there so much poorly indented code out there?

  - by dsimcha

  The more I browse the code to open source projects in languages that aren't Python, the more I realize that it seems a lot of programmers don't believe in proper indentation. (I won't mention any projects specifically to avoid having anyone take this question too personally.) Usually code is indented, but in a way just different enough from the standard style that it drives me crazy, especially in old/crufty code. I've noticed that when I write in C-like languages, I tend to indent correctly as religiously as when I'm writing in Python, with the exception of debugging code that I actually want to stick out like a sore thumb. Given how easy it is with a modern IDE to fix incorrect indentation, what are some rationales for not religiously keeping indentation in sync with braces?

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• DRYing up Rails Views with Nested Resources

  - by viatropos

  What is your solution to the problem if you have a model that is both not-nested and nested, such as products: a "Product" can belong_to say an "Event", and a Product can also just be independent. This means I can have routes like this: map.resources :products # /products map.resources :events do |event| event.resources :products # /events/1/products end How do you handle that in your views properly? Note: this is for an admin panel. I want to be able to have a "Create Event" page, with a side panel for creating tickets (Product), forms, and checking who's rsvp'd. So you'd click on the "Event Tickets" side panel button, and it'd take you to /events/my-new-event/tickets. But there's also a root "Products" tab for the admin panel, which could list tickets and other random products. The 'tickets' and 'products' views look 90% the same, but the tickets will have some info about the event it belongs to. It seems like I'd have to have views like this: products/index.haml products/show.haml events/products/index.haml events/products/show.haml But that doesn't seem DRY. Or I could have conditionals checking to see if the product had an Event (@product.event.nil?), but then the views would be hard to understand. How do you deal with these situations? Thanks so much.

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• Advice on a simple Windows Form

  - by Austin Hyde

  I have a VERY simple windows form that the user uses to manage "Stores". Each store has a name and number, and is kept in a corresponding DB table. The form has a listbox of stores, an add button that creates a new store, a delete button, and an edit button. Beside those I have text boxes for the name and number, and save/cancel buttons. When the user chooses a store from the list box, and clicks 'edit', the textboxes become populated and save/cancel become active. When the user clicks 'add', I create a new Store, add it to the listbox, activate the textboxes and save/cancel buttons, then commit it to the database when the user clicks 'save', or discards it when the user clicks 'cancel'. Right now, my event system looks like this (in psuedo-code. It's just shorter that way.) add->click: store = new Store() listbox.add(store) populateAndEdit(store) delete->click: store = listbox.selectedItem db.deleteOnSubmit(store) listbox.remove(store) db.submit() edit->click: populateAndEdit(listbox.selectedItem) save->click: parseAndSave(listbox.selectedItem) db.submit() disableTexts() cancel->click: disableTexts() The problem is in how I determine if we are inserting a new Store, or updating an existing one. The obvious solution to me would be to make it a "modal" process - that is, when I click edit, I go into edit mode, and the save button does things differently than if I were in add mode. I know I could make this more MVC-like, but I don't really think this simple form merits the added complexity. I'm not very experienced with winforms, so I'm not sure if I even have the right idea for how to tackle this. Is there a better way to do this? I would like to keep it simple, but usable.

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• Win7: Right place to install a program that may be 'shared' with other computers

  - by robsoft

  We have an app that currently installs itself into 'program files\our app', and it puts the internal data files into the common Application Data folder. This means the program is available to any user on that particular PC. Now we want to make a multi-user version of this program, multiple PCs accessing the program at the same time across the network. In the bad old days, under XP, we'd just have the user who installed the app 'share' the app directory and off we'd go. In principle, is this still the 'right' way to do it under Vista/Windows 7? We'd like to do this 'properly' and be as compliant as possible! Is there a recommended 'Microsoft' approach for doing this, or is it largely down to whatever we can get away with and subsequently support (hah!). I've tried researching this on the MS websites but not found anything too helpful at all - it'd be really useful to have a 'if you're trying to install this kind of thing, put it here' type guide for developers!

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• P/Invoke or C++/CLI for wrapping a C library

  - by Ian G

  Have a moderate size (40-odd function) C API that needs to be called from a C# project. The functions logically break up to form a few classes that will be API presented to the rest of the project. Are there any objective reasons to prefer P/Invoke or C++/CLI for the interoperability underneath that API, in terms of robustness, maintainability, deployment, ...? The issues I could think of that might be, but aren't problematic are: C++/CLI will require an separate assembly, the P/Invoke classes can be in the main assembly. (We've already got multiple assemblies and there'll be the C dlls anyway so not a major issue). Performance doesn't seem differ noticeable between the two methods. Issues that I'm not sure about are: My feeling is C++/CLI will be easier to debug if there's inter-op problem, is this true? Language familiarity enough people know C# and C++ but knowledge of details of C++/CLI are rarer here. Anything else?

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• SQL Server 2008 Optimization

  - by hgulyan

  I've learned today, if you append to your query OPTION (MAXDOP 0) your query will run on multiple processors and if it's huge query, query will perform faster. I know general guidelines on query optimizations (using indexes, selecting only needed fields etc.), my question is about SQL Server optimization. Maybe changing some options in configurations or anything else. What guidelines are there for SQL Server Optimization? Thank you.

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• Invoicing vs Quoting or Estimating

  - by FreshCode

  If invoices can be voided, should they be used as quotations? I have an Invoices tables that is created from inventory associated with a Job or Order. I could have a Quotes table as a halfway-house between inventory and invoices, but it feels like I would have duplicate data structures and logic just to handle an "Is this a quote?" bit. From a business perspective, quotes are different from invoices: a quote is sent prior to an undertaking and an invoice is sent once it is complete and payment is due, but how to represent this in my repository and model. What is an elegant way to store and manage quotes & invoices in a database? Edit: indicated Job === Order for this particular instance.

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• Is it bad to explicitly compare against boolean constants e.g. if (b == false) in Java?

  - by polygenelubricants

  Is it bad to write: if (b == false) //... while (b != true) //... Is it always better to instead write: if (!b) //... while (!b) //... Presumably there is no difference in performance (or is there?), but how do you weigh the explicitness, the conciseness, the clarity, the readability, etc between the two? Note: the variable name b is just used as an example, ala foo and bar.

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• is this a secure approach in ActiveRecords in Rails?

  - by Adnan

  Hello, I am using the following for my customers to unsubscribe from my mailing list; def index @user = User.find_by_salt(params[:subscribe_code]) if @user.nil? flash[:notice] = "the link is not valid...." render :action => 'index' else Notification.delete_all(:user_id => @user.id) flash[:notice] = "you have been unsubscribed....." redirect_to :controller => 'home' end end my link looks like; http://site.com/unsubscribe/32hj5h2j33j3h333 so the above compares the random string to a field in my user table and accordingly deletes data from the notification table. My question; is this approach secure? is there a better/more efficient way for doing this? All suggestions are welcome.

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• syntax for binding multiple variables within text

  - by danke

  When binding multiple variables value1 value2 value3 in the same text field, do I do this: text="{some text value1 other text value2 and other text value3}" or text="some text {value1} other text {value2} and other text {value3}" I noticed both work, but which is the right way to do it and will work all the time.

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• A better UPDATE method in LINQ to SQL

  - by Refracted Paladin

  The below is a typical, for me, Update method in L2S. I am still fairly new to a lot of this(L2S & business app development) but this just FEELs wrong. Like there MUST be a smarter way of doing this. Unfortunately, I am having trouble visualizing it and am hoping someone can provide an example or point me in the right direction. To take a stab in the dark, would I have a Person Object that has all these fields as Properties? Then what, though? Is that redundant since L2S already mapped my Person Table to a Class? Is this just 'how it goes', that you eventually end up passing 30 parameters(or MORE) to an UPDATE statement at some point? For reference, this is a business app using C#, WinForms, .Net 3.5, and L2S over SQL 2005 Standard. Here is a typical Update Call for me. This is in a file(BLLConnect.cs) with other CRUD methods. Connect is the name of the DB that holds tblPerson When a user clicks save() this is what is eventually called with all of these fields having, potentially, been updated-- public static void UpdatePerson(int personID, string userID, string titleID, string firstName, string middleName, string lastName, string suffixID, string ssn, char gender, DateTime? birthDate, DateTime? deathDate, string driversLicenseNumber, string driversLicenseStateID, string primaryRaceID, string secondaryRaceID, bool hispanicOrigin, bool citizenFlag, bool veteranFlag, short ? residencyCountyID, short? responsibilityCountyID, string emailAddress, string maritalStatusID) { using (var context = ConnectDataContext.Create()) { var personToUpdate = (from person in context.tblPersons where person.PersonID == personID select person).Single(); personToUpdate.TitleID = titleID; personToUpdate.FirstName = firstName; personToUpdate.MiddleName = middleName; personToUpdate.LastName = lastName; personToUpdate.SuffixID = suffixID; personToUpdate.SSN = ssn; personToUpdate.Gender = gender; personToUpdate.BirthDate = birthDate; personToUpdate.DeathDate = deathDate; personToUpdate.DriversLicenseNumber = driversLicenseNumber; personToUpdate.DriversLicenseStateID = driversLicenseStateID; personToUpdate.PrimaryRaceID = primaryRaceID; personToUpdate.SecondaryRaceID = secondaryRaceID; personToUpdate.HispanicOriginFlag = hispanicOrigin; personToUpdate.CitizenFlag = citizenFlag; personToUpdate.VeteranFlag = veteranFlag; personToUpdate.ResidencyCountyID = residencyCountyID; personToUpdate.ResponsibilityCountyID = responsibilityCountyID; personToUpdate.EmailAddress = emailAddress; personToUpdate.MaritalStatusID = maritalStatusID; personToUpdate.UpdateUserID = userID; personToUpdate.UpdateDateTime = DateTime.Now; context.SubmitChanges(); } }

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• Is a "Confirm Email" input good practice when user changes email address?

  - by dibson

  My organization has a form to allow users to update their email address with us. It's suggested that we have two input boxes for email: the second as an email confirmation. I always copy/paste my email address when faced with the confirmation. I'm assuming most of our users are not so savvy. Regardless, is this considered a good practice? I can't stand it personally, but I also realize it probably isn't meant for me. If someone screws up their email, they can't login, and they must call to sort things out.

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• What are some good usability guidelines an average developer should follow?

  - by Allain Lalonde

  I'm not a usability specialist, and I really don't care to be one. I just want a small set of rules of thumb that I can follow while coding my User Interfaces so that my product has decent usability. At first I thought that this question would be easy to answer "Use your common sense", but if it's so common among us developers we wouldn't, as a group, have a reputation for our horrible interfaces. Any Suggestions?

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• Giving the script tag an ID

  - by The Code Pimp

  Hi guys, i came across a scenario where giving a <script> element an "ID" would solve a problem easily. However, after reading about the script tag at w3schools and quirksmode, it seems doing so could have some unforeseen consequences. Has anyone come across any of these issues with modern browsers such as Chrome, Safari, FF3 up and IE 7 up? Thanks

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• How to write a good PHP database insert using an associative array

  - by Tom

  In PHP, I want to insert into a database using data contained in a associative array of field/value pairs. Example: $_fields = array('field1'=>'value1','field2'=>'value2','field3'=>'value3'); The resulting SQL insert should look as follows: INSERT INTO table (field1,field2,field3) VALUES ('value1','value2','value3'); I have come up with the following PHP one-liner: mysql_query("INSERT INTO table (".implode(',',array_keys($_fields)).") VALUES (".implode(',',array_values($_fields)).")"); It separates the keys and values of the the associative array and implodes to generate a comma-separated string . The problem is that it does not escape or quote the values that were inserted into the database. To illustrate the danger, Imagine if $_fields contained the following: $_fields = array('field1'=>"naustyvalue); drop table members; --"); The following SQL would be generated: INSERT INTO table (field1) VALUES (naustyvalue); drop table members; --; Luckily, multiple queries are not supported, nevertheless quoting and escaping are essential to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities. How do you write your PHP Mysql Inserts? Note: PDO or mysqli prepared queries aren't currently an option for me because the codebase already uses mysql extensively - a change is planned but it'd take alot of resources to convert?

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• Good code architecture for this problem?

  - by RCIX

  I am developing a space shooter game with customizable ships. You can increase the strength of any number of properties of the ship via a pair of radar charts*. Internally, i represent each ship as a subclassed SpaceObject class, which holds a ShipInfo that describes various properties of that ship. I want to develop a relatively simple API that lets me feed in a block of relative strengths (from minimum to maximum of what the radar chart allows) for all of the ship properties (some of which are simplifications of the underlying actual set of properties) and get back a ShipInfo class i can give to a PlayerShip class (that is the object that is instantiated to be a player ship). I can develop the code to do the transformations between simplified and actual properties myself, but i would like some recommendations as to what sort of architecture to provide to minimize the pain of interacting with this translator code (i.e. no methods with 5+ arguments or somesuch other nonsense). Does anyone have any ideas? *=not actually implemented yet, but that's the plan.

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• De-normalization for the sake of reports - Good or Bad?

  - by Travis

  What are the pros/cons of de-normalizing an enterprise application database because it will make writing reports easier? Pro - designing reports in SSRS will probably be "easier" since no joins will be necessary. Con - developing/maintaining the app to handle de-normalized data will become more difficult due to duplication of data and synchronization. Others?

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• Exposing a service to external systems - How should I design the contract?

  - by Larsi

  Hi! I know this question is been asked before here but still I'm not sure what to select. My service will be called from many 3 party system in the enterprise. I'm almost sure the information the service will collect (MyBigClassWithAllInfo) will change during the products lifetime. Is it still a good idea to expose objects? This is basically what my two alternatives: [ServiceContract] public interface ICollectStuffService { [OperationContract] SetDataResponseMsg SetData(SetDataRequestMsg dataRequestMsg); } // Alternative 1: Put all data inside a xml file [DataContract] public class SetDataRequestMsg { [DataMember] public string Body { get; set; } [DataMember] public string OtherPropertiesThatMightBeHandy { get; set; } // ?? } // Alternative 2: Expose the objects [DataContract] public class SetDataRequestMsg { [DataMember] public Header Header { get; set; } [DataMember] public MyBigClassWithAllInfo ExposedObject { get; set; } } public class SetDataResponseMsg { [DataMember] public ServiceError Error { get; set; } } The xml file would look like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Message>   <Header>     <InfoAboutTheSender>...</InfoAboutTheSender>   </Header>   <StuffToCollectWithAllTheInfo>   <stuff1>...</stuff1> </StuffToCollectWithAllTheInfo> </Message> Any thought on how this service should be implemented? Thanks Larsi

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• TDD - beginner problems and stumbling blocks

  - by Noufal Ibrahim

  While I've written unit tests for most of the code I've done, I only recently got my hands on a copy of TDD by example by Kent Beck. I have always regretted certain design decisions I made since they prevented the application from being 'testable'. I read through the book and while some of it looks alien, I felt that I could manage it and decided to try it out on my current project which is basically a client/server system where the two pieces communicate via. USB. One on the gadget and the other on the host. The application is in Python. I started off and very soon got entangled in a mess of rewrites and tiny tests which I later figured didn't really test anything. I threw away most of them and and now have a working application for which the tests have all coagulated into just 2. Based on my experiences, I have a few questions which I'd like to ask. I gained some information from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1146218/new-to-tdd-are-there-sample-applications-with-tests-to-show-how-to-do-tdd but have some specific questions which I'd like answers to/discussion on. Kent Beck uses a list which he adds to and strikes out from to guide the development process. How do you make such a list? I initially had a few items like "server should start up", "server should abort if channel is not available" etc. but they got mixed and finally now, it's just something like "client should be able to connect to server" (which subsumed server startup etc.). How do you handle rewrites? I initially selected a half duplex system based on named pipes so that I could develop the application logic on my own machine and then later add the USB communication part. It them moved to become a socket based thing and then moved from using raw sockets to using the Python SocketServer module. Each time things changed, I found that I had to rewrite considerable parts of the tests which was annoying. I'd figured that the tests would be a somewhat invariable guide during my development. They just felt like more code to handle. I needed a client and a server to communicate through the channel to test either side. I could mock one of the sides to test the other but then the whole channel wouldn't be tested and I worry that I'd miss that. This detracted from the whole red/green/refactor rhythm. Is this just lack of experience or am I doing something wrong? The "Fake it till you make it" left me with a lot of messy code that I later spent a lot of time to refactor and clean up. Is this the way things work? At the end of the session, I now have my client and server running with around 3 or 4 unit tests. It took me around a week to do it. I think I could have done it in a day if I were using the unit tests after code way. I fail to see the gain. I'm looking for comments and advice from people who have implemented large non trivial projects completely (or almost completely) using this methodology. It makes sense to me to follow the way after I have something already running and want to add a new feature but doing it from scratch seems to tiresome and not worth the effort. P.S. : Please let me know if this should be community wiki and I'll mark it like that. Update 0 : All the answers were equally helpful. I picked the one I did because it resonated with my experiences the most. Update 1: Practice Practice Practice!

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• What's the standard behaviour for an out parameter when a TryXxxx method returns false?

  - by Matt Lacey

  Assuming a method with the following signature bool TryXxxx(object something, out int toReturn) What is it acceptable for toReturn to be if TryXxxx returns false? In that it's infered that toReturn should never be used if TryXxxx fails does it matter? If toReturn was a nulable type, then it would make sense to return null. But int isn't nullable and I don't want to have to force it to be. If toReturn is always a certain value if TryXxxx fails we risk having the position where 2 values could be considered to indicate the same thing. I can see this leading to potential possible confusion if the 'default' value was returned as a valid response (when TryXxxx returns true). From an implementation point if view it looks like having toReturn be a[ny] value is easiest, but is there anything more important to consider?

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• Self-Configuring Classes W/ Command Line Args: Pattern or Anti-Pattern?

  - by dsimcha

  I've got a program where a lot of classes have really complicated configuration requirements. I've adopted the pattern of decentralizing the configuration and allowing each class to take and parse the command line/configuration file arguments in its c'tor and do whatever it needs with them. (These are very coarse-grained classes that are only instantiated a few times, so there is absolutely no performance issue here.) This avoids having to do shotgun surgery to plumb new options I add through all the levels they need to be passed through. It also avoids having to specify each configuration option in multiple places (where it's parsed and where it's used). What are some advantages/disadvantages of this style of programming? It seems to reduce separation of concerns in that every class is now doing configuration stuff, and to make programs less self-documenting because what parameters a class takes becomes less explicit. OTOH, it seems to increase encapsulation in that it makes each class more self-contained because no other part of the program needs to know exactly what configuration parameters a class might need.

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