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• Is Tracking Software Usage Illegal?

  - by Graviton

  Let's say if I am doing desktop application, and I am interested to know whether our software really gets used or not. Is it alright to insert in code that tracks whether our software is used, for how long and so on? Note that no person-identifiable information will be collected, all I am interested to know is how frequent and for how long the software is used. The information will be sent to our server for diagnosis. What do you think?

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• How to make the working environment of a programmer less shiny?

  - by Roflcoptr

  Last year I had a sport accident and since then my left eye is a little bit sensitive. Especially if looking in bright and shiny colors, I get tired very fast and can't literally focus on anything. White is the worst color ever! Unfortunately most application that I use in my work environment (Firefox, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Tetris) have a very bright white background. This really hurts my eye. So is there an easy way to generally use color schemes on the laptop so that everything isn't that bright? Obviously I could everywhere change the default color scheme, but isn't there a simpler solution to do that? Or any recommendations what are good color schemes to be less bright but still clearly readable?

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• What would a database look like if it were normalized to be completely abstracted? lets call it Max(n) normal form

  - by Doug Chamberlain

  edit: By simplest form i was not implying that it would be easy to understand. For instance, developing in low level assembly language is the simplest way to can develop code, but it is far from the easiest. Essentially, what I am asking is in math you can simplify a fraction to a point where it can no longer be simplfied. Can the same be true for a database and what would a database look like in its simplest, form?

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• Opensource showcase for MVC in Java Swing

  - by Regular John

  I've allready created small desktop CRUD applications using Java/Swing. In hindsight I'm not quite sure if the overall design of these applications is good. I've also done some reading on MVC and looked at different Swing-tutorials. My problem is, that I've got a very theroatical knowledge of MVC and on the other hand, most Swing-resources don't implement the MVC-pattern. Now I would like to get my hands dirty and see how MVC is implemented in Swing in a real-world-application. Are there any opensource project you could recommend? It would be also interesting to have more than one project, to see different approaches. Best fit would be a software, that uses a relational database in the backend, to see an overall design, that I can compare to my former applications.

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• Are very short or abbreviated method/function names that don't use full words bad practice or a matter of style.

  - by Alb

  Is there nowadays any case for brevity over clarity with method names? Tonight I came across the Python method repr() which seems like a bad name for a method to me. It's not an English word. It apparently is an abbreviation of 'representation' and even if you can deduce that, it still doesn't tell you what the method does. A good method name is subjective to a certain degree, but I had assumed that modern best practices agreed that names should be at least full words and descriptive enough to reveal enough about the method that you would easily find one when looking for it. Method names made from words help let your code read like English. repr() seems to have no advantages as a name other than being short and IDE auto-complete makes this a non-issue. An additional reason given in an answer is that python names are brief so that you can do many things on one line. Surely the better way is to just extract the many things to their own function, and repeat until lines are not too long. Are these just a hangover from the unix way of doing things? Commands with names like ls, rm, ps and du (if you could call those names) were hard to find and hard to remember. I know that the everyday usage of commands such as these is different than methods in code so the matter of whether those are bad names is a different matter.

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• Save match details to SQLite or XML?

  - by trizz

  I'm making a (conceptual) system to simulate any kind of sports match (like soccer,basketball,etc) with actions (for example pass,pass,out,pass,score) so it will be like a real report. The main statistics (play time, number of actions etc.) I'm saving to a MySQL database, but the report itself, can contain more than 1000 actions per match. To avoid millions of records in my database I'm thinking of saving the detailled report in a SQLite database or a XML file. For every match played, a file will be created. When a user request the match details, I read the file for details. What is the best choice for this purpose? SQLite or XML?

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• Is there an appropriate coding style for implementing an algorithm during an interview?

  - by GlenPeterson

  I failed an interview question in C years ago about converting hex to decimal by not exploiting the ASCII table if (inputDigitByte > 9) hex = inputDigitByte - 'a'. The rise of Unicode has made this question pretty silly, but the point was that the interviewer valued raw execution speed above readability and error handling. They tell you to review algorithms textbooks to prepare for these interviews, yet these same textbooks tend to favor the implementation with the fewest lines of code, even if it has to rely on magic numbers (like "infinity") and a slower, more memory-intensive implementation (like a linked list instead of an array) to do that. I don't know what is right. Coding an algorithm within the space of an interview has at least 3 constraints: time to code, elegance/readability, and efficiency of execution. What trade-offs are appropriate for interview code? How much do you follow the textbook definition of an algorithm? Is it better to eliminate recursion, unroll loops, and use arrays for efficiency? Or is it better to use recursion and special values like "infinity" or Integer.MAX_VALUE to reduce the number of lines of code needed to write the algorithm? Interface: Make a very self-contained, bullet-proof interface, or sloppy and fast? On the one extreme, the array to be sorted might be a public static variable. On the other extreme, it might need to be passed to each method, allowing methods to be called individually from different threads for different purposes. Is it appropriate to use a linked-list data structure for items that are traversed in one direction vs. using arrays and doubling the size when the array is full? Implementing a singly-linked list during the interview is often much faster to code and easier remember for recursive algorithms like MergeSort. Thread safety - just document that it's unsafe, or say so verbally? How much should the interviewee be looking for opportunities for parallel processing? Is bit shifting appropriate? x / 2 or x >> 1 Polymorphism, type safety, and generics? Comments? Variable and method names: qs(a, p, q, r) vs: quickSort(theArray, minIdx, partIdx, maxIdx) How much should you use existing APIs? Obviously you can't use a java.util.HashMap to implement a hash-table, but what about using a java.util.List to accumulate your sorted results? Are there any guiding principals that would answer these and other questions, or is the guiding principal to ask the interviewer? Or maybe this should be the basis of a discussion while writing the code? If an interviewer can't or won't answer one of these questions, are there any tips for coaxing the information out of them?

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• What source code organization approach helps improve modularity and API/Implementation separation?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  Few languages are as restrictive as Java with file naming standards and project structure. In that language, the file name must match the public class declared in the file, and the file must live in a directory structure matching the class package. I have mixed feelings about that approach. While I never have to guess where a file lives, there's still a lot of empty directories and artificial constraints. There's several languages that define everything about a class in one file, at least by convention. C#, Python (I think), Ruby, Erlang, etc. The commonality in most these languages is that they are object oriented, although that statement can probably be rebuffed (there is one non-OO language in the list already). Finally, there's quite a few languages mostly in the C family that have a separate header and implementation file. For C I think this makes sense, because it is one of the few ways to separate the API interface from implementations. With C it seems that feature is used to promote modularity. Yet, with C++ the way header and implementation files are split seems rather forced. You don't get the same clean API separation that you do with C, and you are forced to include some private details in the header you would rather keep only in the implementation. There's quite a few languages that have a concept that overlaps with interfaces like Java, C#, Go, etc. Some languages use what feels like a hack to provide the same concept like C# using pure virtual abstract classes. Still others don't really have an interface concept and rely on "duck" typing--for example Ruby. Ruby has modules, but those are more along the lines of mixing in behaviors to a class than they are for defining how to interact with a class. In OO terms, interfaces are a powerful way to provide separation between an API client and an API implementation. So to hurry up and ask the question, from a personal experience point of view: Does separation of header and implementation help you write more modular code, or does it get in the way? (it helps to specify the language you are referring to) Does the strict file name to class name scheme of Java help maintainability, or is it unnecessary structure for structure's sake? What would you propose to promote good API/Implementation separation and project maintenance, how would you prefer to do it?

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• Getting a design company to embrace the benefits of good development

  - by Toby

  I know there are already various topics discussing what we can do to get managers to buy into good development practices, but I was wondering if there are any specific things we can do to explain to designers that Web Development is more than just turning their design into a website. I want to try and push them to design based on progressive enhancement, responsive design and ajax but I think there is a trend to stick to the print based design principles, which is understandable as it is their background, but is frustrating to a dev.

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• Which of these design patterns is superior?

  - by durron597

  I find I tend to design class structures where several subclasses have nearly identical functionality, but one piece of it is different. So I write nearly all the code in the abstract class, and then create several subclasses to do the one different thing. Does this pattern have a name? Is this the best way for this sort of scenario? Option 1: public interface TaxCalc { String calcTaxes(); } public abstract class AbstractTaxCalc implements TaxCalc { // most constructors and fields are here public double calcTaxes(UserFinancials data) { // code double diffNumber = getNumber(data); // more code } abstract protected double getNumber(UserFinancials data); protected double initialTaxes(double grossIncome) { // code return initialNumber; } } public class SimpleTaxCalc extends AbstractCalc { protected double getNumber(UserFinancials data) { double temp = intialCalc(data.getGrossIncome()); // do other stuff return temp; } } public class FancyTaxCalc extends AbstractTaxCalc { protected double getNumber(UserFinancials data) { int temp = initialCalc(data.getGrossIncome()); // Do fancier math return temp; } } Option 2: This version is more like the Strategy pattern, and should be able to do essentially the same sorts of tasks. public class TaxCalcImpl implements TaxCalc { private final TaxMath worker; public DummyImpl(TaxMath worker) { this.worker = worker; } public double calcTaxes(UserFinancials data) { // code double analyzedDouble = initialNumber; int diffNumber = worker.getNumber(data, initialNumber); // more code } protected int initialTaxes(double grossIncome) { // code return initialNumber; } } public interface TaxMath { double getNumber(UserFinancials data, double initial); } Then I could do: TaxCalc dum = new TaxCalcImpl(new TaxMath() { @Override public double getNumber(UserFinancials data, double initial) { double temp = data.getGrossIncome(); // do math return temp; }); And I could make specific implementations of TaxMath for things I use a lot, or I could make a stateless singleton for certain kinds of workers I use a lot. So the question I'm asking is: Which of these patterns is superior, when, and why? Or, alternately, is there an even better third option?

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• When you should and should not use the 'new' keyword?

  - by skizeey

  I watched a Google Tech Talk presentation on Unit Testing, given by Misko Hevery, and he said to avoid using the new keyword in business logic code. I wrote a program, and I did end up using the new keyword here and there, but they were mostly for instantiating objects that hold data (ie, they didn't have any functions or methods). I'm wondering, did I do something wrong when I used the new keyword for my program. And where can we break that 'rule'?

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• Algorithm to figure out appointment times?

  - by Rachel

  I have a weird situation where a client would like a script that automatically sets up thousands of appointments over several days. The tricky part is the appointments are for a variety of US time zones, and I need to take the consumer's local time zone into account when generating appointment dates and times for each record. Appointment Rules: Appointments should be set from 8AM to 8PM Eastern Standard Time, with breaks from 12P-2P and 4P-6P. This leaves a total of 8 hours per day available for setting appointments. Appointments should be scheduled 5 minutes apart. 8 hours of 5-minute intervals means 96 appointments per day. There will be 5 users at a time handling appointments. 96 appointments per day multiplied by 5 users equals 480, so the maximum number of appointments that can be set per day is 480. Now the tricky requirement: Appointments are restricted to 8am to 8pm in the consumer's local time zone. This means that the earliest time allowed for each appointment is different depending on the consumer's time zone: Eastern: 8A Central: 9A Mountain: 10A Pacific: 11A Alaska: 12P Hawaii or Undefined: 2P Arizona: 10A or 11A based on current Daylight Savings Time Assuming a data set can be several thousand records, and each record will contain a timezone value, is there an algorithm I could use to determine a Date and Time for every record that matches the rules above?

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• Sorting versus hashing

  - by Paul Siegel

  My problem is as follows. I have an array of n strings with m < n of them distinct. I want to create a one-to-one function which assigns each of the m distinct strings to the numbers 0 ... m-1. For example, if my strings are: Bob, Amy, Bob, Charlie, Amy then the function: Bob -> 0, Amy -> 1, Charlie -> 2 would meet my needs. I have thought of three possible approaches: Sort the list of strings, remove duplicates, and construct the function using a search algorithm. Create a hash table and check each string to see if it is already in the table before inserting it. Sort the list of strings, remove duplicates, and put the resulting list into a hash table. My code will be written in Java, and I will likely use standard Java algorithms: merge sort for sorting, binary search for searching, and whatever the standard Java hash table algorithm is. Question: Assume that after creating the function I will have to evaluate it on each of the n original strings. Which of the three approaches is fastest? Is there a better way? Part of the problem is that I don't really know what's going on "under the hood" in standard hashing algorithms. Any help would be appreciated.

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• Find vertices of a convex hull

  - by Jeff Bullard

  I am attempting to do this within CGAL. From a 3D point cloud, find the convex hull, then loop over the finite facets of the convex hull and print each facet's vertices. It seems like there should be a straightforward way to do this; I would have expected that 3D polyhedra would own a vector of facet objects, each of which in turn would own a vector of its edges, each of which in turn would own a vector of its vertices, and that their would be some access through this hierarchy using iterators. But so far I have been unable to find a simple way to navigate through this hierarchy (if it exists).

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• What are the best practices for phasing out obsolete code?

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  I have the need to phase out an obsolete method. I am aware of the [Obsolete] attribute. Does Microsoft have a recommended best practice guide for doing this? Here's my current plan: A. I do not want to create a new assembly because developers would have to add a new reference to their projects and I expect to get a lot of grief from my boss and co-workers if they must do this. We also do not maintain multiple assembly versions. We only use the latest version. Changing this practice would require changing our deployment process which is a big issue (have to teach people how to do things with TFS instead of FinalBuilder and get them to give up FinalBuilder) B. Mark the old method obsolete. C. Because the implementation is changing (not the method signature), I need to rename the method rather than create an overload. So, to make users aware of the proper method I plan to add a message to the [Obsolete] attribute. This part bothers me, because the only change I'm making is decoupling the method from the connection string. But, because I'm not adding a new assembly, I see no way around this. Result: [Obsolete("Please don't use this anymore because it does not implement IMyDbProvider. Use XXX instead.")]; /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="settingName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Dictionary<string, Setting> ReadSettings(string settingName) { return ReadSettings(settingName, SomeGeneralClass.ConnectionString); } public Dictionary<string, Setting> ReadSettings2(string settingName) { return ReadSettings(settingName);// IMyDbProvider.ConnectionString private member added to class. Probably have to make this an instance method. }

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• Backbone.js, Rails and code duplication

  - by Matteo Pagliazzi

  I'm building a web app and I need a JS framework like Backbone.js to work with my backend rovided by Rails that mostly return JSON objects after DB queries. Searching on the web I've discovered Backbone which seems to be complete, quite populare and actively developed but I've noticed that a lot of things done by Backbone are simply a duplicte of the works done by Rails: for example validation and models. My idea of "perfect" (for my actual needs) JS mvc (it can't be called mvc but i don't have any other names) is something really simple that has a function for each action in my Rails controller that are triggered by a specific event (user/hash changes, click on a button...) and send requests to the server that respond with a JSON object then I'll load a template or execute some JS code. Do you have any concern/suggestion about my idea? Do you know some "micro" js framework like what i have described? If you have worked with backone.js + rails what can you suggest me?

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• How do I convince my team that a requirements specification is unnecessary if we adopt user-stories?

  - by Nupul

  We are planning to adopt user-stories to capture stakeholder 'intent' in a lightweight fashion rather than a heavy SRS (software requirements specifications). However, it seems that though they understand the value of stories, there is still a desire to 'convert' the stories into an SRS-like language with all the attributes, priorities, input, outputs, source, destination etc. User-stories 'eliminate' the need for a formal SRS like artifact to begin with so what's the point in having an SRS? How should I convince my team (who are all very qualified CS folks by the way - both by education and practice) that the SRS would be 'eliminated' if we adopted user-stories for capturing the functional requirements of the system? (NFRs etc can be captured too, but that's not the intent of the question). So here's my 'work-flow' argument: Capture initial requirements as user-stories and later elaborate them to use-cases (which are required to be documented at a low level i.e. describing interactions with the UI prototypes/mockups and are a deliverable post deployment). Thus going from user-stories to use-cases rather than user-stories to SRS to use-cases. How are you all currently capturing user-stories at your workplace (if at all) and how do you suggest I 'make a case' for absence of SRS in presence of user-stories?

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• Is there a design pattern for chained observers?

  - by sharakan

  Several times, I've found myself in a situation where I want to add functionality to an existing Observer-Observable relationship. For example, let's say I have an Observable class called PriceFeed, instances of which are created by a variety of PriceSources. Observers on this are notified whenever the underlying PriceSource updates the PriceFeed with a new price. Now I want to add a feature that allows a (temporary) override to be set on the PriceFeed. The PriceSource should still update prices on the PriceFeed, but for as long as the override is set, whenever a consumer asks PriceFeed for it's current value, it should get the override. The way I did this was to introduce a new OverrideablePriceFeed that is itself both an Observer and an Observable, and that decorates the actual PriceFeed. It's implementation of .getPrice() is straight from Chain of Responsibility, but how about the handling of Observable events? When an override is set or cleared, it should issue it's own event to Observers, as well as forwarding events from the underlying PriceFeed. I think of this as some kind of a chained observer, and was curious if there's a more definitive description of a similar pattern.

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• Why do companies opensource their code?

  - by Fahad Uddin

  I have seen many big companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn opensource their code. I was curious to understand why would any company share their code to the world. One reason I understood that it makes the people better understand their API. Still, I am a little confused as any other company/person can use their code to find a vulnerability inside and get their site down. Why do such big companies take this risk then?

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• Empirical Evidence of Popularity of Git and Mercurial

  - by ana

  It's 2012! Mercurial and Git are both still strong. I understand the trade-offs of both. I also understand everyone has some sort of preference for one or the other. That's fine. I'm looking for some information on level of usage of both. For example, on stackoverflow.com, searching for Git gets you 12000 hits, Mercurial gets you 3000. Google Trends says it's 1.9:1.0 for Git. What other empirical information is available to estimate the relative usage of both tools?

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• Working for free?

  - by Jonny

  I came across this article Work for Free that got me thinking. The goal of every employer is to gain more value from workers than the firm pays out in wages; otherwise, there is no growth, no advance, and no advantage for the employer. Conversely, the goal of every employee should be to contribute more to the firm than he or she receives in wages, and thereby provide a solid rationale for receiving raises and advancement in the firm. I don't need to tell you that the refusenik didn't last long in this job. In contrast, here is a story from last week. My phone rang. It was the employment division of a major university. The man on the phone was inquiring about the performance of a person who did some site work on Mises.org last year. I was able to tell him about a remarkable young man who swung into action during a crisis, and how he worked three 19-hour days, three days in a row, how he learned new software with diligence, how he kept his cool, how he navigated his way with grace and expertise amidst some 80 different third-party plug-ins and databases, how he saw his way around the inevitable problems, how he assumed responsibility for the results, and much more. What I didn't tell the interviewer was that this person did all this without asking for any payment. Did that fact influence my report on his performance? I'm not entirely sure, but the interviewer probably sensed in my voice my sense of awe toward what this person had done for the Mises Institute. The interviewer told me that he had written down 15 different questions to ask me but that I had answered them all already in the course of my monologue, and that he was thrilled to hear all these specifics. The person was offered the job. He had done a very wise thing; he had earned a devotee for life. The harder the economic times, the more employers need to know what they are getting when they hire someone. The job applications pour in by the buckets, all padded with degrees and made to look as impressive as possible. It's all just paper. What matters today is what a person can do for a firm. The resume becomes pro forma but not decisive under these conditions. But for a former boss or manager to rave about you to a potential employer? That's worth everything. What do you think? Has anyone here worked for free? If so, has it benefited you in any way? Why should(nt) you work for free (presuming you have the money from other means to keep you going)? Can you share your experience? Me, I am taking a year out of college and haven't gotten a degree yet so that's probably why most of my job applications are getting ignored. So im thinking about working for free for the experience?

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• Architecture/pattern resources for small applications and tools

  - by s73v3r

  I was wondering if anyone had any resources or advice related to using architecture patterns like MVVM/MVC/MVP/etc on small applications and tools, as opposed to large, enterprisy ones. EDIT: Most of the information I see on application architecture is directed at large, enterprise applications. I'm just writing small programs and tools. As far as using these architecture patterns, is it generally worthwhile to go through the overhead of using an MVC/MVVM framework? Or would I be better off keeping it simple?

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• Differences between TypeScript and Dart

  - by margabit

  Microsoft recently unveiled Typescript, a new JavaScript-like programming language. Some time ago, I heard about Dart, a new programming language created by Google to solve problems related to Javascript like performance, scalability, etc.. The purpose of both new languages seem the same to me.. What do you think? Are the purposes of the languages the same? What are the real differences about them?

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• Should my dropdown of recently used items show items I no longer have access to

  - by Dan Hibbert

  We are implementing a client for our document management system. Part of this is the checkin screen where one of the fields a user chooses is the folder where the document should be checked into. In our original system, this was represented with a combobox where a user could hand type a folder path or select a path from a list of 5 folders they'd recently used for checking. It is possible that between the time they used the folder and the time they are doing the new checkin the user will no longer have access to the folder. At present, we still show the folder as an option and then, if the user chooses that folder, display an error message when the user submits the check in. We are thinking of removing these recently used folders the user doesn't have access to (we'll make a check when the form is instantiated) because why show an option if we know it will cause a failure (and another dialog message the user has to OK). However, an opposite opinion is that if we remove those folders, the users will think the system has "forgotten" their recent choices and will lose trust in what they are using. I'd like to get some opinions on the better user experience for this problem.

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• Is it possible to create a single tokenizer to parse this?

  - by Adrian

  This extends off this other Q&A thread, but is going into details that are out of scope from the original question. I am generating a parser that is to parse a context-sensitive grammar which can take in the following subset of symbols: ,, [, ], {, }, m/[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z_0-9]*/, m/[0-9]+/ The grammar can take in the following string { abc[1] }, } and parse it as ({, abc[1], }, }). Another example would be to take: { abc[1] [, } and parse it as ({, abc[1], [,, }). This is similar to the grammar used in Perl for the qw() syntax. The braces indicate that the contents are to be whitespace tokenized. A closing brace must be on its own to indicate the end of the whitespace tokenized group. Can this be done using a single lexer/tokenizer, or would it be necessary to have a separate tokenizer when parsing this group?

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