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• What tool/framework to use for technical documentation?

  - by Pangea

  We develop products and frameworks to be used with in our organization. I am looking for programmer friendly documentation tools. I have researched on few options sometime back but couldn't decide which one to use. I am looking for suggestions from the people who already used these tools. docbook: springframework and hibernate use this format and this looks good. but I believe they have customized the default xslt/stylesheet. Can I copy and use their xslt and css (ofcourse with colors and images changed). Can I integrate the doc generation using maven? wiki: this is not friendly to the technical document writers and the documentation doesn't look professional. versioning is also not possible I believe word docs: this is what we use currently but it is hard to link and reuse common documents. DITA?

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• Delphi - online technical tests

  - by RBA

  I have searched for some online Delphi programming tests, and except the small test for Delphi certification and several tests on Delphi.about.com I did find nothing. Any ideas where I can find some Delphi online tests? LE: defining online Delphi programming tests: - technical questions about Delphi fundamentals,Data types,classes, libraries, generics, database concepts, etc. Examples here (Delphi Developer Certification Exam Study Guide) and here. LE2: tests to take after you have read all the articles from this question: Questions every good Delphi developer should be able to answer?

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• Pros and cons of Localisation of technical words ?

  - by paercebal

  This question is directed to the non-english speaking people here. It is somewhat biased because SO is an "english-speaking" web forum, so... In the other hand, most developers would know english anyway... In your locale culture, are technical words translated into locale words ? For example, how "Design Pattern", or "Factory", or whatever are written/said in german, spanish, etc. etc. when used by IT? Are the english words prefered? The local translation? Do the two version (english/locale) are evenly used? Edit Could you write with your answer the locale translation of "Design Pattern"? In french, according to Wikipedia.fr, it is "Patron de conception", which translates back as "Model of Conceptualization" (I guess).

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• Using the word "you" in an user manual

  - by yan bellavance

  I am writing a user manual and I have come to a discussion with a colleague. He says I cannot use the word "you" anywhere in the manual. Now I remember something about this at school but that was not for writing procedures. Also, doing some googling I observed that most tutorials where using it a lot. I would prefer using it but only if this is considered good practice. what do you think?

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• CIC 2010 - Ghost Stories and Model Based Design

  - by warren.baird

  I was lucky enough to attend the collaboration and interoperability congress recently. The location was very beautiful and interesting, it was held in the mountains about two hours outside Denver, at the Stanley hotel, famous both for inspiring Steven King's novel "The Shining" and for attracting a lot of attention from the "Ghost Hunters" TV show. My visit was prosaic - I didn't get to experience the ghosts the locals promised - but interesting, with some very informative sessions. I noticed one main theme - a lot of people were talking about Model Based Design (MBD), which is moving design and manufacturing away from 2d drawings and towards 3d models. 2d has some pretty deep roots in industrial manufacturing and there have been a lot of challenges encountered in making the leap to 3d. One of the challenges discussed in several sessions was how to get model information out to the non-engineers in the company, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. In the 2D space, people without access to CAD software (for example, people assembling a product on the shop floor) can be given printouts of the design - it's not particularly efficient, and it definitely isn't very green, but it tends to work. There's no direct equivalent in the 3D space. One of the ways that AutoVue is used in industrial manufacturing is to provide non-CAD users with an easy to use, interactive 3D view of their products - in some cases it's directly used by people on the shop floor, but in cases where paper is really ingrained in the process, AutoVue can be used by a technical publications person to create illustrative 2D views that can be printed that show all of the details necessary to complete the work. Are you making the move to model based design? Is AutoVue helping you with your challenges? Let us know in the comments below.

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• The spork/platypus average: shameless self promotion

  - by Roger Hart

  This is the video of presentation I gave at UA Europe and TCUK this year. The actual sub-title was "Content strategy at Red Gate Software", but this heading feels more honest. For anybody who missed it, or is just vaguely interested, here's a link to me talking about de-suckifying the web. You can find the slideshare deck here, too* Watching it back is more than a little embarrassing, and makes me really, really want to do a follow up, so I can do three things: explain the rest of the big web project, now we've done it give some data on the outcome of the content review make a grovelling apology to our marketing guys, who I've been unfairly mean to in a childish effort to look cool There are a whole bunch of other TCUK presentations online, too. You can find them all here: http://tiny.cc/tcuk10_videos I'd particularly recommend Chris Atherton's: "Everything you always wanted to know about psychology and technical communication" - it's full of cool stuff. You should probably also watch David Black's opening keynote, which managed to make my hour of precocious grandstanding look measured, meek, and helpful. He actually makes some interesting points, but you'd basically have to ship Richard Dawkins off to Utah, if you wanted to go further out of your way to aggravate your audience. It does give an engaging account of running a large tech comms project, and raise some questions about how we propose to understand a world where increasing amounts of our stuff gets done by increasingly many increasingly complicated tissues of APIs. Well, sort of. That's what all the notes I made were about, anyway.   *Slideshare ate my fonts. Just so we're clear on this: I'd never use badly-kerned Arial in a presentation. Don't worry.

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• Sucking Less Every Year?

  - by AdityaGameProgrammer

  Sucking Less Every Year -Jeff Atwood I had come across this insightful article.Quoting directly from the post I've often thought that sucking less every year is how humble programmers improve. You should be unhappy with code you wrote a year ago. If you aren't, that means either A) you haven't learned anything in a year, B) your code can't be improved, or C) you never revisit old code. All of these are the kiss of death for software developers. How often does this happen or not happen to you? How long before you see an actual improvement in your coding ? month, year? Do you ever revisit Your old code? How often does your old code plague you? or how often do you have to deal with your technical debt. It is definitely very painful to fix old bugs n dirty code that we may have done to quickly meet a deadline and those quick fixes ,some cases we may have to rewrite most of the application/code. No arguments about that. Some of the developers i had come across argued that they were already at the evolved stage where their coding doesn't need improvement or cant get improved anymore. Does this happen? If so how many years into coding on a particular language does one expect this to happen? Related: Ever look back at some of your old code and grimace in pain? Star Wars Moment in Code "Luke! I am your code!" "No! Impossible! It can't be!"

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• Sucking Less Every Year ?

  - by AdityaGameProgrammer

  Sucking Less Every Year A trail of thought that had been on my mind for a while Quoting directly from the post I've often thought that sucking less every year is how humble programmers improve. You should be unhappy with code you wrote a year ago. If you aren't, that means either A) you haven't learned anything in a year, B) your code can't be improved, or C) you never revisit old code. All of these are the kiss of death for software developers. How often does this happen or not happen to you? How long before you see an actual improvement in your coding ? month, year? Do you ever revisit Your old code? How often does your old code plague you? or how often do you have to deal with your technical debt. It is definitely very painful to fix old bugs n dirty code that we may have done to quickly meet a deadline and those quick fixes ,some cases we may have to rewrite most of the application/code. No arguments about that. Some of the developers i had come across argued that they were already at the evolved stage where their coding doesn't need improvement or cant get improved anymore. Does this happen? If so how many years into coding on a particular language does one expect this to happen?

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• Learn about the Exciting New WebCenter Content 11.1.1.8 Features by Attending the Advisor Webcast on November 21st!

  - by AlanBoucher

  Have you been looking for a place to store your content securely and in an organized fashion, while needing to access it while you are on the go? Well you can!  Learn about the new Mobile App for WebCenter Content 11.1.1.8 along with other exciting new features by attending the Advisor Webcast called WebCenter Content 11.1.1.8 Overview and Support Information. November 21, 2013 at 11 am ET, 10 am CT, 9 am MT, 8 am PT, 5:00 pm, Europe Time (Paris, GMT+01:00) This one-hour session is recommended for technical and functional users who have installed or will install WebCenter Content 11.1.1.8 or would just like more information on the latest release. TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: Overview of new features and enhancements Installation of the new Content UI Upgrading from older WebCenter Content versions Support issues including latest patches Roadmap of proposed additional features REGISTER NOW and mark your Calendar:1. Event address for attendees: https://oracleaw.webex.com/oracleaw/onstage/g.php?d=590991341&t=a2. Register for the meeting.Once the host approves your request, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions for joining the meeting.

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• Malware - Technical anlaysis

  - by nullptr

  Note: Please do not mod down or close. Im not a stupid PC user asking to fix my pc problem. I am intrigued and am having a deep technical look at whats going on. I have come across a Windows XP machine that is sending unwanted p2p traffic. I have done a 'netstat -b' command and explorer.exe is sending out the traffic. When I kill this process the traffic stops and obviously Windows Explorer dies. Here is the header of the stream from the Wireshark dump (x.x.x.x) is the machines IP. GNUTELLA CONNECT/0.6 Listen-IP: x.x.x.x:8059 Remote-IP: 76.164.224.103 User-Agent: LimeWire/5.3.6 X-Requeries: false X-Ultrapeer: True X-Degree: 32 X-Query-Routing: 0.1 X-Ultrapeer-Query-Routing: 0.1 X-Max-TTL: 3 X-Dynamic-Querying: 0.1 X-Locale-Pref: en GGEP: 0.5 Bye-Packet: 0.1 GNUTELLA/0.6 200 OK Pong-Caching: 0.1 X-Ultrapeer-Needed: false Accept-Encoding: deflate X-Requeries: false X-Locale-Pref: en X-Guess: 0.1 X-Max-TTL: 3 Vendor-Message: 0.2 X-Ultrapeer-Query-Routing: 0.1 X-Query-Routing: 0.1 Listen-IP: 76.164.224.103:15649 X-Ext-Probes: 0.1 Remote-IP: x.x.x.x GGEP: 0.5 X-Dynamic-Querying: 0.1 X-Degree: 32 User-Agent: LimeWire/4.18.7 X-Ultrapeer: True X-Try-Ultrapeers: 121.54.32.36:3279,173.19.233.80:3714,65.182.97.15:5807,115.147.231.81:9751,72.134.30.181:15810,71.59.97.180:24295,74.76.84.250:25497,96.234.62.221:32344,69.44.246.38:42254,98.199.75.23:51230 GNUTELLA/0.6 200 OK So it seems that the malware has hooked into explorer.exe and hidden its self quite well as a Norton Scan doesn't pick anything up. I have looked in Windows firewall and it shouldn't be letting this traffic through. I have had a look into the messages explorer.exe is sending in Spy++ and the only related ones I can see are socket connections etc... My question is what can I do to look into this deeper? What does malware achieve by sending p2p traffic? I know to fix the problem the easiest way is to reinstall Windows but I want to get to the bottom of it first, just out of interest.

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• Writing a script for ash?

  - by rumtscho

  My VPN is behaving funny sometimes, and I have to restart it often. I wanted to write a script which does that for me. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a shortcut for the commands I have to type into the terminal. More specifically: it will look at the running processes. If it finds a running vpnc process, it will kill it. Then it will start vpnc. I've written bash scripts of similar complexity, but now I don't have a bash, only an ash. Until now, the only difference I noticed is that there are much less commands available, but then, I don't use it very often. So I have some questions. Is writing ash scripts different than writing bash scripts? Is there something specific to consider when doing it? When the script is ready, how can I deploy it? For bash, I just put the executable file under /usr/lib and run it by typing the file name into the command line, will this work with ash? Are there any special pitfalls to watch out for in the script I want to write? I think that the killing process part may get hairy, if I write something that kills the wrong process, but even then running the script shouldn't break anything permanently, right?

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• Trouble with backslash characters and rsyslog writing to postgres

  - by Flimzy

  I have rsyslog 4.6.4 configured to write mail logs to a PostgreSQL database. It all works fine, until the log message contains a backslash, as in this example: Jun 12 11:37:46 dc5 postfix/smtp[26475]: Vk0nYDKdH3sI: to=<[email protected], relay=----.---[---.---.---.---]:25, delay=1.5, delays=0.77/0.07/0.3/0.35, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (host ----.---[199.85.216.241] said: 451 4.3.0 Error writing to file d:\pmta\spool\B\00000414, status = ERROR_DISK_FULL in "DATA" (in reply to end of DATA command)) The above is the log entry, as written to /var/log/mail.log. It is correct. The trouble is that the backslash characters in the file name are interpreted as escapes when sent to the following SQL recipe: $template dcdb, "SELECT rsyslog_insert(('%timereported:::date-rfc3339%'::TIMESTAMPTZ)::TIMESTAMP,'%msg:::escape-cc%'::TEXT,'%syslogtag%'::VARCHAR)",STDSQL :syslogtag, startswith, "postfix" :ompgsql:/var/run/postgresql,dc,root,;dcdb As a result, the rsyslog_insert() stored procedure gets the following value for as msg: Vk0nYDKdH3sI: to=<[email protected], relay=----.---[---.---.---.---]:25, delay=1.5, delays=0.77/0.07/0.3/0.35, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (host ----.---[199.85.216.241] said: 451 4.3.0 Error writing to file d:pmtaspoolB The \p, \s, \B and \0 in the file name are interpreted by PostgreSQL as literal p, s, and B followed by a NULL character, thus early-terminating the string. This behavior can be easiily confirmed with: dc=# SELECT 'd:\pmta\spool\B\00000414'; ?column? -------------- d:pmtaspoolB (1 row) dc=# Is there a way to correct this problem? Is there a way I'm not finding in the rsyslog docs to turn \ into \\?

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• Why is writing to my external hard drive slow, while benchmarks show fast writing?

  - by matix2267

  I have an iOmega eGo 320GB portable drive connected through USB2.0 to my laptop running Windows Vista. It's been working fine for quite some time until recently it became very slow when writing e.g. when copying ~300MB movie over to the drive at first it is extremely fast but it actually doesn't write it only puts in cache and then hangs on last 10-20MBs for about a minute. When copying larger files it's the same story: starts fast but then slows down to ~5MB/s (sometimes even slower down to 2MB/s). Strange thing is that I have always had caching disabled for this drive (it was disabled by default and I never bothered changing it). At first I thought that the disk is dying so I checked S.M.A.R.T. values and everything is fine there. I also run chkdsk and it seemed to fix the problem - it worked fast for a few minutes but then it slowed down again. I also tried plugging it into another USB port - no difference. Additionally I noticed that reading under certain circumstances is sometimes slower e.g. loading times for some games are ~10 times longer, whereas simple copying files from this drive to my internal HDD is fast. I ran a speed benchmark using CrystalDiskMark with a 5x100MB run and strangely got these results: read write (MB/s) Seq 33.05 28.25 512k 17.30 15.27 4k 0.267 0.372 4kQD32 0.510 0.260 This is different from what most other people have (I've found many threads about slow disk write while googling but all of them were slow on benchmarks too) which is why I decided to post this problem here. BTW most of the time when writing (or sometimes reading) the activity led is mostly idle (blinks a while and then stops for longer, sometimes has slower blinks ~1 sek, sometimes goes off for a few seconds - extremely long blink :) ) but when benchmarking, defragmenting or just reading (copying from this drive, installing apps from installers there, watching HD videos) it is blinking really fast (like it should) and there are no slowdowns. It shouldn't be driver issue unless stock Windows drivers have some issues I'm not aware of.

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• NTFS frequent corruption when writing many small files, index $I30 error

  - by david sedai

  I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate on a laptop with a 500G HDD, and had all partitions formatted as NTFS. I do a lot of programming and LaTeX typesetting, both of these involves a large amount of reading/writing/deleting to a lot of small files, such as C++ library headers or LaTeX packages. The problem is that frequently, when there is a large number of writing to files, the partition being written to often corrupts, the chkntfs e: returns dirty, where e: is the partition being written. I've re-formatted the drive, I've contacted the laptop manufacturer and had the HDD checked, the HDD is not faulty, there are no bad sectors, and I've tried a brand new HDD, to no avail, and the other partition on the same physical drive doesn't have this issue. I'm pretty sure that it's no hardware related. I've searched the Microsoft support pages, one page http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018 provides an update for Advanced Format Disks, which I've already installed. The chkntfs log shows $130 index errors. I'm at a loss here. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

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• Productive Writing Software

  - by Nick Retallack

  What do you guys use to write a personal journal, notes, and reference information that you want to group and search through later? I'm not one of those crazy people who likes to share their journal with the world. Some things I like to keep to myself. It's quite nice to have a reference. Preferences for cross-platform stuff (windows, mac, linux) Some Background For Windows, there's a program called Yeah Write, which really changed my expectations about how easy it should be to start writing something. You don't open or close files -- just click an empty slot and start writing, or click a filled slot to work on another file. And you can organize things into categories by creating tabs. Now that I carry a Macbook, I've just been using TextEdit. I like it because I can't lose my work when my computer crashes: it auto-saves everything and restores it when I launch TextEdit again. But I make a mess, leave thirty open files, and save everything to one directory with no tags for easy grouping. Saving files and selecting the directory they should be in is too clunky to do in the middle of a meeting. And organizing files into folders in the Finder is a pain, since there's no tree view like on Windows. Sure, I'm lazy, but I miss Yeah Write. I'm not going to get a windows laptop just to use it though. Since the laptop I take my notes on is a mac, I'm gonna be biased toward mac solutions.

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• Servlet 3.1, Expression Language 3.0, Bean Validation 1.1, Admin Console Replay: Java EE 7 Launch Webinar Technical Breakouts on YouTube

  - by arungupta

  As stated previously (here, here, here, and here), the On-Demand Replay of Java EE 7 Launch Webinar is already available. You can watch the entire Strategy and Technical Keynote there, and all other Technical Breakout sessions as well. We are releasing the final set of Technical Breakout sessions on GlassFishVideos YouTube channel as well. In this series, we are releasing Servlet 3.1, Expression Language 3.0, Bean Validation 1.1, and Admin Console. Here's the Servlet 3.1 session: Here's the Expression Language 3.0 session: Here's the Bean Validation 1.1 session: And finally the Admin Console session: Enjoy watching all of them together in a consolidated playlist: And don't forget to download Java EE 7 SDK and try the numerous bundled samples.

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• Is there value in having technical authors in a software team?

  - by Desolate Planet

  During my 5 years in IT as a software developer, I've noticed that developers have a strong distaste towards doing any documentation. The act of taking screenshots and creating documentation seems to be a painful and time consuming experience. In one company I worked for, we had a technical documentation team with two technical authors and they developed all the user guides for our customers. In other companies where I've suggested hiring a technical author, I've been told they are not worth the money, but I'm a little unsure if that rings true. Is it better to have developers stop coding and take half a day to do screenshots and create the various guides or is it worth hiring someone who handles such tasks?

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• JSF 2.2, Interceptors 1.2, and JPA 2.1 Replay: Java EE 7 Launch Webinar Technical Breakouts on YouTube

  - by arungupta

  As stated previously (here, here, and here), the On-Demand Replay of Java EE 7 Launch Webinar is already available. You can watch the entire Strategy and Technical Keynote there, and all other Technical Breakout sessions as well. We are releasing the next set of Technical Breakout sessions on GlassFishVideos YouTube channel as well. In this series, we are releasing JSF 2.2, Interceptors 1.2, and JPA 2.1. Here's the JSF 2.2 session: Here's the Interceptors 1.1 session: Here's the JPA 2.1 session: Enjoy watching them over the next few days before we release the next set of videos! And don't forget to download Java EE 7 SDK and try numerous bundled samples.

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• March 21 EBS Webcast: A Functional and Technical Overview of Batch Layer Costing When Using Actual Costing

  - by Oracle_EBS

  ADVISOR WEBCAST: A Functional and Technical Overview of Batch Layer Costing When Using Actual CostingPRODUCT FAMILY: Process Manufacturing - EBS March 21, 2012 at 11 am ET, 9 am MT, 8 am PT This one-hour session is recommended for technical and functional users who use Actual Costing in OPM Financials. You will gain a better understanding of why layer costing was introduced, how it works, what benefits it provides, and how to get the the most out of this functionality.TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: Explain why Batch Layer Costing when using Actual Costing was introduced How this functionality works What benefits provided with Batch Layer Costing when using Actual Costing Tips to make this functionality work as desired Technical overview A short, live demonstration (only if applicable) and question and answer period will be included. Oracle Advisor Webcasts are dedicated to building your awareness around our products and services. This session does not replace offerings from Oracle Global Support Services. Current Schedule can be found on Note 740966.1 Post Presentation Recordings can be found on Note 740964.1

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• Technical choices in unmarshaling hash-consed data

  - by Pascal Cuoq

  There seems to be quite a bit of folklore knowledge floating about in restricted circles about the pitfalls of hash-consing combined with marshaling-unmarshaling of data. I am looking for citable references to these tidbits. For instance, someone once pointed me to library aterm and mentioned that the authors had clearly thought about this and that the representation on disk was bottom-up (children of a node come before the node itself in the data stream). This is indeed the right way to do things when you need to re-share each node (with a possible identical node already in memory). This re-sharing pass needs to be done bottom-up, so the unmarshaling itself might as well be, too, so that it's possible to do everything in a single pass. I am in the process of describing difficulties encountered in our own context, and the solutions we found. I would appreciate any citable reference to the kind of aforementioned folklore knowledge. Some people obviously have encountered the problems before (the aterm library is only one example). But I didn't find anything in writing. Even the little piece of information I have about aterm is hear-say. I am not worried it's not reliable (you can't make this up), but "personal communication" and "look how it's done in the source code" are considered poor form in citations. I have enough references on hash-consing alone. I am only interested in references where it interferes with other aspects of programming, such as marshaling or distribution.

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• Should i write my own forum? If my site has banning/PM/etc?

  - by acidzombie24

  I built a site from scratch (already done). It has banning, PM, comments, etc. The PMs and comments are done using markdown (like SO system). Should i write my own forum code or should i find one already made? What are reasons for or against writing my own? There are pros and cons for writing my own or using another software. But some cons keeping me from using another forum software is Multiple Logins: One for the site, one for separate forums. Need to Customization code: I'll need to change the toolbar in the forum software so i can access pages on the regular site. Look consistency: It may look drastically different from my site even after applying lots of css changes. Banning and User consistency. Users may be ban on site or on forums but not the other. users may select a different or multiple usernames on the forum instead of being forced to use the same username on both site and forum. What are reasons for or against writing my own and using forum software?

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• Tron: Legacy, 3D goggles, and embedded UA

  - by Roger Hart

  The 3D edition of Tron: Legacy opens with embedded user assistance. The film starts with an iconic white-on-black command-prompt message exhorting viewers to keep their 3D glasses on throughout. I can't quote it verbatim, and at the time of writing nor could anybody findable with 5 minutes of googling. But it was something like: "Although parts of the movie are 2D, it was shot in 3D, and glasses should be worn at all times. This is how it was intended to be viewed" Yeah - "intended". That part is verbatim. Wow. Now, I appreciate that even out of the small sub-set of readers who care a rat's ass for critical theory, few will be quite so gung-ho for the whole "death of the author" shtick as I tend to be. And yes, this is ergonomic rather than interpretive, but really - telling an audience how you expect them to watch a movie? That's up there with Big Steve's "you're holding it wrong" Even if it solves the problem, it's pretty arrogant. If anything, it's worse than RTFM. And if enough people are doing it wrong that you have to include the announcement, then maybe - just maybe - you've got a UX and/or design problem. Plus, current 3D glasses are like sitting in a darkened room, cosplaying the lovechild of Spider Jerusalem and Jarvis Cocker. Ok, so that observation was weirder than it was helpful; but seriously, nobody wants to wear the glasses if they don't have to. They ruin the visual experience of the non-3D sections, and personally, I find them pretty disruptive to the suspension of disbelief. This is an old, old, problem, and I'm carping on about it because Tron is enjoyable mass-market slush. It's easier for me to say "no, I can't just put some text on it. It's fundamentally broken, redesign it." in the middle of a small-ish, agile, software project than it would be for some beleaguered production assistant at the end of editing a $200 million movie. But lots of folks in software don't even get to do that. Way more people are going to see Tron, and be annoyed by this, than will ever read a technical communication blog. So hopefully, after two hours of being mildly annoyed, wanting to turn the brightness up, and slowly getting a headache, they'll realise something very, very important: you just can't document your way out of a shoddy UI.

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• What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase?

  - by GordonM

  I'm currently working at a company with 2 other PHP developers aside from me, and 1 junior developer. The senior developer who originally built the system we're all working on has resigned and will only be here for a matter of weeks. The other developer, who is the only other guy who knows anything about the system, is unhappy here and is looking for a new job. I'm very real danger of being left behind as the only experienced developer on this codebase. Since I've joined this company I've tried to push for better coding standards, project documentation, etc and I do think I've made some headway, but the vast majority of the code is simply unmaintainable and uncommented. A lot of this has to do with the need to get things done fast at points in the project before I joined, but now the technical debt is enormous, even with the two developers who do understand the system on board. Without them, it will simply be impossible to do anything with it. The senior developer is working on trying to at least comment all his code before he leaves but I think the codebase is simply too vast to properly document in the remaining time. Besides, when he does comment it still doesn't make things as clear as it could. If the system was better organized and documented I could probably start refactoring it incrementally, but the whole thing is so tightly coupled that it's very difficult to make any changes in one module without having unintended knock-on effects in other modules. Naturally, there's no unit tests either, and I honestly don't think this codebase could possibly be unit tested anyway given how it's implemented. There also never seems to be enough time to get things done even with 3 developers and 1 junior developer. With one developer and one junior, neither of which had significant input into the early design of the system, I don't see how we could possibly get anything done with keeping the current system working, implementing new features as needed and developing a replacement for the current codebase that is better organized. Is there an approach I can take to cope with this situation, or should I be getting my own CV in order as well at this point? If it was just me and the junior designer who would be left I'd go for the latter option almost without question. However, there's a team of front-end developers and content managers as well, and I'm worried what would become of them if I left and put them in a position where there would be no developers at all. The department might just be closed down altogether under such circumstances, and then I'd have their unemployment on my conscience as well!

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• Technical non-terminating condition in a loop

  - by Snarfblam

  Most of us know that a loop should not have a non-terminating condition. For example, this C# loop has a non-terminating condition: any even value of i. This is an obvious logic error. void CountByTwosStartingAt(byte i) { // If i is even, it never exceeds 254 for(; i < 255; i += 2) { Console.WriteLine(i); } } Sometimes there are edge cases that are extremely unlikeley, but technically constitute non-exiting conditions (stack overflows and out-of-memory errors aside). Suppose you have a function that counts the number of sequential zeros in a stream: int CountZeros(Stream s) { int total = 0; while(s.ReadByte() == 0) total++; return total; } Now, suppose you feed it this thing: class InfiniteEmptyStream:Stream { // ... Other members ... public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count) { Array.Clear(buffer, offset, count); // Output zeros return count; // Never returns -1 (end of stream) } } Or more realistically, maybe a stream that returns data from external hardware, which in certain cases might return lots of zeros (such as a game controller sitting on your desk). Either way we have an infinite loop. This particular non-terminating condition stands out, but sometimes they don't. A completely real-world example as in an app I'm writing. An endless stream of zeros will be deserialized into infinite "empty" objects (until the collection class or GC throws an exception because I've exceeded two billion items). But this would be a completely unexpected circumstance (considering my data source). How important is it to have absolutely no non-terminating conditions? How much does this affect "robustness?" Does it matter if they are only "theoretically" non-terminating (is it okay if an exception represents an implicit terminating condition)? Does it matter whether the app is commercial? If it is publicly distributed? Does it matter if the problematic code is in no way accessible through a public interface/API? Edit: One of the primary concerns I have is unforseen logic errors that can create the non-terminating condition. If, as a rule, you ensure there are no non-terminating conditions, you can identify or handle these logic errors more gracefully, but is it worth it? And when? This is a concern orthogonal to trust.

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• Free SQL Server training? Now you’re talking.

  - by Fatherjack

  SQL Server user groups are everywhere, literally all over the globe there are SQL Server professionals meeting on a regular basis, sharing ideas, solving problems, learning about how to do new stuff and new ways to do old stuff and it’s all for free. I don’t have detailed figures but of all the SQL Server professionals there are only a small number of them attend these user groups. Those people are the people that are taking the time and making then effort to make themselves better at their chosen trade, more employable and having a good time. For free. I don’t know why but there are many people that don’t seem to want to be the best they can be. Some of you enlightened people that do already attend could be doing more though. Have you ever spoken at  your group? Not just in the break while you have a mouthful of pizza and a drink in your hand but had the attention of the whole group listen to you speak. It doesn’t need to be a full hour, it doesn’t need to be some obscure deeply technical demonstration of SQL Server internals, just a few minutes on something that you do that might help other people with their daily work. A neat process that helps you get from Problem A to Solution B. There is no need to get concerned that becoming a speaker means that you suddenly have to know more than anyone else in the room. This is you talking about something that you experienced. What you did, what you would repeat, what you might do differently next time. No one in the audience can pick you up on a technicality. If someone comes out with a great idea that you hadn’t thought of, say “That’s a great idea, I didn’t think of that while we had the problem on our hands. I’ll try to remember that for next time”. If someone is looking to show you up for picking the wrong decision (and this, in my experience, is very uncommon indeed) then you simply give a reply like “Well, at the time we chose that option. Perhaps another time then we would tackle things differently but we were happy with how our solution worked”. It’s sharing things like this that makes user groups have a real value, talking about how you coped with or averted a disaster, a handy little section of code or using a tool in a particular way that you take for granted that might, just might, be something that other people haven’t thought of that solves a problem or saves some time for them. At the next meeting you might get the same benefit from a different person and so it goes on. As individuals benefits so the community benefits. For free. Things I encourage you to do; If you are a chapter or user group leader; encourage someone from your group who has never spoken before to start speaking. If you are a chapter or user group attendee that hasn’t spoken before; speak for at least 5 minutes on something related to SQL Server at any group meeting. If you don’t currently attend a user group; please go along to you nearest one when they are meeting next and invest in yourself and your future. UK user group details are here: http://sqlsouthwest.co.uk/national_ug.htm , PASS chapters outside the UK are found via http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters/LocalChapters.aspx. If you are unsure of how you might achieve any of these things then get in touch with me*, I’ll give you specific advice on getting started on any of the above points and help you prove to yourself what you are capable of. SQL Community – be part of it and make it better. Let me know how you get on in the comments.

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