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• Blogging locally and globally–my experience

  - by DigiMortal

  In Baltic MVP Summit 2011 there was discussion about having two blogs - one for local and another for global audience – and how to publish once written information in these blogs. There are many ways how to optimize your blogging activities if you have more than one audience and here you can find my experiences, best practices and advices about this topic. My two blogs I have to working blogs: this one here technology and programming blog for local market My local blog is almost five years old and it makes it one of the oldest company blogs in Estonia. It is still active and I write there as much as I have time for it. This blog here is active since September 2007, so it is about 3.5 years old right now. Both of these blogs are  my major hits in my MVP carrier and they have very good web statistics too. My local blog My local blog is about programming, web and technology. It has way wider target audience then this blog here has. By example, in my local blog I blog also about local events, cool new concept phones, different webs providing some interesting services etc. But local guys can find there also my postings about how to solve one or another programming problem and postings about Microsoft technologies I am playing with. This far my local blog has a lot of readers for such a small country that Estonia is. This blog has made me a lot of cool contacts and I have had there a lot of interesting discussions about different technical topics. Why I started this blog? Living in small country is different than living in big country. In small country you have less people and therefore smaller audience so you have to target more than one technical topic to find enough readers. In a same time you are still interested in your main topics and you want to reach to more people who are sharing same interests with you. Practically one day y will grow out from local market and you go global. This is how this blog was born. Was it worth to create, promote and mess with it? Every second I have put on my time to this blog has been worth of it. Thanks to this blog I have found new good friends and without them I think it is more boring to work on different problems and solutions. Defining target audiences One thing you should always do when having more than one blog is defining target audiences. If you are just technomaniac interested in sharing your stuff and make some new friends and have something to write to your MVP nomination form then you don’t have to go through complex targeting process. You can do it simple way and same effectively. Here is how I defined target audiences to my blogs: local blog – reader of my local blog is IT professional, software developer, technology innovator or just some guy who is interested in technology,   this blog – reader of this blog is experienced professional software developer who works on Microsoft technologies or software developer who is open minded and open to new technologies and interesting solutions to development problems. You can see how local blog – due to small market with less people – has wider definition for audience while this blog is heavily targeted to Microsoft technologies and specially to software development. On practical side these decisions are also made well I think because it is very hard to build up popular common IT blog. On global level it is better to target some specific niche and find readers who are professionals on your favorite topics. Thanks to this blog I have found new friends who are professional developers and I am very happy about all the discussions I have had with them. Publishing content to different blogs My local blog and this blog have some overlapping topics like .NET, databases and SEO. Due to this overlapping there is question: when I write posting to my local blog then should I have to publish same thing in my global blog? And if I write something to my global blog then should I publish same thing also in my local blog? Well, it really depends on the definition of your target audiences. If they match then of course it is good idea to translate you post and publish it also to another blog. But if you have different audiences then you may need to modify your posting before publishing it. The questions you have to answer are: is target audience interested in this topic? is target audience expecting more specific and deeper handling of this topic or are they expecting more general handling of topic? is the problem you are discussing actual for target audience or not? You have to answer these questions and after that make your decision. If you need to modify your original posting then take some time and do it. Provide quality to all your readers because they will respect you if you respect them. Cross-posting and referencing It is tempting to save time that preparing some blog post takes and if you have are done with posting in one blog it may seem like good idea to make short posting to another blog and add reference to first one where topic is discussed longer. Well, don’t do it – all your readers expect good quality content from you and jumping from one blog post to another is disturbing for them. Of course, there is problem with differences between target audiences. You may have wider target audience and some people may be interested in more specific handling of topic. In this case feel free to refer your blog you are writing in english. This is not working very well in opposite direction because almost all my global blog readers understand english but not estonian. By example, estonian language is complex one and online translating tools make very poor translations from estonian language. This is why I don’t even plan to publish postings here that refer to my local blog for more information. I am keeping these two blogs as two different worlds and if there is posting that fits well to both blogs I will write my posting to one blog and then answer previous three questions before posting same thing to another blog. Conclusion Growing out of your local market is not anything mysterious if you are living in small country. As it is harder to find people there who are interested in same topics with you then sooner or later you will start finding these new contacts from global audience. Global audience is bigger and to be visible there you must provide high quality content to your audience. It is something you will learn over time and you will learn every day something new when you are posting to your global blog. You may ask: if global blog is much more complex thing to do then is it worth to do at all? My answer is: yes, do it for sure. It is not easy thing to do when you start but if you work on your global blog and improve it over time you will get over all obstacles pretty soon. Just don’t forget one thing – content is king and your readers expect high quality from you.

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• How to review the current state of open source vs. closed source graphics drivers?

  - by Bucic

  How to know whether it's worth it to replace open source drivers installed by default with proprietary ones. Are there any benchmarks? Major known issues summaries. I don't mean 'at the time of writing this post'. I mean an up-to-date status on how the drivers compare. This page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ certainly doesn't do much on the matter, nor it even mentions Intel. EDIT: I've just learned there is no Intel proprietary driver because they made their drivers open source http://askubuntu.com/a/17395/29347

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• How to implement a game launch counter in LibGDX

  - by Vishal Kumar

  I'm writing a game using LibGDX in which I want to save the number of launches of a game in a text file. So, In the create() of my starter class, I have the following code ..but it's not working public class MainStarter extends Game { private int count; @Override public void create() { // Set up the application AppSettings.setUp(); if(SettingsManager.isFirstLaunch()){ SettingsManager.createTextFileInLocalStorage("gamedata"); SettingsManager.writeLine("gamedata", "Launched:"+count ,FileType.LOCAL_FILE ); } else{ SettingsManager.writeLine("gamedata", "Not First launch :"+count++ ,FileType.LOCAL_FILE ); } // // Load assets before setting the screen // ##################################### Assets.loadAll(); // Set the tests screen setScreen(new MainMenuScreen(this, "Main Menu")); } } What is the proper way to do this?

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• How should a new programmers behave at their first job? [on hold]

  - by Dimension

  What are programmers expected to know at their first job and how old will they typically be? I'm not going to school so I'm not around other programmers, therefore I have no idea what kind of programmers they are when they first get hired. I just want to get an idea what the median programmer's knowledge looks like. Will they already have had experience with version control? Are they writing good maintainable code? And what are they expected to do do? I'm programming my own software at home and because of the complexities of it and how new I am to programming I'm sometimes throwing all the code out and starting again with a better design. Aren't new programmers going to write terribly structured software for their employer, or is someone else going to be making the decisions on how everything is laid out?

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• FormatDate in Display Item Form Webpart

  - by H(at)Ni

  I've faced an issue that I wanted to display the date in the format of ('MMMM dd') that is retrieved from a sharepoint list in an arabic site collection. So, after googling this issue, I've found out that a possible solution to my poblem is using the function ddwrt:FormatDateTime that can be used as long as you'll include the following namespace xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" My purpose was solved by writing this line of code in my xsl code behind for the webpart : ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@StartDate),3073,'MMMM dd') but that worked only if the webpart is inserted into an English site . After trying to search but in vain, I started to use my guesses that ended up doing something like that: ddwrt:FormatDateTime(ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@StartDate),3073,'dd/MM/yyyy'), 3073, 'MMMM dd') And the cause of the problem was that sharepoint parses the date as 'MM/dd/yyyy' which I think could be related to server regional settings, so I had to force it to parse the date in arabic-Egypt format as 'dd/MM/yyyy' in order to get the correct 'Month Day' format as expected.

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• Naming conventions used for variables and functions in C

  - by Zel

  While coding a large project in C I came upon a problem. If I keep on writing more code then there will be a time when it will be difficult for me to organize the code. I mean that the naming for functions and variables for different parts of the program may seem to be mixed up. So I was thinking whether there are useful naming conventions that I can use for C variables and functions? Most languages suggest a naming convention. But for C the only thing I have read so far is the names should be descriptive for code readability. EDIT: Examples of some examples of suggested naming conventions: Python's PEP 8 Java Tutorial I read some more naming conventions for java somewhere but couldn't remember where.

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• Why must I restart for HDMI audio?

  - by David Shochat

  I have a System76 Lemur Ultra laptop, which has an HDMI port. When I plug in the HDMI cable, it is recognized immediately for video, but not for audio, i.e., it does not show up in the Output tab of the Sound Settings dialog. However, if I do a full restart with the cable plugged in, then it does show up and can be selected. I've also discovered that manually killing and restarting pulseaudio with the HDMI plugged in will force it to be recognized as an available audio output. So my question is, what is broken here? I've thought about writing a bug in launchpad, but I don't know which component is malfunctioning. Is it the kernel? ALSA? Pulse Audio? Something else? By the way, the same bug seems to exist in reverse, namely if I disconnect the HDMI, it is still listed in the Output tab until I again restart the OS. This is 12.04 LTS.

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• Best strategy (tried and tested) for using Box2D in a real-time multiplayer game?

  - by Simon Grey

  I am currently tackling real-time multiplayer physics updates for a game engine I am writing. My question is how best to use Box2D for networked physics. If I run the simulation on the server, should I send position, velocity etc to every client on every tick? Should I send it every few ticks? Maybe there is another way that I am missing? How has this problem been solved using Box2D before? Anyone with some ideas would be greatly appreciated!

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• What are the so-called "levels" of understanding multithreading?

  - by Dan Tao

  I seem to remember reading somewhere some list of 4 "levels" of understanding multithreading. This may have been in a formal publication, or it may have been in an extremely informal context (even like in a Stack Overflow question, for example). Unfortunately I don't remember who referred to them or precisely what they were. I seem to recall that they were roughly like: Total ignorance Awareness mixed with incompetence Relative competence mixed with fear True understanding My intention is to refer to these levels in a blog post I'm writing, with a reference; but I can't for the life of me remember where I first encountered this list. Brief Google searches have proved unfruitful.

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• Adwords: Is there a drawback to setting a really high CPC to learn what works faster?

  - by Rob Sobers

  I'm toying with increasing my max CPC really high on all my keywords so ensure my ad gets shown in the top spot on page one in order to draw more clicks. I think this will be a good way to quickly figure out whether the ads I'm writing have a decent CTR and, more importantly, whether the landing pages I'm building are converting. Since I can set a max daily budget for my campaign, I won't risk breaking the bank. I can't think of any drawbacks, personally. Am I missing any?

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• Which logfile(s) log(s) errors reading a cd?

  - by Robert Vila

  I introduce a CD-RW, maybe blank (I really don't know), and after a little movement inside the reader, the CD is ejected without any message at all. I would like to know what is going on and the reason why it is ejected. How can I know that in Natty. The CD reader is working OK because I can read other CD's. It only gave me problems writing from Natty, a few days ago, but with MacOS there was no problem. Thank you Edit: Maybe there is no error, but then, how can I know what is in the Cd if there is anything?

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• What are your programming idiosyncrasies?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I noticed that I have a peculiar habit of finishing every line with a space. It carries over from my prose writing where a paragraph can have multiple sentences and so it is very common to follow a period with a space, and I end up doing that automatically for every period (or when it comes to programming- semicolon). It started out as something automatic, but I'm so used to this by now that if I miss the space it actually bothers me and I end up returning to that line to input it. What are some of your programming idiosyncrasies?

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• Seeking questions about creating Microsoft Live Labs Pivot collections

  - by John Conwell

  I've spent the past 3 weeks working a lot with Pivot from Microsoft Live Labs (http://getpivot.com/).  Pivot is a tool that allows you to visually explore data. Its an interesting take on visual data mining. Anyway, I've been writing a lot of code that creates a hierarchy of Pivot collections, where one item in the collection drills down into an entirly new collection. The dev community around Pivot is still very young, so there isnt much tribal knowledge built up yet.  I've spent a lot of time trying to get things to work through trial and error, as well as digging around in Reflector.  But I've finally got a framework built for programatically creating DeepZoom images, Pivot collections, Sparse Images, etc.   If anyone has any questions, or suggestions on a post topic, leave a comment and I'll try and answer your question.

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• Resources on learning to program in machine code?

  - by AceofSpades

  I'm a student, fresh into programming and loving it, from Java to C++ and down to C. I moved backwards to the barebones and thought to go further down to Assembly. But, to my surprise, a lot of people said it's not as fast as C and there is no use. They suggested learning either how to program a kernel or writing a C compiler. My dream is to learn to program in binary (machine code) or maybe program bare metal (program micro-controller physically) or write bios or boot loaders or something of that nature. The only possible thing I heard after so much research is that a hex editor is the closest thing to machine language I could find in this age and era. Are there other things I'm unaware of? Are there any resources to learn to program in machine code? Preferably on a 8-bit micro-controller/microprocessor. This question is similar to mine, but I'm interested in practical learning first and then understanding the theory.

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• How to deal with tautology in comments?

  - by Tamás Szelei

  Sometimes I find myself in situations when the part of code that I am writing is (or seems to be) so self-evident that its name would be basically repeated as a comment: class Example { /// <summary> /// The location of the update. /// </summary> public Uri UpdateLocation { get; set; }; } (C# example, but please refer to the question as language-agnostic). A comment like that is useless; what am I doing wrong? Is it the choice of the name that is wrong? How could I comment parts like this better? Should I just skip the comment for things like this?

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• Trim on encrypted SSD--Urandom first?

  - by cb474

  My understanding (I'm not sure I'm getting this all right) is that if one uses Trim on an encrypted SSD, it defeats some of the security benefits, because the drive will write zeros to empty space (as files are deleted). See: http://www.askubuntu.com/questions/115823/trim-on-an-encrypted-ssd And: http://asalor.blogspot.com/2011/08/trim-dm-crypt-problems.html My question is: From the perspective of the performance of the SSD and the functioning of Trim, would it therefore be better to simply zero out the SSD, before setting up an encrypted system, rather than writing random data to the drive, with urandom, as one usually does? Would this basically leave one with the same level of security anyway? And more importantly, would it better enable the Trim functionality to work as intended, with the encrypted SSD?

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• Extracting main article from webpage/feed. Is it legal/ethical?

  - by Mahdi Ghiasi

  There are some applications like Readability and Pocket, which are letting users to read the main content of web pages, in a clean interface or such. But the articles should be bookmarked from another application, or the web browser. However, I'm creating a news reader app (Zite and Flipboard are popular news reader apps), and I want to create a clean experience for users, so I want to show full content of articles inside my application. Some websites have fulltext feeds, and I'm using it. But about some other websites, which don't have full text feeds: I want to know, is it legal/ethical to use for example Readability API (Or maybe writing my own code for this) to show full text of articles inside my application?

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• What can I put in my software development blog to make it a good showcase of me?

  - by Sean

  I have been itching to write a software development blog for some time now. The best advice I've received about blog writing is "Write the blog you would have want to read". Its good advice but its only half the story, Once you write a blog it becomes your showcase on the Internet, it is bound to come up on any search conducted by a future colleague or employer. It can be a good thing or it can do some serious damage. So if there are any hiring managers out there, can you give me a few pointers on what it is in a blog that give you a good impression about candidate and/or the kind of stuff that causes you to throw the candidate's resume to the nearest bean? Does a blog have to come up with a clever piece of code every week? (Don’t think I can manage it) Is it OK to blog more then not about development methods to improved quality and productivity (have a lot of ideas about that). Can I blog about stuff I did not try first hand but seems noteworthy?

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• Mount an external drive at boot time only if it is plugged in.

  - by Jeremy

  I've got an entry for an external harddrive in my fstab: UUID="680C0FE30C0FAAE0" /jgdata ntfs noatime,rw But sometimes this drive isn't plugged in at boot time. This leaves me half way through a boot, with a prompt to "Continue Waiting, press S or press M" but no keypress has any affect at this stage (including ctrl-alt-delete, not even caps-lock). Short of writing a script to check the output of fdisk -l, how can I mount this drive at boot time only if it is present? It would be handy to have an fdisk entry for this drive, so I can just type mount /jgdata instead of needing a device name.

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• Shadowmap first phase and shaders

  - by KaiserJohaan

  I am using OpenGL 3.3 and am tryin to implement shadow mapping using cube maps. I have a framebuffer with a depth attachment and a cube map texture. My question is how to design the shaders for the first pass, when creating the shadowmap. This is my vertex shader: in vec3 position; uniform mat4 lightWVP; void main() { gl_Position = lightWVP * vec4(position, 1.0); } Now, do I even need a fragment shader in this shader pass? from what I understand after reading http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Fragment_Shader, by default gl_FragCoord.z is written to the currently attached depth component (to which my cubemap texture is bound to). Thus I shouldnt even need a fragment shader for this pass and from what I understand, there is no other work to do in the fragment shader other than writing this value. Is this correct?

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• Changing DisplayMode seems not to update Input&Graphic Dimension

  - by coding.mof

  I'm writing a small game using Slick and Nifty-GUI. At the program startup I set the DisplayMode using the following lines: AppGameContainer app = new ... app.setDisplayMode( 800, 600, false ); app.start(); I wrote a Nifty-ScreenController for my settings dialog in which the user can select the desired DisplayMode. When I try to set the new DisplayMode within this controller class the game window gets resized correctly but the Graphics and Input objects aren't updated accordingly. Therefore my rendering code just uses a part of the new window. I tried to set different DisplayModes in the main method to test if it's generally possible to invoke this method multiple times. It seems that changing the DisplayMode only works before I call app.start(). Furthermore I tried to update the Graphics & Input object manually but the init and setDimensions methods are package private. :( Does someone know what I'm doing wrong and how to change the DisplayMode correctly?

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• The performance implications of IEnumerable vs. IQueryable

  It all started innocently enough. I was implementing a "Older Posts/Newer Posts" feature for my new web site and was writing code like this:IEnumerable<Post> FilterByCategory(IEnumerable<Post> posts, string category) {  if( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(category) ) { return posts.Where(p => p.Category.Contains(category)); }}...  var posts = FilterByCategory(db.Posts, category);  int count = posts.Count();... The "db" was an EF object context object, but it could just as...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• The performance implications of IEnumerable vs. IQueryable

  It all started innocently enough. I was implementing a "Older Posts/Newer Posts" feature for my new web site and was writing code like this:IEnumerable<Post> FilterByCategory(IEnumerable<Post> posts, string category) {  if( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(category) ) { return posts.Where(p => p.Category.Contains(category)); }}...  var posts = FilterByCategory(db.Posts, category);  int count = posts.Count();... The "db" was an EF object context object, but it could just as...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• What is the best wrapping strategy ?

  - by Riduidel

  Hi, I'm planning to integrate an external tool (ffmpeg in my particular case, but it could be anything, in fact, as lolng as its tasks are long running ones). This tool has a lot of command-line parameters. For now, I've done to simple things with it, already requiring me a good bunch of class writing, to embed all the information it can return to me. I now face the even more complex task of having to send it a bunch of parameters and to handle possible errors. So, what is a best way for that ? Create classes containing all possible options Relying upon a reverse equivalent of commons-cli / CliBuilder / OptionParser Directly write all options from user input Obiwan Kenobi powers (or anything I don't even know about) Please notice I do it in an uncommon language (for the sake of me, don't ask me what it is, as it looks like a desperate and sterile union between CoffeeScript and lua), as a consequence, there can be no framework doing what I want in the language I use.

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• What ethical problems realistically arise in programming?

  - by Fishtoaster

  When I co-oped during college, I had to fill out an evaluation of the co-op afterwards. One metric I always had to rate was how much the company required me to "Make ethical decisions related to your profession." This always seemed kinda silly- I mean, my first co-op was writing java apps to manage industrial radios. There wasn't much moral ambiguity going on. Anyway, I'm wonder what sort of ethical dilemmas one might actually encounter in software development. Edit: It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. - Nathanial Borenstein

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