Search Results

Search found 2950 results on 118 pages for 'andrew martin'.

Page 18/118 | < Previous Page | 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25  | Next Page >

  • Default values - are they good or evil?

    - by Andrew
    The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

    Read the article

  • What partition to use to keep data files in Ubuntu?

    - by Martin Lee
    I have been using Ubuntu for a few years and usually my partition set up was the following: Ext3 or Ext4 partition for the system itself (20 GB); A 10 GB swap partition; a big FAT32 partition to store movies, photos, work stuff, etc. (depends on the capacity of the disk, but usually it is what is left from Ext3+Swap, currently it is more than 200 GB). Does this setup sound right? I am considering to switching to one big Ext3 partition now, because the problem with Fat32 in Ubuntu has not gone anywhere: for example, right now I can access my 'big' partition with a 'Data' label only through /media/_themes?END. Pretty strange name for a partition, isn't it? some Linux software fail to read/write on this partition. For example, if I want to play around with rebar and build/make/compile things on this FAT32 partition, it will always complain about permissions and won't work (the same goes for many other kinds of software); it is not stable, I can not refer to some files on this FAT32 partition, because after the next reboot it will be called not '_themes?END', but something else. On the other side I usually begin to run out of space on the Ext3 partition after a few months of usage. So, the question is - what is the best setup of partitions for an Ubuntu system? Should a FAT32 partition be used at all?

    Read the article

  • How do I consistently activate USB speakers

    - by Andrew.Healy
    I have a pair of Ricco USB speakers. As these are external, I sought to use them with 11.10. They are recognised by 'aplay -l' and Pulseaudio- I have selected them, but, have to reset the volume, every time I log on. I can also only recieve feedback and sound from apps and programs- like Kaffeine- on this boosted volume- I cannot get System Sounds, like logon or logoff. I have tried the alsamixer install that used to work, to no effect. Is their an app that I should be trying or is this feat impossible ? I have tried to delete all the files in .pulse and rebooting or just deletion of the entire .purge directory, as Michael K suggested- neither work as the directory is automatically rewritten on reboot. Ideas?

    Read the article

  • How to get MAC address from c# [migrated]

    - by Andrew Simpson
    I have a C# application. In a routine I have code to get the MAC address from using SendARP. It works on Windows 7 but does not work on Windows XP. I just get a null string returned. This is my code. Thanks... System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("iphlpapi.dll", ExactSpelling = true)] static extern int SendARP(int DestIP, int SrcIP, byte[] pMacAddr, ref int PhyAddrLen); public static PhysicalAddress GetMacAddress(IPAddress ipAddress) { const int MacAddressLength = 6; //i know it is has a length of 6 int length = MacAddressLength; var macBytes = new byte[MacAddressLength]; SendARP(BitConverter.ToInt32(ipAddress.GetAddressBytes(), 0), 0, macBytes, ref length); return new PhysicalAddress(macBytes); }

    Read the article

  • How do you demo software with No UI in the Sprint Review?

    - by Jeff Martin
    We are doing agile software development, basically following Scrum. We are trying to do sprint reviews but finding it difficult. Our software is doing a lot of data processing and the stories often are about changing various rules around this. What are some options for demoing the changes that occurred in the sprint when there isn't a UI or visible workflow change, but instead the change is a subtle business rule on a processing job that can take 10s of minutes or even a couple of hours?

    Read the article

  • Can I host a website on a different address from the webmail?

    - by Andrew
    I have what is to me an unusual situation. I have a client for whom I have built a website which I will be hosting, they have been using their domain name for their email addresses for a long period before I came along so moving their email account to my host would be problematic and building the website with their current host would also be problematic because their host is very restrictive. So to fix this I altered the A record in their existing control panel to point the domain name to my server. As a result I can see the pages that I have created at their domain and they can still access their existing webmail. However, it appears that they are now experiencing problems receiving email so I can only assume my solution was incorrect. What is the correct way to point their domain at my website but keep their webmail with the existing host? EDIT: 25/5/2012 - My client has finally responded to me after changing the MX record on their existing C-Panel. Email to their email address were being bounced back with the error 'no such recipient', so I set up the same email address in the new C-Panel and changed the MX record there to 'Remote mail exchanger' which has stopped the emails bouncing but has apparently lost them in cyperspace! Unfortunately I can't add a new record because this would require a fully qualified domain name and their domain name is of course pointed at our server!

    Read the article

  • Oracle Database Appliance and Remarketers - A Whole New Opportunity

    - by Martin Morganti
    We have recently had another exciting announcement for the remarketer initiative. The Oracle Database Appliance is now available for resale through your authorized Value Added Distributor. This means that with no fees, no barriers and no upfront commitments, a remarketer can identify and close transactions for the Oracle Database Appliance without having to sign an Oracle contract. In addition, the remarketer is now authorized to sell the Oracle Database Appliance with Oracle Database 11G Enterprise Edition, RAC or RAC One Node software included in the transaction. The availability of the Oracle Database Appliance for remarketers means that a broad base of customers through remarketers can now start engaging with Oracle by taking advantage of this engineered system technology; basically Oracle Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together to drive incremental revenue. The Oracle Database Appliance is a simple, reliable and affordable way to rapidly deploy a database cluster by plugging in the power; the network and pushing the one button install for the Appliance Manager software. Find out more about the Oracle Database Appliance, including a webinar by Oracle President Mark Hurd, as well as other material to help you better understand the opportunity available to you as remarketers. If you want Oracle to keep you informed about developments in Remarketer complete the free registration, or talk to your local Oracle Remarketer Authorized value added distributors. (Complete list available on the Oracle Remarketer page).

    Read the article

  • Can non-IT people handle a wiki?

    - by Andrew Heath
    (I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...) My company is looking to improve their market research data management. Current data management style: "Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0? "yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook" "who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from '09." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..." Desired data management style: data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor) for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type data editing histories communal access (no data silos) I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like. Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire//become a ghost town//look like Geocities? Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem? Thank you.

    Read the article

  • Registration free hosting for ASP.NET web service

    - by Andrew
    I've built a simple ASP.NET web service, tested it locally and would like to test it when externally hosted. Are there free hosting services available where I can just upload the assembly and service description file and test it straight away. Without registering the account, etc. My service does not do anything malicious and I am ok to run it in a restricted (security sandbox, bandwith, calls per second, etc) environment? I have heard about appharbor.com but it looks like an overkill to test a simple web service.

    Read the article

  • tring to edit brightness

    - by Martin Mobbs
    i'm tring to edit the /sys/class/backlight/max_brightness file to stop ubuntu 12 returning to maximum brightness on each reboot. gedit won't save the file after i have modified it i have used chown to change ownership to me which was successful. I then changed gedits settings so it won't save a backup but it still won't save. It returns with this error, Could not save the file /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness. Unexpected error: Error writing to file: Input/output error is this yet another bug?

    Read the article

  • How to choose a development method?

    - by Martin
    There are many academic/industrial researchs about various development methods (Scrum, XP, waterfall, ect.), telling us how to do it right and stuff. But I never saw something that suggest how to choose a method, what will be better for a given project. I know that what the developers are used to is an very important aspect. But lets say that I am assembling a new group from scratch, and that every programmer in the world is willing to work with me. :) What aspects of the project should I consider to decide between Scrum, XP, TDD, ect.? Or is that an entirely human thing, regardless of what is being developed? I said that all programmers are available, but you may comment they're knowledge about the domain, or other characteristics in the answers. E.g. "If you chose to hire people with no domain knowledge, MethodX is better than MathodY, beacause ...." is a completely welcomed answer.

    Read the article

  • Do you know about the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Guidance?

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    I have been tasked with investigating the Guidance available around Visual Studio 2010 for one of our customers and it makes sense to make this available to everyone. The official guidance around Visual Studio 2010 has been created by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers and is a brew of a bunch of really clever guys experiences working with the tools and customers. I will be creating a series of posts on the different guidance options as many people still do not know about them even though Willy-Peter Schaub has done a fantastic job of making sure they get the recognition they deserve. There is a full list of all of the Rangers Solutions and Projects on MSDN, but I wanted to add my own point of view to the usefulness of each one. If you don’t know who the rangers are you should have a look at the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Index to see the full breadth of where the rangers are. All of the Rangers Solutions are available on Codeplex where you can download them and add reviews… Rangers Solutions and Projects Do you know about the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Guidance? More coming soon… These solutions took a very long time to put together and I wanted to make sure that we all understand the value of the free time that member of The Product Team, Visual Studio ALM MVP’s and partners put in to make them happen.

    Read the article

  • How do I set up hosting a domain name at home with Apache?

    - by Andrew McIntyre
    I am relatively new to Ubuntu Linux and I am struggling to figure out the basic set-up of hosting a domain name at home with Apache2. I understand that you have to change your IP from dynamic to a static IP Address but I am not sure how you achieve that step. I am looking for some assistance on this on how to enable self signing certificates, make the domain name resolve on the Internet from hosting the website on the web server, enabling protected directories and the basic commands of accessing the directory where the website files can be uploaded and available on the World Wide Web.

    Read the article

  • Do you know about the Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects Guidance?

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Early on in the Team System (now Visual Studio ALM) cycle a new product surfaced within Team System that was affectionately called “Data Dude”, but had the more formal name of “Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals”. The purpose of this product was to try and make the database a “first class citizen” in the development world. Those that started using Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (Data Dude) loved it, but everyone else did not get it. The capabilities were a little patchy, but the one thing it did bring to the party was the ability to put your database schema under source control. This was revolutionary as previously your DBA sat as far away from the team as possible, and usually in a dark cupboard, now they could partake of all the goodness of Version Control, Work Item Tracking and automated builds. The problem was that the understanding required to manage these projects was very different to that needed previously. Then the Visual Studio ALM Rangers got a hold of it…and produced some of the best guidance available. Figure: Download the guidance from http://vsdatabaseguide.codeplex.com/ This guidance discusses scenarios and approaches of using the Database Projects in Visual Studio 2010 to help you use the tools more effectively and maximize their value to your organization This guidance is focused on these five areas: Solution and Project Management Source Code Control and Configuration Management Integrating External Changes with the Project System Build and Deployment Automation with Visual Studio Database Projects Database Testing and Deployment Verification Each of these areas has common guidance, usage scenarios, hands on labs, and lessons learned from real world engagements and the community discussions.   The guidance is broken down into three packages: Guidance documentation Hands-on-lab (HOL) documentation note: The documentation is available in XPS-only format packages or complete XPS,PDF,DOCX format packages HOL Package If you need assistance and no one else can help, then you may need to call the Visual Studio ALM Rangers. The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have the mission to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. They are supported by Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from the field, where the technology has been tested and used. For more information on the Rangers please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee358786.aspx and for more a list of other Rangers projects please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee358787.aspx.

    Read the article

  • How to change sample text in font installer

    - by Tony Martin
    I have several Japanese fonts but do not want to install them all. I would like to preview them before installing. In icon view I can get a very rough idea of the style of the font as it shows Aa. When I open the font I am presented with a dialog box which shows a sample of the font with the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. I would like to change this sample text to Japanese text to get a fuller preview of the font. Is it at all possible? I suspect I might have to edit and compile source, not something I'm very familiar with.

    Read the article

  • DX11 - Weird shader behavior with and without branching

    - by Martin Perry
    I have found problem in my shader code, which I dont´t know how to solve. I want to rewrite this code without "ifs" tmp = evaluate and result is 0 or 1 (nothing else) if (tmp == 1) val = X1; if (tmp == 0) val = X2; I rewite it this way, but this piece of code doesn ´t word correctly tmp = evaluate and result is 0 or 1 (nothing else) val = tmp * X1 val = !tmp * X2 However if I change it to: tmp = evaluate and result is 0 or 1 (nothing else) val = tmp * X1 if (!tmp) val = !tmp * X2 It works fine... but it is useless because of "if", which need to be eliminated I honestly don´t understand it Posted Image . I tried compilation with NO and FULL optimalization, result is same

    Read the article

  • Is it a waste of time to free resources before I exit a process?

    - by Martin
    Let's consider a fictional program that builds a linked list in the heap, and at the end of the program there is a loop that frees all the nodes, and then exits. For this case let's say the linked list is just 500K of memory, and no special space managing is required. Is that a wast of time, because the OS will do that anyway? Will there be a different behavior later? Is that different according to the OS version? I'm mainly interested in UNIX based systems, but any information will be appreciated. I had today my first lesson in OS course and I'm wondering about that now.

    Read the article

  • Is anyone doing "real" TDD with Visual-C++, and if yes, how do they do it?

    - by Martin
    Test Driven Development implies writing the test before the code and following a certain cycle: Write Test Check Test (run) Write Production Code Check Test (run) Clean up Production Code Check test (run) As far as I'm concerned, this is only possible if your development solution allows you to very quickly switch between the production and test code, and to execute the test for a certain production code part extremely quickly. Now, while there exist lots of Unit Testing Frameworks for C++ (I'm using Bost.Test atm.) it does seem that there doesn't really exist any decent (for native C++) Visual Studio (Plugin) solution that makes the TDD cycle bearable regardless of framework used. "Bearable" means that it's a one-click action to run a test for a certain cpp file without having to manually set up a separate testing project etc. "Bearable" also means that a simple test starts (linking!) and runs very quickly. So, what tools (plugins) and techniques are out there that make the TDD cycle possible for native C++ development with Visual Studio? Note: I'm fine with free or "commercial" tools. Please: No framework recommendations. (Unless the framework has a dedicated Visual Studio plugin and you want to recommend the plugin.) Edit Note: The answers so far have provided links on how to integrate a Unit Testing framework into Visual Studio. The resources more or less describe how to get the UT framework to compile and get your first Tests running. This is not what this question is about. I'm of the opinion that to really work productively, having the Unit Tests in a manually maintained(!), separate vcproj from your production classes will add so much overhead that TDD "isn't possible". As far as I am aware, you do not add extra "projects" to a Java or C# thing to enable Unit Tests and TDD, and for a good reason. This should be possible with C++ given the right tools, but it seems (this question is about) that there are very little tools for TDD/C++/VS. Googling around, I've found one tool, VisualAssert, that seems to aim in the right direction. However, afaiks, it doesn't seem to be in widespread use (compared to CppUnit, Boost.Test etc.). Edit: I would like to add a comment to the context for this question. I think it does a good summary of outlining (part of) the problem: (comment by Billy ONeal) Visual Studio does not use "build scripts" that are reasonably editable by the user. One project produces one binary. Moreover, Java has the property that Java never builds a complete binary -- the binary you build is just a ZIP of the class files. Therefore it's possible to compile separately then JAR together manually (using e.g. 7z). C++ and C# both actually link their binaries, so generally speaking you can't write a script like that. The closest you can get is to compile everything separately and then do two linkings (one for production, one for testing).

    Read the article

  • Deterministic Multiplayer RTS game questions?

    - by Martin K
    I am working on a cross-platform multiplayer RTS game where the different clients and a server(flash and C#), all need to stay deterministically synchronised. To deal with Floatpoint inconsistencies, I've come across this method: http://joshblog.net/2007/01/30/flash-floating-point-number-errors/#comment-49912 which basically truncates off the nondeterministic part: return Math.round(1000 * float) / 1000; Howewer my concern is that every time there is a division, there is further chance of creating additional floatpoint errors, in essence making it worse? . So it occured to me, how about something like this: function floatSafe(number:Number) : Number {return Math.round(float* 1024) / 1024; } ie dividing with only powers of 2 ? What do you think? . Ironically with the above method I got less accurate results: trace( floatSafe(3/5) ) // 0.599609375 where as with the other method(dividing with 1000), or just tracing the raw value I am getting 3/5 = 0.6 or Maybe thats what 3/5 actually is, IE 0.6 cannot really be represented with a floatpoint datatype, and would be more consistent across different platforms?

    Read the article

  • Bejeweled Twist clone for Gnu/linux

    - by Andrew
    What is The best Bejeweled Twist clone for Gnu/linux. I know about like Kdiamond and Geweled, but those games are don't have sound or good graphics. I know One good Bejeweled Clone for Gnu/Linux Hotei Jewels Relax but that wasn't a Bejeweled Twist clone. F.I.Y I only run thing natively in Gnu/Linux And I don't use Compatibility layers or emulations over they are buggy and they don't use the Gnu/linux file hierarchy. Thank you.

    Read the article

  • How to host a simple website using a domain name I own

    - by Cedric Martin
    I'm familiar with hosting webapps when I'm doing "the whole shebang" of installing / configuring / setting up Apache/Tomcat/PostreSQL / "coding" the website myself using HTML / JSP / CSS etc. on dedicated servers I'm renting. But in the above case, I'm "owning" the entire stack: from the Debian GNU/Linux dedicated servers to every single file that is served. Now I'd like to do something much simpler and I must admit I don't know what's involved at all. I'd like to host a simple website made of only a few static pages (no database, no nothing) and I'd like it to be accessible from "example.com". What needs to be technically done to have such a thing? How is the DNS supposed to be set up? Note that I do not want to host this on one of my dedicated servers.

    Read the article

  • Basic procedural generated content works, but how could I do the same in reverse?

    - by andrew
    My 2D world is made up of blocks. At the moment, I create a block and assign it a number between 1 and 4. The number assigned to the nth block is always the same (i.e if the player walks backwards or restarts the game.) and is generated in the function below. As shown here by this animation, the colours represent the number. function generate_data(n) math.randomseed(n) -- resets the random so that the 'random' number for n is always the same math.random() -- fixes lua random bug local no = math.random(4) --print(no, n) return no end Now I want to limit the next block's number - a block of 1 will always have a block 2 after it, while block 2 will either have a block 1,2 or 3 after it, etc. Before, all the blocks data was randomly generated, initially, and then saved. This data was then loaded and used instead of being randomly called. While working this way, I could specify what the next block would be easily and it would be saved for consistency. I have now removed this saving/loading in favour of procedural generation as I realised that save whiles would get very big after travelling. Back to the present. While travelling forward (to the right), it is easy to limit what the next blocks number will be. I can generate it at the same time as the other data. The problem is when travelling backwards (to the left) I can not think of a way to load the previous block so that it is always the same. Does anyone have any ideas on how I could sort this out?

    Read the article

  • Anonymous function vs. separate named function for initialization in jquery

    - by Martin N.
    We just had some controversial discussion and I would like to see your opinions on the issue: Let's say we have some code that is used to initialize things when a page is loaded and it looks like this: function initStuff() { ...} ... $(document).ready(initStuff); The initStuff function is only called from the third line of the snippet. Never again. Now I would say: Usually people put this into an anonymous callback like that: $(document).ready(function() { //Body of initStuff }); because having the function in a dedicated location in the code is not really helping with readability, because with the call on ready() makes it obvious, that this code is initialization stuff. Would you agree or disagree with that decision? And why? Thank you very much for your opinion!

    Read the article

  • Is there a modern (eg NoSQL) web analytics solution based on log files?

    - by Martin
    I have been using Awstats for many years to process my log files. But I am missing many possibilities (like cross-domain reports) and I hate being stuck with extra fields I created years ago. Anyway, I am not going to continue to use this script. Is there a modern apache logs analytics solution based on modern storage technologies like NoSQL or at least somehow ready to cope with large datasets efficiently? I am primarily looking for something that generates nice sortable and searchable outputs with the focus on web analytics, before having to write my own frontends. (so graylog2 is not an option) This question is purely about log file based solutions.

    Read the article

  • Why are the packages found with apt-get always horribly out of date?

    - by Andrew
    Whenever I use the package manager, it can only ever find really old versions of stuff. Example: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install postgresql The best it can do is version 8.4 (3 years out of date). Trying to get a later version, I get: $ sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Couldn't find package postgresql-9.1 I experience the same issue whenever I use the package manager, so I usually just download and build things from source. How can I make it find up-to-date software?

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25  | Next Page >