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• Windows Azure Training Kit October 2012 Release

  - by Clint Edmonson

  The Windows Azure Technical Evangelism team have been busy bees lately and we want to share with you what they’ve been working on. As you know we release the Windows Azure Training Kit on a regular cadence, so I’m pleased to announce the Windows Azure Training Kit October 2012 Release. This update of the training kit includes 47 hands-on labs, 24 demos and 38 presentations designed to help you learn how to build applications that use Windows Azure services, including updated hands-on labs to use the latest version of Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, new demos and presentations. Essential Links: Windows Azure Training Kit Download Windows Azure Training Kit Github [Issues] Updated Presentations With Speaker Notes Your voices were heard loud and clear! I am excited to announce Speaker Notes have been added to a the majority of the content we have available. Find the new updated decks which contain speaker notes below: Foundation SQL Federation Virtual Machine Overview Virtual Networks Windows 8 and Windows Azure Web Sites Windows Azure Cloud Services Windows Azure Overview Windows Azure Service Bus Deploying Active Directory Building Apps With IaaS and PaaS Identity and Access Control Linux Virtual Machines Managing Virtual Machines PowerShell Migrating Apps and Workloads Scalable Global and Highly Available Apps Security and Identity SQL Database SQL Database Migration Cloud Service Life Cycle DevCamps Cloud Services iOS, Android and Windows Azure Windows 8 and Windows Azure Web Sites Windows 8 and Windows Azure Mobile Services Added Localized Content Due to the excitement in the community surrounding the mobile services launch, it was apparent that we needed to make localized content available to continue to deliver the exciting message around Windows Azure Mobile Services. Localized content is available in the following languages: French Japanese German Chinese (Taiwan) Spanish Italian Korean Portuguese (Brazilian) Russian Updated Hands-On Labs To support those who have upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 or those trying out the Visual Studio 2012 Express Editions, we have made sure that the content is available and supported (selected labs only) in Visual Studio 2012 Express and up. Visual Studio 2012 Windows Azure Traffic Manager Introduction to Cloud Services Service Bus Messaging Introduction to Access Control Service This adds a significant amount of additional content, so we have revamped the Hands-On Lab Navigation page to include subsections for Visual Studio 2012 Labs, Visual Studio 2010 Labs, Open Source Labs, Scenario Labs, All Labs. Added Demos Demos are available for a number of presentations which are available in Foundation, DevCamp, ITPro Event & Device + Service DevCamps. You can browse through the demos on the respective Demo Navigation page or on Github (links provided in Demo listing below). HelloASP Connecting Cloud Services Service Bus Relay Windows 8 and Mobile Services URL Shortener iOS Client Migrating a Web Farm Deploying Active Directory URL Shortener Service  (PHP) Geo-Location Service (PHP) Geo-Location Android Client Getting Started with VMs Load Balancing Availability Deploying Hybrid Apps Migrate VM AppController Geo-Location iOS Client Scale Up/Down Using CSUpload URL Shortener Android Client Imaging Virtual Machines The Windows Azure Training Kit is open source and available on GitHub, enabling you in the community to Report Issues or Fork and either extend the solution or commit bug fixes back to the Training Kit. You can find out more details about  the training kit from our GitHub Page including guidelines on how to commit back to the project. Stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• Getting away from a customized Magento 1.4 installation - Magento 1.6, OpenCart, or others?

  - by Phil

  I'm dealing with a Magento 1.4.0.0 Community Edition installation with various undocumented changes to the core (mostly integration with an ERP system), an outdated Sweet Tooth Points & Rewards module and some custom payment providers. It also doubles as a mediocre blogging/CMS system. It has one store each for 3 different languages, with about 40 product categories for a few hundred products. [rant] With no prior experience with any PHP e-commerce systems, I find it very difficult to work with. I attempted to install Magento 1.4.0.0 on my local WAMP dev machine, it installs fine, but the main page or search do not show any products no matter what I do in the backend admin panel. I don't know what's wrong with it, and whatever information I googled is either too old or too new from Magento 1.4. Later I'm given FTP access to the testing server, which neither my manager or I have permission to install XDebug on, as apparantly it runs on the same server as the production server (yikes). Trying to learn how Magento works is torture. I spent a week trying to add some fields into the Onepage Checkout before giving up and went to work on something else. The template system, just like the rest of Magento, is a bloated mishmash of overcomplicated directory structures, weird config xml files and EAV databases. I went into 6 different models and several content blocks in the backend just to change what the front page looks like. With little-to-none helpful and clear documentation (unlike CodeIgniter) and various breaking changes between minor point revisions which makes it hard to find useful information, Magento 1.4 is a developer killer. [/rant] The client is planning to redesign the site and has decided it might as well as move on from this unsustainable, hacky, upgrade-unfriendly, developer-unfriendly mess. Magento 1.4 is starting to show its age, with Magento 1.7 coming soon, the client is considering upgrading to Magento 1.6 or 1.7 if it has improved from 1.4. The customizations done to the current Magento 1.4 installation will have to be redone, and a new license for the Sweet Tooth Points & Rewards module will have to be bought. The client is also open to other e-commerce systems. I've looked at OpenCart and it seems to be quite developer friendly with a fairly simple structure. I found some complaints regarding its performance when the shop has thousands of categories or products, but this is not an issue with the current number of products my client has. It seems to be solid ground for easy customization to bring the rewards system and ERP integration over. What should the client upgrade to in this case?

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• Designing for an algorithm that reports progress

  - by Stefano Borini

  I have an iterative algorithm and I want to print the progress. However, I may also want it not to print any information, or to print it in a different way, or do other logic. In an object oriented language, I would perform the following solutions: Solution 1: virtual method have the algorithm class MyAlgoClass which implements the algo. The class also implements a virtual reportIteration(iterInfo) method which is empty and can be reimplemented. Subclass the MyAlgoClass and override reportIteration so that it does what it needs to do. This solution allows you to carry additional information (for example, the file unit) in the reimplemented class. I don't like this method because it clumps together two functionalities that may be unrelated, but in GUI apps it may be ok. Solution 2: observer pattern the algorithm class has a register(Observer) method, keeps a list of the registered observers and takes care of calling notify() on each of them. Observer::notify() needs a way to get the information from the Subject, so it either has two parameters, one with the Subject and the other with the data the Subject may pass, or just the Subject and the Observer is now in charge of querying it to fetch the relevant information. Solution 3: callbacks I tend to see the callback method as a lightweight observer. Instead of passing an object, you pass a callback, which may be a plain function, but also an instance method in those languages that allow it (for example, in python you can because passing an instance method will remain bound to the instance). C++ however does not allow it, because if you pass a pointer to an instance method, this will not be defined. Please correct me on this regard, my C++ is quite old. The problem with callbacks is that generally you have to pass them together with the data you want the callback to be invoked with. Callbacks don't store state, so you have to pass both the callback and the state to the Subject in order to find it at callback execution, together with any additional data the Subject may provide about the event is reporting. Question My question is relative to the fact that I need to implement the opening problem in a language that is not object oriented, namely Fortran 95, and I am fighting with my usual reasoning which is based on python assumptions and style. I think that in Fortran the concept is similar to C, with the additional trouble that in C you can store a function pointer, while in Fortran 95 you can only pass it around. Do you have any comments, suggestions, tips, and quirks on this regard (in C, C++, Fortran and python, but also in any other language, so to have a comparison of language features that can be exploited on this regard) on how to design for an algorithm that must report progress to some external entity, using state from both the algorithm and the external entity ?

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• What type of interview questions should you ask for "legacy" programmers?

  - by Marcus Swope

  We have recently been receiving lots of applicants for our open developer positions from people who I like to refer to as "legacy" programmers. I don't like the term "old" because it seems a little prejudiced (especially to HR!) and it doesn't accurately reflect what I mean. We are a company that does primarily .NET development using TDD in an Agile environment, we use Git as a source control system, we make heavy use of OSS tools and projects and we contribute to them as well, we have a strong bias towards adhering to strong Object-Oriented principles, SOLID, etc, etc, etc... Now, the normal list of questions that we ask doesn't really seem to apply to applicants that are fresh out of school, nor does it seem to apply to these "legacy" programmers. Here is how I (loosely) define a "legacy" programmer. Spent a significant amount of their career working almost exclusively with Assembly/Machine Languages. Primary accomplishments include work done with TANDEM systems. Has extensive experience with technologies like FoxPro and ColdFusion It's not that we somehow think that what we do is "better" than what they do, on the contrary, we respect these types of applicants and we are scared that we may be missing a good candidate. It is just very difficult to get a good read on someone who is essentially speaking a different language than you. To someone like this, it seems a little strange to ask a question like: What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface? Because, I would think that they would almost never know the answer or even what I'm talking about. However, I don't want to eliminate someone who could be a very good candidate in their own right and could be able to eventually learn the stuff that we do. But, I also don't want to just ask a bunch of behavioral questions, because I want to know about their technical background as well. Am I being too naive? Should "legacy" programmers like this already know about things like TDD, source control strategies, and best practices for object-oriented programming? If not, what questions should we ask to get a good representation about whether or not they are still able to learn them and be able to keep up in our fast-paced environment? EDIT: I'm not concerned with whether or not applicants that meet these criteria are in general capable or incapable, as I have already stated that I believe that they can be 100% capable. I am more interested in figuring out how to evaluate their talents, as I am having a hard time figuring out how to determine if they are an A+ "legacy" programmer or if they are a D- "legacy" programmer. I've worked with both.

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• Using lookahead assertions in regular expressions

  - by Greg Jackson

  I use regular expressions on a daily basis, as my daily work is 90% in Perl (legacy codebase, but that's a different issue). Despite this, I still find lookahead and lookbehind to be terribly confusing and often unreadable. Right now, if I were to get a code review with a lookahead or lookbehind, I would immediately send it back to see if the problem can be solved by using multiple regular expressions or a different approach. The following are the main reasons I tend not to like them: They can be terribly unreadable. Lookahead assertions, for example, start from the beginning of the string no matter where they are placed. That, among other things, can cause some very "interesting" and non-obvious behaviors. It used to be the case that many languages didn't support lookahead/lookbehind (or supported them as "experimental features"). This isn't the case quite as much, but there's still always the question as to how well it's supported. Quite frankly, they feel like a dirty hack. Regexps often already are, but they can also be quite elegant, and have gained widespread acceptance. I've gotten by without any need for them at all... sometimes I think that they're extraneous. Now, I'll freely admit that especially the last two reasons aren't really good ones, but I felt that I should enumerate what goes through my mind when I see one. I'm more than willing to change my mind about them, but I feel that they violate some of my core tenets of programming, including: Code should be as readable as possible without sacrificing functionality -- this may include doing something in a less efficient, but clearer was as long as the difference is negligible or unimportant to the application as a whole. Code should be maintainable -- if another programmer comes along to fix my code, non-obvious behavior can hide bugs or make functional code appear buggy (see readability) "The right tool for the right job" -- I'm sure you can come up with contrived examples that could use lookahead, but I've never come across something that really needs them in my real-world development work. Is there anything that they're really the best tool for, as opposed to, say, multiple regexps (or, alternatively, are they the best tool for most cases they're used for today). My question is this: Is it good practice to use lookahead/lookbehind in regular expressions, or are they simply a hack that have found their way into modern production code? I'd be perfectly happy to be convinced that I'm wrong about this, and simple examples are useful for examples or illustration, but by themselves, won't be enough to convince me.

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• Are there deprecated practices for multithread and multiprocessor programming that I should no longer use?

  - by DeveloperDon

  In the early days of FORTRAN and BASIC, essentially all programs were written with GOTO statements. The result was spaghetti code and the solution was structured programming. Similarly, pointers can have difficult to control characteristics in our programs. C++ started with plenty of pointers, but use of references are recommended. Libraries like STL can reduce some of our dependency. There are also idioms to create smart pointers that have better characteristics, and some version of C++ permit references and managed code. Programming practices like inheritance and polymorphism use a lot of pointers behind the scenes (just as for, while, do structured programming generates code filled with branch instructions). Languages like Java eliminate pointers and use garbage collection to manage dynamically allocated data instead of depending on programmers to match all their new and delete statements. In my reading, I have seen examples of multi-process and multi-thread programming that don't seem to use semaphores. Do they use the same thing with different names or do they have new ways of structuring protection of resources from concurrent use? For example, a specific example of a system for multithread programming with multicore processors is OpenMP. It represents a critical region as follows, without the use of semaphores, which seem not to be included in the environment. th_id = omp_get_thread_num(); #pragma omp critical { cout << "Hello World from thread " << th_id << '\n'; } This example is an excerpt from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMP Alternatively, similar protection of threads from each other using semaphores with functions wait() and signal() might look like this: wait(sem); th_id = get_thread_num(); cout << "Hello World from thread " << th_id << '\n'; signal(sem); In this example, things are pretty simple, and just a simple review is enough to show the wait() and signal() calls are matched and even with a lot of concurrency, thread safety is provided. But other algorithms are more complicated and use multiple semaphores (both binary and counting) spread across multiple functions with complex conditions that can be called by many threads. The consequences of creating deadlock or failing to make things thread safe can be hard to manage. Do these systems like OpenMP eliminate the problems with semaphores? Do they move the problem somewhere else? How do I transform my favorite semaphore using algorithm to not use semaphores anymore?

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is NewSQL – Day 10 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the relational database. In this article we will take a quick look at the what is NewSQL. What is NewSQL? NewSQL stands for new scalable and high performance SQL Database vendors. The products sold by NewSQL vendors are horizontally scalable. NewSQL is not kind of databases but it is about vendors who supports emerging data products with relational database properties (like ACID, Transaction etc.) along with high performance. Products from NewSQL vendors usually follow in memory data for speedy access as well are available immediate scalability. NewSQL term was coined by 451 groups analyst Matthew Aslett in this particular blog post. On the definition of NewSQL, Aslett writes: “NewSQL” is our shorthand for the various new scalable/high performance SQL database vendors. We have previously referred to these products as ‘ScalableSQL‘ to differentiate them from the incumbent relational database products. Since this implies horizontal scalability, which is not necessarily a feature of all the products, we adopted the term ‘NewSQL’ in the new report. And to clarify, like NoSQL, NewSQL is not to be taken too literally: the new thing about the NewSQL vendors is the vendor, not the SQL. In other words - NewSQL incorporates the concepts and principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) and NoSQL languages. It combines reliability of SQL with the speed and performance of NoSQL. Categories of NewSQL There are three major categories of the NewSQL New Architecture – In this framework each node owns a subset of the data and queries are split into smaller query to sent to nodes to process the data. E.g. NuoDB, Clustrix, VoltDB MySQL Engines – Highly Optimized storage engine for SQL with the interface of MySQ Lare the example of such category. E.g. InnoDB, Akiban Transparent Sharding – This system automatically split database across multiple nodes. E.g. Scalearc  Summary In simple words – NewSQL is kind of database following relational database principals and provides scalability like NoSQL. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about the Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• How and when to ask for a pay raise?

  - by Nico

  When should one ask for a pay raise? Will I know when the time is right for a pay raise? or should I just think "I deserve a pay raise for X and Y." When would be a moment to ask for a pay grade? For instance, if you are in a company that outsources to others, could it be the right moment to ask when they move you to a different physical workplace? Maybe a few weeks/months after you started working as a consultant at the client? Should you ask for one after engaging new technologies or something you've never worked with before? In short, should you ask for a raise for a "business motive" (they move you, they assign you new responsibilities), a "professional motive" (you are required to learn new languages or technologies), or a "personal motive" (you are having twins, your mother died and you need to arrange the funeral), or are all of the above potentially valid motives? How should one ask for it? Asking for a pay raise can be difficult for some people, how you deal with this? Do you just walk up to your manager and tell him "I need more money", "I think I deserve a pay raise"? Do you suggest you might have other offers on the table? Couldn't this be counterproductive if you actually really want to stay in the company you are in (because you like the environment, made a few friends, and like all the features they give you besides your pay grade; say: free sodas, parties, after-offices that happen pretty often, a ps3 you can grab when you are tired or want to chill out, courses, english classes, football games, etc, etc. [these would be my reasons not to leave]). I mean, how would you ask for a pay raise, effectively, but without pretending to threaten to leave the company if you don't get it? Because you don't actually want to. How would you deal with their answer? If they tell you they don't think you deserve a raise, would you ask for their reasons, would you get furious and trash the room? If they give you their reasons why they think you don't deserve a pay raise yet, would you discuss this with them or just take their opinion as factual? What if they ask you how much more you think you deserve to be being paid? Should you have thought this before-hand, or expect them to set the new grade? If they do agree to a pay raise, should you expect extra work to be thrown your way, or should everything remain the same, except your pay grade?

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• Explanation of the definition of interface inheritance as described in GoF book

  - by Geek

  I am reading the first chapter of the Gof book. Section 1.6 discusses about class vs interface inheritance: Class versus Interface Inheritance It's important to understand the difference between an object's class and its type. An object's class defines how the object is implemented.The class defines the object's internal state and the implementation of its operations.In contrast,an object's type only refers to its interface--the set of requests on which it can respond. An object can have many types, and objects of different classes can have the same type. Of course, there's a close relationship between class and type. Because a class defines the operations an object can perform, it also defines the object's type . When we say that an object is an instance of a class, we imply that the object supports the interface defined by the class. Languages like c++ and Eiffel use classes to specify both an object's type and its implementation. Smalltalk programs do not declare the types of variables; consequently,the compiler does not check that the types of objects assigned to a variable are subtypes of the variable's type. Sending a message requires checking that the class of the receiver implements the message, but it doesn't require checking that the receiver is an instance of a particular class. It's also important to understand the difference between class inheritance and interface inheritance (or subtyping). Class inheritance defines an object's implementation in terms of another object's implementation. In short, it's a mechanism for code and representation sharing. In contrast,interface inheritance(or subtyping) describes when an object can be used in place of another. I am familiar with the Java and JavaScript programming language and not really familiar with either C++ or Smalltalk or Eiffel as mentioned here. So I am trying to map the concepts discussed here to Java's way of doing classes, inheritance and interfaces. This is how I think of of these concepts in Java: In Java a class is always a blueprint for the objects it produces and what interface(as in "set of all possible requests that the object can respond to") an object of that class possess is defined during compilation stage only because the class of the object would have implemented those interfaces. The requests that an object of that class can respond to is the set of all the methods that are in the class(including those implemented for the interfaces that this class implements). My specific questions are: Am I right in saying that Java's way is more similar to C++ as described in the third paragraph. I do not understand what is meant by interface inheritance in the last paragraph. In Java interface inheritance is one interface extending from another interface. But I think the word interface has some other overloaded meaning here. Can some one provide an example in Java of what is meant by interface inheritance here so that I understand it better?

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• Simple method for reliably detecting code in text?

  - by Jeff Atwood

  GMail has this feature where it will warn you if you try to send an email that it thinks might have an attachment. Because GMail detected the string see the attached in the email, but no actual attachment, it warns me with an OK / Cancel dialog when I click the Send button. We have a related problem on Stack Overflow. That is, when a user enters a post like this one: my problem is I need to change the database but I don't won't to create a new connection. example: DataSet dsMasterInfo = new DataSet(); Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase("ConnectionString"); DbCommand dbCommand = db.GetStoredProcCommand("uspGetMasterName"); This user did not format their code as code! That is, they didn't indent by 4 spaces per Markdown, or use the code button (or the keyboard shortcut ctrl+k) which does that for them. Thus, our system is accreting a lot of edits where people have to go in and manually format code for people that are somehow unable to figure this out. This leads to a lot of bellyaching. We've improved the editor help several times, but short of driving over to the user's house and pressing the correct buttons on their keyboard for them, we're at a loss to see what to do next. That's why we are considering a Google GMail style warning: Did you mean to post code? You wrote stuff that we think looks like code, but you didn't format it as code by indenting 4 spaces, using the toolbar code button or the ctrl+k code formatting command. However, presenting this warning requires us to detect the presence of what we think is unformatted code in a question. What is a simple, semi-reliable way of doing this? Per Markdown, code is always indented by 4 spaces or within backticks, so anything correctly formatted can be discarded from the check immediately. This is only a warning and it will only apply to low-reputation users asking their first questions (or providing their first answers), so some false positives are OK, so long as they are about 5% or less. Questions on Stack Overflow can be in any language, though we can realistically limit our check to, say, the "big ten" languages. Per the tags page that would be C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Objective-C, C, C++, Python, Ruby. Use the Stack Overflow creative commons data dump to audit your potential solution (or just pick a few questions in the top 10 tags on Stack Overflow) and see how it does. Pseudocode is fine, but we use c# if you want to be extra friendly. The simpler the better (so long as it works). KISS! If your solution requires us to attempt to compile posts in 10 different compilers, or an army of people to manually train a bayesian inference engine, that's ... not exactly what we had in mind.

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• Your interesting code tricks/ conventions? [closed]

  - by Paul

  What interesting conventions, rules, tricks do you use in your code? Preferably some that are not so popular so that the rest of us would find them as novelties. :) Here's some of mine... Input and output parameters This applies to C++ and other languages that have both references and pointers. This is the convention: input parameters are always passed by value or const reference; output parameters are always passed by pointer. This way I'm able to see at a glance, directly from the function call, what parameters might get modified by the function: Inspiration: Old C code int a = 6, b = 7, sum = 0; calculateSum(a, b, &sum); Ordering of headers My typical source file begins like this (see code below). The reason I put the matching header first is because, in case that header is not self-sufficient (I forgot to include some necessary library, or forgot to forward declare some type or function), a compiler error will occur. // Matching header #include "example.h" // Standard libraries #include <string> ... Setter functions Sometimes I find that I need to set multiple properties of an object all at once (like when I just constructed it and I need to initialize it). To reduce the amount of typing and, in some cases, improve readability, I decided to make my setters chainable: Inspiration: Builder pattern class Employee { public: Employee& name(const std::string& name); Employee& salary(double salary); private: std::string name_; double salary_; }; Employee bob; bob.name("William Smith").salary(500.00); Maybe in this particular case it could have been just as well done in the constructor. But for Real WorldTM applications, classes would have lots more fields that should be set to appropriate values and it becomes unmaintainable to do it in the constructor. So what about you? What personal tips and tricks would you like to share?

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• Finding work as a college student

  - by lightburst

  I'm a 3rd year CS student. I'm currently really, really, bored and tired of cheap school programming(I go to a fairly respectable(albeit not top) university in my country, but, really, it's not MIT) so I've been thinking about getting a part-time dev job for a long while now. I'm not some hotshot programmer or anything, but "Add/Delete XYZ class objects to list" or "Do this web feature/pattern in PHP" does get old after a few semesters. I also only learned(heard?) of programming when I entered college, so the duration of me being in contact with any code is short. I can't really apply as an intern as I have not accumulated the necessary credits yet to do that so I was thinking of selling myself as a part-time dev. I still need to go to school, and don't want to subject myself to living two lives. Plus, I think I'd have better chances considering my lack of things to write on the resume. The only language I know at heart is C (I've written several pointer-oriented stuff on my freshman year, which is apparently pretty leet(for some reason), or so Joel says. That sort of boosted my morale a bit) but I've worked with several other languages only for the sake of course work such as C#/Java/PHP/ASM. My only user-worthy project was a recursive quicksort simulator I wrote for class using GTK+ that used a textbox to output the progress. I also have not taken the compiler theory class yet, or my thesis. All that being said, I wonder if any legitimate software company(big or small) would hire somebody like me considering all that. If there are companies that do accept anybody like me, would I be doing programming or maybe just be a tester or something? Would anybody hire me as a dev at all? I know I don't have much(not even a degree) but what I lack in experience, I compensate with interest? I am less interested in websites and 'management' software(no offense or anything. also, most of the places here ONLY have those), and more into 'process driven'(I'm not sure how to call it) and system software. I have my eyes on a startup that sells basically an extension of Google Drive, but I feel like I'm too 'risky' for them. Oh, I'm also 19 if that means anything. We're not K-12 so kids go to college earlier than in the US.

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• GNU/Linux interactive table content GUI editor?

  - by sdaau

  I often find myself in the need to gather data (say from the internet), into a table, for comparison reasons. I usually need the final table output in HTML or MediaWiki mostly, but often times also Latex. My biggest problem is that I often forget the correct table syntax for these markup languages, as well as what needs to be properly escaped in the inline data, for the table to render correctly. So, I often wish there was a GUI application, which provides a tabular framework - which I could stick "Always on Top" as a desktop window, and I could paste content into specific cells - before finally exporting the table as a code in the correct language. One application that partially allows this is Open/LibreOffice calc: The good thing here is that: I can drag and drop browser content into a specifically targeted table cell (here B2) "Rich" text / HTML code gets pasted For long content, the cell (column) width stays put as it originally was The bad thing is, that: when the cell height (due to content size) becomes larger than the calc window, it becomes nearly impossible to scroll calc contents up and down (at least with the mousewheel), as the view gets reset to top-right corner of the selected cell calc shows an "endless"/unlimited field of cells, so not exactly a "table" - which I find visually very confusing (and cognitively taxing) Can only export table to HTML What I would need is an application that: Allows for a limited size table, but with quick adding of rows and columns (e.g. via corresponding + buttons) Allows for quick setup of row and column height and width (as well as table size) Stays put at those sizes, regardless of size of content pasted in; if cell content overflows, cell scrollbars are shown (cell content could be possibly re-edited in a separate/new window); if table overflows over window size, window scrollbars are shown Exports table in multiple formats (I'd need both HTML and mediawiki), properly escaping cell content for each (possibility to strip HTML tags from content pasted in cells, to get plain text, is a plus) Targeting a specific cell in the table for the content paste operation is a must - it doesn't have to be drag'n'drop though, a right click over a cell with "Paste content" is enough. I'd also want the ability to click in a specific cell and type in (plain text) content immediately. So, my question is: is there an application out there that already does something like this? The reason I'm asking is that - as the screenshots show - for instance Libre/OpenOffice allows it, but only somewhat (as using it for that purpose is tedious). I know there exist some GUI editors for Linux (both for UI like guile or HTML like amaya); but I don't know them enough to pinpoint if any of them would offer this kind of functionality (and at least in my searches, that kind of functionality, if present in diverse software, seems not to be advertised). Note I'm not interested in styling an HTML table, which is why I haven't used "table designer" in the title, but "table editor" (in lack of better terms) - I'm interested in (quickly) adjusting row/column size of the table, and populating it with pasted data (which is possibly HTML) in a GUI; and finally exporting such a table as self-contained HTML (or other) code.

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• Developer – Cross-Platform: Fact or Fiction?

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a guest blog post by Jeff McVeigh. Jeff McVeigh is the general manager of Performance Client and Visual Computing within Intel’s Developer Products Division. His team is responsible for the development and delivery of leading software products for performance-centric application developers spanning Android*, Windows*, and OS* X operating systems. During his 17-year career at Intel, Jeff has held various technical and management positions in the fields of media, graphics, and validation. He also served as the technical assistant to Intel’s CTO. He holds 20 patents and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s not a homogenous world. We all know it. I have a Windows* desktop, a MacBook Air*, an Android phone, and my kids are 100% Apple. We used to have 2.5 kids, now we have 2.5 devices. And we all agree that diversity is great, unless you’re a developer trying to prioritize the limited hours in the day. Then it’s a series of trade-offs. Do we become brand loyalists for Google or Apple or Microsoft? Do we specialize on phones and tablets or still consider the 300M+ PC shipments a year when we make our decisions on where to spend our time and resources? We weigh the platform options, monetization opportunities, APIs, and distribution models. Too often, I see developers choose one platform, or write to the lowest common denominator, which limits their reach and market success. But who wants to be ?me too”? Cross-platform coding is possible in some environments, for some applications, for some level of innovation—but it’s not all-inclusive, yet. There are some tricks of the trade to develop cross-platform, including using languages and environments that ?run everywhere.” HTML5 is today’s answer for web-enabled platforms. However, it’s not a panacea, especially if your app requires the ultimate performance or native UI look and feel. There are other cross-platform frameworks that address the presentation layer of your application. But for those apps that have a preponderance of native code (e.g., highly-tuned C/C++ loops), there aren’t tons of solutions today to help with code reuse across these platforms using consistent tools and libraries. As we move forward with interim solutions, they’ll improve and become more robust, based, in no small part, on our input. What’s your answer to the cross-platform challenge? Are you fully invested in HTML5 now? What are your barriers? What’s your vision to navigate the cross-platform landscape?  Here is the link where you can head next and learn more about how to answer the questions I have asked: https://software.intel.com/en-us Republished with permission from here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Intel

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• Liskov principle: violation by type-hinting

  - by Elias Van Ootegem

  According to the Liskov principle, a construction like the one below is invalid, as it strengthens a pre-condition. I know the example is pointless/nonsense, but when I last asked a question like this, and used a more elaborate code sample, it seemed to distract people too much from the actual question. //Data models abstract class Argument { protected $value = null; public function getValue() { return $this->value; } abstract public function setValue($val); } class Numeric extends Argument { public function setValue($val) { $this->value = $val + 0;//coerce to number return $this; } } //used here: abstract class Output { public function printValue(Argument $arg) { echo $this->format($arg); return $this; } abstract public function format(Argument $arg); } class OutputNumeric extends Output { public function format(Numeric $arg)//<-- VIOLATION! { $format = is_float($arg->getValue()) ? '%.3f' : '%d'; return sprintf($format, $arg->getValue()); } } My question is this: Why would this kind of "violation" be considered harmful? So much so that some languages, like the one I used in this example (PHP), don't even allow this? I'm not allowed to strengthen the type-hint of an abstract method but, by overriding the printValue method, I am allowed to write: class OutputNumeric extends Output { final public function printValue(Numeric $arg) { echo $this->format($arg); } public function format(Argument $arg) { $format = is_float($arg->getValue()) ? '%.3f' : '%d'; return sprintf($format, $arg->getValue()); } } But this would imply repeating myself for each and every child of Output, and makes my objects harder to reuse. I understand why the Liskov principle exists, don't get me wrong, but I find it somewhat difficult to fathom why the signature of an abstract method in an abstract class has to be adhered to so much stricter than a non-abstract method. Could someone explain to me why I'm not allowed to hind at a child class, in a child class? The way I see it, the child class OutputNumeric is a specific use-case of Output, and thus might need a specific instance of Argument, namely Numeric. Is it really so wrong of me to write code like this?

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Hitachi Data Systems

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter Watch this Webcast to see a live demo on how HDS creates multilingual content for their 35+ regional websites  Solution SummaryHitachi Data Systems (HDS) provides mid-range and high-end storage systems, software and services. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. HDS is based in Santa Clara, California, and has over 5,300 employees in more then 100 countries and regions. HDS's main objectives were to provide a consistent message across all their sites, to maintain a tight governance structure across their messages and related content, expand the use of the existing content management systems and implement a centralized translation management system. HDS implemented a global web content management system based on Oracle WebCenter Content and integrated the Lingotek translation management system to manage their multilingual content. The implemented solution provides each Geo with the ability to expand their web offering to meet local market needs, while staying aligned with the Corporate Web Guidelines Company OverviewHitachi Data Systems (HDS) provides mid-range and high-end storage systems, software and services. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. and part of the Hitachi Information Systems & Telecommunications Division. The company sells through direct and indirect channels in more than 170 countries and regions. Its customers include of 50 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. HDS is based in Santa Clara California and has over 5,300 employees in more than 100 countries and regions. Business ChallengesHDS has over 35 global websites and the lack of global web capabilities led to inconsistency of messaging, slower time to market and failed to address local language needs. There was an extensive operational overhead due to manual and redundant processes. Translation efforts where superficial, inconsistent and wasteful and the lack of translation automation tools discouraged localization.  HDS's main objectives were to provide a consistent message across all their sites, to maintain a tight governance structure across their messages and related content, expand the use of the existing content management systems and implement a centralized translation management system. Solution DeployedHDS implemented a global web content management system based on Oracle WebCenter Content. The solution supports decentralized publishing for their 35+ global sites to address local market needs while ensuring editorial and brand review trough embedded review processes. They integrated the Lingotek translation management system into Oracle WebCenter Content to manage their multilingual content. Business Results Provides each Geo with the ability to expand their web offering to meet local market needs, while staying aligned with the Corporate Web Guidelines Enables end-to-end content lifecycle management across multiple languages Leverage translation memory for reuse and consistency Reduce time to market with central repository of translated content Additional Information HDS Webcast Oracle WebCenter Content Lingotek website

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• How can a solo programmer become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Express your personality and potential @ Oracle

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  Ciao, my name is Michel and I am a 24 year old guy from Forlì, Italy, working as a Business Intelligence Business Development Consultant in Rome. After I completed the Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration at Bologna University, I took a Multiple Master of Science in International Management organized by three European Universities: Bologna University (IT), ICN Business School of Nancy (FR) and Uppsala University (SE).I therefore had the chance to travel a lot and, most important, to study and meet hundreds of people from all over the world. This experience enhanced the passion I foster for international environments, different cultures and countries; not to mention the learning of foreign languages. Working for such a structured multinational as Oracle totally reflects my desire to be surrounded by a multicultural and international atmosphere, having the opportunity to grow from the personal point of view and to endlessly boost my career path. Demand Generation My department is responsible for demand generation activities. That implies, for instance, the implementation of various strategies aimed to feed the pipeline for Business Intelligence products in the Italian market. Organization of marketing campaigns, events, providing ideas or contacts to the sales force is just a few examples of our work. I like to define the role of the business development as something that translates the marketing insights into tools to increase the sales, accounting the differences amongst countries, companies and industries. Furthermore, it is an important feature to collaborate with the EMEA team to share knowledge and best practices. My initial lack of an IT background has been constantly covered by the managers and my personal mentor. The thing I appreciated most is indeed the fact I always feel to be a growing potential, becoming essential day after day. I am surprised by the trust and confidence people have on me and how they proudly encourage my personal initiative and always spur me to contribute. Career Ambitions If your ambitions are to work within an international but extremely people focused environment, to contribute to the growth of one of the most successful companies in the world, to deal with a fast-paced industry and highly competitive market, to have the chance to fully express your personality and potential and to satisfy your career ambitions over the years, then Oracle is right for YOU. Looking forward to having YOU aboard! Do you want to find out more about the open roles within Oracle? Follow us on http://campus.oracle.com.

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• Best Language for the job? Database | C++, .NET, Java

  - by Randy E

  Ok, quick overview. I'm pretty brand new to software design. I have experience reading and editing/customizing PHP things for online scripts/software; Such as CMS, Wordpress, some forum solutions. I'm about to begin my degree in Software Design, the school I'm going to will allow us to kind of focus on an area, C++, Java, or .NET. I've played around a little with VB over the past week, mostly just trying to get a slight feel for it, however nothing extensive. I've been through Herbert Schildt's "C++, A Beginner's Guide." but I was mainly reading it, not doing anything with it beyond a couple basic Console Apps (and getting frustrated with auto-close :/ ). Now, where I decide to focus more in with my degree will depend on what the best language for the job is for my first piece of software I want to develop on my own. Assume I haven't looked at any of the languages at all, please help with the following: My first piece of software will be a database program. Everything has to do with users inputting and retrieving data, and calling that data to help with another function of the software, automatically calculating billing information based on information inputted in the other portion of the program. I won't go into too many details as I'm targeting a niche that doesn't have too much competition, but the competition that is there is established. I want to offer more features, scalable solutions, and the ability to port it to an online version. Ok, basically, it is a complete case management with integrated billing for Private Investigators. I would like the case management to be able to check the Database to see if certain information has been inputted before (such as Names/SSN's), and then the billing will pull hours inputted in the case portion for investigative work, multiplying by an already inputted amount for the fee, and then calculate sales tax. I also want to provide potential clients with an easily scalable solution, that is, a basic option for start ups that costs the least amount, with no additional users, ran on one machine. A middle option with the ability to create users and place them in two groups (User or Admin), as well as adding a few additional features, ran on one machine, but this will allow it to be accessed after being mapped on a network drive. And a third option to allow the placement into 4 different groups (Investigators, Billing, Managers, Admins) and more features. And then, a couple of years after launch, a 4th option that is browser based allowing the same 4 groups to login, as well as clients (view things concerning their case, with some admin customizable objects that can be added for clients view), over the internet. The only licensing security I would like to employ right off the bat will be serial key generated after ordering online (received in an email after the successful purchase). The program will access a database stored on a server periodically to verify license. I would like it to be able to check to make sure it's the most updated version and automatically update if not.

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• Two interfaces with identical signatures

  - by corsiKa

  I am attempting to model a card game where cards have two important sets of features: The first is an effect. These are the changes to the game state that happen when you play the card. The interface for effect is as follows: boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs); void play(Player p, GameState gs); And you could consider the card to be playable if and only if you can meet its cost and all its effects are playable. Like so: // in Card class boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs) { if(p.resource < this.cost) return false; for(Effect e : this.effects) { if(!e.isPlayable(p,gs)) return false; } return true; } Okay, so far, pretty simple. The other set of features on the card are abilities. These abilities are changes to the game state that you can activate at-will. When coming up with the interface for these, I realized they needed a method for determining whether they can be activated or not, and a method for implementing the activation. It ends up being boolean isActivatable(Player p, GameState gs); void activate(Player p, GameState gs); And I realize that with the exception of calling it "activate" instead of "play", Ability and Effect have the exact same signature. Is it a bad thing to have multiple interfaces with an identical signature? Should I simply use one, and have two sets of the same interface? As so: Set<Effect> effects; Set<Effect> abilities; If so, what refactoring steps should I take down the road if they become non-identical (as more features are released), particularly if they're divergent (i.e. they both gain something the other shouldn't, as opposed to only one gaining and the other being a complete subset)? I'm particularly concerned that combining them will be non-sustainable as soon as something changes. The fine print: I recognize this question is spawned by game development, but I feel it's the sort of problem that could just as easily creep up in non-game development, particularly when trying to accommodate the business models of multiple clients in one application as happens with just about every project I've ever done with more than one business influence... Also, the snippets used are Java snippets, but this could just as easily apply to a multitude of object oriented languages.

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• MS in Computer Science after BE in electronics

  - by Abhinav

  I am doing my 3rd year Bachelors in Electronics and Electrical Communication but from the first year I have been interested in Computer Science. But at that time it was just my hobby. But in second year when I joined robotics my love for computer science rose. I with my team came in top three in 2 National Competition (Technical fests of different IITs) where we used Image Processing, Hardware interfacing etc. But then I realised that Computer Science is not just about coding. I took many lectures from online free schools like Udacity, Coursera in subjects related to Artificial Intelligence, Building a Search Engine, Design and Analysis of Algorithm, Programming a Robotic Car, Programming Languages, Machine Learning, Software Engineering as a Service, WebApps Engineering, Compilers, Applied Crypotography etc. I also did some courses in Core and Advanced Java in my second year from training institute. I will also be taking course in Statistics, Databases, Discrete Mathematics from 25th June. Now I realized how vast is the field of Computer Science and how efficient you become on deciding algorithms and classifying problems into different subfields which have been thoroughly researched so you don't always do brute force thing or naive programming. Now this field has become kind of passion for me. Adding to the fact I am also doing my 6 months internship in software field in Texas Instruments where I am working on Automation and Algorithms. I also have some 5-6 good college level projects in Softwares and Robotics. I also like Electronics but only some fields like Operating System(this subject was there in Electronics also), Micro Processor, Digital, Computer Architecture, DSPs etc. I really want to pursue MS in some field of Computer Science. I am giving GRE in October/November. Till now I have good CG of around 9.4/10 and my 1 year in college is still left. Do I have any chance that some good University in US will consider me for MS in field related to computer science or Robotics. Also Can you suggest somethings that I can do during this 1 year to increase my chances for MS or should I apply for EECS(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and then I can shift more towards Computer Science as my major option. My main aim is to do Phd after Ms in CS if I am able to do that somehow. I know that I have to put much extra effort to understand things in MS than CS undergraduates but I will do that with my full dedication, also when I communicate with my college CS students or during my internship period I didn't feel that I am missing very much stuff that they know and was very comfortable during my internship with software employees.

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• Is there a pedagogical game engine?

  - by K.G.

  I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

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• SEO to ensure visibility for a narrow, non-competitive, non-commercial site

  - by hen3ry

  I'm webmaster of a non-commercial site in English. A non-native-English speaker asked me why our site doesn't produce hits in Google searches she conducts for relevant keywords in her native language. I asked her for a list of keywords in her native language, and I naively tried inserting those into the META info in the page headers and waited a couple of weeks. No help. A little searching informed me that Google doesn't use the META info, and has not done so for a very long time. D'oh! To be entirely concrete, suppose the StackExchange folks want Russian speakers to find this site, Pro Webmasters. The direct translation in Russian of "webmaster" --thanks, Google Translator-- is: "?????????". (Not sure this will render properly, but that's not essential to my question.) Assuming Pro Webmasters has a common template for all pages it generates, inserting "?????????" into the Keywords META for that template won't help, it seems. What could StackExchange do to make this site visible to users searching with the Russian keyword "?????????" ? Pretty much all the advice I've seen boils down to this, if I understand correctly: use the desired search term often (but not too often) among site content, and the problem will be solved. That's great, but I don't think sprinkling "?????????" visibly all over Pro Webmasters is going to fly. Just for completeness, crawlers must be long immune to the invisible-to-visitors scheme, e.g, format "?????????" in a tiny text size in a color the same as an existing background, e.g. white-over-white. Or, put that text inside a div styled: ' style="visibility: hidden" '. Probably some other equivalents. I can only think of one slightly effective method, along these lines: place an unobtrusive link on the common template to a page titled "for international users" , and on that page list desired synonyms for "webmaster" in various languages on that page. A test case --admittedly, just one-- using my site implies that a Google search for "international users" ????????? will produce a hit for this page, and thus make the site minimally visible, despite the fact that the page will almost never be visited. At the moment, anyway. Note: All the SEO discussions I have found so far are about competitive and --almost certainly-- commercial sites. To repeat: my site is non-commercial, and it is about an obscure, narrow topic that is of interest to only a small number of people worldwide. This isn't about clawing our way to the top of competitive rankings, just making this content minimally visible to interested non-native-English speakers. Ideas? TIA

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• 3 Reasons You Need To Know Something About Every Technology

  - by Tim Murphy

  I make my living as a consultant and a general technologist.  I credit my success to the fact that I have never been afraid to pick up any product, language or platform needed to get the job done.  While Microsoft technologies I my mainstay, I have done work on mainframe and UNIX platforms and have worked with a wide variety of database engines.  Each one has it’s use and most times it is less expensive to find a way to communicate with an existing system than to replace it. So what are the main benefits of expending the effort to learn a new technology? New ways to solve problems Accelerate development Advise clients and get new business opportunities By new technology I mean ones that you haven’t had experience with before.  They don’t have to be the the one that just came out yesterday.  As they say, those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.  If you can learn something from an older technology it can be just as valuable as the shiny new one.  Either way, when you add another tool to your kit you get a new view on each problem you face.  This makes it easier to create a sound solution. The next thing you can learn from working with different products and techniques is how to more efficiently develop solve problems.  Many times if you are working with a new language you will find that there are specific design patterns that are used with it in normal use.  These can usually be applied with most languages.  You just needed to be exposed to them. The last point is about helping your clients and helping yourself.  If you can get in on technologies early you will have advantage over your competition in the market.  You will also be able to honestly advise you client on why they should or should not go with a new product.  Being able to compare products and their features is always an ability that stake holders appreciate. You don’t need to learn every detail of a product.  Learn enough to function and get an idea of how to use the technology.  Keep eating those technology Wheaties and you will be ready to go the distance in any project. del.icio.us Tags: Technology,technologists,technology generalist,Software Architecture

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