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  • Python or Ruby for freelance?

    - by Sophia
    Hello, I'm Sophia. I have an interest in self-learning either Python, or Ruby. The primary reason for my interest is to make my life more stable by having freelance work = $. It seems that programming offers a way for me to escape my condition of poverty (I'm on the edge of homelessness right now) while at the same time making it possible for me to go to uni. I intend on being a math/philosophy major. I have messed with Python a little bit in the past, but it didn't click super well. The people who say I should choose Python say as much because it is considered a good first language/teaching language, and that it is general-purpose. The people who say I should choose Ruby point out that I'm a very right-brained thinker, and having multiple ways to do something will make it much easier for me to write good code. So, basically, I'm starting this thread as a dialog with people who know more than I do, as an attempt to make the decision. :-) I've thought about asking this in stackoverflow, but they're much more strict about closing threads than here, and I'm sort of worried my thread will be closed. :/ TL;DR Python or Ruby for freelance work opportunities ($) as a first language? Additional question (if anyone cares to answer): I have a personal feeling that if I devote myself to learning, I'd be worth hiring for a project in about 8 weeks of work. I base this on a conservative estimate of my intellectual capacities, as well as possessing motivation to improve my life. Is my estimate necessarily inaccurate? random tidbit: I'm in Portland, OR I'll answer questions that are asked of me, if I can help the accuracy and insight contained within the dialog.

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  • The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

    - by Rick Strahl
    About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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  • IIM Calcutta &ndash; EPBM 14 &ndash; Campus Visit &ndash; Day 4 &ndash; Managing Self, SDCC and Gari

    - by Ram Shankar Yadav
    …I’m becoming more of an addict of writing about my experiences, here in Kolkata! Today we started a bit of late at around 8 AM, did our breakfast and reached in class a bit late at around 9:50 AM, and here goes the surprise…. Today we had two lectures on “Managing Self” and two lectures on “Sustainable Development and Climate Change” (SDCC). Some of us got few self discipline lessons the moment they entered class and asked to “get out” :D So frankly speaking it was a nostalgic moment, which reminded us of Collage ;) We did a FIRO-B test as and got very good tips on managing ourselves and differentiate between “manager” and “leader” After the lunch we had our session on SDCC, in which the prof started by explaining “Credit Crisis”, and moved on to Sustainable Development and few great examples from industry and life~! After the class we went for shopping at Garihat Market, we ate Pani Puri and Moodi :P ..one more surprise…my room got flooded with lot of my new ePBM friends to take the copy of the pictures and we did lot of chit chat around anything and everything :D …so far so good…it’s an amazing experience for me and hopefully for others….who came out of their daily chores and went back to the nostalgic lanes of friendship, learning and most importantly “Happyness” ~~~ Cheers, ram :) EPBM 14 pics : http://epbm14.shutterfly.com/pictures

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  • DC Comics Identifies Krypton on the Star Map

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    This week Action Comics Superman #14 hits the stands and DC comics reveals the actual location of Kyrpton, delivered by none other than beloved astrophysicist Neil Tyson. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy reports on the resolution of fans’ long standing curiosity about the location of Krypton: Well, that’s about to change. DC comics is releasing a new book this week – Action Comics Superman #14 – that finally reveals the answer to this stellar question. And they picked a special guest to reveal it: my old friend Neil Tyson. Actually, Neil did more than just appear in the comic: he was approached by DC to find a good star to fit the story. Red supergiants don’t work; they explode as supernovae when they are too young to have an advanced civilization rise on any orbiting planets. Red giants aren’t a great fit either; they can be old, but none is at the right distance to match the storyline. It would have to be a red dwarf: there are lots of them, they can be very old, and some are close enough to fit the plot. I won’t keep you in suspense: the star is LHS 2520, a red dwarf in the southern constellation of Corvus (at the center of the picture here). It’s an M3.5 dwarf, meaning it has about a quarter of the Sun’s mass, a third its diameter, roughly half the Sun’s temperature, and a luminosity of a mere 1% of our Sun’s. It’s only 27 light years away – very close on the scale of the galaxy – but such a dim bulb you need a telescope to see it at all (for any astronomers out there, the coordinates are RA: 12h 10m 5.77s, Dec: -15° 4m 17.9 s). 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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  • BizTalk: mapping with Xslt

    - by Leonid Ganeline
    BizTalk Map Editor (Mapper) is a good editor, especially in the last 2010 version of the BizTalk. But still sometimes it cannot do the tasks easily. It is time for the Xslt code, It is time to remember that the maps are executed by the Xslt engine.  Right-click the Mapper Grid (a field between the source and target schemas) and choose Properties /Custom XSLT Path.  Input here a name of the file with Xslt code. Only this code will be executed, forget the picture in the Mapper, all those links and functoids.  Let’s see the real-life example. There are two source Addresses. One is on the top level and the second is inside the Member_Address record with MaxOccurs=* . The target address is placed inside the Locator record with MaxOccurs=*. The requirement is to map all source address to the one target address structure. The source Xml document looks like: The result Xml should be like this: Try to do this mapping with the Mapper and you will spent good amount of time and the result map would be tricky. If we use the Xslt code, the mapping will be simple and unambiguous, like this: Simple, elegant.

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 29, 2010 -- #872

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Chris Koenig, Kunal Chowdhury, SilverLaw, Shayne Burgess, Ian T. Lackey, Alan Beasley, Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: Ozymandias has a post up that's not Silverlight necessarily, but it's pretty cool: Typeface Selection Flowchart Damian Schenkelman posted about the latest: Prism 2.2 Release available. Get it at Codeplex. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 OData Paging with RX Extensions Michael Washington continues with this OData and Rx post using the View Model Style. Michael has some good external links, good info, and all the code. WP7 Part 4: Morphing and Mapping Chris Koenig has the 4th in his WP7 series he's doing, and this one is on MVVMLight and BingMaps ... code included. Silverlight 4: Interoperability with Excel using the COM Object Kunal Chowdhury has a post up about Excel Interoperability using the COM object including opening an Excel Workbook and writing data out, then modifying the data in the spreadsheet and seeing it updated in the app. Creating A Flexible Surface Effect – Silverlight 4 (Part 1) SilverLaw put up a demo of an awesome 'water ripple' SL4 demo a couple days ago, and now he's got part 1 of a great tutorial explaining it all. Service Operations and the WCF Data Services Client Shayne Burgess has a post up about Service Operations and how they can be used by the WCF Data Services client. Role Based Silverlight Behaviors Also from the Open Light Group, Ian T. Lackey has a post up about Behaviors that takes a list of roles and updates the UI appropriatetly. How to Toggle (Show/Hide) using Behaviours (Behaviors) between Visual States or Storyboards in Expression Blend for Windows Phone Alan Beasley has a quick post up talking about the solution he found to a problem he was having with state switching in a WP7 app. MEFedMVVM: Testability Marlon Grech has another MEFedMVVM post up and he's discussing Testability all rolled in there with everything else :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • ASP.NET developers turning to Visual WebGui for rich management system

    - by Webgui
    When The Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) decided they needed a web application to allow easy access to the expenses management system they initially went to ASP.NET web forms combined with CSS. The outcome, however, was not satisfying enough as it appeared bland and lacked in richness. So in order to enrich the UI and give the web application some glitz, Visual WebGui was selected. Visual WebGui provided the needed richness and the familiar Windows look and feel also made the transition for the desktop users very easy. The richer GUI of Visual WebGui compared to ASP.NET conveyed some initial concerns about performance. But the Visual WebGui performance turned out to be a surprising advantage as the website maintained good response times. Working with Visual WebGui required a paradigm shift for the development process as some of the usual methods of coding with ASP.NET did not apply. However, the transition was fairly easy due to the simplicity and intuitiveness of Visual WebGui as well as the good support and documentation. “The shift into a different development paradigm was eased by the Visual WebGui web forums which are very active thanks to a large, involved community. There are also several video and web pages dedicated to answering the most commonly asked questions and pitfalls" Dave Bhatia, Systems Engineer who added "A couple of issues such as deploying on IIS7 seemed to be show stoppers at first, however the solution was readily available in a white paper on the Gizmox website.” The full story is found on the Visual WebGui website: http://www.visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Resources/CaseStudies/tabid/358/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/964/The-Center-for-Organ-Recovery-Education-gets-a-web-based-expenses-management-system.aspx

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  • How do I manage the technical debate over WCF vs. Web API?

    - by Saeed Neamati
    I'm managing a team of like 15 developers now, and we are stuck at a point on choosing the technology, where the team is broken into two completely opposite teams, debating over usage of WCF vs. Web API. Team A which supports usage of Web API, brings forward these reasons: Web API is just the modern way of writing services (Wikipedia) WCF is an overhead for HTTP. It's a solution for TCP, and Net Pipes, and other protocols WCF models are not POCO, because of [DataContract] & [DataMember] and those attributes SOAP is not as readable and handy as JSON SOAP is an overhead for network compared to JSON (transport over HTTP) No method overloading Team B which supports the usage of WCF, says: WCF supports multiple protocols (via configuration) WCF supports distributed transactions Many good examples and success stories exist for WCF (while Web API is still young) Duplex is excellent for two-way communication This debate is continuing, and I don't know what to do now. Personally, I think that we should use a tool only for its right place of usage. In other words, we'd better use Web API, if we want to expose a service over HTTP, but use WCF when it comes to TCP and Duplex. By searching the Internet, we can't get to a solid result. Many posts exist for supporting WCF, but on the contrary we also find people complaint about it. I know that the nature of this question might sound arguable, but we need some good hints to decide. We're stuck at a point where choosing a technology by chance might make us regret it later. We want to choose with open eyes. Our usage would be mostly for web, and we would expose our services over HTTP. In some cases (say 5 to 10 percent) we might need distributed transactions though. What should I do now? How do I manage this debate in a constructive way?

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  • Visual web page designer for Django?

    - by Robert Oschler
    I'm just starting my Django learning so pardon me if any part of this question is off-base. I have done a lot of web searching for information on the equivalent of a visual web page designer for Django and I don't seem to be getting very far. I have experience with Delphi (Object Pascal), C, C++, Python, PHP, Java, and Javascript and have created and maintained several web sites that included MySQL database dependent content. For the longest time I've been using one of the standard WYSIWIG designers to design the actual web pages, with any needed back end programming done via Forms or AJAX calls that call server side PHP scripts. I have grown tired of the quirks, bugs, and other annoyances associated with the program. Also, I find myself hungry for the functionality and reliability a good MVC based framework would provide me so I could really express myself with custom code easily. So I am turning to Django/Python. However, I'm still a junkie for a good WYSIWIG designer for the layout of web pages. I know there are some out there that thrive on opening up a text editor, possibly with some code editor tools to assist, and pounding out pages. But I do adore a drag and drop editor for simple page layout, especially for things like embedded images, tables, buttons, etc. I found a few open source projects on GitHub but they seem to be focused on HTML web forms, not a generic web page editor. So can I get what I want here? The supreme goal would be to find not only a web page editor that creates Django compatible web pages, but if I dare say it, have a design editor that could add Python code stubs to various page elements in the style of the Delph/VCL or VB design editors. Note, I also have the Wing IDE Professional IDE, version 2.0. As a side note, if you know of any really cool, fun, or time-saving Python libraries that are designed for easy integration into Django please tell me about them. -- roschler

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  • Is it possible for beginner to learn and develop an application in rails in 4 months?

    - by Parth
    I want to develop a web application or a website using rails. My current knowledge includes 1. HTML 2. CSS 3. C 4. Java And I am currently going through 5th chapter of the well grounded rubyist book by David A. Thomas. I came to know that learning ruby is beneficial for good knowledge of rails. So currently I am going through the basics of ruby. And learning rails in parallel. I want to know if in this scenario is it practically feasible to understand rails and develop an application/website in it within the time frame of 4 months. I need to develop an application which have atleast 3 complexity (complex functionality). Any ideas of good application for rails beginners is welcomed. But the application should be large or if it is small than it should have some complexity. Time is a constraint for me. I would have to develop application for college work but rails technology is my choice as I want to learn it.

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  • Is meta description still relevant?

    - by Jeff Atwood
    I received this bit of advice about the meta description tag recently: Meta descriptions are used by Google probably 80% of the time for the snippet. They don’t help with rankings but you should probably use them. You could just auto generate them from the first part of the question. The description tag exists in the header, like so: <meta name="Description" content="A brief summary of the content on the page."> I'm not sure why we would need this field, as Google seems perfectly capable of showing the relevant search terms in context in the search result pages, like so (I searched for c# list performance): In other words, where would a meta description summary improve these results? We want the page to show context around the actual search hits, not a random summary we inserted! Google Webmaster Central has this advice: For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged -- just make sure that your descriptions are not "spammy." Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. I'm struggling to think of any scenario when I would want the Google-generated summary, that is, actual context from the page for the search terms, to be replaced by a hard-coded meta description summary of the question itself.

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  • Keyboard input system handling

    - by The Communist Duck
    Note: I have to poll, rather than do callbacks because of API limitations (SFML). I also apologize for the lack of a 'decent' title. I think I have two questions here; how to register the input I'm receiving, and what to do with it. Handling Input I'm talking about after the fact you've registered that the 'A' key has been pressed, for example, and how to do it from there. I've seen an array of the whole keyboard, something like: bool keyboard[256]; //And each input loop check the state of every key on the keyboard But this seems inefficient. Not only are you coupling the key 'A' to 'player moving left', for example, but it checks every key, 30-60 times a second. I then tried another system which just looked for keys it wanted. std::map< unsigned char, Key keyMap; //Key stores the keycode, and whether it's been pressed. Then, I declare a load of const unsigned char called 'Quit' or 'PlayerLeft'. input-BindKey(Keys::PlayerLeft, KeyCode::A); //so now you can check if PlayerLeft, rather than if A. However, the problem with this is I cannot now type a name, for example, without having to bind every single key. Then, I have the second problem, which I cannot really think of a good solution for: Sending Input I now know that the A key has been pressed or that playerLeft is true. But how do I go from here? I thought about just checking if(input-IsKeyDown(Key::PlayerLeft) { player.MoveLeft(); } This couples the input greatly to the entities, and I find it rather messy. I'd prefer the player to handle its own movement when it gets updated. I thought some kind of event system could work, but I do not know how to go with it. (I heard signals and slots was good for this kind of work, but it's apparently very slow and I cannot see how it'd fit). Thanks.

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  • mpirun -np N, what if N is larger than my core number?

    - by Daniel
    Say I have a 4-core workstation, what would linux (Ubuntu) do if I execute mpirun -np 9 XXX Q1. Will 9 run immediately together, or they will run 4 after 4? Q2. I suppose that using 9 is not good, because the remainder 1, it will make the computer confused, (I don't know is it going to be confused at all, or the "head" of the computer will decide which core among the 4 cores will be used?) Or it will be randomly picked. Who decide which one core to call? Q3. If I feel my cpu is not bad and my ram is okay and large enough, and my case is not very big. Is it a good idea in order to fully use my cpu and ram, that I do mpirun -np 8 XXX, or even mpirun -np 12 XXX. Q4. Who decides all of these effciency optimization, Ubuntu, or linux, or motherboard or cpu? Your enlightenment would be really appreciated.

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  • Can defect containment metrics be readily applied at an organizational level when there is only a consistant organizational process framework?

    - by Thomas Owens
    Defect containment metrics, such as total defect containment effectiveness (TDCE) and phase containment effectiveness (PCE), can be used to give a good indicator of the quality of the process. TDCE captures the defects that are captured at some point between requirements and the release of a product into the field, indicating the overall effectiveness of the entire process to find and remove defects. PCE provides more detail at each phase of the software development life cycle and how the defect detection and removal techniques are working. Applying these metrics makes sense at a level where you have a well-defined process and methodology for product development, often a project. However, some organizations provide a process framework that is tailored at the project level. This process framework would include the necessary guidance for meeting certifications (ISO9001, CMMI), practices for incorporating known good techniques (agile methods, Lean, Six Sigma), and requirements for legal or regulatory reasons. However, the specific details of how to gather requirements, design the system, produce the software, conduct test, and release are left to the product development teams. Is there any effective way to apply defect containment metrics at an organizational level when only a process framework exists at the organizational level? If not, what might be some ideas for metrics that can be distilled from each project (each using a tailored process that fits into the organizational process framework) that captures defect containment metrics to discuss the ability of the process to find and remove defects? The end goal of such a metric would be to consolidate the defect containment practices of a large number of ongoing projects and report to management. The target audience would be people in roles such as the chief software engineer and the chief engineer (of all engineering disciplines) for the organization. Although project specific data would be available, the idea is to produce something that quantifies the general effectiveness of all tailored processes across all ongoing projects. I would suspect that this data would also be presented as part of CMMI, ISO, or similar audits to demonstrate process quality.

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  • Generating Normal map from a Image with a given Albedo map

    - by snape
    I am working on a research problem part of which involves generating normal map from a given image of a rusted object. I searched the internet for techniques to achieve the above and apparently crazybump is mentioned a lot. I tried it but it didn't produce the desirable effects. Also I am looking for a method which draws inspiration from an existing research paper not some closed source software. I turned my attention to the technique described in the this paper. Results from this technique are satisfactory for normal objects because of bias in the training data but it doesn't work very well in the case of rusted objects. After this I focussed my attention on generating Albedo map (the above problem would become more solvable if Albedo map is obtained). Fortunately I am able to generate pretty good albedo maps for images of rusted objects. I used this paper's approach to generate Albedo maps. Now I want to know a good technique to get Normal map given an image and it's corresponding Albedo map. To give you an idea of what kind of images I am working with I am attaching a sample. Links to research material would be really appreciated. Thanks!

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  • Unexpected SQL Server 2008 Performance Tip: Avoid local variables in WHERE clause

    - by Jim Duffy
    Sometimes an application needs to have every last drop of performance it can get, others not so much. We’re in the process of converting some legacy Visual FoxPro data into SQL Server 2008 for an application and ran into a situation that required some performance tweaking. I figured the Making Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Fly session that Yavor Angelov (SQL Server Program Manager – Query Processing) presented at PDC 2009 last November would be a good place to start. I was right. One tip among the list of incredibly useful tips Yavor presented was “local variables are bad news for the Query Optimizer and they cause the Query Optimizer to guess”. What that means is you should be avoiding code like this in your stored procs even though it seems such an intuitively good idea. DECLARE @StartDate datetime SET @StartDate = '20091125' SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE OrderDate = @StartDate Instead you should be referencing the value directly in the WHERE clause so the Query Optimizer can create a better execution plan. SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE OrderDate = '20091125' My first thought about this one was we reference variables in the form of passed in parameters in WHERE clauses in many of our stored procs. Not to worry though because parameters ARE available to the Query Optimizer as it compiles the execution plan. I highly recommend checking out Yavor’s session for additional tips to help you squeeze every last drop of performance out of your queries. Have a day. :-|

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  • release management system - architectural question

    - by Sonic Soul
    Every place i've worked created their own release process, and all of them worked pretty well, however it took pretty good effort (and often a dedicated team) to manage releases. I am currently at a new place, and about to design such a system, however this time the team is very lean and we won't have dedicated resources to releasing. It will be up to development manager until the system is proofed enough for other developers to use. we're using Subversion as code repository, Team City as the build server, Jira issue tracker, Oracle db. I was thinking about writing a basic workflow app, that will let developers create a new manifest which will specify the following items. release details (who, jira issues etc) workflow step (dev, test, uat, prod approved, prod released) source files that last item is where it can get hairy. especially with database scripts. Figured I'd ask if there is a good pattern, or off the shelf product that could help with the database part, or perhaps the whole process. I briefly tested Red Gate Oracle deployment tool, but it didn't work out as well as I had hoped (from 1 day of testing at least) Questions: I think I could get around releasing of our code with something like Octopus Deploy straight from Team City. I am not clear however, how I could create a simple database deployment part, that will track which version of which script (from subversion) has been deployed where. Is there already some utility I could utilize for navigating subversion to choose which scripts should be released, instead of writing one from scratch. I'd just need it to produce some manifest of paths + versions.

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  • Schedule for my session at MIX10

    - by Laurent Bugnion
    Microsoft has published the schedule for the MIX10 sessions. I have a sweet spot, and I dearly hope that it stays this way (Last year I had a great spot, but it was changed last minute and then I had a much better one, “competing” against Vertigo and their Playboy app… yeah try to explain to a bunch of geeks that MVVM is better than Playboy… good luck with that ;) Anyway, this year my sweet spot is on the very first day of the conference (there are workshops on Sunday, but this qualifies as pre-conference), Monday after the keynote which should get everyone pumped and excited. Schedule and location I would be really happy to meet y’all at Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern in Lagoon F on Monday at 2:00 PM http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX14 See you in Vegas (or in video…) Everything I saw so far hints that this should be a very, very exciting edition of MIX, maybe the most electrifying ever. The great news is that everything will be available even if you cannot make it: The keynotes are typically streamed live, and if you remember last year’s experience at PDC, it is a really good alternative. Built with Silverlight, the feed uses smooth streaming (adjusting the quality according to your bandwidth automatically), possibility to pause and rewind if you miss something, and a great picture quality. As for the sessions, the message at MIX is that the videos will be available online approximately 24 hours after the session is being held. This is a great feat! So, see you in Vegas (or in video)! Cheers, Laurent

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  • Ajax application: using SOAP vs REST ?

    - by coder
    I'm building an ajax heavy application (client-side strictly html/css/js) which will be getting all the data and using server business logic via webservices. I know REST seems to be the hot topic but I can't find any good arguments. The main argument seems to be its "light-weight". My impression so far is that wsdl/soap based services are more expressive and allow for more a more complex transfer of data. It appears that soap would be more useful in the application I'm building where the only code consuming the services will be the js downloaded in the client browser. REST on the other hand seems to have a smaller entry barrier and so can be more useful for services like twitter in allowing other developers to consume these services easily. Also, REST seems to Te better suited for simple data transfers. So in summary SOAP is useful for complex data transfer and REST is useful in simple data transfer. I'm currently under the impression that using SOAP would be best due to the complexity of the messages but perhaps there's other factors. What are your thoughts on the pros/cons of soap/rest for a heavy ajax web app? EDIT: While the wsdl is in xml, the data I'm transferring back and forth is actually in JSON. It just appears more natural to use wsdl/soap here due to the nature of the app. The verbs GET and POST may not be enough. I may want to say something like: processQueue, or executeTimer. This is why my conclusion has been wsdl/soap would be good for bridging a complex layer between two applications (client and server) whereas REST would be better (due to its simplicity) for allowing many developer-users to consume resources programmatically. So you could say the choice falls along two lines Will the app be verb-oriented (completing tasks: use soap) or noun-oriented (consuming resources: use REST) Will the api be consumed by few developers or many developers (REST is strong for many developers)? Since such an ajax heavy app would potentially use many verbs and would only be used by the client developer it appears soap/wsdl would be the best fit.

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  • How much system and business analysis should a programmer be reasonably expected to do?

    - by Rahul
    In most places I have worked for, there were no formal System or Business Analysts and the programmers were expected to perform both the roles. One had to understand all the subsystems and their interdependencies inside out. Further, one was also supposed to have a thorough knowledge of the business logic of the applications and interact directly with the users to gather requirements, answer their queries etc. In my current job, for ex, I spend about 70% time doing system analysis and only 30% time programming. I consider myself a good programmer but struggle with developing a good understanding of the business rules of a complex application. Often, this creates a handicap because while I can write efficient algorithms and thread-safe code, I lose out to guys who may be average programmers but have a much better understanding of the business processes. So I want to know - How much business and systems knowledge should a programmer have ? - How does one go about getting this knowledge in an immensely complex software system (e.g. trading applications) with several interdependent business processes but poorly documented business rules.

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  • How to Best Optimize up Model Transforms, Import 3DS Animations Into XNA 4.0?

    - by Jason R. Mick
    Relative beginner to XNA, but trying to build a multi-purpose (3D) game frameworking in XNA 4. Been using the Reed (O'Reilly) and Cawood/McGee (McGraw Hill) guides. My question is multi-faceted and involves how to most efficiently handle models. I'm using 3DS Max 2010 with kw-Xport to ship out my models as .X files. Solved an early problem by using my depth stencil state. My models are now loading properly (yay!) and I have basic bounding working, I just want to optimize transforming models and get animations working as a next step. My questions on models are: 1. Do you have any suggestions for good resources on exporting 3DS animations to XNA? I've seen some resources on how to handle animations in XNA, but most skimp on basic topics of how to convert multi-animation 3DS files. For example how do I take one big long string of keyframed animations (say running, frame 5-20, climbing frames 25-45, etc.) and turned them into named XNA animations. To my understanding every XNA animation has to have a name, but I haven't seen any tutorials on creating a new named animation from a subset of frames. 2. Is it faster to load a model once and animate/transform that base model on the fly @ draw time, or to load multiple models? My game will have multiple enemies, and I've already seen some lagginess in XNA, so II want to make my code efficient... 3. I've heard people on app hub talking about making custom content processors for models-- what is the benefit of this? Does it speed up transforming or animating the models? If so, can you point me towards any good (model-centric) tutorials? (I've built a custom height map content processor to generate terrain, following Cawood's examples, I'm just a bit confused as to how a model content processor would be implemented.)

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  • Open source vs commercial game engines

    - by Vanangamudi
    How commercial game accomplsih stunnning graphics with smooth game play? I am a huge die hard fan and follower of GNU Stallman and his philosophies and other Libre people Cmon how wud I miss Linus. but I got to admit commercial games does excellent jobs. One such good example is Assasin's Creed from Ubisoft. It has good quality graphcis and plays smoothly in my Dual core CPU with Nvidia Geforce 8400ES. Rockstar GTA4 has awesome graphcis but it's slower than AC considering the graphics quality tradeoff. Age of Empires from Ensemble studios, does include Massive crowd AI simulation, yet it plays so smoothly with eyecandy graphics and very large weapon sets and different techtree elements on the other hand. Open source games like Glest, 0A.D(still in alpha :) are not so smooth even though they have very restricted abilities? Coming to question: how do game companies achieve such optmizations, or the open source community is not doing optimizations, or there are any propriarity technological elements that benefits only the companies exists huh?? e.g the OpenSubDiv from Pixar just released open to community?? something like that. and why it is hard to implement optimizations? are there any legal restrictions???

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  • Am I wrong to disagree with A Gentle Introduction to symfony's template best practices?

    - by AndrewKS
    I am currently learning symfony and going through the book A Gentle Introduction to symfony and came across this section in "Chapter 4: The Basics of Page Creation" on creating templates (or views): "If you need to execute some PHP code in the template, you should avoid using the usual PHP syntax, as shown in Listing 4-4. Instead, write your templates using the PHP alternative syntax, as shown in Listing 4-5, to keep the code understandable for non-PHP programmers." Listing 4-4 - The Usual PHP Syntax, Good for Actions, But Bad for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test) { echo "<p>".time()."</p>"; } ?> (The ironic thing about this is that echo statement would look even better if time was variable declared in the controller, because then you could just embed the variable in the string instead of concatenating) Listing 4-5 - The Alternative PHP Syntax, Good for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test): ?> <p><?php echo time(); ?> </p><?php endif; ?> I fail to see how listing 4-5 makes the code "understandable for non-PHP programmers", and its readability is shaky at best. 4-4 looks much more readable to me. Are there any programmers who are using symfony that write their templates like those in 4-4 rather than 4-5? Are there reasons I should use one over the other? There is the very slim chance that somewhere down the road someone less technical could be editing it the template, but how does 4-5 actually make it more understandable to them?

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  • Cluster Nodes as RAID Drives

    - by BuckWoody
    I'm unable to sleep tonight so I thought I would push this post out VERY early. When you don't sleep your mind takes interesting turns, which can be a good thing. I was watching a briefing today by a couple of friends as they were talking about various ways to arrange a Windows Server Cluster for SQL Server. I often see an "active" node of a cluster with a "passive" node backing it up. That means one node is working and accepting transactions, and the other is not doing any work but simply "standing by" waiting for the first to fail over. The configuration in the demonstration I saw was a bit different. In this example, there were three nodes that were actively working, and a fourth standing by for all three. I've put configurations like this one into place before, but as I was looking at their architecture diagram, it looked familar - it looked like a RAID drive setup! And that's not a bad way to think about your cluster arrangements. The same concerns you might think about for a particular RAID configuration provides a good way to think about protecting your systems in general. So even if you're not staying awake all night thinking about SQL Server clusters, take this post as an opportunity for "lateral thinking" - a way of combining in your mind the concepts from one piece of knowledge to another. You might find a new way of making your technical environment a little better. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • What steps should I follow to start developing website applications?

    - by Oscar Mederos
    Hello, I've been developing desktop applications for about 4 years, using .NET, C++, C, and a little of Python. I've covered lots of topics while developing my applications, and even web technologies (cookies, GET/POST methods, when programming some scrapers/crawlers). I've been always waiting to start developing websites, preferably using PHP + MySQL, although other advises will be welcomed to make this question more useful and generic for others. I know I could use a CMS instead of starting from scratch, but sometimes I don't need an entire CMS to do minor things... What steps should I follow to create a website? Let's suppose I have a web designer. First of all, the designer designs the entire website (CSS, etc) and then I do the programming stuffs, like loading dynamically things from databases, doing some client-side stuffs with javascript, etc? Or how is the best way to do it? Edit: I'm not looking for tools/frameworks/languages suggestions. What I want to know is how a team (or a developer with a designer) starts creating a website. The steps they do, what tasks they do first, how they integrate the work, etc. An example of an answer could be: 1) Design the entire website with good CSS practices, using containers instead of tables in some cases, etc. 2) Use that design and develop the logic or the functionalities of the website. Of course, that's just an example. I'm looking for a good way to approach it, because I've been wanting to start on it but don't really know how exactly to organize the job :/

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