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• My ASP.NET news sources

  - by Jon Galloway

  I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news. Top Link Blogs Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon. Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets. While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists. Twitter Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft: @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info) @shanselman @haacked @bradwilson @davidfowl @InfinitiesLoop @davidebbo @marcind @DamianEdwards @stevensanderson @bleroy @humancompiler @osbornm @anurse I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list. Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users. Twitter Search with Topsy You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc You can also do combined queries for several tags: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix Paper.li Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service. My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc Delicious I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good: Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence. Community Sites I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies,  CodeProject,  and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed. Terms of Enrampagement When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often. What works for you?

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• Pie Charts Just Don't Work When Comparing Data - Number 10 of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie

  - by Tony Wolfram

  When comparing data, which is what a pie chart is for, people have a hard time judging the angles and areas of the multiple pie slices in order to calculate how much bigger one slice is than the others. Pie Charts Don't Work A slice of pie is good for serving up a portion of desert. It's not good for making a judgement about how big the slice is, what percentage of 100 it is, or how it compares to other slices. People have trouble comparing angles and areas to each other. Controlled studies show that people will overestimate the percentage that a pie slice area represents. This is because we have trouble calculating the area based on the space between the two angles that define the slice. This picture shows how a pie chart is useless in determing the largest value when you have to compare pie slices.   You can't compare angles and slice areas to each other. Human perception and cognition is poor when viewing angles and areas and trying to make a mental comparison. Pie charts overload the working memory, forcing the person to make complicated calculations, and at the same time make a decision based on those comparisons. What's the point of showing a pie chart when you want to compare data, except to say, "well, the slices are almost the same, but I'm not really sure which one is bigger, or by how much, or what order they are from largest to smallest. But the colors sure are pretty. Plus, I like round things. Oh,was I suppose to make some important business decision? Sorry." Bad Choices and Bad Decisions Interaction Designers, Graphic Artists, Report Builders, Software Developers, and Executives have all made the decision to use pie charts in their reports, software applications, and dashboards. It was a bad decision. It was a poor choice. There are always better options and choices, yet the designer still made the decision to use a pie chart. I'll expore why people make such poor choices in my upcoming blog entires. (Hint: It has more to do with emotions than with analytical thinking.) I've outlined my opinions and arguments about the evils of using pie charts in "Countdown of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie Chart." Each of my next 10 blog entries will support these arguments with illustrations, examples, and references to studies. But my goal is not to continuously and endlessly rage against the evils of using pie charts. This blog is not about pie charts. This blog is about understanding why designers choose to use a pie chart. Why, when give better alternatives, and acknowledging the shortcomings of pie charts, do designers over and over again still freely choose to place a pie chart in a report? As an extra treat and parting shot, check out the nice pie chart that Wikipedia uses to illustrate the United States population by state.   Remember, somebody chose to use this pie chart, with all its glorious colors, and post it on Wikipedia for all the world to see. My next blog will give you a better alternative for displaying comparable data - the sorted bar chart.

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• Code is not the best way to draw

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It should be quite obvious: drawing requires constant visual feedback. Why is it then that we still draw with code in so many situations? Of course it’s because the low-level APIs always come first, and design tools are built after and on top of those. Existing design tools also don’t typically include complex UI elements such as buttons. When we launched our Touch Display module for Netduino Go!, we naturally built APIs that made it easy to draw on the screen from code, but very soon, we felt the limitations and tedium of drawing in code. In particular, any modification requires a modification of the code, followed by compilation and deployment. When trying to set-up buttons at pixel precision, the process is not optimal. On the other hand, code is irreplaceable as a way to automate repetitive tasks. While tools like Illustrator have ways to repeat graphical elements, they do so in a way that is a little alien and counter-intuitive to my developer mind. From these reflections, I knew that I wanted a design tool that would be structurally code-centric but that would still enable immediate feedback and mouse adjustments. While thinking about the best way to achieve this goal, I saw this fantastic video by Bret Victor: The key to the magic in all these demos is permanent execution of the code being edited. Whenever a parameter is being modified, everything is re-executed immediately so that the impact of the modification is instantaneously visible. If you do this all the time, the code and the result of its execution fuse in the mind of the user into dual representations of a single object. All mental barriers disappear. It’s like magic. The tool I built, Nutshell, is just another implementation of this principle. It manipulates a list of graphical operations on the screen. Each operation has a nice editor, and translates into a bit of code. Any modification to the parameters of the operation will modify the bit of generated code and trigger a re-execution of the whole program. This happens so fast that it feels like the drawing reacts instantaneously to all changes. The order of the operations is also the order in which the code gets executed. So if you want to bring objects to the front, move them down in the list, and up if you want to move them to the back: But where it gets really fun is when you start applying code constructs such as loops to the design tool. The elements that you put inside of a loop can use the loop counter in expressions, enabling crazy scenarios while retaining the real-time edition features. When you’re done building, you can just deploy the code to the device and see it run in its native environment: This works thanks to two code generators. The first code generator is building JavaScript that is executed in the browser to build the canvas view in the web page hosting the tool. The second code generator is building the C# code that will run on the Netduino Go! microcontroller and that will drive the display module. The possibilities are fascinating, even if you don’t care about driving small touch screens from microcontrollers: it is now possible, within a reasonable budget, to build specialized design tools for very vertical applications. Direct feedback is a powerful ally in many domains. Code generation driven by visual designers has become more approachable than ever thanks to extraordinary JavaScript libraries and to the powerful development platform that modern browsers provide. I encourage you to tinker with Nutshell and let it open your eyes to new possibilities that you may not have considered before. It’s open source. And of course, my company, Nwazet, can help you develop your own custom browser-based direct feedback design tools. This is real visual programming…

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• Ongoing confusion about ivars and properties in objective C

  - by Earl Grey

  After almost 8 months being in ios programming, I am again confused about the right approach. Maybe it is not the language but some OOP principle I am confused about. I don't know.. I was trying C# a few years back. There were fields (private variables, private data in an object), there were getters and setters (methods which exposed something to the world) ,and properties which was THE exposed thing. I liked the elegance of the solution, for example there could be a class that would have a property called DailyRevenue...a float...but there was no private variable called dailyRevenue, there was only a field - an array of single transaction revenues...and the getter for DailyRevenue property calculated the revenue transparently. If somehow the internals of daily revenue calculation would change, it would not affect somebody who consumed my DailyRevenue property in any way, since he would be shielded from getter implementation. I understood that sometimes there was , and sometimes there wasn't a 1-1 relationship between fields and properties. depending on the requirements. It seemed ok in my opinion. And that properties are THE way to acces the data in object. I know the difference betweeen private, protected, and public keyword. Now lets get to objectiveC. On what factor should I base my decision about making someting only an ivar or making it as a property? Is the mental model the same as I describe above? I know that ivars are "protected" by default, not "private" asi in c#..But thats ok I think, no big deal for my presnet level of understanding the whole ios development. The point is ivars are not accesible from outside (given i don't make them public..but i won't). The thing that clouds my clear understanding is that I can have IBOutlets from ivars. Why am I seeing internal object data in the UI? *Why is it ok?* On the other hand, if I make an IBOutlet from property, and I do not make it readonly, anybody can change it. Is this ok too? Let's say I have a ParseManager object. This object would use a built in Foundation framework class called NSXMLParser. Obviously my ParseManager will utilize this nsxmlparser's capabilities but will also do some additional work. Now my question is, who should initialize this NSXMLParser object and in which way should I make a reference to it from the ParseManager object, when there is a need to parse something. A) the ParseManager -1) in its default init method (possible here ivar - or - ivar+ppty) -2) with lazyloading in getter (required a ppty here) B) Some other object - who will pass a reference to NSXMLParser object to the ParseManager object. -1) in some custom initializer (initWithParser:(NSXMLPArser *) parser) when creating the ParseManager object.. A1 - the problem is, we create a parser and waste memory while it is not yet needed. However, we can be sure that all methods that are part ot ParserManager object, can use the ivar safely, since it exists. A2 - the problem is, the nsxmlparser is exposed to outside world, although it could be read only. Would we want a parser to be exposed in some scenario? B1 - this could maybe be useful when we would want to use more types of parsers..i dont know... I understand that architectural requirements and and language is not the same. But clearly the two are in relation. How to get out of that mess of my? Please bear with me, I wasn't able to come up with a single ultimate question. And secondly, it's better to not scare me with some superadvanced newspeak that talks about some crazy internals (what the compiler does) and edge cases.

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• Handling "related" work within a single agile work item

  - by Tesserex

  I'm on a project team of 4 devs, myself included. We've been having a long discussion on how to handle extra work that comes up in the course of a single work item. This extra work is usually things that are slightly related to the task, but not always necessary to accomplish the goal of the item (that may be an opinion). Examples include but are not limited to: refactoring of the code changed by the work item refactoring code neighboring the code changed by the item re-architecting the larger code area around the ticket. For example if an item has you changing a single function, you realize the entire class now could be redone to better accommodate this change. improving the UI on a form you just modified When this extra work is small we don't mind. The problem is when this extra work causes a substantial extension of the item beyond the original feature point estimation. Sometimes a 5 point item will actually take 13 points of time. In one case we had a 13 point item that in retrospect could have been 80 points or more. There are two options going around in our discussion for how to handle this. We can accept the extra work in the same work item, and write it off as a mis-estimation. Arguments for this have included: We plan for "padding" at the end of the sprint to account for this sort of thing. Always leave the code in better shape than you found it. Don't check in half-assed work. If we leave refactoring for later, it's hard to schedule and may never get done. You are in the best mental "context" to handle this work now, since you're waist deep in the code already. Better to get it out of the way now and be more efficient than to lose that context when you come back later. We draw a line for the current work item, and say that the extra work goes into a separate ticket. Arguments include: Having a separate ticket allows for a new estimation, so we aren't lying to ourselves about how many points things really are, or having to admit that all of our estimations are terrible. The sprint "padding" is meant for unexpected technical challenges that are direct barriers to completing the ticket requirements. It is not intended for side items that are just "nice-to-haves". If you want to schedule refactoring, just put it at the top of the backlog. There is no way for us to properly account for this stuff in an estimation, since it seems somewhat arbitrary when it comes up. A code reviewer might say "those UI controls (which you actually didn't modify in this work item) are a bit confusing, can you fix that too?" which is like an hour, but they might say "Well if this control now inherits from the same base class as the others, why don't you move all of this (hundreds of lines of) code into the base and rewire all this stuff, the cascading changes, etc.?" And that takes a week. It "contaminates the crime scene" by adding unrelated work into the ticket, making our original feature point estimates meaningless. In some cases, the extra work postpones a check-in, causing blocking between devs. Some of us are now saying that we should decide some cut off, like if the additional stuff is less than 2 FP, it goes in the same ticket, if it's more, make it a new ticket. Since we're only a few months into using Agile, what's the opinion of all the more seasoned Agile veterans around here on how to handle this?

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Jeff Foster

  My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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• Dealing with "Coder's Block" (or blank form syndrome)

  - by robsoft

  I know this is the sort of somewhat open-ended question that we're discouraged from asking, but there are lots of open-ended questions around already, and this is something quite relevant to me right now. Do you ever get those times when you're about to start work on a new function/feature of an established system, and you get "coder's block"?. It's like a mental freeze at the sight of a large, completely unpopulated dialog, or an empty code file with just the stub reference headers etc. Do you ever have that 'ulp' moment that seems to sap all your momentum and leave you wide open to distractions (surfing the web for inspiration, checking out 'crackoverflow' etc)? Not that I'd wish it on anyone, but hopefully some of you do, and hopefully some of you can suggest tips or strategies for overcoming the situation, regaining your momentum and becoming productive again. I usually try to reduce what I'm about to do down to absurdly small steps, in the hope that as the job becomes just a series of 'doh' tasks, I'll kickstart myself into working through them. However sometimes, particularly when a deadline is looming, I'll get overwhelmed by this approach as I realise I probably don't have enough time to do all of those tiny steps properly. Those are the darkest moments, (often literally) just before dawn! This situation can be particularly crippling if you mostly work alone, too. Any thoughts or suggestions? Any methods that you found helpful yourself?

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• How do you keep all your languages straight?

  - by Chris Blackwell

  I think I'm going a little crazy. Right now, I'm working with the following languages (I was just doing a mental inventory): C++ - our game engine Assembler - low level debugging and a few co-processor specific routines Lua - our game engine scripting language HLSL - for shaders Python - our build system and utility tools Objective C/C++ - game engine platform code for Mac and iPhone C# - A few tools developed in our overseas office ExtendScript - Photoshop exporting tools ActionScript - UI scripting VBScript - some spreadsheet related stuff PHP - some web related stuff SQL - some web and tool related stuff On top of this are the plethora of API's that often have many different ways of doing the same thing: std library, boost, .NET, wxWidgets, Cocoa, Carbon, native script libraries for Python, Lua, etc, OpenGL, Direct3d, GDI, Aqua, augh! I find myself inadvertently conflating languages and api's, not realizing what I'm doing until I get syntax errors. I feel like I can't possibly keep up with it, and I can't possibly be proficient in all of these areas. Especially outside the realm of C++ and Python, I find myself programming more by looking at manuals that from memory. Do you have a similar problem? Ideas for compartmentalizing so you're more efficient? Deciding where you want to stay proficient? Organizational tips? Good ways to remember when you switch from Lua to C++ you need to start using semi-colons again? Rants on how complicated we programmers have made things for ourselves? Any ideas welcome!

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• Bubble Breaker Game Solver better than greedy?

  - by Gregory

  For a mental exercise I decided to try and solve the bubble breaker game found on many cell phones as well as an example here:Bubble Break Game The random (N,M,C) board consists N rows x M columns with C colors The goal is to get the highest score by picking the sequence of bubble groups that ultimately leads to the highest score A bubble group is 2 or more bubbles of the same color that are adjacent to each other in either x or y direction. Diagonals do not count When a group is picked, the bubbles disappear, any holes are filled with bubbles from above first, ie shift down, then any holes are filled by shifting right A bubble group score = n * (n - 1) where n is the number of bubbles in the bubble group The first algorithm is a simple exhaustive recursive algorithm which explores going through the board row by row and column by column picking bubble groups. Once the bubble group is picked, we create a new board and try to solve that board, recursively descending down Some of the ideas I am using include normalized memoization. Once a board is solved we store the board and the best score in a memoization table. I create a prototype in python which shows a (2,15,5) board takes 8859 boards to solve in about 3 seconds. A (3,15,5) board takes 12,384,726 boards in 50 minutes on a server. The solver rate is ~3k-4k boards/sec and gradually decreases as the memoization search takes longer. Memoization table grows to 5,692,482 boards, and hits 6,713,566 times. What other approaches could yield high scores besides the exhaustive search? I don't seen any obvious way to divide and conquer. But trending towards larger and larger bubbles groups seems to be one approach Thanks to David Locke for posting the paper link which talks above a window solver which uses a constant-depth lookahead heuristic.

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• Hiring a programmer: looking for the "right attitude"

  - by Totophil

  It's actually two questions in one: What is the right attitude for a programmer? How do you (or would you) look for one when interviewing or during hiring process? Please note this question is not about personality or traits of a candidate, it is about their attitude towards what they do for living. This is also not about reverse of programmers pet peeves. The question has been made community wiki, since I am interested in a good answer rather than reputation. I disagree that the question is purely subjective and just a matter of opinion: clearly some attitudes make a better programmer than others. Consecutively, there might quite possibly exist an attitude that is common to the most of the better programmers. Update: After some deliberation I came up with the following attitude measurement scales: identifies themselves with the job ? fully detached perceives code as a collection of concepts ? sees code as a sequence of steps thinks of creating software as an art ? takes 100% rational approach to design and development Answers that include some sort of a comment on the appropriateness of these scales are greatly appreciated. Definition of "attitude": a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways; "he had the attitude that work was fun" The question came as a result of some reflection on the top voted answer to "How do you ensure code quality?" here on Stack Overflow.

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• Handling conflicting priorities and expectations in project development

  - by jasonk

  There are any number of situations in the standard day where priority conflicts exist for projects. Management wants maximum productivity from employees. Marketing wants maximum salability and fast turnaround. Ownership wants maximum profit. Customers want usability and low cost. Regardless of the origin of the demands, time and money are always the limiting factor in business. Sometimes project elements have intrinsic or goodwill benefits for which there is not a hard, fast way to measure with monetary means (e.g. arguments for an attractive UI appeal vs. functional but plain). Other elements of software may have a method of providing “mental breaks” or motivating “cool factor” for developers that can get them back on track on other bigger, complex issues. While they may sidetrack the project short term they may have greater results long term through improved job satisfaction, etc. Continued training is a must, but working it in can setup back progress. What are your suggestions for setting priorities? How do you evaluate requests/demands on your projects? What are your suggestions for communicating and passing those on to your team in a way that they stay focused?

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• Adding database results to array

  - by Jason

  Hi all, I am having a mental blank here and cannot for the life of me figure out a solution. My scenario is that I am programming in PHP and MySQL. I have a database table returning the results for a specific orderid. The query can return a maximum of 4 rows per order and a minimum of 1 row. Here is an image of how I want to return the results. I have all the orderdetails (Name, address) ect stored in a table named "orders". I have all the packages for that order stored in a table named "packages". What I need to do is using a loop I need to have access to each specific element of the database results (IE package1, itemstype1, package2, itemtype2) ect I am using a query like this to try and get hold of just the "number of items: $sql = "SELECT * FROM bookings_onetime_packages WHERE orderid = '".$orderid."' ORDER BY packageid DESC"; $total = $db-database_num_rows($db-database_query($sql)); $query = $db-database_query($sql); $noitems = ''; while($info = $db-database_fetch_assoc($query)){ $numberitems = $info['numberofitems']; for($i=0; $i $noitems .= $numberitems[$i]; } } print $noitems; I need to have access to each specific element because I them need to create fill out a pdf template using "fpdf". I hope this makes sense. Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

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• Do I need Response.End() in ASP.Net 2.0

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Hi, I am just starting with ASP.Net. I copied a ex-co-worker's code (from .Net 1.1 era) and it has a Response.End(); in case of an error. There is also a: catch (Exception ex) { Response.Write(ex.Message); Response.End(); } at the end of Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) which always appends "Thread was aborted." or something like that at the end. I suspect that this worked differently before, or the error conditions were not tested very well. Anyhow, I was able to stop using Response.End(); in case when I do not like the GET parameters, and use return; instead. It seemed to do the right think in a simple case. Is this Ok in general? There are some problems with the code I copied, but I do not want to do a rewrite; I just want to get it running first and find wrinkles later. The Response.End(); caused a mental block for me, however, so I want to figure it out. I want to keep the catch all clause just in case, at least for now. I could also end the method with: catch (System.Threading.ThreadAbortException) { Response.End(); } catch (Exception ex) { Response.Write(ex.Message); Response.End(); } but that just seems extremely stupid, once you think about all of the exceptions being generated. Please give me a few words of wisdom. Feel free to ask if something is not clear. Thanks! P.S. Ex-coworker was not fired and is a good coder - one more reason to reuse his example.

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• ASP.NET MVC Authorize by Group

  - by Jimmo

  I have what seems like a common issue with SaaS applications, but have not seen this question on here anywhere. I am using ASP.NET MVC with Forms Authentication. I have implemented a custom membership provider to handle logic, but have one issue (perhaps the issue is in my mental picture of the system). As with many SaaS apps, Customers create accounts and use the app in a way that looks like they are the only ones present (they only see their items, users, etc.) In reality, there are generic controllers and views presenting data depending on their account. When calling something like ValidateUser, I have access to their affiliation in the User object - what I don't have is the context of the request to which to compare it. As an example, One company called ABC goes to abc.mysite.com Another company called XYZ goes to xyz.mysite.com When an ABC user calls http://abc.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I have an [Authorize] attribute on the Edit method in the ProductController to make sure he is signed in and has sufficient permission to do so. If that same ABC user tried to access http://xyz.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I would not want to validate him in the context of that call. In the ValidateUser of the MembershipProvider, I have the information about the user, but not about the request. I can tell that the user is from ABC, but I cannot tell that the request is for XYZ at that point in the code. How should I resolve this?

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• ASP.NET MVC Authorize by Subdomain

  - by Jimmo

  I have what seems like a common issue with SaaS applications, but have not seen this question on here anywhere. I am using ASP.NET MVC with Forms Authentication. I have implemented a custom membership provider to handle logic, but have one issue (perhaps the issue is in my mental picture of the system). As with many SaaS apps, customers create accounts and use the app in a way that looks like they are the only ones present (they only see their items, users, etc.). In reality, there are generic controllers and views presenting data depending on the customer represented in the URL. When calling something like the MembershipProvider.ValidateUser, I have access to the user's customer affiliation in the User object - what I don't have is the context of the request to compare whether it is a data request for the same customer as the user. As an example, One company called ABC goes to abc.mysite.com Another company called XYZ goes to xyz.mysite.com When an ABC user calls http://abc.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I have an [Authorize] attribute on the Edit method in the ProductController to make sure he is signed in and has sufficient permission to do so. If that same ABC user tried to access http://xyz.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I would not want to validate him in the context of that call. In the ValidateUser of the MembershipProvider, I have the information about the user, but not about the request. I can tell that the user is from ABC, but I cannot tell that the request is for XYZ at that point in the code. How should I resolve this?

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• What's the best way to learn .NET?

  - by duffymo

  I've been developing Java EE for quite a while now. I've used WebLogic, Tomcat, Spring, and Hibernate extensively, so I have a mental model of what features are available and how things are developed and deployed. The problem that I have with .NET is that I don't have a clear mapping of its features onto Java EE. Here's what I know so far: Java EE - .NET Java - C# JAR - DLL WAR - ? (deployment in general) EAR - ? (deployment in general) Tomcat - IIS web server JSP - ASP? JDBC - ODBC JMS - MSMQ JTA - Microsoft Transaction Manager So much of the functionality that WebLogic handles appears to be dispersed throughout the Windows OS. My confusion kicks in when I see the waves of books at Borders - VB.NET, ASP.NET, C#, etc. If I'm not a VB programmer, would it be possible to stick with C# and write enterprise apps that are the equivalent of what I'm used to with Java EE? If there were a Top Three list of books to learn from, what would they be? The "Head First" series has certainly been successful for Java. http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-C-Brain-Friendly-Guides/dp/0596514824/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224121193&sr=8-1 Equally well recommended for .NET learning? Thanks. - %

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• Keeping updated with the latest technologies.

  - by Prashanth

  I am a software developer and I have been programming since the past six years. I simply love the mental challenge involved in trying to come up with solutions to hard problems, reading up programming literature, blogs by prominent developers and so on. I work on Microsoft platform and I have trouble keeping up with the pace at which various frameworks are rolled out. Remoting,WCF,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC, LINQ, WPF, WWF, OSLO, ADO.NET data services, DSL tools etc etc. Even understanding all these frameworks at an abstract level and see how they are all tied up with MS vision itself is a major hurdle. Now when you add other non microsoft technologies, programming languages etc to the equation, I wonder how do people manage? Given that there are only 24 hours in a day, how does one keep himself updated about so many technology changes that happen everyday? My question is , is it even worth doing that? The thing is, I am also interested in other fields such as literature, science. I try my best to at least gain a superficial understanding of what is happening in other fields of my interest and don't want to give up on that :)

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• What is the best way to store site configuration data?

  - by DaveDev

  I have a question about storing site configuration data. We have a platform for web applications. The idea is that different clients can have their data hosted and displayed on their own site which sits on top of this platform. Each site has a configuration which determines which panels relevant to the client appear on which pages. The system was originally designed to keep all the configuration data for each site in a database. When the site is loaded all the configuration data is loaded into a SiteConfiguration object, and the clients panels are generated based on the content of this object. This works, but I find it very difficult to work with to apply change requests or add new sites because there is so much data to sift through and it's difficult maintain a mental model of the site and its configuration. Recently I've been tasked with developing a subset of some of the sites to be generated as PDF documents for printing. I decided to take a different approach to how I would define the configuration in that instead of storing configuration data in the database, I wrote XML files to contain the data. I find it much easier to work with because instead of reading meaningless rows of data which are related to other meaningless rows of data, I have meaningful documents with semantic, readable information with the relationships defined by visually understandable element nesting. So now with these 2 approaches to storing site configuration data, I'd like to get the opinions of people more experienced in dealing with this issue on dealing with these two approaches. What is the best way of storing site configuration data? Is there a better way than the two ways I outlined here? note: StackOverflow is telling me the question appears to be subjective and is likely to be closed. I'm not trying to be subjective. I'd like to know how best to approach this issue next time and if people with industry experience on this could provide some input.

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• How to get the second sub element of every element in a list in R

  - by PaulHurleyuk

  I know I've come across this problem before, but I'm having a bit of a mental block at the moment. and as I can't find it on SO, I'll post it here so I can find it next time. I have a dataframe that contains a field representing an ID label. This label has two parts, an alpha prefix and a numeric suffix. I want to split it apart and create two new fields with these values in. structure(list(lab = c("N00", "N01", "N02", "B00", "B01", "B02", "Z21", "BA01", "NA03")), .Names = "lab", row.names = c(NA, -9L ), class = "data.frame") df$pre<-strsplit(df$lab, "[0-9]+") df$suf<-strsplit(df$lab, "[A-Z]+") Which gives lab pre suf 1 N00 N , 00 2 N01 N , 01 3 N02 N , 02 4 B00 B , 00 5 B01 B , 01 6 B02 B , 02 7 Z21 Z , 21 8 BA01 BA , 01 9 NA03 NA , 03 So, the first strsplit works fine, but the second gives a list, each having two elements, an empty string and the result I want, and stuffs them both into the dataframe column. How can I select the second sub-element from each element of the list ? (or, is there a better way to do this) Thanks Paul.

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• where does a novice begin with error logging in asp.net c# ?

  - by korben

  i'm a novice teaching myself asp.net in c# via trial and error learn by doing, unfortunately this means lots of errors! i have a custom errors page now that is basically a 404 so that site visitors don't get that ugly application error message .NET throws, but i WOULD like to be able to see what's going wrong myself as people use the site. so i'm looking to build or learn from a fairly basic error logging c# class, that will send the same information given in a browser when hitting a .NET error, send this into a TXT file and email me the error at the same time would be great i don't know where to even begin, can someone give me some pointers? an open source class that does this already that i could plugin and play with would work as well. otherwise some links or guidance on where to start reading would be great too. i sort of have a mental block on understand msdn info-dump pages though, i'm hoping to find some articles on real people talking about implementing the same thing themselves or something like that please note i'm not looking to use some extensive or complicated third party service for this, i'm hoping to learn from the process of implementing a concise customized one

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• Why is BorderLayout calling setSize() and setBounds()?

  - by ags

  I'm trying to get my head around proper use of the different LayoutManagers to make my GUI design skills more efficient and effective. For me, that usually requires a detailed understanding of what is going on under the hood. I've found some good discussion of the interaction and consequences of a Container using BorderLayout containing a Container using FlowLayout. I understand it for the most part, but wanted to confirm my mental model and to do so I am looking at the code for BorderLayout. In the code snippet below taken from BorderLayout.layoutContainer(), note the calls to the child Component's setSize() method followed by setBounds(). Looking at the source for these methods of Component, setSize() actually calls setBounds() with the current values for Component.x and Component.y. Why is this done (and not entirely redudant?) Doesn't the setBounds() call completely overwrite the results of the setSize() call? if ((c=getChild(NORTH,ltr)) != null) { c.setSize(right - left, c.height); Dimension d = c.getPreferredSize(); c.setBounds(left, top, right - left, d.height); top += d.height + vgap; } I'm also tring to understand where/when the child Component's size is initially set (before the LayoutManager.layoutContainer() method is called). Finally, this post itself raises a "meta-question": in a situation like this, where the source is available elsewhere, is the accepteed protocol to include the entire method? Or some other way to make it easier for folks to participate in the thread? Thanks.

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• How do you keep application logic separate from UI when UI components have built-in functionality?

  - by Al C

  I know it's important to keep user interface code separated from domain code--the application is easier to understand, maintain, change, and (sometimes) isolate bugs. But here's my mental block ... Delphi comes with components with methods that do what I want, e.g., a RichText Memo component lets me work with rich text. Other components, like TMS's string grid not only do what I want, but I paid extra for the functionality. These features put the R in RAD. It seems illogical to write my own classes to do things somebody else has already done for me. It's reinventing the wheel [ever tried working directly with rich text? :-) ] But if I use the functionality built into components like these, then I will end up with lots of intermingled UI and domain code--I'll have a form with most of my code built into its event handlers. How do you deal with this issue? ... Or, if I want to continue using the code others have already written for me, how would you suggest I deal with the issue?

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