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  • Moms on Mobile: Are They Way Ahead of You?

    - by Mike Stiles
    You may have no idea how much and how fast moms are embracing mobile. Of all the demographics that can be targeted by marketers, moms have always been at or near the top of the list. And why not? They’re running households, they’re all over town, they’re making buying decisions, and they’re influencing family and friends. They, out of necessity, become masters of efficiency and time management. So when a technology tool, like mobile, comes along that assists with that efficiency and time management, we would obviously expect them to take advantage of it. So if it’s obvious, why are so many big, sophisticated brands left choking on the dust of moms who have zoomed past them in the adoption of mobile, and social on mobile? Let’s break down some hard truths as presented by a Mojiava report: -Moms spend 6.1 hours per day on average on their smartphones – more than magazines, TV or radio. -46% took action after seeing a mobile ad. -51% self-identify as “addicted” to their smartphone. -Households with an income of $25K-$50K have about the same mobile penetration among moms as those with incomes of $50K-$75K. So mobile is regarded as a necessity for middle-class moms. -Even moms without smartphones spend 2.5 hours on average per day on some connected mobile device. -Of moms with such devices, 9.8% have an iPad, 9.5% a Kindle and 5.7% an iPod Touch. -Of tablet-owning moms, 97% bought something using their tablet in the last month. -31% spend over 10 hours per week on their tablet, but less than 2 hours per week on their PCs. -62% of connected moms use shopping apps. -46% want to get info on their mobile while in a store. -Half of connected moms use social on their mobile. And they’re engaged. 81% are brand fans, 86% post updates, and 84% comment. If women and moms are one of your primary targets and you find yourself with no strong social channels where content is driving engagement and relationship-building, with sites not optimized for mobile, or with no tablet or smartphone apps, you have been solidly left behind by your customers and prospects. And their adoption of mobile and social on mobile is only exponentially speeding up, not slowing down. How much sense does it make when your customer is ready to act on your mobile ad, wants to user your iPad app to buy something from you, wants to be your fan on Facebook, wants to get messages and deals from you while they’re in your store…but you’re completely absent? I’ll help you cheat on the test by giving you the answer…no sense at all. Catch up to momma.

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  • Applying DDD principles in a RESTish web service

    - by Andy
    I am developing an RESTish web service. I think I got the idea of the difference between aggregation and composition. Aggregation does not enforce lifecycle/scope on the objects it references. Composition does enforce lifecycle/scope on the objects it contain/own. If I delete a composite object then all the objects it contain/own are deleted as well, while the deleting an aggregate root does not delete referenced objects. 1) If it is true that deleting aggregate roots does not necessary delete referenced objects, what sense does it make to not have a repository for the references objects? Or are aggregate roots as a term referring to what is known as composite object? 2) When you create an web service you will have multiple endpoints, in my case I have one entity Book and another named Comment. It does not make sense to leave the comments in my application if the book is deleted. Therefore, book is a composite object. I guess I should not have a repository for comments since that would break the enforcement of lifecycle and rules that the book class may have. However I have URL such as (examples only): GET /books/1/comments POST /books/1/comments Now, if I do not have a repository for comments, does that mean I have to load the book object and then return the referenced comments? Am I allowed to return a list of Comment entities from the BookRepository, does that make sense? The repository for Book may eventually become rather big with all sorts of methods. Am I allowed to write JPQL (JPA queries) that targets comments and not books inside the repository? What about pagination and filtering of comments. When adding a new comment triggered by the POST endpoint, do you need to load the book, add the comment to the book, and then update the whole book object? What I am currently doing is having a own CommentRepository, even though the comments are deleted with the book. I could need some direction on how to do it correct. Since you are exposing not only root objects in RESTish services I wonder how to handle this at the backend. I am using Hibernate and Spring.

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  • Where does a "Technical Programmer" fit in, and what does the title mean? [closed]

    - by Mike E
    Was: "What is a 'Technical Programmer'"? I've noticed in job posting boards a few postings, all from European companies in the games industry, for a "Technical Programmer". The job description was similar, having to do with tools development, 3d graphics programming, etc. It seems to be somewhere between a Technical Artist who's more technical than artist or who can code, and a Technical Director but perhaps without the seniority/experience. Information elsewhere on the position is sparse. The title seems redundant and I haven't seen any American companies post jobs by that name, exactly. One example is this job posting on gamedev.net which isn't exactly thorough. In case the link dies: Subject: Technical Programmer Frictional Games, the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the Penumbra series, are looking for a talented programmer to join the company! You will be working for a small team with a big focus on finding new and innovating solutions. We want you who are not afraid to explore uncharted territory and constantly learn new things. Self-discipline and independence are also important traits as all work will be done from home. Some the things you will work with include: 3D math, rendering, shaders and everything else related. Console development (most likely Xbox 360). Hardware implementations (support for motion controls, etc). All coding is in C++, so great skills in that is imperative. Revised Summarised Question: So, where does a programmer of this nature fit in to software development team? If I had these on my team, what tasks am I expecting them to complete? Can I ask one to build a new level editor, or optimize the rendering engine? It doesn't seem to be a "tools programmer" which focuses on producing artist tools, often in high-level languages like C#, Python, or Java. Nor does it seem to be working directly on the engine, nor a graphics programmer, as such. Yet, a strong C++ requirement, which was mirrored in other postings besides this one I quoted. Edited To Add As far as it being a low-level programmer, I had considered that but lacking from the posting was a requirement of Assembly. Instead, they tend to require familiarity with higher-level hardware APIs such as DirectX, or DirectInput. I wasn't fully clear in my original post. I think, however, that Mathew Foscarini has it right in his answer, so barring someone who definitely works with or as a "Technical Programmer" stepping in to provide a clearer explanation, I'll go with that. A generalist, which also fits the description of a more-technical-than-artist TA.

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  • All hail the Excel Queen

    - by Tim Dexter
    An excellent question this past week from dear ol Blighty; actually from Brian at Nextgen Clearing Ltd in the big smoke (London). Brian was developing an excel template and wanted to be able to reference the data fields multiple times inside the Excel template. Damn good question and I of course has some wacky solutions, from macros and cell referencing in Excel to pre-processing the data with an XSL stylesheet to copy the data multiple times so it could be referenced multiple times. All completely outlandish, enter our Queen of Excel, Shirley from the development team. Shirley is singlehandedly responsible for the Excel templates, I put her through six months of hell a few years back, with a host of Excel template requirements. She was more than up to the challenge and has developed some great features. One of those, is the ability to use the hidden XDO_METADATA sheet to map the data to custom named fields so they can be used multiple times in the template. So simple and very neat! Excel template and regular Excel users will know that you can only use the naming function once ie the names have to be unique across the workbook so you can not reuse a cell/group name. To get around this you can just come up with as many cell names as you want and map them in the XDO_METADATA sheet to the data columns/fields in your XML data set:. For example: XDO_?DEPTNO_SUMMARY?  <?DEPTNO?> XDO_?DNAME_SUMMARY?  <?DNAME?> XDO_GROUP_?G_D_DETAIL? <xsl:for-each-group select=".//G_D" group-by="./DEPTNO"> XDO_?DEPTNO_DETAIL? <?DEPTNO?> As you can see DEPTNO has been referenced twice and mapped to different named values in the left hand column. These values can then be used to name individual cells in the Excel template. You'll also notice a mix of Publisher <? ...?> and native XSL commands. So the world is your oyster on the mapping and the complexity you might need for calculations or string manipulation. Shirley has kindly built out a sample Excel template, data and result here so you can see how it all hangs together. the XDO_METADATA sheet is hidden, just right click on the sheet names and use the Unhide command to show it.

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  • June 2013 release of SSDT contains a minor bug that you should be aware of

    - by jamiet
    I have discovered what seems, to me, like a bug in the June 2013 release of SSDT and given the problems that it created yesterday on my current gig I thought it prudent to write this blog post to inform people of it. I’ve built a very simple SSDT project to reproduce the problem that has just two tables, [Table1] and [Table2], and also a procedure [Procedure1]: The two tables have exactly the same definition, both a have a single column called [Id] of type integer. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table1] (     [Id] INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY ) My stored procedure simply joins the two together, orders them by the column used in the join predicate, and returns the results: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[Procedure1] AS     SELECT t1.*     FROM    Table1 t1     INNER JOIN Table2 t2         ON    t1.Id = t2.Id     ORDER BY Id Now if I create those three objects manually and then execute the stored procedure, it works fine: So we know that the code works. Unfortunately, SSDT thinks that there is an error here: The text of that error is: Procedure: [dbo].[Procedure1] contains an unresolved reference to an object. Either the object does not exist or the reference is ambiguous because it could refer to any of the following objects: [dbo].[Table1].[Id] or [dbo].[Table2].[Id]. Its complaining that the [Id] field in the ORDER BY clause is ambiguous. Now you may well be thinking at this point “OK, just stick a table alias into the ORDER BY predicate and everything will be fine!” Well that’s true, but there’s a bigger problem here. One of the developers at my current client installed this drop of SSDT and all of a sudden all the builds started failing on his machine – he had errors left right and centre because, as it transpires, we have a fair bit of code that exhibits this scenario.  Worse, previous installations of SSDT do not flag this code as erroneous and therein lies the rub. We immediately had a mass panic where we had to run around the department to our developers (of which there are many) ensuring that none of them should upgrade their SSDT installation if they wanted to carry on being productive for the rest of the day. Also bear in mind that as soon as a new drop of SSDT comes out then the previous version is instantly unavailable so rolling back is going to be impossible unless you have created an administrative install of SSDT for that previous version. Just thought you should know! In the grand schema of things this isn’t a big deal as the bug can be worked around with a simple code modification but forewarned is forearmed so they say! Last thing to say, if you want to know which version of SSDT you are running check my blog post Which version of SSDT Database Projects do I have installed? @Jamiet

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  • A solution for a PHP website without a framework

    - by lortabac
    One of our customers asked us to add some dynamic functionality to an existent website, made of several static HTML pages. We normally work with an MVC framework (mostly CodeIgniter), but in this case moving everything to a framework would require too much time. Since it is not a big project, not having the full functionality of a framework is not a problem. But the question is how to keep code clean. The solution I came up with is to divide code in libraries (the application's API) and models. So inside HTML there will only be API calls, and readability will not be sacrificed. I implemented this with a sort of static Registry (sorry if I'm wrong, I am not a design pattern expert): <?php class Custom_framework { //Global database instance private static $db; //Registered models private static $models = array(); //Registered libraries private static $libraries = array(); //Returns a database class instance static public function get_db(){ if(isset(self::$db)){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$db; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it self::$db = new DB; return self::$db; } } //Returns a model instance static public function get_model($model_name){ if(isset(self::$models[$model_name])){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$models[$model_name]; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it if(is_file(ROOT_DIR . 'application/models/' . $model_name . '.php')){ include_once ROOT_DIR . 'application/models/' . $model_name . '.php'; self::$models[$model_name] = new $model_name; return self::$models[$model_name]; } else { return FALSE; } } } //Returns a library instance static public function get_library($library_name){ if(isset(self::$libraries[$library_name])){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$libraries[$library_name]; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it if(is_file(ROOT_DIR . 'application/libraries/' . $library_name . '.php')){ include_once ROOT_DIR . 'application/libraries/' . $library_name . '.php'; self::$libraries[$library_name] = new $library_name; return self::$libraries[$library_name]; } else { return FALSE; } } } } Inside HTML, API methods are accessed like this: <?php echo Custom_framework::get_library('My_library')->my_method(); ?> It looks to me as a practical solution. But I wonder what its drawbacks are, and what the possible alternatives.

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  • How do you conquer the challenge of designing for large screen real-estate?

    - by Berin Loritsch
    This question is a bit more subjective, but I'm hoping to get some new perspective. I'm so used to designing for a certain screen size (typically 1024x768) that I find that size to not be a problem. Expanding the size to 1280x1024 doesn't buy you enough screen real estate to make an appreciable difference, but will give me a little more breathing room. Basically, I just expand my "grid size" and the same basic design for the slightly smaller screen still works. However, in the last couple of projects my clients were all using 1080p (1920x1080) screens and they wanted solutions to use as much of that real estate as possible. 1920 pixels across provides just under twice the width I am used to, and the wide screen makes some of my old go to design approaches not to work as well. The problem I'm running into is that when presented with so much space, I'm confronted with some major problems. How many columns should I use? The wide format lends itself to a 3 column split with a 2:1:1 split (i.e. the content column bigger than the other two). However, if I go with three columns what do I do with that extra column? How do I make efficient use of the screen real estate? There's a temptation to put everything on the screen at once, but too much information actually makes the application harder to use. White space is important to help make sense of complex information, but too much makes related concepts look too separate. I'm usually working with web applications that have complex data, and visualization and presentation is key to making sense of the raw data. When your user also has a large screen (at least 24"), some information is out of eye sight and you need to move the pointer a long distance. How do you make sure everything that's needed stays within the visual hot points? Simple sites like blogs actually do better when the width is constrained, which results in a lot of wasted real estate. I kind of wonder if having the text box and the text preview side by side would be a big benefit for the admin side of that type of screen? (1:1 two column split). For your answers, I know almost everything in design is "it depends". What I'm looking for is: General principles you use How your approach to design has changed I'm finding that i have to retrain myself how to work with this different format. Every bump in resolution I've worked through to date has been about 25%: 640 to 800 (25% increase), 800 to 1024 (28% increase), and 1024 to 1280 (25% increase). However, the jump from 1280 to 1920 is a good 50% increase in space--the equivalent from jumping from 640 straight to 1024. There was no commonly used middle size to help learn lessons more gradually.

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  • JavaOne 2013: (Key) Notes of a conference – State of the Java platform and all the roadmaps by Amis

    - by JuergenKress
    Last week’s JavaOne conference provided insights in the roadmap of the Java platform as well as in the current state of things in the Java community. The close relationship between Oracle and IBM concerning Java, the (continuing) lack of such a relationship with Google, the support from Microsoft for Java applications on its Azure cloud and the vibrant developer community – with over 200 different Java User Groups in many countries of the world. There were no major surprises or stunning announcements. Java EE 7 (release in June) was celebrated, the progress of Java 8 SE explained as well as the progress on Java Embedded and ME. The availability of NetBeans 7.4 RC1 and JDK 8 Early Adopters release as well as the open sourcing of project Avatar probably were the only real news stories. The convergence of JavaFX and Java SE is almost complete; the upcoming alignment of Java SE Embedded and Java ME is the next big consolidation step that will lead to a unified platform where developers can use the same skills, development tools and APIs on EE, SE, SE Embedded and ME development. This means that anything that runs on ME will run on SE (Embedded) and EE – not necessarily the reverse because not all SE APIs are part of the compact profile or the ME environment. However, the trimming down of the SE libraries and the increased capabilities of devices mean that a pretty rich JVM runs on many devices – such as JavaFX 8 on the Raspberry PI. The major theme of the conference was Internet of Things. A world of things that are smart and connected, devices like sensors, cameras and equipment from cars, fridges and television sets to printers, security gates and kiosks that all run Java and are all capable of sending data over local network connections or directly over the internet. The number of devices that has these capabilities is rapidly growing. This means that the number of places where Java programs can help program the behavior of devices is growing too. It also means that the volume of data generated is expanding and that we have to find ways to harvest that data, possibly do a local pre-processing (filter, aggregate) and channel the data to back end systems. Terms typically used are edge devices (small, simple, publishing data), gateways (receiving data from many devices, collecting and consolidating, pre-processing, sending onwards to back end – typically using real time event processing) and enterprise services – receiving the data-turned-information from the gateways to further consolidate, distribute and act upon. A cheap device like the Raspberry PI is a perfect way to get started as a Java developer with what embedded (device) programming means and how interaction with physical input and output takes place. Roadmaps The over all progress on Java is visualized in this overview: Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Amis,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,JavaOne,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • How can I cleanly and elegantly handle data and dependancies between classes

    - by Neophyte
    I'm working on 2d topdown game in SFML 2, and need to find an elegant way in which everything will work and fit together. Allow me to explain. I have a number of classes that inherit from an abstract base that provides a draw method and an update method to all the classes. In the game loop, I call update and then draw on each class, I imagine this is a pretty common approach. I have classes for tiles, collisions, the player and a resource manager that contains all the tiles/images/textures. Due to the way input works in SFML I decided to have each class handle input (if required) in its update call. Up until now I have been passing in dependencies as needed, for example, in the player class when a movement key is pressed, I call a method on the collision class to check if the position the player wants to move to will be a collision, and only move the player if there is no collision. This works fine for the most part, but I believe it can be done better, I'm just not sure how. I now have more complex things I need to implement, eg: a player is able to walk up to an object on the ground, press a key to pick it up/loot it and it will then show up in inventory. This means that a few things need to happen: Check if the player is in range of a lootable item on keypress, else do not proceed. Find the item. Update the sprite texture on the item from its default texture to a "looted" texture. Update the collision for the item: it might have changed shape or been removed completely. Inventory needs to be updated with the added item. How do I make everything communicate? With my current system I will end up with my classes going out of scope, and method calls to each other all over the place. I could tie up all the classes in one big manager and give each one a reference to the parent manager class, but this seems only slightly better. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated! If anything is unclear, I'm happy to expand on things.

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  • GLSL per pixel lighting with custom light type

    - by Justin
    Ok, I am having a big problem here. I just got into GLSL yesterday, so the code will be terrible, I'm sure. Basically, I am attempting to make a light that can be passed into the fragment shader (for learning purposes). I have four input values: one for the position of the light, one for the color, one for the distance it can travel, and one for the intensity. I want to find the distance between the light and the fragment, then calculate the color from there. The code I have gives me a simply gorgeous ring of light that get's twisted and widened as the matrix is modified. I love the results, but it is not even close to what I am after. I want the light to be moved with all of the vertices, so it is always in the same place in relation to the objects. I can easily take it from there, but getting that to work seems to be impossible with my current structure. Can somebody give me a few pointers (pun not intended)? Vertex shader: attribute vec4 position; attribute vec4 color; attribute vec2 textureCoordinates; varying vec4 colorVarying; varying vec2 texturePosition; varying vec4 fposition; varying vec4 lightPosition; varying float lightDistance; varying float lightIntensity; varying vec4 lightColor; void main() { vec4 ECposition = gl_ModelViewMatrix * gl_Vertex; vec3 tnorm = normalize(vec3 (gl_NormalMatrix * gl_Normal)); fposition = ftransform(); gl_Position = fposition; gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0; fposition = ECposition; lightPosition = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 5.0, 0.0) * gl_ModelViewMatrix * gl_Vertex; lightDistance = 5.0; lightIntensity = 1.0; lightColor = vec4(0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0); } Fragment shader: varying vec4 colorVarying; varying vec2 texturePosition; varying vec4 fposition; varying vec4 lightPosition; varying float lightDistance; varying float lightIntensity; varying vec4 lightColor; uniform sampler2D texture; void main() { float l_distance = sqrt((gl_FragCoord.x * lightPosition.x) + (gl_FragCoord.y * lightPosition.y) + (gl_FragCoord.z * lightPosition.z)); float l_value = lightIntensity / (l_distance / lightDistance); vec4 l_color = vec4(l_value * lightColor.r, l_value * lightColor.g, l_value * lightColor.b, l_value * lightColor.a); vec4 color; color = texture2D(texture, gl_TexCoord[0].st); gl_FragColor = l_color * color; //gl_FragColor = fposition; }

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  • Understanding the levels of computing

    - by RParadox
    Sorry, for my confused question. I'm looking for some pointers. Up to now I have been working mostly with Java and Python on the application layer and I have only a vague understanding of operating systems and hardware. I want to understand much more about the lower levels of computing, but it gets really overwhelming somehow. At university I took a class about microprogramming, i.e. how processors get hard-wired to implement the ASM codes. Up to now I always thought I wouldn't get more done if learned more about the "low level". One question I have is: how is it even possible that hardware gets hidden almost completely from the developer? Is it accurate to say that the operating system is a software layer for the hardware? One small example: in programming I have never come across the need to understand what L2 or L3 Cache is. For the typical business application environment one almost never needs to understand assembler and the lower levels of computing, because nowadays there is a technology stack for almost anything. I guess the whole point of these lower levels is to provide an interface to higher levels. On the other hand I wonder how much influence the lower levels can have, for example this whole graphics computing thing. So, on the other hand, there is this theoretical computer science branch, which works on abstract computing models. However, I also rarely encountered situations, where I found it helpful thinking in the categories of complexity models, proof verification, etc. I sort of know, that there is a complexity class called NP, and that they are kind of impossible to solve for a big number of N. What I'm missing is a reference for a framework to think about these things. It seems to me, that there all kinds of different camps, who rarely interact. The last few weeks I have been reading about security issues. Here somehow, much of the different layers come together. Attacks and exploits almost always occur on the lower level, so in this case it is necessary to learn about the details of the OSI layers, the inner workings of an OS, etc.

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  • Are separate business objects needed when persistent data can be stored in a usable format?

    - by Kylotan
    I have a system where data is stored in a persistent store and read by a server application. Some of this data is only ever seen by the server, but some of it is passed through unaltered to clients. So, there is a big temptation to persist data - whether whole rows/documents or individual fields/sub-documents - in the exact form that the client can use (eg. JSON), as this removes various layers of boilerplate, whether in the form of procedural SQL, an ORM, or any proxy structure which exists just to hold the values before having to re-encode them into a client-suitable form. This form can usually be used on the server too, though business logic may have to live outside of the object, On the other hand, this approach ends up leaking implementation details everywhere. 9 times out of 10 I'm happy just to read a JSON structure out of the DB and send it to the client, but 1 in every 10 times I have to know the details of that implicit structure (and be able to refactor access to it if the stored data ever changes). And this makes me think that maybe I should be pulling this data into separate business objects, so that business logic doesn't have to change when the data schema does. (Though you could argue this just moves the problem rather than solves it.) There is a complicating factor in that our data schema is constantly changing rapidly, to the point where we dropped our previous ORM/RDBMS system in favour of MongoDB and an implicit schema which was much easier to work with. So far I've not decided whether the rapid schema changes make me wish for separate business objects (so that server-side calculations need less refactoring, since all changes are restricted to the persistence layer) or for no separate business objects (because every change to the schema requires the business objects to change to stay in sync, even if the new sub-object or field is never used on the server except to pass verbatim to a client). So my question is whether it is sensible to store objects in the form they are usually going to be used, or if it's better to copy them into intermediate business objects to insulate both sides from each other (even when that isn't strictly necessary)? And I'd like to hear from anybody else who has had experience of a similar situation, perhaps choosing to persist XML or JSON instead of having an explicit schema which has to be assembled into a client format each time.

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  • Frame rate on one of two machines running same code seems to be capped at 60 for no reason

    - by dennmat
    ISSUE I recently moved a project from my laptop to my desktop(machine info below). On my laptop the exact same code displays the fps(and ms/f) correctly. On my desktop it does not. What I mean by this is on the laptop it will display 300 fps(for example) where on my desktop it will show only up to 60. If I add 100 objects to the game on the laptop I'll see my frame rate drop accordingly; the same test on the desktop results in no change and the frames stay at 60. It takes a lot(~300) entities before I'll see a frame drop on the desktop, then it will descend. It seems as though its "theoretical" frames would be 400 or 500 but will never actually get to that and only do 60 until there's too much to handle at 60. This 60 frame cap is coming from no where. I'm not doing any frame limiting myself. It seems like something external is limiting my loop iterations on the desktop, but for the last couple days I've been scratching my head trying to figure out how to debug this. SETUPS Desktop: Visual Studio Express 2012 Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Laptop: Visual Studio Express 2010 Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit The libraries(allegro, box2d) are the same versions on both setups. CODE Main Loop: while(!abort) { frameTime = al_get_time(); if (frameTime - lastTime >= 1.0) { lastFps = fps/(frameTime - lastTime); lastTime = frameTime; avgMspf = cumMspf/fps; cumMspf = 0.0; fps = 0; } /** DRAWING/UPDATE CODE **/ fps++; cumMspf += al_get_time() - frameTime; } Note: There is no blocking code in the loop at any point. Where I'm at My understanding of al_get_time() is that it can return different resolutions depending on the system. However the resolution is never worse than seconds, and the double is represented as [seconds].[finer-resolution] and seeing as I'm only checking for a whole second al_get_time() shouldn't be responsible. My project settings and compiler options are the same. And I promise its the same code on both machines. My googling really didn't help me much, and although technically it's not that big of a deal. I'd really like to figure this out or perhaps have it explained, whichever comes first. Even just an idea of how to go about figuring out possible causes, because I'm out of ideas. Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

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  • Curating projects of deceased friends

    - by Ant
    A very good friend of mine, and an avid programmer, recently passed away. He left nearly 40 projects on BitBucket. Most of them are public, but a few of them are marked as private. I've decided to take on curation duties for the projects rather than leave his work to disappear. If you have been in the same situation, what did you do? Did you open-source everything? Continue development? Delete it all? I'm very interested to hear other people's experiences. There are a few reasons why some of the projects are marked as private (private projects on BitBucket are visible only to invited users and the original creator): One of them is an iOS web app that was free in the app store. I've had to remove the app from the store as I'm shutting down his web sites as a favour to his widow. However, I've already made the app public under the GPL v3 (he was a big GPL supporter). One of them contains proprietary code. It can't be open-sourced. Others are very much work-in-progress. I don't know if he intended to make them into hosted, paid services or if he wanted to give the code away under an open-source licence when they were finished. Here's a list of the private projects: Some kind of living cell simulator that uses SBML along with Runge-Kutta and Euler algorithms to do... something. There's a fair amount of code here but I don't know what it does or how far along it is. No docs. An accountacy application; it seems to have a solid DB design behind it but there's little code on top of that. A website whose purpose is to suggest good restaurants. Built on yii. Seems to have a lot of code but I'd need to set up a WAMP stack to see how far along it is. A website intended to host memorials to people who suffered from the same problem he was. Built on Joomla. I'm not sure how much of the code is just Joomla and how much is custom; again, I'd need to get Joomla running to find out. I'd just introduced him to Mercurial and BitBucket. All of the private projects are single commits of codebases he wasn't using version control with/was previously using SVN. I don't have the SVN repositories so I can't see the commit logs.

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  • Are You Meeting Social Customer Service Expectations?

    - by Mike Stiles
    Whether it’s B2B or B2C, one sure path to repeat business is making sure your buyer has a memorably pleasant and successful customer service experience with you. If they get that kind of treatment consistently, that’s called a relationship. And those aren’t broken easily. Social customer service, driven by integrated SRM (social relationship management) technology, is the venue that can effectively connect customers not only to the brand, but to other customers. Positive experiences, once administered, don’t just rest with the recipient. They’re published in the form of public raves and peer-to-peer recommendation, a force far more actionable than push advertising. What’s more, your customers have come to expect access to you and satisfaction from you using social. An NM Incite study shows 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect to get an answer from brands the same day they post to them on their social assets. To make sure you’re responding, you’ve got to have a tech platform that’s set up to moderate and alert so you’ll know ASAP a customer needs help. The more integrated your social enterprise is, the faster you can not only respond, but respond with the answer they’re looking for, because your system is connected to the internal resources that can surface the answer or put wheels in motion to rectify the situation in the shortest amount of time possible. But if you go to the necessary lengths to make sure your customers feel valued and important, will they really reward you? The study says 71% of consumers who got quick and effective responses from companies they contacted via social were more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and followers. So yes, sweeping people off their feet pays big dividends in terms of word-of-mouth marketing. But you should be keenly aware of the reverse side of that coin. Give people a negative experience, either in real world or virtual customer service, and that message is highly likely to get amplified through social channels faster and louder. Only 36% of the NM Incite study’s respondents reported that their problems were solved quickly and effectively. 36%? That’s hardly an impressive number. It gets worse. 10% never got so much as a response - at all. Going back to the relationship analogy, companies that are this deep in the ditch where customer service is concerned are making their girl or boyfriends really easy for a competitor to steal. Given the technology tools and data available right now for having an intimate knowledge of the customer, what products they’ve purchased, likely problems with those products, effective resolutions to those problems, and follow-up communication to gauge satisfaction, there are fewer excuses than ever for making the lifeblood of your business feel like you couldn’t care less. @mikestiles

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  • Testing and Validation – You Really Do Have The Time

    - by BuckWoody
    One of the great advantages in my role as a Technical Specialist here at Microsoft is that I get to work with so many great clients. I get to see their environments and how they use them, and the way they work with SQL Server. I’ve been a data professional myself for many years. Over that time I’ve worked with many database platforms, lots of client applications, and written a lot of code in many industries. For a while I was also a consultant, so I got to see how other shops did things as well. But because I now focus on a “set” base of clients (over 500 professionals in over 150 companies) I get to see them over a longer period of time. Many of them help me understand how they use the product in their projects, and I even attend some DBA regular meetings. I see the way the product succeeds, and I see when it fails. Something that has really impacted my way of thinking is the level of importance any given shop is able to place on testing and validation. I’ve always been a big proponent of setting up a test system and following a very disciplined regimen to make sure it will work in production for any new projects, and then taking the lessons learned into production as standards. I know, I know – there’s never enough time to do things right like this. Yet the shops I see that do it have the same level of work that they output as the shops that don’t. They just make the time to do the testing and validation and create a standard that they will follow in production. And what I’ve found (surprise surprise) is that they have fewer production problems. OK, that might seem obvious – but I’ve actually tracked it and those places that do the testing and best practices really do save stress, time and trouble from that effort. We all think that’s a good idea, but we just “don’t have time”. OK – but from what I’m seeing, you can gain time if you spend a little up front. You may find that you’re actually already spending the same amount of time that you would spend in doing the testing, you’re just doing it later, at night, under the gun. Food for thought.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Will not supporting IE or older browsers drive away potential visitors/users of my site? [closed]

    - by XToro
    Normally a SO browser but this question doesn't fit there, hopefully it fits here. I just want to ask from web designers' point of view if it's wrong to not care about supporting Internet Explorer or older browsers. The site I'm designing looks great in all browsers except IE9-. There are certain things that IE doesn't support or behave like other browsers; webkit stuff, some CSS styles, drop-and-drop files from OS etc etc, but it all works great in Safari, FireFox, Chrome etc. Should I be that concerned? I know there are several people that use IE, but it's limitations have just been causing me more work by having to come up with workarounds. From what I've read, many of the issues I've been having should be solved with IE10, but not everybody keeps up to date. I know of several people who are still using IE6! Again, I'm hoping this is the right place to ask a question like this, and if not, please point me to the right stack exchange site instead of just downvoting me. Thanks! EDIT: Upon further research.... So far this year, IE(all versions) and Chrome have been neck and neck as the top, with IE only squeaking by Chrome, and FireFox a close 3rd. But looking at the top 10 browsers, IE6 doesn't even show up on this list in which the lowest percentage is 1.92%. Source : http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2012&month=7 Having a look at this other site, IE6 shows up in 11th place out of 12, just before "Other" http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-february-2012/ This makes me a little more wary of not spending more time on IE compatibility. However, my site will not be going to a live beta until October or November, and I'm hoping that IE10 will have more features coded into it. Currently, I've written my upload page which is a "drag-and-drop files from the OS" type to simply display "IE is not supported", leaving no other option for IE users to upload pictures because I've spent so much time writing the uploader which does many things other than just upload the files. I will be changing this kinda cold "Access Denied" to a suggestion to upgrade, or install other browsers, with download links for each. Big thanks for the posts here and the interesting links!

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  • SSMS Tools Pack 3.0 is out. Full SSMS 2014 support and improved features.

    - by Mladen Prajdic
    With version 3.0 the SSMS 2014 is fully supported. Since this is a new major version you'll eventually need a new license. Please check the EULA to see when. As a thank you for your patience with this release, everyone that bought the SSMS Tools Pack after April 1st, the release date of SQL Server 2014, will receive a free upgrade. You won't have to do anything for this to take effect. First thing you'll notice is that the UI has been completely changed. It's more in line with SSMS and looks less web-like. Also the core has been updated and rewritten in some places to be better suited for future features. Major improvements for this release are: Window Connection Coloring Something a lot of people have asked me over the last 2 years is if there's a way to color the tab of the window itself. I'm very glad to say that now it is. In SSMS 2012 and higher the actual query window tab is also colored at the top border with the same color as the already existing strip making it much easier to see to which server your query window is connected to even when a window is not focused. To make it even better, you can not also specify the desired color based on the database name and not just the server name. This makes is useful for production environments where you need to be careful in which database you run your queries in. Format SQL The format SQL core was rewritten so it'll be easier to improve it in future versions. New improvement is the ability to terminate SQL statements with semicolons. This is available only in SSMS 2012 and up. Execution Plan Analyzer A big request was to implement the Problems and Solutions tooltip as a window that you can copy the text from. This is now available. You can move the window around and copy text from it. It's a small improvement but better stuff will come. SQL History Current Window History has been improved with faster search and now also shows the color of the server/database it was ran against. This is very helpful if you change your connection in the same query window making it clear which server/database you ran query on. The option to Force Save the history has been added. This is a menu item that flushes the execution and tab content history save buffers to disk. SQL Snippets Added an option to generate snippet from selected SQL text on right click menu. Run script on multiple databases Configurable database groups that you can save and reuse were added. You can create groups of preselected databases to choose from for each server. This makes repetitive tasks much easier New small team licensing option A lot of requests came in for 1 computer, Unlimited VMs option so now it's here. Hope it serves you well.

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  • Lazy Processing of Streams

    - by Giorgio
    I have the following problem scenario: I have a text file and I have to read it and split it into lines. Some lines might need to be dropped (according to criteria that are not fixed). The lines that are not dropped must be parsed into some predefined records. Records that are not valid must be dropped. Duplicate records may exist and, in such a case, they are consecutive. If duplicate / multiple records exist, only one item should be kept. The remaining records should be grouped according to the value contained in one field; all records belonging to the same group appear one after another (e.g. AAAABBBBCCDEEEFF and so on). The records of each group should be numbered (1, 2, 3, 4, ...). For each group the numbering starts from 1. The records must then be saved somewhere / consumed in the same order as they were produced. I have to implement this in Java or C++. My first idea was to define functions / methods like: One method to get all the lines from the file. One method to filter out the unwanted lines. One method to parse the filtered lines into valid records. One method to remove duplicate records. One method to group records and number them. The problem is that the data I am going to read can be too big and might not fit into main memory: so I cannot just construct all these lists and apply my functions one after the other. On the other hand, I think I do not need to fit all the data in main memory at once because once a record has been consumed all its underlying data (basically the lines of text between the previous record and the current record, and the record itself) can be disposed of. With the little knowledge I have of Haskell I have immediately thought about some kind of lazy evaluation, in which instead of applying functions to lists that have been completely computed, I have different streams of data that are built on top of each other and, at each moment, only the needed portion of each stream is materialized in main memory. But I have to implement this in Java or C++. So my question is which design pattern or other technique can allow me to implement this lazy processing of streams in one of these languages.

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  • What's a good way to get an IT internship? [closed]

    - by user1419715
    I'm a second year CS student who's worked really hard to build and expand my skills. I've spent the past week now trying to find a place to volunteer (i.e. work for FREE) so I can get a little bit of in-the-door experience with web development. I have a portfolio with several decent projects, a handful of languages and other hard/soft skills that employers constantly say they're clamoring for. I can't even get people to take my calls. This is me offering to work for them for FREE, remember. I'm in a reputable program at a respected school, get decent grades and...yeah, I've worked really hard to be presentable. On the rare occassions I actually get to speak to somebody at a design firm they hedge and do everything they can to get me off the phone. Nobody's ever expressed even the slightest interest in taking me on. The answer to the experience problem is supposed to be "you need to spend a year or two building up a big portfolio of projects on your own" so that employers will be impressed. I've done that. Websites, standalone apps, etc.. Nobody will even look at my resume, though. Question: Why does there seem to be so little interest in taking on upaid interns in the world of IT? Update: Sorry you all think I'm too aggressive or angry. It wasn't my intent to be a jerk to people while asking them for their opinions. That said, how would you feel if employer after employer turned you down cold when you offered yourself to them without asking for remuneration? One can't even get an unpaid job in this economy now, it seems. How am I going about my search? I find web firms in my area and contact them via email with a brief sales pitch of myself and a resume attached. Then a couple of days later I follow up with a phone contact. Nobody--anywhere--is advertising for interns of any kind. If there were I'm sure there'd be about 500 resumes per position, even unpaid. I've had good experiences in the past with cold-calling firms for actual paid jobs in other industries (hiring is a pain in the ass process and a call like this can show initiative while reducing a busy employer's need to do all the hiring overhead work), so I thought volunteering would work at least as well. My skills are pretty good for a CS student and include the usual suspects: HTML/CSS/Javascript, Python, Java, C, C#/.Net etc etc. I made a point on my resume to tie each ability claim to a project as well. Oh, and regarding the "working for free still costs the employer money" argument: that's an excellent point I hadn't though of. But it means...what? I have to pay the employer for the privilege of working there now?

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  • How bad does it look to have left a job soon after starting? [closed]

    - by unitedgremlin
    I have a job I would like to leave. On advice from friends and parents I have stayed. Their primary concern is that it would look bad on my resume if I left only after a few months of joining. My concerns with the job are as follows: When I started it was preferred I provide and use my own equipment. Could be out of business in a few months from lack of cash flow Poor code quality: memory leaks and lack of error handling. The same mistakes continue to be made even though I have raised the issue. It has become evident that co-workers do not understand memory management rules of the platform and are not interested in learning them. Yet, there is still surprise from them when strange bugs continue to crop up. As a result don't feel I will learn from co-workers. Plus, fixing the the lingering bugs and trying to keep up on new feature development is like a game of whack-o-mole that never ends. I don't believe in the companies vision or its ability to execute on the ideas anymore. My ideas and suggestions for very small tweaks are quickly dismissed. And so more than half or so have come back as bugs that we end up needing to address. I have been told to wait on fixing bugs in codes until we can talk to the original author. I don't feel I am allowed to take initiative to just fix/change things and do what I think is best. Everything needs consensus even for a bug fix before any work is done. I am adopting a shut-up and just do what I am told approach to save myself from ulcers. Lots of meetings (I am personally not involved in all of them which is good) but the sheer amount reminds me of days at a big corporation. Why is everyone around me always meeting? It's a small company. I can count everyone on my toes and fingers. I can say with certainty I have no interest in working with any of them again. This is the first time I have truly worked with a group of so called "B and C players". Ultimately, I think it is my fault for not doing a better job evaluating the team and company before joining. But I have generated a better set of questions when probing companies in the future. My questions are: How bad does it look to have left a job soon (few months) after starting? What would be the best way to explain my concerns and reasons for leaving without badmouthing the company? Should I stick it out to what I believe will be the soon end of the company?

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  • Automatically change resolution when not in dock

    - by jwir3
    I have Ubuntu 11.04 (yep, I know it's old news) on my Lenovo W520. At home, I have a dock with dual monitors. I have a pretty decent setup - things work almost perfectly (hence the reason I'm reluctant to upgrade... that and I'm not 100% sold on Unity). Anyway, the only annoyance I have is that when I'm on travel, I use the laptop screen. When I un-dock the laptop, I need to manually go into nvidia x-server settings and change the resolution from 'Auto' to 1920x1200, or it will think I have two screens, and my mouse pointer will be able to go way off the left side of the screen. This isn't a big deal, but I need to do it every time I restart the x-server (so if I reboot, or have to kill it, etc...) What would be really nice is if there was a way for it to automatically detect whether or not there is external monitors (which it seems to do already), and switch into the mode I select, depending on which monitors are connected. Is there any way to accomplish this? I've posted my xorg.conf file for reference. # nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings # nvidia-settings: version 270.29 (buildd@allspice) Fri Feb 25 14:42:07 UTC 2011 # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 275.19 ([email protected]) Tue Jul 12 18:35:38 PDT 2011 #Section "Monitor" # Identifier "Monitor1" # VendorName "Lenovo" # ModelName "ThinkpadLCD" # #HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0 # #VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0 # #Option "DPMS" #EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "DELL U2410" HorizSync 30.0 - 81.0 VertRefresh 56.0 - 76.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "Quadro 1000M" Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1" EndSection Section "Screen" # Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+120, DFP-6: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0" # Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+120, DFP-5: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0" # Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +1920+419, DFP-5: nvidia-auto-select +3840+0, DFP-6: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" # Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP-5: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-6: 1920x1200 +1920+0" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "NoLogo" "True" Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0" Option "TwinView" "1" Option "metamodes" "DFP-5: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0, DFP-6: 1920x1200 +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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  • Sql Table Refactoring Challenge

    Ive been working a bit on cleaning up a large table to make it more efficient.  I pretty much know what I need to do at this point, but I figured Id offer up a challenge for my readers, to see if they can catch everything I have as well as to see if Ive missed anything.  So to that end, I give you my table: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[lq_ActivityLog]( [ID] [bigint] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [PlacementID] [int] NOT NULL, [CreativeID] [int] NOT NULL, [PublisherID] [int] NOT NULL, [CountryCode] [nvarchar](10) NOT NULL, [RequestedZoneID] [int] NOT NULL, [AboveFold] [int] NOT NULL, [Period] [datetime] NOT NULL, [Clicks] [int] NOT NULL, [Impressions] [int] NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_lq_ActivityLog2] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [Period] ASC, [PlacementID] ASC, [CreativeID] ASC, [PublisherID] ASC, [RequestedZoneID] ASC, [AboveFold] ASC, [CountryCode] ASC)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY]) ON [PRIMARY] And now some assumptions and additional information: The table has 200,000,000 rows currently PlacementID ranges from 1 to 5000 and should support at least 50,000 CreativeID ranges from 1 to 5000 and should support at least 50,000 PublisherID ranges from 1 to 500 and should support at least 50,000 CountryCode is a 2-character ISO standard (e.g. US) and there is a country table with an integer ID already.  There are < 300 rows. RequestedZoneID ranges from 1 to 100 and should support at least 50,000 AboveFold has values of 1, 0, or 1 only. Period is a date (no time). Clicks range from 0 to 5000. Impressions range from 0 to 5000000. The table is currently write-mostly.  Its primary purpose is to log advertising activity as quickly as possible.  Nothing in the rest of the system reads from it except for batch jobs that pull the data into summary tables. Heres the current information on the database tables size: Design Goals This table has been in use for about 5 years and has performed very well during that time.  The only complaints we have are that it is quite large and also there are occasionally timeouts for queries that reference it, particularly when batch jobs are pulling data from it.  Any changes should be made with an eye toward keeping write performance optimal  while trying to reduce space and improve read performance / eliminate timeouts during read operations. Refactor There are, I suggest to you, some glaringly obvious optimizations that can be made to this table.  And Im sure there are some ninja tweaks known to SQL gurus that would be a big help as well.  Ill post my own suggested changes in a follow-up post for now feel free to comment with your suggestions. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Taking too long to get skills for entry level programmer position [closed]

    - by greenonion
    I don't have the skills for an entry level position as a .Net programmer. I am trying to learn what I need but there is too much to learn and too little time. What can I do? About two months ago, I went to a job interview for an entry level C# .Net programming/consultant position in NYC. When I heard back from them, they told me that the knowledge gap between what I knew and what they needed me to know was too big and I might have been a better fit if I had 6 months of experience. This was the first interview that I went on since graduating college. before the interview, I read a book on visual C#. Turns out it wasn't a very good book and I was missing a lot of key areas of knowledge such as ADO.net SQL (I had learned some LINQ) A little bit about how memory is handled Multiple threaded programming, etc. Because the book wasn't very good, the stuff I did know, I didn't know very well. I felt crushed. I've applied for jobs to gain experience but when recruiters hear that I have no experience they lose interest. I figured that I can at least work on my knowledge. Since then, I read "SQL Essentials" to cover the SQL bit and I found a pretty awesome book that is good enough to clear up what's hazy in my mind and covers almost all of the extra topics. The book is "C# 4.0: The Complete Reference" by Herbert Schildt. I'm even learning a lot about the topics I was familiar with. For a month now I've been working my way through this beast of a book. However, gaining the knowledge I need is taking too long. I can't hold off not having a full-time job much longer. I'm not stupid and I'm studying constantly pouring through the book, asking questions on stackoverflow, referencing the C# specification, etc. I have made great progress but there is just too much ground to cover. I'm on chapter 12 which is about a 3rd through the book. To get an idea of what I know vs don't know, the table of contents is on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/C-4-0-The-Complete-Reference/dp/007174116X How on earth can someone know enough to function as a programmer in the real world? Can I try for a job in academia? Will I have time to finish learning the rest of the C# language or am I just un-hireable?

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  • Application workflow

    - by manseuk
    I am in the planning process for a new application, the application will be written in PHP (using the Symfony 2 framework) but I'm not sure how relevant that is. The application will be browser based, although there will eventually be API access for other systems to interact with the data stored within the application, again probably not relavent at this point. The application manages SIM cards for lots of different providers - each SIM card belongs to a single provider but a single customer might have many SIM cards across many providers. The application allows the user to perform actions against the SIM card - for example Activate it, Barr it, Check on its status etc Some of the providers provide an API for doing this - so a single access point with multiple methods eg activateSIM, getStatus, barrSIM etc. The method names differ for each provider and some providers offer methods for extra functions that others don't. Some providers don't have APIs but do offer these methods by sending emails with attachments - the attachments are normally a CSV file that contains the SIM reference and action required - the email is processed by the provider and replied to once the action has been complete. To give you an example - the front end of my application will provide a customer with a list of SIM cards they own and give them access to the actions that are provided by the provider of each specific SIM card - some methods may require extra data which will either be stored in the backend or collected from the user frontend. Once the user has selected their action and added any required data I will handle the process in the backend and provide either instant feedback, in the case of the providers with APIs, or start the process off by sending an email and waiting for its reply before processing it and updating the backend so that next time the user checks the SIM card its status is correct (ie updated by a backend process). My reason for creating this question is because I'm stuck !! I'm confused about how to approach the actual workflow logic. I was thinking about creating a Provider Interface with the most common methods getStatus, activateSIM and barrSIM and then implementing that interface for each provider. So class Provider1 implements Provider - Then use a Factory to create the required class depending on user selected SIM card and invoking the method selected. This would work fine if all providers offered the same methods but they don't - there are a subset which are common but some providers offer extra methods - how can I implement that flexibly ? How can I deal with the processes where the workflow is different - ie some methods require and API call and value returned and some require an email to be sent and the next stage of the process doesn't start until the email reply is recieved ... Please help ! (I hope this is a readable question and that this is the correct place to be asking) Update I guess what I'm trying to avoid is a big if or switch / case statement - some design pattern that gives me a flexible approach to implementing this kind of fluid workflow .. anyone ?

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