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• What popular "best practices" are not always best, and why?

  - by SnOrfus

  "Best practices" are everywhere in our industry. A Google search on "coding best practices" turns up nearly 1.5 million results. The idea seems to bring comfort to many; just follow the instructions, and everything will turn out fine. When I read about a best practice - for example, I just read through several in Clean Code recently - I get nervous. Does this mean that I should always use this practice? Are there conditions attached? Are there situations where it might not be a good practice? How can I know for sure until I've learned more about the problem? Several of the practices mentioned in Clean Code did not sit right with me, but I'm honestly not sure if that's because they're potentially bad, or if that's just my personal bias talking. I do know that many prominent people in the tech industry seem to think that there are no best practices, so at least my nagging doubts place me in good company. The number of best practices I've read about are simply too numerous to list here or ask individual questions about, so I would like to phrase this as a general question: Which coding practices that are popularly labeled as "best practices" can be sub-optimal or even harmful under certain circumstances? What are those circumstances and why do they make the practice a poor one? I would prefer to hear about specific examples and experiences.

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• What is the best way to evaluate new programmers?

  - by Rafael

  What is the best way to evaluate the best candidates to get a new job (talking merely in terms of programming skills)? In my company we have had a lot of bad experiences with people who have good grades but do not have real programming skills. Their skills are merely like code monkeys, without the ability to analyze the problems and find solutions. More things that I have to note: The education system in my country sucks--really sucks. The people that are good in this kind of job are good because they have talent for it or really try to learn on their own. The university / graduate /post-grad degree doesn't mean necessarily that you know exactly how to do the things. Certifications also mean nothing here because the people in charge of the certification course also don't have skills (or are in low paying jobs). We need really to get the good candidates that are flexible and don't have mechanical thinking (because this type of people by experience have a low performance). We are in a government institution and the people that are candidates don't necessarily come from outside, but we have the possibility to accept or not any candidates until we find the correct one. I hope I'm not sounding too aggressive in my question; and BTW I'm a programmer myself. edit: I figured out that asked something really complex here. I will un-toggle "the correct answer" only to let the discussion going fluent, without any bias.

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• EVENT RECAP: Oracle Day & Product Fair - Atlanta

  - by cwarticki

  Are you attending any of the Oracle Days and other Events? They are fantastic!  Keep track of the Oracle Events by following @OracleEvents on Twitter.  Also, stay in the know by subscribing to one of the several Oracle Newsletters. Those will also keep you posted of upcoming in-person and webcast events. From the Oracle Events website, simply navigate to your geography and refine your options to locate what interests you. You can also perform keyword searches. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate in the Oracle Day & Product Fair in Atlanta, Georgia.  Thanks to those who stopped by to ask your support questions and watch me demo My Oracle Support features and best practices. It was a fantastic turnout.  The Buckhead Theatre provided served as an excellent venue. It was standing room only for the double keynotes on topics of interest to our customers: Navigating Complexity by Simplifying I.T., and Oracle Exadata X3-Transforming Data Management. The Product Fair was staffed by many Oracle professionals and our Partners too.  It was great meeting new people like the team representing OAUG.  Many thanks to our sponsors: BIAS, Cloudera, Intel and TekStream Solutions.Come attend one of the many Oracle Days & other events planned for you. I'll be attending the one Ft. Lauderdale, FL on November 16th. See you there. -Chris WartickiGlobal Customer Management

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

  - by snape

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

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• What is your unique programming problem-solving style? [closed]

  - by gcc

  Everyone has their own styles and technique for approaching and solving real world problems. These distinguish us from other people or other programmers. (Actually, I think it make us more desirable as programmers and improves computer science) To improve, we read a lot of books; for example, programming style, how to solve problems, how to approach problems, software and algorithms, et al. Can I learn your technique? In other words, if someone gives you a problem, at first step, what are you doing to solve it? I want learn the style in which you approach, analyze, and solve a problem. EDIT: every programmer is a unique instance; each of us approach problems and converge on solutions in our own... idiomatic manner. This manner is sometimes a quirk of training, a bias of tools, but often it is an insightful nugget, a little golden hammer that cracks nuts just slightly faster then others. When answering, give your general approaches but also take a moment to identify how you look at things in ways that your peers do not. Let's call this your Unique Solving Perspective, or USP.

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• links for 2010-06-04

  - by Bob Rhubart

  @biemond: JEJB Transport and manipulating the Java Response in OSB 11g "JEJB Transport works like the EJB Transport," says Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond, "but the request and response objects are not translated to XML so you can't use XQuery etc. To make things not too hard, OSB 11g makes a XML presentation of the request method and its parameters, which you can use in the Proxy Service." (tags: oracleace soa oracle jejb java) @bex: Oracle UCM jQuery Plugin  "This connector allows you to use jQuery to make UCM Service calls through AJAX, and easily display the results,: says Oracle Ace Director Bex Huff. "This is 100% pure JavaScript, no Java, Idoc, or ADF required!" (tags: oracleace ucm oracle otn enterprise2.0) Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 and its Customer Feedback Program are now available (Oracle Developer Tools Blog) "Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 is available on Solaris 10 (SPARC, x86), OEL 5 (x86), RHEL 5 (x86), SuSE 11 (x86) today and will be available for OpenSolaris in the near future," says Pieter Humphrey. (tags: oracle otn solaris sparc liunux) @soatoday: EA and SOA Should Report to COO "So, who gets EA-- the CIO or VP of a Business? I argue neither! After all, a typical EA goal is to connect the Business and IT together to impart better structure and visibility across the enterprise. I firmly believe that neither should own EA so that neither imparts too much of their organization (i.e bias) on the EA process and deliverables. EA needs to be independent, and it's for all the right reasons." -- Orace ACE Director JOrdan Braunstein (tags: oracleace entarch soa)

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• JOGL hardware based shadow mapping - computing the texture matrix

  - by axel22

  I am implementing hardware shadow mapping as described here. I've rendered the scene successfully from the light POV, and loaded the depth buffer of the scene into a texture. This texture has correctly been loaded - I check this by rendering a small thumbnail, as you can see in the screenshot below, upper left corner. The depth of the scene appears to be correct - objects further away are darker, and that are closer to the light are lighter. However, I run into trouble while rendering the scene from the camera's point of view using the depth texture - the texture on the polygons in the scene is rendered in a weird, nondeterministic fashion, as shown in the screenshot. I believe I am making an error while computing the texture transformation matrix, but I am unsure where exactly. Since I have no matrix utilities in JOGL other then the gl[Load|Mult]Matrix procedures, I multiply the matrices using them, like this: void calcTextureMatrix() { glPushMatrix(); glLoadIdentity(); glLoadMatrixf(biasmatrix, 0); glMultMatrixf(lightprojmatrix, 0); glMultMatrixf(lightviewmatrix, 0); glGetFloatv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, shadowtexmatrix, 0); glPopMatrix(); } I obtained these matrices by using the glOrtho and gluLookAt procedures: glLoadIdentity() val wdt = width / 45 val hgt = height / 45 glOrtho(wdt, -wdt, -hgt, hgt, -45.0, 45.0) glGetFloatv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, lightprojmatrix, 0) glLoadIdentity() glu.gluLookAt( xlook + lightpos._1, ylook + lightpos._2, lightpos._3, xlook, ylook, 0.0f, 0.f, 0.f, 1.0f) glGetFloatv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, lightviewmatrix, 0) My bias matrix is: float[] biasmatrix = new float[16] { 0.5f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.5f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.5f, 0.f, 0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f, 1.f } After applying the camera projection and view matrices, I do: glTexGeni(GL_S, GL_TEXTURE_GEN_MODE, GL_EYE_LINEAR) glTexGenfv(GL_S, GL_EYE_PLANE, shadowtexmatrix, 0) glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_GEN_S) for each component. Does anybody know why the texture is not being rendered correctly? Thank you.

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• Shuffling algorithm with no "self-mapping"?

  - by OregonTrail

  To randomly shuffle an array, with no bias towards any particular permutation, there is the Knuth Fischer-Yeats algorithm. In Python: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys from random import randrange def KFYShuffle(items): i = len(items) - 1 while i > 0: j = randrange(i+1) # 0 <= j <= i items[j], items[i] = items[i], items[j] i = i - 1 return items print KFYShuffle(range(int(sys.argv[1]))) There is also Sattolo's algorithm, which produces random cycles. In Python: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys from random import randrange def SattoloShuffle(items): i = len(items) while i > 1: i = i - 1 j = randrange(i) # 0 <= j <= i-1 items[j], items[i] = items[i], items[j] return items print SattoloShuffle(range(int(sys.argv[1]))) I'm currently writing a simulation with the following specifications for a shuffling algorithm: The algorithm is unbiased. If a true random number generator was used, no permutation would be more likely than any other. No number ends up at its original index. The input to the shuffle will always be A[i] = i for i from 0 to N-1 Permutations are produced that are not cycles, but still meet specification 2. The cycles produced by Sattolo's algorithm meet specification 2, but not specification 1 or 3. I've been working at creating an algorithm that meets these specifications, what I came up with was equivalent to Sattolo's algorithm. Does anyone have an algorithm for this problem?

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• I don't know C. And why should I learn it?

  - by Stephen

  My first programming language was PHP (gasp). After that I started working with JavaScript. I've recently done work in C#. I've never once looked at low or mid level languages like C. The general consensus in the programming-community-at-large is that "a programmer who hasn't learned something like C, frankly, just can't handle programming concepts like pointers, data types, passing values by reference, etc." I do not agree. I argue that: Because high level languages are easily accessible, more "non-programmers" dive in and make a mess, and In order to really get anything done in a high level language, one needs to understand the same similar concepts that most proponents of "learn-low-level-first" evangelize about. Some people need to know C. Those people have jobs that require them to write low to mid-level code. I'm sure C is awesome. I'm sure there are a few bad programmers who know C. My question is, why the bias? As a good, honest, hungry programmer, if I had to learn C (for some unforeseen reason), I would learn C. Considering the multitude of languages out there, shouldn't good programmers focus on learning what advances us? Shouldn't we learn what interests us? Should we not utilize our finite time moving forward? Why do some programmers disagree with this? I believe that striving for excellence in what you do is the fundamental deterministic trait between good programmers and bad ones. Does anyone have any real world examples of how something written in a high level language--say Java, Pascal, PHP, or Javascript--truely benefitted from a prior knowledge of C? Examples would be most appreciated. (revised to better coincide with the six guidelines.)

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• I don't know C. And why should I learn it?

  - by Stephen

  My first programming language was PHP (gasp). After that I started working with JavaScript. I've recently done work in C#. I've never once looked at low or mid level languages like C. The general consensus in the programming-community-at-large is that "a programmer who hasn't learned something like C, frankly, just can't handle programming concepts like pointers, data types, passing values by reference, etc." I do not agree. I argue that: Because high level languages are easily accessible, more "non-programmers" dive in and make a mess In order to really get anything done in a high level language, one needs to understand the same similar concepts that most proponents of "learn-low-level-first" evangelize about. Some people need to know C; those people have jobs that require them to write low to mid-level code. I'm sure C is awesome, and I'm sure there are a few bad programmers who know C. Why the bias? As a good, honest, hungry programmer, if I had to learn C (for some unforeseen reason), I would learn C. Considering the multitude of languages out there, shouldn't good programmers focus on learning what advances us? Shouldn't we learn what interests us? Should we not utilize our finite time moving forward? Why do some programmers disagree with this? I believe that striving for excellence in what you do is the fundamental deterministic trait between good programmers and bad ones. Does anyone have any real world examples of how something written in a high level language—say Java, Pascal, PHP, or Javascript—truely benefitted from a prior knowledge of C? Examples would be most appreciated.

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• Finishing an iteration early

  - by f1dave

  I'd like some input on this on those working with agile methodologies... A current project is finding that development on our planned user stories is finishing some time before the end of the iteration, and that the testing effort and business acceptance is what's actually dragging us out longer towards the end. This means that the devs in question have spare time, and they're essentially going out to the iteration+1 backlog and starting work on cards there before our current iteration cards are 'done'. As iteration manager, I want to put a stop to this - I want a more team-orientated approach where the group takes ownership of getting all the cards done, as opposed to "Well, dev's done so what do I dev next?" The problem I face is convincing the team of this. On one hand, I understand why the devs don't want to test the code they've written (there are unit tests they write of course, but the manual testing to be done could be influenced by their bias). The team sees working ahead as making our next iterations easier, because a lot of the work is done before we start. I see this as screwing with the whole system of planning/actuals - but it's difficult to convince the team as to why this matters. What advice can you guys and girls give? How do we stop devs reaching ahead? What should they be doing instead? How much of a problem is this in the scheme of things, if things are still getting done?

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• Trying to move away from PHP/Yii: RoR, Python/Django or ASP.NET MVC? Your opinions please [closed]

  - by Örs

  I have a CS degree and I've been working as a web developer (front & backend) for about 2 years now. I've been working with PHP mostly because it was easy to pick up and find a job, but I've grown to dislike the language and want to try something new, and possibly get a better paying job. That last point is especially important because in my area (Romania/Eastern Europe) PHP jobs are mostly for people fresh out of college/high school, hence the pay is rather low. I've been working with the Yii framework which, if I understand correctly, borrows a lot from Ruby on Rails (convention over configuration, MVC, Active Record, scaffolding). Other than PHP I only know curly-brace languages (C/C++/Java) and bash so Python/Ruby might be a bit challenging. On the other hand I've been using Linux (with vim and recently Sublime Text 2) for almost 4 years now so Windows and a lack of a terminal would have its downsides as well. I'm leaning towards Python/Ruby because of my *nix bias (plus both look like fun), but I've heard great things about ASP.NET MVC as well. Any suggestions? PS: I think there are more jobs in ASP.NET around here, but that's not necessarily a plus, because there are a lot of CS graduates as well. tl;dr: Romanian PHP/Yii developer trying to move to Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or C#/ASP.NET MVC. Suggestions?

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• Algorithm for rating books: Relative perception

  - by suneet

  So I am developing this application for rating books (think like IMDB for books) using relational database. Problem statement : Let's say book "A" deserves 8.5 in absolute sense. In case if A is the best book I have ever seen, I'll most probably rate it 9.5 whereas for someone else, it might be just an average book, so he/they will rate it less (say around 8). Let's assume 4 such guys rate it 8. If there are 10 guys who are like me (who haven't ever read great literature) and they all rate it 9.5-10. This will effectively make it's cumulative rating greater than 9 (9.5*10 + 8*4) / 14 = 9.1 whereas we needed the result to be 8.5 ... How can I take care of(normalize) this bias due to incorrect perception of individuals. MyProposedSolution : Here's one of the ways how I think it could be solved. We can have a variable Lit_coefficient which tells us how much knowledge a user has about literature. If I rate "A"(the book) 9.5 and person "X" rates it 8, then he must have read books much better than "A" and thus his Lit_coefficient should be higher. And then we can normalize the ratings according to the Lit_coefficient of user. Could there be a better algorithm/solution for the same?

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• Advice on reconciling discordant data

  - by Justin

  Let me support my question with a quick scenario. We're writing an app for family meal planning. We'll produce daily plans with a target calorie goal and meals to achieve it for our nuclear family. Our calorie goal will be calculated for each person from their attributes (gender, age, weight, activity level). The weight attribute is the simplest example here. When Dad (the fascist nerd who is inflicting this on his family) first uses the application he throws approximate values into it for Daughter. He thinks she is 5'2" (157 cm) and 125 lbs (56kg). The next day Mom sits down to generate the menu and looks back over what the bumbling Dad did, quietly fumes that he can never recall anything about the family, and says the value is really 118 lbs! This is the first introduction of the discord. It seems, in this scenario, Mom is probably more correct that Dad. Though both are only an approximation of the actual value. The next day the dear Daughter decides to use the program and sees her weight listed. With the vanity only a teenager could muster she changes the weight to 110 lbs. Later that day the Mom returns home from a doctor's visit the Daughter needed and decides that it would be a good idea to update her Daughter's weight in the program. Hooray, another value, this time 117 lbs. Now how do you reconcile these data points? Measurement error, confidence in parties, bias, and more all confound the data. In some idealized world we'd have a weight authority of some nature providing the one and only truth. How about in our world though? And the icing on the cake is that this single data point changes over time. How have you guys solved or managed this conflict?

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• What is the best objective way to measure language popularity trends? (What's better than TIOBE?)

  - by Eric Wilson

  The best way to get data on computer language popularity that I know is the TIOBE index. But everyone knows that TIOBE is hopelessly flawed. (If someone provides a link to support this, I'll add it here.) So is there any data on programming language popularity that is generally considered meaningful? The only other option I know is to look at the trends at indeed.com, which is inherently flawed, being based on job postings. It isn't like I would make a future language decision solely based on an index, but it might provide a useful balance to the skewed perspective one obtains by talking to ones friends and colleagues. To illustrate that bias, I'll point out that based on the experience of those I personally know, the only languages used professionally today (in order of popularity) are Java, C#, Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby, Objective C, and Perl. (Though it is evident that C, C++ and PHP were used in the past.) So my question is, everyone bashes TIOBE, but is there anything else? If so, can anyone explain how we know the alternative has better methodology? Thanks.

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• Good embedded database solution (like SQLite) for .Net

  - by vfilby

  I am looking for file based storage solutions that I can use with a .Net project. THey need to have a sql-like interface for storing and retrieving data. They need to have relatively little overhead and must not require any additional components installed by the end user. I am hopping for a .dll that I can reference and use. Cool points awarded if it is closely tied to an ORM. My current favourite is SQLite, are there any better ones out there that I should know about? I have a (health?) bias against access because I feel it is overcomplicated for what I need, I am open to being convinced otherwise though. PS: "No, there is nothing better than SQLite" is a perfectly good answer.

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• Pseudorandom crashes in Flash Debugger - My bad, or Abode's?

  - by rinogo

  I'm working on a large-size dual AS3/Flex project (some parts are pure AS3, other parts are Flex), and I'm experiencing a lot of Flash Debugger crashes. These crashes aren't completely random - it seems like I can get them to occur with greater consistency when I perform certain actions in my app. However, at the same time, they aren't consistently repeatable - sometimes a set of actions causes my app to crash, and other times, the same steps execute fine without a crash. I have two questions (carefully worded to remove my personal bias :) ) Are these crashes due to my coding practices, or Adobe's Flash Debugger? When I deploy my app on a web site and access it via Flash Player, should I expect the same crashes to occur, or is Flash Player considerably more resilient than Flash Debugger? Thanks so much, all! :) -Rich

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• Style: Dot notation vs. message notation in Objective-C 2.0

  - by groundhog

  In Objective-C 2.0 we got the "dot" notation for properties. I've seen various back and forths about the merits of dot notation vs. message notation. To keep the responses untainted I'm not going to respond either way in the question. What is your thought about dot notation vs. message notation for property accessing? Please try to keep it focused on Objective-C - my one bias I'll put forth is that Objective-C is Objective-C, so your preference that it be like Java or JavaScript aren't valid. Valid commentary is to do with technical issues (operation ordering, cast precedence, performance, etc), clarity (structure vs. object nature, both pro and con!), succinctness, etc. Note, I'm of the school of rigorous quality and readability in code having worked on huge projects where code convention and quality is paramount (the write once read a thousand times paradigm).

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• How to know what you don't know?

  - by Ivo Danihelka

  Is there a way how to recognize that you don't know something? For example, I had some hard realizations: I didn't know that criticism isn't a good way to teach your friends. I realized that after reading How to Win Friends & Influence People. I didn't know about the fundamental needed for an indutive bias in machine learning. If I have read Mitchell's Machine Learning book early, I would know it. I haven't found it mentioned in other books and papers. Sorry if the question is too generic. The question could also mean: How to know that you are missing something important about your programming language?

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• Small methods - Small sprocs

  - by Berlioz

  Uncle Bob recommends having small methods. Do stored procedures have an ideal size? Or can they run on for 100's and 100's of lines long? Also does anyone have anything to say about where to place business logic. If located in stored procedures, the database is being used as data processing tier. If you read Adam Machanic, his bias is toward the database, does that imply long stored procedures that only the author of the sproc understands, leaving maintainers to deal with the mess? I guess there is two inter-related questions, somehow. Thanks in advance for responding to a fuzzy question(s).

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• Neural Network Basics

  - by Stat Onetwothree

  I'm a computer science student and for this years project, I need to create and apply a Genetic Algorithm to something. I think Neural Networks would be a good thing to apply it to, but I'm having trouble understanding them. I fully understand the concepts but none of the websites out there really explain the following which is blocking my understanding: How the decision is made for how many nodes there are. What the nodes actually represent and do. What part the weights and bias actually play in classification. Could someone please shed some light on this for me? Also, I'd really appreciate it if you have any similar ideas for what I could apply a GA to. Thanks very much! :)

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• What are the best blogs for staying up to date on C#, ASP.NET, LINQ, SQL, C++, Ruby, Java, Python?

  - by Arj

  Apologies if this repeats another - but I couldn't fine one like it. My day to day programming spans a fair number of technologies: C#, ASP.NET, LINQ / SQL, C++, Ruby, Java, Python in approximately that order. It's a struggle to keep up to date on any of best practices, new ideas, innovation and improvements, let alone all. Therefore, what would your top 1 blog be in each of these technologies and which technology do you find easiest to stay up to date with? I'd have a bias towards blogs with broad and high level rather than narrow and detailed content / solutions / examples.

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• measuring uncertainty in matlabs svmclassify

  - by Mark

  I'm doing contextual object recognition and I need a prior for my observations. e.g. this space was labeled "dog", what's the probability that it was labeled correctly? Do you know if matlabs svmclassify has an argument to return this level of certainty with it's classification? If not, matlabs svm has the following structures in it: SVM = SupportVectors: [11x124 single] Alpha: [11x1 double] Bias: 0.0915 KernelFunction: @linear_kernel KernelFunctionArgs: {} GroupNames: {11x1 cell} SupportVectorIndices: [11x1 double] ScaleData: [1x1 struct] FigureHandles: [] Can you think of any ways to compute a good measure of uncertainty from these? (Which support vector to use?) Papers/articles explaining uncertainty in SVMs welcome. More in depth explanations of matlabs SVM are also welcome. If you can't do it this way, can you think of any other libraries with SVMs that have this measure of uncertainty?

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• Windows and SQL Azure Best Practices: Affinity Groups

  - by BuckWoody

  When you create a Windows Azure application, you’ll pick a subscription to put it under. This is a billing container - underneath that, you’ll deploy a Hosted Service. That holds the Web and Worker Roles that you’ll deploy for your applications. along side that, you use the Storage Account to create storage for the application. (In some cases, you might choose to use only storage or Roles - the info here applies anyway) As you are setting up your environment, you’re asked to pick a “region” where your application will run. If you choose a Region, you’ll be asked where to put the Roles. You’re given choices like Asia, North America and so on. This is where the hardware that physically runs your code lives. We have lots of fault domains, power considerations and so on to keep that set of datacenters running, but keep in mind that this is where the application lives. You also get this selection for Storage Accounts. When you make new storage, it’s a best practice to put it where your computing is. This makes the shortest path from the code to the data, and then back out to the user. One of the selections for the location is “Anywhere U.S.”. This selection might be interpreted to mean that we will bias towards keeping the data and the code together, but that may not be the case. There is a specific abstraction we created for just that purpose: Affinity Groups. An Affinity Group is simply a name you can use to tie together resources. You can do this in two places - when you’re creating the Hosted Service (shown above) and on it’s own tree item on the left, called “Affinity Groups”. When you select either of those actions, You’re presented with a dialog box that allows you to specify a name, and then the Region that  names ties the resources to. Now you can select that Affinity Group just as if it were a Region, and your code and data will stay together. That helps with keeping the performance high. Official Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh531560.aspx

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

  - by Marcus Swope

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

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