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• Backbone.js "model" query

  - by Novice coder

  I'm a learning coder trying to understand this code from a sample MVC framework. The below code is from a "model" file. I've done research on Backbone.js, but I'm still confused as to exactly how this code pull information from the app's database. For example, how are base_url, Model.prototype, and Collection.prototype being used to retrieve information from the backend? Any help would be greatly appreciated. exports.definition = { config : { "defaults": { "title": "-", "description": "-" }, "adapter": { "type": "rest", "collection_name": "schools", "base_url" : "/schools/", } }, extendModel: function(Model) { _.extend(Model.prototype, { // Extend, override or implement Backbone.Model urlRoot: '/school/', name:'school', parse: function(response, options) { response.id = response._id; return response; }, }); return Model; }, extendCollection: function(Collection) { _.extend(Collection.prototype, { // Extend, override or implement Backbone.Collection urlRoot: '/schools/', name: 'schools', }); return Collection; } }

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• What does it mean when a User-Agent has another User-Agent inside it?

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  Basically, sometimes the user-agent will have its normal user-agent displayed, then at the end it will have teh "User-Agent: " tag displayed, and right after it another user-agent is shown. Sometimes, the second user-agent is just appended to the first one without the "User-Agent: " tag. Here are some samples I've seen: The first few contain the "User-Agent: " tag in the middle somewhere, and I've changed its font to make it easier to to see. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; GTB6; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6; MRA 5.10 (build 5339); User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152) Here are some without the "User-Agent: " tag in the middle, but just two user agents that seem stiched together. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6; IPMS/6568080A-04A5AD839A9; TCO_20090713170733; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); InfoPath.2) Now, just to add a few notes to this. I understand that the "User-Agent: " tag is normally a header, and what follows a typical "User-Agent: " string sequence is the actual user agent that is sent to servers etc, but normally the "User-Agent: " string should not be part of the actual user agent, that is more like the pre-fix or a tag indicating that what follows will be the actual user agent. Additionally, I may have thought, hey, these are just two user agents pasted together, but on closer inspection, you realize that they are not. On all of these dual user agent listings, if you look at the opening bracket "(" just before the "compatible" keyword, you realize the pair to that bracket ")" is actually at the very end, the end of the second user agent. So, the first user agents closing bracket ")" never occurs before the second user agent begins, it's always right at the end, and therefore, the second user agent is more like one of the features of the first user agent, like: "Trident/4.0" or "GTB6" etc etc... The other thing to note that the second user agent is always MSIE 6.0 (Internet Explorer 6.0), interesting. What I had initially thought was it's some sort of Virtual Machine displaying the browser in use & the browser that is installed, but then I thought, what'd be the point in that? Finally, right now, I am thinking, it's probably soem sort of "Compatibility View" type thing, where even if MSIE 7.0 or 8.0 is installed, when my hypothetical the "Display In Internet Explorer 6.0" mode is turned on, the user agent changes to something like this. That being, IE 8.0 is installed, but is rendering everything as IE 6.0 would. Is there or was there such a feature in Internet Explorer? Am I on to something here? What are your thoughts on this? If you have any other ideas, please feel free to let us know. At the moment, I'm just trying to understand if these are valid User Agents, or if they are invalid. In a list of about 44,000 User Agents, I've seen this type of Dual User Agent about 400 times. I've closely inspected 40 of them, and every single one had MSIE 6.0 as the "second" user agent (and the first user agent a higher version of MSIE, such as 7 or 8). This was true for all except one, where both user agents were MSIE 8.0, here it is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Win32; GMX); GTB0.0) This occured once in my 40 "close" inspections. I've estimated the 400 in 44,000 by taking a sample of the first 4,400 user agents, and finding 40 of these in the MSIE/Windows user agents, and extrapolated that to estimate 40. There were also similar things occuring for non MSIE user agents where there were two Mozilla's in one user agent, the non MSIE ones would probably add another 30% on top of the ones I've noted. I can show you samples of them if anyone would like. There we have it, this is where I'm at, what do you guys think?

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• Writing/discussions about the aesthetics of code?

  - by dilettante.coder

  I'm looking for considerations of the questions "Can code be beautiful?" and "What makes code beautiful?" Examples would include: This academic paper: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics This blog post: Hamon or the Skin Deep Beauty of Code Please note that I'm not trying to start a discussion here, or asking for opinions about what makes code beautiful, or for code you think is beautiful; I'm trying to find stuff that has already been published. Thanks for your help.

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• UppercuT &ndash; Custom Extensions Now With PowerShell and Ruby

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Arguably, one of the most powerful features of UppercuT (UC) is the ability to extend any step of the build process with a pre, post, or replace hook. This customization is done in a separate location from the build so you can upgrade without wondering if you broke the build. There is a hook before each step of the build has run. There is a hook after. And back to power again, there is a replacement hook. If you don’t like what the step is doing and/or you want to replace it’s entire functionality, you just drop a custom replacement extension and UppercuT will perform the custom step instead. Up until recently all custom hooks had to be written in NAnt. Now they are a little sweeter because you no longer need to use NAnt to extend UC if you don’t want to. You can use PowerShell. Or Ruby.   Let that sink in for a moment. You don’t have to even need to interact with NAnt at all now. Extension Points On the wiki, all of the extension points are shown. The basic idea is that you would put whatever customization you are doing in a separate folder named build.custom. Each step Let’s take a look at all we can customize: The start point is default.build. It calls build.custom/default.pre.build if it exists, then it runs build/default.build (normal tasks) OR build.custom/default.replace.build if it exists, and finally build.custom/default.post.build if it exists. Every step below runs with the same extension points but changes on the file name it is looking for. NOTE: If you include default.replace.build, nothing else will run because everything is called from default.build.    * policyChecks.step    * versionBuilder.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/versionBuilder.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - svn.step, tfs.step, or git.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/versioners)    * generateBuildInfo.step    * compile.step    * environmentBuilder.step    * analyze.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyze.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - test.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyzers/test.replace.step, the items below will not run.        + mbunit2.step, gallio.step, or nunit.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - ncover.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - ndepend.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - moma.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)    * package.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/package.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - deploymentBuilder.step Customize UppercuT Builds With PowerShell UppercuT can now be extended with PowerShell (PS). To customize any extension point with PS, just add .ps1 to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in PowerShell. If you are not signing your scripts you will need to change a setting in the UppercuT.config file. This does impose a security risk, because this allows PS to now run any PS script. This setting stays that way on ANY machine that runs the build until manually changed by someone. I’m not responsible if you mess up your machine or anyone else’s by doing this. You’ve been warned. Now that you are fully aware of any security holes you may open and are okay with that, let’s move on. Let’s create a file called default.replace.build.ps1 in the build.custom folder. Open that file in notepad and let’s add this to it: write-host "hello - I'm a custom task written in Powershell!" Now, let’s run build.bat. You could get some PSake action going here. I won’t dive into that in this post though. Customize UppercuT Builds With Ruby If you want to customize any extension point with Ruby, just add .rb to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in Ruby.  Let’s write a custom ruby task for UC. If you were thinking it would be the same as the one we just wrote for PS, you’d be right! In the build.custom folder, lets create a file called default.replace.build.rb. Open that file in notepad and let’s put this in there: puts "I'm a custom ruby task!" Now, let’s run build.bat again. That’s chunky bacon. UppercuT and Albacore.NET Just for fun, I wanted to see if I could replace the compile.step with a Rake task. Not just any rake task, Albacore’s msbuild task. Albacore is a suite of rake tasks brought about by Derick Bailey to make building .NET with Rake easier. It has quite a bit of support with developers that are using Rake to build code. In my build.custom folder, I drop a compile.replace.step.rb. I also put in a separate file that will contain my Albacore rake task and I call that compile.rb. What are the contents of compile.replace.step.rb? rake = 'rake' arguments= '-f ' + Dir.pwd + '/../build.custom/compile.rb' #puts "Calling #{rake} " + arguments system("#{rake} " + arguments) Since the custom extensions call ruby, we have to shell back out and call rake. That’s what we are doing here. We also realize that ruby is called from the build folder, so we need to back out and dive into the build.custom folder to find the file that is technically next to us. What are the contents of compile.rb? require 'rubygems' require 'fileutils' require 'albacore' task :default => [:compile] puts "Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks" desc 'Compile the source' msbuild :compile do |msb| msb.properties = { :configuration => :Release, :outputpath => '../../build_output/UppercuT' } msb.targets [:clean, :build] msb.verbosity = "quiet" msb.path_to_command = 'c:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v3.5/MSBuild.exe' msb.solution = '../uppercut.sln' end We are using the msbuild task here. We change the output path to the build_output/UppercuT folder. The output path has “../../” because this is based on every project. We could grab the current directory and then point the task specifically to a folder if we have projects that are at different levels. We want the verbosity to be quiet so we set that as well. So what kind of output do you get for this? Let’s run build.bat custom_tasks_replace:      [echo] Running custom tasks instead of normal tasks if C:\code\uppercut\build\..\build.custom\compile.replace.step exists.      [exec] (in C:/code/uppercut/build)      [exec] Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks      [exec] Microsoft (R) Build Engine Version 3.5.30729.4926      [exec] [Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 2.0.50727.4927]      [exec] Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2007. All rights reserved. If you think this is awesome, you’d be right!   With this knowledge you shall build.

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• Chuck Norris Be Thy Name

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Chuck Norris doesn’t program with a keyboard. He stares the computer down until it does what he wants. All things need a name. We’ve tossed around a bunch of names for the framework of tools we’ve been working on, but one we kept coming back to was Chuck Norris. Why did we choose Chuck Norris? Well Chuck Norris sort of chose us. Everything we talked about, the name kept drawing us closer to it. We couldn’t escape Chuck Norris, no matter how hard we tried. So we gave in. Chuck Norris can divide by zero. What is the Chuck Norris Framework? @drusellers and I have been working on a variety of tools: WarmuP - http://github.com/chucknorris/warmup (Template your entire project/solution and create projects ready to code - From Zero to a Solution with everything in seconds. Your templates, your choices.) UppercuT - http://projectuppercut.org (Build with Conventions - Professional Builds in Moments, Not Days!) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut DropkicK - http://github.com/chucknorris/dropkick (Deploy Fluently) RoundhousE - http://projectroundhouse.org (Professional Database Management with Versioning) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/roundhouse SidePOP - http://sidepop.googlecode.com (Does your application need to check email?) HeadlocK - http://github.com/chucknorris/headlock (Hash a directory so you can later know if anything has changed) Others – still in concept or vaporware People ask why we choose such violent names for each tool of our framework? At first it was about whipping your code into shape, but after awhile the naming became, “How can we relate this to Chuck Norris?” People also ask why we uppercase the last letter of each name. Well, that’s more about making you ask questions…but there are a few reasons for it. Project managers never ask Chuck Norris for estimations…ever. The class object inherits from Chuck Norris Chuck Norris doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick() So what are you waiting for? Join the Google group today, download and play with the tools. And lastly, welcome to Chuck Norris. Or should I say Chuck Norris welcomes you…

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• Symbolic Regular Expression Exploration

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  This is a pretty sweet little tool. Rex (Regular Expression Exploration) is a tool that allows you to give it a regular expression and it returns matching strings. The example below creates10 strings that start and end with a number and have at least 2 characters: > rex.exe "^\d.*\d$" /k:10 This is something I could use to validate/generate the Regular Expressions I have created with both UppercuT and RoundhousE. Check out the video below: Margus Veanes - Rex - Symbolic Regular Expression Exploration Margus Veanes, a Researcher from the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, gives an overview of Rex, a tool that generates matching string from .NET regular expressions. Rex turns regular expres...

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• Professional iOS Development as a Backup Career [closed]

  - by New Coder

  I am a research chemist by day and I am a self-taught hobbyist iOS programmer by night. I am in the process of developing a moderately complex iOS app and hope to launch it within a month or two. I love everything about iOS development (and programming in general). I want to know if iOS development could become a backup career for me if I loose my job. My question: Let's say I had a couple of apps in the app store, a solid foundation in objective-C and the apple frameworks and basic knowledge on network integrated apps. Without a formal CS degree, what other experience/knowledge would I need to land a job as a professional iOS developer? Forgive me if this question is out of bounds for this forum. If it is, suggestions on where to post such a question would be appreciated.

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• Coders For Charities

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Last weekend I had the opportunity to give back to the community doing what I love. As geeks we don’t usually have this opportunity. The event is called Coders 4 Charities (C4C) and it’s a grueling weekend of coding for nearly 30 hours over the weekend. When you finish you get to present to the charity and all of the other groups what you have completed. From the site: Coders For Charities is a 3-day charity event that pairs charities and local software developers. Charities often do not have the funds to implement a new website or intranet or database solution. Software developers often do not volunteer for charities because their skills do not apply. This event is the perfect marriage of these two needs; software developers volunteering their time to help charities better serve their community though the latest technology! The actual event was lined with multiple charities and about 50 developers, designers, business analysts, etc, each working with a different charity to come up with a solution that they could implement in less than 3 days. C4C provided a place and food for us so that we wouldn’t have to leave much during the time we had to implement our solution. They also provided games like Rock Band so we could get away and clear our minds for a few moments if necessary. I don’t think we made it down there to play, but the food and drinks were a huge help for us. The charity we we picked was Harvest Home. They had a need for an online intranet site where they could track membership and gardening. Over the next few days we worked on a site we could give them. Below is a screen shot with private data marked out. It was an awesome and humbling experience to be able to give back to a charity and I’m happy I was a part of it. I would definitely do it again. How often do we get to use our abilities to volunteer our time to a charity?

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Ajax application: using SOAP vs REST ?

  - by coder

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

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• Microsoft C# Most Valuable Professional

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Visual C#. For those that don’t know it’s an annual award based on nominations from peers and Microsoft. Although there are just over 4,000 MVPs worldwide from all kinds of specializations, there are less than 100 C# MVPs in the US. There is more information at the site: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft. With fewer than 5,000 awardees worldwide, Microsoft MVPs represent a highly select group of experts. MVPs share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. To recognize the contributions they make, MVPs from around the world have the opportunity to meet Microsoft executives, network with peers, and position themselves as technical community leaders. Here is my profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/profile/rob.reynolds I want to thank those that nominated me, without nominations this would never have happened. Thanks to Microsoft for liking me and finding my achievements and contributions to the community to be worth something. It’s good to know when you put in a lot of hard work that you get rewarded! I also want to thank many of the people I have worked with over the last 7 years. You guys have been great and I’m definitely standing on the shoulders of giants! Thanks to KDOT for giving me that first shot into professional programming and the experience and all of the training! A special thanks to @drusellers for kick starting me when I went stale in my learning back in 2007 and for always pushing me and bouncing ideas off of me. Without you I don’t think I would have made it this far. Thanks Alt.NET for keeping it fresh and funky! A very special thank you goes out to my wife for supporting me and locking me in the basement to work on all of my initiatives!

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• From Zero To Deployed Contest&ndash;Prizes Announced

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Do you have what it takes to meet the challenge? We’ll make it worth it. You may have noticed at the end of my last post I threw down the community challenge to get from zero to deployed faster than me. The Challenge My time was 13:48 to be from zero to deployed. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Here are the links to the videos: #1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZIUVfHWsbc #2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7WluaXIya0 #3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqPh7wbWsLc The Rules Let’s revisit those ground rules before I tell you what the prizes will be: Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) The Prizes The prize package for the best time is:                      $50 Gift Card or equivalent – Provided by yours truly. AppHarbor $100 service credit – AppHarbor will provide a $100 credit for their services once they launch payments. Thank you to the folks at AppHarbor! ReSharper - Jetbrains will provide a FULL license of ReSharper Personal. This license is a $199 value. Thank you to the folks at Jetbrains! Telerik Ultimate Collection for .NET – Telerik will provide a license to pretty much every .NET tool they offer. This license is a $1999 value. A big thank you to the folks at Telerik!! This is a total value of $2348!!! The prize package for the person that has the most creative video(s) with a time better than mine (if there are at least 5 responses):           $20 Gift card or equivalent – Provided by this guy. AppHarbor $50 service credit – same deal as above. Thank you AppHarbor! Twilio T-Shirt - Twilio has donated a shirt and will ship your size to you (this may be subject to US residents only). This is a $25 value. Thank you to the folks at Twilio!

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• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

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• Stagnating in programming

  - by Coder

  Time after time this question came up in my mind, but up until today I wasn't thinking about it much. I have been programming for maybe around 8 years now, and for the last two years it seems I'm not as keen to pick up new technologies anymore. Maybe that's a burnout or something, but I'd say it's experience and what I like, that's stopping me from running after the latest and greatest. I'm C++ developer, by this I mean, I love close to metal programming. I have no problems tracing problems through assembly, using tools like WinDbg or HexView. When I use constructs, I think about how they are realized underneath, how the bits are set and unset under the hood. I love battling with complex threading problems and doing everything hardcore way, even by hand if the regular solutions seem half baked. But I also love the C++0x stuff, and use it a lot. And all C++ code as long as it's not cumbersome compared to C counterparts, sometimes I also fall back to sort of "Super C" if the C++ way is ugly. And then there are all other developers who seem to be way more forward looking, .Net 4.0 MVC, WPF, all those Microsoft X#s, LINQ languages, XML and XSLT, mobile devices and so on. I have done a considerable amount of .NET, SQL, ASPX programming, but the further I go, the less I want to try those technologies. Is that bad? Almost every day I hear people saying that managed code is the only way forward, WPF is the way to go. I hear that C++ is godawful, and you can't code anything in it that's somewhat stable. But I don't buy it. With the experience I have, and the knowledge of how native code is compiled and executes, I can say I find it extremely rare that C++ code is unstable, or leaks, or causes crashes that takes more than 30 seconds to identify and fix. And to tell the truth, I've seen enough problems with other "cool" languages that I'd say C++ is even more stable and production proof than the safe languages, at least for me. The only thing that scares me in C++ is new frameworks, I don't trust them, and I use them extra sparingly. STL - yes, ATL - very sparingly, everything else... Well, not very keen on it. Most huge problems I've ran into, all were related to frameworks, not the language itself. Some overrided operator here, bad hierarchy there, poor class design here, mystical castings there. Other than that, C/C++ (yes, I use them together) still seems a very controlled and stable way to develop applications. Am I stagnating? Should I switch a profession, or force myself in all that marketing hype? Are there more developers who feel the same way?

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• Is it ok to replace optimized code with readable code?

  - by Coder

  Sometimes you run into a situation where you have to extend/improve an existing code. You see that the old code is very lean, but it's also difficult to extend, and takes time to read. Is it a good idea to replace it with modern code? Some time ago I liked the lean approach, but now, it seems to me that it's better to sacrifice a lot of optimizations in favor of higher abstractions, better interfaces and more readable, extendable code. The compilers seem to be getting better as well, so things like struct abc = {} are silently turned into memsets, shared_ptrs are pretty much producing the same code as raw pointer twiddling, templates are working super good because they produce super lean code, and so on. But still, sometimes you see stack based arrays and old C functions with some obscure logic, and usually they are not on the critical path. Is it good idea to change such code if you have to touch a small piece of it either way?

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• RoundhousE now supports Oracle, SQL2000

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  RoundhousE, the database migration software that is based on sql scripts has added support for Oracle and SQL 2000.  There have also been numerous other little things, including better logging and a script run errors table. The script errors table captures what went wrong when/if your scripts are not quite up to par or there is some other issue. A special thanks goes out to http://twitter.com/PascalMestdach and http://twitter.com/jochenjonc. They worked hard on this and all I did was provide guidance and help bring it back to the trunk. This is what an entry in the database looks like: This is a preview of new log: ================================================== Versioning ================================================== Attempting to resolve version from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\sample\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml using //buildInfo/version. Found version 0.5.0.188 from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\sample\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml. Migrating TestRoundhousE from version 0 to 0.5.0.188. Versioning TestRoundhousE database with version 0.5.0.188 based on http://roundhouse.googlecode.com/svn. ================================================== Migration Scripts ================================================== Looking for Update scripts in "C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\sample\deployment\..\db\TestRoundhousE\up". These should be one time only scripts. -------------------------------------------------- Running 0001_CreateTables.sql on (local) - TestRoundhousE. Running 0002_ChangeTable.sql on (local) - TestRoundhousE. Running 0003_TestBatchSplitter.sql on (local) - TestRoundhousE. -------------------------------------------------- But what are you waiting for? Head out and grab the latest release today!

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• Why do some user agents have spam urls in them?

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  If you go to (say) the last 100 entries (visits) to the botsvsbrowsers.com website (exact link, feel free to take a look: http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html ), you'd notice that almost every User Agent that has the keywords "Opera" and "Presto" inside them, will almost certainly have a web link (URL/Web Address) inside it, and it won't just be a normal web address, but a HTML anchor tag/link to that address. Why is this so, I could not even find a single discussion about it on the internet, nowhere, I tried varying my search terms many times. If the user agent contains the words "Opera" and "Presto" it doesnt mean it will have this weblink, but it means there is about an 80% change that it will. A typical anchor tag/link inside a user agent will look like this: Mozilla/4.0 <a href="http://osis-uk.co.uk/disabled-equipment">disability equipment</a> (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60 If you check it out at the website, http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html you will notice that the back and forward arrows are in there unescaped format. This isn't just true for botsvsbrowsers, but several other user agent listing sites. I'm really confused and feel line I'm in a room full of 10,000 people and am the only one seeing this ghost :). If I'm doing statistical analysis, should I include or exclude this type of user agent from my listing (ie: are these just normal users who've set their user agents to attempt to drive some traffic to their sites as they browser the web), or is there something else going on? The fact that it is so consistent in terms of its format leads me to believe that it is an automated process (the setting or alteration of the user agent) so I cannot decide or understand the process by which this change is made (I know how to change a user agent), but unsure which program or facility is doing this, especially since it is exclusive to Opera (Presto) user agents that are beyond I think an 8 or 9 point something browser version. I've run some statistical tests, parsing entries from all over the place, writing custom programs, to get a better understanding of this. Keep in mind that I see normal URL's in user agents infrequently, they are just text such as +http://www.someSite.com appended to a user agent normally, especially if its a crawler or bot it provided its service URL, this is normal and isnt done with an embedded link (A HREF=) etc, so I'm not talking about "those".

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• ATI Radeon HD 6870 Driver fails to install default-policy.sh does not support version

  - by Rogue Coder

  I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 Beta, with everything updated completely. I'm using Ubuntu Classic, because Unity fails to run, supposedly because of my video card. The drivers for the Radeon HD 6870 series is apparently lacking, but I found a post stating the newest version has full support for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. That post is slightly old, so i grabbed 11.3 for Ubuntu x86 off the ATI website. When I run the installation program, I receive the following error: > ./ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run Created directory fglrx-install.uREFoO Verifying archive integrity... All good. Uncompressing ATI Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver-8.831.2......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.38-8-generic-pae:; make sure that the version is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.38-8-generic-pae:; make sure that the version is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.uREFoO > I would love to get the latest ATI drivers working so that I can try out Unity!

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• AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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• Biggest mistake you've ever made

  - by Rogue Coder

  Similar to the question I read on Server Fault, what is the biggest mistake you've ever made in an IT related position. Some examples from friends: I needed to do some work on a production site so I decided to copy over the live database to the beta site. Pretty standard, but when I went to the beta site it was still pulling out-of-date info. OOPS! I had copied the beta database over to the live site! Thank god for backups. And for me, I created a form for an event that was to be held during a specific time range. Participants would fill out the form for a chance to win, and we would send the event organizers a CSV from the database. I went into the database, and found ONLY 1 ENTRY, MINE. Upon investigating, it appears as though I forgot an auto increment key, and because of the server setup there was no way to recover the lost data. I am aware this question is similar to ones on Stack Overflow but the ones I found seemed to receive generic answers instead of actual stories :) What is the biggest coding error/mistake ever…

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• Yahoo hosts Cracks / Warez on its OWN server!

  - by Naughty.Coder

  I can not believe no body has done anything regarding this issue. Yahoo bought a website called dvd4arab.com 4-5 years back. This site has all copyrighted / illegal material you can imagine .. Music/ Movies/ Software and games. I believe most of them hosted somewhere on file-sharing websites, but there are attachments in the forum. How to report this? and to whom? The series of buying is like this: Dvd4arab sold to Maktoob, Yahoo bought Maktoob, Microsoft bought Yahoo

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• UppercuT and Mercurial (hg)

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  I mentioned this awhile back on twitter, but UppercuT (UC) has support for Mercurial for versioning your assemblies. In the settings file, all you need to do it tell UC to use hg. When you build your assemblies, they will use the changeset number in the version, and in the informational version, you get the hash, just like you do when using Git. Pretty sweet. By the way, UC also supports .NET 4.0 as of last week. With this knowledge you shall build.

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• Puppet: Getting Started On Windows

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-getting-started-on-windows.aspxNow that we’ve talked a little about Puppet. Let’s see how easy it is to get started. Install Puppet Let’s get Puppet Installed. There are two ways to do that: With Chocolatey: Open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: choco install puppet Download and install Puppet manually - http://puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options Run Puppet Let’s make pasting into a console window work with Control + V (like it should): choco install wincommandpaste If you have a cmd.exe command shell open, (and chocolatey installed) type: RefreshEnv The previous command will refresh your environment variables, ala Chocolatey v0.9.8.24+. If you were running PowerShell, there isn’t yet a refreshenv for you (one is coming though!). If you have to restart your CLI (command line interface) session or you installed Puppet manually open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: puppet resource user Output should look similar to a few of these: user { 'Administrator': ensure => 'present', comment => 'Built-in account for administering the computer/domain', groups => ['Administrators'], uid => 'S-1-5-21-some-numbers-yo-500', } Let's create a user: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => present, groups => ['Users'], }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: created Run the 'puppet resource user' command again. Note the user we created is there! Let’s clean up after ourselves and remove that user we just created: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => absent, }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: removed Run the 'puppet resource user' command one last time. Note we just removed a user! Conclusion You just did some configuration management /system administration. Welcome to the new world of awesome! Puppet is super easy to get started with. This is a taste so you can start seeing the power of automation and where you can go with it. We haven’t talked about resources, manifests (scripts), best practices and all of that yet. Next we are going to start to get into more extensive things with Puppet. Next time we’ll walk through getting a Vagrant environment up and running. That way we can do some crazier stuff and when we are done, we can just clean it up quickly.

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• What is the most effective way to add functionality to unfamiliar, structurally unsound code?

  - by Coder

  This is probably something everyone has to face during the development sooner or later. You have an existing code written by someone else, and you have to extend it to work under new requirements. Sometimes it's simple, but sometimes the modules have medium to high coupling and medium to low cohesion, so the moment you start touching anything, everything breaks. And you don't feel that it's fixed correctly when you get the new and old scenarios working again. One approach would be to write tests, but in reality, in all cases I've seen, that was pretty much impossible (reliance on GUI, missing specifications, threading, complex dependencies and hierarchies, deadlines, etc). So everything sort of falls back to good ol' cowboy coding approach. But I refuse to believe there is no other systematic way that would make everything easier. Does anyone know a better approach, or the name of the methodology that should be used in such cases?

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• Input Handling and Game loop

  - by Bob Coder

  So, I intercept the WM_KEYDOWN and other messages. Thing is, my game can't/shouldn't react to these messages just yet, since my game might be currently drawing to the screen or in the middle of updating my game entities. So the idea is to keep a keyboardstate and mousestate, which is updated by the part of my code that intercepts the windows messages. These states just keep track of which keys/buttons are currently pressed. Then, at the start of my game's update function, I access these keyboard and mouse states and my game reacts to the user input. Now, which is the best way to access these states? I assume that windows messages can be sent whenever, so the keyboard/mouse states are constantly being edited. Accessing say a list of currently pressed keys in the keyboard state the same time another part of the code is editing the list would cause problems. Should I make a deep copy of a state and act on that? How would I deal with the garbage generated though, this would take place every frame.

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