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• Why do programmers have to learn for their whole lives and aren't you afraid of that?

  - by serg555

  Programming technologies are evolving so fast that programmers constantly have to learn more and more to catch up whether you want it or not. Often it is not just learning more in the same direction but starting from a scratch. Lets say you were a topnotch programmer in 1999 who quit for 10 years and went to a job interview in 2009 (funny even to imagine) - how much of your knowledge is still needed? And if we take a carpenter, engineer, doctor or even mathematician - they all are still good specialists after 10 years. So why programming is so not stable? Is it because it is just relatively new or because something important is still missing after 50 years and we can't find it to settle in that direction? Do you think after some time situation will change? Learning something new all the time is exciting and all, but it is starting to worry me that as I become older it will be harder and harder. After all "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" and I'm afraid that at the end I just end up behind college students and become one of those "cobol dinosaurs", only it will be probably "java dinosaurs" by that time.

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• Have I taken a wrong path in programming by being excessively worried about code elegance and style?

  - by Ygam

  I am in a major stump right now. I am a BSIT graduate, but I only started actual programming less than a year ago. I observed that I have the following attitude in programming: I tend to be more of a purist, scorning unelegant approaches to solving problems using code I tend to look at anything in a large scale, planning everything before I start coding, either in simple flowcharts or complex UML charts I have a really strong impulse on refactoring my code, even if I miss deadlines or prolong development times I am obsessed with good directory structures, file naming conventions, class, method, and variable naming conventions I tend to always want to study something new, even, as I said, at the cost of missing deadlines I tend to see software development as something to engineer, to architect; that is, seeing how things relate to each other and how blocks of code can interact (I am a huge fan of loose coupling) i.e the OOP thinking I tend to combine OOP and procedural coding whenever I see fit I want my code to execute fast (thus the elegant approaches and refactoring) This bothers me because I see my colleagues doing much better the other way around (aside from the fact that they started programming since our first year in college). By the other way around I mean, they fire up coding, gets the job done much faster because they don't have to really look at how clean their codes are or how elegant their algorithms are, they don't bother with OOP however big their projects are, they mostly use web APIs, piece them together and voila! Working code! CLients are happy, they get paid fast, at the expense of a really unmaintainable or hard-to-read code that lacks structure and conventions, or slow executions of certain actions (which the common reasoning against would be that internet connections are much faster these days, hardware is more powerful). The excuse I often receive is clients don't care about how you write the code, but they do care about how long you deliver it. If it works then all is good. Now, did my "purist" approach to programming may have been the wrong way to start programming? Should I just dump these purist concepts and just code the hell up because I have seen it: clients don't really care how beautifully coded it is?

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• A moral dilemma - What job to go for?

  - by StefanE

  Here is the story: I have accepted an offer from a gaming company to work as an senior test engineer / developer. I have not yet received an signed copy of the contract. I will get a bit less salary then I asked for and it is as well less than I have today. The company have booked flight tickets for my move over there. Now comes the problem. I did an telephone interview with a company last week and they have asked me for an in person interview and are willing to pay for flights for the meeting. This company is my first choice(and have been for a few years) and would also benefit my career and I believe I will enjoy working there more. What should I do here.. I do feel uncomfortable giving a last minute rejection when I have over the phone accepted the offer, but on the other hand they have yet produced a signed contract and as well paying me a bit less than I think I'm worth. The business is small in many ways and I don't want to end up with a bad reputation. Would be great to hear your opinions!

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• Presenting an image cropping interface

  - by wkw

  I'm trying to engineer a UI for cropping images in iphone OS and suspect I'm going about things the hard way. My goal is pretty much what the Tapbots duo have done with Pastebot. In that app, they dim the source image but provide a movable and resizable cropping view and the image you're cropping is in a zoomable scrollview; when you resize or move the underlying image, the cropping view adjusts appropriately. I mocked up a composite image which will give a sense of the design I'm after, along with how I presently have my view hierarchy setup, viewable here The approach I've started with is the following: UIImageView with the image to crop is in a scrollview, a plain UIView with black fill and suitable transparency/alpha setting is added in front of the imageview. I then use a custom UIView which is a sibling to the scrollview at a higher level, which implements the drawRect: method and for the most part calls CGImageCreateWithImageInRect to get the portion of the image's bitmap that matches the position of the cropping view and draws that to the CGContext. in the viewcontroller I'm using the UIScrollViewDelegate methods to track scrolling and passing those changes to the custom cropping UIView so it stays in sync with the scroll contentOffset. That much is finally working. But trying to keep in sync as the scrollview zoomScale changes is when I figured I should ask for help. Looking for suggestions or guidance. My initial approach just seems like more work than is required. Could this be done with a masking layer in the ImageView? And if so, how would I setup the tracking for moving and resizing the cropping rect? My experience working with layers is non-nil, but very limited thus far.

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• iPhone SDK allow touches to affect multiple views

  - by Parad0x13

  I have a main view that has has two buttons on it that control methods to display the next image and display the previous image. In this case the 'Image' is a class that inherits from UIImageView and has multiple pictures on it that you can interact with, and I call this class a 'Pane'. The pane itself handles all the user interaction itself while the main view controls the display of next and previous panes with the buttons. Here is my dilemma, because the pane fully covers the main view it wont allow for the user to tap the buttons on the main view! So once a pane pops up you cannot change it via the buttons! Is there a way to allow touches through transparent parts of a view, or if not how in the world do I achieve this?! I cannot pass touchesBegan or any of those methods from the pane to the superview because all of the button touch methods are created in the xib file. I cannot insert the pane under the control panel because then you wouldn't be able to interact with the pane. And as far as I know theres no way to pass touch events to every single pane within the paneHoldingArray that belongs to the main view I cannot add the command buttons inside of the pane because I want to be able to replace the command button's image with a thumbprint render of the next/previous pane. I've been stuck on this for a very long time, please somebody help me out with a fix action or a new way to re-engineer the code so that it will work!

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• Are women worse developers than men? [closed]

  - by Ekaterina

  Hi people, I am a software engineer and a woman. I constantly keep hearing all these jokes around me, about women in programming. They (they - stands for male colleagues) keep pointing out the differences in thinking between men and women. The truth is that when I started working as a developer, my colleagues gave a hard time only because I am a woman. They automatically assumed that I want to do only html and styling, and didn't even me giving me the chance to do something different. I am a .NET programmer and I really disliked (and still dislike) front-end developing. I do agree men and women think differently, but I don't agree that necessarily is a bad thing. Different approach of problems/goals brings more ideas and diversity. I really believe that there are good developer and bad developers despite the male/female factor. I am curious to hear overall opinion though. Would you not hire a woman developer only because is a woman? Cheers!

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• What languages should a microISV use to write commercial software?

  - by Wal

  I've been writing software in Java for many years now, but it was always for internal applications that would be deployed to a server. I'd like to get into writing desktop applications now but I don't know where to start. I've written a few Java/Swing applications but again they were for internal use. My understanding is that Java and other semi-compiled and interpreted languages are too easy to reverse engineer, making them unsuitable for commercial software. I am aware that there are compilers for Java and some other interpreted language, but I've also heard that they are pricey and/or unreliable. Assuming I start a microISV and wish to develop and sell applications to a broad audience, what's my best bet? I would prefer something that can be written close to once, and compiled for different operating systems but I am not opposed to .NET and a Windows-only audience if other languages would compromise the experience (installation ease & user experience) in Windows. My only issue there is that I don't have a large starting budget and paying out the wazoo for the required development tools is not really in the cards.

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• What's the most efficient query?

  - by Aaron Carlino

  I have a table named Projects that has the following relationships: has many Contributions has many Payments In my result set, I need the following aggregate values: Number of unique contributors (DonorID on the Contribution table) Total contributed (SUM of Amount on Contribution table) Total paid (SUM of PaymentAmount on Payment table) Because there are so many aggregate functions and multiple joins, it gets messy do use standard aggregate functions the the GROUP BY clause. I also need the ability to sort and filter these fields. So I've come up with two options: Using subqueries: SELECT Project.ID AS PROJECT_ID, (SELECT SUM(PaymentAmount) FROM Payment WHERE ProjectID = PROJECT_ID) AS TotalPaidBack, (SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT DonorID) FROM Contribution WHERE RecipientID = PROJECT_ID) AS ContributorCount, (SELECT SUM(Amount) FROM Contribution WHERE RecipientID = PROJECT_ID) AS TotalReceived FROM Project; Using a temporary table: DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Project_Temp; CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE Project_Temp (project_id INT NOT NULL, total_payments INT, total_donors INT, total_received INT, PRIMARY KEY(project_id)) ENGINE=MEMORY; INSERT INTO Project_Temp (project_id,total_payments) SELECT `Project`.ID, IFNULL(SUM(PaymentAmount),0) FROM `Project` LEFT JOIN `Payment` ON ProjectID = `Project`.ID GROUP BY 1; INSERT INTO Project_Temp (project_id,total_donors,total_received) SELECT `Project`.ID, IFNULL(COUNT(DISTINCT DonorID),0), IFNULL(SUM(Amount),0) FROM `Project` LEFT JOIN `Contribution` ON RecipientID = `Project`.ID GROUP BY 1 ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE total_donors = VALUES(total_donors), total_received = VALUES(total_received); SELECT * FROM Project_Temp; Tests for both are pretty comparable, in the 0.7 - 0.8 seconds range with 1,000 rows. But I'm really concerned about scalability, and I don't want to have to re-engineer everything as my tables grow. What's the best approach?

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• Does a CS PhD Help for Software Engineering Career?

  - by SiLent SoNG

  I would like to seek advice on whether or not to take a PhD offer from a good university. My only concern is the PhD will take at least 4 year's commitment. During the period I won't have good monetary income. I am also concerned whether the PhD will help my future career development. My career goal is software engineering only. Some of the PhD info: The PhD is CS related. The research area is Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Nature Language Processing. More specifically, the research topic is Deep Web search. Some of backgrounds: I worked in Oracle for 3 years in database development after obtained a CS degree from some good university. In last year I received an email telling an interesting project from a professor and thereafter I was lured into his research team. The team consists of 4 PhD students; those students have little or no industry experiences and their coding skills are really really bad. By saying bad I mean they do not know some common patterns and they do not know pitfalls of the programming languages as well as idioms for doing things right. I guess a at least 4 year commitment is worth of serious consideration. I am 27 at this moment. If I take the offer, that implies I will be 31+ upon graduation. Wah... becoming.. what to say, no longer young. Hence, here I am seeking advice on whether it is good or not to take the PhD offer, and whether a CS PhD is good for my future career growth as a software engineer? I do not intent to go for academia.

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• Uncrackable anti-piracy protection/DRM even possible? [closed]

  - by some guy

  I hope that this is programming-related enough. You have probably heard about Ubisofts recent steps against piracy. (New DRM requires a constant connection to the Ubisoft server) Many people including me see this as intolerable because the only ones suffering from it at the end are the paying customers. Now to the actual question(s): Ubisoft justified this by calling this mechanism "Uncrackable, only playable by the paying customers". Is a so called uncrackable DRM even possible? You can reverse-engineer and modify everything, even if it takes long. Isn't Ubisoft already lying by calling something not crackable? I mean, hey - With the game you get all its content (textures, models, you know) and some anti-piracy mechanism hardcoded into it. How could that be "uncrackable"? You can just patch the unwanted mechanisms out ---- "Pirates" play the cracked game without problems and the paying customers are the idiots by having constant problems with the game and being unable to play it without a (working) internet connection. What are the points Ubisoft sees in this? If they are at least a bit intelligent and informed they know their anti-piracy protection won't last long. All they get is lower sales, angry customers and happy pirates and crackers.

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• Definition of the job titles involved in a software development process.

  - by Rafael Romão

  I have seen many job titles for people involved in a software development process, but never found a consensus about they mean. I know many of them are equivalent, and found some other questions about that here in SO, but I would like to know your definitions and comments about them. I want not only to know if there is really a consensus, but also to know if what I suppose to be a Software Architect, is really a Software Architect, and so on. The job titles I mean are: Developer; System Analyst; Programmer; Analyst Programmer; Software Engineer; Software Architect; Designer; Software Designer; Business Manager; Business Analyst; Program Manager; Project Manager; Development Manager; Tester; Support Analyst; Please, feel free to add more titles to this list in your answers. It would be very helpful.

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• Is it impossible to secure .net code (intellectual property) ?

  - by JL

  I used to work in JavaScript a lot and one thing that really bothered my employers was that the source code was too easy to steal. Even with obfuscation, nothing really helped, because we all knew that any competent developer would be able to read that code if they wanted to. JS Scripts are one thing, but what about SOA projects that have millions invested in IP (Intellectual Property). I love .net, and especially C#, but I recently again had to answer the question "If we give this compiled program over to our clients, can their developers reverse engineer it?" I had gone out of my way to obfuscate the code, but I knew it wouldn't take that much for another determined C# developer to get at the code. So I earnestly pose the question, is it impossible to secure .net code? The considerations I have as as follows: Even regular native executables can be reversed, but not every developer has the skill to be able to do this. Its a lot harder to disassemble a native executable than a .net assembly. Obfuscation will only get you so far, but it does help a little. Why have I never seen any public acknowledgement by Microsoft that anything written in .net is subject to relatively easy IP theft? Why have I never seen a scrap of counter measure training on any Microsoft site? Why does VS come with a community obfuscater as an optional component? Ok maybe I have just had my head in the sand here, but its not exactly high on most developers priority list. Are there any plans to address my concerns in any future version of .net? I'm not knocking .net, but I would like some realistic answers, thank you, question marked as subjective and community!

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• Fitting title for my position

  - by lithander

  In the last 2 years my company has developed a boxed and full-price computer game. All the software development has been done collaboratively by me and my co-developer. We know each other from university and got hired at the same day to equal conditions and we share the same responsibilites including the decisions of what technology to license and how to spend development resources and even how team-workflow is organized. But I struggle to find the correct wording for my position. Can I call myself a senior developer with only 3 years working-experience? Can I call myself lead programmer if I don't really have a team to "lead"? All these fancy names used in the industry (Technical Lead, Development Lead, Software Architect) seem to imply that you aren't actually coding anymore or have staff under you. On the other hand titles like "Programmer" or "Software Engineer" seem to imply that there's someone between you and the project management. That makes it hard to fill out a resume or even the badges you typically wear on conferences... people tend to judge you by your title and I'd like to avoid confusion where possible.

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• Developer friendly open-source license?

  - by Francisco Garcia

  As a software engineer/programmer myself, I love the possibility to download the code and learn from it. However building software is what brings food to my table. I have doubts regarding the type of license I should use for my own personal projects or when picking up one project to learn from. There are already many questions about licenses on Stackoverflow, but I would like to make this one much more specific. If your main profession and way of living is building software, which type of license do you find more useful for you? And I mean, the license that can benefit you most as a professional because it gives you more freedom to reuse the experience you gain. GPL is a great license to build communities because it forces you to give back your work. However I like BSD licenses because of their extra freedom. I know that if the code I am exploring is BSD licensed, I might be able to expand not only my skills, but also my programmer toolbox. Whenever I am working for a company, I might recall that something similar was done in another project and I will be able to copy or imitate certain part of the code. I know that there are religious wars regarding GPL vs BSD and it is not my intention to start one. Probably many companies already take snipsets from GPL projects anyway. I just want to insist in the factor of professional enrichment. I do not intend to discriminate any license. I said I prefer BSD licenses but I also use Linux because the user base is bigger and also the market demand.

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• Entangled text boxes

  - by user38329

  Hi StackOverflow, A mere Windows textbox greatly surprised me today. I have two unrelated text boxes inside an application. I can type in either text box and switch the focus by clicking on them. Then happens some event X, which I can't describe here for reasons given below. After this event happens, the two text boxes become "entangled" in an almost quantum way. Say, text box A was focused before X happened. When I click text box B to type in some text, the new text appears in text box A, whereas the blinking cursor happily moves along in text box B through the void, as if the text were there. No amount of clicking on either text boxes can resolve this. The cursor will always remain in B, whereas the text will always go to A. Message spying reveals that after the event X, the text boxes lose the ability to lose or gain focus. When I click on B, WM_LOSE_FOCUS does not come to A, and WM_SET_FOCUS does not come to B. (The rectangles and visibility of the boxes are OK.) The same thing happens in Windows XP and Windows 7. Now, event X: it's a big event in a third-party UI library which I cannot reverse-engineer in a timely manner. (Namely, docking a pane in wxAUI.) I am sure that this behavior is the result of incorrect WinAPI calls to the text boxes (garbage in - garbage out). I would like to know what could possibly cause such "textbox trip" to know where to start looking for the bug. Thanks!

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• Git from localhost to remotehost with a team of three

  - by Mark McDonnell

  Hi, I'm completely new to Git. I've only just worked out how to use Github in a basic way (e.g. push my local file changes to Github - so I've not done 'pulling' down of content from Github and 'merging' it into my localhost version or anything like that). I had a look over at this existing question - Git: localhost remote development remote production - but I think it may have been a bit advanced for me at this stage as I didn't quite understand the terminology that most of the people were using. What I would like to achieve is to have a local server set-up that my team of developers can all 'push' to/'pull' from etc. And then have that local server upload any updated files automatically to our web server so we could see the updates live in the browser. I'm happy to get a server set-up in the office running Mac OSX Server and then installing Git on it and then getting the devs to write a shell script to push to the remote server but only if it was fairly easy for the devs local git to push to this new local server. I'm not a network engineer so I don't know what would need to be set-up for that to work, I know obviously we could set-up the server to be accessible via a local ip address like 192.168.0.xxx but not sure how that works with pushing to a git repository on that server? Would that literally be something like doing this on my local machine: git remote add MyGitFile git://192.168.0.xxx/MyGitFile.git ? Any ideas or advice you can give to a total Git newbie trying to help his team get a better work flow. Kind regards, Mark

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• Are certain open-source licenses more suitable than others for career growth?

  - by Francisco Garcia

  As a software engineer/programmer myself, I love the possibility to download the code and learn from it. However building software is what brings food to my table. I have doubts regarding the type of license I should use for my own personal projects or when picking up one project to learn from. There are already many questions about licenses on Stackoverflow, but I would like to make this one much more specific. If your main profession and way of living is building software: which type of license do you find more useful for you? And I mean, the license that can benefit you most as a professional because it gives you more freedom to reuse the experience you gain. GPL is a great license to build communities because it forces you to give back your work. However I like BSD licenses because of their extra freedom. I know that if the code I am exploring is BSD licensed, I might be able to expand not only my skills, but also my programmer toolbox. Whenever I am working for a company, I might recall that something similar was done in another project and I will be able to copy or imitate certain part of the code. I know that there are religious wars regarding GPL vs BSD and it is not my intention to start one. Probably many companies already take snipsets from GPL projects anyway. I just want to insist in the factor of professional enrichment. I do not intend to discriminate any license. I said I prefer BSD licenses but I also use Linux because the user base is bigger and also the market demand.

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• How difficult is it for an old-school programmer to pick up an FPGA kit and make something useful wi

  - by JUST MY correct OPINION

  I'm an old, old, old coder. (How old? I've used paper tape in anger.) I've programmed in a lot of languages and under a lot of paradigms (spaghetti, structured, object-oriented, functional and a smattering of logical). I'm getting bored. FPGAs look interesting to me. I have the crazy notion of resurrecting some of the ancient hardware I worked on in the days using FPGAs. I know this can be done because I've seen PDP-10 and PDP-11 implementations in FPGAs. I'd like to do the same for a few machines that are perhaps not as popular as those two, however. While I am an old, old coder, what I am not is an electronics or computer systems engineer. I'll be learning from scratch if I go down this path. My question, therefore, is two-fold: How difficult will it be for this old dinosaur to pick up and learn FPGAs to the point that interesting (not necessarily practical -- more from a hobbyist perspective) projects can be made? What should I start with learning-wise to go down this path? I know where to get FPGA kits, but I haven't found anything like "FPGAs for Complete Dinosaurs" yet anywhere out there.

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• How I May Have Taken A Wrong Path in Programming

  - by Ygam

  I am in a major stump right now. I am a BSIT graduate, but I only started actual programming less than a year ago. I observed that I have the following attitude in programming: I tend to be more of a purist, scorning unelegant approaches to solving problems using code I tend to look at anything in a large scale, planning everything before I start coding, either in simple flowcharts or complex UML charts I have a really strong impulse on refactoring my code, even if I miss deadlines or prolong development times I am obsessed with good directory structures, file naming conventions, class, method, and variable naming conventions I tend to always want to study something new, even, as I said, at the cost of missing deadlines I tend to see software development as something to engineer, to architect; that is, seeing how things relate to each other and how blocks of code can interact (I am a huge fan of loose coupling) i.e the OOP thinking I tend to combine OOP and procedural coding whenever I see fit I want my code to execute fast (thus the elegant approaches and refactoring) This bothers me because I see my colleagues doing much better the other way around (aside from the fact that they started programming since our first year in college). By the other way around I mean, they fire up coding, gets the job done much faster because they don't have to really look at how clean their codes are or how elegant their algorithms are, they don't bother with OOP however big their projects are, they mostly use web APIs, piece them together and voila! Working code! CLients are happy, they get paid fast, at the expense of a really unmaintainable or hard-to-read code that lacks structure and conventions, or slow executions of certain actions (which the common reasoning against would be that internet connections are much faster these days, hardware is more powerful). The excuse I often receive is clients don't care about how you write the code, but they do care about how long you deliver it. If it works then all is good. Now, did my "purist" approach to programming may have been the wrong way to start programming? Should I just dump these purist concepts and just code the hell up because I have seen it: clients don't really care how beautifully coded it is?

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• Compromising design & code quality to integrate with existing modules

  - by filip-fku

  Greetings! I inherited a C#.NET application I have been extending and improving for a while now. Overall it was obviously a rush-job (or whoever wrote it was seemingly less competent than myself). The app pulls some data from an embedded device & displays and manipulates it. At the core is a communications thread in the main application form which executes a 600+ lines of code method which calls functions all over the place, implementing a state machine - lots of if-state-then-do type code. Interaction with the device is done by setting the state/mode globally and letting the thread do it's thing. (This is just one example of the badness of the code - overall it is not very OO-like, it reminds of the style of embedded C code the device firmware is written in). My problem is that this piece of code is central to the application. The software, communications protocol or device firmware are not documented at all. Obviously to carry on with my work I have to interact with this code. What I would like some guidance on, is whether it is worth scrapping this code & trying to piece together something more reasonable from the information I can reverse engineer? I can't decide! The reason I don't want to refactor is because the code already works, and changing it will surely be a long, laborious and unpleasant task. On the flip side, not refactoring means I have to sometimes compromise the design of other modules so that I may call my code from this state machine! I've heard of "If it ain't broke don't fix it!", so I am wondering if it should apply when "it" is influencing the design of future code! Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!

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• How do C++ compilers actually pass reference parameters?

  - by T.E.D.

  This question came about as a result of some mixed-langauge programming. I had a Fortran routine I wanted to call from C++ code. Fortran passes all its parameters by reference (unless you tell it otherwise). So I thought I'd be clever (bad start right there) in my C++ code and define the Fortran routine something like this: extern "C" void FORTRAN_ROUTINE (unsigned & flag); This code worked for a while but (of course right when I needed to leave) suddenly started blowing up on a return call. Clear indication of a munged call stack. Another engineer came behind me and fixed the problem, declaring that the routine had to be deinfed in C++ as extern "C" void FORTRAN_ROUTINE (unsigned * flag); I'd accept that except for two things. One is that it seems rather counter-intuitive for the compiler to not pass reference parameters by reference, and I can find no documentation anywhere that says that. The other is that he changed a whole raft of other code in there at the same time, so it theoretically could have been another change that fixed whatever the issue was. So the question is, how does C++ actually pass reference parameters? Is it perhaps free to do copy-in, copy-out for small values or something? In other words, are reference parameters utterly useless in mixed-language programming? I'd like to know so I don't make this same code-killing mistake ever again.

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• Screenscraping and reverse engineering health based web tool

  - by ArbInv

  Hi There is a publicly available free tool which has been built to help people understand the impact of various risk factors on their health / life expectancy. I am interested in understanding the data that sits behind the tool. To get this out it would require putting in a range of different socio-demographic factors and analyzing the resulting outputs. This would need to be done across many thousand different individual profiles. The tool was probably built on some standard BI platorm. I have no interest in how the tool was built but do want to get to the data within it. The site has a Terms of Use Agreement which includes: Not copying, distribute, adapt, create derivative works of, translate, or otherwise modify the said tool Not decompile, disassemble, reverse assemble, or otherwise reverse engineer the tool. The said institution retains all rights, title and interest in and to the Tool, and any and all modifications thereof, including all copyright, copyright registrations, trade secrets, trademarks, goodwill and confidential and proprietary information related thereto. Would i be in effect breaking the law if i were to point a screen scraping tool which downloaded the data that sits behind the tool in question?? Any advice welcomed? THANKS

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• Any guidelines for handling the Headset and Bluetooth AVRC transport controls in Android 2.2

  - by StefanK

  I am trying to figure out what is the correct (new) approach for handling the Intent.ACTION_MEDIA_BUTTON in Froyo. In pre 2.2 days we had to register a BroadcastReceiver (either permanently or at run-time) and the Media Button events would arrive, as long as no other application intercepts them and aborts the broadcast. Froyo seems to still somewhat support that model (at least for the wired headset), but it also introduces the registerMediaButtonEventReceiver, and unregisterMediaButtonEventReceiver methods that seem to control the "transport focus" between applications. During my experiments, using registerMediaButtonEventReceiver does cause both the bluetooth and the wired headset button presses to be routed to the application's broadcast receiver (the app gets the "transport focus"), but it looks like any change in the audio routing (for example unplugging the headset) shits the focus back to the default media player. What is the logic behind the implementation in Android 2.2? What is correct way to handle transport controls? Do we have to detect the change in the audio routing and try to re-gain the focus? This is an issue that any 3rd party media player on the Android platform has to deal with, so I hope that somebody (probably a Google Engineer) can provide some guidelines that we can all follow. Having a standard approach may make headset button controls a bit more predictable for the end users. Stefan

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• Should I go to school and get my degree in computer science?

  - by ryan

  I'll try and keep this short and simple. I've always enjoyed programming and I've been doing it since high school. Right after I graduated from high school (2002), I opted to skip college because I was offered a software engineer position. I quit after a couple of years later to team up on various startup companies. However, most of them did not launch as well as expected. But it honestly did not matter to me because I've learned so much from that experience. So fast forwarding to today, now turned 25, I need a job due to this tough economic climate. Looking on Craigslist, a lot of the listings require computer science degrees. It's evident now that programming is what I want to do because I seem to never get enough of it. But just the thought of having to push 2 years without attending any real computer class for an Associates at age 25 is very, very discouraging. And the thought of having to learn from basic (Hello WOOOOORRLLLD) just does not seem exciting. I guess I have 3 questions to wrap this up: Should I just suck it up and go back to school while working at McDonalds at age 25? Is there a way where I can just skip all the boring stuff and just get tested with what I know? From your experience, how many jobs use computer science degrees as prerequisites? Or am I screwed and better pray that my next startup will be the next big thing?

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• At what point is it worth using a database?

  - by radix07

  I have a question relating to databases and at what point is worth diving into one. I am primarily an embedded engineer, but I am writing an application using QT to interface with our controller. We are at an odd point where we have enough data that it would be feasible to implement a database (around 700+ items and growing) to manage everything, but I am not sure it is worth the time right now to deal with. I have no problems implementing the GUI with files generated from excel and parsed in, but it gets tedious and hard to track even with VBA scripts. I have been playing around with converting our data into something more manageable for the application side with Microsoft Access and that seems to be working well. If that works out I am only a step (or several) away from using an SQL database and using the QT library to access and modify it. I don't have much experience managing data at this level and am curious what may be the best way to approach this. So what are some of the real benefits of using a database if any in this case? I realize much of this can be very application specific, but some general ideas and suggestions on how to straddle the embedded/application programming line would be helpful. Thanks

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