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• iPhone reachability checking

  - by Sneakyness

  I've found several examples of code to do what I want (check for reachability), but none of it seems to be exact enough to be of use to me. I can't figure out why this doesn't want to play nice. I have the reachability.h/m in my project, I'm doing #import <SystemConfiguration/SystemConfiguration.h> And I have the framework added. I also have: #import "Reachability.h" at the top of the .m in which I'm trying to use the reachability. Reachability* reachability = [Reachability sharedReachability]; [reachability setHostName:@"http://www.google.com"]; // set your host name here NetworkStatus remoteHostStatus = [reachability remoteHostStatus]; if(remoteHostStatus == NotReachable) {NSLog(@"no");} else if (remoteHostStatus == ReachableViaWiFiNetwork) {NSLog(@"wifi"); } else if (remoteHostStatus == ReachableViaCarrierDataNetwork) {NSLog(@"cell"); } This is giving me all sorts of problems. What am I doing wrong? I'm an alright coder, I just have a hard time when it comes time to figure out what needs to be put where to enable what I want to do, regardless if I want to know what I want to do or not. (So frustrating) Update: This is what's going on. This is in my viewcontroller, which I have the #import <SystemConfiguration/SystemConfiguration.h> and #import "Reachability.h" set up with. This is my least favorite part of programming by far. FWIW, we never ended up implementing this in our code. The two features that required internet access (entering the sweepstakes, and buying the dvd), were not main features. Nothing else required internet access. Instead of adding more code, we just set the background of both internet views to a notice telling the users they must be connected to the internet to use this feature. It was in theme with the rest of the application's interface, and was done well/tastefully. They said nothing about it during the approval process, however we did get a personal phone call to verify that we were giving away items that actually pertained to the movie. According to their usually vague agreement, you aren't allowed to have sweepstakes otherwise. I would also think this adheres more strictly to their "only use things if you absolutely need them" ideaology as well. Here's the iTunes link to the application, EvoScanner.

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• a4j:support within a rich:modalPanel

  - by Andy Deighton

  Hi all, I've hit a wall. I know the a4j and rich tags pretty well (I use Seam 2.2.0 and Richfaces 3.3.1). However, I'm trying to do something quite simple, but in a rich:modalPanel. It seems that rich:modalPanels do not allow Ajax events to be fired. Here's a simple breakdown: I have a h:selectOneMenu with some items in it and whose value is attached to a backing bean. Attached to that h:selectOneMenu is a a4j:support tag so that whenever the change event is fired, the backing bean should get updated. Truly simple stuff eh? However, when this h:selectOneMenu is in a rich:modalPanel the onchange event doesn't update the backing bean until the rich:modalPanel closes. I can confirm this because I'm running it in Eclipse debug mode and I have a breakpoint on the setter of the property that's hooked up to the h:selectOneMenu. This is driving me mad! This is vanilla stuff for Ajax, but rich:modalPanels don't seem to allow it. So, the question is: can I do Ajax stuff within a rich:modalPanel? I'm basically trying to use the rich:modalPanel as a form (I've tried a4j:form and h:form to no avail) that reacts to changes to the drop down (e.g. when the user changes the drop down, a certain part of the form should get reRendered). Am I trying to do something that's not possible? Here's a simplified version of the modalPanel: <rich:modalPanel id="quickAddPanel"> <div> <a4j:form id="quickAddPaymentForm" ajaxSubmit="true"> <s:decorate id="paymentTypeDecorator"> <a4j:region> <h:selectOneMenu id="paymentType" required="true" value="#{backingBean.paymentType}" tabindex="1"> <s:selectItems label="#{type.description}" noSelectionLabel="Please select..." value="#{incomingPaymentTypes}" var="type"/> <s:convertEnum/> <a4j:support ajaxSingle="true" event="onchange" eventsQueue="paymentQueue" immediate="true" limitToList="true" reRender="paymentTypeDecorator, paymentDetailsOutputPanel, quickAddPaymentForm"/> </h:selectOneMenu> </a4j:region> </s:decorate> </fieldset> <fieldset class="standard-form"> <div class="form-title">Payment details</div> <a4j:outputPanel id="paymentDetailsOutputPanel"> <h:outputText value="This should change whenever dropdown changes: #{backingBean.paymentType}"/> </a4j:outputPanel> </fieldset> </a4j:form> </div> </rich:modalPanel> Regards, Andy

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• Parallel.For maintain input list order on output list

  - by romeozor

  I'd like some input on keeping the order of a list during heavy-duty operations that I decided to try to do in a parallel manner to see if it boosts performance. (It did!) I came up with a solution, but since this was my first attempt at anything parallel, I'd need someone to slap my hands if I did something very stupid. There's a query that returns a list of card owners, sorted by name, then by date of birth. This needs to be rendered in a table on a web page (ASP.Net WebForms). The original coder decided he would construct the table cell-by-cell (TableCell), add them to rows (TableRow), then each row to the table. So no GridView, allegedly its performance is bad, but the performance was very poor regardless :). The database query returns in no time, the most time is spent on looping through the results and adding table cells etc. I made the following method to maintain the original order of the list: private TableRow[] ComposeRows(List<CardHolder> queryResult) { int queryElementsCount = queryResult.Count(); // array with the query's size var rowArray = new TableRow[queryElementsCount]; Parallel.For(0, queryElementsCount, i => { var row = new TableRow(); var cell = new TableCell(); // various operations, including simple ones such as: cell.Text = queryResult[i].Name; row.Cells.Add(cell); // here I'm adding the current item to it's original index // to maintain order in the output list rowArray[i] = row; }); return rowArray; } So as you can see, because I'm returning a very different type of data (List<CardHolder> -> TableRow[]), I can't just simply omit the ordering from the original query to do it after the operations. Also, I also thought it would be a good idea to Dispose() the objects at the end of each loop, because the query can return a huge list and letting cell and row objects pile up in the heap could impact performance.(?) How badly did I do? Does anyone have a better solution in case mine is flawed?

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• If Then Statement Condition Being Ignored With Optimisations On

  - by Matma

  I think im going mad but can some show me what im missing, it must be some stupidly simple i just cant see the wood for the trees. BOTH side of this if then else statement are being executed? Ive tried commenting out the true side and moving the condition to a seperate variable with the same result. However if i explicitly set the condition to 1=0 or 1=1 then the if then statement is operating as i would expect. i.e. only executing one side of the equation... The only time ive seen this sort of thing is when the compiler has crashed and is no longer compiling (without visible indication that its not) but ive restarted studio with the same results, ive cleaned the solution, built and rebuilt with no change? please show me the stupid mistake im making using vs2005 if it matters. Dim dset As DataSet = New DataSet If (CboCustomers.SelectedValue IsNot Nothing) AndAlso (CboCustomers.SelectedValue <> "") Then Dim Sql As String = "Select sal.SalesOrderNo As SalesOrder,cus.CustomerName,has.SerialNo, convert(varchar,sal.Dateofpurchase,103) as Date from [dbo].[Customer_Table] as cus " & _ " inner join [dbo].[Hasp_table] as has on has.CustomerID=cus.CustomerTag " & _ " inner join [dbo].[salesorder_table] as sal On sal.Hasp_ID =has.Hasp_ID Where cus.CustomerTag = '" & CboCustomers.SelectedValue.ToString & "'" Dim dap As SqlDataAdapter = New SqlDataAdapter(Sql, FormConnection) dap.Fill(dset, "dbo.Customer_Table") DGCustomer.DataSource = dset.Tables("dbo.Customer_Table") Else Dim erm As String = "wtf" End If EDIT: i have found that this is something to do with the release config settings im using, i guesing its the optimisations bit. does anyone know of any utils/addons for vs that show if a line has been optimised out. delphi, my former language showed blue dots in the left margin to show that it was a compiled line, no dot meaning it wasnt compiled in, is there anything like that for vs? alternatively can someone explain how optimisations would affect this simple if statement causeing it to run both sides? EDIT2: using this thread as possible causes/solutions : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2135509/bug-only-occurring-when-compile-optimization-enabled. It does the same with release = optimisations on, x86, x64 and AnyCPU Goes away with optimisations off. Im using V2005 on a x64 win7 machine, if that matters. Thanks

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• UIScrollView Infinite Scrolling

  - by Ben Robinson

  I'm attempting to setup a scrollview with infinite (horizontal) scrolling. Scrolling forward is easy - I have implemented scrollViewDidScroll, and when the contentOffset gets near the end I make the scrollview contentsize bigger and add more data into the space (i'll have to deal with the crippling effect this will have later!) My problem is scrolling back - the plan is to see when I get near the beginning of the scroll view, then when I do make the contentsize bigger, move the existing content along, add the new data to the beginning and then - importantly adjust the contentOffset so the data under the view port stays the same. This works perfectly if I scroll slowly (or enable paging) but if I go fast (not even very fast!) it goes mad! Heres the code: - (void) scrollViewDidScroll:(UIScrollView *)scrollView { float pageNumber = scrollView.contentOffset.x / 320; float pageCount = scrollView.contentSize.width / 320; if (pageNumber > pageCount-4) { //Add 10 new pages to end mainScrollView.contentSize = CGSizeMake(mainScrollView.contentSize.width + 3200, mainScrollView.contentSize.height); //add new data here at (320*pageCount, 0); } //*** the problem is here - I use updatingScrollingContent to make sure its only called once (for accurate testing!) if (pageNumber < 4 && !updatingScrollingContent) { updatingScrollingContent = YES; mainScrollView.contentSize = CGSizeMake(mainScrollView.contentSize.width + 3200, mainScrollView.contentSize.height); mainScrollView.contentOffset = CGPointMake(mainScrollView.contentOffset.x + 3200, 0); for (UIView *view in [mainContainerView subviews]) { view.frame = CGRectMake(view.frame.origin.x+3200, view.frame.origin.y, view.frame.size.width, view.frame.size.height); } //add new data here at (0, 0); } //** MY CHECK! NSLog(@"%f", mainScrollView.contentOffset.x); } As the scrolling happens the log reads: 1286.500000 1285.500000 1284.500000 1283.500000 1282.500000 1281.500000 1280.500000 Then, when pageNumber<4 (we're getting near the beginning): 4479.500000 4479.500000 Great! - but the numbers should continue to go down in the 4,000s but the next log entries read: 1278.000000 1277.000000 1276.500000 1275.500000 etc.... Continiuing from where it left off! Just for the record, if scrolled slowly the log reads: 1294.500000 1290.000000 1284.500000 1280.500000 4476.000000 4476.000000 4473.000000 4470.000000 4467.500000 4464.000000 4460.500000 4457.500000 etc.... Any ideas???? Thanks Ben.

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• Release management with a distributed version control system

  - by See Sharp Cheddar

  We're considering a switch from SVN to a distributed VCS at my workplace. I'm familiar with all the reasons for wanting to using a DVCS for day-to-day development: local version control, easier branching and merging, etc., but I haven't seen that much that's compelling in terms of managing software releases. Here's our release process: Discover what changes are available for merging. Run a query to find the defects/tickets associated with these changes. Filter out changes associated with "open" tickets. In our environment, tickets must be in a closed state in order to merged with a release branch. Filter out changes we don't want in the release branch. We are very conservative when it comes to merging changes. If a change isn't absolutely necessary, it doesn't get merged. Merge available changes, preferably in chronological order. We group changes together if they're associated with the same ticket. Block unwanted changes from the release branch (svnmerge block) so we don't have to deal with them again. Sometimes we can be juggling 3-5 different milestones at a time. Some milestones have very different constraints, and the block list can get quite long. I've been messing around with git, mercurial and plastic, and as far as I can tell none of them address this model very well. It seems like they would work very well when you have only one product you're releasing, but I can't imagine using them for juggling multiple, very different products from the same codebase. For example, cherry-picking seems to be an afterthought in mercurial. (You have to use the 'transplant' command). After you cherry-pick a change into a branch it still shows up as an available integration. Cherry-picking breaks the mercurial way of working. DVCS seems to be better suited for feature branches. There's no need for cherry-picking if you merge directly from a feature branch to trunk and the release branch. But who wants to do all that merging all the time? And how do you query for what's available to merge? And how do you make sure all the changes in a feature branch belong together? It sounds like total chaos. I'm torn because the coder in me wants DVCS for day-to-day work. I really want it. But I fear the day when I have to put the release manager hat and sort out what needs to be merged and what doesn't. I want to write code, I don't want to be a merge monkey.

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• How to manipulate file paths intelligently in .Net 3.0?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Scenario: I am maintaining a function which helps with an install - copies files from PathPart1/pending_install/PathPart2/fileName to PathPart1/PathPart2/fileName. It seems that String.Replace() and Path.Combine() do not play well together. The code is below. I added this section: // The behavior of Path.Combine is weird. See: // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/53102/why-does-path-combine-not-properly-concatenate-filenames-that-start-with-path-dir while (strDestFile.StartsWith(@"\")) { strDestFile = strDestFile.Substring(1); // Remove any leading backslashes } Debug.Assert(!Path.IsPathRooted(strDestFile), "This will make the Path.Combine(,) fail)."); in order to take care of a bug (code is sensitive to a constant @"pending_install\" vs @"pending_install" which I did not like and changed (long story, but there was a good opportunity for constant reuse). Now the whole function: //You want to uncompress only the files downloaded. Not every file in the dest directory. private void UncompressFiles() { string strSrcDir = _application.Client.TempDir; ArrayList arrFiles = new ArrayList(); GetAllCompressedFiles(ref arrFiles, strSrcDir); IEnumerator enumer = arrFiles.GetEnumerator(); while (enumer.MoveNext()) { string strDestFile = enumer.Current.ToString().Replace(_application.Client.TempDir, String.Empty); // The behavior of Path.Combine is weird. See: // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/53102/why-does-path-combine-not-properly-concatenate-filenames-that-start-with-path-dir while (strDestFile.StartsWith(@"\")) { strDestFile = strDestFile.Substring(1); // Remove any leading backslashes } Debug.Assert(!Path.IsPathRooted(strDestFile), "This will make the Path.Combine(,) fail)."); strDestFile = Path.Combine(_application.Client.BaseDir, strDestFile); strDestFile = strDestFile.Replace(Path.GetExtension(strDestFile), String.Empty); ZSharpLib.ZipExtractor.ExtractZip(enumer.Current.ToString(), strDestFile); FileUtility.DeleteFile(enumer.Current.ToString()); } } Please do not laugh at the use of ArrayList and the way it is being iterated - it was pioneered by a C++ coder during a .Net 1.1 era. I will change it. What I am interested in: what is a better way of replacing PathPart1/pending_install/PathPart2/fileName with PathPart1/PathPart2/fileName within the current code. Note that _application.Client.TempDir is just _application.Client.BaseDir + @"\pending_install". While there are many ways to improve the code, I am mainly concerned with the part which has to do with String.Replace(...) and Path.Combine(,). I do not want to make changes outside of this function. I wish Path.Combine(,) took an optional bool flag, but it does not. So ... given my constraints, how can I rework this so that it starts to sucks less? Thanks!

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• How to replicate this button in CSS

  - by jasondavis

  I am trying to create a CSS theme switcher button like below. The top image shows what I have so far and the bottom image shows what I am trying to create. I am not the best at this stuff I am more of a back-end coder. I could really use some help. I have a live demo of the code here http://dabblet.com/gist/2230656 Just looking at what I have and the goal image, some differences. I need to add a gradient The border is not right on mine Radius is a little off Possibly some other stuff? Also here is the code...it can be changed anyway to improve this, the naming and stuff could be improved I am sure but I can use any help I can get. HTML <div class="switch-wrapper"> <div class="switcher left selected"> <span id="left">....</span> </div> <div class="switcher right"> <span id="right">....</span> </div> </div> CSS /* begin button styles */ .switch-wrapper{ width:400px; margin:220px; } .switcher { background:#507190; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; box-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,.3); position:relative; } #left, #right{ width:17px; height:11px; overflow:hidden; position:absolute; top:50%; left:50%; margin-top:-5px; margin-left:-8px; font: 0/0 a; } #left{ background-image: url(http://www.codedevelopr.com/assets/images/switcher.png); background-position: 0px px; } #right{ background-image: url(http://www.codedevelopr.com/assets/images/switcher.png); background-position: -0px -19px; } .left, .right{ width: 30px; height: 25px; border: 1px solid #3C5D7E; } .left{ border-radius: 6px 0px 0px 6px; } .right{ border-radius: 0 6px 6px 0; margin: 0 0 0 -6px } .switcher:hover, .selected { background: #27394b; box-shadow: -1px 1px 0px rgba(255,255,255,.4), inset 0 4px 5px rgba(0,0,0,.6), inset 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.6); }

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• Setting default values for inherited property without using accessor in Objective-C?

  - by Ben Stock

  I always see people debating whether or not to use a property's setter in the -init method. I don't know enough about the Objective-C language yet to have an opinion one way or the other. With that said, lately I've been sticking to ivars exclusively. It seems cleaner in a way. I don't know. I digress. Anyway, here's my problem … Say we have a class called Dude with an interface that looks like this: @interface Dude : NSObject { @private NSUInteger _numberOfGirlfriends; } @property (nonatomic, assign) NSUInteger numberOfGirlfriends; @end And an implementation that looks like this: @implementation Dude - (instancetype)init { self = [super init]; if (self) { _numberOfGirlfriends = 0; } } @end Now let's say I want to extend Dude. My subclass will be called Playa. And since a playa should have mad girlfriends, when Playa gets initialized, I don't want him to start with 0; I want him to have 10. Here's Playa.m: @implementation Playa - (instancetype)init { self = [super init]; if (self) { // Attempting to set the ivar directly will result in the compiler saying, // "Instance variable `_numberOfGirlfriends` is private." // _numberOfGirlfriends = 10; <- Can't do this. // Thus, the only way to set it is with the mutator: self.numberOfGirlfriends = 10; // Or: [self setNumberOfGirlfriends:10]; } } @end So what's a Objective-C newcomer to do? Well, I mean, there's only one thing I can do, and that's set the property. Unless there's something I'm missing. Any ideas, suggestions, tips, or tricks? Sidenote: The other thing that bugs me about setting the ivar directly — and what a lot of ivar-proponents say is a "plus" — is that there are no KVC notifications. A lot of times, I want the KVC magic to happen. 50% of my setters end in [self setNeedsDisplay:YES], so without the notification, my UI doesn't update unless I remember to manually add -setNeedsDisplay. That's a bad example, but the point stands. I utilize KVC all over the place, so without notifications, things can act wonky. Anyway, any info is much appreciated. Thanks!

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• How do you unit test the real world?

  - by Kim Sun-wu

  I'm primarily a C++ coder, and thus far, have managed without really writing tests for all of my code. I've decided this is a Bad Idea(tm), after adding new features that subtly broke old features, or, depending on how you wish to look at it, introduced some new "features" of their own. But, unit testing seems to be an extremely brittle mechanism. You can test for something in "perfect" conditions, but you don't get to see how your code performs when stuff breaks. A for instance is a crawler, let's say it crawls a few specific sites, for data X. Do you simply save sample pages, test against those, and hope that the sites never change? This would work fine as regression tests, but, what sort of tests would you write to constantly check those sites live and let you know when the application isn't doing it's job because the site changed something, that now causes your application to crash? Wouldn't you want your test suite to monitor the intent of the code? The above example is a bit contrived, and something I haven't run into (in case you haven't guessed). Let me pick something I have, though. How do you test an application will do its job in the face of a degraded network stack? That is, say you have a moderate amount of packet loss, for one reason or the other, and you have a function DoSomethingOverTheNetwork() which is supposed to degrade gracefully when the stack isn't performing as it's supposed to; but does it? The developer tests it personally by purposely setting up a gateway that drops packets to simulate a bad network when he first writes it. A few months later, someone checks in some code that modifies something subtly, so the degradation isn't detected in time, or, the application doesn't even recognize the degradation, this is never caught, because you can't run real world tests like this using unit tests, can you? Further, how about file corruption? Let's say you're storing a list of servers in a file, and the checksum looks okay, but the data isn't really. You want the code to handle that, you write some code that you think does that. How do you test that it does exactly that for the life of the application? Can you? Hence, brittleness. Unit tests seem to test the code only in perfect conditions(and this is promoted, with mock objects and such), not what they'll face in the wild. Don't get me wrong, I think unit tests are great, but a test suite composed only of them seems to be a smart way to introduce subtle bugs in your code while feeling overconfident about it's reliability. How do I address the above situations? If unit tests aren't the answer, what is? Thanks!

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• How to manipulate file paths intelligently in .Net 3.5?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Scenario: I am maintaining a function which helps with an install - copies files from PathPart1/pending_install/PathPart2/fileName to PathPart1/PathPart2/fileName. It seems that String.Replace() and Path.Combine() do not play well together. The code is below. I added this section: // The behavior of Path.Combine is weird. See: // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/53102/why-does-path-combine-not-properly-concatenate-filenames-that-start-with-path-dir while (strDestFile.StartsWith(@"\")) { strDestFile = strDestFile.Substring(1); // Remove any leading backslashes } Debug.Assert(!Path.IsPathRooted(strDestFile), "This will make the Path.Combine(,) fail)."); in order to take care of a bug (code is sensitive to a constant @"pending_install\" vs @"pending_install" which I did not like and changed (long story, but there was a good opportunity for constant reuse). Now the whole function: //You want to uncompress only the files downloaded. Not every file in the dest directory. private void UncompressFiles() { string strSrcDir = _application.Client.TempDir; ArrayList arrFiles = new ArrayList(); GetAllCompressedFiles(ref arrFiles, strSrcDir); IEnumerator enumer = arrFiles.GetEnumerator(); while (enumer.MoveNext()) { string strDestFile = enumer.Current.ToString().Replace(_application.Client.TempDir, String.Empty); // The behavior of Path.Combine is weird. See: // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/53102/why-does-path-combine-not-properly-concatenate-filenames-that-start-with-path-dir while (strDestFile.StartsWith(@"\"")) { strDestFile = strDestFile.Substring(1); // Remove any leading backslashes } Debug.Assert(!Path.IsPathRooted(strDestFile), "This will make the Path.Combine(,) fail)."); strDestFile = Path.Combine(_application.Client.BaseDir, strDestFile); strDestFile = strDestFile.Replace(Path.GetExtension(strDestFile), String.Empty); ZSharpLib.ZipExtractor.ExtractZip(enumer.Current.ToString(), strDestFile); FileUtility.DeleteFile(enumer.Current.ToString()); } } Please do not laugh at the use of ArrayList and the way it is being iterated - it was pioneered by a C++ coder during a .Net 1.1 era. I will change it. What I am interested in: what is a better way of replacing PathPart1/pending_install/PathPart2/fileName with PathPart1/PathPart2/fileName within the current code. Note that _application.Client.TempDir is just _application.Client.BaseDir + @"\pending_install". While there are many ways to improve the code, I am mainly concerned with the part which has to do with String.Replace(...) and Path.Combine(,). I do not want to make changes outside of this function. I wish Path.Combine(,) took an optional bool flag, but it does not. So ... given my constraints, how can I rework this so that it starts to suck less?

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• Device drivers and Windows

  - by b-gen-jack-o-neill

  Hi, I am trying to complete the picture of how the PC and the OS interacts together. And I am at point, where I am little out of guess when it comes to device drivers. Please, don´t write things like its too complicated, or you don´t need to know when using high programming laguage and winapi functions. I want to know, it´s for study purposes. So, the very basic structure of how OS and PC (by PC I mean of course HW) is how I see it is that all other than direct CPU commands, which can CPU do on itself (arithmetic operation, its registers access and memory access) must pass thru OS. Mainly becouse from ring level 3 you cannot use in and out intructions which are used for acesing other HW. I know that there is MMIO,but it must be set by port comunication first. It was not like this all the time. Even I am bit young to remember MSDOS, I know you could access HW directly, becouse there ws no limitation, no ring mode. So you could to write string to diplay use wheather DOS function, or directly acess video card memory and write it by yourself. But as OS developed, there is no longer this possibility. But it is fine, since OS now handles all the HW comunication, and frankly it more convinient and much more safe (I would say the only option) in multitasking environment. So nowdays you instead of using int instructions to use BIOS mapped function or DOS function you call dll which internally than handles everything you don´t need to know about. I understand this. I also undrstand that device drivers is the piece of code that runs in ring level 0, so it can do all the HW interactions. But what I don´t understand is connection between OS and device driver. Let´s take a example - I want to make a sound card make a sound. So I call windows API to acess sound card, but what happens than? Does windows call device drivers to do so? But if it does call device driver, does it mean, that all device drivers which can be called by winAPI function, must have routines named in some specific way? I mean, when I have new sound card, must its drivers have functions named same as the old one? So Windows can actually call the same function from its perspective? But if Windows have predefined sets of functions requored by device drivers, that it cannot use new drivers that doesent existed before last version of OS came out. Please, help me understand this mess. I am really getting mad. Thanks.

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• C++ stream as a parameter when overloading operator<<

  - by TheOm3ga

  I'm trying to write my own logging class and use it as a stream: logger L; L << "whatever" << std::endl; This is the code I started with: #include <iostream> using namespace std; class logger{ public: template <typename T> friend logger& operator <<(logger& log, const T& value); }; template <typename T> logger& operator <<(logger& log, T const & value) { // Here I'd output the values to a file and stdout, etc. cout << value; return log; } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { logger L; L << "hello" << '\n' ; // This works L << "bye" << "alo" << endl; // This doesn't work return 0; } But I was getting an error when trying to compile, saying that there was no definition for operator<<: pruebaLog.cpp:31: error: no match for ‘operator<<’ in ‘operator<< [with T = char [4]](((logger&)((logger*)operator<< [with T = char [4]](((logger&)(& L)), ((const char (&)[4])"bye")))), ((const char (&)[4])"alo")) << std::endl’ So, I've been trying to overload operator<< to accept this kind of streams, but it's driving me mad. I don't know how to do it. I've been loking at, for instance, the definition of std::endl at the ostream header file and written a function with this header: logger& operator <<(logger& log, const basic_ostream<char,char_traits<char> >& (*s)(basic_ostream<char,char_traits<char> >&)) But no luck. I've tried the same using templates instead of directly using char, and also tried simply using "const ostream& os", and nothing. Another thing that bugs me is that, in the error output, the first argument for operator<< changes, sometimes it's a reference to a pointer, sometimes looks like a double reference...

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• What is wrong in this c++ code?

  - by narayanpatra

  Why this coder do not show error #include <iostream> int main() { using namespace std; unsigned short int myInt = 99; unsigned short int * pMark = 0; cout << myInt << endl; pMark = &myInt; *pMark = 11; cout << "*pMark:\t" << *pMark << "\nmyInt:\t" << myInt << endl; return 0; } But this one shows : #include<iostream> using namespace std; int addnumber(int *p, int *q){ cout << *p = 12 << endl; cout << *q = 14 << endl; } #include<iostream> using namespace std; int addnumber(int *p, int *q){ cout << *p = 12 << endl; cout << *q = 14 << endl; } int main() { int i , j; cout << "enter the value of first number"; cin >> i; cout << "enter the value of second number"; cin >> j; addnumber(&i, &j); cout << i << endl; cout << j << endl; } In both the code snippets, I am assigning *pointer=somevalue. In first code it do not show any error but it shows error in the line cout << *p = 12 << endl; cout << *q = 14 << endl; What mistake I am doing ?

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• Why does Cacti keep waiting for dead poller processes?

  - by Oliver Salzburg

  sorry for the length I am currently setting up a new Debian (6.0.5) server. I put Cacti (0.8.7g) on it yesterday and have been battling with it ever since. Initial issue The initial issue I was observing, was that my graphs weren't updating. So I checked my cacti.log and found this concerning message: POLLER: Poller[0] Maximum runtime of 298 seconds exceeded. Exiting. That can't be good, right? So I went checking and started poller.php myself (via sudo -u www-data php poller.php --force). It will pump out a lot of message (which all look like what I would expect) and then hang for a minute. After that 1 minute, it will loop the following message: Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. This goes on for 4 more minutes until the process is forcefully ended for running longer than 300s. So far so good I went on for a good hour trying to determine what poller might still be running, until I got to the conclusion that there simply is no running poller. Debugging I checked poller.php to see how that warning is issued and why. On line 368, Cacti will retrieve the number of finished processes from the database and use that value to calculate how many processes are still running. So, let's see that value! I added the following debug code into poller.php: print "Finished: " . $finished_processes . " - Started: " . $started_processes . "\n"; Result This will print the following within seconds of starting poller.php: Finished: 0 - Started: 1 Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. Finished: 1 - Started: 1 So the values are being read and are valid. Until we get to the part where it keeps looping: Finished: - Started: 1 Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. Suddenly, the value is gone. Why? Putting var_dump() in there confirms the issue: NULL Finished: - Started: 1 Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. The return value is NULL. How can that be when querying SELECT COUNT()...? (SELECT COUNT() should always return one result row, shouldn't it?) More debugging So I went into lib\database.php and had a look at that db_fetch_cell(). A bit of testing confirmed, that the result set is actually empty. So I added my own database query code in there to see what that would do: $finished_processes = db_fetch_cell("SELECT count(*) FROM poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'"); print "Finished: " . $finished_processes . " - Started: " . $started_processes . "\n"; $mysqli = new mysqli("localhost","cacti","cacti","cacti"); $result = $mysqli->query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00';"); $row = $result->fetch_assoc(); var_dump( $row ); This will output Finished: - Started: 1 array(1) { ["COUNT(*)"]=> string(1) "2" } Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. So, the data is there and can be accessed without any problems, just not with the method Cacti is using? Double-check that! I enabled MySQL logging to make sure I'm not imagining things. Sure enough, when the error message is looped, the cacti.log reads as if it was querying like mad: 06/29/2012 08:44:00 PM - CMDPHP: Poller[0] DEVEL: SQL Cell: "SELECT count(*) FROM cacti.poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'" 06/29/2012 08:44:01 PM - CMDPHP: Poller[0] DEVEL: SQL Cell: "SELECT count(*) FROM cacti.poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'" 06/29/2012 08:44:02 PM - CMDPHP: Poller[0] DEVEL: SQL Cell: "SELECT count(*) FROM cacti.poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'" But none of these queries are logged my MySQL. Yet, when I add my own database query code, it shows up just fine. What the heck is going on here?

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• Enterprise Library Logging / Exception handling and Postsharp

  - by subodhnpushpak

  One of my colleagues came-up with a unique situation where it was required to create log files based on the input file which is uploaded. For example if A.xml is uploaded, the corresponding log file should be A_log.txt. I am a strong believer that Logging / EH / caching are cross-cutting architecture aspects and should be least invasive to the business-logic written in enterprise application. I have been using Enterprise Library for logging / EH (i use to work with Avanade, so i have affection towards the library!! :D ). I have been also using excellent library called PostSharp for cross cutting aspect. Here i present a solution with and without PostSharp all in a unit test. Please see full source code at end of the this blog post. But first, we need to tweak the enterprise library so that the log files are created at runtime based on input given. Below is Custom trace listner which writes log into a given file extracted out of Logentry extendedProperties property. using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common.Configuration; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Configuration; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging; using System.IO; using System.Text; using System; using System.Diagnostics;   namespace Subodh.Framework.Logging { [ConfigurationElementType(typeof(CustomTraceListenerData))] public class LogToFileTraceListener : CustomTraceListener {   private static object syncRoot = new object();   public override void TraceData(TraceEventCache eventCache, string source, TraceEventType eventType, int id, object data) {   if ((data is LogEntry) & this.Formatter != null) { WriteOutToLog(this.Formatter.Format((LogEntry)data), (LogEntry)data); } else { WriteOutToLog(data.ToString(), (LogEntry)data); } }   public override void Write(string message) { Debug.Print(message.ToString()); }   public override void WriteLine(string message) { Debug.Print(message.ToString()); }   private void WriteOutToLog(string BodyText, LogEntry logentry) { try { //Get the filelocation from the extended properties if (logentry.ExtendedProperties.ContainsKey("filelocation")) { string fullPath = Path.GetFullPath(logentry.ExtendedProperties["filelocation"].ToString());   //Create the directory where the log file is written to if it does not exist. DirectoryInfo directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(Path.GetDirectoryName(fullPath));   if (directoryInfo.Exists == false) { directoryInfo.Create(); }   //Lock the file to prevent another process from using this file //as data is being written to it.   lock (syncRoot) { using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(fullPath, FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.Write, 4096, true)) { using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(fs, Encoding.UTF8)) { Log(BodyText, sw); sw.Close(); } fs.Close(); } } } } catch (Exception ex) { throw new LoggingException(ex.Message, ex); } }   /// <summary> /// Write message to named file /// </summary> public static void Log(string logMessage, TextWriter w) { w.WriteLine("{0}", logMessage); } } }   The above can be “plugged into” the code using below configuration <loggingConfiguration name="Logging Application Block" tracingEnabled="true" defaultCategory="Trace" logWarningsWhenNoCategoriesMatch="true"> <listeners> <add listenerDataType="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Configuration.CustomTraceListenerData, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" traceOutputOptions="None" filter="All" type="Subodh.Framework.Logging.LogToFileTraceListener, Subodh.Framework.Logging, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" name="Subodh Custom Trace Listener" initializeData="" formatter="Text Formatter" /> </listeners> Similarly we can use PostSharp to expose the above as cross cutting aspects as below using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Reflection; using PostSharp.Laos; using System.Diagnostics; using GC.FrameworkServices.ExceptionHandler; using Subodh.Framework.Logging;   namespace Subodh.Framework.ExceptionHandling { [Serializable] public sealed class LogExceptionAttribute : OnExceptionAspect { private string prefix; private MethodFormatStrings formatStrings;   // This field is not serialized. It is used only at compile time. [NonSerialized] private readonly Type exceptionType; private string fileName;   /// <summary> /// Declares a <see cref="XTraceExceptionAttribute"/> custom attribute /// that logs every exception flowing out of the methods to which /// the custom attribute is applied. /// </summary> public LogExceptionAttribute() { }   /// <summary> /// Declares a <see cref="XTraceExceptionAttribute"/> custom attribute /// that logs every exception derived from a given <see cref="Type"/> /// flowing out of the methods to which /// the custom attribute is applied. /// </summary> /// <param name="exceptionType"></param> public LogExceptionAttribute( Type exceptionType ) { this.exceptionType = exceptionType; }   public LogExceptionAttribute(Type exceptionType, string fileName) { this.exceptionType = exceptionType; this.fileName = fileName; }   /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the prefix string, printed before every trace message. /// </summary> /// <value> /// For instance <c>[Exception]</c>. /// </value> public string Prefix { get { return this.prefix; } set { this.prefix = value; } }   /// <summary> /// Initializes the current object. Called at compile time by PostSharp. /// </summary> /// <param name="method">Method to which the current instance is /// associated.</param> public override void CompileTimeInitialize( MethodBase method ) { // We just initialize our fields. They will be serialized at compile-time // and deserialized at runtime. this.formatStrings = Formatter.GetMethodFormatStrings( method ); this.prefix = Formatter.NormalizePrefix( this.prefix ); }   public override Type GetExceptionType( MethodBase method ) { return this.exceptionType; }   /// <summary> /// Method executed when an exception occurs in the methods to which the current /// custom attribute has been applied. We just write a record to the tracing /// subsystem. /// </summary> /// <param name="context">Event arguments specifying which method /// is being called and with which parameters.</param> public override void OnException( MethodExecutionEventArgs context ) { string message = String.Format("{0}Exception {1} {{{2}}} in {{{3}}}. \r\n\r\nStack Trace {4}", this.prefix, context.Exception.GetType().Name, context.Exception.Message, this.formatStrings.Format(context.Instance, context.Method, context.GetReadOnlyArgumentArray()), context.Exception.StackTrace); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(fileName)) { ApplicationLogger.LogException(message, fileName); } else { ApplicationLogger.LogException(message, Source.UtilityService); } } } } To use the above below is the unit test [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(NotImplementedException))] public void TestMethod1() { MethodThrowingExceptionForLog(); try { MethodThrowingExceptionForLogWithPostSharp(); } catch (NotImplementedException ex) { throw ex; } }   private void MethodThrowingExceptionForLog() { try { throw new NotImplementedException(); } catch (NotImplementedException ex) { // create file and then write log ApplicationLogger.TraceMessage("this is a trace message which will be logged in Test1MyFile", @"D:\EL\Test1Myfile.txt"); ApplicationLogger.TraceMessage("this is a trace message which will be logged in YetAnotherTest1Myfile", @"D:\EL\YetAnotherTest1Myfile.txt"); } }   // Automatically log details using attributes // Log exception using attributes .... A La WCF [FaultContract(typeof(FaultMessage))] style] [Log(@"D:\EL\Test1MyfileLogPostsharp.txt")] [LogException(typeof(NotImplementedException), @"D:\EL\Test1MyfileExceptionPostsharp.txt")] private void MethodThrowingExceptionForLogWithPostSharp() { throw new NotImplementedException(); } The good thing about the approach is that all the logging and EH is done at centralized location controlled by PostSharp. Of Course, if some other library has to be used instead of EL, it can easily be plugged in. Also, the coder ARE ONLY involved in writing business code in methods, which makes code cleaner. Here is the full source code. The third party assemblies provided are from EL and PostSharp and i presume you will find these useful. Do let me know your thoughts / ideas on the same. Technorati Tags: PostSharp,Enterprize library,C#,Logging,Exception handling

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Creating a multi-column rollover image gallery with HTML 5

  - by nikolaosk

  I know it has been a while since I blogged about HTML 5. I have two posts in this blog about HTML 5. You can find them here and here.I am creating a small content website (only text,images and a contact form) for a friend of mine.He wanted to create a rollover gallery.The whole concept is that we have some small thumbnails on a page, the user hovers over them and they appear enlarged on a designated container/placeholder on a page. I am trying not to use Javascript scripts when I am using effects on a web page and this is what I will be doing in this post.  Well some people will say that HTML 5 is not supported in all browsers. That is true but most of the modern browsers support most of its recommendations. For people who still use IE6 some hacks must be devised.Well to be totally honest I cannot understand why anyone at this day and time is using IE 6.0.That really is beyond me.Well, the point of having a web browser is to be able to ENJOY the great experience that the WE? offers today.  Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be ) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.For the people who are not convinced yet that they should invest time and resources on becoming experts on HTML 5 I should point out that HTML 5 websites will be ranked higher than others. Search engines will be able to locate better the content of our site and its relevance/importance since it is using semantic tags. Let's move now to the actual hands-on example. In this case (since I am mad Liverpool supporter) I will create a rollover image gallery of Liverpool F.C legends. I create a folder in my desktop. I name it Liverpool Gallery.Then I create two subfolders in it, large-images (I place the large images in there) and thumbs (I place the small images in there).Then I create an empty .html file called LiverpoolLegends.html and an empty .css file called style.css.Please have a look at the HTML Markup that I typed in my fancy editor package below<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Liverpool Legends Gallery</title><meta charset="utf-8"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"></head><body><header><h1>A page dedicated to Liverpool Legends</h1><h2>Do hover over the images with the mouse to see the full picture</h2></header><ul id="column1"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/john-barnes.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/john-barnes-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/ian-rush.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/ian-rush-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/graeme-souness.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/graeme-souness-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column2"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/steven-gerrard.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/steven-gerrard-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/kenny-dalglish.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/kenny-dalglish-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/robbie-fowler.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/robbie-fowler-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column3"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/alan-hansen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/alan-hansen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/michael-owen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/michael-owen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul></body></html> It is very easy to follow the markup. Please have a look at the new doctype and the new semantic tag <header>. I have 3 columns and I place my images in there.There is a class called "large".I will use this class in my CSS code to hide the large image when the mouse is not on (hover) an image Make sure you validate your HTML 5 page in the validator found hereHave a look at the CSS code below that makes it all happen.img { border:none;}#column1 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 100; }li { margin: 15px; list-style-type:none;}#column1 a img.large {  position: absolute; top: 0; left:700px; visibility: hidden;}#column1 a:hover { background: white;}#column1 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column2 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 195px; }li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column2 a img.large { position: absolute; top: 0; left:510px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column2 a:hover { background: white;}#column2 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column3 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 400px; width:108px;}li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column3 a img.large { width: 260px; height:260px; position: absolute; top: 0; left:315px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column3 a:hover { background: white;}#column3 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}?n the first line of the CSS code I set the images to have no border.Then I place the first column in the page and then remove the bullets from the list elements.Then I use the large CSS class to create a position for the large image and hide it.Finally when the hover event takes place I make the image visible.I repeat the process for the next two columns. I have tested the page with IE 10 and the latest versions of Opera,Chrome and Firefox.Feel free to style your HTML 5 gallery any way you want through the magic of CSS.I did not bother adding background colors and borders because that was beyond the scope of this post. Hope it helps!!!!

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• TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs.  So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts.  Preparing for Travel   When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need.  Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled.  For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there.  I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around.  Packing  Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the  clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take.  For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide.  For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard.  If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag.  Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water.  At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else.  I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change.  Working While Away  While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well.  I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it.  So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

  - by Bil Simser

  Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

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• 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

  - by Matt

  Coda plays an important role in designing layout on Mac. There are numerous coda alternatives for windows and Linux too. It is not possible to describe each and everyone so some of the coda alternatives, which work on both windows and Linux platforms, are discussed below. EditPlus $35.00 Good thing about EditPlus is that it highlights URLs and email addresses, activating them when you ‘crtl + double-click’. It also has a built in browser for previewing HTML, and FTP and SFTP support. Also supports Macros and RegEx find and replace. UltraEdit $49.99 It is another good coda alternative for windows and Linux. It is the best suited editor for text, HTML and HEX. It also plays an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. It supports disk-based 64-bit or standard file handling on 32-bit Windows platforms or window 2000 and later versions. HippoEdit $39.95 HippoEDIT has the best autocomplete it gives pop a ‘tooltip’ above your cursor as you type, suggesting words you’ve already typed. It does syntax highlighting for over 2 dozen language. Sublime Text $59.00 Sublime Text awesome ‘zoomed out’ view of the file lets you focus on the area you want. It lets you open a local file when you right-click on its link, and there are a few automation features, so this would make a solid choice of a text editor. Textpad $24.70 TextPad is simple editor with nifty features such as column select, drag-and-drop text between files, and hyperlink support. It also supports large files. Aptana Free Aptana Studio is one of the best editors working on both windows and Linux. It is a complete web development setting that has a nice blend of powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services. It is quite helpful as it support for PHP, CSS, FTP, and more. SciTE Free It is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. It has gradually developed as a generally useful editor. It provides for building and running programs. It is best to be used for jobs with simple configurations. SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12 E Text Editor $34.96 E Text Editor is a new text editor for Windows, which also works on Linux as well. It has powerful editing features and also some unique abilities. It makes text manipulation quite fast and easy, and makes user focus on his writing as it automatically does all the manual work. It can be extend it in any language. It supports Text Mate bundles, thus allows the user to tap into a huge and active community. Editra Free Editra is an upcoming editor, with some fantastic features such as user profiles, auto-completion, session saving, and syntax highlighing for 60+ languages. Plugins can extend the feature set, offering an integrated python console, FTP client, file browser, and calculator, among others. PSPad Free PSPad is a good Template for writing CSS, as it an internal web browser, and a macro recorder to the table. It also supports hex editing, and some degree of code compiling. JEdit Free It is a mature programmer’s text editor and has taken a good deal of time to be developed as it is today. It is better than many costlier development tools due to its features and simplicity of use. It has been released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Which also adds to its attractiveness. NEdit Free It is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which also works on Linux. It combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the full functionality and stability required by users who edit text for long period a day. It also provides for thorough support for development in various languages. It also facilitates the use of text processors, and other tools at the same time. It can be used productively by anyone who needs to edit text. It is quite a user-friendly tool. Its salient features include syntax highlighting with built in pattern, auto indent, tab emulation, block indentation adjustment etc. As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. MadEdit Free Mad Edit is an Open-Source and Cross-Platform Text/Hex Editor. It is written in C++ and wxWidgets. MadEdit can edit files in Text/Column/Hex modes. It also supports many useful functions, such as Syntax Highlighting, Word Wrap, Encoding for UTF8/16/32,and others. It also supports word count, which makes it quite a useful text editor for both windows and Linux. It has been recently modified on 10/09/2010. KompoZer Free Kompozer is a complete web authoring system that has a combination of web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer has been designed to be completely and extensively easy to use. It is thus an ideal tool for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without knowing HTML or web coding. It is based on the NVU source code. Vim Free Vim or “Vi IMproved” is an advanced text editor. Its salient features are syntax highlighting, word completion and it also has a huge amount of contributed content. Vim has several “modes” on offer for editing, which adds to the efficiency in editing. Thus it becomes a non-user-friendly application but it is also strength for its users. The normal mode binds alphanumeric keys to task-oriented commands. The visual mode highlights text. More tools for search & replace, defining functions, etc. are offered through command line mode. Vim comes with complete help. NotePad ++ Free One of the the best free text editor for Windows out there; with support for simple things—like syntax highlighting and folding—all the way up to FTP, Notepad++ should tick most of the boxes Notepad2 Free Notepad2 is also based on the Scintilla editing engine, but it’s much simpler than Notepad++. It bills itself as being fast, light-weight, and Notepad-like. Crimson Editor Free Crimson Editor has the ability to edit remote files, using a built-in FTP client; there’s also a spell checker. TotalEdit Free TotalEdit allows file comparison, RegEx search and replace, and has multiple options for file backup / versioning. For cleanup, it offers (X)HTML and XML customizable formatting, and a spell checker. In-Type Free ConTEXT Free SourceEdit Free SourceEdit includes features such as clipboard history, syntax highlighting and autocompletion for a decent set of languages. A hex editor and FTP client. RJ TextED Free RJ TextED supports integration with TopStyle Lite. Provides HTML validation and formatting. It includes an FTP client, a file browser, and a code browser, as well as a character map and support for email. GEDIT Free It is one of the best coda alternatives for windows and Linux. It has syntax highlighting and is best suitable for programming. It has many attractive features such as full support for UTF-8, undo/redo, and clipboard support, search and replace, configurable syntax highlighting for various languages and many more supportive features. It is extensible with plug ins. Other important coda alternatives for windows and Linux are Redcar, Bluefish Editor, NVU, Ruby Mine, Slick Edit, Geany, Editra, txt2html and CSSED. There are many more. Its up to user to decide which one suits best to his requirements. Related posts:10 Useful Text Editor For Developer Applications to Install & Run Windows on Linux Open Source WYSIWYG Text Editors

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• A Good Developer is So Hard to Find

  - by James Michael Hare

  Let me start out by saying I want to damn the writers of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – 2. It is eating every last shred of my free time! But as I've been churning through each puzzle and marvelling at the brain teasers and trivia within, I began to think about interviewing developers and why it seems to be so hard to find good ones.  The problem is, it seems like no matter how hard we try to find the perfect way to separate the chaff from the wheat, inevitably someone will get hired who falls far short of expectations or someone will get passed over for missing a piece of trivia or a tricky brain teaser that could have been an excellent team member.   In shops that are primarily software-producing businesses or other heavily IT-oriented businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) there often exists a much tighter bond between HR and the hiring development staff because development is their life-blood. Unfortunately, many of us work in places where IT is viewed as a cost or just a means to an end. In these shops, too often, HR and development staff may work against each other due to differences in opinion as to what a good developer is or what one is worth.  It seems that if you ask two different people what makes a good developer, often you will get three different opinions.   With the exception of those shops that are purely development-centric (you guys have it much easier!), most other shops have management who have very little knowledge about the development process.  Their view can often be that development is simply a skill that one learns and then once aquired, that developer can produce widgets as good as the next like workers on an assembly-line floor.  On the other side, you have many developers that feel that software development is an art unto itself and that the ability to create the most pure design or know the most obscure of keywords or write the shortest-possible obfuscated piece of code is a good coder.  So is it a skill?  An Art?  Or something entirely in between?   Saying that software is merely a skill and one just needs to learn the syntax and tools would be akin to saying anyone who knows English and can use Word can write a 300 page book that is accurate, meaningful, and stays true to the point.  This just isn't so.  It takes more than mere skill to take words and form a sentence, join those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into a document.  I've interviewed candidates who could answer obscure syntax and keyword questions and once they were hired could not code effectively at all.  So development must be more than a skill.   But on the other end, we have art.  Is development an art?  Is our end result to produce art?  I can marvel at a piece of code -- see it as concise and beautiful -- and yet that code most perform some stated function with accuracy and efficiency and maintainability.  None of these three things have anything to do with art, per se.  Art is beauty for its own sake and is a wonderful thing.  But if you apply that same though to development it just doesn't hold.  I've had developers tell me that all that matters is the end result and how you code it is entirely part of the art and I couldn't disagree more.  Yes, the end result, the accuracy, is the prime criteria to be met.  But if code is not maintainable and efficient, it would be just as useless as a beautiful car that breaks down once a week or that gets 2 miles to the gallon.  Yes, it may work in that it moves you from point A to point B and is pretty as hell, but if it can't be maintained or is not efficient, it's not a good solution.  So development must be something less than art.   In the end, I think I feel like development is a matter of craftsmanship.  We use our tools and we use our skills and set about to construct something that satisfies a purpose and yet is also elegant and efficient.  There is skill involved, and there is an art, but really it boils down to being able to craft code.  Crafting code is far more than writing code.  Anyone can write code if they know the syntax, but so few people can actually craft code that solves a purpose and craft it well.  So this is what I want to find, I want to find code craftsman!  But how?   I used to ask coding-trivia questions a long time ago and many people still fall back on this.  The thought is that if you ask the candidate some piece of coding trivia and they know the answer it must follow that they can craft good code.  For example:   What C++ keyword can be applied to a class/struct field to allow it to be changed even from a const-instance of that class/struct?  (answer: mutable)   So what do we prove if a candidate can answer this?  Only that they know what mutable means.  One would hope that this would infer that they'd know how to use it, and more importantly when and if it should ever be used!  But it rarely does!  The problem with triva questions is that you will either: Approve a really good developer who knows what some obscure keyword is (good) Reject a really good developer who never needed to use that keyword or is too inexperienced to know how to use it (bad) Approve a really bad developer who googled "C++ Interview Questions" and studied like hell but can't craft (very bad) Many HR departments love these kind of tests because they are short and easy to defend if a legal issue arrises on hiring decisions.  After all it's easy to say a person wasn't hired because they scored 30 out of 100 on some trivia test.  But unfortunately, you've eliminated a large part of your potential developer pool and possibly hired a few duds.  There are times I've hired candidates who knew every trivia question I could throw out them and couldn't craft.  And then there are times I've interviewed candidates who failed all my trivia but who I took a chance on who were my best finds ever.    So if not trivia, then what?  Brain teasers?  The thought is, these type of questions measure the thinking power of a candidate.  The problem is, once again, you will either: Approve a good candidate who has never heard the problem and can solve it (good) Reject a good candidate who just happens not to see the "catch" because they're nervous or it may be really obscure (bad) Approve a candidate who has studied enough interview brain teasers (once again, you can google em) to recognize the "catch" or knows the answer already (bad). Once again, you're eliminating good candidates and possibly accepting bad candidates.  In these cases, I think testing someone with brain teasers only tests their ability to answer brain teasers, not the ability to craft code. So how do we measure someone's ability to craft code?  Here's a novel idea: have them code!  Give them a computer and a compiler, or a whiteboard and a pen, or paper and pencil and have them construct a piece of code.  It just makes sense that if we're going to hire someone to code we should actually watch them code.  When they're done, we can judge them on several criteria: Correctness - does the candidate's solution accurately solve the problem proposed? Accuracy - is the candidate's solution reasonably syntactically correct? Efficiency - did the candidate write or use the more efficient data structures or algorithms for the job? Maintainability - was the candidate's code free of obfuscation and clever tricks that diminish readability? Persona - are they eager and willing or aloof and egotistical?  Will they work well within your team? It may sound simple, or it may sound crazy, but when I'm looking to hire a developer, I want to see them actually develop well-crafted code.

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• Microsoft and the open source community

  - by Charles Young

  For the last decade, I have repeatedly, in my imitable Microsoft fan boy style, offered an alternative view to commonly held beliefs about Microsoft's stance on open source licensing.  In earlier times, leading figures in Microsoft were very vocal in resisting the idea that commercial licensing is outmoded or morally reprehensible.  Many people interpreted this as all-out corporate opposition to open source licensing.  I never read it that way. It is true that I've met individual employees of Microsoft who are antagonistic towards FOSS (free and open source software), but I've met more who are supportive or at least neutral on the subject.  In any case, individual attitudes of employees don't necessarily reflect a corporate stance.  The strongest opposition I've encountered has actually come from outside the company.  It's not a charitable thought, but I sometimes wonder if there are people in the .NET community who are opposed to FOSS simply because they believe, erroneously, that Microsoft is opposed. Here, for what it is worth, are the points I've repeated endlessly over the years and which have often been received with quizzical scepticism. a)  A decade ago, Microsoft's big problem was not FOSS per se, or even with copyleft.  The thing which really kept them awake at night was the fear that one day, someone might find, deep in the heart of the Windows code base, some code that should not be there and which was published under GPL.  The likelihood of this ever happening has long since faded away, but there was a time when MS was running scared.  I suspect this is why they held out for a while from making Windows source code open to inspection.  Nowadays, as an MVP, I am positively encouraged to ask to see Windows source. b)  Microsoft has never opposed the open source community.  They have had problems with specific people and organisations in the FOSS community.  Back in the 1990s, Richard Stallman gave time and energy to a successful campaign to launch antitrust proceedings against Microsoft.  In more recent times, the negative attitude of certain people to Microsoft's submission of two FOSS licences to the OSI (both of which have long since been accepted), and the mad scramble to try to find any argument, however tenuous, to block their submission was not, let us say, edifying. c) Microsoft has never, to my knowledge, written off the FOSS model.  They certainly don't agree that more traditional forms of licensing are inappropriate or immoral, and they've always been prepared to say so.  One reason why it was so hard to convince people that Microsoft is not rabidly antagonistic towards FOSS licensing is that so many people think they have no involvement in open source.  A decade ago, there was virtually no evidence of any such involvement.  However, that was a long time ago.  Quietly over the years, Microsoft has got on with the job of working out how to make use of FOSS licensing and how to support the FOSS community.  For example, as well as making increasingly extensive use of Github, they run an important FOSS forge (CodePlex) on which they, themselves, host many hundreds of distinct projects.  The total count may even be in the thousands now.  I suspect there is a limit of about 500 records on CodePlex searches because, for the past few years, whenever I search for Microsoft-specific projects on CodePlex, I always get approx. 500 hits.  Admittedly, a large volume of the stuff they publish under FOSS licences amounts to code samples, but many of those 'samples' have grown into useful and fully featured frameworks, libraries and tools. All this is leading up to the observation that yesterday's announcement by Scott Guthrie marks a significant milestone and should not go unnoticed.  If you missed it, let me summarise.   From the first release of .NET, Microsoft has offered a web development framework called ASP.NET.  The core libraries are included in the .NET framework which is released free of charge, but which is not open source.   However, in recent years, the number of libraries that constitute ASP.NET have grown considerably.  Today, most professional ASP.NET web development exploits the ASP.NET MVC framework.  This, together with several other important parts of the ASP.NET technology stack, is released on CodePlex under the Apache 2.0 licence.   Hence, today, a huge swathe of web development on the .NET/Azure platform relies four-square on the use of FOSS frameworks and libraries. Yesterday, Scott Guthrie announced the next stage of ASP.NET's journey towards FOSS nirvana.  This involves extending ASP.NET's FOSS stack to include Web API and the MVC Razor view engine which is rapidly becoming the de facto 'standard' for building web pages in ASP.NET.  However, perhaps the more important announcement is that the ASP.NET team will now accept and review contributions from the community.  Scott points out that this model is already in place elsewhere in Microsoft, and specifically draws attention to development of the Windows Azure SDKs.  These SDKs are central to Azure development.   The .NET and Java SDKs are published under Apache 2.0 on Github and Microsoft is open to community contributions.  Accepting contributions is a more profound move than simply releasing code under FOSS licensing.  It means that Microsoft is wholeheartedly moving towards a full-blooded open source approach for future evolution of some of their central and most widely used .NET and Azure frameworks and libraries.  In conjunction with Scott's announcement, Microsoft has also released Git support for CodePlex (at long last!) and, perhaps more importantly, announced significant new investment in their own FOSS forge. Here at Solidsoft we have several reasons to be very interested in Scott's announcement. I'll draw attention to one of them.  Earlier this year we wrote the initial version of a new UK Government web application called CloudStore.  CloudStore provides a way for local and central government to discover and purchase applications and services. We wrote the web site using ASP.NET MVC which is FOSS.  However, this point has been lost on the ladies and gentlemen of the press and, I suspect, on some of the decision makers on the government side.  They announced a few weeks ago that future versions of CloudStore will move to a FOSS framework, clearly oblivious of the fact that it is already built on a FOSS framework.  We are, it is fair to say, mildly irked by the uninformed and badly out-of-date assumption that “if it is Microsoft, it can't be FOSS”.  Old prejudices live on.

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• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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• DRY and SRP

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/06/11/dry-and-srp.aspxKent Beck’s XP Simplicity Rules (aka Four Rules of Simple Design) are a prioritized list of rules that when applied to your code generally yield a great design.  As you’ll see from the above link the list has slightly evolved over time.  I find today they are usually listed as: All Tests Pass Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) Express Intent Minimalistic These are prioritized.  If your code doesn’t work (rule 1) then everything else is forfeit.  Go back to rule one and get the code working before worrying about anything else. Over the years the community have debated whether the priority of rules 2 and 3 should be reversed.  Some say a little duplication in the code is OK as long as it helps express intent.  I’ve debated it myself.  This recent post got me thinking about this again, hence this post.   I don’t think it is fair to compare “Expressing Intent” against “DRY”.  This is a comparison of apples to oranges.  “Expressing Intent” is a principal of code quality.  “Repeating Yourself” is a code smell.  A code smell is merely an indicator that there might be something wrong with the code.  It takes further investigation to determine if a violation of an underlying principal of code quality has actually occurred. For example “using nouns for method names”, “using verbs for property names”, or “using Booleans for parameters” are all code smells that indicate that code probably isn’t doing a good job at expressing intent.  They are usually very good indicators.  But what principle is the code smell of Duplication pointing to and how good of an indicator is it? Duplication in the code base is bad for a couple reasons.  If you need to make a change and that needs to be made in a number of locations it is difficult to know if you have caught all of them.  This can lead to bugs if/when one of those locations is overlooked.  By refactoring the code to remove all duplication there will be left with only one place to change, thereby eliminating this problem. With most projects the code becomes the single source of truth for a project.  If a production code base is inconsistent with a five year old requirements or design document the production code that people are currently living with is usually declared as the current reality (or truth).  Requirement or design documents at this age in a project life cycle are usually of little value. Although comparing production code to external documentation is usually straight forward, duplication within the code base muddles this declaration of truth.  When code is duplicated small discrepancies will creep in between the two copies over time.  The question then becomes which copy is correct?  As different factions debate how the software should work, trust in the software and the team behind it erodes. The code smell of Duplication points to a violation of the “Single Source of Truth” principle.  Let me define that as: A stakeholder’s requirement for a software change should never cause more than one class to change. Violation of the Single Source of Truth principle will always result in duplication in the code.  However, the inverse is not always true.  Duplication in the code does not necessarily indicate that there is a violation of the Single Source of Truth principle. To illustrate this, let’s look at a retail system where the system will (1) send a transaction to a bank and (2) print a receipt for the customer.  Although these are two separate features of the system, they are closely related.  The reason for printing the receipt is usually to provide an audit trail back to the bank transaction.  Both features use the same data:  amount charged, account number, transaction date, customer name, retail store name, and etcetera.  Because both features use much of the same data, there is likely to be a lot of duplication between them.  This duplication can be removed by making both features use the same data access layer. Then start coming the divergent requirements.  The receipt stakeholder wants a change so that the account number has the last few digits masked out to protect the customer’s privacy.  That can be solve with a small IF statement whilst still eliminating all duplication in the system.  Then the bank wants to take a picture of the customer as well as capture their signature and/or PIN number for enhanced security.  Then the receipt owner wants to pull data from a completely different system to report the customer’s loyalty program point total. After a while you realize that the two stakeholders have somewhat similar, but ultimately different responsibilities.  They have their own reasons for pulling the data access layer in different directions.  Then it dawns on you, the Single Responsibility Principle: There should never be more than one reason for a class to change. In this example we have two stakeholders giving two separate reasons for the data access class to change.  It is clear violation of the Single Responsibility Principle.  That’s a problem because it can often lead the project owner pitting the two stakeholders against each other in a vein attempt to get them to work out a mutual single source of truth.  But that doesn’t exist.  There are two completely valid truths that the developers need to support.  How is this to be supported and honour the Single Responsibility Principle?  The solution is to duplicate the data access layer and let each stakeholder control their own copy. The Single Source of Truth and Single Responsibility Principles are very closely related.  SST tells you when to remove duplication; SRP tells you when to introduce it.  They may seem to be fighting each other, but really they are not.  The key is to clearly identify the different responsibilities (or sources of truth) over a system.  Sometimes there is a single person with that responsibility, other times there are many.  This can be especially difficult if the same person has dual responsibilities.  They might not even realize they are wearing multiple hats. In my opinion Single Source of Truth should be listed as the second rule of simple design with Express Intent at number three.  Investigation of the DRY code smell should yield to the proper application SST, without violating SRP.  When necessary leave duplication in the system and let the class names express the different people that are responsible for controlling them.  Knowing all the people with responsibilities over a system is the higher priority because you’ll need to know this before you can express it.  Although it may be a code smell when there is duplication in the code, it does not necessarily mean that the coder has chosen to be expressive over DRY or that the code is bad.

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