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• Unable to boot ubuntu 11.10 from external usb drive

  - by user45006

  I'm new to Ubuntu (and actually all things Linux) as of this morning, so please excuse any stupid mistakes I may be making. I recently bought an external hard drive for my newly built PC (that is running windows 7 if it matters). I would like to install Ubuntu onto the external drive and boot from there. I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 and made a bootable cd, unplugged my internal HDDs, plugged in the external drive, installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the external drive via the installer, and replugged in my internal HDDs. Then I set my bios boot order to: Boot from USB-HDD - Boot from Hard Disk - Boot from CD/DVD. Now when I restart I get the message "Starting Operating System..." (or something like that, I forget exactly what it says) that lingers on the screen for a moment and then windows starts. Any idea what the problem may be? ~Relevant info~ BIOS version: Award Software International, Inc. F2, 2/22/2011 Ubuntu Version: 11.10 External Hard Drive: Western Digital My Passport Essential 500GB Portable Hard Drive (Black) ~Things I've already tried~ 1) Unplug internal HDDs so that only external drive was plugged in via usb. Same thing happened only obviously my BIOS could not detect any hard drives besides the external one. When booting received error "Could not detect operating system" 2) Formatted external hard drive and re installed. It didn't make a difference, however interestingly when I booted from cd the ubuntu installer said it detected ubuntu 11.10 on the external hard drive. 3) Within BIOS I've messed around with every boot order combo I could think of both in the "Hard Disk boot order" screen and the "Boot order" screen. I'm a little confused of why there are two screens for this. 4) Held F12 during startup which opens (what I think is) the one time boot screen and it gave me the options "Hard Drive", "cd/dvd", "USB-FDD", "USB-cdrom", "USB-HDD", and "USB-something else I can't remember what it was". I tried all of them, but the same thing as before happened each time. ~References~ I noticed several people on askubuntu have tried to do something similar if not the exact same. In fact, I even found a post that pretty much outlines step by step exactly what I did... only their's worked. /jealous. Linky: Install Ubuntu or Kubuntu on a External USB Drive I'm willing to try a different version of ubuntu - it's not like my heart is set on 11.10, but it's a pain to open my case and unplug my internal hard drives so I'd prefer not to do this unless someone is reasonably confident it'll work. Thank you for all of your help in advance! I'm really looking forward to exploring Ubuntu!

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Is it ok to initialize an RB_ConstraintActor in PostBeginPlay?

  - by Almo

  I have a KActorSpawnable subclass that acts weird. In PostBeginPlay, I initialize an RB_ConstraintActor; the default is not to allow rotation. If I create one in the editor, it's fine, and won't rotate. If I spawn one, it rotates. Here's the class: class QuadForceKActor extends KActorSpawnable placeable; var(Behavior) bool bConstrainRotation; var(Behavior) bool bConstrainX; var(Behavior) bool bConstrainY; var(Behavior) bool bConstrainZ; var RB_ConstraintActor PhysicsConstraintActor; simulated event PostBeginPlay() { Super.PostBeginPlay(); PhysicsConstraintActor = Spawn(class'RB_ConstraintActorSpawnable', self, '', Location, rot(0, 0, 0)); if(bConstrainRotation) { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.bSwingLimited = true; PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.bTwistLimited = true; } SetLinearConstraints(bConstrainX, bConstrainY, bConstrainZ); PhysicsConstraintActor.InitConstraint(self, None); } function SetLinearConstraints(bool InConstrainX, bool InConstrainY, bool InConstrainZ) { if(InConstrainX) { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.LinearXSetup.bLimited = 1; } else { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.LinearXSetup.bLimited = 0; } if(InConstrainY) { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.LinearYSetup.bLimited = 1; } else { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.LinearYSetup.bLimited = 0; } if(InConstrainZ) { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.LinearZSetup.bLimited = 1; } else { PhysicsConstraintActor.ConstraintSetup.LinearZSetup.bLimited = 0; } } DefaultProperties { bConstrainRotation=true bConstrainX=false bConstrainY=false bConstrainZ=false bSafeBaseIfAsleep=false bNoEncroachCheck=false } Here's the code I use to spawn one. It's a subclass of the one above, but it doesn't reference the constraint at all. local QuadForceKCreateBlock BlockActor; BlockActor = spawn(class'QuadForceKCreateBlock', none, 'PowerCreate_Block', BlockLocation(), m_PreparedRotation, , false); BlockActor.SetDuration(m_BlockDuration); BlockActor.StaticMeshComponent.SetNotifyRigidBodyCollision(true); BlockActor.StaticMeshComponent.ScriptRigidBodyCollisionThreshold = 0.001; BlockActor.StaticMeshComponent.SetStaticMesh(m_ValidCreationBlock.StaticMesh); BlockActor.StaticMeshComponent.AddImpulse(m_InitialVelocity); I used to initialize an RB_ConstraintActor where I spawned it from the outside. This worked, which is why I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the other code in QuadForceKCreateBlock. I then added the internal constraint in QuadForceKActor for other purposes. When I realized I had two constraints on the CreateBlock doing the same thing, I removed the constraint code from the place where I spawn it. Then it started rotating. Is there a reason I should not be initializing an RB_ConstraintActor in PostBeginPlay? I feel like there's some basic thing about how the engine works that I'm missing.

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• Calling home, receiving calls and smartphone data from the US

  - by Rob Farley

  I got asked about calling home from the US, by someone going to the PASS Summit. I found myself thinking “there should be a blog post about this”... The easiest way to phone home is Skype - no question. Use WiFi, and if you’re calling someone who has Skype on their phone at the other end, it’s free. Even if they don’t, it’s still pretty good price-wise. The PASS Summit conference centre has good WiFI, as do the hotels, and plenty of other places (like Starbucks). But if you’re used to having data all the time, particularly when you’re walking from one place to another, then you’ll want a sim card. This also lets you receive calls more easily, not just solving your data problem. You’ll need to make sure your phone isn’t locked to your local network – get that sorted before you leave. It’s no trouble to drop by a T-mobile or AT&T store and getting a prepaid sim. You can’t get one from the airport, but if the PASS Summit is your first stop, there’s a T-mobile store on 6th in Seattle between Pine & Pike, so you can see it from the Sheraton hotel if that’s where you’re staying. AT&T isn’t far away either. But – there’s an extra step that you should be aware of. If you talk to one of these US telcos, you’ll probably (hopefully I’m wrong, but this is how it was for me recently) be told that their prepaid sims don’t work in smartphones. And they’re right – the APN gets detected and stops the data from working. But luckily, Apple (and others) have provided information about how to change the APN, which has been used by a company based in New Zealand to let you get your phone working. Basically, you send your phone browser to http://unlockit.co.nz and follow the prompts. But do this from a WiFi place somewhere, because you won’t have data access until after you’ve sorted this out... Oh, and if you get a prepaid sim with “unlimited data”, you will still need to get a Data Feature for it. And just for the record – this is WAY easier if you’re going to the UK. I dropped into a T-mobile shop there, and bought a prepaid sim card for five quid, which gave me 250MB data and some (but not much) call credit. In Australia it’s even easier, because you can buy data-enabled sim cards that work in smartphones from the airport when you arrive. I think having access to data really helps you feel at home in a different place. It means you can pull up maps, see what your friends are doing, and more. Hopefully this post helps, but feel free to post comments with extra information if you have it. @rob_farley

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• SEO to ensure visibility for a narrow, non-competitive, non-commercial site

  - by hen3ry

  I'm webmaster of a non-commercial site in English. A non-native-English speaker asked me why our site doesn't produce hits in Google searches she conducts for relevant keywords in her native language. I asked her for a list of keywords in her native language, and I naively tried inserting those into the META info in the page headers and waited a couple of weeks. No help. A little searching informed me that Google doesn't use the META info, and has not done so for a very long time. D'oh! To be entirely concrete, suppose the StackExchange folks want Russian speakers to find this site, Pro Webmasters. The direct translation in Russian of "webmaster" --thanks, Google Translator-- is: "?????????". (Not sure this will render properly, but that's not essential to my question.) Assuming Pro Webmasters has a common template for all pages it generates, inserting "?????????" into the Keywords META for that template won't help, it seems. What could StackExchange do to make this site visible to users searching with the Russian keyword "?????????" ? Pretty much all the advice I've seen boils down to this, if I understand correctly: use the desired search term often (but not too often) among site content, and the problem will be solved. That's great, but I don't think sprinkling "?????????" visibly all over Pro Webmasters is going to fly. Just for completeness, crawlers must be long immune to the invisible-to-visitors scheme, e.g, format "?????????" in a tiny text size in a color the same as an existing background, e.g. white-over-white. Or, put that text inside a div styled: ' style="visibility: hidden" '. Probably some other equivalents. I can only think of one slightly effective method, along these lines: place an unobtrusive link on the common template to a page titled "for international users" , and on that page list desired synonyms for "webmaster" in various languages on that page. A test case --admittedly, just one-- using my site implies that a Google search for "international users" ????????? will produce a hit for this page, and thus make the site minimally visible, despite the fact that the page will almost never be visited. At the moment, anyway. Note: All the SEO discussions I have found so far are about competitive and --almost certainly-- commercial sites. To repeat: my site is non-commercial, and it is about an obscure, narrow topic that is of interest to only a small number of people worldwide. This isn't about clawing our way to the top of competitive rankings, just making this content minimally visible to interested non-native-English speakers. Ideas? TIA

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• Handy Generic JQuery Functions

  - by Steve Wilkes

  I was a bit of a late-comer to the JQuery party, but now I've been using it for a while it's given me a host of options for adding extra flair to the client side of my applications. Here's a few generic JQuery functions I've written which can be used to add some neat little features to a page. Just call any of them from a document ready function. Apply JQuery Themeroller Styles to all Page Buttons   The JQuery Themeroller is a great tool for creating a theme for a site based on colours and styles for particular page elements. The JQuery.UI library then provides a set of functions which allow you to apply styles to page elements. This function applies a JQuery Themeroller style to all the buttons on a page - as well as any elements which have a button class applied to them - and then makes the mouse pointer turn into a cursor when you mouse over them: function addCursorPointerToButtons() {     $("button, input[type='submit'], input[type='button'], .button") .button().css("cursor", "pointer"); } Automatically Remove the Default Value from a Select Box   Required drop-down select boxes often have a default option which reads 'Please select...' (or something like that), but once someone has selected a value, there's no need to retain that. This function removes the default option from any select boxes on the page which have a data-val-remove-default attribute once one of the non-default options has been chosen: function removeDefaultSelectOptionOnSelect() {     $("select[data-val-remove-default='']").change(function () {         var sel = $(this);         if (sel.val() != "") { sel.children("option[value='']:first").remove(); }     }); } Automatically add a Required Label and Stars to a Form   It's pretty standard to have a little * next to required form field elements. This function adds the text * Required to the top of the first form on the page, and adds *s to any element within the form with the class editor-label and a data-val-required attribute: function addRequiredFieldLabels() {     var elements = $(".editor-label[data-val-required='']");     if (!elements.length) { return; }     var requiredString = "<div class='editor-required-key'>* Required</div>";     var prependString = "<span class='editor-required-label'> * </span>"; var firstFormOnThePage = $("form:first");     if (!firstFormOnThePage.children('div.editor-required-key').length) {         firstFormOnThePage.prepend(requiredString);     }     elements.each(function (index, value) { var formElement = $(this);         if (!formElement.children('span.editor-required-label').length) {             formElement.prepend(prependString);         }     }); } I hope those come in handy :)

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• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

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• Sql Table Refactoring Challenge

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

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• What does the Spring framework do? Should I use it? Why or why not?

  - by sangfroid

  So, I'm starting a brand-new project in Java, and am considering using Spring. Why am I considering Spring? Because lots of people tell me I should use Spring! Seriously, any time I've tried to get people to explain what exactly Spring is or what it does, they can never give me a straight answer. I've checked the intros on the SpringSource site, and they're either really complicated or really tutorial-focused, and none of them give me a good idea of why I should be using it, or how it will make my life easier. Sometimes people throw around the term "dependency injection", which just confuses me even more, because I think I have a different understanding of what that term means. Anyway, here's a little about my background and my app : Been developing in Java for a while, doing back-end web development. Yes, I do a ton of unit testing. To facilitate this, I typically make (at least) two versions of a method : one that uses instance variables, and one that only uses variables that are passed in to the method. The one that uses instance variables calls the other one, supplying the instance variables. When it comes time to unit test, I use Mockito to mock up the objects and then make calls to the method that doesn't use instance variables. This is what I've always understood "dependency injection" to be. My app is pretty simple, from a CS perspective. Small project, 1-2 developers to start with. Mostly CRUD-type operations with a a bunch of search thrown in. Basically a bunch of RESTful web services, plus a web front-end and then eventually some mobile clients. I'm thinking of doing the front-end in straight HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery, so no real plans to use JSP. Using Hibernate as an ORM, and Jersey to implement the webservices. I've already started coding, and am really eager to get a demo out there that I can shop around and see if anyone wants to invest. So obviously time is of the essence. I understand Spring has quite the learning curve, plus it looks like it necessitates a whole bunch of XML configuration, which I typically try to avoid like the plague. But if it can make my life easier and (especially) if make it can make development and testing faster, I'm willing to bite the bullet and learn Spring. So please. Educate me. Should I use Spring? Why or why not?

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• Creating a frozen bubble clone

  - by Vaughan Hilts

  This photo illustrates the environment: http://i.imgur.com/V4wbp.png I'll shoot the cannon, it'll bounce off the wall and it's SUPPOSED to stick to the bubble. It does at pretty much every other angle. The problem is always reproduced here, when hit off the wall into those bubbles. It also exists in other cases, but I'm not sure what triggers it. What actually happens: The ball will sometimes set to the wrong cell, and my "dropping" code will detect it as a loner and drop it off the stage. *There are many implementations of "Frozen Bubble" on the web, but I can't for the life of me find a good explanation as to how the algorithm for the "Bubble Sticking" works. * I see this: http://www.wikiflashed.com/wiki/BubbleBobble https://frozenbubblexna.svn.codeplex.com/svn/FrozenBubble/ But I can't figure out the algorithims... could anyone explain possibly the general idea behind getting the balls to stick? Code in question: //Counstruct our bounding rectangle for use var nX = currentBall.x + ballvX * gameTime; var nY = currentBall.y - ballvY * gameTime; var movingRect = new BoundingRectangle(nX, nY, 32, 32); var able = false; //Iterate over the cells and draw our bubbles for (var x = 0; x < 8; x++) { for (var y = 0; y < 12; y++) { //Get the bubble at this layout var bubble = bubbleLayout[x][y]; var rowHeight = 27; //If this slot isn't empty, draw if (bubble != null) { var bx = 0, by = 0; if (y % 2 == 0) { bx = x * 32 + 270; by = y * 32 + 45; } else { bx = x * 32 + 270 + 16; by = y * 32 + 45; } //Check var targetBox = new BoundingRectangle(bx, by, 32, 32); if (targetBox.intersects(movingRect)) { able = true; } } } } cellY = Math.round((currentBall.y - 45) / 32); if (cellY % 2 == 0) cellX = Math.round((currentBall.x - 270) / 32); else cellX = Math.round((currentBall.x - 270 - 16) / 32); Any ideas are very much welcome. Things I've tried: Flooring and Ceiling values Changing the wall bounce to a lower value Slowing down the ball None of these seem to affect it. Is there something in my math I'm not getting?

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• Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001.5 (a review of City Under The Sand)

  - by Chris Williams

  City Under The Sand - a review I'm moderately familiar with the Dark Sun setting. I've read the other Dark Sun novels, ages ago and I recently started running a D&D 4.0 campaign in the Dark Sun world, so I picked up this book to help re-familiarize myself with the setting. Overall, it did accomplish that, in a limited way. The book takes place in Nibenay and a neighboring expanse of desert that includes a formerly buried city, a small town and a bandit outpost. The book does a more interesting job of describing Nibenese politics and the court of the ruling Sorcerer King, his templars and the expected jockeying for position that occurs between the Templar Wives. There is a fair amount of combat, which was interesting and fairly well detailed. The ensemble cast is introduced and eventually brought together over the first few chapters. Not a lot of backstory on most of the characters, but you get a feel for them fairly quickly. The storyline was somewhat predictable after the first third of the book. Some of the reviews on Amazon complain about the 2-dimensional characterizations, and yes there were some... but it's easy to ignore because there is a lot going on in the book... several interwoven plotlines that all eventually converge. Where the book falls short... First, it appears to have been edited by a 4th grader who knows how to use spellcheck but lacks the attention to detail to notice the frequent occurence of incorrect words that often don't make sense or change the context of the entire sentence. It happened just enough to be distracting, and honestly I expect better from WOTC. Second, there is a lot of buildup to the end of the story... the big fight, the confrontation between good and evil, etc... which is handled in just a few pages and then the story basically just ends. Kind of a letdown, honestly. There wasn't a big finish, and it wasn't a cliffhanger, it just wraps up neatly and ends. It felt pretty rushed. Overall, aside from the very end, I enjoyed it. I really liked the insight into that region of Athas and it gave me some good ideas for fleshing out my own campaign. In that sense, the book served its purpose for me. If you're looking for a light read (got a 5-6 hour flight somewhere?) or you want to learn more about the Dark Sun setting, then I'd recommend this book.

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• Making A Photo-Sharing App For Android In Eclipse [on hold]

  - by user3694394

  I've only just started developing mobile apps, which is something that I've been wanting to learn for a while now. I'm from an indie games studio, making PC games for around the last 3 years, and I finally decided to move into android app development. The only problem I'm having is that I don't know where to start. The project which I'm aiming to create will be something similar to Instagram, basically a photo-sharing app which allows users to take new photos, or pull them from their device, and add filters to them, before posting them. I have a rough idea of how I could go about doing this, but I need pointing towards any tutorials available for each specific step. So, here's my idea: Create a UI in eclipse (this wont be a problem for me, I should be able to do this fine through xml files) Setup a server-side database to store all user info and uploaded images (the images will need to be converted into byte arrays, and I have no idea how to do this through a database). My best idea would be to use a MySQL database to do this. Add user interactions (likes, favourites, reposts, etc.). This would, again, have to be stored in the database (or, at least, i think it would). Add the ability to take new photos using the phone's camera (I can probably do this anyway, using the Camera API). Add the ability to pull existing photos from the device (again, pretty simple to do). Add the ability to add filters to any photos (I had a look around, and there are some repos and resources which allow you to do this, but they're mainly for iOS development). Add facebook/twitter integration (possibly) to allow phots to be shared to other social networks. Create a news feed which shows users all of the latest photos from their friends, and allows them to post their own images to it. Give all registered users their own wall/page which has their latest posts/images displayed on it. Add the ability to allow users to follow other users, and display their followed users posts on their news feed. Yep. It's not going to be easy, and I don't even know if it's possible for me to do alone in Eclipse. However, this is the plan, and I'm going to do my best to learn everything I need to know to do this successfully. My actual question would be how should I start doing this- where do I begin learning how to do all of this? I've had a look at snapify, which can be edited via Parse, but I won't be spending hundreds of dollars (since I'm 15 and just don't have the available funds) on software. I have extensive knowledge of Java (again, I've been making games for around 3 years, mainly in Java), and various scripting languages. So, hopefully, this will be of some use here. Thanks in advance, Josh.

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• How to become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Windows 8 and the future of Silverlight

  - by Laila

  After Steve Ballmer's indiscrete 'MisSpeak' about Windows 8, there has been a lot of speculation about the new operating system. We've now had a few glimpses, such as the demonstration of 'Mosh' at the D9 2011 conference, and the Youtube video, which showed a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript. This has caused acute anxiety to the programmers who have followed the recommended route of WPF, Silverlight and .NET, but it need not have caused quite so much panic since it was, in fact, just a thin layer to make Windows into an apparently mobile-friendly OS. More worryingly, the press-release from Microsoft was at pains to say that 'Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML', as if all thought of Silverlight, dominant in WP7, had been jettisoned. Ironically, this brave new 'happening' platform can all be done now in Windows 7 and an iPad, using Adobe Air, so it is hardly cutting-edge; in fact the tile interface had a sort of Retro-Zune Metro UI feel first seen in Media Centre, followed by Windows Phone 7, with any originality leached out of it by the corporate decision-making process. It was kinda weird seeing old Excel running alongside stodgily away amongst all the extreme paragliding videos. The ability to snap and resize concurrent apps might be a novelty on a tablet, but it is hardly so on a PC. It was at that moment that it struck me that here was a spreadsheet application that hadn't even made the leap to the .NET platform. Windows was once again trying to be all things to all men, whereas Apple had carefully separated Mac OS X development from iOS. The acrobatic feat of straddling all mobile and desktop devices with one OS is looking increasingly implausible. There is a world of difference between an operating system that facilitates business procedures and a one that drives a device for playing pop videos and your holiday photos. So where does this leave Silverlight? Pretty much where it was. Windows 8 will support it, and it will continue to be developed, but if these press-releases reflect the thinking within Microsoft, it is no longer seen as the strategic direction. However, Silverlight is still there and there will be a whole new set of developer APIs for building touch-centric apps. Jupiter, for example, is rumoured to involve an App store that provides new, Silverlight based "immersive" applications that are deployed as AppX packages. When the smoke clears, one suspects that the Javascript/HTML5 is merely an alternative development environment for Windows 8 to attract the legions of independent developers outside the .NET culture who are unlikely to ever take a shine to a more serious development environment such as WPF or Silverlight. Cheers, Laila

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• Agile Documentation

  - by Nick Harrison

  We all know that one of the premises of the agile manifesto is to value Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation. This is a wonderful idea and it takes a tremendous burden off of project implementations. I have seen as many projects fail because of the maintenance weight of the project documentations as I have for any reason. But this goal as important as it is may not always be practical. Sometimes the client will simply insist on tedious documentation despite the arguments against it. This may be to calm a nervous client. This may be to satisfy an audit / compliance requirement. This may be a non-too subtle attempt at sabotaging the project. Ok, it is probably not an all out attempt to sabotage the project, but it will probably feel that way. So what can we do to keep to the spirit of the Agile Manifesto but still meet the needs of the client wanting the documentation? This is a good question that I have been puzzling over lately! I hope to explore some possible answers more fully here. A common theme that my solutions are likely to follow is the same theme that I often follow with simplifying complex business logic. Make it table driven! My thought is that the sought after documentation could be a report or reports out of a metadata repository. Reports are much easier to maintain than hand written documentation. Here are a few additional advantages that we can explore over time: Reports will take advantage of the fact that different people have different needs and different format requirements Reports and the supporting metadata are more easily validated and the validation can be automated. If the application itself uses this metadata than there never has to be a question as to whether or not the metadata is up to date. It is up to date or the application would not work. In many cases we should be able to automatically gather most of the Meta data that we need using reflection, system tables, etc. I think that this will lower the total cost of ownership for the documentation and may provide something useful beyond having a pretty document to look at.  What are your thoughts?

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• What is this algorithm for converting strings into numbers called?

  - by CodexArcanum

  I've been doing some work in Parsec recently, and for my toy language I wanted multi-based fractional numbers to be expressible. After digging around in Parsec's source a bit, I found their implementation of a floating-point number parser, and copied it to make the needed modifications. So I understand what this code does, and vaguely why (I haven't worked out the math fully yet, but I think I get the gist). But where did it come from? This seems like a pretty clever way to turn strings into floats and ints, is there a name for this algorithm? Or is it just something basic that's a hole in my knowledge? Did the folks behind Parsec devise it? Here's the code, first for integers: number' :: Integer -> Parser Integer number' base = do { digits <- many1 ( oneOf ( sigilRange base )) ; let n = foldl (\x d -> base * x + toInteger (convertDigit base d)) 0 digits ; seq n (return n) } So the basic idea here is that digits contains the string representing the whole number part, ie "192". The foldl converts each digit individually into a number, then adds that to the running total multiplied by the base, which means that by the end each digit has been multiplied by the correct factor (in aggregate) to position it. The fractional part is even more interesting: fraction' :: Integer -> Parser Double fraction' base = do { digits <- many1 ( oneOf ( sigilRange base )) ; let base' = fromIntegral base ; let f = foldr (\d x -> (x + fromIntegral (convertDigit base d))/base') 0.0 digits ; seq f (return f) Same general idea, but now a foldr and using repeated division. I don't quite understand why you add first and then divide for the fraction, but multiply first then add for the whole. I know it works, just haven't sorted out why. Anyway, I feel dumb not working it out myself, it's very simple and clever looking at it. Is there a name for this algorithm? Maybe the imperative version using a loop would be more familiar?

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• What to use C++ for?

  - by futlib

  I really love C++. However, I'm struggling to find good uses for it lately. It is still the language to use if you're building huge systems with huge performance requirements. Like backend/infrastructure code at Google and Facebook, or high-end games. But I don't get to do stuff like that. It's also a good choice for code that runs close to the hardware. I'd like to do more low-level stuff, but it isn't part of my job, and I can't think of useful private projects that would involve that. Traditionally, C++ was also a good choice for rich client applications, but those are mostly written in C# and Obj-C lately - and aren't really that important anymore, with everything being a web app. Or a mobile app, which are mostly written in Obj-C and Java. And of course, web-based desktop and mobile apps are quite prominent, too. At my job, I work mostly on web applications, using Java, JavaScript and Groovy. Java is a good/popular choice for non-Google-scale backends, Groovy (or Python, or Ruby or Node.js) is pretty good for the server-side of web apps and JavaScript is the only real choice for the client-side. Even the little games I'm writing in my spare time are lately mostly written in JavaScript, so they can run in the browser. So what would you suggest I could use C++ for? I'm aware that this question is very similar. However, I don't want to learn C++, I was a professional C++ programmer for years. I want to keep doing it and find good new use cases for it. I know that I can use C++ for web apps/games. I could even compile C++ to JavaScript with Emscripten. However, it doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm looking for something C++ is really good at to stay competent in the language. If your answer is: Just give up and forget C++, you'll probably never need it again, so be it.

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• How to handle this unfortunately non hypothetical situation with end-users?

  - by User Smith

  I work in a medium sized company but with a very small IT force. Last year (2011), I wrote an application that is very popular with a large group of end-users. We hit a deadline at the end of last year and some functionality (I will call funcA from now on) was not added into the application that was wanted at the very end. So, this application has been running in live/production since the end of 2011, I might add without issue. Yesterday, a whole group of end-users started complaining that funcA that was never in the application is no longer working. Our priority at this company is that if an application is broken it must be fixed first prior to prioritized projects. I have compared code and queries and there is no difference since 2011, which is proofA. I then was able to get one of the end-users to admit that it never worked proofB, but since then that end-user has went back and said that it was working previously......I believe the horde of end-users has assimilated her. I have also reviewed my notes for this project which has requirements and daily updates regarding the project which specifically states, "funcA not achieved due to time constraints", proofC. I have spoken with many of them and I can see where they could be confused as they are very far from a programming background, but I also know they are intelligent enough to act in a group in order to bypass project prioritization orders in order to get functionality that they want to make their job easier. The worst part is is that now group think is setting in and my boss and the head of IT is actually starting to believe them, even though there is no code or query changes. As far as reviewing the state of the logic it is very cut and dry to the point of if 1 = 1, funcA will not work. So, this is the end of the description of my scenario, but I am trying not to get severally dinged on my performance metrics due to this which would essentially have me moved to fixing a production problem that doesn't exist that will probably take over 1 month. I am looking for direct answers to this question. This question is not for rants, polling, or discussions as this is not the format for StackExchange. Please don't downvote me too terribly it is pretty common on this specific site of stack, I am looking for honest answers to this situation and I couldn't find a forum more appropriate.

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• How to suggest using an ORM instead of stored procedures?

  - by Wayne M

  I work at a company that only uses stored procedures for all data access, which makes it very annoying to keep our local databases in sync as every commit we have to run new procs. I have used some basic ORMs in the past and I find the experience much better and cleaner. I'd like to suggest to the development manager and rest of the team that we look into using an ORM Of some kind for future development (the rest of the team are only familiar with stored procedures and have never used anything else). The current architecture is .NET 3.5 written like .NET 1.1, with "god classes" that use a strange implementation of ActiveRecord and return untyped DataSets which are looped over in code-behind files - the classes work something like this: class Foo { public bool LoadFoo() { bool blnResult = false; if (this.FooID == 0) { throw new Exception("FooID must be set before calling this method."); } DataSet ds = // ... call to Sproc if (ds.Tables[0].Rows.Count > 0) { foo.FooName = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0]["FooName"].ToString(); // other properties set blnResult = true; } return blnResult; } } // Consumer Foo foo = new Foo(); foo.FooID = 1234; foo.LoadFoo(); // do stuff with foo... There is pretty much no application of any design patterns. There are no tests whatsoever (nobody else knows how to write unit tests, and testing is done through manually loading up the website and poking around). Looking through our database we have: 199 tables, 13 views, a whopping 926 stored procedures and 93 functions. About 30 or so tables are used for batch jobs or external things, the remainder are used in our core application. Is it even worth pursuing a different approach in this scenario? I'm talking about moving forward only since we aren't allowed to refactor the existing code since "it works" so we cannot change the existing classes to use an ORM, but I don't know how often we add brand new modules instead of adding to/fixing current modules so I'm not sure if an ORM is the right approach (too much invested in stored procedures and DataSets). If it is the right choice, how should I present the case for using one? Off the top of my head the only benefits I can think of is having cleaner code (although it might not be, since the current architecture isn't built with ORMs in mind so we would basically be jury-rigging ORMs on to future modules but the old ones would still be using the DataSets) and less hassle to have to remember what procedure scripts have been run and which need to be run, etc. but that's it, and I don't know how compelling an argument that would be. Maintainability is another concern but one that nobody except me seems to be concerned about.

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• Can working exclusively with niche apps or tech hurt your career in software development? How to get out of the cycle? [closed]

  - by Keoma

  I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle. I've been at a pretty comfortable IT group for almost a decade. I got my start here working on web development, mostly CRUD, but have demonstrated the ability to figure out more complex problems. I'm not a rock star, but I have received many compliments on my programming aptitude, and technologists and architects have commented on my ability to pick things up (for example, I recently learned a very popular web framework that shall remain nameless since I don’t want to be identified). My problem is that, over time, my responsibilities have been shifting towards work such as support or ‘development’ with some rather niche products (afraid to mention here due to potential for being identified). Some of this work, if it includes anything resembling coding, is very menial scripting in languages such as Powershell or VBScript. The vast majority of the time, however, a typical day consists of going back and forth with the product’s vendor support to send them logs and apply configuration changes or patches they recommend. I’m basically starved for some actual software development. However, even though I’m more than capable of doing that development work (and actually do a much better job at it than anything else), our boss is more interested in the kind of work I mentioned above, her reasoning being that since no one else in the organization wants to do it, it must mean job security. This has been going on for close to 3 years, and the only reason I have held on is on the promise that we would eventually get more development projects assigned to us. Well, that turned out not to be true at all. A recent talk with the boss has just made it more explicitly clear, as she told me in no uncertain terms that it’s very likely that development work (web or otherwise) would go to another group. The reason given to me is that our we don’t have enough resources in our group to handle that. So now I find myself in the position that I either have to stay in what has essentially become a dead end IT job that is tied to the fortunes of a niche stack of apps, or try to find a position that will be better for my long term career. My problem (is it a problem?), however, is that compared to others, my development projects in the last three years are very sparse in number. To compound things, projects using the latest and most popular frameworks, amount to the big fat number of just one—with no work of that kind in the foreseeable future. I am very concerned that this sparseness in my resume is a deficit, and that it will hurt my chances of landing a different job. I’m also wondering how much it will hurt me, and whether that can be ameliorated with hobby projects of my own. I guess I’m looking for opinions. Thank you very much for reading.

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• Paranoid management, contractor checking work [closed]

  - by user833345

  Just wanted to get some opinions and experiences on an issue I'm having at work. First, a little background. I've been working at a company for some time (past any probation periods) and rewriting a horrendous system. No tests, incomplete and broken functionality everywhere, enough copypasta to feed a small village, redundant code, more unused SQL tables than used ones and terrible performance. I've never seen such bad code, pretty much all of it is worthy of being posted on TheDailyWTF. The company has been operating for a number of years and have had a string of bad developers working on this system. I made a call on rewriting instead of refactoring since I judged it to be less work overall and decided that the result will address the requirements more appropriately, since the central requirement is to have a future-proof system for the next decade with plenty of room to scale up. Refactoring would have entailed untangling a huge ball of yarn and at the same time integrating it with a proper foundation or building a foundation from scratch. I've introduced the latest spiffy framework, unit & functional testing, CI, a bug tracker and agile workflow to the environment. I've fixed most of the performance issues of the old system (there were no indexes on any of the tables, for example). I've created an automated deployment process for the old system. The CTO has been maintaining the old system while I have been building the new one and he has been advising management that everything is being done as per best practices. However, management is hiring a contractor to come in and verify my work. In my experience, this is unprecedented. I can understand their reasoning to an extent, since they've had bad luck in the past, but can't help but feel somewhat offended at the fact that they distrust two senior developers who have been working with them for some time enough that a third party is being brought in. And it's not just me who is under watch - people's emails are constantly checked, someone had a remote desktop application installed on their computer of which I was asked to check the usage logs to try to determine if they were stealing sensitive data and there are CCTV cameras in one of the rooms. It's the first time I've decided to disable my Skype history at work. Am I right to feel indignant here? Has anyone else ever encountered such a situation? If so, how did it work out in the end? Was it worth sticking around? Should I just find another job?

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• How to move a website and domain name without experiencing downtime for emails or site?

  - by user4842

  Okay, I have a pretty complex problem, so I'll get right to it. I'm a designer who built a new website for my client. Their old site is hosted at GoDaddy, as well as their email. Problem is, the guy who built the original site decided to put the original domain name and hosting under HIS personal GoDaddy account. Well, that turned out to be a bad move for several reasons. Here's how it's all tied together. The original domain name, www.domainoriginal.com, was actually purchased at Network Solutions. The original web designer pointed the nameservers from Network Solutions to his GoDaddy account, where the email and hosting is setup. The new domain name, www.domainnew.com, was purchased under a new and separate GoDaddy account belonging to the company, and the new website was built under a 3rd party platform (Big Commerce). So, the www.domainnew.com is already pointed to the new website using A records at new GoDaddy account. All is fine there. However, they still need www.domainoriginal.com to point to the NEW website as well. (The old one can simply be deleted, it is NOT important). AND, they want to keep their old email addresses intact and working as well, but under the NEW GoDaddy account. Obviously, I have no DNS control at Network Solutions, and I have no idea what kind of control I have at GoDaddy under the old account because the web designer will not let me see inside his account. But, he and GoDaddy both tell me nothing can be done other than to repoint the nameservers to Network Solutions, and then repoint the A record to my new website, www.domainnew.com, and point the MX Records to GoDaddy. I'm told the downtime would be 24-48 hours if I do this. Ideally, we'd like to do a domain name transfer and get www.domainoriginal.com in the new GoDaddy account created by the company. But, I'm told this could take up to 7 days. Does this mean the site and email will be down for 7 days? And any emails sent during this time, would they be lost forever? If I do this, how long could I expect the site and email to go down? And, will the emails be permanently lost? I've gotten different answers from everybody at GoDaddy so I kind of don't trust them anymore... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks, Tyson

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• Big-name School for Undergrad Students

  - by itaiferber

  As a soon-to-be graduating high school senior in the U.S., I'm going to be facing a tough decision in a few months: which college should I go to? Will it be worth it to go to Cornell or Stanford or Carnegie Mellon (assuming I get in, of course) to get a big-name computer science degree, internships, and connections with professors, while taking on massive debt; or am I better off going to SUNY Binghamton (probably the best state school in New York) and still get a pretty decent education while saving myself from over a hundred-thousand dollars worth of debt? Yes, I know questions like this has been asked before (namely here and here), but please bear with me because I haven't found an answer that fits my particular situation. I've read the two linked questions above in depth, but they haven't answered what I want to know: Yes, I understand that going to a big-name college can potentially get me connected with some wonderful professors and leaders in the field, but on average, how does that translate financially? I mean, will good connections pay off so well that I'd be easily getting rid of over a hundred-thousand dollars of debt? And how does the fact that I can get a fifth-years master's degree at Carnegie Mellon play into the equation? Will the higher degree right off the bat help me get a better-paying job just out of college, or will the extra year only put me further into debt? Not having to go to graduate school to get a comparable degree will, of course, be a great financial relief, but will getting it so early give it any greater worth? And if I go to SUNY Binghamton, which is far lesser-known than what I've considered (although if there are any alumni out there who want to share their experience, I would greatly appreciate it), would I be closing off doors that would potentially offset my short-term economic gain with long-term benefits? Essentially, is the short-term benefit overweighed by a potential long-term loss? The answers to these questions all tie in to my final college decision (again, permitting I make it to these schools), so I hope that asking the skilled and knowledgeable people of the field will help me make the right choice (if there is such a thing). Also, please note: I'm in a rather peculiar situation where I can't pay for college without taking out a bunch of loans, but will be getting little to no financial aid (likely federal or otherwise). I don't want to elaborate on this too much (so take it at face value), but this is mainly the reason I'm asking the question. Thanks a lot! It means a lot to me.

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• How employable am I as a programmer?

  - by dsimcha

  I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

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