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• Are there any memorization techniques that exist for programmers? [closed]

  - by Akromyk

  I just watched this video on Ted.com entitled: Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can do and it got me thinking about memory from a programmers perspective. There are so many abstract concepts and syntactic nuances we encounter daily, and yet we still manage to remember enough information to be productive. The memory palace may help in remembering someone's name or a random story but are there any memorization techniques that can better aid programmers?

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• How do you approach tutorials

  - by aurel

  Hi I get lots of interesting tutorials through feeds and sometimes I implement them step by step, other times I just read through them and note anything that I do not know. when ever I implement them I takes a long time - starting the project, typing the code (as I feel there is no point to copy and paste ), then going back and forth between browser and editing program All in all, I am interested to know how do you learn from the tutorials (I'm no where close to being an expert). Or if you don't use tutorials, is there any other way to learn? Thanks a lot

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• maintaining a growing, diverse codebase with continuous integration

  - by Nate

  I am in need of some help with philosophy and design of a continuous integration setup. Our current CI setup uses buildbot. When I started out designing it, I inherited (well, not strictly, as I was involved in its design a year earlier) a bespoke CI builder that was tailored to run the entire build at once, overnight. After a while, we decided that this was insufficient, and started exploring different CI frameworks, eventually choosing buildbot. One of my goals in transitioning to buildbot (besides getting to enjoy all the whiz-bang extras) was to overcome some of the inadequacies of our bespoke nightly builder. Humor me for a moment, and let me explain what I have inherited. The codebase for my company is almost 150 unique c++ Windows applications, each of which has dependencies on one or more of a dozen internal libraries (and many on 3rd party libraries as well). Some of these libraries are interdependent, and have depending applications that (while they have nothing to do with each other) have to be built with the same build of that library. Half of these applications and libraries are considered "legacy" and unportable, and must be built with several distinct configurations of the IBM compiler (for which I have written unique subclasses of Compile), and the other half are built with visual studio. The code for each compiler is stored in two separate Visual SourceSafe repositories (which I am simply handling using a bunch of ShellCommands, as there is no support for VSS). Our original nightly builder simply took down the source for everything, and built stuff in a certain order. There was no way to build only a single application, or pick a revision, or to group things. It would launched virtual machines to build a number of the applications. It wasn't very robust, it wasn't distributable. It wasn't terribly extensible. I wanted to be able to overcame all of these limitations in buildbot. The way I did this originally was to create entries for each of the applications we wanted to build (all 150ish of them), then create triggered schedulers that could build various applications as groups, and then subsume those groups under an overall nightly build scheduler. These could run on dedicated slaves (no more virtual machine chicanery), and if I wanted I could simply add new slaves. Now, if we want to do a full build out of schedule, it's one click, but we can also build just one application should we so desire. There are four weaknesses of this approach, however. One is our source tree's complex web of dependencies. In order to simplify config maintenace, all builders are generated from a large dictionary. The dependencies are retrieved and built in a not-terribly robust fashion (namely, keying off of certain things in my build-target dictionary). The second is that each build has between 15 and 21 build steps, which is hard to browse and look at in the web interface, and since there are around 150 columns, takes forever to load (think from 30 seconds to multiple minutes). Thirdly, we no longer have autodiscovery of build targets (although, as much as one of my coworkers harps on me about this, I don't see what it got us in the first place). Finally, aformentioned coworker likes to constantly bring up the fact that we can no longer perform a full build on our local machine (though I never saw what that got us, either, considering that it took three times as long as the distributed build; I think he is just paranoically phobic of ever breaking the build). Now, moving to new development, we are starting to use g++ and subversion (not porting the old repository, mind you - just for the new stuff). Also, we are starting to do more unit testing ("more" might give the wrong picture... it's more like any), and integration testing (using python). I'm having a hard time figuring out how to fit these into my existing configuration. So, where have I gone wrong philosophically here? How can I best proceed forward (with buildbot - it's the only piece of the puzzle I have license to work on) so that my configuration is actually maintainable? How do I address some of my design's weaknesses? What really works in terms of CI strategies for large, (possibly over-)complex codebases?

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• Absolute statements in IT that are wrong

  - by Dan McGrath

  I was recently in a discussion about the absolute statement "It costs more in programming time to optimise software than it costs to throw hardware at a problem". The general thought (of which I agree with) is that as an absolute statement this is wrong. There are too many variables to ever generalise in such a way. What other statements do you hear about software/programming that simply do not work as an absolute and why?

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• Cumulative Update packages for SQL Server 2008 are available now: CU7 for SQL2008 SP2 and CU2 for SQL2008 SP3

  - by ssqa.net

  Another instalment of Cumulative Update package for SQL Server 2008 SP3 is available now, which is CU2 and the build number is known as 10.00.5768.00. As usual this CU2 for SQL2008 SP3 contains hotfixes for issues that were fixed after the release of SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 3 (SP3). KBA2633143 list the following article numbers about more information on the fixes: VSTS bug number KB article number Description 794387 2522893 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2522893/ ) FIX: A backup operation...(read more)

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• Programmers and tech email: Do you actually read all of them?

  - by AdityaGameProgrammer

  Email Alerts, Blog /Forum updates, discussion subscriptions general programming/technology update emails that we often subscribe to.Do you actually read them ? or go direct to the source when you find time. often we might the mail of programmers filled with loads of unread subscription mail from technology they previously were following or worked on or things they wish to follow .some or a majority of these mail just keep on piling up . i personally have few updates that i wish i read but constantly avoid and keep of for latter and finally delete them in effort keep the in box clean. few questions come to mind regarding this Do you keep such mail in separate accounts? Do you read all the mail you have subscribed to? Do you ever unsubscribe to any such email if you aren't reading them? How much do you really value these email. Lastly do you keep your in box clean ? wish to deal with this in a better way.

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• Developing a feature which sole purpose to be taken out?

  - by adib

  What is the name of the pattern in which individual contributors (programmers/designers) developed an artifact for the sole purpose is to serve as a diversion so that management can remove that feature in the final product? This is a folklore I heard from an ex-colleague who used to work at a large game development company. At that company, it is well known that middle management is pressurized to "give inputs" and "make changes" to the product otherwise they risk being seen as not contributing to the project. This situation have delayed many projects because of these superfluous "management inputs". In one project at the above company, the artists and developers created a supernumerary animated character that appears in every cutscene and sticks out like a sore thumb. They designed it in such a way that it can be easily removed before the game is shipped (this was when games were still sold in physical media and not a downloadable product). Obviously the management then voted to remove the animation. On the positive side, management didn't introduced any unnecessary changes that would have delayed the project because they have shown that they provided constructive inputs to the product. This process pattern has a name among game programmers that work in corporates, but I forgot what was the actual name. I believe it's duck-something. Anybody can help pointing out the name and perhaps some rather credible reference to how the pattern develops?.

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• How to develop "Client script library" for ASP.net controls and how do these work?

  - by Niranjan Kala

  I have been working on .Net platform for 2 years and right now I am working on DevExpress controls for 6 months. All these control have client-side Events which are under some ClientScript nameSpace of particular control, Which specify ClientInstanceName, methods and properties accessible at client side. For example Button1 is ClientInstanceName and Button1.Text is a property, with methods like these: Button1.SetValue(); Button1.GetValue(); In ASP.Net Controls, buttons have the ClientClick event that fires before the Server Side Click event. I have inspected and goggled to extend client side functionality in asp.net controls. For example: create a ClientInstanceName property for controls or CheckedChanged event for CheckBox / RadioButton control. I have tried using these MSDN articles: Injecting Client-Side Script from an ASP.NET Server Control Working with Client-Side Script I got much information and ideas from these articles on how to implement/extend these. All are working in the client side. protected override void AddAttributesToRender(HtmlTextWriter writer) { base.AddAttributesToRender(writer); string script = @"return confirm(""%%POPUP_MESSAGE%%"");"; script = script.Replace("%%POPUP_MESSAGE%%", this.PopupMessage.Replace("\"", "\\\"")); writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Onclick, script); } Here It is just setting up attribute to the button. but all client side interaction no control from server. Here is that I want to know: How can I implement such functionality to create methods, properties etc. on client side. For example I am creating a PopControl as in the above code snippet same behavior as like Ajax ModalPopupExtender That have OK Button related properties. Ajax Controls can be directed to perform work from server side code e.g. Popup1.show(); How can I do this with such client enabled controls implemented controls as windows do? I am learning creation of Ajax Controls but I do not want to use ScriptManager or depend on another control. Just some extension to standard controls. I am expecting for ideas and implementation methods for such functionality.

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• Should one always know what an API is doing just by looking at the code?

  - by markmnl

  Recently I have been developing my own API and with that invested interest in API design I have been keenly interested how I can improve my API design. One aspect that has come up a couple times is (not by users of my API but in my observing discussion about the topic): one should know just by looking at the code calling the API what it is doing. For example see this discussion on GitHub for the discourse repo, it goes something like: foo.update_pinned(true, true); Just by looking at the code (without knowing the parameter names, documentation etc.) one cannot guess what it is going to do - what does the 2nd argument mean? The suggested improvement is to have something like: foo.pin() foo.unpin() foo.pin_globally() And that clears things up (the 2nd arg was whether to pin foo globally, I am guessing), and I agree in this case the later would certainly be an improvement. However I believe there can be instances where methods to set different but logically related state would be better exposed as one method call rather than separate ones, even though you would not know what it is doing just by looking at the code. (So you would have to resort to looking at the parameter names and documentation to find out - which personally I would always do no matter what if I am unfamiliar with an API). For example I expose one method SetVisibility(bool, string, bool) on a FalconPeer and I acknowledge just looking at the line: falconPeer.SetVisibility(true, "aerw3", true); You would have no idea what it is doing. It is setting 3 different values that control the "visibility" of the falconPeer in the logical sense: accept join requests, only with password and reply to discovery requests. Splitting this out into 3 method calls could lead to a user of the API to set one aspect of "visibility" forgetting to set others that I force them to think about by only exposing the one method to set all aspects of "visibility". Furthermore when the user wants to change one aspect they almost always will want to change another aspect and can now do so in one call.

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• Fonts look bad in Microsoft Office using Wine

  - by amfcosta

  Office fonts in wine look very different from what they look in Windows or LibreOffice. As can be seen from the attached screenshots, they look blurry in some sizes and aliased in other sizes. You can see the differences not only in the document text but also in the ribbon menu. It happens with a lot of fonts. I'm testing it with Office 2010 now, but it also happens in Office 2007. Things I've tried: Changing fontsmooth settings with winetricks - made no difference. Copying fonts from a Windows system - made no difference. Using Ubuntu's fonts (by removing the Windows/Fonts from the wineprefix) - removed the blurriness in some fonts but increased aliasing. The three screenshots correspond to different "configurations": office_wine.png - Office Word in Wine using Wine's original fonts; office_nowinefonts.png - Office Word in Wine using Ubuntu's fonts; office_windows.png - Office Word in Windows. PS: please make sure to see the screenshots without scaling them to notice the problem. EDIT: A screenshot of how Calibri behaves in Wine here.

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• Style bits vs. Separate bool's

  - by peterchen

  My main platform (WinAPI) still heavily uses bits for control styles etc. (example). When introducing custom controls, I'm permanently wondering whether to follow that style or rather use individual bool's. Let's pit them against each other: enum EMyCtrlStyles { mcsUseFileIcon = 1, mcsTruncateFileName = 2, mcsUseShellContextMenu = 4, }; void SetStyle(DWORD mcsStyle); void ModifyStyle(DWORD mcsRemove, DWORD mcsAdd); DWORD GetStyle() const; ... ctrl.SetStyle(mcsUseFileIcon | mcsUseShellContextMenu); vs. CMyCtrl & SetUseFileIcon(bool enable = true); bool GetUseFileIcon() const; CMyCtrl & SetTruncteFileName(bool enable = true); bool GetTruncteFileName() const; CMyCtrl & SetUseShellContextMenu(bool enable = true); bool GetUseShellContextMenu() const; ctrl.SetUseFileIcon().SetUseShellContextMenu(); As I see it, Pro Style Bits Consistent with platform less library code (without gaining complexity), less places to modify for adding a new style less caller code (without losing notable readability) easier to use in some scenarios (e.g. remembering / transferring settings) Binary API remains stable if new style bits are introduced Now, the first and the last are minor in most cases. Pro Individual booleans Intellisense and refactoring tools reduce the "less typing" effort Single Purpose Entities more literate code (as in "flows more like a sentence") No change of paradim for non-bool properties These sound more modern, but also "soft" advantages. I must admit the "platform consistency" is much more enticing than I could justify, the less code without losing much quality is a nice bonus. 1. What do you prefer? Subjectively, for writing the library, or for writing client code? 2. Any (semi-) objective statements, studies, etc.?

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• Which programming language should I learn? [on hold]

  - by Ashkan

  I'm Ashkan and I'm from Iran, I started programming when I was 13 and I learned a lot of stuff since then, But now I'm totally lost. Since I live in Iran there are no counselor or any professionals out there to help me, so I decided to ask here. I started with Visual Basic and after 1 year I started to learn HTML , CSS , Javascript and JQuery. And for the past 6 months I've been learning PHP,and I have a basic understanding of OOP. I want to move to America to continue my studies and I was wondering which programming language helps me the most to get there? Should I learn C++ or JAVA or should I study Computer Science and Math? also since We are not in a good place financially, I want a programming language that helps me in college and lets me make some money? Thanks in advance and sorry for my poor English skills.

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• Are programmers getting lazier and less competent

  - by Skeith

  I started programming in C++ at uni and loved it. In the next term we changed to VB6 and I hated it. I could not tell what was going on, you drag a button to a form and the ide writes the code for you. While I hated the way VB functioned I cannot argue that it was faster and easier than doing the same thing in C++ so i can see why it is a popular language. Now I am not calling VB developers lazy in just saying it easier than C++ and I have noticed that a lot of newer languages are following this trend such a C#. This leads me to think that as more business want quick results more people will program like this and sooner or later there will be no such thing as what we call programming now. Future programmers will tell the computer what they want and the compiler will write the program for them like in star trek. Is this just an under informed opinion of a junior programmer or are programmers getting lazier and less competent in general? EDIT: A lot of answers say why re invent the wheel and I agree with this but when there are wheels available people are not bothering to learn how to make the wheel. I can google how to do pretty much anything in any language and half the languages do so much for you when it come to debugging they have no idea what there code does of how to fix the error. That's how I cam up with the theory that programmers are becoming lazier and less competent as no one cares how stuff works just that it does until it does not.

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• Non-zero exit status for clean exit

  - by trinithis

  Is it acceptable to return a non-zero exit code if the program in question ran properly? For example, say I have a simple program that (only) does the following: Program takes N arguments. It returns an exit code of min(N, 255). Note that any N is valid for the program. A more realistic program might return different codes for successfully ran programs that signify different things. Should these programs instead write this information to a stream instead, such as to stdout?

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• Recap - SQL Saturday 151 in Orlando

  - by KKline

  It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays were started by Andy Warren ( Twitter | Blog ). On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server. I also delivered a session on SQL Server Internals and Architecture to a totally packed house. For those of you who emailed me directly, here's the link for the special SQL Sentry offer . I got to attend the extended events session...(read more)

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• Is monkeypatching considered good programming practice?

  - by vartec

  I've been under impression, that monkeypatching is more in quick and dirty hack category, rather than standard, good programming practice. While I'd used from time to time to fix minor issues with 3rd party libs, I considered it temporary fix and I'd submit proper patch to the 3rd party project. However, I've seen this technique used as "the normal way" in mainstream projects, for example in Gevent's gevent.monkey module. Has monkeypatching became mainstream, normal, acceptable programming practice? See also: "Monkeypatching For Humans" by Jeff Atwood

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• Meaningful concise method naming guidelines

  - by Sam

  Recently I started releasing an open source project, while I was the only user of the library I did not care about the names, but know I want to assign clever names to each methods to make it easier to learn, but I also need to use concise names so they are easy to write as well. I was thinking about some guidelines about the naming, I am aware of lots of guidelines that only care about letters casing or some simple notes. Here, I am looking after guidelines for meaningful concise naming. For example, this could be part of the guidelines I am looking after: Use Add when an existing item is going to be added to a target, Use Create when a new item is being created and added to a target. Use Remove when an existing item is going to be removed from a target, Use delete when an item is going to be removed permanently. Pair AddXXX methods with RemoveXXX and Pair CreateXXX methods with DeleteXXX methods, but do not mix them. The above guidance may be intuitive for native English speakers, but for me that English is my second language I need to be told about things like this.

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• Buzzword for "performance-aware" software development

  - by errantlinguist

  There seems to be an overabundance of buzzwords for software development styles and methodologies: Agile development, extreme programming, test-driven development, etc... well, is there any sort of buzzword for "performance-aware" development? By "performance awareness", I don't necessarily mean low-latency or low-level programming, although the former would logically fall under the blanket term I'm looking for. I mean development in which resources are recognised to be finite and so there is a general emphasis on low computational complexity, good resource management, etc. If I was to be snarky, I would say "good programming", but that doesn't seem to get the message across so well...

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• Filtering your offices IPs from Google Analytics when each has a dynamic IP?

  - by leeand00

  I found the documentation for filtering IPs from Google Analytics, but the address of the several locations of our company all have dynamic IP addresses that change every 30 days from what I'm told. I know from working with Dynamic DNS that the provider usually gives you a script that you configure your router to run when it's IP address changes or when it is restarted, which passes the new IP address to the DDNS server. I'm wondering if there might be a way to write or use a preexisting script to do the same thing with the Google Analytics API.

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• What non-programming tools do programmers use?

  - by user828584

  I'm reading code complete with the intention of learning how to better structure my code, but I'm also learning a lot about how many aspects of programming something there are that aren't just writing the code. The book talks a lot about problem definition, determining the requirements, defining the structure, designing the code, etc. What tools are used for these non-writing steps of programming? Is there software that will help me design and plan out what I'm going to write before I do?

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• Finding complexity of a program as a service [on hold]

  - by Seshu

  I would like to find the complexity of a specific code chunk written in Java. Is there a place/web site/service where I can find out the complexity of any arbitrary program. This program might include loops/recursion. Using theory we can compute complexity ourselves. But, just curious in finding if any service is out there to find such complexity. We have several code quality related tools does any of such tools will also find complexity of given code? Could any one point me or direct me to such a utility/site/service?

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• What to watch out for when writing code at an Interview?

  - by Philip

  Hi, I have read that at a lot of companies you have to write code at an interview. On the one hand I see that it makes sense to ask for a work sample. On the other hand: What kind of code do you expect to be written in 5 minutes? And what if they tell me "Write an algorithm that does this and that" but I cannot think of a smart solution or even write code that doesn't semantically work? I am particularly interested in that question because I do not have that much commercial programming experience, 2 years part-time, one year full-time. (But I am interested in programming languages since nearly 15 years though usually I was more concentrated in playing with the language rather than writing large applications...) And actually I consider my debugging and problem solving skills much better than my coding skills. I sometimes see myself not writing the most beautiful code when looking back, but on the other hand I often come up with solutions for hard problems. And I think I am very good at optimizing, fixing, restructuring existing code, but I have problems with writing new applications from scratch. The software design sucks... ;-) Therefore I don't feel comfortable when thinking about this code writing situation at an interview... So what do the interviewers expect? What kind of information about my code writing are they interested in? Philip

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• Techniques to read code written by others?

  - by Simon

  Are there any techniques that you find useful or follow when it comes to reading and understanding code written by others when Direct Knowledge Transfer/meeting the person who wrote the code is not an option. One of the techniques that I follow when dealing with legacy code is by adding additional debugging statements and based on the values I figure out the flow/logic. This can be tedious at times. Hence the reason behind this question, Are there any other techniques being widely practiced or that you personally follow when it comes to dealing with code written by other people/colleagues/open-source team?

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• How do I improve my code reading skills

  - by Andrew

  Well the question is in the title - how do I improve my code reading skills. The software/hardware environment I currently do development in is quite slow with respect to compilation times and time it takes the whole system to test. The system is quite old/complex and thus splitting it into a several smaller, more manageable sub-projects is not feasible in a neare future. I have realized is what really hinders the development progress is my code reading skills. How do I improve my code reading skills, so I can spot most of the errors and issues in the code even before I hit the "do compile" key, even before I start the debugger?

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• How should programmers handle email-username identity theft?

  - by Craige

  Background I recently signed up for an iTunes account, and found that somebody had fraudulently used MY email to register their iTunes account. Why Apple did not validate the email address, I will never know. Now I am told that I cannot use my email address to register a new iTunes account, as this email address is linked to an existing account. This got be thinking... Question How should we as developers handle email/identity theft? Obviously, we should verify that an email address belongs to the person it is said to belong to. Why Apple did not do this in my case, I have no idea. But lets pretend we use email address for login/account identification, and something slipped though the cracks (be it our end, or the users). How should we handle reports of fraudulent accounts?

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