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  • How to deal with malicious domain redirections?

    - by user359650
    It is possible for anybody to buy a domain name containing negative terms and point it to someone's website in order to damage their reputation. For instance someone could buy the domain child-pornography.com and point it to the address 64.34.119.12 which is the address behind stackoverflow.com and people navigating to the domain in question would end up visualizing content from StackExchange which would be detrimental to StackExchange's image. To illustrate this, I added the entry 64.34.119.12 child-pornography.com to my /etc/hosts file and tested. Here is what I obtained: I personally found this user experience terrible as someone could think that Stack Exchange are in favor of child pornography and awaiting support from the community to create a Q&A site about it. I tested with other websites and experienced other behaviors that I would categorize as follows: 1 - Useful 404 page (happens with stackoverflow.com): For me the worst way of handling this as the image of the targeted website is directly associated with the offending domain. The more useful the 404 page, the bigger the impression that the targeted website would be willing to help with child pornography. 2 - Redirection (happens with microsoft.com): For instance when accessing child-pornography.com you get redirected to www.microsoft.com. It isn't as bad as above as the offending domain name never appears alongside the targeted website's content, but still bad in my opinion as it gives the impression the targeted website bought the offending domain and redirected it to their website to get more traffic. 3 - Server error (happens with lemonde.fr): You get an error from the webserver which page doesn't contain any content that can be associated with the targeted website (e.g. default Apache 404 page, completely blank page). I believe that is good as the identify of the targeted website isn't revealed. Above are the various behaviors I experienced, but I also thought about a fourth way of dealing with this which is described below. 4 - Disclaimer page (haven't found any website implementing that technique): Display a message such as : "You ended here because someone bought and linked the child-pornography.com domain to our website. We do not own this domain and do not associate ourselves with it. This request has been logged by our servers and we will raise this issue with the competent authorities to have this domain taken down. If you want to access our website, please click here." The good thing about this method is that it can be implemented at application layer (good if you don't have control over web server which happens with some hosting solutions), allows you to protect yourself from any liability, and offer the visitor to be redirected to your own website. Which of the above options would you implement to deal with malicious domain linking (IMO only options 3 and 4 are worth considering) ?

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  • best way to cleanly display 15-20 youtube videos in a webpage?

    - by Phil
    I am currently building a website for a client who has about 20 or so videos that he wants put on a video gallery page and I was wondering if you guys could help me out and give me some advice on how to go about this. I have found yoxview, possibly lightbox... but I don't know if that popup window is really good for video browsing. Also, should/could this be asked in the webmasters instead of stackoverflow?

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  • Which language is best for OpenGL?

    - by Neurofluxation
    Well, this is silly - I've had to post a question about programming on a site other than stackoverflow... Worst thing they have ever done.. I have the following list of languages: C++ C# VB.Net D Delphi Euphoria GLUT Java Power Basic Python REALbasic Visual Basic I would like to know what people think is the: *a) Best (most efficient) language to work with OpenGL* and b) What is the easiest language to work with OpenGL Thanks in advance guys n gals!

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  • books on web server technology [closed]

    - by tushar
    i need to understand the web server technologies as to how are the packets recieved how does it respond and understand httpd.conf files and also get to undertand what terms like proxy or reverse proxy actually mean. but i could not find any resources so please help me and suggest some ebook or web site and by server i dont mean a specific one (apache or nginx..) in short a book on understanding the basics about a web server i already asked this on stackoverflow and webmasters in a nutshell was the answer i got and they said its better if i ask it here so please help me out

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  • Companion Book for Cormen

    - by Robert S. Barnes
    I asked this question on Stackoverflow and they suggested it was more appropriate here. I"m taking a course soon based on the first fourteen chapters of Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms. The course is based on a translation of the 2003 edition. I have two questions: Is it recommended to get the newer 2009 edition and what are the differences? Can anyone recommend a good companion text which has more worked problems and less, "this clearly works" type explanations?

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  • Which is the best Question and Answers site ?

    - by Geek
    Hi, Which site do you think is the best site for Question/Answers for a developer incase of technical questions. Good old stackoverflow seems to be losing it's charm, if you go through it you will find loads and loads of questions with very few answers. Infact most questions dont even have enough reads on them. Has any new site come up which has gained recent popularity for technical questions ? thanks.

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  • How to apply Data Oriented Design with Object Oriented Programming?

    - by Pombal
    Hi. I've read lots of articles about DOD and I understand it but I can't design an Object Oriented system with DOD in mind, I think my OOP education is blocking me. How should I think to mix the two? The objective is to have a nice OO interface while using DOD behind the scenes. I saw this too but didn't help much: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3872354/how-to-apply-dop-and-keep-a-nice-user-interface

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  • Interviewing Process (using blank paper etc)

    - by MJH
    I am curious to know why do companies hand you a blank paper and ask you to write code? This confuses me, because these days intellisense, google, stackoverflow etc are common sources to look up syntax and / or IDE gives you a colored indicator if your syntax is wrong. I usually get stressed out during these situations. I am curious to know opinions of other developers. I am posting this on this forum, hoping to get helpful feedback from other experienced developers.

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  • Do not expose enum in WCF response

    - by Michael Freidgeim
    We had a backward compatibility problem in WCF client, when in Service application a new value was added to one of enums. We discussed different ways to avoid this backward compatibility issues, and I found recommendation do not expose enum in wcf response in http://stackoverflow.com/a/788281/52277.It is still required to create new versions of our service interfaces to replace each enum fields with string field, that expects only documented values, and describe, what should be default behavior, if field has an unexpected value.

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  • Google Chrome Loses ASP.NET Sessions - Need FavIcon

    - by nannette
    I had programmed a brilliant web page in ASP.NET 4.0 and lo and behold, this one page lost its sessions in Google Chrome. I could run it locally in debug and could not reproduce the issues in Chrome. Didn't happen in IE or Firefox, only Chrome on the published server. I finally found in a forum where someone mentioned that Google Chrome looks for favicons and if it doesn't find one it will throw a 302 redirect and kill the session. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8247842/session-data-lost-in-chrome...(read more)

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  • Is the W3 standard a major factor when google decides SERP position?

    - by Anonymous12345
    I have a dynamic php website which index only has around 800 errors according to the w3 validator online. I have tried checking major websites like ebay, stackoverflow and others also, all with around 400 errors. So my first thought is, what good is that validator when it always displays errors? Secondly, will the errors affect my SERP ranking? ie, will me fixing these errors as good as I can increase my Google search position? Thanks

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  • Text Classification Implementation

    - by Hearty
    I've been trying to implement a text classification system. It needs to read a text file, and extract the words and the word frequency. So far, I've been planning to parse the words, put them in a dictionary and save it to an XML file. I am using C++/CLI. Is this a good implementation or is there a simpler or better implementation? May be related question (some code implementation): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10631309/save-dictionary-to-xml-file

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  • Div vs span in html !

    - by Anirudha
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/07/24/div-vs-span-in-html.aspxThere is many difference between Div and html.   Div is block element and span is inline. If you give padding to div it will work but not to span without set display :block or :inline-block You can use span inside div but not div inside span. If you tried it you can see code is invalid. Read this discussion on SO http://stackoverflow.com/questions/183532/what-is-the-difference-between-html-tags-div-and-span

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  • Why are there so many minus pont on questions in this forum? [migrated]

    - by BlackLotus
    First, I think I will get minus too here or blocked idk why I want know this so why when I am looking at question list so many minus point on question here so they are asking about programming not other, so this programmers forum or not? and what defferent with stackoverflow ? so many question about programmer there but just little question got minus and i know that must got minus because asking about cyber cryme or other bad but here so many good question got minus why ? thanks for replay,good or not

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  • Unable to access stackexchange sites from this system

    - by Sandeepan Nath
    Earlier, I was not able to access most of the stackexchange sites like stackoverflow, programmers.SE etc. on my home Windows XP system. I was able to access only a few like http://meta.stackexchange.com and not even http://www.meta.stackexchange.com (note the www). I tried many other sites like http://www.stackoverflow.com, http://area51.stackexchange.com/ but was getting page not found errors on all browsers. Even pinging from terminal was saying destination host unreachable. I did not check recently but may be all SE sites are unreachable now. I was clueless about what could be the issue. I thought some firewall issue? So, I stopped AVG antivirus's firewall, then completely uninstalled it and even turned of windows firewall. But still not reachable even after fresh installation of Windows 7. Then I noticed a "Too many requests" notice on google. This page - http://www.google.co.in/sorry/?continue=http://www.google.co.in/# I don't know why this appeared but I guess somehow too many requests might have been sent to these sites and they blocked me. But in that case, SE would be smart enough to show a captcha like google. So, how to confirm the problem and fix it. Similar questions like these don't look solved yet - Unable to access certain websites Unable to Access Certain Websites I have lately started actively participating in lots of SE sites. There are new new questions popping up in my mind every time and I am not able to ask them. Please help! Thanks

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  • Dynamic subdomain routing

    - by Nader
    Hi everyone, I asked this question over at stackoverflow, but got very few views: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2284917/route-web-requests-to-different-servers-based-on-subdomain Perhaps it's more applicable to this crowd. Here it is again for convenience: I have a platform where a user can create a new website using a subdomain. There will be thousands of these, eg abc.mydomain.com, def.mydomain.com . Hopefully if we are successful hundreds of thousands. I need to be able to route these domains to a different IPs to point at a particular app server. I have this mapping in a database right now. What are the best practices and recommended technologies here? I see a couple options: Have DNS setup with a wildcard CNAME entry so that all requests go to a single IP where perhaps two machines using heartbeat (for failover) know how to look up the IP in the database and then do an http redirect to the appropriate app server. This seems clunky and slow to me. Run my own DNS server that can be programatically managed such that when a new site is created a DNS entry is added. We also move sites around to different app servers, so I would need to be able to update DNS entries in close to real time. Thoughts anyone? Thanks. Update2: I've setup external wildcard DNS pointing at an HAProxy web server whose job it is to route requests to backend servers. The mapping is stored in our internal PowerDNS server. Question now is how to get the HAProxy server (or another) to use the value of the internal DNS and not some config file or access list? – Update: Based on some suggestions below, it seems like reverse-proxy server(s) is the way to go. As I'll be rebalancing the domain-server mapping, these need to work instantly and the TTL on a DNS solution could be a problem. Any recommendations on software to use considering this domain-IP data is stored in a DB, and I'll need this to be performant?

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  • SVN, Samba and Symbolic Links. How to get them all to play together?

    - by Camsoft
    I've got a website project under version control that relies on files from an unversioned directory on the same server via Symbolic Links. I'm currently storing the symbolic links in the repository. The idea is that if someone checks out a working copy on to the same server they can edit and test the working copy of the project before committing it back to the repository. When they checkout their working copy it successfully sets up the symlinks so that the entire site works when testing. The users that work on the project are Windows users, so I've set a samba shares on the server and then mapped them to network drives in Windows. People can edit their working copies directly on the server via network shares and then test them in the web browser before committing their changes back to the repository via TortoiseSVN. The Problem The problem I have is that Samba resolves the symlinks as expected but when a user tries to commit their changes back to the repository, TortoiseSVN thinks the linked files are part of the project and tries to commit the target files to the repository and not the symlinks themselves. I tried turning off symlink support in samba which means that the linked files cannot be resolved as I don't really want people to have access to the linked files nor do I want to import the linked files in the repository. The problem with this is that I get Can't stat '\webserver\projects\working\project\symlinked_file.php'. Access is denied Apart from the symlink problem everything else works 100% perfectly. Users can either checkout website projects to their machine and work on them (but can't test) or checkout them out to their space on the dev web server and work on them and fully test. So I don't want to change the workflow process, I just need a solution to the symbolic link issue. Many thanks. Originally posted on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2400917/svn-samba-and-symbolic-links-how-to-get-them-all-to-play-together

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  • How can I batch convert SVG files containing text to PDF files (specifically on CentOS 5.3 x86_64)?

    - by molecules
    I would like to programatically convert SVG files to PDF files. However, the SVG files contain text that must be searchable in the generated PDF files. Also, it has to work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 or CentOS 5.3 for the x86_64 architecture. It would be nice if it were Open Source or at least not very expensive. Here is what I've tried. All of these, except Batik, work fine on Debian Lenny. Inkscape I can get it installed using autopackages from http://inkscape.modevia.com/ap, but when I use it from the command line, the text is not searchable. Batik rasterizer [sic] When it converts SVG files to PDF files, the text is no longer searchable. svg2pdf The source for this and several of its dependencies are available to download. I have been trying to get it to compile on CentOS, but haven't had success yet. I found a precompiled version for Debian x86_64, but it doesn't work on CentOS. rsvg-convert Generated PDF isn't searchable on CentOS 5.3. Perhaps installing a newer version of cairo would help. Thanks to DaveParillo for mentioning rsvg-convert (on superuser). SOLUTION (but perhaps some of the above will still be useful to the reader) princeXML It works fine on CentOS when installed from source. For some reason it doesn't work when installed from the .rpm. Thanks Erik Dahlström! (provided solution that worked for my case on stackoverflow) Cross posted on stackoverflow

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  • git : The remote end hung up unexpectedly - too many simultaneous users?

    - by Pritam Barhate
    I asked this first on StackOverflow and I was suggested that I should ask it here: We have a self hosted git server (Gitolite) on a VPS account (CPU:2.68GHz RAM:1824MB). This same VPS is also used to publish our underdevelopment web apps for client demos. (Very little traffic). so the main use of the server is as a Git Server Only. This git server is accessed by a team of 30-40 people for various projects. Our problem is that during the day when 6-7 people are trying to access the server (sometimes same repo) we get frequent error message: ssh: connect to host xxx.xxx.xx.xx port 22: Bad file number fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly After trying for 10-15 minutes it generally succeeds. During early mornings and late nights when there are only 1-2 people, git commands work with 100% success rate. Also I would like to note that if I access the other file hosted on the server through HTTP it works fine. I found a couple of questions on StackOverflow and on other sites regarding this. But most of the people point towards SSH key set up or conflicts between Msysgit and Cygns SSH. However I don't think this is the problem in our case as we get this behavior on Windows (using msysgit only) as well as Mac Machines. Also if it was SSH configuration issue then it shouldn't work at all. But in our case it works after 10-15 minutes. I think in our case it might be too many simultaneous connections to same server (or same repo) or something like that. Does there exists a setting or a conf file that needs to modified to solve this problem? Please help me solve this problem or point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance. Pritam.

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  • Apache httpd workers retry

    - by David Newcomb
    I have an Apache httpd web server running mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer. The whole of /somedir is sent to 2 worker machines which service the requests using the round robin scheduler. Each worker machine is running IIS but I don't think that is important. I can demonstrate the load balancer working by repeatedly requesting a single page which contains the IP address of the machine and can see that it switches from one to the other in a predictable round robin fashion. If I switch off one of the IIS servers and start requesting the same page then each page only contains the IP address of the machine that is up. However, if I start IIS and don't run my IIS application then /somedir returns 500 (as it should). I've added 500 to the failonstatus (Apache 2.4) so when it hits the error Apache places the worker machine into error state. Apache still returns the proxy error to the client though. How can I make Apache catch the proxy failure and retry using a different worker in the same way that a connection failure does. Update There is almost the same question asked in StackOverflow so joining them together. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11083707/httpd-mod-proxy-balancer-failover-failonstatus-transperant-switching

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  • Recovering corrupted VB.NET Form file?

    - by Omega
    Good day. This question is directly related to this one I made here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4911099/there-is-no-editor-available-for-form1-vb-error There, I was working on my VB.NET 2010 Express application, I saved, then a blackout came and now, apparently, I can't view the designer nor code of my Form file (Form1.vb). On StackOverflow, I was recommended to check for the From1.vb file, and try to open it on Notepad. If nothing appeared, it would mean that my file was corrupted. I open it on Notepad, and I get a blank file. It is 27kb, but it only has blank spaces. So I assume it is corrupted. I was told this place was better for dealing with corrupted files, about techniques to recover them. I use Windows7, VB.NET 2010 Express. I run Windows7 on Parallels Desktop, Mac OS X. However, I do not believe that is the problem, most likely it was that damned blackout... this is the first time that happens to me. VB.NET worked just fine for me all time (about a month and half). Thank you.

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  • Use preforker(ruby gem) with supervisor

    - by user1548832
    I also asked same question on stackoverflow.com http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13871169/use-preforkerruby-gem-with-supervisor But, superuser.com might much help to me. Can anyone amswer this? I want to run a server program using preforker ruby gem with supervisor. But error has occured. I wrote a following test program using preforker. #!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'rubygems' require 'preforker' Preforker.new(:app_name => 'test-preforker', :timeout => 60, :workers => 1) do |master| while master.wants_me_alive? do puts "hello" sleep 10 end end.run And a following supervisor config. [program:test-preforker] command=/home/tkono/tmp/test-preforker.rb stdout_logfile_maxbytes=1MB stderr_logfile_maxbytes=1MB stdout_logfile=/var/log/%(program_name)s.log stderr_logfile=/var/log/%(program_name)s.log autorestart=true Then, reload supervisor. # supervisorctl reload Restarted supervisord Here is the log file of supervisor. 2012-12-13 17:50:47,161 CRIT Supervisor running as root (no user in config file) 2012-12-13 17:50:47,163 WARN Included extra file "/etc/supervisor.d/test-preforker.ini" during parsing 2012-12-13 17:50:47,209 INFO RPC interface 'supervisor' initialized 2012-12-13 17:50:47,213 CRIT Server 'unix_http_server' running without any HTTP authentication checking 2012-12-13 17:50:47,215 INFO supervisord started with pid 12437 2012-12-13 17:50:48,231 INFO spawned: 'test-preforker' with pid 12440 2012-12-13 17:50:48,233 INFO exited: test-preforker (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-12-13 17:50:49,248 INFO spawned: 'test-preforker' with pid 12441 2012-12-13 17:50:49,261 INFO exited: test-preforker (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-12-13 17:50:51,267 INFO spawned: 'test-preforker' with pid 12442 2012-12-13 17:50:51,284 INFO exited: test-preforker (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-12-13 17:50:54,305 INFO spawned: 'test-preforker' with pid 12443 2012-12-13 17:50:54,308 INFO exited: test-preforker (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-12-13 17:50:55,311 INFO gave up: test-preforker entered FATAL state, too many start retries too quickly Please tell me what is wrong? A program using preforker cannot run with supervisor? preforker https://github.com/dcadenas/preforker supervisor http://supervisord.org/index.html

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  • Community Outreach - Where Should I Go

    - by Roger Brinkley
    A few days ago I was talking to person new to community development and they asked me what guidelines I used to determine the worthiness of a particular event. After our conversation was over I thought about it a little bit more and figured out there are three ways to determine if any event (be it conference, blog, podcast or other social medias) is worth doing: Transferability, Multiplication, and Impact. Transferability - Is what I have to say useful to the people that are going to hear it. For instance, consider a company that has product offering that can connect up using a number of languages like Scala, Grovey or Java. Sending a Scala expert to talk about Scala and the product is not transferable to a Java User Group, but a Java expert doing the same talk with a Java slant is. Similarly, talking about JavaFX to any Java User Group meeting in Brazil was pretty much a wasted effort until it was open sourced. Once it was open sourced it was well received. You can also look at transferability in relation to the subject matter that you're dealing with. How transferable is a presentation that I create. Can I, or a technical writer on the staff, turn it into some technical document. Could it be converted into some type of screen cast. If we have a regular podcast can we make a reference to the document, catch the high points or turn it into a interview. Is there a way of using this in the sales group. In other words is the document purely one dimensional or can it be re-purposed in other forms. Multiplication - On every trip I'm looking for 2 to 5 solid connections that I can make with developers. These are long term connections, because I know that once that relationship is established it will lead to another 2 - 5 from that connection and within a couple of years were talking about some 100 connections from just one developer. For instance, when I was working on JavaHelp in 2000 I hired a science teacher with a programming background. We've developed a very tight relationship over the year though we rarely see each other more than once a year. But at this JavaOne, one of his employees came up to me and said, "Richard (Rick Hard in Czech) told me to tell you that he couldn't make it to JavaOne this year but if I saw you to tell you hi". Another example is from my Mobile & Embedded days in Brasil. On our very first FISL trip about 5 years ago there were two university students that had created a project called "Marge". Marge was a Bluetooth framework that made connecting bluetooth devices easier. I invited them to a "Sun" dinner that evening. Originally they were planning on leaving that afternoon, but they changed their plans recognizing the opportunity. Their eyes were as big a saucers when they realized the level of engineers at the meeting. They went home started a JUG in Florianoplis that we've visited more than a couple of times. One of them went to work for Brazilian government lab like Berkley Labs, MIT Lab, John Hopkins Applied Physicas Labs or Lincoln Labs in the US. That presented us with an opportunity to show Embedded Java as a possibility for some of the work they were doing there. Impact - The final criteria is how life changing is what I'm going to say be to the individuals I'm reaching. A t-shirt is just a token, but when I reach down and tug at their developer hearts then I know I've succeeded. I'll never forget one time we flew all night to reach Joan Pasoa in Northern Brazil. We arrived at 2am went immediately to our hotel only to be woken up at 6 am to travel 2 hours by car to the presentation hall. When we arrived we were totally exhausted. Outside the facility there were 500 people lined up to hear 6 speakers for the day. That itself was uplifting.  I delivered one of my favorite talks on "I have passion". It was a talk on golf and embedded java development, "Find your passion". When we finished a couple of first year students came up to me and said how much my talk had inspired them. FISL is another great example. I had been about 4 years in a row. FISL is a very young group of developers so capturing their attention is important. Several of the students will come back 2 or 3 years later and ask me questions about research or jobs. And then there's Louis. Louis is one my favorite Brazilians. I can only describe him as a big Brazilian teddy bear. I see him every year at FISL. He works primarily in Java EE but he's attended every single one of my talks over the last 4 years. I can't tell you why, but he always greets me and gives me a hug. For some reason I've had a real impact. And of course when it comes to impact you don't just measure a presentation but every single interaction you have at an event. It's the hall way conversations, the booth conversations, but more importantly it's the conversations at dinner tables or in the cars when you're getting transported to an event. There's a good story that illustrates this. Last year in the spring I was traveling to Goiânia in Brazil. I've been there many times and leaders there no me well. One young man has picked me up at the airport on more than one occasion. We were going out to dinner one evening and he brought his girl friend along. One thing let to another and I eventually asked him, in front of her, "Why haven't you asked her to marry you?" There were all kinds of excuses and she just looked at him and smiled. When I came back in December for JavaOne he came and sought me. "I just want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said, and I asked her to marry me. We're getting married next Spring." Sometimes just one presentation is all it takes to make an impact. Other times it takes years. Some impacts are directly related to the company and some are more personal in nature. It doesn't matter which it is because it's having the impact that matters.

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  • Authoritative sources about Database vs. Flatfile decision

    - by FastAl
    <tldr>looking for a reference to a book or other undeniably authoritative source that gives reasons when you should choose a database vs. when you should choose other storage methods. I have provided an un-authoritative list of reasons about 2/3 of the way down this post.</tldr> I have a situation at my company where a database is being used where it would be better to use another solution (in this case, an auto-generated piece of source code that contains a static lookup table, searched by binary sort). Normally, a database would be an OK solution even though the problem does not require a database, e.g, none of the elements of ACID are needed, as it is read-only data, updated about every 3-5 years (also requiring other sourcecode changes), and fits in memory, and can be keyed into via binary search (a tad faster than db, but speed is not an issue). The problem is that this code runs on our enterprise server, but is shared with several PC platforms (some disconnected, some use a central DB, etc.), and parts of it are managed by multiple programming units, parts by the DBAs, parts even by mathematicians in another department, etc. These hit their own platform’s version of their databases (containing their own copy of the static data). What happens is that every implementation, every little change, something different goes wrong. There are many other issues as well. I can’t even use a flatfile, because one mode of running on our enterprise server does not have permission to read files (only databases, and of course, its own literal storage, e.g., in-source table). Of course, other parts of the system use databases in proper, less obscure manners; there is no problem with those parts. So why don’t we just change it? I don’t have administrative ability to force a change. But I’m affected because sometimes I have to help fix the problems, but mostly because it causes outages and tons of extra IT time by other programmers and d*mmit that makes me mad! The reason neither management, nor the designers of the system, can see the problem is that they propose a solution that won’t work: increase communication; implement more safeguards and standards; etc. But every time, in a different part of the already-pared-down but still multi-step processes, a few different diligent, hard-working, top performing IT personnel make a unique subtle error that causes it to fail, sometimes after the last round of testing! And in general these are not single-person failures, but understandable miscommunications. And communication at our company is actually better than most. People just don't think that's the case because they haven't dug into the matter. However, I have it on very good word from somebody with extensive formal study of sociology and psychology that the relatively small amount of less-than-proper database usage in this gigantic cross-platform multi-source, multi-language project is bureaucratically un-maintainable. Impossible. No chance. At least with Human Beings in the loop, and it can’t be automated. In addition, the management and developers who could change this, though intelligent and capable, don’t understand the rigidity of this ‘how humans are’ issue, and are not convincible on the matter. The reason putting the static data in sourcecode will solve the problem is, although the solution is less sexy than a database, it would function with no technical drawbacks; and since the sharing of sourcecode already works very well, you basically erase any database-related effort from this section of the project, along with all the drawbacks of it that are causing problems. OK, that’s the background, for the curious. I won’t be able to convince management that this is an unfixable sociological problem, and that the real solution is coding around these limits of human nature, just as you would code around a bug in a 3rd party component that you can’t change. So what I have to do is exploit the unsuitableness of the database solution, and not do it using logic, but rather authority. I am aware of many reasons, and posts on this site giving reasons for one over the other; I’m not looking for lists of reasons like these (although you can add a comment if I've miss a doozy): WHY USE A DATABASE? instead of flatfile/other DB vs. file: if you need... Random Read / Transparent search optimization Advanced / varied / customizable Searching and sorting capabilities Transaction/rollback Locks, semaphores Concurrency control / Shared users Security 1-many/m-m is easier Easy modification Scalability Load Balancing Random updates / inserts / deletes Advanced query Administrative control of design, etc. SQL / learning curve Debugging / Logging Centralized / Live Backup capabilities Cached queries / dvlp & cache execution plans Interleaved update/read Referential integrity, avoid redundant/missing/corrupt/out-of-sync data Reporting (from on olap or oltp db) / turnkey generation tools [Disadvantages:] Important to get right the first time - professional design - but only b/c it's meant to last s/w & h/w cost Usu. over a network, speed issue (best vs. best design vs. local=even then a separate process req's marshalling/netwk layers/inter-p comm) indicies and query processing can stand in the way of simple processing (vs. flatfile) WHY USE FLATFILE: If you only need... Sequential Row processing only Limited usage append only (no reading, no master key/update) Only Update the record you're reading (fixed length recs only) Too big to fit into memory If Local disk / read-ahead network connection Portability / small system Email / cut & Paste / store as document by novice - simple format Low design learning curve but high cost later WHY USE IN-MEMORY/TABLE (tables, arrays, etc.): if you need... Processing a single db/ff record that was imported Known size of data Static data if hardcoding the table Narrow, unchanging use (e.g., one program or proc) -includes a class that will be shared, but encapsulates its data manipulation Extreme speed needed / high transaction frequency Random access - but search is dependent on implementation Following are some other posts about the topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1499239/database-vs-flat-text-file-what-are-some-technical-reasons-for-choosing-one-over http://stackoverflow.com/questions/332825/are-flat-file-databases-any-good http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2356851/database-vs-flat-files http://stackoverflow.com/questions/514455/databases-vs-plain-text/514530 What I’d like to know is if anybody could recommend a hard, authoritative source containing these reasons. I’m looking for a paper book I can buy, or a reputable website with whitepapers about the issue (e.g., Microsoft, IBM), not counting the user-generated content on those sites. This will have a greater change to elicit a change that I’m looking for: less wasted programmer time, and more reliable programs. Thanks very much for your help. You win a prize for reading such a large post!

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