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• Can the "Documents" standard folder be rescued and how?

  - by romkyns

  Anyone who likes their Documents folder to contain only things they place there knows that the standard Documents folder is completely unsuitable for this task. Every program seems to want to put its settings, data, or something equally irrelevant into the Documents folder, despite the fact that there are folders specifically for this job. So that this doesn't sound empty, take my personal "Documents" folder as an example. I don't ever use it, in that I never, under any circumstances, save anything into this folder myself. And yet, it contains 46 folders and 3 files at the top level, for a total of 800 files in 500 folders. That's 190 MB of "documents" I didn't create. Obviously any actual documents would immediately get lost in this mess. My question is: can anything be done to improve the situation sufficiently to make "Documents" useful again, say over the next 5 years? Can programmers be somehow educated en-masse not to use it as a dumping ground? Could the OS start reporting some "fake" location hidden under AppData through the existing APIs, while only allowing Explorer and the various Open/Save dialogs to know where the "real" Documents folder resides? Or are any attempts completely futile or even unnecessary?

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• vim + Ruby on Rails: how do you bounce among those 4-5 files you're currently working on?

  - by glitch

  I'm just starting to get familiar with vim, and I'd like to use it as my primary Rails development tool. As a Visual Studio and RubyMine user, I find a lot of stuff to be missing from the barebones vim installation, and therefore I went ahead and attempted to soup it up with plugins such as: rails.vim tcomment ruby-vim NERDtree and a couple of others. The issue is that I still don't quite get the average work-flow of using vim as one's Rails IDE. In RubyMine (again, similarly to Visual Studio) I have a series of tabs always open, containing the main files I'm switching among, and I additionally use NERDtree to open files from the folder structure. I tried opening them as new tabs, but the tab system in vim is just a lot more awkward than that in real IDEs. (I haven't seen vim pros in action, but I imagine that they'd not be relying on tabs, but using numerous splits instead, keeping at least a couple of files per split and switching between them with CTRL + ^. Is that the case?) So, at the end of the day, how do I really squeeze the most from vim if I want to be able to quickly access several files at once? Thank you!

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• How Visual Studio could help to avoid duplicating code?

  - by MegaMind

  I work within a team of developers. Everyone is making their changes without carrying too much if the same thing is already implemented in the codebase. This leads to classes constantly growing and to severe duplication. I want to add line items to class definitions from which a developer could judge what this class has. Would it help? How to do it in Visual Studio? If it wouldn't help, what would be the better alternative to encourage the developers to check if something exists before implementing it?

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• How to switch off? [closed]

  - by Xophmeister

  While I've programmed software for many years, I've only recently started doing so professionally and have noticed a bit of a problematic pattern. I hope this is the best place to pose such a question, as I am interested in others' experiences and solutions... Writing software is, by its nature, a cerebral exercise. When coding for my own sake, I would do so until I was satisfied; even if that meant going all night. Now I'm coding in exchange for goods and services, on projects that are inherently uninteresting to me, I want to 'switch off' when it's time to go home. Maybe you consider that to be a 'bad attitude', but I just don't feel that whatever I'm working on is worth caring about after-hours. Besides, my employer doesn't exactly have the infrastructure required to make out-of-office changes; I can't just clone a repo and even remote login is a PITA. Anyway, the problem I'm experiencing is that, while I'm not particularly overworked or stressed, if I'm faced with a problem, my brain will work on a solution. Generally, it won't give up. Hence I can't switch off and, sometimes, the problem or the solution is significant enough that it disrupts my sleep. While, paradoxically, this doesn't seem to affect my coding ability, it can have a profound impact of the rest of my life. I get increasingly low as I get tired. So far, the best solutions I've found are writing little notes on the matter (and, say, e-mailing them back to my work address) and exercise. Neither of these can switch me off entirely and, as the week progresses, exercise especially becomes untenable due to tiredness. TL;DR How can you stop from being a coding zombie?

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• returning null vs returning zero, which would be better?

  - by Dark Star1

  I inherited a project that I am managing and having to maintain pending the redevelopment of the code base. At the moment I am being tasked with adding little feature all over the place and have gotten into the habit of returning null instead of zero in parts of the code where I am working on. The problem is we have a client that is using this code and parts of code that require data from my implemented features recieve a null and dump the stack trace in UI. I would like to avoid this entirely from my input but without the nullPointer exceptions there's the potential that errors would be introduced into the client's data which may go un-noticed. Usually I would have come up with my own error notification system but I have never inherited a project before. so I am unsure whether to continue down this path. I still believe that the stack dump is preferable to un-noticed data corruption/inaccuracies.

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• Can decoupling hurt maintainability in certain situations?

  - by Ceiling Gecko

  Can the fact that the business logic is mapped to interfaces instead of implementations actually hinder the maintenance of the application in certain situations? A naive example with the Java's Hibernate framework would be, that for example (provided I don't have the whole code-base in my head, the project structure is a mess and classes are named with arbitrary names) if I wish to see what's going on in a certain DAO, to see if it actually is doing what it's supposed to do, then instead of traversing backwards up the tree from the point where the data service is invoked (where the tree will end in an interface with no implementation details whatsoever apart from the signature) I have to for example go and look for a configuration XML file to see which class is mapped to said interface as the implementation before being able to access the actual implementation details. Are there any situations where having loose coupling can actually hurt maintainability?

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• My coworker created a 96 columns SQL table

  - by Eric

  Here we are in 2010, software engineers with 4 or 5 years or experience, still designing tables with 96 fracking columns. I told him it's gonna be a nightmare. I showed him that we have to use ordinals to interface MySQL with C#. I explained that tables with more columns than rows are a huge smell. Still, I get the "It's going to be simpler this way". What should I do? EDIT * This table contains data from sensors. We have sensor 1 with Dynamic_D1X Dynamic_D1Y [...] Dynamic_D6X Dynamic_D6Y [...]

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• How to implement Restricted access to application features

  - by DroidUser

  I'm currently developing a web application, that provides some 'service' to the user. The user will have to select a 'plan' according to which she/he will be allowed to perform application specific actions but up to a limit defined by the plan. A Plan will also limit access to certain features, which will not be available at all for some plans. As an example : say there are 3 plans, 2 actions throughout the application users in plan-1 can perform action-1 3 times, and they can't perform action-2 at all users in plan-2 can perform action-1 10 times, action-2 5 times users in plan-3 can perform action-1 20 times, action-2 10 times So i'm looking for the best way to get this done, and my main concerns besides implementing it, are the following(in no particular order) maintainability/changeability : the number of plans, and type of features/actions will change in the final product industry standard/best practice : for future readiness!! efficiency : ofcourse, i want fast code!! I have never done anything like this before, so i have no clue about how do i go about implementing these functionalities. Any tips/guides/patterns/resources/examples? I did read a little about ACL, RBAC, are they the patterns that i need to follow? Really any sort of feedback will help.

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• How do you keep track of the authors of code?

  - by garbagecollector

  This is something I was never taught. I have seen alot of different types of authoring styles. I code primarily in Java and Python. I was wondering if there was a standard authoring style or if everything is freestyle. Also if you answer would you mind attaching the style you use to author files that your create at home or at work. I usually just go @author garbagecollector @company garbage inc.

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• Necessary Infrastructure for large project with many components communicating through IPCs

  - by jluzwick

  I have a fairly in depth question which probably doesn't have an exact answer. As a software engineer, I am usually tasked with working on a program or project with minimal understanding of how other components or programs in the project interact with each other. When one program fails in a sea of multiple components and processes, what infrastructure elements are necessary to ensure that the problem can be accurately tracked to the violating application? More specifically, what infrastructure elements should be necessary for this large project and which are optional but very helpful. One such example I can think of is some form of a common logging infrastructure that allows for a developer or tester to easily browse through a log that contains numerous components for messages that might allude to the culprit program along with a "trail" of what happened before the issue occurred. I'm thinking of something similar to Androids alogcat tool. These necessary infrastructure elements should be language-agnostic. While these elements should be understood by all engineers on the team in question, which elements should be understood at great detail by the technical system engineers and what should the individual software engineers be responsible for adding to their tools to allow for such infrastructures to take hold? Please feel free to ask for clarification if something does not make sense as I understand this question is very broad and needs some refinement. I will refine as necessary from the answers and comments I receive. Thanks for any help!

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• Why use other number bases when programming

  - by JMD

  My coworkers and I have been bending our minds to figuring out why anyone would go out of their way to program numbers in a base other than base 10. I suggested that perhaps you could optimize longer equations by putting the variables in the correct base you are working with (for instance, if you have only sets of 5 of something with no remainders you could use base 5), but I'm not sure if that's true. Any thoughts?

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• Android loading screens blocking, good practice?

  - by Oren

  I've noticed many (if not all) android games don't support the "back" button functionality during their loading screens. Which leads to some frustrating moments when a user accidentally starts up the game and has to wait for the long loading stage to end in order to close it. So my questions are: 1) Why is that ? Is there a good reason to avoid something like asynchronous loading (or some other solution to this problem) in android games ? 2) If there is no good reason not to support this functionality, what would be the best way to accomplish it ?

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• How should UI layer pass user input to BL layer?

  - by BornToCode

  I'm building an n-tier application, I have UI, BL, DAL & Entities (built from POCO) projects. (All projects have a reference to the Entities). My question is - how should I pass user input from the UI to the BL, as a bunch of strings passed to the BL method and the BL will build the object from the parameters, or should I build the objects inside the UI submit_function and send objects as parameters? EDIT: I wrote n-tier application, but what I actually meant was just layers.

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• What languages do you support when localizing?

  - by Javoid

  I recently converted an iphone app to support different languages, and was wondering which ones I should include, and which ones aren't worth the trouble. What I mean by that is best illustrated by an example. In Ireland, the Irish language is spoken by very few of the people there. It could be considered a dying language. Almost everybody speaks English (if not everybody). So in this example, I don't think it's worth the trouble to support. In addition, the number of people using modern technology may be limited as well. For example, most people in Cambodia would not be likely to purchase software, and therefore the benefits of localization are reduced. What languages do you support when localizing?

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• Why do most of us use 'i' as a loop counter variable?

  - by kprobst

  Has anyone thought about why so many of us repeat this same pattern using the same variable names? for (int i = 0; i < foo; i++) { // ... } It seems most code I've ever looked at uses i, j, k and so on as iteration variables. I suppose I picked that up from somewhere, but I wonder why this is so prevalent in software development. Is it something we all picked up from C or something like that? Just an itch I've had for a while in the back of my head.

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• Diving into a computer science career [closed]

  - by Willis

  Well first I would like to say thank you for taking the time to read my question. I'll give you some background. I graduated two years ago from a local UC in my state with a degree in cognitive psychology and worked in a neuroscience lab. During this time I was exposed to some light Matlab programming and other programming tidbits, but before this I had some basic understanding of programming. My father worked IT for a company when I was younger so I picked up his books and took learned things along the way growing up. Naturally I'm an inquisitive person, constantly learning, love challenges, and have had exposure to some languages. Yet at this point I was fully pursue it as a career and always had this in the back of my head. Where do I start? I'm 25 and feel like I still have time to make a switch. I've immersed myself in the terminal/command prompt to start, but which language do I focus on? I've read the A+ book and planning to take on the exam, then the networking exam, but I want to deal with more programming, development, and troubleshooting. I understand to get involved in open source, but where? I took the next step and got a small IT assistant job, but doesn't really deal with programming, development, just troubling shooting and small network issues. Thank you!

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• Sites with overlapping code-bases. Developing multiple sites with little changes

  - by Web Developer

  I have to develop 3 different sites video.com for hosting video audio.com for hosting audio docs.com for hosting docs. domain names for example only Almost 80% of the functionality is the same for all the three, with remaining 20% being completely different features... How do I handle this? How does sites like SO handle this? I am developing this in YII framework and was thinking of having these different features as modules but in this case the menu/code links in html code can become difficult.

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• Should HTTP Verbs Be Used Semantically?

  - by Xophmeister

  If I'm making a web application which integrates with a server-side backend, would it be considered best practice to use HTTP methods semantically? That is, for example, if I'm fetching data (e.g., to populate a menu, etc.), I would use GET, but to update data (e.g., save a record), I would use POST. (I realise there are other methods that may be even more appropriate, but we need to consider browser support.) I can see the benefits of this in the sense that it's effectively a RESTful API, but at a slightly increased development cost. In my previous projects, I've POST'd everything: Is it worth switching to a RESTful mindset simply for the sake of best practice?

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• When decomposing a large function, how can I avoid the complexity from the extra subfunctions?

  - by missingno

  Say I have a large function like the following: function do_lots_of_stuff(){ { //subpart 1 ... } ... { //subpart N ... } } a common pattern is to decompose it into subfunctions function do_lots_of_stuff(){ subpart_1(...) subpart_2(...) ... subpart_N(...) } I usually find that decomposition has two main advantages: The decomposed function becomes much smaller. This can help people read it without getting lost in the details. Parameters have to be explicitly passed to the underlying subfunctions, instead of being implicitly available by just being in scope. This can help readability and modularity in some situations. However, I also find that decomposition has some disadvantages: There are no guarantees that the subfunctions "belong" to do_lots_of_stuff so there is nothing stopping someone from accidentally calling them from a wrong place. A module's complexity grows quadratically with the number of functions we add to it. (There are more possible ways for things to call each other) Therefore: Are there useful convention or coding styles that help me balance the pros and cons of function decomposition or should I just use an editor with code folding and call it a day? EDIT: This problem also applies to functional code (although in a less pressing manner). For example, in a functional setting we would have the subparts be returning values that are combined in the end and the decomposition problem of having lots of subfunctions being able to use each other is still present. We can't always assume that the problem domain will be able to be modeled on just some small simple types with just a few highly orthogonal functions. There will always be complicated algorithms or long lists of business rules that we still want to correctly be able to deal with. function do_lots_of_stuff(){ p1 = subpart_1() p2 = subpart_2() pN = subpart_N() return assembleStuff(p1, p2, ..., pN) }

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• Determine Better Coding Practice

  - by footprint.

  As a new programmer, it has always been hard to create applications, because I am still at the learning stage. I understand that to achieve a particular affect or function in an application, there will be numerous ways to achieve the same result. However, should I just purely create a function to it's working state, which means that as long as it works, just as the way I want it to, then it should be fine. Can any fellow programmers of a higher level kindly let me know the right way of doing things?

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• JavaScript and callback nesting

  - by Jake King

  A lot of JavaScript libraries (notably jQuery) use chaining, which allows the reduction of this: var foo = $(".foo"); foo.stop(); foo.show(); foo.animate({ top: 0 }); to this: $(".foo").stop().show().animate({ top: 0 }); With proper formatting, I think this is quite a nice syntactic capability. However, I often see a pattern which I don't particularly like, but appears to be a necessary evil in non-blocking models. This is the ever-present nesting of callback functions: $(".foo").animate({ top: 0, }, { callback: function () { $.ajax({ url: 'ajax.php', }, { callback: function () { ... } }); } }); And it never ends. Even though I love the ease non-blocking models provide, I hate the odd nesting of function literals it forces upon the programmer. I'm interesting in writing a small JS library as an exercise, and I'd love to find a better way to do this, but I don't know how it could be done without feeling hacky. Are there any projects out there that have resolved this problem before? And if not, what are the alternatives to this ugly, meaningless code structure?

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• Storing a looong lookup table

  - by inquisitive

  Background The product i am working on has a very long lookup-table. the table contains static data and cannot be auto generated. there are about 500 rows and 10 columns. columns have mostly integers and strings. to complicate the matters, there are actually two such tables. every row in table-1 maps to zero-or-more rows in table-2. we use an SQLite database with two tables. the product installer places the SQLite file in the installation directory. the application is written in dot-net and we use ADO to load the data once on startup. now, the lookup table grows. in each release a month, we add about 10 new entries existing entries are adjusted. every release we fine tune existing entries. The problem a team of (10) developers work on the lookup table. Code goes in the SVN, but the little devil the SQLite does not. this prevents multiple developers to work on it. we do take regular backups of the file, but proper versioning is not possible. we never know who did the breaking change. the worse thing is we dont know if there is any change at all. diff'ing databases is tedious if not impossible. the tables are expected to grow quite large in years to come and we would need developers to work in parallel on it. the data is business critical. we need to be able to audit changes made to it. Question What would be a solution for the problems outlines above? one idea was to transform the whole thing to XML and treat it like just another source file. that way SVN can do the versioning and we can work in parallel. but the data shows relational behavior. with XML we loose the unique and foreign-key constraints. also we cant query it with sql like ease. any help here will be appreciated.

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• What Part of Your Project Should be in Source Code Control?

  - by muffinista

  A fellow developer has started work on a new Drupal project, and the sysadmin has suggested that they should only put the sites/default subdirectory in source control, because it "will make updates easily scriptable." Setting aside that somewhat dubious claim, it raises another question -- what files should be under source control? And is there a situation where some large chunk of files should be excluded? My opinion is that the entire tree for the project should be under control, and this would be true for a Drupal project, rails, or anything else. This seems like a no-brainer -- you clearly need versioning for your framework as much as you do for any custom code you write. That said, I would love to get other opinions on this. Are there any arguments for not having everything under control? Is this sysadmin a BOFH?

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• To reorganize code, what to choose between library and service?

  - by essbeev

  I want to reorganize a large application with lot of code duplication into multiple components. Plus, some code is also duplicated over other applications. The common set of functionality that can be taken out of main application is clearly defined. Now, do I write a library or do I write a service for this functionality; so that all such applications continue to work and there is only one code-base (of common functionality) to maintain ?

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• Lazy Processing of Streams

  - by Giorgio

  I have the following problem scenario: I have a text file and I have to read it and split it into lines. Some lines might need to be dropped (according to criteria that are not fixed). The lines that are not dropped must be parsed into some predefined records. Records that are not valid must be dropped. Duplicate records may exist and, in such a case, they are consecutive. If duplicate / multiple records exist, only one item should be kept. The remaining records should be grouped according to the value contained in one field; all records belonging to the same group appear one after another (e.g. AAAABBBBCCDEEEFF and so on). The records of each group should be numbered (1, 2, 3, 4, ...). For each group the numbering starts from 1. The records must then be saved somewhere / consumed in the same order as they were produced. I have to implement this in Java or C++. My first idea was to define functions / methods like: One method to get all the lines from the file. One method to filter out the unwanted lines. One method to parse the filtered lines into valid records. One method to remove duplicate records. One method to group records and number them. The problem is that the data I am going to read can be too big and might not fit into main memory: so I cannot just construct all these lists and apply my functions one after the other. On the other hand, I think I do not need to fit all the data in main memory at once because once a record has been consumed all its underlying data (basically the lines of text between the previous record and the current record, and the record itself) can be disposed of. With the little knowledge I have of Haskell I have immediately thought about some kind of lazy evaluation, in which instead of applying functions to lists that have been completely computed, I have different streams of data that are built on top of each other and, at each moment, only the needed portion of each stream is materialized in main memory. But I have to implement this in Java or C++. So my question is which design pattern or other technique can allow me to implement this lazy processing of streams in one of these languages.

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