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• Personal knowledge base [closed]

  - by AlexLocust

  Possible Duplicate: How do you manage your knowledge base? Hello. Now I am using easy writing pad for scratches while doing some researches, solving troubles or doing workarounds. But.. you now, it's really difficult to remember all details of founded solution and it's alternatives after few months. And writing pad is not wery useful. Usually writing pad doesn't contains half of needed inforation: links founded in internet, output of some test commands and etc. Now I'am looking for a tool for storing information about my researches and it's results. Basic reqirements: ability to store files; ability to store formatted text (kind of HTML will be nice) with hyperlinks and code snippets; tags on notes; easy to use. Now I'am thinking about some kind of file-system organized storage, but I think it will be inconvenient. Another thinks is local wiki or blog. So, my question is: How do you organize you knowlege base? What tools do you use, and what "pros and cons".

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• Decoupling software components via naming convention

  - by csteinmueller

  I'm currently evaluating alternatives to refactor a drivermanagement. In my multitier architecture I have Baseclass DAL.Device //my entity Interfaces BL.IDriver //handles the dataprocessing between application and device BL.IDriverCreator //creates an IDriver from a Device BL.IDriverFactory //handles the driver creation requests Every specialization of Device has a corresponding IDriver implementation and a corresponding IDriverCreator implementation. At the moment the mapping is fix via a type check within the business layer / DriverFactory. That means every new driver needs a) changing code within the DriverFactory and b) referencing the new IDriver implementation / assembly. On a customers point of view that means, every new driver, used or not, needs a complex revalidation of their hardware environment, because it's a critical process. My first inspiration was to use a caliburn micro like nameconvention see Caliburn.Micro: Xaml Made Easy BL.RestDriver BL.RestDriverCreator DAL.RestDevice After receiving the RestDevicewithin the IDriverFactory I can load all driver dlls via reflection and do a namesplitting/comparing (extracting the xx from xxDriverCreator and xxDevice) Another idea would be a custom attribute (which also leads to comparing strings). My question: is that a good approach above layer borders? If not, what would be a good approach?

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• RTFMobile

  - by ultan o'broin

  It may seem obvious but it’s worth stating again. The idea that mobile users are going to read lots of user assistance on their devices is just wrong. So, Jakob Nielsen’s post Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult serves as a timely reminder for anyone thinking of putting manuals as a form of user assistance onto mobile phones. There is also an excellent post on UXMag.com, explaining that one of the ways to screw up with your iPhone app is to throw an old-style user manual into the user experience: 10 Surefire Ways to Screw Up Your iPhone App.   (Image copyright and referenced from UX Magazine 2010)   Instead, user assistance  alternatives—if any at all—include one-time tours, graphics, in-context instructions, and so on. Not so sure that importing “humor” and “personality” work so well in the enterprise app space, myself. However, the message is clear: iPhone users don’t read manuals. Great message. Users will figure it out, and if they can’t, well then your app’s UX is a problem and the app will fail. Shame some teams are obsessed with figuring out ways to port existing manuals to mobile platforms without any thought for the UX. Razorfish’s Scatter/Gather blog says it all: One thing that is particularly discouraging, most material currently available on “Creating Content for the iPad” or similar themes turns out to be about getting traditional content onto, or into, the iPad. Now, manuals for non-end users in PDF format on eReaders is a different matter. I have research on that, but it’s for another post. Technorati Tags: mobile,user assistance,UX,user experience,manuals,documentation

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• What is Ubuntu's Definition of a "Registered Application"?

  - by Tom

  I've run into this a few times when installing apps from source, and during the occasional hack with update-alternatives. So far, it's only been a minor annoyance (ie, not got in the way of the end-goal) but it's now a frustration as it's pointing to a hole in my knowledge-base... so when I get a message that 'foo' is "not a registered application" (or I can't use foo's default icon cuz Ubuntu has no knowledge of 'foo'): (1) what defines a "registered application"? (2) how can I define an application installed from source (and likely residing in $HOME/bin/app-name) such that it packs the same functionality as a package installed from a .deb? (if the solution is not self-evident from answer 1) Example: I download and unpack daily dev builds of sublime-text-2 to /home/tom/bin/sublime-text-2. I've created a *.desktop file with appropriate shortcuts, etc. But the icon for sublime cannot be display in any launcher even if I provide a full pathname to the option. The solution is to install a 2nd instance of sublime from a deb package. When I install sublime-text-2 from a .deb package, it installs under /usr/bin && /usr/lib, the installed .desktop file is stored under /usr/share/applications, and the relevant line reads: icon=sublime_text. Where's the linkage I'm missing? Somehow Ubuntu knows how to exact the icon from sublime_text in the latter, but not in the former (again, even with a full path provided).

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• Better ways to have valuable data indexed, which is ignored currently

  - by Sam

  <a title="">.../a> Hi folks. It seems that my title tag which holds extremely valuable and describes contents on my simple design page is currently compeltely denied by search engines and not indexed at all!! Those descriptions should however be indexed as the describe valuable portions to an otherwise empty page with clean glossary (thats neat and organised to the eye of the viewer. So putting all that descriptive data into visible space would ruin the designish less is more fundamental... So, which alternatives to the title tag do I have, in order to put important contents that are relevant for both user as well as search engines? A <a name="">......</> B <p name="">......</> C <a alt="">.......</> D <p alt="">.......</> From the above list, arose my question: Which of the above is advisable alternative in order to get the valuable actual content indexed? Should it be in a a tag or p tag? Or are there even better tags for this which still keep layout clean? You suggestions are Much appreciated!

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• How to design highly scalable web services in Java?

  - by Kshitiz Sharma

  I am creating some Web Services that would have 2000 concurrent users. The services are offered for free and are hence expected to get a large user base. In the future it may be required to scale up to 50,000 users. There are already a few other questions that address the issue like - Building highly scalable web services However my requirements differ from the question above. For example - My application does not have a user interface, so images, CSS, javascript are not an issue. It is in Java so suggestions like using HipHop to translate PHP to native code are useless. Hence I decided to ask my question separately. This is my project setup - Rest based Web services using Apache CXF Hibernate 3.0 (With relevant optimizations like lazy loading and custom HQL for tune up) Tomcat 6.0 MySql 5.5 My questions are - Are there alternatives to Mysql that offer better performance for what I'm trying to do? What are some general things to abide by in order to scale a Java based web application? I am thinking of putting my Application in two tomcat instances with httpd redirecting the request to appropriate tomcat on basis of load. Is this the right approach? Separate tomcat instances can help but then database becomes the bottleneck since both applications access the same database? I am a programmer not a Db Admin, how difficult would it be to cluster a Mysql database (or, to cluster whatever database offered as an alternative to 1)? How effective are caching solutions like EHCache? Any other general best practices? Some clarifications - Could you partition the data? Yes we could but we're trying to avoid it. We need to run a lot of data mining algorithms and the design would evolve over time so we can't be sure what lines of partition should be there.

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• Where to store global enterprise properties?

  - by shylynx

  I'm faced with a crowd of java applications, which need different global enterprise wide properties for operation, for example: hostname of the central RDBMS, hostname and location of the central self-service portal, host location of central LDAP, host location of central mail server etc. Formally we build each application with a properties file, where all this properties are definied. But that's a very bad solution, because if the hostname of the mail server changes, we need to change the properties files for each application and deploy all applications again. Our idea is to centralize this properties, so that each application can ask for each property at runtime, for example: Idea: Put the properties file to an easy accessible file share. So if we need to change a property, each application uses the new properties. Idea: Put the properties to database. Main disadvantage: we need a dependency to database client libraries for each application. Idea: Put all applications into one big application server, that provides system properties for each application. Main disadvantage: needs deployment of each application to one application server. But that isn't a realistic scenario. Idea: Webservice that provides global enterprise wide properties. Main disadvantage: not very secure, because some properties are passwords or user credentials. What other alternatives are recommended? What is state of the art?

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• Switch vs Polymorphism when dealing with model and view

  - by Raphael Oliveira

  I can't figure out a better solution to my problem. I have a view controller that presents a list of elements. Those elements are models that can be an instance of B, C, D, etc and inherit from A. So in that view controller, each item should go to a different screen of the application and pass some data when the user select one of them. The two alternatives that comes to my mind are (please ignore the syntax, it is not a specific language) 1) switch (I know that sucks) //inside the view controller void onClickItem(int index) { A a = items.get(index); switch(a.type) { case b: B b = (B)a; go to screen X; x.v1 = b.v1; // fill X with b data x.v2 = b.v2; case c: go to screen Y; etc... } } 2) polymorphism //inside the view controller void onClickItem(int index) { A a = items.get(index); Screen s = new (a.getDestinationScreen()); //ignore the syntax s.v1 = a.v1; // fill s with information about A s.v2 = a.v2; show(s); } //inside B Class getDestinationScreen(void) { return Class(X); } //inside C Class getDestinationScreen(void) { return Class(Y); } My problem with solution 2 is that since B, C, D, etc are models, they shouldn't know about view related stuff. Or should they in that case?

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• Generating Deep Arrays: Shallow to Deep, Deep to Shallow or Bad idea?

  - by MobyD

  I'm working on an array structure that will be used as the data source for a report template in a web app. The data comes from relatively complex SQL queries that return one or many rows as one dimensional associative arrays. In the case of many, they are turned into two dimensional indexed array. The data is complex and in some cases there is a lot of it. To save trips to the database (which are extremely expensive in this scenario) I'm attempting to get all of the basic arrays (1 and 2 dimension raw database data) and put them, conditionally, into a single, five level deep array. Organizing the data in PHP seems like a better idea than by using where statements in the SQL. Array Structure Array of years( year => array of types( types => array of information( total => value, table => array of data( index => db array ) ) ) ) My first question is, is this a bad idea. Are arrays like this appropriate for this situation? If this would work, how should I go about populating it? My initial thought was shallow to deep, but the more I work on this, the more I realize that it'd be very difficult to abstract out the conditionals that determine where each item goes in the array. So it seems that starting from the most deeply nested data may be the approach I should take. If this is array abuse, what alternatives exist?

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• How to define type-specific scripts when using a 'type object' programming pattern?

  - by Erik

  I am in the process of creating a game engine written in C++, using the C/C++ SQLite interface to achieve a 'type object' pattern. The process is largely similar to what is outlined here (Thank you Bob Nystrom for the great resource!). I have a generally defined Entity class that when a new object is created, data is taken from a SQLite database and then is pushed back into a pointer vector, which is then iterated through, calling update() for each object. All the ints, floats, strings are loaded in fine, but the script() member of Entity is proving an issue. It's not much fun having a bunch of stationary objects laying around my gameworld. The only solutions I've come up with so far are: Create a monolithic EntityScript class with member functions encompassing all game AI and then calling the corresponding script when iterating through the Entity vector. (Not ideal) Create bindings between C++ and a scripting language. This would seem to get the job done, but it feels like implementing this (given the potential memory overhead) and learning a new language is overkill for a small team (2-3 people) that know the entirety of the existing game engine. Can you suggest any possible alternatives? My ideal situation would be that to add content to the game, one would simply add a script file to the appropriate directory and append the SQLite database with all the object data. All that is required is to have a variety of integers and floats passed between both the engine and the script file.

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• Modernising settings, packages

  - by Sam Brightman

  The update manager (possibly combined with the janitor) does a reasonable job of bringing packages up to date with a new release, removing ones that are replaced by different projects etc. However, I'm left with the lingering feeling that quite a few settings are lingering from old releases. For example, some packages may be left around that I installed myself whereas now the functionality is provided by default. Another example is that my user doesn't get the new theme, and the panel bar is a mess. I can compare against an inactive user on the same system: everything seems tidier. There are also things like the explosion of System Preferences, user groups (inactive user, more recently created, is in groups that the older, active user isn't). In other areas (e.g. default font) I do seem to get given the new defaults. Another example is Spotlight-equivalent search. I remember Beagle and Tracker, I remember removing tracker when it used all system RAM and swap for 2 entire release cycles, but I don't know what I'm "supposed" to be using now. Is there even a default indexing-search installed and exposed? aptitude install ubuntu-desktop doesn't do anything, so the basics are in place package-wise. Is there any way to update my settings to the modern "Ubuntu way" without reinstalling from scratch? Can I do so selectively i.e. show the differences? Most of the time package management on Linux is an absolute joy compared to the alternatives, but if the desktop gets messed up after only a release or two, we're back to reinstalling just like Windows.

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• Socket.io v.9 with Actionscript

  - by funseiki

  I'm attempting to develop an online multiplayer game using Node.js for the server and Flash to display the client. I've been reading up a bit and have found quite a few recommendations for the socket.io library. I've also found a github project which exposes code to help facilitate communication between an Actionscript 3.0 client and a server using socket.io. The project I mentioned is a bit dated and doesn't seem to have support for the latest version of socket.io, so I was wondering if leveraging this framework (socket.io, that is) would be the most ideal way to go. I have found a simple project that uses the standard 'net' module for node.js, but because there a few options available, I'm a little lost as to which one to go with. I'm currently leaning towards just using the regular 'net' module as it is already familiar to me. Since much of the client is already coded up, I'd really like to not switch over to using the HTML5 canvas just yet (but using socket.io would make a transition in the future more friendly, I think?). Any advice/direction on this matter would be much appreciated, though I do realize that there may be no one right answer. Edit: To be more specific, are there any client-side socket.io frameworks available that allow for communication between an Actionscript 3.0 client and a socket.io server and are robust enough to support current/future versions of socket.io? If not, what are the alternatives?

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• Do I need to uninstall lxde before installing kde-standard?

  - by A Roy

  I have ubuntu 12.04 (upgraded from 10.04) and since I disliked the default desktop, I installed lxde (sudo apt-get install lxde). This was good except that occasionally there would be trouble with Firefox (blinking on panel) so that finally I had to close it and then a error message from Ubuntu was issued. I had asked about it before but there was no useful response so now I want to move to another desktop which will hopefully not create the problem I have now. My doubt is, should I first uninstall lxde and then install kde (sudo apt-get install kde-standard) or is it enough to install kde without uninstalling lxde? In case it is necessary to uninstall, should I use the command sudo apt-get remove lxde or is there a better command for it? You may also help me with choice of desktop. I installed lxde since this is simple and lightweight. I am assuming that kde will not be as simple but hopefully not create problem like above. But I hate if it takes too long to log in or to launch a program like Firefox etc and also there should not be icons fixed on the left part of terminal (I hate to keep icons on desktop since these are distracting). Some of these issues were present with default Ubuntu 12.04. So is my choice of kde-standard appropriate or are there better desktop alternatives?

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• The effects of Agile Programming can alter the five desirable properties of modeling tools and techniques

  The effects of Agile Programming can alter the five desirable properties of modeling tools and techniques as documented by Pfleeger. The agile methodology does promote human understanding and communication through the use of short iterative software development life cycles which forces stakeholders to review the project and adjust the project for any requirement changes.  Due to the consistent evaluations of a project and requirements, process are continually being refined, upgraded, and compared against other alternatives to ensure the best design delivered to the client. Due to the short repetitive development cycles, increased time is devoted to process management due to the fact that requirements and designs could be constantly changing. This requires additional forecasting, monitoring, and planning for each iteration. Because things can change so rapidly, automated guidance in performing process must be updated for each iteration because the environment and the available reusable process could change. In addition, the original guidance and suggestions for the project also need to be updated to account for these changes as well.   In essence the automation of process execution is supported by the agile methodology because during every iteration all processes must be tested, evaluated to ensure process integrity and compliance with the customer’s requirements. I do not think the agile approach diminishes modeling, in fact I think it increases the modeling because before the start of every development cycle, modeling must be checked for accuracy based on the changed requirements. So in essence the reduced time spent initially designing the models is in fact gained as the project completes every iteration of the project.

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• Permanent death in a MUD (think command line MMORPG)

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• Why isn't there a culture of paying for frameworks?

  - by Marty Pitt

  One of the side effects of the recent trend of "Lean" startups, and the app store era, is that consumers are more acclimatised to paying small prices for small games / products. Eg.: Online SAAS that charges ~$5 / month (the basecamp style of product) Games which are short, fun, and cheap ($0.99 from the app store This market has been defined by "doing one thing well, and charging people for it." DHH of Rails / 37 Signals fame argues that if your website isn't going to make money, don't bother making it. Why doesn't the same rule apply to frameworks? There are lots of software framework projects out there - many which are mature and feature-rich, which offer developers significant value, yet there doesn't seem to be a market or culture of paying for these. It seems that the projects which do charge money are often things like UI component toolsets, and are often marginalized in favour of free alternatives. Why is this? Surely programmers / businesses see the value in contributing back to projects such as Ruby, Rails, Hibernate, Spring, Ant, Groovy, Gradle, (the list goes on). I'm not suggesting that these frameworks should start charging for anyone who wants to use them, but that there must be a meaningful business model that would allow the developers to earn money from the time they invest developing the framework. Any thoughts as to why this model hasn't emerged / succeeded?

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• SMART: DISK FAILURE IS IMMINENT (under 24 hours?)

  - by flix

  I have on my hard drive 2 OSes: Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows Vista( I keep it just because of school). Everything was OK on both OSes,but one day on Ubuntu I was getting awkward noises from my notebooks's hard drive and then everything stops and I couldn't do anything. On Windows everything was ok. Everytime I boot on Ubuntu I can get 5 minutes of normal run, without problems. After that the hard drive sounds crazy and nothing works. I could run S.M.A.R.T tests from a older Ubuntu CD (10.04) from the GUI(Disk Utility, or something like that and from terminal). From the GUI I got that the DISK FAILURE IS IMMINENT and I have ~700 bad blocks(or broken blocks, I had that test I while ago) on my HDD. From the terminal ( I don't remember if it was fsck or a SMART test command) I got that the HDD will fail in under 24 hours. Since then it passed 2-3 weeks. I've tried "badblocks" but after 10 hours it was still running and I had to stop it. Now I have to use cygwin and other alternatives for my linux apps on Windows. PLEASE HELP!!! How can I separate the bad blocks from Ubuntu so it wouldn't use them?

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• What You Said: Where Do You Find Your Next Game?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite places and tricks for finding new video games to play. It turns out the least of your problems was finding new games! From the comments it became apparent How-To Geek readers had absolutely no problem finding new games to add to their gaming stable. Buzz writes: I have quite an elaborate procedure in finding my next game:For free games i simply follow the feeds on a few websites like Freegamer, LinuxGames, HappyPenguin and Penguspy. Every now and them i browse Wikipedia articles on free/FOSS games. For commercial games the procedure depends on what i enjoyed the most in that game:- If i enjoyed the story or the general feel: i usually start with a game i like and look for sequels, prequels, mods or spinoffs. I even go out on a limb and give other platforms (than a PC) a try, even if it usually means emulation. If you really enjoy a game series/saga it’s usually worth the effort.- If i enjoy the producer/gaming company then i seek out more of their games.- If i enjoy the technical achievements that went into making the game or if i am concerned for the system requirements of my gear i try to play games that are built on the same engine(s) as one of the games i ran smooth and enjoyed.- If i feel like playing a particular genre i usually start with a title i enjoyed and look for alternatives or similar games- You can always try searching for Game of The Year winners for a particular time period or other similar accomplishments. They usually yield great results. How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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• How to present a stable data model in a public API that allows internal data structures to be changed without breaking the public view of the data?

  - by Max Palmer

  I am in the process of developing an application that allows users to write C# scripts. These scripts allow users to call selected methods and to access and manipulate data in a document. This works well, however, in the development version, scripts access the document's (internal) data structures directly. This means that if we were to change the internal data model/structure, there is a good chance that someone's script will no longer compile. We obviously want to prevent this breaking change from happening, but still want to allow the user to write sensible C# code (whilst not restricting how we develop our internal data model as a result). We therefore need to decouple our scripting API and its data structures from our internal methods and data structures. We've a few ideas as to how we might allow the user to access a what is effectively a stable public version of the document's internal data*, but I wanted to throw the question out there to someone who might have some real experience of this problem. NB our internal document's data structure is quite complex and it could be quite difficult to wrap. We know we want to expose as little as possible in our public API, especially as once it's out there, it's out there for good. Can anyone help? How do scripting languages / APIs decouple their public API and data structures from their internal data structures? Is there no real alternative to having to write a complex interaction layer? If we need to do this, what's a good approach or pattern for wrapping complex data structures that include nested objects, including collections? I've looked at the API facade pattern, which looks like it's trying to address these kinds of issues, but are there alternatives? *One idea is to build a data facade that is kept stable across versions of our application. The facade exposes a set of facade data objects that are used in the script code. These maintain backwards compatibility and wrap access to our internal document's data model.

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• Character creation using spritesheets

  - by Patrick Developer

  I am currently creating a 2D fighting game and have implemented a system where upon starting a new game, the player is presented with the option to create a custom character. I have a set of string arrays set with values that correspond to hair, headgear, chest, lower body and shoes. When done selecting a variety of items from the lists, a code is generated based off the index of each item (i.e 01123), which is then used to assign the correct Spritesheet to the player character. This has already presented a lot of work as I have had to create quite a few spreadsheets based of possible combinations, but I am now looking at a massive amount of work to implement each variation. I have started to look into setting layers for each item to reduce workload, but I am also looking at having different stances for the character - Depending on the currently equipped weapon - so this may present a lot of work either way. My question is, do I have any alternatives or am I stuck creating masses of Spritesheets to cover all combinations? As a side note, how much impact will assigning layered items have on overall performance?

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• How to overcome politics of the net (Google translate code refuses to work from a specific region)

  - by Jawad

  According to the FAQ's I am not sure if my question is a ok to ask or will be closed or should I post it in the meta or even I would blame some one for downvoting it. However it is one that has been bugging me since the trouble strated. Let me explain. I have this Web Site. It uses the Google Translate API (Can't post the link, does not open from this region) with the following code. <meta name="google-translate-customization" content="9f841e7780177523-3214ceb76f765f38-gc38c6fe6f9d06436-c"></meta> <script type="text/javascript"> function googleTranslateElementInit() { new google.translate.TranslateElement({pageLanguage: 'en'}, 'google_translate_element'); } </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script> The problem is since this, it just stopped working. On the site you can see that I had to actually remove the above from here, here, and here while left it here, here, here and here. This is so because the the web site "refuses" to load at all with the pages that have the code (i.e., from this region.) If I use Firefox Stealthy Plugin and open the site in Firefox, It works like a charm without any problems. But with Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera Web browser, the site does not load/open at all because of the Google translate. (I know this because If I remove the Google Translate Code, the site works/loads fine) It was one thing to program for "cross browser compatability" and alltogether another to program for "cross region compatability". What can I do to make sure that the site works from anywhere? Do I completely remove the Google Translate code and just have to do without the additional functionality or Do I look for alternatives like this or according to this?

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• There is No Scrum without Agile

  - by John K. Hines

  It's been interesting for me to dive a little deeper into Scrum after realizing how fragile its adoption can be.  I've been particularly impressed with James Shore's essay "Kaizen and Kaikaku" and the Net Objectives post "There are Better Alternatives to Scrum" by Alan Shalloway.  The bottom line: You can't execute Scrum well without being Agile. Personally, I'm the rare developer who has an interest in project management.  I think the methodology to deliver software is interesting, and that there are many roles whose job exists to make software development easier.  As a project lead I've seen Scrum deliver for disciplined, highly motivated teams with solid engineering practices.  It definitely made my job an order of magnitude easier.  As a developer I've experienced huge rewards from having a well-defined pipeline of tasks that were consistently delivered with high quality in short iterations.  In both of these cases Scrum was an addition to a fundamentally solid process and a huge benefit to the team. The question I'm now facing is how Scrum fits into organizations withot solid engineering practices.  The trend that concerns me is one of Scrum being mandated as the single development process across teams where it may not apply.  And we have to realize that Scurm itself isn't even a development process.  This is what worries me the most - the assumption that Scrum on its own increases developer efficiency when it is essentially an exercise in project management. Jim's essay quotes Tobias Mayer writing, "Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction."  I'm unsure whether a Vice President of Software Development wants to hear that, reality nonwithstanding.  Our Scrum adoption has surfaced a great deal of dysfunction, but I feel the original assumption was that we would experience increased efficiency.  It's starting to feel like a blended approach - Agile/XP techniques for developers, Scrum for project managers - may be a better fit.  Or at least, a better way of framing the conversation. The blended approach. Technorati tags: Agile Scrum

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• How to make this CSS design of words in headings look clean and well desinged? [closed]

  - by kacalapy

  I am trying to get the lipstick on the pig and not wearing my UI developer hat often is making this impossible. Can someone give me nice alternatives to the code below. this is what i have now. <style> .FirstLetter:first-letter{font-family: arial; font-size: 14pt; font-weight: bold;color:White; background:Blue; border:1px black solid; padding-top:8px; padding-left:8px; padding-bottom:3px;} .Spaced{letter-spacing: 5px;font-family: arial; font-size: 14pt; font-weight: bold;} </style> <div class="FirstLetter Spaced headerFont"> Executive Summary </div> Here is the ugly result of the above code- i am lookign to make the header section look better ONLY that's where the first letter is blue:

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• SMART says disk failure is imminent due to bad blocks, what do I need to do?

  - by flix

  I have on my hard drive 2 OSes: Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows Vista (I keep it just because of school). Everything was OK on both OSes, but one day on Ubuntu I was getting awkward noises from my notebooks' hard drive and then everything stopped and I couldn't do anything. On Windows everything was OK. Every time I boot Ubuntu I can get 5 minutes normal run time, without problems. After that the hard drive sounds crazy and nothing works. I could run S.M.A.R.T tests from a older Ubuntu CD (10.04) from the GUI (Disk Utility, or something like that and from terminal). From the GUI, I got that the DISK FAILURE IS IMMINENT and I have ~700 bad blocks (or broken blocks, I had that test I while ago) on my HDD. From the terminal (I don't remember if it was fsck or a SMART test command) I got that the HDD will fail in under 24 hours. Since then it passed 2-3 weeks. I've tried "badblocks" but after 10 hours it was still running and I had to stop it. Now I have to use cygwin and other alternatives for my Linux apps on Windows. How can I separate the bad blocks from Ubuntu so it wouldn't use them? Please help.

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• How can I reduce the amount of time it takes to fully regression test an application ready for release?

  - by DrLazer

  An app I work on is being developed with a modified version of scrum. If you are not familiar with scrum, it's just an alternative approach to a more traditional watefall model, where a series of features are worked on for a set amount of time known as a sprint. The app is written in C# and makes use of WPF. We use Visual C# 2010 Express edition as an IDE. If we work on a sprint and add in a few new features, but do not plan to release until a further sprint is complete, then regression testing is not an issue as such. We just test the new features and give the app a good once over. However, if a release is planned that our customers can download - a full regression test is factored in. In the past this wasn't a big deal, it took 3 or 4 days and the devs simply fix up any bugs found in the regression phase, but now, as the app is getting larger and larger and incorporating more and more features, the regression is spanning out for weeks. I am interested in any methods that people know of or use that can decrease this time. At the moment the only ideas I have are to either start writing Unit Tests, which I have never fully tried out in a commercial environment, or to research the possibilty of any UI Automation API's or tools that would allow me to write a program to perform a series of batch tests. I know literally nothing about the possibilities of UI automation so any information would be valuable. I don't know that much about Unit testing either, how complicated can the tests be? Is it possible to get Unit tests to use the UI? Are there any other methods I should consider? Thanks for reading, and for any advice in advance. Edit: Thanks for the information. Does anybody know of any alternatives to what has been mentioned so far (NUnit, RhinoMocks and CodedUI)?

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