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• Free tools versus paid tools.

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  We live in a strange world. Information should be free. Tools should be free. Software should be free (and I mean free as in free beer, not as in free speech). Of course, since I make my living (and pay my mortgage) by writing software I tend to disagree. Or rather: I want to get paid for the things I do in the daytime. Next to that I also spend time on projects I feel are valuable for the community, which I do for free. The reason I can do that is because I get paid enough in the daytime to afford that time. It gives me a good feeling, I help others and it’s fun to do. But the baseline is: I get paid to write software. I am sure this goes for a lot of other developers. We get paid for what we do during the daytime and spend our free time giving back. So why does everyone always make a fuzz when a company suddenly starts to charge for software? To me, this seems like a very reasonable decision. Companies need money: they have staff to pay, buildings to rent, coffee to buy, etc. All of this doesn’t come free so it makes sense that they charge their customers for the things they produce. I know there’s a very big Open Source market out there, where companies give away (parts of) their software and get revenue out of the services they provide. But this doesn’t work if your product doesn’t need services. If you build a great tool that is very easy to use, and you give it away for free you won’t get any money by selling services that no user of your tool really needs. So what do you do? You charge money for your tool. It’s either that or stop developing the tool and turn to other, more profitable projects. Like it or not, that’s simple economics at work. You have something other people want, so you charge them for it. This week it was announced that what I believe is the most used tool for .net developers (besides Visual Studio of course),namely Red Gates .net reflector, will stop being a free tool. They will charge you $35 for the next version. Suddenly twitter was on fire and everyone was mad about it. But why? The tool is downloaded by so many developers that it must be valuable to them. I know of no serious .net developer who hasn’t got it on his or her machine. So apparently the tool gives them something they need. So why do they expect it to be free? There are developers out there maintaining and extending the tool, building new and better versions of it. And the price? $35 doesn’t seem much. If I think of the time the tool saved me the 35 dollars were earned back in a day. If by spending this amount of money I can rely on great software that helps me do my job better and faster, I have no problems by spending it. I know that there is a great team behind it, (the Red Gate tools are a must have when developing SQL systems, for instance), and I do believe they are in their right to charge this. So.. there you have it. This is of course, my opinion. You may think otherwise. Please let me know in the comments what you think! Tags van Technorati: redgate,reflector,opensource

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• Python Coding standards vs. productivity

  - by Shroatmeister

  I work for a large humanitarian organisation, on a project building software that could help save lives in emergencies by speeding up the distribution of food. Many NGOs desperately need our software and we are weeks behind schedule. One thing that worries me in this project is what I think is an excessive focus on coding standards. We write in python/django and use a version of PEP0008, with various modifications e.g. line lengths can go up to 160 chars and all lines should go that long if possible, no blank lines between imports, line wrapping rules that apply only to certain kinds of classes, lots of templates that we must use, even if they aren't the best way to solve a problem etc. etc. One core dev spent a week rewriting a major part of the system to meet the then new coding standards, throwing away several suites of tests in the process, as the rewrite meant they were 'invalid'. We spent two weeks rewriting all the functionality that was lost, and fixing bugs. He is the lead dev and his word carries weight, so he has convinced the project manager that these standards are necessary. The junior devs do as they are told. I sense that the project manager has a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance about all this but nevertheless agrees with it vehemently as he feels unsure what else to do. Today I got in serious trouble because I had forgotten to put some spaces after commas in a keyword argument. I was literally shouted at by two other devs and the project manager during a Skype call. Personally I think coding standards are important but also think that we are wasting a lot of time obsessing with them, and when I verbalized this it provoked rage. I'm seen as a troublemaker in the team, a team that is looking for scapegoats for its failings. Since the introduction of the coding standards, the team's productivity has measurably plummeted, however this only reinforces the obsession, i.e. the lead dev simply blames our non-adherence to standards for the lack of progress. He believes that we can't read each other's code if we don't adhere to the conventions. This is starting to turn sticky. Now I am trying to modify various scripts, autopep8, pep8ify and PythonTidy to try to match the conventions. We also run pep8 against source code but there are so many implicit amendments to our standard that it's hard to track them all. The lead dev simple picks faults that the pep8 script doesn't pick up and shouts at us in the next stand-up meeting. Every week there are new additions to the coding standards that force us to rewrite existing, working, tested code. Thank heavens we still have tests, (I reverted some commits and fixed a bunch of the ones he removed). All the while there is increasing pressure to meet the deadline. I believe a fundamental issue is that the lead dev and another core dev refuse to trust other developers to do their job. But how to deal with that? We can't do our job because we are too busy rewriting everything. I've never encountered this dynamic in a software engineering team. Am I wrong to question their adherence to coding standards? Has anyone else experienced a similar situation and how have they dealt with it successfully? (I'm not looking for a discussion just actual solutions people have found)

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• Love and Hate Outlook autocomplete, Outlook 2010/Exchange 2010

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  I think that almost every Exchange admin can concur with me that the Outlook autocomplete cache is one of those things you love but at the same time also hate. Users mostly love this function, except when it fails.Luckily since Outlook 2010 things got a little better and we got rid of the dreaded nk2 files.Outlook 2010 now includes a folder named "Suggested Contacts", all users you send an email to and that don't already have an contact object are saved in this suggested contacts folder.A lot of people thought this folder is also the source for the autocomplete cache, which would make it somewhat easy to manage, I wish the solution was that easy.Badly enough separate from the suggested contacts, outlook still maintains a cache for the autocomplete function. Let us say you run in to the following situation: John works for company A and is a popular contact for almost everyone in your organization.Now John quit his job at Company A and moved to Company B.Luckily John maintains your company as customer, but his email address is now changed from companyA.com to companyB.comSince you don't want to do any business with Company A anymore, you want to make sure none of your users accidentally mail to his old address.Now this is where the real fun starts, cause almost all of your 1000 users have mailed at least once with John.Resulting in the fact that every user has John most probably listed in their autocomplete cache.  I have run into sort like situations multiple times with several customers, which is always a pain.And of course this blog post is the result of one of those issues once again.I knew that with the Suggested contacts we could do more than previously, but still never spent time on it before.But today I thought lets nail this now and forever!!  Ok let's start of that things are different for every combination of outlook and exchange.I explain the procedure for Exchange 2010 SP1+ in combination with Outlook 2010.At first we want to get rid of all contact objects that contain [email protected] do this we need to be assigned to the RBAC role "Mailbox Import Export", which can be done through the Exchange Control panel.In my test environment I assigned this role to the Organization admins, but in real life you might want to add it to a custom role. Open the Exchange control panel by logging in to the ecp url, in my case https://ITFEX.itf.local/ECP, and make sure you selected your organization as management scope.Browse to Roles & Auditing, and open the properties for the organization management role group.click on the Add button to add a new role to the Organization Management role group, select the Mailbox Import Export role and click on add and OK to add it to the role.  Once you have assigned that role to your account you can open the Exchange Management Shell and execute the following command: Get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox –targetmailbox "your.account" –targetfolder searchanddelete –loglevel full –logonly –searchquery "kind:contact AND [email protected]" This command will create a list with all mailboxes and any contacts that were found with an email address that contains [email protected], this list is then posted in the mailbox you specified at your.account in the folder searchanddelete.Now examine the report that was created and posted in the mailbox to see if it matches what you think it should match.My results looked like this:  When you're confident that the search includes all references and no false positives you can execute almost the same command, but this time with an delete action instead of the logonly. Get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox –targetmailbox "your.account" –targetfolder searchanddelete –loglevel full –DeleteContent –searchquery "kind:contact AND [email protected]" Now most people would think this would remove the contact object from the suggested contacts, resulting in a removal from the autocomplete list.Sad but not true, to clean up the autocomplete list start Outlook with the command: "outlook /cleanautocompletecache" This will result in an empty cache, but luckily this is rebuild based on the suggested contacts, which now doesn't include the [email protected] contact anymore.

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• My Tech Ed North America Preview - Certification Edition

  - by Chris Gardner

  In my previous TechEd North America Preview, I addressed all the content I wanted to see at the show. This time, we shall turn our attention to the certifications I might try to pick up. If you have never been to TechEd North America before, one of the greatest things about the event is an on-site certification center. If you have a couple hours to spare, you can walk up to a test. The first test on my agenda is 70-5231. I took this update test once, but did not do well on the MVC portion2. A few practice tests later, and I think I'm ready to fake that section. After that, I need to complete my road to being a master. The good folks here at work have been having a real love / hate relationship with the idea of me become an MCM in SQL Server3. Of course, before I do that, I need to finally take the SQL Administration tests. Thus, we shall add 70-4324 and 70-4505 to the list. Speaking of MCM, TechEd North America will have a special on test 88-9706. This test is normally $500, and you have to find a place to take it7. However, there is a special 50% off rate for people who take it on location. With those kind of prices, I may just take it as a form of study guide. As a final push, I may take some Windows Phone exams. I mentioned in my previous post that I may attend the 70-5998 Exam Cram session. Unfortunately, I will be staffing the Hands-On-Lab at that time. As we know, this has never stopped me from taking a test. This may lead to fits of 70-5069, but after we've come this far... That should complete my list. Do I really think I'll find time to take 6 tests at TechEd North America? Probably not. I have done it at TechEd North America before, but that was before I was TechEd North America staff. I also had a co-worker pass 9 in one year, but he basically did nothing but travel to Orlando in 2007 to take tests. And what's the point of attending a HUGE conference if you don't network? Of course, networking will have to wait for Friday's post... 1 Upgrade: Transition Your MCPD .NET Framework 3.5 Web Developer Skills to MCPD .NET Framework 4 Web Developer 2Because I never have used, nor do I really think I ever will use, MVC... 3By that, I mean they love the idea, and they hate the price 4Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance 5PRO: Designing, Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 6SQL Server 2008 Microsoft Certified Master: Knowledge Exam 7Which isn't nearly as expensive as the Lab Exam, nor as difficult to find a location. However, it is not offered at every testing facility. 8PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Phone Applications 9TS: Silverlight 4, Development

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• Thoughts on my new template language/HTML generator?

  - by Ralph

  I guess I should have pre-faced this with: Yes, I know there is no need for a new templating language, but I want to make a new one anyway, because I'm a fool. That aside, how can I improve my language: Let's start with an example: using "html5" using "extratags" html { head { title "Ordering Notice" jsinclude "jquery.js" } body { h1 "Ordering Notice" p "Dear @name," p "Thanks for placing your order with @company. It's scheduled to ship on {@ship_date|dateformat}." p "Here are the items you've ordered:" table { tr { th "name" th "price" } for(@item in @item_list) { tr { td @item.name td @item.price } } } if(@ordered_warranty) p "Your warranty information will be included in the packaging." p(class="footer") { "Sincerely," br @company } } } The "using" keyword indicates which tags to use. "html5" might include all the html5 standard tags, but your tags names wouldn't have to be based on their HTML counter-parts at all if you didn't want to. The "extratags" library for example might add an extra tag, called "jsinclude" which gets replaced with something like <script type="text/javascript" src="@content"></script> Tags can be optionally be followed by an opening brace. They will automatically be closed at the closing brace. If no brace is used, they will be closed after taking one element. Variables are prefixed with the @ symbol. They may be used inside double-quoted strings. I think I'll use single-quotes to indicate "no variable substitution" like PHP does. Filter functions can be applied to variables like @variable|filter. Arguments can be passed to the filter @variable|filter:@arg1,arg2="y" Attributes can be passed to tags by including them in (), like p(class="classname"). You will also be able to include partial templates like: for(@item in @item_list) include("item_partial", item=@item) Something like that I'm thinking. The first argument will be the name of the template file, and subsequent ones will be named arguments where @item gets the variable name "item" inside that template. I also want to have a collection version like RoR has, so you don't even have to write the loop. Thoughts on this and exact syntax would be helpful :) Some questions: Which symbol should I use to prefix variables? @ (like Razor), $ (like PHP), or something else? Should the @ symbol be necessary in "for" and "if" statements? It's kind of implied that those are variables. Tags and controls (like if,for) presently have the exact same syntax. Should I do something to differentiate the two? If so, what? This would make it more clear that the "tag" isn't behaving like just a normal tag that will get replaced with content, but controls the flow. Also, it would allow name-reuse. Do you like the attribute syntax? (round brackets) How should I do template inheritance/layouts? In Django, the first line of the file has to include the layout file, and then you delimit blocks of code which get stuffed into that layout. In CakePHP, it's kind of backwards, you specify the layout in the controller.view function, the layout gets a special $content_for_layout variable, and then the entire template gets stuffed into that, and you don't need to delimit any blocks of code. I guess Django's is a little more powerful because you can have multiple code blocks, but it makes your templates more verbose... trying to decide what approach to take Filtered variables inside quotes: "xxx {@var|filter} yyy" "xxx @{var|filter} yyy" "xxx @var|filter yyy" i.e, @ inside, @ outside, or no braces at all. I think no-braces might cause problems, especially when you try adding arguments, like @var|filter:arg="x", then the quotes would get confused. But perhaps a braceless version could work for when there are no quotes...? Still, which option for braces, first or second? I think the first one might be better because then we're consistent... the @ is always nudged up against the variable. I'll add more questions in a few minutes, once I get some feedback.

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• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS initramfs-tools dependency issue

  - by Mike

  I know this has been asked several times, but each issue and resolution seems different. I've tried almost everything I could think of, but I can't fix this. I have a VM (VMware I think) running 12.04.03 LTS which has stuck dependencies. The VM is on a rented host, running a live system so I don't want to break it (further). uname -a Linux support 3.5.0-36-generic #57~precise1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 20 18:21:09 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Some more: sudo apt-get update [sudo] password for tracker: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run ‘apt-get -f install’ to correct these. The following packages have unmet dependencies. initramfs-tools : Depends: initramfs-tools-bin (< 0.99ubuntu13.1.1~) but 0.99ubuntu13.3 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f. sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: initramfs-tools The following packages will be upgraded: initramfs-tools 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/50.3 kB of archives. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of initramfs-tools: initramfs-tools depends on initramfs-tools-bin (<< 0.99ubuntu13.1.1~); however: Version of initramfs-tools-bin on system is 0.99ubuntu13.3. dpkg: error processing initramfs-tools (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates it's a follow-up error from a previous failure. dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of apparmor: apparmor depends on initramfs-tools; however: Package initramfs-tools is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing apparmor (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates it's a follow-up error from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: initramfs-tools apparmor E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) If I look at the policy behind initramfs-tools / bin I get: apt-cache policy initramfs-tools initramfs-tools: Installed: 0.99ubuntu13.1 Candidate: 0.99ubuntu13.3 Version table: 0.99ubuntu13.3 0 500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main amd64 Packages *** 0.99ubuntu13.1 0 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 0.99ubuntu13 0 500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages apt-cache policy initramfs-tools-bin initramfs-tools-bin: Installed: 0.99ubuntu13.3 Candidate: 0.99ubuntu13.3 Version table: *** 0.99ubuntu13.3 0 500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 0.99ubuntu13 0 500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages So the issue seems to be I have 0.99ubuntu13.3 for initramfs-tools-bin yet 0.99ubuntu13.1 for initramfs-tools, and can't upgrade to 0.99ubuntu13.3. I've performed apt-get clean/autoclean/install -f/upgrade -f many times but they won't resolve. I can think of only 2 other 'solutions': Edit the dpkg dependency list to trick it into doing the installation with a broken dependency. This seems very dodgy and it would be a last resort Downgrade both initramfs-tools and initramfs-tools-bin to 0.99ubuntu13 from the precise/main sources and hope that would get them in step. However I'm not sure if this will be possible, or whether it would introduce more issues. I'm not sure how this situation arise in the first place. /boot was 96% full; it's now 56% full (it's tiny - 64MB ... this is what I got from the hosting company). Can anyone offer advice please?

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• Two Candidates + One Job = Two Different Outcomes

  - by david.talamelli

  Recruiters have always headhunted (sidenote: I do not like this word, in general I think the type of people who use the phrase “headhunting” are the ones who are trying to sound more important than what they likely are). Any serious Recruiter engages in direct recruiting activity, it is part and parcel of the business it is not something unique. With the uptake in Social Media the past 4-5 years, we have seen an increase in the number of Recruiters proactively reaching out to people about job opportunities. We have also seen this activity increase across all levels of hire, from help desk roles to C-Level Executives. While getting approached about a role can be a nice boost to a person’s ego, do not let it give you an inflated sense of entitlement. It is The way that people handle themselves during these calls and subsequent interviews will have a large impact on their potential to land that job. Last week I spoke to two very different candidates, both about the same position and both with very different outcomes. On paper, Candidate #1 looked fantastic; they ticked many of the boxes that we were looking for. The person is working at global IT company and working in a similar role as the one we were hiring for but not in as senior as the role we had. This role would have been the perfect step to getting involved in more complex work for the person. Candidate #2 had less polished IT experience, ticked some of the boxes we were looking for and on paper in comparison to Candidate #1 was not as close a fit as Candidate #1 was. It seemed like I was comparing apples and oranges. After speaking to both candidates it turns out I was comparing apples and oranges except the person better suited for our role was not the one I was expecting it would be. The first candidate on paper looked great – they had the experience we were looking for and appeared to be just right for the role, but after talking to them, they gave me the impression that they thought the world owed them. The impression I was left with was that they did not equate success with hard work, they seemed more interested in “what is in it for me”. Rather than having a proper conversation with me, I was often cut off and asked to hurry it up when explaining our business, what we are doing, etc... . This person seemed more interested in the job title and money than how rather than think about ways to make the role successful. Candidate #2 who had limited experience, made up for any perceived lack of experience and them some with a demonstrated motivation to succeed and do the things needed to make that happen. Candidate #2 made a great first impression, they did not seem afraid of hard work and demonstrated a “team player” attitude. In talking to them they kept me engaged, listened and asked thoughtful questions that made me think this is the type of person who creates their own luck and who would thrive in a place like Oracle. Skills, capabilities, experience and a good resume can certainly get your foot in the door, but the wrong attitude or approach to work can close those opportunities just as easily. On the other hand, hard work, effort and a genuine work ethic may help open those doors that would otherwise closed for you. A resume with all the credentials gets you in the front door but that is just the beginning of the process. It is not how we start the race that is important, it’s how things end that matter most.

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• Must go through Windows Boot Loader to get to Grub

  - by Zach

  I just installed a fresh copy of Precise alongside Windows 7. I have to separate 750GB hard drives; /dev/sda holds the Windows partitions and /dev/sdb holds the Ubuntu partitions. Other than that, these are fresh installs of both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. Whenever I boot, Grub doesn't load, instead it goes to a black screen with a single blinking (horizontal bar) cursor in the top right corner. However, if I boot, hit escape right as the BIOS/POST screen finishes up, see the Windows Boot Loader and hit escape to make it go back to the BIOS screen. After the BIOS screen, grub shows up and everything functions normally; I can boot into Ubuntu or Win7. I don't want to have to do the Escape, Escape, Wait, Boot trick every time. I have no idea what would be wrong or what information I could give you guys to help diagnose. I have run a sudo update-grub and it found everything normally. I tried adding nomodeset flag in the /etc/default/grub line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT which searching around made me think might work. Thoughts on what I could do to fix this? EDIT: I've tried changing the boot order so that both drives in the BIOS (both are labeled as "Internal HDD") have had a try booting first. I think the problem may be that every time I boot, the BIOS boot order is different... and I have to reset it. It seems to not be stable... but I'm not sure how to go about fixing that either. The machine has both traditional BIOS and UEFI. It came standard in "Legacy" mode; so it is currently set to boot through Legacy mode. I've reinstalled Ubuntu now, and now if I hit escape at the end of the BIOS/POST startup screen, it takes me to GRUB menu. Otherwise it automatically loads Windows. It seems like GRUB is now the acting bootloader, it just doesn't automatically start that unless I ask it to open a bootloader. In my other machines, it has always automatically started at the end of BIOS/POST. EDIT2: Using gparted, I just looked at my partitions, it would seem that my linux-swap partition is currently flagged as the boot partition for my Ubuntu install. I currently only have 2 partitions: one of "ext4" with a mount point of "/" and flag " "; and the "linux-swap" with mount point " " and flag "boot." If I change the boot flag to be on "/," it does not reliably solve the problem. After 10 boots: 2 Booted successfully to GRUB 5 Booted directly to Windows 7 3 booted to the black screen with the cursor and hung there Further research makes me think this is an issue of the BIOS not reliably booting hard drives in the same order or not finding both hard drives. If I ask it to create a "boot menu" sometimes it has 2 entries for "Internal HDD," sometimes 1. Also the list it creates changes order every time I bring it up; so it is not following a consistent boot sequence. Will report back if this is not an issue with GRUB.

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• It’s official – Red Gate is a great place to work!

  - by red@work

  At a glittering award ceremony last week, we found out that we’re officially the 14th best small company to work for in the whole of the UK! This is no mean feat, considering that about 1,000 companies enter the Sunday Times Top 100 best companies awards each year. Most of these are in the small companies category too. It's the fourth year in a row for us to be in the Top 100 list and we're tickled pink because the results are based on employee opinion. We’re particularly proud to be the best small company in Cambridge (in the whole of East Anglia, in fact) and the best small software development company in the entire UK. So how does it all work? Well, 90% of us took the time to answer over 70 questions on categories such as management, benefits, wellbeing, leadership, giving something back and what we think of Red Gate as a whole. It makes you think about every part of day to day working life and how you feel about it. Do you slightly or strongly agree or disagree that your manager motivates your to do your best every day, or that you have confidence in Red Gate's leaders, or that you’re not spending too much time working? It's great to see that we had one of the best scores in the country for the question "Do you think your company takes advantage of you?" We got particularly high scores for management, wellbeing and for giving something back too. A few of us got dressed up and headed to London for the awards; very excited about where we’d place but slightly nervous about having to get up on stage. There was a last minute hic up with a bow tie but the Managing Editor of the Sunday Times kindly stepped in to offer his assistance just before we had our official photo taken. We were nominated for two Special Recognition Awards. Despite not bringing them home this year, we're very proud to be nominated as there are only three nominations in each category. First we were up for the Training and Development award. Best Companies loved that we get together at lunchtimes to teach each other photography, cookery and French, as well as our book clubs and techie talks. And of course they liked our opportunities to go on training courses and to jet off to international conferences. Our other nomination was for the Wellbeing award. Best Companies loved our free food (and let’s face it, so do we). Porridge or bacon sandwiches for breakfast, a three course hot dinner, and free fruit and cereals all day long. If all that has an affect on the waistline then there are plenty of sporty activities for us all to get involved in, such as yoga, running or squash. Or if that’s not your thing then a relaxing massage helps us all to unwind every few months or so. The awards were hosted by news presenter Kate Silverton. She gave us a special mention during the ceremony for having great customer engagement as well as employee engagement, after we told her about Rodney Landrum (a Friend of Red Gate) tattooing our logo on his arm. We showed off our customised dinner jacket (thanks to Dom from Usability) with a flashing Red Gate logo on the back and she seemed suitability impressed. Back in the office the next day, we popped open the champagne and raised a glass to our success. Neil, our joint CEO, talked about how pleased he was with the award because it's based on the opinions of the people that count – us. You can read more about the Sunday Times awards here. By the way, we're still growing and are still hiring. If you’d like to keep up with our latest vacancies then why not follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/redgatecareers. Right now we're busy hiring in development, test, sales, product management, web development, and project management. Here's a link to our current job opportunities page – we'd love to hear from great people who are looking for a great place to work! After all, we're only great because of the people who work here. Post by: Alice Chapman

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• What is the best practice, point of view of well experienced developers

  - by Damien MIRAS

  My manager pushes me to use his self defined best practices. All of these practices are based on is own assumptions. I disagree with them and I would like to have some feedback of well experienced people about these practices. I would prefer answers from people involved in the maintenance of huge products and people whom have maintained the product for years. Developers with 15+ years of experience are preferred because my manager has that much experience himself. I have 7 years of experience. Here are the practices he wants me to use: never extends classes, use composition and interface instead because extending classes are unmaintainable and difficult to debug. What I think about that Extend when needed, respect "Liskov's Substitution Principle" and you'll never be stuck with a problem, but prefer composition and decoration. I don't know any serious project which has banned inheriting, sometimes it's impossible to not use that, i.e. in a UI framework. Design patterns are just unusable. In PHP, for simple use cases (for example a user needs a web interface to view a database table), his "best practice" is: copy some random php code wich we own, paste and modify it, put html and php code in same file, never use classes in PHP, it doesn't work well for small jobs, and in fact it doesn't work well at all, there is no good tool to work with. Copy & paste PHP code is good practice for maintenance because scripts are independent, if you have a bug somewhere you can fix it without side effects. What I think about that: NEVER EVER COPY code or do it because you have five minutes to deliver something, you will do some refactoring after that. Copy & paste code is a beginners error, if you have errors you'll have the error everywhere any time you have pasted it's a nightmare to maintain. If you repsect the "Open Close Principle" you'll rarely get edge effects, use unit test if you are afraid of that. For small jobs in PHP use at least something you get or write the HTML separately from the PHP code and reuse it any time you need it. Classes in PHP are mature, not as mature as other languages like python or java, but they are usable. There is tools to work with classes in PHP like Zend Studio that work very well. The use of classes or not depends not on the language you use but the programming paradigm you have choosen. I'm a OOP developer, I use PHP5, why do I have to shoot myself in the foot? When you find a simple bug in the code, and you can fix it simply, if you are not working on the code where you have found it, never fix it, even if it takes 5 seconds. He says to me his "best practices" are driven by the fact that he has a lot of experience in maintaining software in production (14 years) and he now knows what works and what doesn't work, what the community says is a fad, and the people advocating such principles as never copy & paste code, are not evolved in maintaining applications. What I think about that: If you find a bug fix it if you can do it quickly inform the people who've touched that code before, check if you have not introduced a new bug, ideally add a unit test for it. I currently work on a web commerce project, which serves 15k unique users per day. The code base has to be maintained and has been maintained this way since 2005. Ideally you include a short description of your position and experience in terms of years effectively maintaining an application which has been in production for real.

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• The Healthy Tension That Mobility Creates

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps In my previous post, I talked about the value of the mobile revolution on businesses and workers. Now let me put on a different hat and view the world from the IT department and the IT leader’s viewpoint. The IT leader has different concerns – around privacy, potential liability of information leakage, and intellectual property protection. These concerns and the leader’s goals create a healthy tension with the users. For example, effective device management becomes a must have for the IT leader, especially if you look at the Android ecosystem as an example. There are benefits to the Android strategy, but there are also drawbacks, such as uniformity – in device management, in operating systems, and in the application taxonomy and capabilities. Whereas, if you compare Android to iOS, Apple's operating system, iOS is more unified, more streamlined, and easier to manage. In either case, this is where mobile device management in the cloud makes good sense. I don't think IT departments should be hosting device management and managing that complexity. It should be a cloud service and I predict it's going to be key for our customers. A New Focus for IT Departments So where does that leave the IT departments? I think their futures are in governance, which is a more strategic play than a tactical one. Device management is tactical and it's the “now” topic. But the mobile phenomenon, if you will, is going to drive significant change in terms of how IT plans, hosts, and deploys enterprise applications. For example, opening up enterprise applications for mobile users presents some challenges unless you deploy more complicated network topologies, such as virtual private networks and threat protection technology. If you really want employees to be mobile you need to remove those kinds of barriers. But I don’t think IT departments want to wrestle with exposing their private enterprise data centers and being responsible for hosted business applications – applications in a sense that they’re making vulnerable to the public world. This opens up a significant need and a significant driver for cloud applications. However, it's not just about taking away the complexity – it's also about taking away the responsibility. Why should every business have to carry the responsibility and figure out all the nuts and bolts of how to protect themselves in this public, mobile world? When you use apps in the cloud, either your vendor or your hosting partner should have figured all that out. They need to assure the business that they are adhering to all sorts of security and compliance regulations so users can be connected and have access to information anywhere anytime. More Ideas and Better Service What’s more interesting is the world of possibilities that the connected, cloud-based world enables. I believe that the one-size-fits-all, uber-best practices, lowest-common denominator-like capabilities will go away. IT will now be able to solve very specific business challenges for the different corporate functions it serves. In this new world, IT will play a key role in enabling different organizations within a company to be best in class and delivering greater value to the line of business managers. IT will actually help to differentiate. Net result is a more agile workforce and business because each department is getting work done its own way.

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• Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the sayings (attributed to Thomas Paine) that totally resonated with me from the first time I heard it, which was only 3 years ago during some training course at work: "Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way" You'll find many books with this title and you'll find it quoted by politicians and other leaders in various countries at various times... the quote is open to interpretation and works on many levels. To set the tone of what this means to me, I'll use a simple micro example: In any given conversation, you are either leading it or following it, at different times/snapshots of the conversation. If you are not willing or able to lead it, and you are not willing or able to follow it, then you should depart. The bad alternative which this guidance encourages you NOT to do is to stick around and obstruct progress by not following, not leading, and simply complaining or trying to derail the discussion in no particular direction. The same pattern applies at your position/role at work. Either follow your management/leadership team, or try to lead them to what you think is a better place, or change jobs. Don't stick around complaining about the direction things are going, while not actively trying to either change things or make peace with it. In the previous paragraph you can replace the word "your management" with "the people reporting to you" and the guidance still holds. Either lead your direct reports to where you think they should go, or follow their lead, or change jobs. Complaining about folks not taking direction while doing nothing is not a maintainable state. To me this quote is not about a permanent state, it is not about some people always leading and some always following: It is about a role/hat that anybody can play/wear at any given moment. One minute I am leading you, the next I am following you, and the next we are both following someone else and so on... When there is disagreement, debate the different directions for as long as it takes for you to be comfortable that you can either follow or lead. If you don't become comfortable with either of those, get out of the way. Something to remember is that it is impossible to learn how to lead well, without learning how to follow well (probably deserves its own blog entry)... Things go wrong when someone thinks that they must always be leading, or when everybody wants to follow and nobody steps up to lead... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and they don't try to reach agreement on a shared direction, stubbornly sticking to their guns pulling the rest of the team in multiple directions... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and after numerous and lengthy discussions, none of them decides to follow or get out of the way... Things go wrong when people don't want to lead, don't want to follow, and insist on sticking around... While there are a few ways things that can go wrong as enumerated in the previous paragraph, the most common one in my experience is the last one I mentioned. You'll recognize these folks as the ones that always complain about everything that is wrong with their company/product but do nothing about it. Every time you hear someone giving feedback on how something is wrong or suboptimal, ask them "So now that you identified the problem, what do you think the solution is and what are you doing to drive us to that solution?" The next time things start going wrong, step up and remind everyone: Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way. For more perspectives, and for input to help you form your own interpretation, search the web for this phrase to see in what contexts it is being used (bing, google). Finally, regardless of your political views, I hope you can appreciate if only as an example this perspective of someone leading by actually getting out of the way. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How to solve conflicts with another programmer..

  - by Tio

  Hi all.. I've read this question, but I think it doesn't really applies in my case.. I started to work at new company about 2 months ago with the position of senior web developer, there was already one programmer there, my position is above his, but I'm not his boss.. I don't tell him what to do.. Since the day I started to work at the company, I managed to implement a kind of a test server which he refuses to use, implemented a project management tool which he refuses to use also, and I'm in the process of implementing version control using mercurial ( damn Mercurial that's giving me so much headaches ), which he is going to use.. He is a nice guy, but just the other day we had a big discussion about "best practices", and "coding standards".. for me it's absolutely necessary to have this two things, at the place I'm currently working... otherwise it's not going to work.. This discussion, basically revolved about using short tags and the echo shortcut, and how we shouldn't use it anymore ( because I sometimes use short tags ).. this went for about 15 minutes, until I finally dropped the subject because I had work to do.. and of course he didn't budge even a millimeter, he's continuing to use short tags, and the echo shortcut and he not even cares about what I think.. When I mentioned that we are a team, he told me: "We are not a team, you work on your projects and I work on mine".. Let's just say, that the switch in my brain flipped, I raised my voice, and I told him that he was going nuts.. this was the most improper way to deal it with, I know, but there are certain things that can't be said to me.. The question here, is how do I deal with this? I want, to implement more changes on our work workflow, and I know that it's going to be a pain, with him always complaining and saying things like this.. Our boss is going to intervene in a few days, I talked to him today, the other programmer send him an email the day we had the discussion complaining.. Just to clarify, when I talk about implementing changes, I just don't appear at work, the next day with a sheet of paper, and say: "This is our we are doing things from now on! And there is no discussion.." For example, when I was trying to implement the project management tool, I took the time to talk to everybody that was going to be involved in it, to see what they think about it.. everyone was positive except him, he responded that it was just a mean to control us even more.. Does anyone has any idea on how to deal with this? PS: Truth to be told, I didn't start the best way with him, in the 4º day of work at the company, I found a really bad piece of code on our custom CMS, one of those things that I only expect to find in code produced by a programmer that has only 1 month of training in programming, and I talked to my boss about it... he showed up at the time I saw that piece of code, he saw my face and asked about it, so I told him.. I know the worst thing that can be said to a programmer is saying that their code is awful, but I've already learned that my code isn't the best of the world, so I take criticism in a completely different way now.. maybe he doesn't..

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• AI to move custom-shaped spaceships (shape affecting movement behaviour)

  - by kaoD

  I'm designing a networked turn based 3D-6DOF space fleet combat strategy game which relies heavily on ship customization. Let me explain the game a bit, since you need to know a bit about it to set the question. What I aim for is the ability to create your own fleet of ships with custom shapes and attached modules (propellers, tractor beams...) which would give advantages and disadvantages to each ship, so you have lots of different fleet distributions. E.g., long ship with two propellers at the side would let the ship spin around that plane easily, bigger ships would move slowly unless you place lots of propellers at the back (therefore spending more "construction" points and energy when moving, and it will only move fast towards that direction.) I plan to balance all the game around this feature. The game would revolve around two phases: orders and combat phase. During the orders phase, you command the different ships. When all players finish the order phase, the combat phase begins and the ship orders get resolved in real-time for some time, then the action pauses and there's a new orders phase. The problem comes when I think about player input. To move a ship, you need to turn on or off different propellers if you want to steer, travel forward, brake, rotate in place... These propellers don't have to work at their whole power, so you can achieve more movement combinations with less propellers. I think this approach is a bit boring. The player doesn't want to fiddle with motors or anything, you just want to MOVE and KILL. The way I intend the player to give orders to these ships is by a destination and a rotation, and then the AI would calculate the correct propeller power to achive that movement and rotation. Propulsion doesn't have to be the same throught the entire turn calculation (after the orders have been given) so it would be cool if the ships reacted as they move, adjusting the power of the propellers for their needs dynamically, but it may be too hard to implement and it's not really needed for the game to work. In both cases, how would that AI decide which propellers to activate for the best (or at least not worst) trajectory to be achieved? I though about some approaches: Learning AI: The ship types would learn about their movement by trial and error, adjusting their behaviour with more uses, and finally becoming "smart". I don't want to get involved THAT far in AI coding, and I think it can be frustrating for the player (even if you can let it learn without playing.) Pre-calculated timestep movement: Upon ship creation, ALL possible movements are calculated for each propeller configuration and power for a given delta-time. Memory intensive, ugly, bad. Pre-calculated trajectories: The same as above but not for each delta-time but the whole trajectory, which would then be fitted as much as possible. Requires a fixed propeller configuration for the whole combat phase and is still memory intensive, ugly and bad. Continuous brute forcing: The AI continously checks ALL possible propeller configurations throughout the entire combat phase, precalculates a few time steps and decides which is the best one based on that. Con: what's good now might not be that good later, and it's too CPU intensive, ugly, and bad too. Single brute forcing: Same as above, but only brute forcing at the beginning of the simulation, so it needs constant propeller configuration throughout the entire combat phase. Coninuous angle check: This is not a full movement method, but maybe a way to discard "stupid" propeller configurations. Given the current propeller's normal vector and the final one, you can approximate the power needed for the propeller based on the angle. You must do this continuously throughout the whole combat phase. I figured this one out recently so I didn't put in too much thought. A priori, it has the "what's good now might not be that good later" drawback too, and it doesn't care about the other propellers which may act together to make a better propelling configuration. I'm really stuck here. Any ideas?

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• Design Pattern for building a Budget

  - by Scott

  So I've looked at the Builder Pattern, Abstract Interfaces, other design patterns, etc. - and I think I'm over thinking the simplicity behind what I'm trying to do, so I'm asking you guys for some help with either recommending a design pattern I should use, or an architecture style I'm not familiar with that fits my task. So I have one model that represents a Budget in my code. At a high level, it looks like this: public class Budget { public int Id { get; set; } public List<MonthlySummary> Months { get; set; } public float SavingsPriority { get; set; } public float DebtPriority { get; set; } public List<Savings> SavingsCollection { get; set; } public UserProjectionParameters UserProjectionParameters { get; set; } public List<Debt> DebtCollection { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public List<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } public List<Income> IncomeCollection { get; set; } public bool AutoSave { get; set; } public decimal AutoSaveAmount { get; set; } public FundType AutoSaveType { get; set; } public decimal TotalExcess { get; set; } public decimal AccountMinimum { get; set; } } To go into more detail about some of the properties here shouldn't be necessary, but if you have any questions about those I will fill more out for you guys. Now, I'm trying to create code that builds one of these things based on a set of BudgetBuildParameters that the user will create and supply. There are going to be multiple types of these parameters. For example, on the sites homepage, there will be an example section where you can quickly see what your numbers look like, so they would be a much simpler set of SampleBudgetBuildParameters then say after a user registers and wants to create a fully filled out Budget using much more information in the DebtBudgetBuildParameters. Now a lot of these builds are going to be using similar code for certain tasks, but might want to also check the status of a users DebtCollection when formulating a monthly spending report, where as a Budget that only focuses on savings might not want to. I'd like to reduce code duplication (obviously) as much as possible, but in my head, every way I can think to do this would require using a base BudgetBuilderFactory to return the correct builder to the caller, and then creating say a SimpleBudgetBuilder that inherits from a BudgetBuilder, and put all duplicate code in the BudgetBuilder, and let the SimpleBudgetBuilder handle it's own cases. Problem is, a lot of the unique cases are unique to 2/4 builders, so there will be duplicate code somewhere in there obviously if I did that. Can anyone think of a better way to either explain a solution to this that may or may not be similar to mine, or a completely different pattern or way of thinking here? I really appreciate it.

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• Top 5 characteristics Recruiters are looking for

  - by Maria Sandu

  Of course many skills and characteristics recruiters are looking for are job specific. But whether you are a graduate fresh out of college or seasoned in the workplace, recruiters are also looking for generic skills and attitude to see whether you are a good fit to the company. So make sure you prepare and show through examples that you have these skills. 1. Drive/passion Liking the job you are applying for is paramount and something recruiters are always looking for. Show and prove your drive for the role and/or the field you are applying for. Always be prepared to pitch yourself, this shows your drive in the role you are applying for. 2. Communication skills People often make the mistake by thinking this skill is related to how good they are able to talk about their background and expertise. This is important, but as least as important is it that you listen well to questions that are asked. Make sure you answer to the point and ask questions if you want questions to be clarified. This shows your interest in the role and the ability to communicate clearly. This also helps you building trust with the recruiter every time you speak to him/her. 3. Confidence Recruiters are looking for the best candidate for the job. So if you don’t think you are the best candidate why should the recruiter? Show with confidence, without being arrogant (think about building trust), why you are the right person for the job. Confidence also shows in your answers to difficult questions. Be confident enough to explain why some experiences went wrong and how you learnt from them. If you don’t have a direct explanation on a question, it is better to ask for a second to think instead of a random answer. 4. Vision The main reason to hire graduates for many companies is that graduates are perceived to be flexible. The organisation will train and up skill you in the direction best suitable for the organisation. However the most intense learning path is realised when you also know where you want to go. Companies are often happy to accommodate you to support with training and development, but if you don’t have a clear vision on what you want to achieve for yourself and what value you bring to the company, recruiters can decide you are not the right candidate as they are afraid you aren’t going to stay in the company. 5. Business awareness For every job you apply you will get challenged on your knowledge and interest for the market and business they are in. All companies add value in different ways in their respective markets. So make sure you are aware of what a company is doing, what their goal is and why and how they exist and how you can add value for the company in the role you are applying for. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• My architecture has a problem with views that required information from different objects. How can I solve this?

  - by Oscar

  I am building an architecture like this: These are my SW layers ______________ | | | Views | |______________| ______________ | | |Business Logic| |______________| ______________ | | | Repository | |______________| My views are going to generate my HTML to be sent to the user Business logic is where all the business logics are Repository is a layer to access the DB My idea is that the repository uses entities (that are basically the representation of the tables, in order to perform DB queries. The layers communicate between themselves using Business Objects, that are objects that represent the real-world-object itself. They can contain business rules and methods. The views build/use DTOs, they are basically objects that have the information required to be shown on the screen. They expect also this kind of object on actions and, before calling the business logic, they create BO. First question: what is your overall feeling about this architecture? I've used similar architecture for some projects and I always got this problem: If my view has this list to show : Student1, age, course, Date Enrolled, Already paid? It has information from different BO. How do you think one should build the structure? These were the alternatives I could think of: The view layer could call the methods to get the student, then the course it studies, then the payment information. This would cause a lot of DB accesses and my view would have the knowledge about how to act to generate this information. This just seems wrong for me. I could have an "adapter object", that has the required information (a class that would have a properties Student, Course and Payment). But I would required one adapter object for each similar case, this may get very bad for big projects. I still don't like them. Would you have ideas? How would you change the architecture to avoid this kind of problems? @Rory: I read the CQRS and I don't think this suits my needs. As taken from a link references in your link Before describing the details of CQRS we need to understand the two main driving forces behind it: collaboration and staleness That means: many different actors using the same object (collaboration) and once data has been shown to a user, that same data may have been changed by another actor – it is stale (staleness). My problem is that I want to show to the user information from different BO, so I would need to receive them from the service layer. How can my service layer assemble and deliver this information? Edit to @AndrewM: Yes, you understood it correctly, the original idea was to have the view layer to build the BOs, but you have a very nice point about the creation of the BO inside the business layers. Assuming I follow your advice and move the creation logic inside the business layer, my business layer interface would contain the DTOs, for instance public void foo(MyDTO object) But as far as I understand, the DTO is tightly coupled to each view, so it would not be reusable by a second view. In order to use it, the second view would need to build a specific DTO from a specific view or I would have to duplicate the code in the business layer. Is this correct or am I missing something?

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• Wireless device bug on 13.10. BCM4313 registers as eth1 instead of wlan0 and no internet access

  - by user205691

  My Hotel wiFi requires me to login with a username & password after connecting to the hotspot. So, my browser would open a page with username & passwrd fields to login and then connect to internet. But unfortunately, firefox & chromium dont seem to work. i dont think it is browser related but a setting for the wifi router or driver which is creating this issue. using Broadcom 801.11 STA wireless driver (proprietary). tried open source as well but same result !! The image linked below shows my wifi connection setting & Chromium. The login page itself comes up after a long time and after entering the credentials, it keeps loading for ever !! it is the same case for every other browser.. so i dont think its browser issue but something to do with wifi setting or network manager stuff.. interestingly, i am able to connect to WiFi networks with WPA key without any issue. Adhoc hotspot is a problem and that is my regular home network :( .. I hope i can get some help solving this issue ! I have tried repeating the same hotspot after login from my android, by creating a virtual repeater with WPA key and it works. I can browse on ubuntu using this method.. but cant be doing this regularly ! I tried loading the same login page of the hotel wifi while browsing through my repeater wifi created on mobile and screen shot attached below. the page loads up quick and easy.. so this means something is wrong with the way network manager handles adhoc connectivity & login ?? i installed wicd0 but it crashes on startup and not helpful at all ! Screenshot of Chromium page Login page with repeated hotspot ifconfig in my terminal results: krishna@krishna-HP-ENVY-4-Notebook-PC:~$ ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 28:92:4a:1d:54:fa UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr e0:06:e6:89:fa:49 inet addr:10.24.1.71 Bcast:10.24.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::e206:e6ff:fe89:fa49/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:10940 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:348431 TX packets:6611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:7669631 (7.6 MB) TX bytes:864195 (864.1 KB) Interrupt:17 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:2146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:166120 (166.1 KB) TX bytes:166120 (166.1 KB) I wonder why is the wireless configured under eth1 ? I think this is a bug with earlier ubuntu versions, but is this normal in 13.10 or is there a wrong configuration here ? The wireless device in my pc is BCM4313 and i have installed the bcmwl-kernel-sources, wireless-tools to support the device. i also reinstalled the bcmwl-kernel as suggested on broadcom website, via synaptic package manager. Nothing has changed this situation ! I tried booting into liveUSB and then ifconfig results show wireless under wlan0. But then the wireless connects and loads the login page. So is the problem with the device configuration now ? i really want to get this fixed before i start configuring the other stuff like ATI graphics and such on the laptop for overheating.. lack of internet access is too bad a bug for me :P any help is appreciated!

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• Career-Defining Moments

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2013/06/25/career-defining-moments.aspx Fear holds us back from many things. A little fear is healthy, but don’t let it overwhelm you into missing opportunities. In every career there is a moment when you can either step forward and define yourself, or sit down and regret it later. Why do we hold back: is it fear, constraints, family concerns, or that we simply can't do it? I think in many cases it comes to the unknown, and we are good at fearing the unknown. Some people hold back because they are fearful of what they don’t know. Some hold back because they are fearful of learning new things. Some hold back simply because to take on a new challenge it means they have to give something else up. The phrase sometimes used is “It’s the devil you know versus the one you don’t.” That fear sometimes allows us to miss great opportunities. In many people’s case it is the opportunity to go into business for yourself, to start something that never existed. Most hold back hear for a fear of failing. We’ve all heard the phrase “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”, which is intended to get people to think about the opportunities they might create. A better term I heard recently on the Ruby Rogues podcast was “What would be worth doing even if you knew you were going to fail?” I think that wording suits the intent better. If you knew (or thought) going in that you were going to fail and you didn’t care, it would open you up to the possibility of paying more attention to the journey and not the outcome. In my case it is a fear of acceptance. I am fearful that I may not learn what I need to learn or may not do a good enough job to be accepted. At the same time that fear drives me and makes me want to leap forward. Some folks would define this as “The Flinch”. I’m learning Ruby and Puppet right now. I have limited experience with both, limited to the degree it scares me some that I don’t know much about either. Okay, it scares me quite a bit! Some people’s defining moment might be going to work for Microsoft. All of you who know me know that I am in love with automation, from low-tech to high-tech automation. So for me, my “mecca” is a little different in that regard. Awhile back I sat down and defined where I wanted my career to go and it had to do more with DevOps, defined as applying developer practices to system administration operations (I could not find this definition when I searched). It’s an area that interests me and why I really want to expand chocolatey into something more awesome. I want to see Windows be as automatable and awesome as other operating systems that are out there. Back to the career-defining moment. Sometimes these moments only come once in a lifetime. The key is to recognize when you are in one of these moments and step back to evaluate it before choosing to dive in head first. So I am about to embark on what I define as one of these “moments.”  On July 1st I will be joining Puppet Labs and working to help make the Windows automation experience rock solid! I’m both scared and excited about the opportunity!

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• SEO/Google: How should I handle multiple countries and domains?

  - by Valorized

  Hello. I'm the webmaster of an online shop based in Austria (Europe). Therefore we registered "example.at". We also own different other domain names like "example-shop.com" and "example.info". Currently all those domains are redirected (301) to the .at one. Still available is: "example.net" and "example.org" (and .ws/.cc), unfortunately not available: .de/.eu The .com is currently owned by one of our partners, the contract ends in 2012 but until then we have no chance to get this one. Recently I read more about geo-targeting and I noticed ONE big deal. The tld ".at" is hardly recognised in Germany (google.de) whereas it is excellently listed in Austria (google.at). As a result of the .at I cannot set the target location manually (or to unlisted). More info: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399&hl=en This is a big problem. I looked at Google Analytics and - although Germany is 10x as big as Austria - there are more visits from Austria. So, how should I config the domain in order to get the best results in both, Germany and Austria? I thought of some solutions: First I could stop redirecting the .info. Then there would be a duplicate of the .at one. Moreover, in Webmastertools, I could set the target location of the .info to Germany. As the .at still targets Austria, both would be targeted - however I don't now if google punishes one of them because of the duplicate content? Same as 1. but with .net or .org (I think .info is not a "nice" domain and moreover I think search engines prefer .com, .net or .org to .info). Same as 1. (or 2.) but with a rel="canonical" on the new one (pointing to the .at). Con: I don't think this will improve the situation, because it still tells google that the .at one is more important, like: "if .info points to .at, the target may still be Austria". rel="canonical" on the .at pointing to the new (.info or .net or .org). However I fear that this will have a negative impact on the listing on google.at because: "Hey, the well-known .at is not important anymore, so let's focus on the .info which is not well-known." - Therefore: bad position in search results. Redirect .at to the new (.info or .net or .org) with a 301-Redirect. Con: Might be worse than 4, we might loose Page-Rank (or "the value of the page", because google says that page rank is not important anymore). Moreover this might be even more confusing for the customers. In 3. or 4. customers don't get redirected, they do not see the canonical-meta-tag. So, dear experts, please tell me what the best option would be! Thank you very much for your advice in advance and please excuse the long question. I really appreciate this network! Please note: It's exactly the same content AND language. In Austria we speak German.

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• Make a Perl-style regex interpreter behave like a basic or extended regex interpreter

  - by Barry Brown

  I am writing a tool to help students learn regular expressions. I will probably be writing it in Java. The idea is this: the student types in a regular expression and the tool shows which parts of a text will get matched by the regex. Simple enough. But I want to support several different regex "flavors" such as: Basic regular expressions (think: grep) Extended regular expressions (think: egrep) A subset of Perl regular expressions, including the character classes \w, \s, etc. Sed-style regular expressions Java has the java.util.Regex class, but it supports only Perl-style regular expressions, which is a superset of the basic and extended REs. What I think I need is a way to take any given regular expression and escape the meta-characters that aren't part of a given flavor. Then I could give it to the Regex object and it would behave as if it was written for the selected RE interpreter. For example, given the following regex: ^\w+[0-9]{5}-(\d{4})?$ As a basic regular expression, it would be interpreted as: ^\\w\+[0-9]\{5\}-\(\\d\{4\}\)\?$ As an extended regular expression, it would be: ^\\w+[0-9]{5}-(\\d{4})?$ And as a Perl-style regex, it would be the same as the original expression. Is there a "regular expression for regular expressions" than I could run through a regex search-and-replace to quote the non-meta characters? What else could I do? Are there alternative Java classes I could use?

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• Is make -j distcc possible to scale over 5 times?

  - by holmes

  Since distcc cannot keep states and just possible to send jobs and headers and let those servers to use only the data just sent and preprocess and compile, I think the lastest distcc has problem in scalability. In my local build environment which has appx. 10,000 c/c++ files to build, I could only make 2 times faster than not using distcc (but using make -j) when having 20 build servers. What do you think is the problem? If anyone has achieved scalability more than 10 - 20 times using make -j and distcc, please let me know. The following product claims that it is impossible to scale make -j and distcc faster than 5 times. http://www.electric-cloud.com/products/electricaccelerator.php I think this can be improved by: Letting the distccd server to maintain sessions Tied to those sessions, they will cache their own header directories Preprocess will be done demand base from the distccd server This will be done through a LD_PRELOADed library libdistcc.so which will replace stat/open syscalls and fetches the header files over network. ... Has anyone done this kind of thing?

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• How to program a neural network for chess?

  - by marco92w

  Hello! I want to program a chess engine which learns to make good moves and win against other players. I've already coded a representation of the chess board and a function which outputs all possible moves. So I only need an evaluation function which says how good a given situation of the board is. Therefore, I would like to use an artificial neural network which should then evaluate a given position. The output should be a numerical value. The higher the value is, the better is the position for the white player. My approach is to build a network of 385 neurons: There are six unique chess pieces and 64 fields on the board. So for every field we take 6 neurons (1 for every piece). If there is a white piece, the input value is 1. If there is a black piece, the value is -1. And if there is no piece of that sort on that field, the value is 0. In addition to that there should be 1 neuron for the player to move. If it is White's turn, the input value is 1 and if it's Black's turn, the value is -1. I think that configuration of the neural network is quite good. But the main part is missing: How can I implement this neural network into a coding language (e.g. Delphi)? I think the weights for each neuron should be the same in the beginning. Depending on the result of a match, the weights should then be adjusted. But how? I think I should let 2 computer players (both using my engine) play against each other. If White wins, Black gets the feedback that its weights aren't good. So it would be great if you could help me implementing the neural network into a coding language (best would be Delphi, otherwise pseudo-code). Thanks in advance!

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• Is there a perfect algorithm for chess?

  - by Overflown

  Dear Stack Overflow community, I was recently in a discussion with a non-coder person on the possibilities of chess computers. I'm not well versed in theory, but think I know enough. I argued that there could not exist a deterministic Turing machine that always won or stalemated at chess. I think that, even if you search the entire space of all combinations of player1/2 moves, the single move that the computer decides upon at each step is based on a heuristic. Being based on a heuristic, it does not necessarily beat ALL of the moves that the opponent could do. My friend thought, to the contrary, that a computer would always win or tie if it never made a "mistake" move (however do you define that?). However, being a programmer who has taken CS, I know that even your good choices - given a wise opponent - can force you to make "mistake" moves in the end. Even if you know everything, your next move is greedy in matching a heuristic. Most chess computers try to match a possible end game to the game in progress, which is essentially a dynamic programming traceback. Again, the endgame in question is avoidable though. -- thanks, Allan Edit: Hmm... looks like I ruffled some feathers here. That's good. Thinking about it again, it seems like there is no theoretical problem with solving a finite game like chess. I would argue that chess is a bit more complicated than checkers in that a win is not necessarily by numerical exhaustion of pieces, but by a mate. My original assertion is probably wrong, but then again I think I've pointed out something that is not yet satisfactorily proven (formally). I guess my thought experiment was that whenever a branch in the tree is taken, then the algorithm (or memorized paths) must find a path to a mate (without getting mated) for any possible branch on the opponent moves. After the discussion, I will buy that given more memory than we can possibly dream of, all these paths could be found.

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• AVFoundation: Video to OpenGL texture working - How to play and sync audio?

  - by j00hi

  I've managed to load a video-track of a movie frame by frame into a OpenGL texture with AVFoundation. I followed the steps described in the answer here: iOS4: how do I use video file as an OpenGL texture? and took some code from the GLVideoFrame sample from WWDC2010 which can be downloaded here: http://bit.ly/cEf0rM How do I play the audio-track of the movie synchronously to the video. I think it would not be a good idea to play it in a separate player, but to use the audio-track of the same AVAsset. AVAssetTrack* audioTrack = [[asset tracksWithMediaType:AVMediaTypeAudio] objectAtIndex:0]; I retrieve a videoframe and it's timestamp in the CADisplayLink-callback via CMSampleBufferRef sampleBuffer = [self.readerOutput copyNextSampleBuffer]; CMTime timestamp = CMSampleBufferGetPresentationTimeStamp( sampleBuffer ); where readerOutput is of type AVAssetReaderTrackOutput* How to get the corresponding audio-samples? And how to play them? Edit: I've looked around a bit and I think, best would be to use AudioQueue from the AudioToolbox.framework using the approach described here: AVAssetReader and Audio Queue streaming problem There is also an audio-player in the AVFoundation: AVAudioPlayer. But I don't know exactly how I should pass data to it's initWithData-initializer which expects NSData. Furthermore I don't think it's the best choice for my case because a new AVAudioPlayer-instance would have to be created for every new chunk of audio samples, as I understand it. Any other suggestions? What's the best way to play the raw audio samples which i get from the AVAssetReaderTrackOutput?

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