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• What You Said: How You Organize a Messy Music Collection

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your tips, tricks, and tools, for managing a messy music collection. Now we’re back to share so great reader tips; read on to find ways to tame your mountain of music. Several readers were, despite having tried various techniques over the years, fans of doing things largely the manual way. Aurora900 explains: I spent a weekend sorting everything myself once. Took a while, but now I have folders sorted by artist, and within the artist folders are folders for their albums. With my collection at about 260gb, it can be a daunting task, but it’s well worth it in the end. I don’t have the tagging issue as I make sure anything I have is properly tagged to begin with… If I’m ripping a CD I use Easy CD-DA Extractor, which automatically searches a database on the internet for the tags. If I’m downloading something, if its from a reputable source its going to be properly tagged already. Bilbo Baggins would love to automate, but eclectic music tastes make it hard: How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 3 How to Sync Your Media Across Your Entire House with XBMC How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 2

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• Subdomain still times out after set up a month ago

  - by user8137

  I'm a newbie on this and this has probably been asked already but the subjects online were close but too vague in there answers so I've probably really messed this up. I would really appreciate specific step by step instructions. This is what I'd like to do: use the subdomain www.high-res.domain.com to be accessed by external customers with specific permissions to access the site (like ftp). We use Network Solutions to house domain.com. We recently added a new ip address to point to www.high-res.domain.com. I gave the ip address to the company that hosts our website. I pinged www.high-res.domain.com and it points to the correct ip address but still times out. It’s been a few weeks now and when you ping it, it still times out. C:ping XXX.XXX.X.XXX Pinging XXX.XXX.X.XXX with 32 bytes of data: Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Ping statistics for XXX.XXX.X.XXX: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss). Tracert times out as well. I even went to DNS tools and a few other sites for checking this and it shows the same thing. I recently went into the DNSmgmt on our server (wink2k3sp1) and created an A record under the DomainDnsZones which translated to a Cname when you look at it. Under the Domain it has two entries one to the subdomain and the other to the website host each with separate ip addresses. Is this correct? The website people are too busy on another project to research it further and my friends haven't gotten back to me. Please help. Thanks KK

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• Best Usage of Multiple Computers For a Developer

  - by whaley

  I have two Macbook Pros - both are comparable in hardware. One is a 17" and the other a 15". The 17" has a slightly swifter CPU clock speed, but beyond that the differences are completely negligible. I tried a setup a while back where I had the 17" hooked up to an external monitor in the middle of my desk with the 15" laptop immediately to the right of it, and was using teleport to control the 15" from my 17". All development, terminal usage, etc. etc. was being done on the 17" and the 15" was primarily used for email / IM / IRC... or anything secondary to what I was working on. I have a MobileMe account so preferences were synced, but otherwise I didn't really use anything else to keep the computers in sync (I use dropbox/git but probably not optimally). For reasons I can't put my finger on, this setup never felt quite right. A few things that irked me was the 15" was way under-utlized and the 17" was overutilized having 2 laptops and a 21" monitor all on one desk actually took up lots of desk space and it felt like I had too much to look at. I reverted back to just using the 17" and the external monitor and keeping the 15" around the house (and using it very sparingly). For those of you who are using multiple laptops (or just multiple machines for that matter), I'd like to see setups that work for you for when you have 2 or more machines that gives you optimal productivity and why. I'd like to give this one more shot but with a different approach than my previous - which was using the 15" as a machine for secondary things (communication, reading documentation, etc. etc).

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• DIY Halloween Decoration Uses Simple Silohuettes

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  While many of the Halloween decorating tricks we’ve shared over the years involve lots of wire, LEDs, and electronic guts, this one is thoroughly analog (and easy to put together). A simple set of silhouettes can cheaply and quickly transform the front of your house. Courtesy of Matt over at GeekDad, the transformation is easy to pull off. He explains: It’s really just about as simple as you could hope for. The materials needed are: black posterboard or black-painted cardboard; colored cellophane or tissue paper; and tape. The only tools needed are: measuring tape; some sort of drawing implement — chalk works really well; and scissors and/or X-Acto knife. And while you need some drawing talent, the scale is big enough and the need for precision little enough that you don’t need that much. For a more thorough rundown of the steps hit up the link below or hit up Google Images to find some monster silhouette inspiration. Window Monsters [Geek Dad] How Hackers Can Disguise Malicious Programs With Fake File Extensions Can Dust Actually Damage My Computer? What To Do If You Get a Virus on Your Computer

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• Cleaning Up After Chrome

  - by Mark Treadwell

  I find Google Chrome, which I have no interest in, is continually getting installed on machines in my house, mostly due to Adobe Shockwave bringing it along as an install package. (Family members are agreeing to the download, not realizing the Chrome is getting dropped as well.) My major issue after uninstalling Chrome is that you can no longer click on links in Outlook emails. There is a lot on the web about this, and Google has not been proactive at fixing their uninstaller. I have now added a registry file to my Win64 systems to reset the problem registry keys and clear the error. This registry file is pretty simple. It merely resets HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.htm, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html, and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.shtml back to their default values of "htmlfile". Chrome takes over the handling of these file extensions because its default install is to make itself the default web browser. The Chrome uninstalled fails to clear/reset them. In troubleshooting this, I looked in my registry based on the web info on the Chrome uninstall problem. Since my system had never had Chrome installed, my registry did not have the problem keys. To troubleshoot, I installed (ugh!) and uninstalled Chrome. Sure enough, Chrome left the expected debris with a value string of "ChromeHTML.PR2EPLWMBQZK3BY7Z2BFBMFERU" or something similar. Resetting these values fixed the problem. I see that Chrome leaves quite a bit of debris behind in the registry. I guess it is creating the keys then leaving them behind, even though their presence (with bad data) subsequently affects operations.

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• My Only Gripe With Programming

  - by David Espejo

  Is that im having trouble practicing problems. Even if I decide to practice the problems from my C++ book, they dont give any idea of the way the solution(program) should look like, so that I may compare to see if my program is similar in anyway. My book gives me to many generic "Write a program to do "this" " projects without really showing a concrete example of what "this" really is. In other words How Do I Know That I did "that". One problem in my book said to write a program that calculates the sales tax on a given item????? First of all slase tax differs on state(whats the state,) whats the item(a house, a dog,) How can I check this to see if im right. Programming books dont have answer keys! I know that there is no ABSOLUTE answer, thats just silly, programs can be written in many ways, but a sample of what one would look like based of the difficulty of the problem would really help! Is there a solution to this, maby a book that has worked out examples for the problems they give , or online sources that do something similar.(is there such thing as a programming book with an answer key?)

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• How to determine the amount to spend per phrase on Adwords research?

  - by Anonymous -

  My company would like to start a PPC advertising campaign. Whilst I understand the concept and how to set everything up from a technical point of view, this is something I've never done before. Logically, we'd like to test out a wide range of keywords that we think would lead to conversions, which we've put together through brainstorming and with some help from Google's External Keyword Tool. Sub-question whilst I remember - am I correct in thinking that in Google's keyword tool, keywords that we think will perform well that have a low competition yet high monthly searches are good since there will be less advertisers, meaning our bid per click will be less? Is there a common benchmark or process of doing a round of tests with keywords? Should we wait for 100 clicks on each keyword, see which ones have lead to the most sales (or rather, sales that are sustainable with the cost per click of that keyword), then drop the ones which aren't converting and put that budget onto the converting keywords? We realistically have a few hundred keywords/phrases we would like to test, but spending $100 per keyword/phrase is going to work out as quite an expensive test. It would be nice to be able to spend $5-10 per phrase, but I don't think the sample size would be great enough to determine anything usefully reliable. Another approach might be to setup all the keywords, and those that bring the most sales within x hours/days would be the ones we use. What is the common procedure with things like this? I know there are a plethora of companies that specialize in exactly this, but this is something we anticipate doing a lot in the future, so it would make sense to do it in house if at all possible.

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• How to start and maintain an after-work project

  - by Sam

  I work as a full time developer. My workplace, however, is very limiting in the technologies and programming languages I can use. All of the work is done in C++. It is clear that C++ is rapidly losing (or maybe already lost) its leading position. (please don't flame me, I have years and years of C++ experience, and I love this language, I am merely stating a fact). I have a few ideas for java/android projects as well as a project I would like to implement in C#. I see this as a way for me to stay current with the job market's trends and I hope that it will help me find my next job in a more up to date area. So here's the problem, my normal workday is 10-11 hours, after finishing with the kids and house chores I get about 1-2.5 hours before I am too tired to think much less code. at that point I am going to bed frustrated, disappointed with myself for not being able to stick with my plans, and then I wake up the next morning to do it all again. I have a few hours more during the weekends but clearly I would need to do something different if I want to reach any of my goals. Is there any way for me to make better use of the time I have? Did any of you guys have a similar problem, and had succefully resolved it?

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• How do I get away from PHP in the web industry?

  - by Kurtis

  I'm just looking for some tips on getting away from using PHP for web development. I'm self-employed but it seems like all of the work I find deals with PHP. I'm not complaining about the work -- just the poor choice of a language that is incredibly popular. I'd love to do my web development in Python, Perl, C#, or even a fun and fancy functional language. There's the old saying that you don't tell a carpenter what kind of a hammer to use. At the same time, you do tell them what kind of material to build your house out of and how much you're willing to spend. The problem I am running in to is that I don't know how to get out of this spiral. I can't just turn down work because then I wouldn't have any. I really don't want to go work for another company -- and even if I did, I'd probably still be stuck using something I don't enjoy. I'm hoping someone has "been there" before and might have some good ideas on how to get out of this situation. Thanks!

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• Adding files and folders to a Root Folder (inode/directory)

  - by xBaldwin

  Ok so I'm fairly new to Ubuntu and wasn't even the one who put it one this computer(my friend did while I was storing it at his house because I was in the middle of transitioning between houses), but It's on here so I need to learn what I can so I can use it more effectively. My question at the moment is "Would it be safe to add files/folders to a folder (inode/directory) that requires Root access?" I continue to be informed by the system that the directory I am using is running low on space which I found odd seeing how I should have a lot more room on this computer. That's when I started looking at the directories and found that there are two with a bunch of un-used space on them. One says it has 46.9 GB of free space and the other has 24.9 GB of free space. Seems like a complete waste to not use that space and yet they both say they require Root access to add to them. I know that Root folders and files are normally all system folders and files. I also know that changing or deleting them can mess up the computer which right now I cant afford to do. I just don't know if it would mess anything up to add something to those folders. Thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time to reply and try to teach me about how all that works. I really do appreciate it and will do the same if by some crazy (completely unlikely) reason I have an answer to your question. :-)`

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• Antenna Aligner part 1: In the beginning.

  - by Chris George

  Picture the scene, it's 9pm, I'm in my caravan (yes I know, I've heard all the jokes!) with my family and I'm trying to tune the tv by moving the aerial, retuning, moving the aerial again, retuning... 45 mins and much cursing later I succeed. Surely there must be an easier way than this? Aha, an app; there must be an app for that? So I search in the AppStore for such an app, but curiously drew a blank. Then the seeds of the idea started to grow. I can code, I work in a software house with lots of very clever people, surely I can make an app that points to the nearest digital tv transmitter! Not having looked into app development before, I investigated how one goes about making an iPhone app and was quickly greeted by a now familiar answer "Buy a mac!". That was not an option for many reasons, mostly wife related! My dreams were starting to fade until one of my colleagues pointed out that within Red Gate, the very company I work for, there was on-going development on a piece of software that would allow me to write an app using Visual Studio on a Windows machine, Nomad! Once I signed up for the beta program I got to work learning the Jquery mobile / Phonegap framework. Within a couple of hours I had written (in Visual Studio), built in the cloud (using Nomad) and published (via TestFlight) my first iPhone app onto my iPhone ! It didn't do much, but it was a step in the right direction. To be continued...

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• How To Use the Restore Partition to Break Into a Mac Running OS X Lion

  - by Justin Garrison

  It’s trivial to break into a Mac using an OS X boot disk, but new Macs use a restore partition for OS installations. Here’s how you can use that partition to reset a user password and break into a Mac. All laptops that come with OS X 10.7 “Lion” or laptops that were upgraded to Lion have a restore partition for easy OS recovery. This easy-to-use recovery partition also opens up hackers to break into your Mac without needing any additional tools. To reset a user password on a Mac with Lion you first need to restart the computer and hold the Command+R (?+R) keys. When the gray Apple logo shows up on the screen you can release the keys. Your computer should automatically boot into the recovery partition. Start by selecting your language and then go to Utilities -> Terminal in the menu. How to Sync Your Media Across Your Entire House with XBMC How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 2 How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 1

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• How to Enable Priority Inbox on Android (and Setup Important-Only Notifications)

  - by The Geek

  Yesterday Google released an updated Gmail application for Android 2.2 phones that supports the Priority Inbox feature—and more importantly, allows you to change your notifications to only alert you for important email. Let’s take a look. Note: If you’ve never used Priority Inbox, you should really give it a try—it rearranges your email into what is and isn’t important, and you can customize how it classifies messages easily. The idea is that it learns over time, so if you send a lot of emails back and forth with somebody, it will know that they are probably important—you can manually adjust the settings as well. To update the Gmail application, you’ll want to head into the Market and access Menu –> Downloads, where you should see Gmail in the list, and it should let you update from there. If you don’t see an update, you’re either not running Android 2.2, or it has already updated automatically Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

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• Is this a ridiculous way to structure a DB schema, or am I completely missing something?

  - by Jim

  I have done a fair bit of work with relational databases, and think I understand the basic concepts of good schema design pretty well. I recently was tasked with taking over a project where the DB was designed by a highly-paid consultant. Please let me know if my gut intinct - "WTF??!?" - is warranted, or is this guy such a genius that he's operating out of my realm? DB in question is an in-house app used to enter requests from employees. Just looking at a small section of it, you have information on the users, and information on the request being made. I would design this like so: User table: UserID (primary Key, indexed, no dupes) FirstName LastName Department Request table RequestID (primary Key, indexed, no dupes) <...> various data fields containing request details UserID -- foreign key associated with User table Simple, right? Consultant designed it like this (with sample data): UsersTable UserID FirstName LastName 234 John Doe 516 Jane Doe 123 Foo Bar DepartmentsTable DepartmentID Name 1 Sales 2 HR 3 IT UserDepartmentTable UserDepartmentID UserID Department 1 234 2 2 516 2 3 123 1 RequestTable RequestID UserID <...> 1 516 blah 2 516 blah 3 234 blah The entire database is constructed like this, with every piece of data encapsulated in its own table, with numeric IDs linking everything together. Apparently the consultant had read about OLAP and wanted the 'speed of integer lookups' He also has a large number of stored procedures to cross reference all of these tables. Is this valid design for a small to mid-sized SQL DB? Thanks for comments/answers...

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• How to host an AP or a hotspot?

  - by user1048138

  I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 as a virtual machine on my Mac. Since I am unable to get the virtual machine to have full access to my WiFi card, I bought another USB WiFi card to use. This is my WiFi card. If you are unfamiliar with Virtual machine, as far as I know, since the Ubuntu has its own card now, it shouldn't matter. I have followed these guides with no luck: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessAccessPoint http://www.danbishop.org/2011/12/11/using-hostapd-to-add-wireless-access-point-capabilities-to-an-ubuntu-server/ The problem is that the WiFi connection appears on all of the machines that I have in my house: 2 iPhones, Dell machine running Ubuntu and two Macbooks. However the connection times out on all of these machines. Questions: Could this be a driver issue if that same WiFi card can connect to other WiFi points and use its internet Could this be DHCP related? I would think not. It should at least get a 169.X.X.X address? No? Any solutions for me?

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• Weekend Project: Build a Fireball Launcher

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  What’s more fun than playing with fire? Shooting it from your hands. Put on your robe and wizard hat, make a stop at the hardware store, and spend the weekend trying to convince your friends you’ve acquired supernatural powers. Over at MAKE Magazine, Joel Johnson explains the impetus for his project: A stalwart of close-quarter magicians for years, the electronic flash gun is a simple device: a battery-powered, hand-held ignitor that uses a “glo-plug” to light a bit of flash paper and cotton, shooting a fireball a few feet into the air. You can buy one from most magic shops for around $50, but if you build one on your own, you’ll not only save a few bucks, you’ll also learn how easy it is to add fire effects to almost any electronics project. (And what gadget couldn’t stand a little more spurting flame?) The parts list is minimal but the end effect is pretty fantastic. Hit up the link below for the full build guide, plenty of warnings, and a weekend project that’s sure to impress. How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 3 How to Sync Your Media Across Your Entire House with XBMC How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 2

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• How should I start refactoring my mostly-procedural C++ application?

  - by oob

  We have a program written in C++ that is mostly procedural, but we do use some C++ containers from the standard library (vector, map, list, etc). We are constantly making changes to this code, so I wouldn't call it a stagnant piece of legacy code that we can just wrap up. There are a lot of issues with this code making it harder and harder for us to make changes, but I see the three biggest issues being: Many of the functions do more (way more) than one thing We violate the DRY principle left and right We have global variables and global state up the wazoo. I was thinking we should attack areas 1 and 2 first. Along the way, we can "de-globalize" our smaller functions from the bottom up by passing in information that is currently global as parameters to the lower level functions from the higher level functions and then concentrate on figuring out how to removing the need for global variables as much as possible. I just finished reading Code Complete 2 and The Pragmatic Programmer, and I learned a lot, but I am feeling overwhelmed. I would like to implement unit testing, change from a procedural to OO approach, automate testing, use a better logging system, fully validate all input, implement better error handling and many other things, but I know if we start all this at once, we would screw ourselves. I am thinking the three I listed are the most important to start with. Any suggestions are welcome. We are a team of two programmers mostly with experience with in-house scripting. It is going to be hard to justify taking the time to refactor, especially if we can't bill the time to a client. Believe it or not, this project has been successful enough to keep us busy full time and also keep several consultants busy using it for client work.

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• Is it worth moving from Microsoft tech to Linux, NodeJS & other open source frameworks to save money for a start-up?

  - by dormisher

  I am currently getting involved in a startup, I am the only developer involved at the moment, and the other guys are leaving all the tech decisions up to me at the moment. For my day job I work at a software house that uses Microsoft tech on a day to day basis, we utilise .NET, SqlServer, Windows Server etc. However, I realise that as a startup we need to keep costs down, and after having a brief look at the cost of hosting for Windows I was shocked to see some of the prices for a dedicated server. The cheapest I found was £100 a month. Also if the business needs to scale in the future and we end up needing multiple servers, we could end up shelling out £10's of £000's a year in SQL Server / Windows Server licenses etc. I then had a quick look at the price of Linux hosting for a dedicated server and saw the price was waaaaaay lower than windows hosting. One place was offering a machine with 2 cores for less than £20 a month. This got me thinking maybe the way to go is open source on Linux. As I write a lot of Javascript at work (I'm working on a single page backbone app at the moment), I thought maybe NodeJS and a web framework like Express would be cool to use. I then thought that instead of using SQL why not use an open source NoSQL database like MongoDB, which has great support on NodeJS? My only concern is that some of the work the application is going to do is going to be dynamically building images and various other image related stuff, i.e. stuff that is quite CPU heavy - so I'm thinking of maybe writing anything CPU heavy in C++ and consuming it as a module in Node. That's the background - but basically is Linux a good match for: Hosting a NodeJS/Express site? Compiling C++ node modules? Using a NoSQL DB like MongoDB? And is it a good idea to move to these unfamiliar technologies to save money?

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• How to start a Software Company

  - by MeshMan

  I've always been interested in wondering how software companies happen. I find it extremely difficult once you're tied down with car, house, life etc. Funding is always the biggest concern. To make this a bit more specific, I see two types. Those offering a product/service or those offering a consultancy company. One things that bugs me about the product/service kind is that we all know how burning the candle at both ends is extremely exhausting. Coding for 8-10 hours in the day and then code in the evenings on your own stuff, doesn't last long. No matter how passionate you are about your idea, simply put, coding day and night is a recipe for burn out. Is this a defeatist attitude though? Can it be balanced? A consultancy kind isn't as tricky in my honest opinion. I think once you have spent years and years in the industry building up relationships, contacts from contracting or moving around, and of course, being involved in the community, then landing your first project as a consultant I'm sure is easier than the product/service kind. I'd imagine friends then could join you as you take on bigger company projects, like an Agile implementation or TDD training, then off you go gaining bigger things. Could you please specify which company type you're answering if you can't contribute to both. I'd like to hear everyone's experiences or ideas on any level for software company start-ups.

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• What You Said: How Do You Browse Securely Away From Home?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Responses to this week’s Ask the Reader question show that just because you’re away from home doesn’t mean you have to give up the security and privacy that your home network provides. Earlier this week we asked you to share you browsing away from home security tips and tricks and obliged. JC offered one of the more entertaining tales of away-from-home browsing: Recently a bunch of us stayed at a high end resort down in Mexico. Internet was offered as a pay per device service at about $80/week/device. Considering we had about 12 wifi devices there among us(a few geeks), I decided to plan ahead. I setup a WRT54G as a WiFi client with a vpn back to my house and NAT. Setup a second one as a basic wireless access point with password and plugged it into the first. Onsite we setup the devices and connected to the wireless with one paid account(tied to the MAC address). Everyone connected to the other device for wireless access and it was all tunnelled through my home network with encryption. HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online Here’s How to Download Windows 8 Release Preview Right Now HTG Explains: Why Linux Doesn’t Need Defragmenting

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• A key principle of Scrum...

  - by AndyScott

  "A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements." I have been working in a SCRUM environment, with 4-6 week cycles, for about 6 months now and have been very pleased with the impact that it has had on my life (regular work hours, seeing my family, etc).  But was looking up the criteria for a 'Certified Scrum Master' and came across the SCRUM definition on Wikipedia, and started reading the actual definition.  My first thought was "hey, this development methodology actually allows you to deal with what happens in the real world (i.e. customers changing requirements); but is this "selling out" on solid requirements? I understand that this works in the environment that I am currently working in, where there are deep pockets paying the bills, and also making the descisions on what requirements to change / impliment; but is this a recepie for success in smaller or simply more budget concious environments?  Having the ability to be completely flexible when the client wants the product changed.   The more I think about it, the more I feel that SCRUM development may be better suited for an environment where a team is taking over a project from another team (bringing some outside development in-house or something of that ilk), as opposed to ground up development. What do you think?

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• Storing editable site content?

  - by hmp

  We have a Django-based website for which we wanted to make some of the content (text, and business logic such as pricing plans) easily editable in-house, and so we decided to store it outside the codebase. Usually the reason is one of the following: It's something that non-technical people want to edit. One example is copywriting for a website - the programmers prepare a template with text that defaults to "Lorem ipsum...", and the real content is inserted later to the database. It's something that we want to be able to change quickly, without the need to deploy new code (which we currently do twice a week). An example would be features currently available to the customers at different tiers of pricing. Instead of hardcoding these, we read them from database. The described solution is flexible but there are some reasons why I don't like it. Because the content has to be read from the database, there is a performance overhead. We mitigate that by using a caching scheme, but this also adds some complexity to the system. Developers who run the code locally see the system in a significantly different state compared to how it runs on production. Automated tests also exercise the system in a different state. Situations like testing new features on a staging server also get trickier - if the staging server doesn't have a recent copy of the database, it can be unexpectedly different from production. We could mitigate that by committing the new state to the repository occasionally (e.g. by adding data migrations), but it seems like a wrong approach. Is it? Any ideas how best to solve these problems? Is there a better approach for handling the content that I'm overlooking?

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• two thoughts about career excellence

  - by john.rose

  I love Dickens, warts and all. Sometimes he is sententious, and (like the mediocre modern I am) at such points I am willing to listen non-ironically. This bit here struck me hard enough to stop and write it down: I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for. It is Woodcourt's kind. (John Jarndyce to Esther Summerson, Bleak House, ch. 60) Woodcourt is, of course, one of the heroes of the story. It is a heroism that is attractive to me. Here is a similar idea, from the Screwtape Letters. In the satirically inverted logic of that book, the “Enemy” is God, the enemy of the devils but the author of good: The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. (C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, ch. 14) Though I will be happy with a good Bazaar, I also dream of Cathedrals. Put whatever name you like on it, as long as I get some part in the fun of building a good one.

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• How can I get non-programmer colleagues on board with bespoke software rather than Dynamics CRM + Sharepoint?

  - by Bendos

  I am working with a company which designs and builds one-off machines. They have been 'dabbling' with hosted Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint (on different servers!) in an attempt to centralise their data and help colleagues collaborate more effectively across projects. They haven't used either system to their potential. Now we are looking at the engineering department who already use a form of version control software for the various CAD files (Autodesk Vault) however it is becoming increasingly necessary to implement more of a generic file version control system as they use many more files than can be managed in Vault (sometimes just photos or scans of paper documents), hence why they were looking at using Sharepoint. However... as the 'programmer' of the bunch, I can see several scenarios which don't seem to fit well with the Dynamics + Sharepoint approach; simple reports based on cross-table queries, exporting certain metrics as a spreadsheet, defining project hierarchies and many-many relationships, and as such I have been pushing for an in-house developed 'ECM' / 'ERP' software package (perhaps in .NET or php). Some colleagues seem to attach a greater value to the MS software (perhaps becuase it has a logo!) but don't see that it's just a framework, not a solution. Can anyone provide a good example of when custom software would actually be better than using Dynamics + Sharepoint and how do I relate that to non-technical staff?

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• Reliance on Outlook (been a looong time, I know)

  - by AndyScott

  Do you feel that your development group too reliant on Outlook? Have you reached a point that you have to search your email for pertinent information when asked? What are you using? I realized things had gotten out of hand a couple weeks ago over a weekend. I was at my in-laws house (in the country, no PC/laptop, no internet connection; and I get an email on my phone that I needed to reply to, but I couldn't send without deleting items from my inbox/sent items/etc. Now mind you, I have rules set up to move stuff into folders, and files more than a month old are automatically moved to the PST; but generally don't manually move items to a PST until I have had a chance to 'work' the item. Please don't bother mocking my process, it's just the way I work. That being said, it was a frustrating process of 'I need all this information, what can I afford to lose'. I work on an International project (think lots of customers), and conversations in 9 or 10 different directions about 10-20 different things are not abnormal for a given day. I have found myself looking data up in Outlook because that's where it is. I think that I have reached the point now, where I don't feel that Outlook is up to the task of organizing the data that it contains.   When you have that many emails (200 or so a day), information seems to get lost at times, and I find that Outlook's search capabilities are lacking. Additionally, I find that any sort of organizational 'system' of sorting emails that can cover multiple topics is a lost cause. But at the same time, the old process of taking the information that I got from emails and moving it into another 'notes' type of program has proved to be too time consuming. Anyone out there have some better type of system? (Comments about the capacity of my brain, and it's ability to recall information not needed.)

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