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• Software Licencing [closed]

  - by Craig

  A colleague of mine wanted a means to do something, so it was suggested that I write some software to do this. The software has turned into more than the original specification and is now something rather complex, however it is not fully functional still. My colleague has not paid me anything so far and I am unwilling to continue writing the software until some faith has been reciprocated in my direction, as I have put a lot of effort into writing the software. I am also unwilling to finish the software as I do not want to give away a huge chunk of my time and effort away as free, neither do I want to be under compensated for my efforts. Some concerns I have. If I finish the software, what if the client doesn't pay me anything or pays too little, or what if I write the software to a usable level, but not complete and the client pays me a too little. I have lost my motivation to finish the software, as more and more specifications have been added to the software and I have developed a substantially complex piece of software and been effectively paid nothing. To finish the software, I need motivation, money would do this, however the client doesn't want to pay for something that isn't complete, yet keeps adding more requirements. I seem to be in a catch 22 with this, as I have developed some software on faith and have had no faith reciprocated in my direction. I'm really not sure how to get some payment from the client or on how to develop a licencing model so that I get some money from the client and development resumes.

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• Is committing/checking in code everyday a good practice?

  - by ArtB

  I've been reading Martin Fowler's note on Continuous Integration and he lists as a must "Everyone Commits To the Mainline Every Day". I do not like to commit code unless the section I'm working on is complete and that in practice I commit my code every three days: one day to investigate/reproduce the task and make some preliminary changes, a second day to complete the changes, and a third day to write the tests and clean it up^ for submission. I would not feel comfortable submitting the code sooner. Now, I pull changes from the repository and integrate them locally usually twice a day, but I do not commit that often unless I can carve out a smaller piece of work. Question: is committing everyday such a good practice that I should change my workflow to accomodate it, or it is not that advisable? Edit: I guess I should have clarified that I meant "commit" in the CVS meaning of it (aka "push") since that is likely what Fowler would have meant in 2006 when he wrote this. ^ The order is more arbitrary and depends on the task, my point was to illustrate the time span and activities, not the exact sequence.

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• Wanted: Java Code Brainteasers

  - by Tori Wieldt

  The Jan/Feb Java Magazine will go out next week. It's full of great Java stories, interviews and technical articles. It also includes a Fix This section; the idea of this section is challenging a Java developer's coding skills. It's a multiple-choice brainteaser that includes code and possible answers. The answer is provided in the next issue. For an example, check out Fix This in the Java Magazine premier issue. We are looking for community submissions to Fix This. Do you have a good code brain teaser? Remember, you want tease your fellow devs, not stump them completely! If you have a submission, here's what you do:  1. State the problem, including a short summary of the tool/technique, in about 75 words. 2. Send us the code snippet, with a short set-up so readers know what they are looking at (such as, "Consider the following piece of code to have database access within a Servlet.") 3. Provide four multiple-choice answers to the question, "What's the fix?" 4. Give us the answer, along with a brief explanation of why. 5. Tell us who you are (name, occupation, etc.) 6. Email the above to JAVAMAG_US at ORACLE.COM with "Fix This Submission" in the title. Deadlines for Fix This for next two issues of Java Magazine are Dec. 12th and Jan. 15th. Bring It!

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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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• What to do when TDD tests reveal new functionality that is needed that also needs tests?

  - by Joshua Harris

  What do you do when you are writing a test and you get to the point where you need to make the test pass and you realize that you need an additional piece of functionality that should be separated into its own function? That new function needs to be tested as well, but the TDD cycle says to Make a test fail, make it pass then refactor. If I am on the step where I am trying to make my test pass I'm not supposed to go off and start another failing test to test the new functionality that I need to implement. For example, I am writing a point class that has a function WillCollideWith(LineSegment): public class Point { // Point data and constructor ... public bool CollidesWithLine(LineSegment lineSegment) { Vector PointEndOfMovement = new Vector(Position.X + Velocity.X, Position.Y + Velocity.Y); LineSegment pointPath = new LineSegment(Position, PointEndOfMovement); if (lineSegment.Intersects(pointPath)) return true; return false; } } I was writing a test for CollidesWithLine when I realized that I would need a LineSegment.Intersects(LineSegment) function. But, should I just stop what I am doing on my test cycle to go create this new functionality? That seems to break the "Red, Green, Refactor" principle. Should I just write the code that detects that lineSegments Intersect inside of the CollidesWithLine function and refactor it after it is working? That would work in this case since I can access the data from LineSegment, but what about in cases where that kind of data is private?

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• SOA Composite Sensors : Good Practice

  - by angelo.santagata

  I was discussing a interesting design problem with a colleague of mine Niall (his blog) on the topic of how to cancel an inflight SOA Composite process.  Obviously one way to do this is to cancel the process from enterprise Manager ( http://hostort/em ) , however we were thinking this isnt a “user friendly” way of doing this.. If you look at Nialls blog you’ll see he’s highlighted a number of different APIs which enable you the ability to manipulate the SCA instance, e.g. Code Snippet to purge (delete) an instance How to determine the instanceId from a composite_sensor_value using the “composite_sensor_value” table How to determine a BPEL Process status using the cube_instance table   Now all of these require that you know the instanceId of your SOA Composite, how does one find this out? Well the easiest way of doing this is to create a composite sensor on the SCA component. A composite sensor is simply a way of publishing a piece of business data as part of your composite. The magic here is that you can later query composites based on this value. So a good best practice is that for any composites you create consider publishing a composite sensor value using a primary key of some sort , e.g. orderId, that way if you need to manipulate/query composites you can easily look up the instanceId using the sensorid.   For information on how to create a composite Sensor id see this documentation link  

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• Is this technique for stat tracking without a database workable?

  - by baptzmoffire

  If I wanted to create a chess game, for iOS, that tracked both player moves (for retracing the progression of a game and for player stats), what would be the simplest route to take? To clarify, I want to track not only the moves a player has made in a particular game, but how often that player has made that move in past games. For example I want to be able to track: How many times a given player has opened by moving the king pawn up two squares (e4) as white, on move number one. What is the percentage of time the player responds to white's e4 opening move, with moving his own king pawn to e5? What percentage of time does he respond by moving his queenside bishop pawn to c5? And so on. If it's not clear, the stat tracking system should also be able to report how many times this player, as black, move his queen to h1, on move number 30. I'm using Parse.com for my back-end as a server (BaaS) service. If I were to create a class that writes strings that identify move number, player color, moved piece, algebraic notation of the square (e.g. "d8") to a file, locally in the file system saves the file to Parse, and deletes the temporary file from file system upon opening the same game in my tableview (a la a "With Friends" game), download this file from Parse, parse through it and retrieve all stats/history, assign all relevant values to variables Is this plan viable, or is there an easier way?

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• Java's Object.wait method with nanoseconds: Is this a joke or am I missing something

  - by Krumia

  I was checking out the Java API source code (Java 8) just out of curiosity. And I found this in java/lang/Object.java. There are three methods named wait: public final native void wait(long timeout): This is the core of all wait methods, which has a native implementation. public final void wait(): Just calls wait(0). And then there is public final void wait(long timeout, int nanos). The JavaDoc for the particular method tells me that, This method is similar to the wait method of one argument, but it allows finer control over the amount of time to wait for a notification before giving up. The amount of real time, measured in nanoseconds, is given by: 1000000*timeout+nanos But this is how the methods achieves "finer control over the amount of time to wait": if (nanos >= 500000 || (nanos != 0 && timeout == 0)) { timeout++; } wait(timeout); So this method basically does a crude rounding up of nanoseconds to milliseconds. Not to mention that anything below 500000ns/0.5ms will be ignored. Is this piece of code bad/unnecessary code, or am I missing some unseen virtue of declaring this method, and it's no argument cousin as the way they are?

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• Herding Cats - That's My Job....

  - by user709270

  Written by Mike Schmitz - Sr. Director, Program Management Oracle JD Edwards  I remember seeing a super bowl commercial several years ago showing some well dressed people on the African savanna herding cats. I remember turning to the people I was watching the game with and telling them, “You just watched my job description”. Releasing software is a multi-facetted undertaking. In addition to making sure the code changes are complete, you also need to make sure the other key parts of a release are ready. For example when you have a question about the software, will the person on the other end of the phone be ready to answer your question? If you need training on that cool new piece of functionality, will there be an online training course ready for you to review? If you want to read about how the software is supposed to function, is there a user manual available? Putting all the release pieces together so they are available at the same time is what the JD Edwards Program Management team does. It is my team’s job to work with all the different functional teams so when a release is made generally available you have all the things you need to be successful. The JD Edwards Program Management team uses an internal planning tool called the Release Process Model (RPM) to ensure all deliverables are accounted for in a release. The RPM makes sure all the release deliverables are ready at the correct time and in the correct format. The RPM really helps all the functional teams in JD Edwards know what release deliverables they are accountable for and when they are to be delivered. It is my team’s job to make sure everyone understands what they need to do and when they need to deliver. We then make sure they are all on track to deliver on-time and in the right format. It is just that some days this feels like herding cats.

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• The Start of a Blog

  - by dbradley

  So, here's my new blog up and running, who am I and what am I planning to write here?First off - here's a little about me:I'm a recent graduate from university (coming up to a year ago since I finished) studying Software Engineering on a four year course where the third year was an industrial placement. During the industrial placement I went to work for a company called Adfero in a "Technical Consultant" role as well as a junior "Information Systems Developer". Once I completed my placement I went back to complete my final year but also continued in my developer role 2/3 days a week with the company.Working part time while at uni always seems like a great idea until you get half way through the year. For me the problem was not so much having a lack of time, but rather a lack of interest in the course content having got a chance at working on real projects in a live environment. Most people who have been graduated a little while also find this - when looking back at uni work, it seem to be much more trivial from a problem solving point of view which I found to be true and I found key to uni work to actually be your ability to prove though how you talk about something that you comprehensively understand the basics.After completing uni I then returned full time to Adfero purely in the developer role which is where I've now been for almost a year and have now also taken on the title of "Information Systems Architect" where I'm working on some of the more high level design problems within the products.What I'm wanting to share on this blog is some of the interesting things I've learnt myself over the last year, the things they don't teach you in uni and pretty much anything else I find interesting! My personal favorite areas are text indexing, search and particularly good software engineering design - good design combined with good code makes the first step towards a well-written, maintainable piece of software.Hopefully I'll also be able to share a few of the products I've worked on, the mistake I've made and the software problems I've inherited from previous developers and had to heavily re-factor.

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• Possible to draw a select portion of a render target? (in XNA)

  - by TheBroodian

  I'm going to try to do this in reverse fashion and skip straight to the punch line, and then give the back story afterward: Is it possible to, after drawing a scene to a RenderTarget2D, only draw a select portion of the RenderTarget2D, if I don't want the entire thing? I'm using xTile to manage world data in my game (it's a great piece of work, colinvella [xTile's author] has made an amazing product), and for the most part it works great. xTile supports parallax effects in its layers to add some wonderful depth to 2d scenes, which was great, until I implemented a dynamic split-screen system into my game. Wanted to make a co-op game that wouldn't require players to be in close proximity to each other, so I made it so that if the players separate too far apart, the singular full-screen viewport 'snaps-apart', and is replaced by two split-screen viewports, which then smoothly transition to their respective player targets. The effect is pretty smooth aside from the part where the parallax backgrounds become skewed once the viewports split, because xTile's ratio for handling parallax effects is dependent upon viewport size. This is unfortunate, because the effect would otherwise be really snazzy, but the backgrounds become pretty heavily affected when the game goes from single-viewport to multi-viewport. So, Colinvella suggests using rendertargets to record the scene at full viewport size, and then only drawing a portion of it. But as far as I can tell, that isn't even possible? That being said, I've never even used render targets before, so I'm still learning, hence the question here.

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• Optimal communication pattern to update subscribers

  - by hpc

  What is the optimal way to update the subscriber's local model on changes C on a central model M? ( M + C - M_c) The update can be done by the following methods: Publish the updated model M_c to all subscribers. Drawback: if the model is big in contrast to the change it results in much more data to be communicated. Publish change C to all subscribes. The subscribers will then update their local model in the same way as the server does. Drawback: The client needs to know the business logic to update the model in the same way as the server. It must be assured that the subscribed model stays equal to the central model. Calculate the delta (or patch) of the change (M_c - M = D_c) and transfer the delta. Drawback: This requires that calculating and applying the delta (M + D_c = M_c) is an cheap/easy operation. If a client newly subscribes it must be initialized. This involves sending the current model M. So method 1 is always required. Think of playing chess as a concrete example: Subscribers send moves and want to see the latest chess board state. The server checks validity of the move and applies it to the chess board. The server can then send the updated chessboard (method 1) or just send the move (method 2) or send the delta (method 3): remove piece on field D4, put tower on field D8.

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• 'Buy the app' landing page implementations: redirect or javascript popup?

  - by benwad

  My site (using Django) has an app that I'm trying to push - I currently have a piece of middleware that redirects the user to a page advertising the app if they're accessing the page on the iPhone, then setting a cookie so that the user isn't bugged by the message every time they visit the site. This works fine, however checking the page with the mobile Googlebot checker shows that the Googlebot gets stuck in the redirect (since it doesn't store cookies) and therefore won't index the proper content. So, I'm trying to think of an alternative implementation that won't hurt the site's Google ranking and won't have any other adverse effects. I've considered a couple of options: Redirect (the current solution), but don't redirect if the user agent matches the Googlebot's UA string. This would be ideal, however I'm not sure if Google like their bot being treated differently from other users, and I'm afraid the site's ranking may be somehow penalised if I go ahead with this. Use a Javascript popup instead of a redirect. This would make sure the Googlebot finds the content it needs, however I envision this approach causing compatibility issues with the myriad mobile devices/browsers out there, and may affect the page load time. How valid are these options? And is there a better option for implementing this feature out there? I've tried researching this topic but surprisingly can't find any reputable-looking blog posts that explore this topic.

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• Be Prepared: Technology Trends Converge and Disrupt

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Cloud. Big data. Mobile. Social media: these mega trends in technology have had a profound impact on our lives. And now according to SVP Ravi Puri from North America Oracle Consulting Services, these trends are starting to converge and will affect us even more. His article, “Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, And Social: Convergence Will Bring Even More Disruption” appeared in Forbes on June 6. For example, mobile and social are causing huge changes in the business world. Big data and cloud are coming together to help us with deep analytical insights. And much more. These convergences are causing another wave of disruption, which can drive all kinds of improvements in such things as customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, and growth. But, according to Puri, companies need to be prepared. In this article, Puri urges companies to get out in front of the new innovations. H3 gives good directions on how to do so to accelerate time to value and minimize risk. The post is a good thought leadership piece to pass on to your customers.

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• Explaining Asteroids Movement code

  - by Moaz ELdeen

  I'm writing an Asteroids Atari clone, and I want to figure out how the AI for the asteroids is done. I have came across that piece of code, but I can't get what it does 100% if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) { m_Pos.x = -app::getWindowWidth() / 2; if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) m_Pos.x = app::getWindowWidth() / 2; m_Pos.y = (int) ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * app::getWindowWidth()); } else { m_Pos.x = (int) ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * app::getWindowWidth()); m_Pos.y = -app::getWindowHeight() / 2; if (rand() < 0.5) m_Pos.y = app::getWindowHeight() / 2; } m_Vel.x = (float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * 2; if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) { m_Vel.x = -m_Vel.x; } m_Vel.y =(float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * 2; if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) m_Vel.y = -m_Vel.y;

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• SEO strategy for h1, h2, h3 tags for list of items

  - by Theo G

  On a page on my website page I have a list of ALL the products on my site. This list is growing rapidly and I am wondering how to manage it from an SEO point of view. I am shortly adding a title to this section and giving it an H1 tag. Currently the name of each product in this list is not h1,2,3,4 its just styled text. However I was looking to make these h2,3,4. Questions: Is the use of h2,3,4 on these list items bad form as they should be used for content rather than all links? I am thinking of limiting this main list to only 8 items and using h2 tags for each name. Do you this this will have a negative or possible affect over all. I may create a piece of script which counts the first 8 items on the list. These 8 will get the h2, and any after that will get h3 (all styled the same). If I do add h tags should I put just on the name of the product or the outside of the a tag, therefore collecting all info. Has anyone been in a similar situation as this, and if so did they really see any significant difference?

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• Employee Engagement: Drive Business Value

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we’ve been discussing this week, employee engagement is extremely important and you’ve probably realized that effectively engaging your employees is essential to driving business value. Your employees are the ones responsible for executing on the business’ objectives. Your employees (in the sales & service departments) are the ones interacting with your customers the most, so delivering on customer expectations and attaining high levels of customer engagement are simply not possible without successfully empowering these this stakeholder group. High employee and partner engagement can have many benefits including: Higher levels of employee productivity Longer employee retention Stronger, more enduring and more successful relationships Serving as ambassadors for an organization’s brand More likely to deliver excellent customer service Referring others for hire Recommending the organization’s products and services Sharing feedback with their colleagues In a way, engagement is a measure of employee investment in an organization’s mission and brand. And then you have the enablement piece of this as well.  It’s hard to imagine a high level of engagement existing among employees who don’t feel that they’ve been enabled to do their jobs very efficiently or effectively. You’re just not going to find high engagement among people if the everyday processes and technologies  they work with make it a challenge for them to access, share and manage the information  they need do their jobs or if they’re unable to effectively collaborate around the projects they’re working on. How does your organization measure on the employee engagement spectrum? We’ve got a number of different resources to help you get started! Portal Resource Center Video: Got a minute? WebCenter in Action Webcast Series Portal Engagement Webcast 

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• BizTalk Schema Validation

  - by Christopher House

  Perhaps this one should be filed under:  Obvious Yesterday I created a new schema that is going to be used for a WCF receive.  The schema has a bunch of restrictions in it, with the intention that we'd validate incoming messages against the schema.  I'd never done message validation with BizTalk but I knew the XmlDisassembler component had an option for validating, so I figured it would be a piece of cake.  Sadly, that was not to be the case.  I deployed my artifacts and configured my receive location's XmlDisassembler with what I thought to be the correct document spec name.  I entered My.Project.Name.SchemaTypeName for the document spec and started running unit tests.  All of them failed with the following error logged in the event log: "WcfReceivePort_BizTalkWcfService/PurchaseOrderService" URI: "/BizTalkWcfService/PurchaseOrderService.svc" Reason: No Disassemble stage components can recognize the data. I went to the receive port and turned on tracking, submitted another message, then went to the admin console and saved the message.  It looked correct, but just to be sure, I manually validated it against the schema in my project.  As expected, it validated correctly. After a bit of thinking on this, I realized that I probably needed to fully qualify my document spec name, meaning, include the assembly name, as well as the type name.  So, I went back to the receive location and changed the document spec to: My.Project.Name.SchemaTypeName, My.Project.Name,Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxxxxxxxx I re-ran my unit tests and everything was working as expected.  So, note to self:  remember to include the assembly name when setting the document spec.  If you need an easy way to determine your schema name and assembly name, find your schema in the admin console and go to it's properties.  On the property screen, look at the Name and Assembly properties.  Your document spec will be "SchemaName, AssemblyName"

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• Part 4: Development Standards or How to share

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  Although we usually introduce the custom development part in EBS projects as “a small piece only” and “we will avoid as best as possible”, the development effort can be enormous and should therefore be well addressed by project standards. Any additional solution or additional software tool or product shall influence the custom development rules (by adding, removing or replacing sections). It is very common in EBS projects to create a so called “MD.030 Development Standards” document and put everything what’s related to development conventions into it. This document gets approval and will be shared among all developers. Later, additional sections have to be added, and usually the development lead is responsible for doing this. However, sometimes used development techniques are not documented properly, and therefore the development solutions deviate from each other, or from the initially agreed standards. My advice would be the following: keep the MD.030 as a base document, and add a Wiki on top. The “Development Wiki” covers the following: Collect input from every developer without updating the MD.030 directly Collect additional topics that might need further specification Allow a discussion about such topics by reviewing/updating the wiki directly Add also decisions or open questions right into it. In one of my own projects we were using this “Developer Wiki” quite extensive, and my experience is very positive. We had different sections in it, good cross references, but also additional material like code templates, links to external web pages etc. By using this wiki, the development standards became “owned” by the right group of people, the developers. They recognized that information sharing can improve the overall development quality, but will also reduce the workload on individuals. Finally, the wiki was much more accurate and helpful for the daily development work than our initial MD.030, and we all decided to retire the document completely. Summary: Information sharing in the development area is very important! The usual “MD.030 Development Standards“ is a good starting point, but should be combined with a “Development Wiki”, allowing everyone to address and discuss necessary improvements. A well-structured Wiki can replace the document in some sections completely. Side Note: The corresponding task in Oracle OUM (Oracle Unified Method) is DS.050 ‘Determine Design and Build Standards’ Volker

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• Views : ViewControllers, many to one, or one to one?

  - by conor

  I have developed an Android application where, typically, each view (layout.xml) displayed on the screen has it's own corresponding fragment (for the purpose of this question I may refer to this as a ViewController). These views and Fragments/ViewControllers are appropriately named to reflect what they display. So this has the effect of allowing the programmer to easily pinpoint the files associated with what they see on any given screen. The above refers to the one to one part of my question. Please note that with the above there are a few exceptions where very similar is displayed on two views so the ViewController is used for two views. (Using a simple switch (type) to determine what layout.xml file to load) On the flip side. I am currently working on the iOS version of the same app, which I didn't develop. It seems that they are adopting more of a one-to-many (ViewController:View) approach. There appears to be one ViewController that handles the display logic for many different types of views. In the ViewController are an assortment of boolean flags and arrays of data (to be displayed) that are used to determine what view to load and how to display it. This seems very cumbersome to me and coupled with no comments/ambiguous variable names I am finding it very difficult to implement changes into the project. What do you guys think of the two approaches? Which one would you prefer? I'm really considering putting in some extra time at work to refactor the iOS into a more 1:1 oriented approach. My reasoning for 1:1 over M:1 is that of modularity and legibility. After all, don't some people measure the quality of code based on how easy it is for another developer to pick up the reigns or how easy it is to pull a piece of code and use it somewhere else?

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• Hosting files with support for file tagging / keywords

  - by Zev Chonoles

  I have a large (approx. 25GB) collection of files I would like to host online for people to view or download. I have a spare computer I can use as a dedicated server for these files. I'm looking for a method of, or piece of software for, hosting my files where I can assign tags or keywords to the files, and people viewing my files online can search the collection via the tags. By way of approximate solutions I've found so far, I see that there is software such as Collectorz.com or Readerware for creating databases of one's books / music / movies, and these databases can be searched by tags or keywords, and the databases can be made available and searchable online; this would suit my purposes except that my files are not necessarily books, music, or movies, and I want the files themselves accessible online, not a database describing my files. A commercially-available solution like the ones above would be acceptable, but I'd prefer to have the whole setup under my control (i.e. I'd like to either implement it by hand, or use commercial software that doesn't rely on using the company's servers, paying them a continued fee, etc.). The current extent of my internet experience is designing a few Google Sites, so I know there's a fair chance I won't understand the answers I receive, but I'm always happy to have a summer project :)

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• Customer Experience Management for Retail 2.0 - part 2 / 2

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  In the previous post, i discussed some of the key trends shaping up in the retail industry, their implications and the challenges facing retailers seeking to regain control of the buyer-seller relationship. Is Customer Experience Management the panacea for the ailing retailers who are now awakening to the power of the consumer? Quite honestly, customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction have been top of mind for retailers for quite some time now. The missing piece of this puzzle is bringing all those countless hours of strategy and planning to fruition. This is more of an execution gap than anything else. Although technology has made consumers more informed, more mobile and more social, customer experience is still largely defined by delivering on the following: Consistent experiences, whether shopping online or offline Personalize-able interaction ("mass market" sounds good as an internal strategy but not when you are a buyer!) Timely order fulfillment, if not pro-active notification of delays Below is a concept architecture for streamlining front-end, mid-office and back-end interfaces through shared process to achieve consistency and efficiency in managing the customer experience from order capture to order provisioning.

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• Caching by in-memory dictionaries. Are we doing it all wrong?

  - by user73983

  This approach is pretty much the accepted way to do anything in our company. A simple example : when a piece of data for a customer is requested from a service, we fetch all the data for that customer(relevant part to the service) and save it in a in-memory dictionary then serve it from there on following requests(we run singleton services). Any update goes to DB, then updates the in memory dictionary. It seems all simple and harmless but as we implement more complicated business rules the cache gets out of sync and we have to deal with hard to find bugs. Sometimes we defer writing to database, keeping new data in cache till then. There are cases when we store millions of rows in memory because the table has many relations to other tables and we need to show aggregate data quickly. All this cache handling is a big part of our codebase and I sense this is not the right way to do it. All of this juggling adds too much noise to the code and it makes it hard to understand the actual business logic. However I don't think we can serve data in a reasonable amount of time if we have to hit the database every time. I am unhappy about the current situation but I don't have a better alternative. My only solution would be to use NHibernate 2nd level cache but I have nearly no experience with it. I know many campanies use Redis or MemCached heavily to gain performance but I have no idea how I would integrate them into our system. I also don't know if they can perform better than in-memory data structures and queries. Are there any alternative approaches that I should look into?

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• A better alternative to incompatible implementations for the same interface?

  - by glenatron

  I am working on a piece of code which performs a set task in several parallel environments where the behaviour of the different components in the task are similar but quite different. This means that my implementations are quite different but they are all based on the relationships between the same interfaces, something like this: IDataReader -> ContinuousDataReader -> ChunkedDataReader IDataProcessor -> ContinuousDataProcessor -> ChunkedDataProcessor IDataWriter -> ContinuousDataWriter -> ChunkedDataWriter So that in either environment we have an IDataReader, IDataProcessor and IDataWriter and then we can use Dependency Injection to ensure that we have the correct one of each for the current environment, so if we are working with data in chunks we use the ChunkedDataReader, ChunkedDataProcessor and ChunkedDataWriter and if we have continuous data we have the continuous versions. However the behaviour of these classes is quite different internally and one could certainly not go from a ContinuousDataReader to the ChunkedDataReader even though they are both IDataProcessors. This feels to me as though it is incorrect ( possibly an LSP violation? ) and certainly not a theoretically correct way of working. It is almost as though the "real" interface here is the combination of all three classes. Unfortunately in the project I am working on with the deadlines we are working to, we're pretty much stuck with this design, but if we had a little more elbow room, what would be a better design approach in this kind of scenario?

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• AppleTV - itunes store is temporarily unavailable - please check back later

  - by Ken

  When attempting to rent a movie on ATV, my wife received the error message above.  Alternately “server unavailable”.  When your wife is sick, the amount of IT support she needs goes up exponentially.  One piece of the puzzle was that she had changed her Apple ID password.  On her PC I ran iTunes and under account, there was only 1 device listed (not the ATV).  Even when signed out/back-in on the ATV under Settings>iTunes it still gave same error message.  What I suspect is it thinks she is trying to authorize the device to another Apple ID.  Some new 90 day rule limits when a device can be associated with another Apple ID.  Your iTunes store/account will show devices, and how long before they can be associated with a different Apple ID from the Account Information page in iTunes on your computer.  Apple must have no freaking idea why someone would want to know which ID is associated to the ATV (i.e. the vice versa), because it can’t be done. Solution: Try ATV settings>reset I swapped out ATV 1 for ATV 2 (used for music streaming downstairs).  I know it’s a cop-out solution, but remember I had a sick wife breathing down my neck.

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