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ASP.NET MVC hosting problem, routing, handlers and modules

- by johnabs

Hi, This is one of them again, hosting with fasthosts. I recently purchased a windows developer package from them. When I tried to deploy my ASP.NET 3.5 MVC project, which was working fine with the same host on a reseller account, it is not working. The reason to move from reseller to a normal Windows Developer package is, the MS-SQL server database is too expensive in a reseller account, strange! I contact them, and they are saying they upgraded the control panel. The technical support said, I need to disable the Modules and Handlers from the web.config file. Also I need to deploy them as .dll files. I am not sure how to do that. The website is partially working now. I think the problem is now with the routing. I have not deployed any .dlls apart from the System.Web.Mvc.dll, System.Web.Routing.dll and System.Web.Abstractions.dll. I have not got a clue on how to deploy the Modules and Handlers. The code that I commented on the web.config file is as follows.  Anybody got any ideas please. Thank you for your time.

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Personal Project - Next practical language/tech to learn

- by Paul Nathan

I'm working on a personal project doing some finance analysis. It's a totally new field for me, and I'm really having fun with it so far, plus working in the high-level language arena is a great break from my embedded systems daytime work. I have a MySQL backend on a non-local server with a pile of stock data. My task now is to do some analysis of the stocks and produce something approximating a useful result. There are a couple technical difficulties. (1) I have a lot of records. To be precise, I believe I'm near 100K records right now, and this number grows by 6.1K each weekday. I need to create a way to rummage through these fields and do data analysis - based on a given computation, go look at this other set. Fine and dandy, nothing too outre. But this means I could really use a straightforward API for talking to MySQL. (2) Ideally, it runs on OS X 10.4.11. No Windows/Linux machine at home. (3) I can use PHP, C++, Perl, etc. I even have an R installation. I'm pretty flexible with stuff, so long as it runs on OS X. (Lots of options here, pick water, H20, or dihydrogen monoxide ;-) ) (4)Lack of hassle. While I like clever and fun ways of doing things, I'm trying to get some analysis done, not spend ten hours doing installation work and scratching my head figuring out a theoretical syntax question needed to spout out "hello world". What's the question? I'd like to dig into something different than my usual PHP/C++/C toolset. I'm looking for recommendations for languages/technologies that will assist me and meet the above requirements. In particular, I've heard a lot of buzz about F# and Python on SO. I've used CLISP for small problems before, and kinda liked it. I'm seeking opinions about those in particular. edit:since I rent the DB server and have a limited amount of CPU time online, I'm trying to do the analysis on a local machine.

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Minimalistic tools for developer documentation

- by Pekka

I am currently working on a large PHP CMS / Framework and documenting it extensively as I go along. In addition to phpdoc-style inline comments, I need to document XML structures, details on concepts and practices, write HOWTOs and so on. At the moment, I am using simple OpenOffice documents for that, but I'm unhappy with it and looking for a "real" documentation system. So, I am looking for recommendations for robust, minimalistic, easy-to-use documentation software. I have tried a number of Wikis, most prominently Dokuwiki. I like the open-minded approach, the freedom in editing, and the simplicity, but they provide little support in structuring a multi-chapter documentation, and make basic reorganisation tasks very difficult (e.g. moving pages to a different namespace). Working with the plugins is Cumbersome, and they are not really easy to use. Open Source would be a plus but is not a requirement. Thanks for all the suggestions. I have not had time to look into each one in detail. I will be trying Sphinx, especially because it provides so much support for a good structure. I may update this post later when I'm done and report how it worked out. The suggestions Trac's built-in wiki which is great but for my taste provides too little support for keeping a structure - it's perfect though for "normal", smaller size project documentation Markdown my current favourite because of its minimalism, however not sure yet whether maintaining a structure will be easy enough. A Markdown-Based system would of course be very easy to extend, e.g. to look up cross references from the project's code base. Of course it would be great to find something that already has that out of the box. The DocBook format and to edit, the commercial Oxygen XML Editor - a great standard for building documentation, no doubt. Maybe too "technical" for my purposes as I need something to open quickly, write into and go on coding. Still always worth a mention. Sphinx an Open Source, Python based documentation generator, promising structured documentation and extensive cross-referencing. Interesting and will take a look. Confluence a commercial but very affordable Wiki. XWiki, an Open Source playing in Confluence's league with numerous extensions and connectors to Eclipse and Microsoft Office. TiddlyWiki an open-source Wiki.

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Good Secure Backups Developers at Home

- by slashmais

What is a good, secure, method to do backups, for programmers who do research & development at home and cannot afford to lose any work? Conditions: The backups must ALWAYS be within reasonably easy reach. Internet connection cannot be guaranteed to be always available. The solution must be either FREE or priced within reason, and subject to 2 above. Status Report This is for now only considering free options. The following open-source projects are suggested in the answers (here & elsewhere): BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server's disk. Storebackup is a backup utility that stores files on other disks. mybackware: These scripts were developed to create SQL dump files for basic disaster recovery of small MySQL installations. Bacula is [...] to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. In technical terms, it is a network based backup program. AutoDL 2 and Sec-Bk: AutoDL 2 is a scalable transport independant automated file transfer system. It is suitable for uploading files from a staging server to every server on a production server farm [...] Sec-Bk is a set of simple utilities to securely back up files to a remote location, even a public storage location. rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems. rbme: Using rsync for backups [...] you get perpetual incremental backups that appear as full backups (for each day) and thus allow easy restore or further copying to tape etc. Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. [...] uses librsync, [for] incremental archives Other Possibilities: Using a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) such as Git(/Easy Git), Bazaar, Mercurial answers the need to have the backup available locally. Use free online storage space as a remote backup, e.g.: compress your work/backup directory and mail it to your gmail account. Strategies See crazyscot's answer

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Cases of companies taking IP rights of your own personal projects developed outside company time

- by GSS

Hi, I have heard of cases where a developer working for a company is also making his own personal projects in his own time, using his own equipment yet the company he works for tries to claim ownership for the project. I really find this annoying, and bang out of order. It should also be illegal. I am in this position (work for a company and working on my own systems - from small class libraries used to practise what I learn in my exam revision to a large commercial-scale system). While I don't know if the company will try to take ownership, all I know is they say they do not want a conflict of interest. Fair enough, my system is developed in my own time using my own equipment. They also say that work time should be for work only, which it is. Funny thing that as work is so boring, easy and slow that I have plenty of free time, which I wish I could spend on something productive - said system. The problem is, my company does not take hiring technical talent seriously. This is my first job, I am a junior coder (but my status/position doesn't really reflect what I can do), but I am the only developer. Likewise with the guy who controls Windows Server. As the contract does not say anything about taking ownership, I would assume they would. They would try to milk my success (I've made a good impression so I am sure they would). How can this be allowed? Are there any examples of this happening to any fellow Stacker here? It really makes my blood boil. What I find funny is that my company hardly has the expertise and resources to even be able to successfully run a project of my size. What I do at work is an ASP.NET application consisting of five pages, and even then there are flaws in the project. If I told them that they would also have to take responsibility for flaws in the project, then they would think twice! It's exactly because of this I save the best code for myself and at work I write rubbish code full of code smells. The company don't really care about error handling, as long as the business functionality works (ie a scheduled email sends, but there is no error handling). They'd think twice when they see the embarassment and business cost of a YSOD...

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Fuzzy Regex, Text Processing, Lexical Analysis?

- by justinzane

I'm not quite sure what terminology to search for, so my title is funky... Here is the workflow I've got: Semi-structured documents are scanned to file. The files are OCR'd to text. The text is parsed into Python objects The objects are serialized (to SQL, JSON, whatever) for use. The documents are structures like this: HEADER blah blah, Page ### blah Garbage text... 1. Question Text... continued until now. A. Choice text... adsadsf. B. Another Choice... 2. Another Question... I need to extract the questions and choices. The problem is that, because the text is OCR output, there are occasional strange substitutions like '2' - 'Z' which makes ordinary regular expressions useless. I've tried the Levenshtein module and it helps, but it requires prior knowledge of what edit distance is to be expected. I don't know whether I'm looking to create a parser? a lexer? something else? This has lead me down all kinds of interesting but nonrelevant paths. Guidance would be greatly appreciated. Oh, also, the text is generally from specific technical domains, so general spelling tools are not so helpful. Regarding the structure of the documents, there is no clear visual pattern -- like line breaks or indentation -- with the exception of the fact that "questions" usually begin a line. Crap on the document can cause characters to appear before the actual beginning of the line, which means that something along the lines of r'^[0-9]+' does not reliably work. Though the "questions" always begin with an int, a period and a space; the OCR can substitute other characters or skip characters. This is not so much a problem with Tesseract or Cunieform, rather with the poor quality of the paper documents. # Note: for the project in question, it was decided that having a human prep the OCR'd text was better that spending the time coding a solution. I'd still love good pointers, however.

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How do you attract programmers in rural areas?

- by Reed Copsey

I run a software development group for a very small, but stable and established company in a small town, somewhat outside of the "big city". Unfortunately, the "programmer" labor pool is much smaller due to the size of the city. There are many positives to working in this area, especially in terms of quality of life (particularly for people interested in outdoor activities), lower cost of living, great schools and neighborhoods, etc. However, I've always had difficulty attracting high-qualtiy, experienced developers. For those of you who hire developers outside of large cities: Where do you advertise to find good developers? Many of the large sites are very focused in certain metropolitan areas, and seem inappropriate places to advertise if you're outside of that main region. How do you attract quality developers to rural (or at least less metropolitan) locations? Do you find that you make more sacrifices in your hiring due to a smaller labor pool? Or do you just wait, and take extra time to attract people? What sacrifices do you expect to make if you are outside of the main developer-rich cities? For all of the developers out there... What would entice you to working in a smaller town? Are there things that would stand out and make you willing to relocate or at least apply to a position that was not nearby? What specific qualities would help you want to move outside of the city? In the past, I've had difficulty with finding good people. Most of the people who've applied and been willing to move out to a more rural location seem like the types that can't keep a quality job elsewhere. I'd like to know what advice people have to attracting quality technical staff. I don't believe its the work itself that's been the problem - The work is both interesting and challenging, and nearly 100% new development. The developers I have seem very happy with their situation - they love the work, the atmosphere, etc. It's more a matter of finding willing, able developers. Edit: More info after the first couple of answers: Right now, some of my best developers telecommute (some work from overseas); however, for this question, I'm trying to figure out how to get people who want to live and work full time locally. I need some people with whom I interact every day.

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What's the best way to do base36 arithmetic in perl?

- by DVK

What's the best way to do base36 arithmetic in Perl? To be more specific, I need to be able to do the following: Operate on positive N-digit numbers in base 36 (e.g. digits are 0-9 A-Z) N is finite, say 9 Provide basic arithmetic, at the very least the following 3: Addition (A+B) Subtraction (A-B) Whole division, e.g. floor(A/B). Strictly speaking, I don't really need a base10 conversion ability - the numbers will 100% of time be in base36. So I'm quite OK if the solution does NOT implement conversion from base36 back to base10 and vice versa. I don't much care whether the solution is brute-force "convert to base 10 and back" or converting to binary, or some more elegant approach "natively" performing baseN operations (as stated above, to/from base10 conversion is not a requirement). My only 3 considerations are: It fits the minimum specifications above It's "standard". Currently we're using and old homegrown module based on base10 conversion done by hand that is buggy and sucks. I'd much rather replace that with some commonly used CPAN solution instead of re-writing my own bicycle from scratch, but I'm perfectly capable of building it if no better standard possibility exists. It must be fast-ish (though not lightning fast). Something that takes 1 second to sum up 2 9-digit base36 numbers is worse than anything I can roll on my own :) P.S. Just to provide some context in case people decide to solve my XY problem for me in addition to answering the technical question above :) We have a fairly large tree (stored in DB as a bunch of edges), and we need to superimpose order on a subset of that tree. The tree dimentions are big both depth- and breadth- wise. The tree is VERY actively updated (inserts and deletes and branch moves). This is currently done by having a second table with 3 columns: parent_vertex, child_vertex, local_order, where local_order is an 9-character string built of A-Z0-9 (e.g. base 36 number). Additional considerations: It is required that the local order is unique per child (and obviously unique per parent), Any complete re-ordering of a parent is somewhat expensive, and thus the implementation is to try and assign - for a parent with X children - the orders which are somewhat evenly distributed between 0 and 36**10-1, so that almost no tree inserts result in a full re-ordering.

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Using JUnit as an acceptance test framework

- by Chris Knight

OK, so I work for a company who has openly adopted agile practices for development in recent years. Our unit tests and code quality are improving. One area we still are working on is to find what works best for us in the automated acceptance test arena. We want to take our well formed user stories and use these to drive the code in a test driven manner. This will also give us acceptance level tests for each user story which we can then automate. To date, we've tried Fit, Fitnesse and Selenium. Each have their advantages, but we've also had real issues with them as well. With Fit and Fitnesse, we can't help but feel they overcomplicate things and we've had many technical issues using them. The business haven't fully bought in these tools and aren't particularly keen on maintaining the scripts all the time (and aren't big fans of the table style). Selenium is really good, but slow and relies on real time data and resources. One approach we are now considering is the use of the JUnit framework to provide similiar functionality. Rather than testing just a small unit of work using JUnit, why not use it to write a test (using the JUnit framework) to cover an acceptance level swath of the application? I.e. take a new story ("As a user I would like to see basic details of my policy...") and write a test in JUnit which starts executing application code at the point of entry for the policy details link but covers all code and logic down to the stubbed data access layer and back to the point of forwarding to the next page in the application, asserting on what data the user should see on that page. This seems to me to have the following advantages: Simplicity (no additional frameworks required) Zero effort to integrate with our Continuous Integration build server (since it already handles our JUnit tests) Full skillset already present in the team (its just a JUnit test after all) And the downsides being: Less customer involvement (though they are heavily involved in writing the user stories in the first place from which the acceptance tests will be written) Perhaps more difficult to understand (or make understood) the user story and acceptance criteria in a JUnit class verses a freetext specification ala Fit or Fitnesse So, my question is really, have you ever tried this method? Ever considered it? What are your thoughts? What do you like and dislike about this approach? Finally, please only mention alternative frameworks if you can say why you like or dislike them more than this approach.

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How hard programming is? Really. [closed]

- by Bubba88

Hi! The question is about your perception of programming activity. How hard/exacting this task is? There is much buzz about programming nowadays, people say that programmers are smart, very technical and abstract at a time, know much about world, psychology etc.. They say, that programmers got really powerful brain thing, cause there is much to keep in consideration simultaneously again with much information folded into each other associatively (up 10 levels of folding they say))) Still, there are some terms to specify at our own.. So that is the question: What do you think about programming in general? Is it hard? Is it 'for everyone' or for the particular kind of people only? How much non-CS background do you need to program (just to program, really; enterprise applications for example)? How long is the learning curve? (again, for programming in general) And another bunch of random questions: - If you were not to like/love programming, would that be a serious trouble bothering your current employment? - If you were to start from the beginning, would you chose that direction this time? - What other areas (jobs or maybe hobbies) are comparable to programming in the way they can explode someone's lovely brain? - Is 'non turing-complete programming' (SQL, XML, etc.) comparable to what we do or is it really way easier, less requiring, cheap and akin to cooking :)? Well, the essence is: How would you describe programming activity WRT to its difficulty? Or, on the other hand: Did you ever catch yourself thinking at some point: OMG, it's sooo hard! I don't know how would I ever program, even carried away this way and doing programming just for fun? It's very interesting to know your opinion, your'e the programmers after all. I mean much people must be exaggerating/speculating about the thing they do not really know about. But that musn't be the case here on SO :) P.S.: I'll try my best to update this post later, and you please edit it too. At least I'll get decent English in my question text :)

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CakePHP HABTM: Editing one item casuses HABTM row to get recreated, destroys extra data

- by leo-the-manic

I'm having trouble with my HABTM relationship in CakePHP. I have two models like so: Department HABTM Location. One large company has many buildings, and each building provides a limited number of services. Each building also has its own webpage, so in addition to the HABTM relationship itself, each HABTM row also has a url field where the user can visit to find additional information about the service they're interested and how it operates at the building they're interested in. I've set up the models like so: <?php class Location extends AppModel { var $name = 'Location'; var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array( 'Department' => array( 'with' => 'DepartmentsLocation', 'unique' => true ) ); } ?> <?php class Department extends AppModel { var $name = 'Department'; var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array( 'Location' => array( 'with' => 'DepartmentsLocation', 'unique' => true ) ); } ?> <?php class DepartmentsLocation extends AppModel { var $name = 'DepartmentsLocation'; var $belongsTo = array( 'Department', 'Location' ); // I'm pretty sure this method is unrelated. It's not being called when this error // occurs. Its purpose is to prevent having two HABTM rows with the same location // and department. function beforeSave() { // kill any existing rows with same associations $this->log(__FILE__ . ": killing existing HABTM rows", LOG_DEBUG); $result = $this->find('all', array("conditions" => array("location_id" => $this->data['DepartmentsLocation']['location_id'], "department_id" => $this->data['DepartmentsLocation']['department_id']))); foreach($result as $row) { $this->delete($row['DepartmentsLocation']['id']); } return true; } } ?> The controllers are completely uninteresting. The problem: If I edit the name of a Location, all of the DepartmentsLocations that were linked to that Location are re-created with empty URLs. Since the models specify that unique is true, this also causes all of the newer rows to overwrite the older rows, which essentially destroys all of the URLs. I would like to know two things: Can I stop this? If so, how? And, on a less technical and more whiney note: Why does this even happen? It seems bizarre to me that editing a field through Cake should cause so much trouble, when I can easily go through phpMyAdmin, edit the Location name there, and get exactly the result I would expect. Why does CakePHP touch the HABTM data when I'm just editing a field on a row? It's not even a foreign key!

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Issue with RegConnectRegistry connecting to 64 bit machines

- by RA

I'm seeing a weird thing when connecting to the performance registry on 64 bit editions of Windows. The whole program stalls and callstacks becomes unreadable. After a long timeout, the connection attempts aborts and everything goes back to normal. The only solution is to make sure that only one thread at the time queries the remote registry, unless the remote machine is a 32 bit Windows XP, 2003, 2000 , then you can use as many threads as you like. Have anyone a technical explanation why this might be happening ? I've spent 2-3 days searching the web without coming up with anything. Here is a test program, run it first with one thread (connecting to a 64 bit Windows), then remove the comment in tmain and run it with 4 threads. Running it with one thread works as expected, running with 4, returns ERROR_BUSY (dwRet == 170) after stalling for a while. Remember to set a remote machine correctly in RegConnectRegistry before running the program. #define TOTALBYTES 8192 #define BYTEINCREMENT 4096 void PerfmonThread(void *pData) { DWORD BufferSize = TOTALBYTES; DWORD cbData; DWORD dwRet; PPERF_DATA_BLOCK PerfData = (PPERF_DATA_BLOCK) malloc( BufferSize ); cbData = BufferSize; printf("\nRetrieving the data..."); HKEY hKey; DWORD dwAccessRet = RegConnectRegistry(L"REMOTE_MACHINE",HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA,&hKey); dwRet = RegQueryValueEx( hKey,L"global",NULL,NULL,(LPBYTE) PerfData, &cbData ); while( dwRet == ERROR_MORE_DATA ) { // Get a buffer that is big enough. BufferSize += BYTEINCREMENT; PerfData = (PPERF_DATA_BLOCK) realloc( PerfData, BufferSize ); cbData = BufferSize; printf("."); dwRet = RegQueryValueEx( hKey,L"global",NULL,NULL,(LPBYTE) PerfData,&cbData ); } if( dwRet == ERROR_SUCCESS ) printf("\n\nFinal buffer size is %d\n", BufferSize); else printf("\nRegQueryValueEx failed (%d)\n", dwRet); RegCloseKey(hKey); } int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { _beginthread(PerfmonThread,0,NULL); /* _beginthread(PerfmonThread,0,NULL); _beginthread(PerfmonThread,0,NULL); _beginthread(PerfmonThread,0,NULL); */ while(1) { Sleep(2000); } }

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Please help with iPhone Memory & Images, memory usage crashing app

- by Andrew Gray

I have an issue with memory usage relating to images and I've searched the docs and watched the videos from cs193p and the iphone dev site on memory mgmt and performance. I've searched online and posted on forums, but I still can't figure it out. The app uses core data and simply lets the user associate text with a picture and stores the list of items in a table view that lets you add and delete items. Clicking on a row shows the image and related text. that's it. Everything runs fine on the simulator and on the device as well. I ran the analyzer and it looked good, so i then starting looking at performance. I ran leaks and everything looked good. My issue is when running Object Allocations as every time i select a row and the view with the image is shown, the live bytes jumps up a few MB and never goes down and my app eventually crashes due to memory usage. Sorting the live bytes column, i see 2 2.72MB mallocs (5.45Mb total), 14 CFDatas (3.58MB total), 1 2.74MB malloc and everything else is real small. the problem is all the related info in instruments is really technical and all the problem solving examples i've seen are just missing a release and nothing complicated. Instruments shows Core Data as the responsible library for all but one (libsqlite3.dylib the other) with [NSSQLCore _prepareResultsFromResultSet:usingFetchPlan:withMatchingRows:] as the caller for all but one (fetchResultSetReallocCurrentRow the other) and im just not sure how to track down what the problem is. i've looked at the stack traces and opened the last instance of my code and found 2 culprits (below). I havent been able to get any responses at all on this, so if anyone has any tips or pointers, I'd really appreciate it!!!! //this is from view controller that shows the title and image - (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated { [super viewWillAppear:animated]; self.title = item.title; self.itemTitleTextField.text = item.title; if ([item.notes length] == 0) { self.itemNotesTextView.hidden = YES; } else { self.itemNotesTextView.text = item.notes; } //this is the line instruments points to UIImage *image = item.photo.image; itemPhoto.image = image; } - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView commitEditingStyle:(UITableViewCellEditingStyle)editingStyle forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete) { // Delete the managed object for the given index path NSManagedObjectContext *context = [fetchedResultsController managedObjectContext]; [context deleteObject:[fetchedResultsController objectAtIndexPath:indexPath]]; // Save the context. NSError *error = nil; if (![context save:&error]) //this is the line instruments points to { NSLog(@"Unresolved error %@, %@", error, [error userInfo]); exit(-1); } } }

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Keeping track of business rules within IT department?

- by evaldas-alexander

I am looking for the best way to keep track of the business rules for both developers and everybody else (support staff / management) in a startup enviroment. The challenge is that our business model requires quite a lot of different business rules, which are created pretty much on the fly and evolving organically after that. After running this project for 3+ years, we have so many of such rules that often the only way to be sure about what the application is supposed to do in a certain situation is to go find the module responsible for that process and analyze its code and comments. That is all fine as long as you have one single developer who created the entire application from the scratch, but every new developer needs to go over pretty much entire codebase in order to understand how the application works. Even bigger problem is that non technical employees don't even have that option and therefore are forced to ask me pretty much every day how some certain case would be handled by the application. Quick example - we only start charging for our customer campaigns once they have been active for at least 72 hours, but at the same time we stop creating invoices for campaigns that belong to insolvent accounts and close such accounts within a month of the first failed charge. That does not apply to accounts that are set to "non-chargeable" which most commonly belongs to us since we are using the service ourselves. The invoices are created on the 1st of each month and include charges from the previous month + any current balance that the account might have. However, some customers are charged only 4 days after their invoice has been generated due to issues with their billing department. In addition to that, invoices are also created when customer deactivates his campaign, but that can only be done once the campaign is not longer under mandatory 6 month contract, unless account manager approves early deactivation. I know, that's quite a lot of rules that need to be taken into account when answering a question "when do we bill our customers", but actually I could still append an asterisk at the end of each sentence in order to disclose some rare exceptions. Of course, it would be easiest just to keep the business rules to the minimum, but we need to adapt to changing marketplace - i.e. less than a year ago we had no contracts whatsoever. One idea that I had so far was a simplistic wiki with categories corresponding to areas such as "Account activation", "Invoicing", "Collection procedures" and so on. Another idea would be to have giant interactive flowchart showing the entire customer "life cycle" from prospecting to account deactivation. What are your experiences / suggestions?

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Repeating fields in similar database tables

- by user1738833

I have been tasked with working on a database that I have never seen before and I'm looking at the DB structure. Some of the central and most heavily queried and joined tables look like virtual duplicates of each other. Here's a massively simplified representation of the situation, with business-sensitive information changed, listing hypothetical table names and fields: TopLevelGroup: PK_TLGroupId, DisplaysXOnBill, DisplaysYOnBill, IsInvoicedForJ, IsInvoicedForK SubGroup: PK_SubGroupId, FK_ParentTopLevelGroupId, DisplaysXOnBill, DisplaysYOnBill, IsInvoicedForJ, IsInvoicedForK SubSubGroup: PK_SubSUbGroupId, FK_ParentSubGroupId, DisplaysXOnBill, DisplaysYOnBill, IsInvoicedForJ, IsInvoicedForK I haven't listed the types of the fields as I don't think it's particularly important to the situation. In addition, it's worth saying that rather than four repeated fields as in the example above, I'm looking at 86 repeated fields. For the most part, those fields genuinely do represent "facts" about the primary table entity, so it's not automatically wrong for that reason. In addition, the "groups" represented here have a property inheritance relationship. If DisplaysXOnBill is NULL in the SubSubGroup, it takes the value of DisplaysXOnBillfrom it's parent, the SubGroup, and so-on up to the TopLevelGroup. Further, the requirements will never require that the model extends beyond three levels, so there is no need for flexibility in that area. Is there a design smell from several tables which describe very similar entities having almost identical fields? If so, what might be a better design of the example above? I'm using the phrase "design smell" to indicate a possible problem. Of course, in any given situation, a particular design might well be the best solution. I'm looking for a more general answer - wondering what might be wrong with this design and what might be the better design were that the case. Possibly related, but not primary questions: Is this database schema in a reasonably normal form (e.g. to 3NF), insofar as can be told from the information I've provided. I can't see a problem with the requirements of 2NF and 3NF, except in their inheriting the requirements of 1NF. Is 1NF satisfied though? Are repeating groups allowed in different tables? Is there a best-practice method for implementing the inheritance relationship in a database as I require? The method above feels clunky to me because any query on the SubSubGroup necessarily needs to join onto the SubGroup and the TopLevelGroup tables to collect inherited facts, which can make even trivial joins requiring facts from the SubSubGroup table rather long-winded. There are, of course, political considerations to making a relatively large change like this. For the purpose of this question, I'm happy to ignore that fact in the interests of keeping the answers ring-fenced to the technical problem.

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Can I call make runtime decided method calls in Java?

- by Catalin Marin

I know there is an invoke function that does the stuff, I am overall interested in the "correctness" of using such a behavior. My issue is this: I have a Service Object witch contains methods which I consider services. What I want to do is alter the behavior of those services without later intrusion. For example: class MyService { public ServiceResponse ServeMeDonuts() { do stuff... return new ServiceResponse(); } after 2 months I find out that I need to offer the same service to a new client app and I also need to do certain extra stuff like setting a flag, or make or updating certain data, or encode the response differently. What I can do is pop it up and throw down some IFs. In my opinion this is not good as it means interaction with tested code and may result in un wanted behaviour for the previous service clients. So I come and add something to my registry telling the system that the "NewClient" has a different behavior. So I'll do something like this: public interface Behavior { public void preExecute(); public void postExecute(); } public class BehaviorOfMyService implements Behavior{ String method; String clientType; public void BehaviorOfMyService(String method,String clientType) { this.method = method; this.clientType = clientType; } public void preExecute() { Method preCall = this.getClass().getMethod("pre" + this.method + this.clientType); if(preCall != null) { return preCall.invoke(); } return false; } ...same for postExecute(); public void preServeMeDonutsNewClient() { do the stuff... } } when the system will do something like this if(registrySaysThereIs different behavior set for this ServiceObject) { Class toBeCalled = Class.forName("BehaviorOf" + usedServiceObjectName); Object instance = toBeCalled.getConstructor().newInstance(method,client); instance.preExecute(); ....call the service... instance.postExecute(); .... } I am not particularly interested in correctness of code as in correctness of thinking and approach. Actually I have to do this in PHP, witch I see as a kind of Pop music of programming which I have to "sing" for commercial reasons, even though I play POP I really want to sing by the book, so putting aside my more or less inspired analogy I really want to know your opinion on this matter for it's practical necessity and technical approach. Thanks

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Is there a scheduling algorithm that optimizes for "maker's schedules"?

- by John Feminella

You may be familiar with Paul Graham's essay, "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule". The crux of the essay is that for creative and technical professionals, meetings are anathema to productivity, because they tend to lead to "schedule fragmentation", breaking up free time into chunks that are too small to acquire the focus needed to solve difficult problems. In my firm we've seen significant benefits by minimizing the amount of disruption caused, but the brute-force algorithm we use to decide schedules is not sophisticated enough to handle scheduling large groups of people well. (*) What I'm looking for is if there's are any well-known algorithms which minimize this productivity disruption, among a group of N makers and managers. In our model, There are N people. Each person pi is either a maker (Mk) or a manager (Mg). Each person has a schedule si. Everyone's schedule is H hours long. A schedule consists of a series of non-overlapping intervals si = [h1, ..., hj]. An interval is either free or busy. Two adjacent free intervals are equivalent to a single free interval that spans both. A maker's productivity is maximized when the number of free intervals is minimized. A manager's productivity is maximized when the total length of free intervals is maximized. Notice that if there are no meetings, both the makers and the managers experience optimum productivity. If meetings must be scheduled, then makers prefer that meetings happen back-to-back, while managers don't care where the meeting goes. Note that because all disruptions are treated as equally harmful to makers, there's no difference between a meeting that lasts 1 second and a meeting that lasts 3 hours if it segments the available free time. The problem is to decide how to schedule M different meetings involving arbitrary numbers of the N people, where each person in a given meeting must place a busy interval into their schedule such that it doesn't overlap with any other busy interval. For each meeting Mt the start time for the busy interval must be the same for all parties. Does an algorithm exist to solve this problem or one similar to it? My first thought was that this looks really similar to defragmentation (minimize number of distinct chunks), and there are a lot of algorithms about that. But defragmentation doesn't have much to do with scheduling. Thoughts? (*) Practically speaking this is not really a problem, because it's rare that we have meetings with more than ~5 people at once, so the space of possibilities is small.

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SVN: Branches for Every Little Change?

- by yar

Hi. We have a client (who has a client, who has a client) who is driving us mad with change requests to a code base (in PHP). Our first response was to just work in a main trunk in SVN, but the client often comes back and requests that a certain change needs to get pushed to the live servers ASAP. On the other hand, other changes get reduced in priority suddenly, which originally came grouped with other changes (seemingly). We are thinking of using a branch for every change request. Is this mad? What other solutions might work? Thanks! Edit: This is a really hard question to choose the correct answer for. Thanks to everybody for your great answers. Edit: I know that the best answer I chose was not particularly popular. I too wanted to find a technical solution to this problem. But now I think that if the client wants software with features that can be deployed in a modular fashion... this problem should not be solved in our use of the version control system. It would have to be designed into the software. Edit: Now it's almost a month later and my coworker/client has convinced me that multiple branches is the way to go. This is not just due to the client's insanity, but also based on our need to be able to determine if a feature is "ready to go" or "needs more work" or whatever. I don't have the SVN with me, but we merge using the advice from the SVN Cookbook: you merge the branch from the revision it was branched to the head revision. Also, using this system, we merge all branches at some point and that becomes the new QA and then live build. Then we branch from that. Last Edit (Perhaps): Months later, this system is still working out for us. We create branches for every ticket and rarely have problems. On the other hand, we do try to keep things separate as far as what people are working on... Two Years Later: We use GIT now, and now this system is actually quite reasonable.

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How to maxmise the largest contiguous block of memory in the Large Object Heap

- by Unsliced

The situation is that I am making a WCF call to a remote server which is returns an XML document as a string. Most of the time this return value is a few K, sometimes a few dozen K, very occasionally a few hundred K, but very rarely it could be several megabytes (first problem is that there is no way for me to know). It's these rare occasions that are causing grief. I get a stack trace that starts: System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown. at System.Xml.BufferBuilder.AddBuffer() at System.Xml.BufferBuilder.AppendHelper(Char* pSource, Int32 count) at System.Xml.BufferBuilder.Append(Char[] value, Int32 start, Int32 count) at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseText() at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseElementContent() at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Read() at System.Xml.XmlTextReader.Read() at System.Xml.XmlReader.ReadElementString() at Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.XmlSerializationReaderMDRQuery.Read2_getMarketDataResponse() at Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.ArrayOfObjectSerializer2.Deserialize(XmlSerializationReader reader) at System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer.Deserialize(XmlReader xmlReader, String encodingStyle, XmlDeserializationEvents events) at System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer.Deserialize(XmlReader xmlReader, String encodingStyle) at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall) at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters) I've read around and it is because the Large Object Heap is just getting too fragmented, so even preceding the call with a quick check to StringBuilder.EnsureCapacity just causes the OutOfMemoryException to be thrown earlier (and because I'm guessing at what's needed, it might not actually need that much so my check is causing more problems than it is solving). Some opinions are that there's not much I can do about it. Some of the questions I've asked myself: Use less memory - have you checked for leaks? Yes. The memory usage goes up and down, but there's no fundamental growth that guarantees this to happen. Some of the times it fails, it succeeded at that stage previously. Transfer smaller amounts Not an option, this is a third party web service over which I have no control (or at least it would take a long time to resolve, in the meantime I still have a problem) Can you do something to the LOH to make it less likely to fail? ... now this is most fruitful course. It's a 32-bit process (it has to be for various political, technical and boring reasons) but there's normally hundreds of meg free (multiples of the largest amount for which we've seen failures). Can we monitor the LOH? Using perfmon I can track the size of the heaps, but I don't think there's a way to monitor the largest available contiguous block of memory. Question is: any advice or suggestions for things to try?

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Dealing with personal failure

- by codeelegance

A while ago I was given the task of updating and extending the functionality of a software project. I was given a year to make the needed changes working solo. A month into development I came to the conclusion that it would take longer to change the existing product than to rewrite it from the ground up. I'd never attempted a complete rewrite so I talked with my boss about it and he was thrilled with the idea. I'm a fan of agile development but had never had the opportunity to take advantage of all of the prescribed practices so when I set to work I tried to incorporate as many as I could. I didn't have direct access to the customer and my coworkers (non-programmers) knew the business domain but were already so busy they didn't really have time to participate in design meetings so I resigned to working in the dark and occasionally calling one of them over to my desk to get feedback on my progress. I used TDD and refactored mercilessly and even tried taking a domain driven design approach. Things went well for a while. As the deadline came closer and the complexity of the project grew my productivity start slipping. I found myself cutting corners and ignoring the practices I had established as the pressure increased to meet the deadline. I also started working late nights and weekends to keep up with the load. In the end it made little difference how hard I worked. The project missed its deadline and what was completed wasn't enough to give to the customer. I had failed. Not only had I not finished on time but the previous version had sat untouched for almost a year so it wouldn't be of any help. Luckily we had another product that offered some of the same functionality. My boss decided to cancel the project entirely and moved all our orphaned customers to the other product. I spent weeks (along with everyone else at the company) manning the phones providing technical support for those customers. After it was all over, my boss was gracious enough not to fire me for nearly ruining the company. I was moved to the other product and have been trying to redeem myself ever since. Where did I go wrong? Has anyone else had to deal with this kind of defeat? How did you recover?

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What would you suggest as a high school first language?

- by ldigas

Edit by OA: After reading some answers I'll just update the question a little. At first I put it a little bluntly, but some of those gave me some good arguments which have to be taken into consideration while making a stand on this one. (these are mostly picked up from comments and answers below). A few things to take into account: to many pupils this is a first programming language - at this stage most of them have trouble grasping a difference between data types, variable passing, ... and whatnot, less alone pointers and similar 'low level stuff' :) they will all have to pass this to get into next grade (well, big majority of them anyway) not all of them have computers at home, not all of them are willing to learn this, less alone interested in - so the concepts have to be taught on a finite time scale in school hours (as well as practice on computers) free literature is a bonus - the teacher will make some scripts and handaways, but still ... I wouldn't like to bear the parents with the burden of buying expensive literature (also, english is not a native language here ... and although they are all learning it, their ability to read it fluently is somewhat questionable) somebody gave an argument - "a language which does not get in the way of ideas" - good one accessibility on different platforms in not expecially important at this point - although most of the suggested ones are available on win as well as linux - not many macs in this part of europe (their prices are sky high for anything but specialised usage) I will check what are the licencing issues on ms express editions about using it massively in high schools for purposes like this - if someone has any info about this, please, do not be shy with it :) A friend of mine, informatics teacher - in EU it comes as something as junior cs teacher, in a local high school asked me what I thought about what should be the first language pupils should be taught? It is a technical school (a little more oriented towards mathematics than the gymnasium, but not computer oriented totally). So I'm asking you - what do you think should be the first language pupils are exposed to in highschool? They have been teaching Pascal so far, but she's not sure that's a good course. She thought about switching to C (which I resented; considering not all pupils have interests in programming, to start with, and should be taught something higher level since they are just gripping the idea of a loop and such ... for a start), I suggested python or ruby (preferably py since it handles all paradigms). What is your opinion on this one? I looked, but didn't find a similar question on SO, so if there is one, please just point me towards it. Edit: The assumption is that none of the pupils have been exposed to any programming in junior school. See also: What is the best way to teach young kids some basic programming concepts? Best ways to teach a beginner to program How and when do you teach a kid to code What is the easiest language to start with? High School Programming

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php pdo connection scope

- by Scarface

Hey guys I have a connection class I found for pdo. I am calling the connection method on the page that the file is included on. The problem is that within functions the $conn variable is not defined even though I stated the method was public (bare with me I am very new to OOP), and I was wondering if anyone had an elegant solution other then using global in every function. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. CONNECTION class PDOConnectionFactory{ // receives the connection public $con = null; // swich database? public $dbType = "mysql"; // connection parameters // when it will not be necessary leaves blank only with the double quotations marks "" public $host = "localhost"; public $user = "user"; public $senha = "password"; public $db = "database"; // arrow the persistence of the connection public $persistent = false; // new PDOConnectionFactory( true ) <--- persistent connection // new PDOConnectionFactory() <--- no persistent connection public function PDOConnectionFactory( $persistent=false ){ // it verifies the persistence of the connection if( $persistent != false){ $this->persistent = true; } } public function getConnection(){ try{ // it carries through the connection $this->con = new PDO($this->dbType.":host=".$this->host.";dbname=".$this->db, $this->user, $this->senha, array( PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => $this->persistent ) ); // carried through successfully, it returns connected return $this->con; // in case that an error occurs, it returns the error; }catch ( PDOException $ex ){ echo "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. We have a bunch of monkies working really hard to fix the problem. Check back soon: ".$ex->getMessage(); } } // close connection public function Close(){ if( $this->con != null ) $this->con = null; } } PAGE USED ON include("includes/connection.php"); $db = new PDOConnectionFactory(); $conn = $db->getConnection(); function test(){ try{ $sql = 'SELECT * FROM topic'; $stmt = $conn->prepare($sql); $result=$stmt->execute(); } catch(PDOException $e){ echo $e->getMessage(); } } test();

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Objective-C Basic class related question, retaining the value of a specific object using a class fil

- by von steiner

Members, scholars, code gurus. My background is far from any computer programming thus my question may seems basic and somewhat trivial to you. Nevertheless it seems that I can't put my head around it. I have googled and searched for the answer, just to get myself confused even more. With that, I would kindly ask for a simple explanation suitable for a non technical person such as myself and for other alike arriving to this thread. I have left a comment with the text "Here is the issue" below, referring to my question. // character.h #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> @interface character : NSObject { NSString *name; int hitPoints; int armorClass; } @property (nonatomic,retain) NSString *name; @property int hitPoints,armorClass; -(void)giveCharacterInfo; @end // character.m #import "character.h" @implementation character @synthesize name,hitPoints,armorClass; -(void)giveCharacterInfo{ NSLog(@"name:%@ HP:%i AC:%i",name,hitPoints,armorClass); } @end // ClassAtLastViewController.h #import <UIKit/UIKit.h> @interface ClassAtLastViewController : UIViewController { } -(void)callAgain; @end // ClassAtLastViewController.m #import "ClassAtLastViewController.h" #import "character.h" @implementation ClassAtLastViewController - (void)viewDidLoad { //[super viewDidLoad]; character *player = [[character alloc]init]; player.name = @"Minsc"; player.hitPoints = 140; player.armorClass = 10; [player giveCharacterInfo]; [player release]; // Up until here, All peachy! [self performSelector:@selector(callAgain) withObject:nil afterDelay:2.0]; } -(void)callAgain{ // Here is the issue, I assume that since I init the player again I loss everything // Q1. I loss all the data I set above, where is it than? // Q2. What is the proper way to implement this character *player = [[character alloc]init]; [player giveCharacterInfo]; } Many thanks in advance, Kindly remember that my background is more related to Salmons breeding than to computer code, try and lower your answer to my level if it's all the same to you.

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Mixing .NET versions between website and virtual directories and the "server application unavailable" error Message

- by Doug Chamberlain

Backstory Last month our development team created a new asp.net 3.5 application to place out on our production website. Once we had the work completed, we requested from the group that manages are server to copy the app out to our production site, and configure the virtual directory as a new application. On 12/27/2010, two public 'Gineau Pigs' were selected to use the app, and it worked great. On 12/30/2010, We received notification by internal staff, that when that staff member tried to access the application (this was the Business Process Owner) they recieved the 'Server Application Unavailable' message. When I called the group that does our server support, I was told that it probably failed, because I didn't close the connections in my code. However, the same group went in and then created a separate app pool for this Extension Request application. It has had no issues since. I did a little googling, since I do not like being blamed for things. I found that the 'Server Application Unavailable' message will also appear when you have multiple applications using different frameworks and you do not put them in different application pools. Technical Details - Tree of our website structure Main Website <-- ASP Classic +-Virtual Directory(ExtensionRequest) <-- ASP 3.5 From our server support group: 'Reviewed server logs and website setup in IIS. Had to reset the application pool as it was not working properly. This corrected the website and it is now back online. We went ahead and created a application pool for the extension web so it is isolated from the main site pool. In the past we have seen other application do this when there is a connection being left open and the pool fills up. Would recommend reviewing site code to make sure no connections are being left open.' The Real Question: What really caused the failure? Isn't the connection being left open issue an ASP Classic issue? Wouldn't the ExtensionRequest application have to be used (more than twice) in the first place to have the connections left open? Is it more likely the failure is caused by them not bothering to setup the new Application in it's own App Pool in the first place? Sorry for the long windedness

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Recommended ASP.NET Shared Hosting

- by coffeeaddict

Ok, I have to admit I'm getting fed up with www.discountasp.net's pricing model and this annoyance has built up over the past 8 years or so. I've been with them for years and absolutely love them on the technical side, however it's getting ridiculously expensive for so little that you get. I mean here's my scenario: 1) I am running 2 SQL Server databases which costs me $10/ea per month so that's $20/month for 2 and I only get 500 mb disk space which is horrible 2) I am paying $10/mo just for the hosting itself which I only get 1 gig of disk space! I mean common! 3) I am simply running 2 small apps (Screwturn Wiki & Subtext Blog)...so I don't really care if it's up 99% or not, it's not worth paying a total of $300 just to keep these 2 apps running over discountasp.net Anyone else feel the same? Yes, I know they have great support, probably have great servers running behind this but in the end I really don't care as long as my site is up 95% or better. Yes, the hosting toolset rocks. But you know I bet you I can find a similar set somewhere else. I like how I can totally control IIS 7 at discountasp and I can control my own app pool etc. That's very powerful and essential. But anyone have any good alternatives to discountasp that gives me close to the same at a much more reasonable cost point? I mean http://www.m6.net/prices.aspx gives you 10 SQL Databases for $7 and 200 gigs disk space! I don't know about their tools or support but just looking at those numbers and some other hosts I've seen, I feel that discountasp.net is way out of line. They don't even offer any purchasing discounts such as it would be nice if my 2nd SQL Server is only $5/month not $10...stuff like this, to make it much more realistic and fair. Opinions (people who do have discountasp.net, people who have left them, or people who have another host they like)??? But geez $300 just to host a couple DBs and lightweight open source apps? Not worth the price they are charging. I'm almost at a price point that enables me to get a decent dedicated server! I really don't care about beta support. Not a big deal to me.

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