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• What is preferred strategies for cross browser and multiple styled table in CSS?

  - by jitendra

  What is preferred strategies for cross browser and multiple styled table in CSS? in default css what should i predefined for <table>, td, th , thead, tbody, tfoot I have to work in a project there are so many tables with different color schemes and different type of alignment like in some table , i will need to horizontally align data of cell to right, sometime left, sometime right. same thing for vertical alignment, top, bottom and middle. some table will have thin border on row , some will have thick (same with column border). Some time i want to give different background color to particular row or column or in multiple row or column. So my question is: What code should i keep in css default for all tables and how to handle table with different style using ID and classes in multiple pages. I want to do every presentational thing with css. How to make ID classes for everything using semantic naming ? Which tags related to table can be useful? How to control whole tables styling from one css class?

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• CSS Clearing Floats

  - by Frank

  I'm making more of an effort to separate my html structure from presentation, but sometimes when I look at the complexity of the hacks or workarounds to make things work cross-browser, I'm amazed at huge collective waste of productive hours that are put into this. As I understand it, floats were never created for creating layouts, but because many layouts need a footer, that's how they're often being used. To clear the floats, you can add an empty div that clears both sides (div class="clear"). That is simple and works cross browser, but it adds "non-semantic" html rather than solving the presentation problem within the CSS. I realize this, but after looking at all of the solutions with their benefits and drawbacks, it seems to make more sense to go with the empty div (predictable behavior across browsers), rather than create separate stylesheets, including various css hacks and workarounds, etc. which would also need to change as CSS evolves. Is it o.k. to do this as long as you do understand what you're doing and why you're doing it? Or is it better to find the CSS workarounds, hacks and separate structure from presentation at all costs, even when the CSS presentation tools provided are not evolved to the point where they can handle such basic layout issues?

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• CSS - vertical align text where text can be multiple lines

  - by Sniffer

  Hi all I've been given a design by a graphic designer, which I'm trying to put into HTML and CSS. One of the issues I'm facing is on a user input form. In the design the labels for each input are a fixed width - say 100px. The container for each label/input pair is fixed at 2em. The design I've been given has asked that the text for each label is vertically aligned. So the structure is like this: <containerTag> <label /> <input /> </containerTag> No problems as long as the text is on one line (I would have just used line-height of 2em to match the container), but some of the text in the labels are wrapping to two or even lines. Is there a semantic and nice way to get around this problem? I need something that will work in IE6-9, Firefox 3.5+, Chrome and Safari. Although I am using progressive enhancement, so if there is a solution that will only work on the later browsers, but won't break the older ones, then this would be acceptable. Any help gratefully received! Thanks for your time S

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• Effective communication in a component-based system

  - by Tesserex

  Yes, this is another question about my game engine, which is coming along very nicely, with much thanks to you guys. So, if you watched the video (or didn't), the objects in the game are composed of various components for things like position, sprites, movement, collision, sounds, health, etc. I have several message types defined for "tell" type communication between entities and components, but this only goes so far. There are plenty of times when I just need to ask for something, for example an entity's position. There are dozens of lines in my code that look like this: SomeComponent comp = (SomeComponent)entity.GetComponent(typeof(SomeComponent)); if (comp != null) comp.GetSomething(); I know this is very ugly, and I know that casting smells of improper OO design. But as complex as things are, there doesn't seem to be a better way. I could of course "hard-code" my component types and just have SomeComponent comp = entity.GetSomeComponent(); but that seems like a cop-out, and a bad one. I literally JUST REALIZED, while writing this, after having my code this way for months with no solution, that a generic will help me. SomeComponent comp = entity.GetComponent<SomeComponent>(); Amazing how that works. Anyway, this is still only a semantic improvement. My questions remain. Is this actually that bad? What's a better alternative?

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• C#: at design time, how can I reliably determine the type of a variable that is declared using var?

  - by Cheeso

  I'm working on a completion (intellisense) facility for C# in emacs. The idea is, if a user types a fragment, then asks for completion via a particular keystroke combination, the completion facility will use .NET reflection to determine the possible completions. Doing this requires that the type of the thing being completed, be known. If it's a string, it has a set of known methods; if it's an Int32, it has a separate set of methods, and so on. Using semantic, a code lexer/parser package available in emacs, I can locate the variable declarations, and their types. Given that, it's straightforward to use reflection to get the methods and properties on the type, and then present the list of options to the user. The problem arrives when the code uses var in the declaration. How can I reliably determine the actual type used, when the variable is declared with the var keyword? Just to be clear, I don't need to determine it at runtime. I want to determine it at "Design time". So far the best idea I have is: extract the declaration statement, eg var foo = "a string value"; concatenate a statement foo.GetType(); dynamically compile the resulting C# fragment it into a new assembly load the assembly into a new AppDomain, run the framgment and get the return type. unload and discard the assembly This sounds awfully heavyweight, for each completion request in the editor. Any better ideas out there?

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• jQuery .die isnt killing an attached event?

  - by adam

  Hi I've just started experimenting with .live and .die and having some great results but one thing isn't working. I've been tinkering with firebugs console to try out my written code live to see if i can figure out the reason why .die isn't killing off an attached event. First if i do this //attach ajax submission $('a[href$=edit]').live("click", function(event) { $.get($(this).attr("href"), null, null); return false; }); Then as expected when I click on a link the ajax fires off and my server side code injects a form for inline editing. But sometimes I want to disable this behaviour and also make the link unclickable so I do the following //unbind ajax form creation when we click on a link, then disable its semantic behaviour $('a[href$=edit]').die("click").click( function(){ return false; } ); which works but if then try to remove this and restore that ajax goodness with the code below it doesn't work, Instead the link remains unclickable. I cant figure out why? Can anyone help? //remove any previous events from the links $('a[href$=edit]').die(); //attach ajax submission $('a[href$=edit]').live("click", function(event) { $.get($(this).attr("href"), null, null); return false; });

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• Can I create a two-column layout that fluidly adapts to narrow windows?

  - by Brant Bobby

  I'm trying to design a page that has two columns of content, div#left and div#right. (I know these aren't proper semantic identifiers, but it makes explaining easier) The widths of both columns are fixed. Desired result - Wide viewport When the viewport is too narrow to display both side-by-side, I want #right to be stacked on top of #left, like this: Desired result - narrow viewport My first thought was simply to apply float: left to #left and float: right to #right, but that makes #right attach itself to the right side of the window (which is the proper behavior for float, after all), leaving an empty space. This also leaves a big gap between the columns when the browser window is really wide. Wrong - div#right is not flush with the left side of the viewport Wrong - div#right is not on top of div#left Applying float: left to both divs would result in the wrong one moving to the bottom when the window was too small. I could probably do this with media queries, but IE doesn't support those until version 9. The source order is unimportant, but I need something that works in IE7 minimum. Is this possible to do without resorting to Javascript?

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• Patterns to deal with with functions that can have different kinds of results.

  - by KaptajnKold

  Suppose you have an method on an object that given the some input alters the objects state if the input validates according to some complex logic. Now suppose that when the input doesn't validate, it can be due to several different things, each of which we would like to be able to deal with in different ways. I'm sure many of you are thinking: That's what exceptions are for! I've thought of this also. But my reservation against using exceptions is that in some cases there is nothing exceptional about the input not validating and I really would like to avoid using exceptions to control what is really just in the expected flow of the program. If there were only one interpretation possible, I could simply choose to return a boolean value indicating whether or not the operation resulted in a state change or not and the respond appropriately when it did not. There is of course also the option to return a status code which the client can then choose to interpret or not. I don't like this much either because there is nothing semantic about status codes. The solution I have so far is to always check for each possible situation which I am able to handle before I call the method which then returns a boolean to inform the client if the object changed state. This leaves me the flexibility to handle as few or as many as the possible situations as I wish depending on the context I am in. It also has the benefit of making the method I am calling simpler to write. The drawback is that there is quite a lot of duplication in the client code wherever I call the method. Which of these solutions do you prefer and why? What other patterns do people use for providing meaningful feedback from functions? I know that some languages support multiple return values, and I if I had that option I would surely prefer it.

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• UIImagePickerController, UIImage, Memory and More!

  - by Itay

  I've noticed that there are many questions about how to handle UIImage objects, especially in conjunction with UIImagePickerController and then displaying it in a view (usually a UIImageView). Here is a collection of common questions and their answers. Feel free to edit and add your own. I obviously learnt all this information from somewhere too. Various forum posts, StackOverflow answers and my own experimenting brought me to all these solutions. Credit goes to those who posted some sample code that I've since used and modified. I don't remember who you all are - but hats off to you! How Do I Select An Image From the User's Images or From the Camera? You use UIImagePickerController. The documentation for the class gives a decent overview of how one would use it, and can be found here. Basically, you create an instance of the class, which is a modal view controller, display it, and set yourself (or some class) to be the delegate. Then you'll get notified when a user selects some form of media (movie or image in 3.0 on the 3GS), and you can do whatever you want. My Delegate Was Called - How Do I Get The Media? The delegate method signature is the following: - (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:(NSDictionary *)info; You should put a breakpoint in the debugger to see what's in the dictionary, but you use that to extract the media. For example: UIImage* image = [info objectForKey:UIImagePickerControllerOriginalImage]; There are other keys that work as well, all in the documentation. OK, I Got The Image, But It Doesn't Have Any Geolocation Data. What gives? Unfortunately, Apple decided that we're not worthy of this information. When they load the data into the UIImage, they strip it of all the EXIF/Geolocation data. Can I Get To The Original File Representing This Image on the Disk? Nope. For security purposes, you only get the UIImage. How Can I Look At The Underlying Pixels of the UIImage? Since the UIImage is immutable, you can't look at the direct pixels. However, you can make a copy. The code to this looks something like this: UIImage* image = ...; // An image NSData* pixelData = (NSData*) CGDataProviderCopyData(CGImageGetDataProvider(image.CGImage)); unsigned char* pixelBytes = (unsigned char *)[pixelData bytes]; // Take away the red pixel, assuming 32-bit RGBA for(int i = 0; i < [pixelData length]; i += 4) { pixelBytes[i] = 0; // red pixelBytes[i+1] = pixelBytes[i+1]; // green pixelBytes[i+2] = pixelBytes[i+2]; // blue pixelBytes[i+3] = pixelBytes[i+3]; // alpha } However, note that CGDataProviderCopyData provides you with an "immutable" reference to the data - meaning you can't change it (and you may get a BAD_ACCESS error if you do). Look at the next question if you want to see how you can modify the pixels. How Do I Modify The Pixels of the UIImage? The UIImage is immutable, meaning you can't change it. Apple posted a great article on how to get a copy of the pixels and modify them, and rather than copy and paste it here, you should just go read the article. Once you have the bitmap context as they mention in the article, you can do something similar to this to get a new UIImage with the modified pixels: CGImageRef ref = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmap); UIImage* newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:ref]; Do remember to release your references though, otherwise you're going to be leaking quite a bit of memory. After I Select 3 Images From The Camera, I Run Out Of Memory. Help! You have to remember that even though on disk these images take up only a few hundred kilobytes at most, that's because they're compressed as a PNG or JPG. When they are loaded into the UIImage, they become uncompressed. A quick over-the-envelope calculation would be: width x height x 4 = bytes in memory That's assuming 32-bit pixels. If you have 16-bit pixels (some JPGs are stored as RGBA-5551), then you'd replace the 4 with a 2. Now, images taken with the camera are 1600 x 1200 pixels, so let's do the math: 1600 x 1200 x 4 = 7,680,000 bytes = ~8 MB 8 MB is a lot, especially when you have a limit of around 24 MB for your application. That's why you run out of memory. OK, I Understand Why I Have No Memory. What Do I Do? There is never any reason to display images at their full resolution. The iPhone has a screen of 480 x 320 pixels, so you're just wasting space. If you find yourself in this situation, ask yourself the following question: Do I need the full resolution image? If the answer is yes, then you should save it to disk for later use. If the answer is no, then read the next part. Once you've decided what to do with the full-resolution image, then you need to create a smaller image to use for displaying. Many times you might even want several sizes for your image: a thumbnail, a full-size one for displaying, and the original full-resolution image. OK, I'm Hooked. How Do I Resize the Image? Unfortunately, there is no defined way how to resize an image. Also, it's important to note that when you resize it, you'll get a new image - you're not modifying the old one. There are a couple of methods to do the resizing. I'll present them both here, and explain the pros and cons of each. Method 1: Using UIKit + (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)image scaledToSize:(CGSize)newSize; { // Create a graphics image context UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(newSize); // Tell the old image to draw in this new context, with the desired // new size [image drawInRect:CGRectMake(0,0,newSize.width,newSize.height)]; // Get the new image from the context UIImage* newImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext(); // End the context UIGraphicsEndImageContext(); // Return the new image. return newImage; } This method is very simple, and works great. It will also deal with the UIImageOrientation for you, meaning that you don't have to care whether the camera was sideways when the picture was taken. However, this method is not thread safe, and since thumbnailing is a relatively expensive operation (approximately ~2.5s on a 3G for a 1600 x 1200 pixel image), this is very much an operation you may want to do in the background, on a separate thread. Method 2: Using CoreGraphics + (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)sourceImage scaledToSize:(CGSize)newSize; { CGFloat targetWidth = targetSize.width; CGFloat targetHeight = targetSize.height; CGImageRef imageRef = [sourceImage CGImage]; CGBitmapInfo bitmapInfo = CGImageGetBitmapInfo(imageRef); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpaceInfo = CGImageGetColorSpace(imageRef); if (bitmapInfo == kCGImageAlphaNone) { bitmapInfo = kCGImageAlphaNoneSkipLast; } CGContextRef bitmap; if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp || sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetWidth, targetHeight, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } else { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetHeight, targetWidth, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationLeft) { CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, 0, -targetHeight); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationRight) { CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, -targetWidth, 0); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp) { // NOTHING } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, targetWidth, targetHeight); CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-180.)); } CGContextDrawImage(bitmap, CGRectMake(0, 0, targetWidth, targetHeight), imageRef); CGImageRef ref = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmap); UIImage* newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:ref]; CGContextRelease(bitmap); CGImageRelease(ref); return newImage; } The benefit of this method is that it is thread-safe, plus it takes care of all the small things (using correct color space and bitmap info, dealing with image orientation) that the UIKit version does. How Do I Resize and Maintain Aspect Ratio (like the AspectFill option)? It is very similar to the method above, and it looks like this: + (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)sourceImage scaledToSizeWithSameAspectRatio:(CGSize)targetSize; { CGSize imageSize = sourceImage.size; CGFloat width = imageSize.width; CGFloat height = imageSize.height; CGFloat targetWidth = targetSize.width; CGFloat targetHeight = targetSize.height; CGFloat scaleFactor = 0.0; CGFloat scaledWidth = targetWidth; CGFloat scaledHeight = targetHeight; CGPoint thumbnailPoint = CGPointMake(0.0,0.0); if (CGSizeEqualToSize(imageSize, targetSize) == NO) { CGFloat widthFactor = targetWidth / width; CGFloat heightFactor = targetHeight / height; if (widthFactor > heightFactor) { scaleFactor = widthFactor; // scale to fit height } else { scaleFactor = heightFactor; // scale to fit width } scaledWidth = width * scaleFactor; scaledHeight = height * scaleFactor; // center the image if (widthFactor > heightFactor) { thumbnailPoint.y = (targetHeight - scaledHeight) * 0.5; } else if (widthFactor < heightFactor) { thumbnailPoint.x = (targetWidth - scaledWidth) * 0.5; } } CGImageRef imageRef = [sourceImage CGImage]; CGBitmapInfo bitmapInfo = CGImageGetBitmapInfo(imageRef); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpaceInfo = CGImageGetColorSpace(imageRef); if (bitmapInfo == kCGImageAlphaNone) { bitmapInfo = kCGImageAlphaNoneSkipLast; } CGContextRef bitmap; if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp || sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetWidth, targetHeight, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } else { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetHeight, targetWidth, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } // In the right or left cases, we need to switch scaledWidth and scaledHeight, // and also the thumbnail point if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationLeft) { thumbnailPoint = CGPointMake(thumbnailPoint.y, thumbnailPoint.x); CGFloat oldScaledWidth = scaledWidth; scaledWidth = scaledHeight; scaledHeight = oldScaledWidth; CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, 0, -targetHeight); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationRight) { thumbnailPoint = CGPointMake(thumbnailPoint.y, thumbnailPoint.x); CGFloat oldScaledWidth = scaledWidth; scaledWidth = scaledHeight; scaledHeight = oldScaledWidth; CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, -targetWidth, 0); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp) { // NOTHING } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, targetWidth, targetHeight); CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-180.)); } CGContextDrawImage(bitmap, CGRectMake(thumbnailPoint.x, thumbnailPoint.y, scaledWidth, scaledHeight), imageRef); CGImageRef ref = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmap); UIImage* newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:ref]; CGContextRelease(bitmap); CGImageRelease(ref); return newImage; } The method we employ here is to create a bitmap with the desired size, but draw an image that is actually larger, thus maintaining the aspect ratio. So We've Got Our Scaled Images - How Do I Save Them To Disk? This is pretty simple. Remember that we want to save a compressed version to disk, and not the uncompressed pixels. Apple provides two functions that help us with this (documentation is here): NSData* UIImagePNGRepresentation(UIImage *image); NSData* UIImageJPEGRepresentation (UIImage *image, CGFloat compressionQuality); And if you want to use them, you'd do something like: UIImage* myThumbnail = ...; // Get some image NSData* imageData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(myThumbnail); Now we're ready to save it to disk, which is the final step (say into the documents directory): // Give a name to the file NSString* imageName = @"MyImage.png"; // Now, we have to find the documents directory so we can save it // Note that you might want to save it elsewhere, like the cache directory, // or something similar. NSArray* paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES); NSString* documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0]; // Now we get the full path to the file NSString* fullPathToFile = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:imageName]; // and then we write it out [imageData writeToFile:fullPathToFile atomically:NO]; You would repeat this for every version of the image you have. How Do I Load These Images Back Into Memory? Just look at the various UIImage initialization methods, such as +imageWithContentsOfFile: in the Apple documentation.

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• Using VLOOKUP in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  VLOOKUP is one of Excel’s most useful functions, and it’s also one of the least understood.  In this article, we demystify VLOOKUP by way of a real-life example.  We’ll create a usable Invoice Template for a fictitious company. So what is VLOOKUP?  Well, of course it’s an Excel function.  This article will assume that the reader already has a passing understanding of Excel functions, and can use basic functions such as SUM, AVERAGE, and TODAY.  In its most common usage, VLOOKUP is a database function, meaning that it works with database tables – or more simply, lists of things in an Excel worksheet.  What sort of things?   Well, any sort of thing.  You may have a worksheet that contains a list of employees, or products, or customers, or CDs in your CD collection, or stars in the night sky.  It doesn’t really matter. Here’s an example of a list, or database.  In this case it’s a list of products that our fictitious company sells: Usually lists like this have some sort of unique identifier for each item in the list.  In this case, the unique identifier is in the “Item Code” column.  Note:  For the VLOOKUP function to work with a database/list, that list must have a column containing the unique identifier (or “key”, or “ID”), and that column must be the first column in the table.  Our sample database above satisfies this criterion. The hardest part of using VLOOKUP is understanding exactly what it’s for.  So let’s see if we can get that clear first: VLOOKUP retrieves information from a database/list based on a supplied instance of the unique identifier. Put another way, if you put the VLOOKUP function into a cell and pass it one of the unique identifiers from your database, it will return you one of the pieces of information associated with that unique identifier.  In the example above, you would pass VLOOKUP an item code, and it would return to you either the corresponding item’s description, its price, or its availability (its “In stock” quantity).  Which of these pieces of information will it pass you back?  Well, you get to decide this when you’re creating the formula. If all you need is one piece of information from the database, it would be a lot of trouble to go to to construct a formula with a VLOOKUP function in it.  Typically you would use this sort of functionality in a reusable spreadsheet, such as a template.  Each time someone enters a valid item code, the system would retrieve all the necessary information about the corresponding item. Let’s create an example of this:  An Invoice Template that we can reuse over and over in our fictitious company. First we start Excel… …and we create ourselves a blank invoice: This is how it’s going to work:  The person using the invoice template will fill in a series of item codes in column “A”, and the system will retrieve each item’s description and price, which will be used to calculate the line total for each item (assuming we enter a valid quantity). For the purposes of keeping this example simple, we will locate the product database on a separate sheet in the same workbook: In reality, it’s more likely that the product database would be located in a separate workbook.  It makes little difference to the VLOOKUP function, which doesn’t really care if the database is located on the same sheet, a different sheet, or a completely different workbook. In order to test the VLOOKUP formula we’re about to write, we first enter a valid item code into cell A11: Next, we move the active cell to the cell in which we want information retrieved from the database by VLOOKUP to be stored.  Interestingly, this is the step that most people get wrong.  To explain further:  We are about to create a VLOOKUP formula that will retrieve the description that corresponds to the item code in cell A11.  Where do we want this description put when we get it?  In cell B11, of course.  So that’s where we write the VLOOKUP formula – in cell B11. Select cell B11: We need to locate the list of all available functions that Excel has to offer, so that we can choose VLOOKUP and get some assistance in completing the formula.  This is found by first clicking the Formulas tab, and then clicking Insert Function:   A box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel.  To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function).  The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel.  VLOOKUP is the second one in the list.  Select it an click OK… The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function.  You can think of this box as the function is asking us the following questions: What unique identifier are you looking up in the database? Where is the database? Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you? The first three arguments are shown in bold, indicating that they are mandatory arguments (the VLOOKUP function is incomplete without them and will not return a valid value).  The fourth argument is not bold, meaning that it’s optional:   We will complete the arguments in order, top to bottom. The first argument we need to complete is the Lookup_value argument.  The function needs us to tell it where to find the unique identifier (the item code in this case) that it should be retuning the description of.  We must select the item code we entered earlier (in A11). Click on the selector icon to the right of the first argument: Then click once on the cell containing the item code (A11), and press Enter: The value of “A11” is inserted into the first argument. Now we need to enter a value for the Table_array argument.  In other words, we need to tell VLOOKUP where to find the database/list.  Click on the selector icon next to the second argument: Now locate the database/list and select the entire list – not including the header line.  The database is located on a separate worksheet, so we first click on that worksheet tab: Next we select the entire database, not including the header line: …and press Enter.  The range of cells that represents the database (in this case “’Product Database’!A2:D7”) is entered automatically for us into the second argument. Now we need to enter the third argument, Col_index_num.  We use this argument to specify to VLOOKUP which piece of information from the database, associate with our item code in A11, we wish to have returned to us.  In this particular example, we wish to have the item’s description returned to us.  If you look on the database worksheet, you’ll notice that the “Description” column is the second column in the database.  This means that we must enter a value of “2” into the Col_index_num box: It is important to note that that we are not entering a “2” here because the “Description” column is in the B column on that worksheet.  If the database happened to start in column K of the worksheet, we would still enter a “2” in this field. Finally, we need to decide whether to enter a value into the final VLOOKUP argument, Range_lookup.  This argument requires either a true or false value, or it should be left blank.  When using VLOOKUP with databases (as is true 90% of the time), then the way to decide what to put in this argument can be thought of as follows: If the first column of the database (the column that contains the unique identifiers) is sorted alphabetically/numerically in ascending order, then it’s possible to enter a value of true into this argument, or leave it blank. If the first column of the database is not sorted, or it’s sorted in descending order, then you must enter a value of false into this argument As the first column of our database is not sorted, we enter false into this argument: That’s it!  We’ve entered all the information required for VLOOKUP to return the value we need.  Click the OK button and notice that the description corresponding to item code “R99245” has been correctly entered into cell B11: The formula that was created for us looks like this: If we enter a different item code into cell A11, we will begin to see the power of the VLOOKUP function:  The description cell changes to match the new item code: We can perform a similar set of steps to get the item’s price returned into cell E11.  Note that the new formula must be created in cell E11.  The result will look like this: …and the formula will look like this: Note that the only difference between the two formulae is the third argument (Col_index_num) has changed from a “2” to a “3” (because we want data retrieved from the 3rd column in the database). If we decided to buy 2 of these items, we would enter a “2” into cell D11.  We would then enter a simple formula into cell F11 to get the line total: =D11*E11 …which looks like this… Completing the Invoice Template We’ve learned a lot about VLOOKUP so far.  In fact, we’ve learned all we’re going to learn in this article.  It’s important to note that VLOOKUP can be used in other circumstances besides databases.  This is less common, and may be covered in future How-To Geek articles. Our invoice template is not yet complete.  In order to complete it, we would do the following: We would remove the sample item code from cell A11 and the “2” from cell D11.  This will cause our newly created VLOOKUP formulae to display error messages: We can remedy this by judicious use of Excel’s IF() and ISBLANK() functions.  We change our formula from this…       =VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) We would copy the formulas in cells B11, E11 and F11 down to the remainder of the item rows of the invoice.  Note that if we do this, the resulting formulas will no longer correctly refer to the database table.  We could fix this by changing the cell references for the database to absolute cell references.  Alternatively – and even better – we could create a range name for the entire product database (such as “Products”), and use this range name instead of the cell references.  The formula would change from this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,Products,2,FALSE)) …and then copy the formulas down to the rest of the invoice item rows. We would probably “lock” the cells that contain our formulae (or rather unlock the other cells), and then protect the worksheet, in order to ensure that our carefully constructed formulae are not accidentally overwritten when someone comes to fill in the invoice. We would save the file as a template, so that it could be reused by everyone in our company If we were feeling really clever, we would create a database of all our customers in another worksheet, and then use the customer ID entered in cell F5 to automatically fill in the customer’s name and address in cells B6, B7 and B8. If you would like to practice with VLOOKUP, or simply see our resulting Invoice Template, it can be downloaded from here. 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• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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• Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

  - by Bart Read

  I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

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• Binding the position and size of a UserControl inside a Canvas in WPF

  - by John

  Hi. We have dynamically created (i.e. during runtime, via code-behind) UserControls inside a Canvas. We want to bind the position (Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top) and width of those sizable and draggable UserControls to a ObservableCollection<. How would we achieve this if the Usercontrol is contained in a DataTemplate which in turn is used by a ListBox whose DataContext is set to the collection we want to bind to? In other words, how do we bind a control's position and size that doesn't exist in XAML, but in code only (because it's created by clicking and dragging the mouse)? Notice that the collection can be empty or not empty, meaning that the size and position stores in a collection item must be correctly bound to so that the UserControl can be sized and positioned correctly in the Canvas - via DataBinding. Is this possible?

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• how to disable a jqgrid select list (dropdown) on the edit form

  - by MikeD

  This is strange and any alternative method to what I want to accomplish is welcome. My app uses the jqgrid 3.5.3 and I need to disable a select list on my edit form. When I do so using the code displayed below it breaks the edit form - meaning I can not cancel or submit it. Thanks. This code is in the edit options array of the navGrid method. The the dropdown is the 'serv_descr' field. The others are text boxes and don't pose a problem. The form does come up and the field is disabled - its just broken. beforeShowForm: function(eparams) { document.getElementById('equip_id').disabled = true; document.getElementById('service_dt').disabled = true; document.getElementById('serv_descr').disabled = true; document.getElementById('calc_next_svc').checked = 'true'; }

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• django modelformset - one form per related table row

  - by Toby

  Hello, I have two models: class Model1(): name = CharField() url = CharField() class Model2(): model1 = ForeignKey(Model1) user = ForeignKey(User) zzz = CharField() There are 5 rows for model1 in the database, these are fixed and will rarely change. I need to display a formset for model2 that allows users to enter the zzz value, the formset must always show one form per row in the model1 table, the label for each form in the formset must be the name of the related model1. If the user deletes a model2 in the formset the next time the page loads it will render an empty zzz value for that form and the user must be able to edit the previous zzz value - meaning it must be pre populated with all model2 rows associated with the user. The idea is to print each row in the model1 table as a form instead of the user selecting the related model1 name in a select box. I know its not that complicated, but I'm seriously stumped and keep going round in circles!! Many thanks in advance. Similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/298779/form-or-formset-to-handle-multiple-table-rows-in-django

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• Getting mydomain.com/subdomain to resolve to subdomain.mydomain.com

  - by Donald Jenkins

  I have content on subdomain1.mydomain.com which can't reside on mydomain.com/subdomain1. Nevertheless, all my other content resides in folders of the mydomain.com/subdomain* type. For the sake of consistency, I'd like the content actually located at subdomain1.mydomain.com to appear as if it were on mydomain.com/subdomain1 — Is there any way, using .htaccess, that I can achieve this, bearing in mind that: (1) the subdomain itself also has a nested permalink structure, meaning that there are additional folders in the directory structure of the subdomain; (2) I want the browser to display the address as mydomain/subdomain1 after the redirect.

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• SSLException: Received fatal alert: certificate_unknown - what does it mean?

  - by user338154

  Hi, I am getting the "javax.net.ssl.SSLException: Received fatal alert: certificate_unknown" error when attempting to send a HTTPS message. I believe the message is due to the endpoint not recognising the sent certificate or is rejecting it. But I want to be doubly sure this is a server issue and not a local client issue before I go barking up the wrong tree with my error analysis. Can you guys please clarify the meaning of this error (google isn't helping much) and whether it is client or endpoint server related. FYI: I am using Websphere Application Server 6.1 Thanks

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• ERROR: Could not contact the SSO server

  - by BizTalkMama

  Hi, I'm getting the following error on my dev machine when attempting to manage SSO settings: ERROR: 0xC0002A0F : Could not contact the SSO server 'SSODB'. Check that SSO is configured and that the SSO service is running on that server. The Enterprise Single Sign-On Service, RPC service, and COM+ System Application service were all started when I checked, but I gave them a restart anyway and it didn't fix the problem. I can access the SSODB through SSMS. I unconfigured SSO through BizTalk and reconfigured it (successfully). Alas, this also did not help. SSO was previously working fine. I did notice this morning upon reboot that my browser home page was reset back to our corporate site (meaning something may have been pushed to machine this morning when I signed on) but no one else on my team is experiencing the same issues. I'm not sure what to try next. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

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• Getting ANT to scp only new/changed files

  - by Artem

  I would like to optimize my scp deployment which currently copies all files to only copy files that have changed since the last build. I believe it should be possible with the current setup somehow, but I don't know how to do this. I have the following: Project/src/blah/blah/ <---- files I am editing (mostly PHP in this case, some static assets) Project/build <------- I have a local build step that I use to copy the files to here I have an scp task right now that copies all of Project/build out to a remote server when I need it. Is it possible to somehow take advantage of this extra "build" directory to accomplish what I want -- meaning I only want to upload the "diff" between src/** and build/**. Is it possible to somehow retrieve this as a fileset in ANT and then scp that? I do realize that what it means is that if I somehow delete/mess around with files on the server in between, the ANT script would not notice, but for me this is okay.

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• Android - phone number contact format

  - by Daniel Benedykt

  Hi In Android I can get phone numbers of all the contacts without any problem. Tha problem is that for most users some numbers are stored as 'local' numbers, meaning that they dont have the country code included. For example, if the user lives in US and he has 2 contacts: 1) John - 555-123-1234 (local) (starting 1 not showing) 2) Jane - 44-123456787 (england phone number) The question is: How do I get all the numbers in an international format, when some of the numbers doesnt include the country code? Any way to figure that out? Thanks

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• Integer ID obfuscation techniques

  - by Chris

  Hi there, I'm looking for an easy and reversible method of obfuscating integer IDs. Ideally, I'd want the resulting obfuscation to be at most eight characters in length and non-sequential, meaning that the obfuscation of "1" should look nothing like the obfuscation for "2" and so on. This isn't meant to be secure by any means, so this isn't a huge concern. Additionally, the integers I'll be obfuscating aren't large - between one and 10,000 - but I don't want any collisions, either. Does anybody have any ideas for something that would fit this criteria? Thanks! Chris

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• Formula for calculating Exotic wagers such as Trifecta and Superfecta

  - by JohnnyCantCode

  I am trying to create an application that will calculate the cost of exotic parimutuel wager costs. I have found several for certain types of bets but never one that solves all the scenarios for a single bet type. If I could find an algorithm that could calculate all the possible combinations I could use that formula to solve my other problems. Additional information: I need to calculate the permutations of groups of numbers. For instance; Group 1 = 1,2,3 Group 2 = 2,3,4 Group 3 = 3,4,5 What are all the possible permutation for these 3 groups of numbers taking 1 number from each group per permutation. No repeats per permutation, meaning a number can not appear in more that 1 position. So 2,4,3 is valid but 2,4,4 is not valid. Thanks for all the help.

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• Custom Fill Property on PathGeometry in Silverlight

  - by Otaku

  I've been looking at (and getting confused by) Dependency Properties - I'm not sure if this is what I need or if there is something else. I'm looking to something very specific with <Path.Data/> children in Silverlight, in particular <PathGeometry/>, <EllipseGeometry/>, etc. While the <Path/> element has a .Fill property, I'd like to add a .Fill property to any of it's Geometries, meaning it's a different color from it's parent. It could be a <SolidColorBrush/> or <LinearGradientBrush/> color, or a percentage of the parent color (like 20% darker than <Path.Fill/>. Is this possible? Is this a dependency property? How would <RectangleGeometry/>, for example, know that I am trying to fill it with a color? How would I get started? (adding WPF as a tag too as someone who knows WPF may be able to help)

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• Identify valid server in XML-RPC request using PHP

  - by Ian

  I'm working on a client-server system, where the client makes XMLRPC requests to the server. The client part of the system is handed to a third-party, meaning that he could eventually modify the code or re-route the xmlrpc requests. Now, hoping the third-party won't modify the code, I need a way to make sure that the server the client script is contacting is actually MY server (cause, the person could somehow reroute the requests to his own server where he could make up some xml responses, not what I want). Is there a way to identify a server using PHP? Some sort of SSL connection? Hope you guys understand me. Cheers.

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• PropertyGrid PaintValue problem: How to remove (and paint outside) the standard rectangle?

  - by Pedery

  This might be a straightforward question, even though I haven't found an easy solution to it: I've implemented my custom UITypeEditor with the sole purpose of adding a PaintValue to bools. For the sake of the discussion, let's assume that PaintValue will either paint a checked or unchecked radiobutton. Question 1: Now, here's the problem: It seems like PaintValue automatically inserts a 20x13px rectangle after all paint code has completed. Naturally, a radiobutton inside a black rectangle is ugly. Can I easily instruct or override this rectagle not to be painted? Question 2: In this respect, is it possible to paint on top of the propertygrid's native look - meaning could I paint something in order to obscure (part of) the black line separating two grid cells vertically? The purpose of doing this would be to indicate that two values were linked, like constrained width/height to an aspect ratio.

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