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• How do you keep cool when production system goes down?

  - by Mag20

  This has happened to most of us... You come to work one day. Everything seems normal: the sun is shining, birds are chirping, but you notice a couple of weird things on your way to work like deja vu with cat in matrix. You get into office, there are a lot of phones ringing, but could be that they are just doing a new sales promotion. You settle in, when you notice a dark cloud hovering over you. It takes you a couple of moments, but you recognize the cloud is your boss. Usually he checks on you every morning with his "Soooo Peeeeter, how about those TCP/IP reports?" routine, but today he forgot everything about common manners and rudely invaded your personal space. No "Good Morning", just some drooling, grunts and curses. He reminds you a bit of neanderthal who is trying to get away from cyber tooth tiger, fear and panic all compressed in a tight ball. You try to decipher the new language that he created since yesterday and you start understanding that something bad happened overnight - production system went down. Now, your system is usually used by clients during regular working hours from 9-5, but for whatever reason you didn't get any alerts on your beeper (for people under 30 - beeper was like a mobile phone that could only ring and tell you who beeped you). Need to remember to charge it next time. So it is 8:45am, the system MUST be up at 9am. Every 10 seconds, your boss lets out yet another curse which communicates to you that another customer is having problems getting into the system. Also several account managers are now hovering over your boss trying to make him understand how clients are REALLY REALLY suffering. Everyone is depending on you to get the system up ASAP and at the same time hinder your progress by constantly distracting you. How do you keep cool in a situation like this?

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• Activist shared printing material gallery

  - by Dave

  What would you say would be the best way to do this: We would like to create a section on our activist community FB page and website in order to share with everyone images and files ready for printing panflets, brochures, t-shirts, stickers, etc. Let's say we have some cool slogans for t-shirts, so we would like to show them on a gallery, and offer for download the original design files needed for a print shop to create the t-shirts. And the same thing for all other kinds of media. We want to enable anyone to be able to just download the files for free, and easily create printed materials with them. But besides offering this hybrid between picture gallery and downloads manager, we would also like to make it very easy for anyone to upload and share their own files with the community, to make it a true collaboration initiative, be it that they get posted automatically, or that we first review and approve all uploads. Cafepress or Spreadshirt let you upload your design and sell your own merchandise. We need something similar, but where people can then download working files for making quality printings and materials. What apps, tools, services or methods are out there with which you think this could be best done?? We have some ideas, but we would like to hear some more!!

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• Evaluating Scrum - is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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• Ubuntu won't suspend automatically any more

  - by Sparhawk

  In the last month or so, Ubuntu (12.04) has stopped sleeping automatically. I've gone to System Settings Power, and verified (and toggled) "suspend on inactive for" to 5 minutes (for both battery and "when plugged in"), but the system stays awake. I've also tried used code similar to $ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-timeout 300 $ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-battery-timeout 300 to set the timeout values. I've also verified these in dconf Editor. Previously, I could set this quite low to make my computer sleep quickly, but now it no longer works either. I'm not sure if this is relevant, but under old versions of Ubuntu, if I wanted my computer to never suspend (via the CLI), I would also have to set $ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac false At some point, this seemed to have been depreciated (and also gave me the error "No such key 'sleep-inactive-ac'"). I found that it it was enough to set sleep-inactive-ac-timeout to 0. This worked for a while, but at some point auto-suspend stopped working as stated above. Oddly enough, the sleep-inactive-ac key is still present when I look via dconf editor. However, when I click it, it says "no schema", and the summary, etc. fields are blank. To test if the dconf power plugin was working, I tried playing around with other settings in the schema. Idle-dim-time and idle-dim-ac work as expected . However, setting sleep-display-ac to 5 seconds has no effect. I'm also not sure if this is relevant, but I've uninstalled gnome-screensaver, and installed xscreensaver. I have tried killing xscreensaver and re-installing gnome-screensaver, but this did not help. I've also had some trouble with DPMS. I'm not sure if this is related, but I'll put the information here, just in case. Using xscreensaver, I set Power Management to enabled, with standby and suspend timeouts to 10 minutes. I've verified these settings in ~/.xscreensaver and xset q. However, the screen blanks after about 30 seconds. If I turn off DPMS (either via xscreensaver GUI or modifying ~/.xscreensaver), it won't blank at all, so I know that DPMS is partially reading the xscreensaver settings. -- edit I've attempted more troubleshooting, by creating a new user account, then logging out of the main account and into the new account. I've tried modifying the timeouts via dconf, but get the same results as above (i.e. it doesn't work, nor does sleep-display-ac, but idle-dim-time and idle-dim-ac work). Also, the depreciated sleep-display-ac key is not visible, so I think that this is probably unrelated. -- edit I've since moved to gnome-shell instead of unity, and still have this problem, so I guess that it's something to do with gnome-power-manager.

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• Should Professional Development occur on company time?

  - by jshu

  As a first-time part-time software developer at a small consulting company, I'm struggling to organise time to further my own software development knowledge - whether that's reading a book, keeping up with the popular questions on StackOverflow, researching a technology we're using in-depth, or following the front page of Hacker News. I can see results borne from my self-allocated study time, but listing and demonstrating the skills and knowledge gained through Professional Development is difficult. The company does not have any defined PD policy, and there's a lot of pressure to get something deliverable done now! when working for consultants. I've checked what my coworkers do, and they don't appear to allocate any time to self-improvement; they just work at the problems they're given, looking up specific MSDN references, code samples, and the like as they need them. I realise that PD policy is going to vary across companies of different size and culture, and a company like my own is probably a bit of an edge case. I'd love to hear views and experiences from more seasoned developers; especially those who have to make the PD policy choices in their team or company. I'd also like to learn about the more radical approaches to PD, even if they're completely out there; it's always interesting to see what other people are trying. Not quite a summary, but what I'm trying to ask: Is it common or recommended for companies to allocate PD time? Whose responsibility is it to ensure a developer's knowledge and skills are up to date? Should a part-time work schedule inspire a lower ratio of PD time : work? How can a developer show non-developer coworkers that reading blogs and books is net productive? Is reading blogs and books actually net productive? (references welcomed) Is writing blogs effective as a way of PD? (a recent theme on Hacker News) This is sort of a broad question because I don't know exactly which questions I need to ask here, so any thoughts on relevant issues I haven't addressed are very welcome.

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• 2011 - ALMs for your development team and the people they work with.

  - by David V. Corbin

  Welcome to 2011, it is already shaping up to be a very exciting year. The title of the post is not about charitable giving, although that is also a great topic. Application Lifecycle Management and the Systems that support the environment is, and 2011 will be a year where I expect many teams to invest heavily in this area. For those not familiar with ALM, it can be simplified down to "A comprehensive view of all of the iteas, requirements, activities and artifacts that impact an application over the course of its lifecycle, from concept until decommissioning". Obviously, this encompases a large number of different areas even for relatively small and medium sized projects. In recent years, many teams have adapted methodoligies which address individual aspects of this; but the majority of this adoption has resulted in "islands of improvement" rather than the desired comprehensive outcome...Until now! Last year Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 along with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition, and with these two in combination the situation has drastically changed. At last there is a single environment that is capable of handling all aspects of ALM, and is also capable of dealing with migration and integration with existing systems to make the transition to a single solution much easier. Thse possibilities (and practicalities) are nothing short of amazing, Architecture thru Testing integration? YES. Being able to correlate specific requirement items (and their history) to actual code (and code history)? YES. Identification of which tests will be potentially impacted by a given code change? YES. Resiliant Automated Testing of User Interfaces? YES. Automatic Deployment Management? YES. Integraton Level testing as part of (designated) Builds? YES. I could easily double or triple the above list, but these items should be enough to get you thinking about the "pain points" your team and organization currently face and the fact that there IS a way to relieve the pain. Over the course of the year, I am hoping to bring together some of the "best of breed" information, along with hosting (and participating in) discussions with various experts in the field. There are already a number of groups (including many on LinkedIn) that have an ALM focus, and I encourage everyone out to check them out. I will be posting a list of the ones I find most helpful in the not too distant future. As I said at the beginning, 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting (and productive) year. Why wait to start investigating and adopting ALM? ps: For those interested in becoming an "Alms Giver" in the charitable sense, I highly recommend checking out GiveCamp. A group of developers, designers and others get together to create a solution for a charity in just under 48 hours. I will be attending the GiveCamp in New York City on Jan 14-16, more information is available at nycgivecamp.org/

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• Is there any web application to manage people doing Link Building? [closed]

  - by Alexandru Trandafir Catalin

  I am doing SEO for a website and collaborating with 4-5 people that are working on Link Building for my keywords. I was wondering if there is any application similar to a project management tool but oriented to SEO, Link building, Content writing. This application would allow you to set tasks and your collaborators will update with the links they add in a spreadsheet format so you can later check how many liks have been added for each of your keywords, on wich websites, and how efective is the collaborator.

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• Software development process for a part time University project for 1 developer?

  - by Pricey

  I will be doing a part time University project soon and the time frame for it is around 8 months with approximately 10-15 hours a week spent working on it, with a review by a tutor each quarter. My question is what software development process would you recommend using when the course requires you to work on your own in order to manage yourself as well as the project? I wanted to use a weekly or bi-weekly iterative approach to my work but a lot of the processes seem tailored to teams of people. I am looking at XP (Extreme Programming) OR Scrum as something that is less than the norm for University work but again Scrum I don't know a lot about yet, and a question I have is; can you say you are doing XP without pair-programming? because my tutor seems to think that I have to stick to all the practices otherwise I can't do it (nevermind if I am working alone). We can have external user input as well but due to the small timescales with part time work it may be more beneficial for myself to be the user as well, which is not what I prefer considering how I can get lost in the design.

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• How does a game developer get feedback from gamers (not developers) or start a forum community without paying for advertising or hiring Q&A teams?

  - by Carter81

  I am familiar with a lot of game developer forums, but I'd assume this is much less likely to attract more casual commentators. I also fear that feedback from a gamer's perspective would often be tainted by their game dev perspective. For example, if I were making a RTS game and wanted to get feedback from "The RTS gamers" where would I go? Is there a general idea of what type of website or forum to go to? Do you go to specific game websites, to try to "steal" attention? Would this not equate to spam or inappropriate posting? What is considered appropriate and inappropriate? I am not asking for specifics. I am asking how one "starts a community", or how one "gets feedback from gamers" without resorting to spamming forums or 'advertising' just to see what sticks. What TYPE OF PLACE does one go? Are there already sites designed for this purpose? I tried going to what was once a very popular forum for feedback from what I believed was a niche hardcore group of gamers in the genre, but its popularity seemed to have died significantly; Leaving only trolls and very young teenagers. The resulting feedback was quite disappointing, mainly for how little feedback it resulted. Many years ago, feedback would flood in by the hundreds so quickly. Without this website, I am at a loss as to where to go to see what people think of ideas, gather feedback from a gamer's perspective (not a developer's perspective), or where to pull from to start my own site's forum. I am out of ideas of what to do, short of going to various game forums to post in the off-topic sections there.

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Guizhou Power Grid Company

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryGuizhou Power Grid Company is responsible for power grid planning, construction, management, and power distribution in Guizhou Province, serving 39 million people. Giuzhou has 49,823 employees and an annual revenue of over $5 Billion. The business objectives were to consolidate information contained in disparate systems into a single knowledge repository and provide a safe and efficient way for staff and managers to access, query, share, manage, and store business information. Guizhou Power Grid Company saved more than US$693,000 in storage costs, reduced  average search times from 180 seconds to 5 seconds and solved 80% to 90% of technology and maintenance issues by searching the Oracle WebCenter Content management system. Company OverviewA wholly owned subsidiary of China Southern Power Grid Company Limited, Guizhou Power Grid Company is responsible for power grid planning, construction, management, and power distribution in Guizhou Province, serving 39 million people. Giuzhou has 49,823 employees and an annual revenue of over $5 Billion. Business ChallengesThe business objectives were to consolidate information contained in disparate systems, such as the customer relationship management and power grid management systems, into a single knowledge repository and provide a safe and efficient way for staff and managers to access, query, share, manage, and store business information. Solution DeployedGuizhou Power Grid Company  implemented Oracle WebCenter Content to build a content management system that enabled the secure, integrated management and storage of information, such as documents, records, images, Web content, and digital assets. The content management solution was integrated with the power grid, customer service, maintenance, and other business systems, as well as the corporate Web site. Business Results Saved more than US$693,000 in storage costs and shortened the material distribution time by integrating the knowledge management solution with the power grid, customer service, maintenance, and other business systems, as well as the corporate Web site Enabled staff to search 31,650 documents using catalogs, multidimensional attributes, and knowledge maps, reducing average search times from 180 seconds to 5 seconds and saving approximately 1,539 hours in annual search time Gained comprehensive document management, format transformation, security, and auditing capabilities Enabled users to upload new documents and supervisors to check the accuracy of these documents online, resulting in improved information quality control Solved 80% to 90% of technology and maintenance issues by searching the Oracle content management system for information, ensuring IT staff can respond quickly to users’ technical problems Improved security by using role-based access controls to restrict access to confidential documents and information Supported the efficient classification of corporate knowledge by using Oracle’s metadata functions to collect, tag, and archive documents, images, Web content, and digital assets “We chose Oracle WebCenter Content, as it is an outstanding integrated content management platform. It has allowed us to establish a system to access, query, share, manage, and store our corporate assets. This has laid a solid foundation for Guizhou Power Grid Company to improve management practices.” Luo Sixi, Senior Information Consultant, Guizhou Power Grid Company Additional Information Guizhou Power Grid Company Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content

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• Will people respect a Masters of Science in IT w/software engineering concentration from RPI?

  - by twneale

  Here's my thing: I got my undergraduate degree in political science, then a law degree. Then I figured out that I love programming and I'm pretty good at it too. It's fun and rewarding enough for me that I'd prefer to do it for a living over almost any form of pure law practice. So I'm looking at getting a masters degree to put some weight behind a possible career switch. If I actually want to develop software (web, in particular), would people in programming circles respect a master's of science in IT? Specifically, consider as an example the MS in IT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (with a concentration in software engineering). Here's the home page: http://www.rpi.edu/IT/graduate/masters_program.html In particular, I mean to draw a contrast between IT as specifically contemplated by the RPI masters program (an interdisciplinary tech/business program) and other MS degrees in computer science or software engineering that focus more on the science and technical aspects. I guess I want to make sure that other programmers would respect my credentials and not consider me as different or underqualified based on the connotations of the phrase "IT". I believe RPI has an unimpeachable reputation for hard science, and the program seems excellent, but it still matters to me how people in industry would perceive it.

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• How can I reduce the amount of time it takes to fully regression test an application ready for release?

  - by DrLazer

  An app I work on is being developed with a modified version of scrum. If you are not familiar with scrum, it's just an alternative approach to a more traditional watefall model, where a series of features are worked on for a set amount of time known as a sprint. The app is written in C# and makes use of WPF. We use Visual C# 2010 Express edition as an IDE. If we work on a sprint and add in a few new features, but do not plan to release until a further sprint is complete, then regression testing is not an issue as such. We just test the new features and give the app a good once over. However, if a release is planned that our customers can download - a full regression test is factored in. In the past this wasn't a big deal, it took 3 or 4 days and the devs simply fix up any bugs found in the regression phase, but now, as the app is getting larger and larger and incorporating more and more features, the regression is spanning out for weeks. I am interested in any methods that people know of or use that can decrease this time. At the moment the only ideas I have are to either start writing Unit Tests, which I have never fully tried out in a commercial environment, or to research the possibilty of any UI Automation API's or tools that would allow me to write a program to perform a series of batch tests. I know literally nothing about the possibilities of UI automation so any information would be valuable. I don't know that much about Unit testing either, how complicated can the tests be? Is it possible to get Unit tests to use the UI? Are there any other methods I should consider? Thanks for reading, and for any advice in advance. Edit: Thanks for the information. Does anybody know of any alternatives to what has been mentioned so far (NUnit, RhinoMocks and CodedUI)?

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• Failed Project: When to call it?

  - by Dan Ray

  A few months ago my company found itself with its hands around a white-hot emergency of a project, and my entire team of six pulled basically a five week "crunch week". In the 48 hours before go-live, I worked 41 of them, two back to back all-nighters. Deep in the middle of that, I posted what has been my most successful question to date. During all that time there was never any talk of "failure". It was always "get it done, regardless of the pain." Now that the thing is over and we as an organization have had some time to sit back and take stock of what we learned, one question has occurred to me. I can't say I've ever taken part in a project that I'd say had "failed". Plenty that were late or over budget, some disastrously so, but I've always ended up delivering SOMETHING. Yet I hear about "failed IT projects" all the time. I'm wondering about people's experience with that. What were the parameters that defined "failure"? What was the context? In our case, we are a software shop with external clients. Does a project that's internal to a large corporation have more space to "fail"? When do you make that call? What happens when you do? I'm not at all convinced that doing what we did is a smart business move. It wasn't my call (I'm just a code monkey) but I'm wondering if it might have been better to cut our losses, say we're not delivering, and move on. I don't just say that due to the sting of the long hours--the company royally lost its shirt on the project, plus the intangible costs to the company in terms of employee morale and loyalty were large. Factor that against the PR hit of failing to deliver a high profile project like this one was... and I don't know what the right answer is.

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• Is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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• What are some good seminar topics that can be used to improve designer&developer communication?

  - by tactoth

  Hello guys the thing I'll tell is what happens in the company I work for but I know it's more like a common issue in software companies. I'm development team leader in a internet service company that provides service that's very similar to dropbox. In our company we have mainly two divisions: the tech division and the designers division, both have their own reporting hierarchy. Designers focus on designing UI and prioritizing features, while developers focus on implement designers' ideas (more like being driven as our big boss has said). Then here comes our issue: the DEV team and DES team communicate very bad. DEV complain DES for these reasons: Too frequent changing of requirements Too complicated interaction (our DEV team has actually learned many HCI principles) Documents for design are incomplete, usually you just get 'design principles' and it's up to DEV to complete design details. When you find design defects, you ask DES team to resolve them, then DES team quickly change the principles and you gonna spend another several weeks because the change is so fundamental. While DES complain DEV for these reasons: Code architecture is not good enough to adapt to changing requirements (Obviously DES knows something about software development) Product design is about principles, not details. DEV fails to realize this. Communication should be quick and should be mainly oral. Trying to make most feature discussion in document for reference is too overloaded and doesn't make sense. As you can see, DEV and DES have different ideas on product design, and encourages very different practice. We have this difference because of the way we work. So our solution is that we should plan some seminars to make each part more aware of the way the other part work. Then my question is, what are some good topics for such seminars? Guessing some people may not think seminars can solve this problem, please also suggest your solution.

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• Can a 10-bit monitor connection preserve all tones in 8-bit sRGB gradients on a wide-gamut monitor?

  - by hjb981

  This question is about color management and the use of a higher color depth, 10 bits per channel (30 bits in total, resulting in 1.07 billion colors, or 1024 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "deep color") compared to the standard of 8 bits per channel (24 bits in total, 16.7 million colors, 256 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "true color"). Do not confuse with "32 bit color", which usually refers to standard 8 bit color with an extra channel ("alpha channel") for transparency (used to achieve effects like semi-transparent windows etc). The following can be assumed to be in place: 1: A wide-gamut monitor that supports 10-bit input. Further, it can be assumed that the monitor has been calibrated to its native gamut and that an ICC color profile has been created. 2: A graphics card that supports 10-bit output (and is connected to the monitor via DisplayPort). 3: Drivers for the graphics card that support 10-bit output. If applications that support 10-bit output and color profiles would be used, I would expect them to display images that were saved using different color spaces correctly. For example, both an sRGB and an adobeRGB image should be displayed correctly. If an sRGB image was saved using 8 bits per channel (almost always the case), then the 10-bit signal path would ensure that no tonal gradients were lost in the conversion from the sRGB of the image to the native color space of the monitor. For example: If the image contains a pixel that is pure red in 8 bits (255,0,0), the corresponding value in 10 bits would be (1023,0,0). However, since the monitor has a larger color space than sRGB, sending the signal (1023,0,0) to the monitor would result in a red that was too saturated. Therefore, according to the ICC color profile, the signal would be transformed into a different value with less red saturation, for example (987,0,0). Since there are still plenty of levels left between 0 and 987, all 256 values (0-255) for red in the sRGB color space of the file could be uniquely mapped to color-corrected 10-bit values in the monitor's native color space. However, if the conversion was done in 8 bits, (255,0,0) would be translated to (246,0,0), and there would now only be 247 available levels for the red channel instead of 256, degrading the displayed image quality. My question is: how does this work on Ubuntu? Let's say that I use Firefox (which is color-aware and uses ICC color profiles). Would I get 10-bit processing, thus preserving all levels of an 8-bit picture? What is the situation like for other applications, especially photo applications like Shotwell, Rawtherapee, Darktable, RawStudio, Photivo etc? Does Ubuntu differ from other operating systems (Linux and others) on this point?

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• Getting started on Large Projects

  - by Mercfh

  So I just graduated from my College with a B.S. in Comp. Science (although it was a good school, we're the only accredited CS department in our state.....for w/e that means lol) I feel like im a decent programmer, not amazing....but not terrible. Anyways I got my first job about 2 weeks ago, it's a pretty entry level job: firmware development/tester (I know I know people look down on testers...but I gotta start somewhere). Anyways there isn't a whole lot of coding to be had right now (mostly simple stuff) but here soon I have the option of helping out with development (which is what I want to do) Thing is....I have NEVER worked on a huge project. I mean in school sure we had "group" projects but nothing really big. So I'm not super familiar with HUGE classes and such (main language was C++)....Is this something I'll just get used to with time? Some fellow students were used to that with internships and such...but I never got that chance. My job was mostly a "one man job" kinda thing. Mostly little things. Plus in class we never did huge projects anyways. So how do you guys I guess "plan" out these things? Do you use a whiteboard and plan out classes and such....or what. Also...another worry of mine is that I have to use google......ALOT for examples of code, because sometimes I just don't get how something works. Is this normal? It makes me feel sorta.....stupid I guess. I mean "technically" i've had 4-5 years coding experience......but it really only feels like I had 2 years of REAL experience. If that makes any sense? Thanks

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• How is determined an impact of a requirement change on the existing code?

  - by MainMa

  Hi, How companies working on large projects evaluate an impact of a single modification on an existing code? Since my question is probably not very clear, here's an example: Let's take a sample business application which deals with tasks. In the database, each task has a state, 0 being "Pending", ... 5 - "Finished". A new requirement adds a new state, between 2nd and 3rd one. It means that: A constraint on the values 1 - 5 in the database must be changed, Business layer and code contracts must be changed to add a new state, Data access layer must be changed to take in account that, for example the state StateReady is now 6 instead of 5, etc. The application must implement a new state visually, add new controls for it, new localized strings for tool-tips, etc. When an application is written recently by one developer, it's more or less easy to predict every change to do. On the other hand, when an application was written for years by many people, no single person can anticipate every change immediately, without any investigation. So since this situation (such changes in requirements) is very frequent, I imagine there are already some clever techniques and ways to predict the impact. Is there any? Do you know any books which deal about this subject? Note: my question is not related to How do you deal with changing requirements? question. In fact, I'm not interested in evaluating the cost of a change, but rather the way to predict the parts of an application which will be concerned by the change. What will be those changes and how difficult they are really doesn't matter in my question.

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• How do I know if I am using Scrum methodologies?

  - by Jake

  When I first started at my current job, my purpose was to rewrite a massive excel-VBA workbook-application to C# Winforms because it was thought that the new C# app will fix all existing problems and have all the new features for a perfect world. If it were a direct port, in theory it would be easy as i just need to go through all the formulas, conditional formatting, validations, VBA etc. to understand it. However, that was not the case. Many of the new features are tightly dependant on business logic which I am unfamiliar with. As a solo programmer, the first year was spent solely on deciphering the excel workbook and writing the C# app. In theory, I had the business people to "help" me specify requirements, how GUI looks and work, and testing of the app etc; but in practice it is like a contant tsunami of feature creep. At the beginning of the second year I managed to convince the management that this is not going anywhere. I made them start from scratch with the excel-VBA. I have this "issue log" saved on the network, each time they found something they didn't like about the excel-VBA app, they will write it in there. I check the log daily and consolidate issues (in my mind) mainly into 2 groups: (1) requires massive change. (2) can be fixed in current version. For massive change issues, I make a copy of the latest excel-VBA and give it a new version number, then work on it whenever I can. For current version fixes, I make the changes in a few days to a week, and then immediately release it. I also ensure I update the same change in any in-progress massive change future versions. This has gone on for about 4 months and I feel it works great. I made many releases and solved many real issues, also understood the business logic more and more. However, my boss (non-IT trained) thinks what I am doing are just adhoc changes and that i am not looking at the "bigger picture". I am struggling to convince my boss that this works. So I hope to formalise my approach and maybe borrow a buzzword to confuse him. Incidentally, I read about Agile and SCRUM, about backlog and sprints. But it's all very vague to me still. QUESTION (finally): I want to tell him that this is SCRUM! But I want to hold my breath first and ask whether my current approach is considered SCRUM or SCRUM-like? How can I make it more SCRUM-like? Note that I have only myself, there's no project leader or teams.

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• Should one reject over-scoped projects?

  - by Little Child

  I spoke to my first potential client today and he told me about the requirements of his project - an Android app. He is a well-known designer / photographer in my country and now wants me to "convert the website into an app, custom-tailored". So the requirements, details stripped out, are as follows: eCommerce Aggregating all his content like videos, blogs, tweets, etc. into the app Live streaming any of his studio demos Augmented reality. So that people can see what his painting will look like on their wall before they buy it Taxi Sharing Now, for a freelance project, it seems too over-scoped. I am not saying that I cannot do it. I can. But let me be realistic: There is a steep learning curve when it comes to VR. I am not a tester. I have never white-box tested my own apps. I always black-box test. Since he is a renowned artist, something short of perfect might harm his public image So, I asked him for 2 weeks' worth of time before I give him the final answer. Now knowing whom to consult for advise, I am posting the question here. Although interesting and personally challenging, I am split-minded about accepting a project like this. I will be the only developer for this. Should one reject a project that seems to be over-scoped for one's own abilities?

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• Storing editable site content?

  - by hmp

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

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• Creating an in-house single source software development team

  - by alphadogg

  Our company wants to create a single department for all software development efforts (rather than having software development managed by each business unit). Business units would then "outsource" their software needs to this department. What would you setup as concerns/expectations that must be cleared before doing this? For example: Need agreement between units on how much actual time (FTE) is allocated to each unit Need agreement on scheduling of staff need agreement on request procedure if extra time is required by one party etc... Have you been in a situation like this as a manager of one unit destined to use this? If so, what were problems you experienced? What would you have or did implement? Same if you were the manager of the shared team. Please assume, for discussion, that the people concerned know that you can't swap devs in and out on a whim. I don't want to know the disadvantages of this approach; I know them. I want to anticipate issues and know how to mitigate the fallout.

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• How can I reduce the amount of time it takes to fully regression test an application ready for release?

  - by DrLazer

  An app I work on is being developed with a modified version of scrum. If you are not familiar with scrum, it's just an alternative approach to a more traditional watefall model, where a series of features are worked on for a set amount of time known as a sprint. The app is written in C# and makes use of WPF. We use Visual C# 2010 Express edition as an IDE. If we work on a sprint and add in a few new features, but do not plan to release until a further sprint is complete, then regression testing is not an issue as such. We just test the new features and give the app a good once over. However, if a release is planned that our customers can download - a full regression test is factored in. In the past this wasn't a big deal, it took 3 or 4 days and the devs simply fix up any bugs found in the regression phase, but now, as the app is getting larger and larger and incorporating more and more features, the regression is spanning out for weeks. I am interested in any methods that people know of or use that can decrease this time. At the moment the only ideas I have are to either start writing Unit Tests, which I have never fully tried out in a commercial environment, or to research the possibilty of any UI Automation API's or tools that would allow me to write a program to perform a series of batch tests. I know literally nothing about the possibilities of UI automation so any information would be valuable. I don't know that much about Unit testing either, how complicated can the tests be? Is it possible to get Unit tests to use the UI? Are there any other methods I should consider? Thanks for reading, and for any advice in advance.

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• How to educate business managers on the complexity of adding new features? [duplicate]

  - by Derrick Miller

  This question already has an answer here: How to educate business managers on the complexity of adding new features? [duplicate] 3 answers We maintain a web application for a client who demands that new features be added at a breakneck pace. We've done our best to keep up with their demands, and as a result the code base has grown exponentially. There are now so many modules, subsystems, controllers, class libraries, unit tests, APIs, etc. that it's starting to take more time to work through all of the complexity each time we add a new feature. We've also had to pull additional people in on the project to take over things like QA and staging, so the lead developers can focus on developing. Unfortunately, the client is becoming angry that the cost for each new feature is going up. They seem to expect that we can add new features ad infinitum and the cost of each feature will remain linear. I have repeatedly tried to explain to them that it doesn't work that way - that the code base expands in a fractal manner as all these features are added. I've explained that the best way to keep the cost down is to be judicious about which new features are really needed. But, they either don't understand, or they think I'm bullshitting them. They just sort of roll their eyes and get angry. They're all completely non-technical, and have no idea what does into writing software. Is there a way that I can explain this using business language, that might help them understand better? Are there any visualizations out there, that illustrate the growth of a code base over time? Any other suggestions on dealing with this client?

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• Reputation Management Online - What Do People Think of Your Business?

  Reputation management is a hot topic online and rightly so. Do you know who is saying what about your business online?

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