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• Cloud Apps News @#OOW12

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  All eyes were on Oracle this past week and the news cycle was in full swing. What better time to make some key announcements that were guaranteed to create buzz ... and so we did. The name of the game was Cloud! Here are the key Cloud announcements for Apps, which included Fusion Tap that enables mobility across all Cloud Apps, HCM customer momentum in the Cloud, and our very first ERP Cloud Services customer. Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPadOracle Fusion Tap - Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce - not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'"  "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." The entire release is available here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1855392 Customers Live on Oracle Fusion Human Capital ManagementOracle HCM Cloud Service Helps Power HR's Contribution to the Business "More than 25 of the 100-plus customers who have selected Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) are already live. Ardent Leisure, Peach Aviation, Toshiba Medical Systems and Zillow have deployed Oracle HCM Cloud Service and are using it to transform their HR operations. They join companies such as Principal Financial Group and Elizabeth Arden, who are already using Oracle HCM Cloud Service to help manage international growth and deliver pervasive, role-based, configurable solutions to their employees. With these recent go-lives, Oracle takes a leading position in successfully bringing live HCM customers in the cloud."  "As a technology company, Zillow looked to a partner who could scale with us. Zillow has gone live on Oracle HCM Cloud Service, which will give us the ability automate and streamline HR operations for our employees in the near future," said Sarah Bilton, Senior Director HR, Zillow. Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859573 Lending Club Selects Oracle ERP Cloud Service to Help Increase Insight and EfficienciesOracle ERP Cloud Service Provides an Open Architecture, Best-of-Breed Decision-Making, and Scalability in the Cloud "Lending Club, the leading platform for investing in and obtaining personal loans, has selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service to help improve decision-making and workflow, implement robust reporting, and take advantage of the inherent scalability and cost savings provided by the cloud. With more than 76,000 borrowers and 90,000 investors Lending Club utilizes technology and innovation to reduce the cost of traditional banking and offer borrowers better rates and investors better returns.  After an extensive search, Lending Club selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service due to the breadth and depth of capabilities and ongoing innovation of Oracle ERP Cloud Service, as well as Oracle's open architecture, industry leadership and commitment to partners." "Lending Club is an innovative, data-intensive, high-growth company and we needed a solution and partner that could match us," said Carrie Dolan, CFO, Lending Club. "We conducted a thorough review of our options, and Oracle ERP Cloud Service was the clear winner in terms of capabilities and business value as well as commitment to us as a customer." Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859020

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• Why are you doing this? [closed]

  - by NIcholas Lawson

  I am working on a story that I am going to be querying to several magazines in my hometown about this work that is being done by the AXR group. This is a group of people who have networked online and are working on developing a higher level syntax structure than CSS and HTML currently offer. I am covering this is as a story because I see potential in this as a human interest story in cosmopolitan society. I have been asked by the group to pose this question to you and would appreciate any and all comments you would have on the following ... To AXR: So when does the internet become finished? At what point does a computer scientist say to himself ... my job here is finished ... the internet is complete? When is the internet ready to be more about the display of content than the uploading of new websites or computer tech? You are embarking on upon a sixty year project every day you work with this internet, what drives you? Why are you spending your hard earned hours working on the code to this computer? I spend thirty hours a week online because I love the writing and I know what would make the internet better ... ease of use ... i know it is difficult to program but I see some very elegant solutions online ... in this early inception phase of your programming development for this HSS prototype ... I would like to know why I do not see you programmers asking questions such as ... What would make the end user's life the easiest when using this code? I know you can solve the problem but an evolution forward would be simple, not simple to a computer scientist but simple to use for a career janitor ... if you could solve the problem of alleviating the stress at using a the computer you could get better content out of the computer ... right now the main problem is that the best content is in the hands of the people least likely to use the computer and the more simple you make the computer to use ... the better the content collection will be in the long run ... That is not what I want to talk about though ... why are you writing code when you could be writing stories? I know the computer is worthless without content so I build content, I know the book is worthless without the combinations of words in them, i know the television is worthless without the television news anchor or the actor, what I want to know from you folks in a very journalistic sense is why are you even bothering to bother to write code for a machine that has only made our lives i would dare say less interesting. why are you feeding the beast your time when you could be writing stories or being an actor or musician or auto mechanic ... why code? why this machine? what do you love about it? what do you hate about it? what do you wonder about it? I want to know so that starting out I know how to further shape my questions with axr ... i want the full story ... i want the real answers ... and i want to know why you are doing this, it would make for great writing if you could elucidate on this point.

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• Where should you put constants and why?

  - by Tim Meyer

  In our mostly large applications, we usually have a only few locations for constants: One class for GUI and internal contstants (Tab Page titles, Group Box titles, calculation factors, enumerations) One class for database tables and columns (this part is generated code) plus readable names for them (manually assigned) One class for application messages (logging, message boxes etc) The constants are usually separated into different structs in those classes. In our C++ applications, the constants are only defined in the .h file and the values are assigned in the .cpp file. One of the advantages is that all strings etc are in one central place and everybody knows where to find them when something must be changed. This is especially something project managers seem to like as people come and go and this way everybody can change such trivial things without having to dig into the application's structure. Also, you can easily change the title of similar Group Boxes / Tab Pages etc at once. Another aspect is that you can just print that class and give it to a non-programmer who can check if the captions are intuitive, and if messages to the user are too detailed or too confusing etc. However, I see certain disadvantages: Every single class is tightly coupled to the constants classes Adding/Removing/Renaming/Moving a constant requires recompilation of at least 90% of the application (Note: Changing the value doesn't, at least for C++). In one of our C++ projects with 1500 classes, this means around 7 minutes of compilation time (using precompiled headers; without them it's around 50 minutes) plus around 10 minutes of linking against certain static libraries. Building a speed optimized release through the Visual Studio Compiler takes up to 3 hours. I don't know if the huge amount of class relations is the source but it might as well be. You get driven into temporarily hard-coding strings straight into code because you want to test something very quickly and don't want to wait 15 minutes just for that test (and probably every subsequent one). Everybody knows what happens to the "I will fix that later"-thoughts. Reusing a class in another project isn't always that easy (mainly due to other tight couplings, but the constants handling doesn't make it easier.) Where would you store constants like that? Also what arguments would you bring in order to convince your project manager that there are better concepts which also comply with the advantages listed above? Feel free to give a C++-specific or independent answer. PS: I know this question is kind of subjective but I honestly don't know of any better place than this site for this kind of question. Update on this project I have news on the compile time thing: Following Caleb's and gbjbaanb's posts, I split my constants file into several other files when I had time. I also eventually split my project into several libraries which was now possible much easier. Compiling this in release mode showed that the auto-generated file which contains the database definitions (table, column names and more - more than 8000 symbols) and builds up certain hashes caused the huge compile times in release mode. Deactivating MSVC's optimizer for the library which contains the DB constants now allowed us to reduce the total compile time of your Project (several applications) in release mode from up to 8 hours to less than one hour! We have yet to find out why MSVC has such a hard time optimizing these files, but for now this change relieves a lot of pressure as we no longer have to rely on nightly builds only. That fact - and other benefits, such as less tight coupling, better reuseability etc - also showed that spending time splitting up the "constants" wasn't such a bad idea after all ;-)

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• Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

  - by Job

  I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some of them into my C# code at a previous job, and luckily it was easy to write C# code in a more functional style. At my new job we use Python and multiple inheritance is all the rage. My co-workers are very smart but they have to produce code fast given the nature of the company. I am learning both the tools and the codebase, but the architecture itself slows me down as well. I have not written the existing class hierarchy (neither would I be able to remember everything about it), and so, when I started adding a fairly small feature, I realized that I had to read a lot of code in the process. At the surface the code is neatly organized and split into small functions/methods and not copy-paste-repetitive, but the flip side of being not repetitive is that there is some magic functionality hidden somewhere in the hierarchy chain that magically glues things together and does work on my behalf, but it is very hard to find and follow. I had to fire up a profiler and run it through several examples and plot the execution graph as well as step through a debugger a few times, search the code for some substring and just read pages at the time. I am pretty sure that once I am done, my resulting code will be short and neatly organized, and yet not very readable. What I write feels declarative, as if I was writing an XML file that drives some other magic engine, except that there is no clear documentation on what the XML should look like and what the engine does except for the existing examples that I can read as well as the source code for the 'engine'. There has got to be a better way. IMO using composition over inheritance can help quite a bit. That way the computation will be linear rather than jumping all over the hierarchy tree. Whenever the functionality does not quite fit into an inheritance model, it will need to be mangled to fit in, or the entire inheritance hierarchy will need to be refactored/rebalanced, sort of like an unbalanced binary tree needs reshuffling from time to time in order to improve the average seek time. As I mentioned before, my co-workers are very smart; they just have been doing things a certain way and probably have an ability to hold a lot of unrelated crap in their head at once. I want to convince them to give composition and functional as opposed to OOP approach a try. To do that, I need to find some very good material. I do not think that a SCIP lecture or one by Rich Hickey will do - I am afraid it will be flagged down as too academic. Then, simple examples of Dog and Frog and AddressBook classes do not really connivence one way or the other - they show how inheritance can be converted to composition but not why it is truly and objectively better. What I am looking for is some real-world example of code that has been written with a lot of inheritance, then hit a wall and re-written in a different style that uses composition. Perhaps there is a blog or a chapter. I am looking for something that can summarize and illustrate the sort of pain that I am going through. I already have been throwing the phrase "composition over inheritance" around, but it was not received as enthusiastically as I had hoped. I do not want to be perceived as a new guy who likes to complain and bash existing code while looking for a perfect approach while not contributing fast enough. At the same time, my gut is convinced that inheritance is often the instrument of evil and I want to show a better way in a near future. Have you stumbled upon any great resources that can help me?

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• Test your internet connection - Emtel Fixed Broadband

  Already at the begin of April, I had a phone conversation with my representative at Emtel Ltd. about some upcoming issues due to the ongoing construction work in my neighbourhood. Unfortunately, they finally raised the house two levels above ours, and of course this has to have a negative impact on the visibility between the WiMAX outdoor unit on the roof and the aimed access point at Medine. So, today I had a technical team here to do a site survey and to come up with potential solutions. Short version: It doesn't look good after all. The site survey Well, the two technicians did their work properly, even re-arranged the antenna to check the connection with another end point down at La Preneuse. But no improvements. Looks like we are out of luck since the construction next door hasn't finished yet and at the moment, it even looks like they are planning to put at least one more level on top. I really wonder about the sanity of the responsible bodies at the local district council. But that's another story. Anyway, the outdoor unit was once again pointed towards Medine and properly fixed with new cable guides (air from the sea and rust...). Both of them did a good job and fine-tuned the reception signal to a mere 3 over 9; compared to the original 7 over 9 I had before the daily terror started. The site survey has been done, and now it's up to Emtel to come up with (better) solutions. Well, I wouldn't mind to have an unlimited, symmetric 3G/UMTS or even LTE connection. Let's see what they can do... Testing the connection There are several online sites available which offer you to check certain aspects of your internet connection. Personally, I'm used to speedtest.net and it works very well. I think it is good and necessary to check your connection from time to time, and only a couple of days ago, I posted the following on Emtel's wall at Facebook (21.05.2013 - 14:06 hrs): Dear Emtel, could you eventually provide an answer on the miserable results of SpeedTest? I chose Rose Hill (Hosted by Emtel Ltd.) as testing endpoint... Sadly, no response to this. Seems that the marketing department is not willing to deal with customers on Facebook. Okay, over at speedtest.net you can use their Flash-based test suite to check your connection to quite a number of servers of different providers world-wide. It's actually very interesting to see the results for different end points and to compare them to each other. The results Following are the results of Rose Hill (hosted by Emtel) and respectively Frankfurt, Germany (hosted by Vodafone DE): Speedtest.net result of 30.05.2013 between Flic en Flac and Rose Hill, Mauritius (Emtel - Fixed Broadband) Speedtest.net result of 30.05.2013 between Flic en Flac and Frankfurt, Germany (Emtel - Fixed Broadband) Luckily, the results are quite similar in terms of connection speed; which is good. I'm currently on a WiMAX tariff called 'Classic Browsing 2', or Fixed Broadband as they call it now, which provides a symmetric line of 768 Kbps (or roughly 0.75 Mbps). In terms of downloads or uploads this means that I would be able to transfer files in either direction with approximately 96 KB/s. Frankly speaking, thanks to compression, my choice of browser and operating system I usually exceed this value and I have download rates up to 120 KB/s - not too bad after all. Only the ping times are a little bit of concern. Due to the difference in distance, or better said based on the number of hubs between the endpoints, they indicate the amount of time that it takes to send a package from your machine to the remote server and get a response back. A lower value is better, and usually the ping is less than 300 ms between Mauritius and Europe. The alternatives in Mauritius Not sure whether I should note this done because for my requirements there are no alternatives to Emtel WiMAX at the moment. It would be great to have your opinion on the situation of internet connectivity in Mauritius. Are there really alternatives? And if so, what are the conditions?

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• Juggling with JDKs on Apple OS X

  - by Blueberry Coder

  I recently got a shiny new MacBook Pro to help me support our ADF Mobile customers. It is really a wonderful piece of hardware, although I am still adjusting to Apple's peculiar keyboard layout. Did you know, for example, that the « delete » key actually performs a « backspace »? But I disgress... As you may know, ADF Mobile development still requires JDeveloper 11gR2, which in turn runs on Java 6. On the other hand, JDeveloper 12c needs JDK 7. I wanted to install both versions, and wasn't sure how to do it.   If you remember, I explained in a previous blog entry how to install JDeveloper 11gR2 on Apple's OS X. The trick was to use the /usr/libexec/java_home command in order to invoke the proper JDK. In this case, I could have done the same thing; the two JDKs can coexist without any problems, since they install in completely different locations. But I wanted more than just installing JDeveloper. I wanted to be able to select my JDK when using the command line as well. On Windows, this is easy, since I keep all my JDKs in a central location. I simply have to move to the appropriate folder or type the folder name in the command I want to execute. Problem is, on OS X, the paths to the JDKs are... let's say convoluted.  Here is the one for Java 6. /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home The Java 7 path is not better, just different. /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home Intuitive, isn't it? Clearly, I needed something better... On OS X, the default command shell is bash. It is possible to configure the shell environment by creating a file named « .profile » in a user's home folder. Thus, I created such a file and put the following inside: export JAVA_7_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v1.7) export JAVA_6_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v1.6) export JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_7_HOME alias java6='export JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_6_HOME' alias java7='export JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_7_HOME'  The first two lines retrieve the current paths for Java 7 and Java 6 and store them in two environment variables. The third line marks Java 7 as the default. The last two lines create command aliases. Thus, when I type java6, the value for JAVA_HOME is set to JAVA_6_HOME, for example.  I now have an environment which works even better than the one I have on Windows, since I can change my active JDK on a whim. Here a sample, fresh from my terminal window. fdesbien-mac:~ fdesbien$ java6 fdesbien-mac:~ fdesbien$ java -version java version "1.6.0_65" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_65-b14-462-11M4609) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.65-b04-462, mixed mode) fdesbien-mac:~ fdesbien$ fdesbien-mac:~ fdesbien$ java7 fdesbien-mac:~ fdesbien$ java -version java version "1.7.0_45" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_45-b18) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.45-b08, mixed mode) fdesbien-mac:~ fdesbien$ Et voilà! Maximum flexibility without downsides, just I like it. 

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• Drive

  - by erikanollwebb

  Picking up where we left off, let's summarize.  People have both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and whether reward works depends a bit on what you are rewarding.  Rewards don't decreased intrinsic motivation provided you know what you are getting and why, and when you reward high performance.  But as anyone who has watched the great animation of Dan Pink's TED talk knows, even that doesn't tell the whole story.  Although people may not be less intrinsically motivated by rewards, the impact of rewards on actual performance is a really odd questions.  Larger rewards don't necessarily lead to better performance and in fact, some times lead to worse performance.  Pink argues that people are driven and engaged when they have autonomy, mastery and purpose.  If they can self-direct and can be good at what they do and have a sense of purpose for what they are doing, they show the highest engagement.   (Personally, I would add progress to the list.  My experience is that if you have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose but don't get a feeling that you are making any progress day to day, your level of engagement will drop rapidly.) So Pink is arguing if we could set up work so that people have a sense of purpose in what they do, have some autonomy and the ability to build mastery, you'll have better companies.  And that's probably true in a lot of ways, but there's a problem.  Sometimes, you have things you need to do but maybe you don't really want to do.  Or that you don't really see the point of.  Or that doesn't have a lot of value to you at the end of the day.  Then what does a company do?  Let me give you an example.  I've worked on some customer relationship management (CRM) tools over the years and done user research with sales people to try and understand their world.  And there's a funny thing about sales tools in CRM.  Sometimes what the company wants a sales person to do is at odds with what a sales person thinks is useful to them.  For example, companies would like to know who a sales person talked to at the company and the person level.  They'd like to know what they talked about, when, and whether the deals closed.  Those metrics would help you build a better sales force and understand what works and what does not.  But sales people see that as busy work that doesn't add any value to their ability to sell.  So you have a sales person who has a lot of autonomy, they like to do things that improve their ability to sell and they usually feel a sense of purpose--the group is trying to make a quota!  That quota will help the company succeed!  But then you have tasks that they don't think fit into that equation.  The company would like to know more about what makes them successful and get metrics on what they do and frankly, have a record of what they do in case they leave, but the sales person thinks it's a waste of time to put all that information into a sales application. They have drive, just not for all the things the company would like.   You could punish them for not entering the information, or you could try to reward them for doing it, but you still have an imperfect model of engagement.  Ideally, you'd like them to want to do it.  If they want to do it, if they are motivated to do it, then the company wins.  If *something* about it is rewarding to them, then they are more engaged and more likely to do it.  So the question becomes, how do you create that interest to do something?

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• Why is x=x++ undefined?

  - by ugoren

  It's undefined because the it modifies x twice between sequence points. The standard says it's undefined, therefore it's undefined. That much I know. But why? My understanding is that forbidding this allows compilers to optimize better. This could have made sense when C was invented, but now seems like a weak argument. If we were to reinvent C today, would we do it this way, or can it be done better? Or maybe there's a deeper problem, that makes it hard to define consistent rules for such expressions, so it's best to forbid them? So suppose we were to reinvent C today. I'd like to suggest simple rules for expressions such as x=x++, which seem to me to work better than the existing rules. I'd like to get your opinion on the suggested rules compared to the existing ones, or other suggestions. Suggested Rules: Between sequence points, order of evaluation is unspecified. Side effects take place immediately. There's no undefined behavior involved. Expressions evaluate to this value or that, but surely won't format your hard disk (strangely, I've never seen an implementation where x=x++ formats the hard disk). Example Expressions x=x++ - Well defined, doesn't change x. First, x is incremented (immediately when x++ is evaluated), then it's old value is stored in x. x++ + ++x - Increments x twice, evaluates to 2*x+2. Though either side may be evaluated first, the result is either x + (x+2) (left side first) or (x+1) + (x+1) (right side first). x = x + (x=3) - Unspecified, x set to either x+3 or 6. If the right side is evaluated first, it's x+3. It's also possible that x=3 is evaluated first, so it's 3+3. In either case, the x=3 assignment happens immediately when x=3 is evaluated, so the value stored is overwritten by the other assignment. x+=(x=3) - Well defined, sets x to 6. You could argue that this is just shorthand for the expression above. But I'd say that += must be executed after x=3, and not in two parts (read x, evaluate x=3, add and store new value). What's the Advantage? Some comments raised this good point. It's not that I'm after the pleasure of using x=x++ in my code. It's a strange and misleading expression. What I want is to be able to understand complicated expressions. Normally, a complicated expression is no more than the sum of its parts. If you understand the parts and the operators combining them, you can understand the whole. C's current behavior seems to deviate from this principle. One assignment plus another assignment suddenly doesn't make two assignments. Today, when I look at x=x++, I can't say what it does. With my suggested rules, I can, by simply examining its components and their relations.

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• Optimal Data Structure for our own API

  - by vermiculus

  I'm in the early stages of writing an Emacs major mode for the Stack Exchange network; if you use Emacs regularly, this will benefit you in the end. In order to minimize the number of calls made to Stack Exchange's API (capped at 10000 per IP per day) and to just be a generally responsible citizen, I want to cache the information I receive from the network and store it in memory, waiting to be accessed again. I'm really stuck as to what data structure to store this information in. Obviously, it is going to be a list. However, as with any data structure, the choice must be determined by what data is being stored and what how it will be accessed. What, I would like to be able to store all of this information in a single symbol such as stack-api/cache. So, without further ado, stack-api/cache is a list of conses keyed by last update: `(<csite> <csite> <csite>) where <csite> would be (1362501715 . <site>) At this point, all we've done is define a simple association list. Of course, we must go deeper. Each <site> is a list of the API parameter (unique) followed by a list questions: `("codereview" <cquestion> <cquestion> <cquestion>) Each <cquestion> is, you guessed it, a cons of questions with their last update time: `(1362501715 <question>) (1362501720 . <question>) <question> is a cons of a question structure and a list of answers (again, consed with their last update time): `(<question-structure> <canswer> <canswer> <canswer> and ` `(1362501715 . <answer-structure>) This data structure is likely most accurately described as a tree, but I don't know if there's a better way to do this considering the language, Emacs Lisp (which isn't all that different from the Lisp you know and love at all). The explicit conses are likely unnecessary, but it helps my brain wrap around it better. I'm pretty sure a <csite>, for example, would just turn into (<epoch-time> <api-param> <cquestion> <cquestion> ...) Concerns: Does storing data in a potentially huge structure like this have any performance trade-offs for the system? I would like to avoid storing extraneous data, but I've done what I could and I don't think the dataset is that large in the first place (for normal use) since it's all just human-readable text in reasonable proportion. (I'm planning on culling old data using the times at the head of the list; each inherits its last-update time from its children and so-on down the tree. To what extent this cull should take place: I'm not sure.) Does storing data like this have any performance trade-offs for that which must use it? That is, will set and retrieve operations suffer from the size of the list? Do you have any other suggestions as to what a better structure might look like?

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• My Favorite Free Windows Phone Twitter App

  - by Tim Murphy

  Windows Phone 7 has been out for about two years now.  In that time I have switched back and forth with different free Twitter apps.  Mostly the has been because someone has mentioned one or another that they like.  I figured I would give a quick run down of what I felt were the pros and cons of each.  These are only the ones that I have used and your mileage may vary.  So here we go. WP7 Built-In Twitter Functionality While it is great that Microsoft put this functionality in, it is extremely limited in usefulness.  Some apps leverage it to allow you to share pictures or information they contain.  In all though, I don’t use it unless it is the quickest way to get something out. Official Twitter App The official Twitter app isn’t a very big step up from the phone functionality.  It gives you a better timeline view and better attachment handling, but it makes you bounce to a browser page to see images that are linked to a tweet. TweetCaster This was my main Twitter app for quite a while.  It is the only one with InstaPaper integration so that you can save you a tweet and review it later.  My main problem is that it crashes too much when it can’t find a connection.  It also only previews yfrog and twitpic images and only once you go to the detail of a tweet.  Other than that it is a solid Twitter client. moTweets This is my current favorite. It has nice image display in your timeline which I have not seen on any of the other apps.  There are two modes that you can use with this app.  The first is standard to most Twitter apps that allows you to navigate to a tweet and do the usual operations.  The second is what they call Quick Buttons.  In this case you do not see the content of the tweet but go straight to the let’s get something done stage.  It is an interesting take.  I do miss the Instapaper integration and it has a tendency to show a blank timeline list once in a while after you view detail entry.  If you scroll the list it restore your timeline, but you lose you place and are put to the first entry. Seesmic I am not very fond of this app.  The first thing is that it makes you pick a “Space” when you enter the app.  This is really “which account do you want to see”.  On top of that it does not show who retweeted an entry in your timeline and then only tells you how many people RT the post when you look at the detail.  There is a Speak feature that will read you a single tweet, but you have to navigate to the tweet and then to a menu to make it work.  We will have to see if this gets better with the features in Windows Phone 8.  Other than that it is another basic feature app.  Summary In the end I am sticking with moTweets.  I would appreciate it if they added the Instapaper capability and fixed the one bug.  If they did that I would be really happy with the product. del.icio.us Tags: Twitter,Windows Phone 7,WP7,TweetCaster,moTweets,Seesmic

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• Should an Event that has no arguments define its own custom EventArgs or simply use System.EventArgs

  - by Mike Rosenblum

  I have an event that is currently defined with no event arguments. That is, the EventArgs it sends is EventArgs.Empty. In this case, it is simplest to declare my Event handler as: EventHandler<System.EventArgs> MyCustomEvent; I do not plan on adding any event arguments to this event, but it is possible that any code could need to change in the future. Therefore, I am leaning towards having all my events always create an empty event args type that inheretis from System.EventArgs, even if there are no event args currently needed. Something like this: public class MyCustomEventArgs : EventArgs { } And then my event definition becomes the following: EventHandler<MyCustomEventArgs> MyCustomEvent; So my question is this: is it better to define my own MyCustomEventArgs, even if it does not add anything beyond inheriting from System.EventArgs, so that event arguments could be added in the future more easily? Or is it better to explicitly define my event as returning System.EventArgs, so that it is clearer to the user that there are no extra event args? I am leaning towards creating custom event arguments for all my events, even if the event arguments are empty. But I was wondering if others thought that making it clearer to the user that the event arguments are empty would be better? Much thanks in advance, Mike

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• Will JSON replace XML as a data format?

  - by 13ren

  When I first saw XML, I thought it was basically a representation of trees. Then I thought: the important thing isn't that it's a particularly good representation of trees, but that it is one that everyone agrees on. Just like ASCII. And once established, it's hard to displace due to network effects. The new alternative would have to be much better (maybe 10 times better) to displace it. Of course, ASCII has been (mostly) replaced by Unicode, for internationalization. According to google trends, XML has a x43 lead, but is declining - while JSON grows. Will JSON replace XML as a data format? (edited) for which tasks? for which programmers/industries? NOTES: S-expressions (from lisp) are another representation of trees, but which has not gained mainstream adoption. There are many, many other proposals, such as YAML and Protocol Buffers (for binary formats). I can see JSON dominating the space of communicating with client-side AJAX (AJAJ?), and this possibly could back-spread into other systems transitively. XML, being based on SGML, is better than JSON as a document format. I'm interested in XML as a data format. XML has an established ecosystem that JSON lacks, especially ways of defining formats (XML Schema) and transforming them (XSLT). XML also has many other standards, esp for web services - but their weight and complexity can arguably count against XML, and make people want a fresh start (similar to "web services" beginning as a fresh start over CORBA).

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• How to organize the work when project needs to be re-implemented due to poor code quality?

  - by Dmitriy Nagirnyak

  Hi, I have joined a very small where one main developer has been buiding the web app (.NET 4.0) during ~6 months. The project should be delivered within next 2 months. After first look at the code I can say that I would never allow it to go to production (things like catch { }, not tests at all with WebForms etc). So the code quality is incredibly low. My task is to improve that and still deliver the solution. So I plan to start with unit testing and MVC2 reimplementing most of the functionality (though using some of the existing code). I estimate that I will need about 6 weeks to catch up with the current progress and be on te same functionality level as the application will be in 6 months. The problem is that the main developer who has been working on the project does not seem to be very 'professional' and skillful (he seems to be really starting in IT and many basic things are unknown to him). It will take significant amount of time and effort to educate him how to do the proper testing, development and apply some patterns. I am ready to take responsibility for the reimplemnting the application but at the same time I don't want the main developer to be on idle but as he won't be able to significantly contribute to the better-world project at this stage I am not sure what would the best way to keep productivity high for both of us. Currently I think following solution is good enough: He proceeds doing what he does until I will catch up with him and then start working on a new project together. The problem is that of course this approach is not very productive as one developer will do better-world project while the other will proceed with what he did, effectively doing similar tasks. Can you suggest how we could better organise the work together in order to be most efficient for the overall project? Thanks, Dmitriy.

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• Finding text orientation in image (angle for rotation)

  - by maximus

  There is an image captured by camera, and I need to find the angle of the text in order to rotate it to make the image better for OCR results. So I know that the fourier transform can be used for that purpose, My question is, does it really gives good results or may be it is better to use something different than that? Can you tell me if there is a good method for this purpose? I am afraid that not every image containing the text will give me a good result after using fourier transform method. Actually, if I make like it is written here: link text (see the part related with an example of text image) calculating the logarithm of the magnitude of the Fourier transform of image with text and then thresholding it, I get that points and I can calculate the line approximately passing through them, and after getting the line calculate the angle, and then make an affine transform, But, what if I do not get a good result every time using this method , and make a false transform? Any ideas please to judge wether the result is correct or not, or may be another method is better? The binary image can contain noise, even if there are not so much of them, the angle found as a result can be not accurate.

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• Download-from-PyPI-and-install script

  - by zubin71

  Hello, I have written a script which fetches a distribution, given the URL. After downloading the distribution, it compares the md5 hashes to verify that the file has been downloaded properly. This is how I do it. def download(package_name, url): import urllib2 downloader = urllib2.urlopen(url) package = downloader.read() package_file_path = os.path.join('/tmp', package_name) package_file = open(package_file_path, "w") package_file.write(package) package_file.close() I wonder if there is any better(more pythonic) way to do what I have done using the above code snippet. Also, once the package is downloaded this is what is done: def install_package(package_name): if package_name.endswith('.tar'): import tarfile tarfile.open('/tmp/' + package_name) tarfile.extract('/tmp') import shlex import subprocess installation_cmd = 'python %ssetup.py install' %('/tmp/'+package_name) subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(installation_cmd) As there are a number of imports for the install_package method, i wonder if there is a better way to do this. I`d love to have some constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement. Also, I have only implemented the install_package method for .tar files; would there be a better manner by which I could install .tar.gz and .zip files too without having to write seperate methods for each of these?

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• List of objects or parallel arrays of properties?

  - by Headcrab

  The question is, basically: what would be more preferable, both performance-wise and design-wise - to have a list of objects of a Python class or to have several lists of numerical properties? I am writing some sort of a scientific simulation which involves a rather large system of interacting particles. For simplicity, let's say we have a set of balls bouncing inside a box so each ball has a number of numerical properties, like x-y-z-coordinates, diameter, mass, velocity vector and so on. How to store the system better? Two major options I can think of are: to make a class "Ball" with those properties and some methods, then store a list of objects of the class, e. g. [b1, b2, b3, ...bn, ...], where for each bn we can access bn.x, bn.y, bn.mass and so on; to make an array of numbers for each property, then for each i-th "ball" we can access it's 'x' coordinate as xs[i], 'y' coordinate as ys[i], 'mass' as masses[i] and so on; To me it seems that the first option represents a better design. The second option looks somewhat uglier, but might be better in terms of performance, and it could be easier to use it with numpy and scipy, which I try to use as much as I can. I am still not sure if Python will be fast enough, so it may be necessary to rewrite it in C++ or something, after initial prototyping in Python. Would the choice of data representation be different for C/C++? What about a hybrid approach, e.g. Python with C++ extension?

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• Why avoid increment ("++") and decrement ("--") operators in JavaScript?

  - by artlung

  I'm a big fan of Douglas Crockford's writing on JavaScript, particularly his book JavaScript: The Good Parts. It's made me a better JavaScript programmer and a better programmer in general. One of his tips for his jslint tool is this : ++ and -- The ++ (increment) and -- (decrement) operators have been known to contribute to bad code by encouraging excessive trickiness. They are second only to faulty architecture in enabling to viruses and other security menaces. There is a plusplus option that prohibits the use of these operators. This has always struck my gut as "yes, that makes sense," but has annoyed me when I've needed a looping condition and can't figure out a better way to control the loop than a while( a < 10 )do { a++ } or for (var i=0;i<10;i++) { } and use jslint. It's challenged me to write it differently. I also know in the distant past using things, in say PHP like $foo[$bar++] has gotten me in trouble with off-by-one errors. Are there C-like languages or other languages with similarities that that lack the "++" and "--" syntax or handle it differently? Are there other rationales for avoiding "++" and "--" that I might be missing? UPDATE -- April 9, 2010: In the video Crockford on JavaScript -- Part 5: The End of All Things, Douglas Crockford addresses the ++ issue more directly and with more detail. It appears at 1:09:00 in the timeline. Worth a watch.

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• Questions about the MVC architecture

  - by ah123

  I started coding a considerably complicated web application, and it became quite a mess. So I figured I'd try to organize it in a better way. MVC seemed appropriate. I've never used MVC before, and researching about it I'm trying to consolidate a better perception of it (and my questions obviously reflect what I think I've learned so far). My questions are slightly JavaScript oriented: What object should make "AJAX" requests? The Controller or the Model? (seperation -- should the Model just store/manipulate the data, should it not care/know where the data came from, or should it be the one fetching it?) Should the Model call View functions providing them with data as arguments or should the View query (reference) the Model within itself? (seperation principles in mind, "the View shouldn't care/know where it gets the data from" -- is that correct?) In general, should the View "know" of the Model's existance, and vice-versa? Is the Controller the only thing gluing them together or is that simply incorrect? (I really doubt that statement is generally correct) There's a good chance I'd want to port this into a desktop/mobile application, so I would like to seperate components in a way that will allow me to achieve that task, replacing the current source of the data, HTTP requests, with DB access, and replacing the View. Maybe every approach that I've asked about is still "valid" MVC and it's just up to me to choose. I understand that nothing is set in stone, I'm just trying to have a (better) general idea in my head.

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• Got a table of people, who I want to link to each other, many-to-many, with the links being bidirect

  - by dflock

  Imagine you live in very simplified example land - and imagine that you've got a table of people in your MySQL database: create table person ( person_id int, name text ) select * from person; +-------------------------------+ | person_id | name | +-------------------------------+ | 1 | Alice | | 2 | Bob | | 3 | Carol | +-------------------------------+ and these people need to collaborate/work together, so you've got a link table which links one person record to another: create table person__person ( person__person_id int, person_id int, other_person_id int ) This setup means that links between people are uni-directional - i.e. Alice can link to Bob, without Bob linking to Alice and, even worse, Alice can link to Bob and Bob can link to Alice at the same time, in two separate link records. As these links represent working relationships, in the real world they're all two-way mutual relationships. The following are all possible in this setup: select * from person__person; +---------------------+-----------+--------------------+ | person__person_id | person_id | other_person_id | +---------------------+-----------+--------------------+ | 1 | 1 | 2 | | 2 | 2 | 1 | | 3 | 2 | 2 | | 4 | 3 | 1 | +---------------------+-----------+--------------------+ For example, with person__person_id = 4 above, when you view Carol's (person_id = 3) profile, you should see a relationship with Alice (person_id = 1) and when you view Alice's profile, you should see a relationship with Carol, even though the link goes the other way. I realize that I can do union and distinct queries and whatnot to present the relationships as mutual in the UI, but is there a better way? I've got a feeling that there is a better way, one where this issue would neatly melt away by setting up the database properly, but I can't see it. Anyone got a better idea?

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• How to build Graceful Degradation AJAX web page?

  - by Morgan Cheng

  I want to build web page with "Graceful Degradation". That is, the web page functions even javascript is disabled. Now I have to make design decision on the format of AJAX response. If javascript is disabled, each HTTP request to server will generate HTML as response. The browser refreshes with the returned HTML. That's fine. If javascript is enabled, each AJAX HTTP request to server will generate ... well, JSON or HTML. If it is HTML, it is easy to implement. Just have javascript to replace part of page with the returned HTML. And, in server side, not much code change is needed. If it is JSON, then I have to implement JSON-to-html logic in javascript again which is almost duplicate of server side logic. Duplication is evil. I really don't like it. The benefit is that the bandwidth usage is better than HTML, which brings better performance. So, what's the best solution to Graceful Degradation? AJAX request better to return JSON or HTML?

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• Linear feedback shift register?

  - by Mattia Gobbi

  Lately I bumped repeatedly into the concept of LFSR, that I find quite interesting because of its links with different fields and also fascinating in itself. It took me some effort to understand, the final help was this really good page, much better than the (at first) cryptic wikipedia entry. So I wanted to write some small code for a program that worked like a LFSR. To be more precise, that somehow showed how a LFSR works. Here's the cleanest thing I could come up with after some lenghtier attempts (Python): def lfsr(seed, taps): sr, xor = seed, 0 while 1: for t in taps: xor += int(sr[t-1]) if xor%2 == 0.0: xor = 0 else: xor = 1 print xor sr, xor = str(xor) + sr[:-1], 0 print sr if sr == seed: break lfsr('11001001', (8,7,6,1)) #example I named "xor" the output of the XOR function, not very correct. However, this is just meant to show how it circles through its possible states, in fact you noticed the register is represented by a string. Not much logical coherence. This can be easily turned into a nice toy you can watch for hours (at least I could :-) def lfsr(seed, taps): import time sr, xor = seed, 0 while 1: for t in taps: xor += int(sr[t-1]) if xor%2 == 0.0: xor = 0 else: xor = 1 print xor print time.sleep(0.75) sr, xor = str(xor) + sr[:-1], 0 print sr print time.sleep(0.75) Then it struck me, what use is this in writing software? I heard it can generate random numbers; is it true? how? So, it would be nice if someone could: explain how to use such a device in software development come up with some code, to support the point above or just like mine to show different ways to do it, in any language Also, as theres not much didactic stuff around about this piece of logic and digital circuitry, it would be nice if this could be a place for noobies (like me) to get a better understanding of this thing, or better, to understand what it is and how it can be useful when writing software. Should have made it a community wiki? That said, if someone feels like golfing... you're welcome.

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• What is the best prctice for using security in JAX-WS

  - by kislo_metal

  Here is scenario : I have some web services (JAX-WS) that need to be secured. Currently for authentication needs I providing addition SecurityWService that give authorized user some userid & sessionid that is need to be described in request to other services. It would be more better to use some java security. We have many of them but could not defined what is better to use. Q1 : It is understand that I should use SSL in transport layer, but what should I use for user authorization. Is there is better way to establishing session, validating user etc. ? Here is some key description : Most web services clents is php based. I am using jax-ws implementation as a Stateless session EJB. Deploying to glassfish v3. Q2: what is the best framework / technology for user authorization / authentication in case of using JSF 2.0 and ejb3.1 technologies ( Realms? WSIT? )? Thank You!

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• how to implement a sparse_vector class

  - by Neil G

  I am implementing a templated sparse_vector class. It's like a vector, but it only stores elements that are different from their default constructed value. So, sparse_vector would store the index-value pairs for all indices whose value is not T(). I am basing my implementation on existing sparse vectors in numeric libraries-- though mine will handle non-numeric types T as well. I looked at boost::numeric::ublas::coordinate_vector and eigen::SparseVector. Both store: size_t* indices_; // a dynamic array T* values_; // a dynamic array int size_; int capacity_; Why don't they simply use vector<pair<size_t, T>> data_; My main question is what are the pros and cons of both systems, and which is ultimately better? The vector of pairs manages size_ and capacity_ for you, and simplifies the accompanying iterator classes; it also has one memory block instead of two, so it incurs half the reallocations, and might have better locality of reference. The other solution might search more quickly since the cache lines fill up with only index data during a search. There might also be some alignment advantages if T is an 8-byte type? It seems to me that vector of pairs is the better solution, yet both containers chose the other solution. Why?

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• implementing stretchable dialog borders in iphone sdk

  - by Joey

  Hi, I want to implement dialog borders that scale to the size I require the dialog to be. Perhaps there is a better more conventional name for this sort of thing. If there is, if someone would edit the title, that'd be great. Anyhow, I'd like to do this so I can have dialogs of any size without the visual artifacts that come with scaling border art to small, large, or wacky unproportional dimentions. I have a few ideas on how this is done, but am not sure which is better for iphone. I have a few questions. 1) Should I make a containing view object that basically overloads its drawRect method and draws the images where they should be at their appropriate scale when the method is called, or should I main a containing view object that simply contains 8 UIImageViews? I suspect the latter approach won't work if I need to actively scale the resulting dialog class like in an animation. 1b) If overloading drawRect is the way to go, does someone have some sample code or a link to an example that demonstrates drawing an image directly from drawRect()? 2) Is it generally better to create a) a 3 x 3 image where the segments are in their appropriate 1x1 grid of the image? If so, is it simple to draw from a portion of this image onto my target view in drawRect (if the former assumption is correct that I should use drawRect)? b) The pieces separately in 8 different files?

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• In Java it seems Public constructors are always a bad coding practice

  - by Adam Gent

  This maybe a controversial question and may not be suited for this forum (so I will not be insulted if you choose to close this question). It seems given the current capabilities of Java there is no reason to make constructors public ... ever. Friendly, private, protected are OK but public no. It seems that its almost always a better idea to provide a public static method for creating objects. Every Java Bean serialization technology (JAXB, Jackson, Spring etc...) can call a protected or private no-arg constructor. My questions are: I have never seen this practice decreed or written down anywhere? Maybe Bloch mentions it but I don't own is book. Is there a use case other than perhaps not being super DRY that I missed? EDIT: I explain why static methods are better. .1. For one you get better type inference. For example See Guava's http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/wiki/CollectionUtilitiesExplained .2. As a designer of the class you can later change what is returned with a static method. .3. Dealing with constructor inheritance is painful especially if you have to pre-calculate something.

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