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• How can I get multitouch enabled on my Sentelic touchpad (msi x350 notebook)?

  - by Jon

  I understand my MSI x350 notebook comes with a Sentelic trackpad, which supports multi-touch (according to the MSI website). Is there a way to enable multitouch on Ubuntu? I've been having difficulty finding info about this on google, and since it's not a synaptics touchpad I haven't been able to find much info in ubuntu docs. My mouse preferences doesn't have a trackpad tab like it does on, say, a Macbook. Running "xinput list" returns: FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad id=11 And in my Xorg.0.log: [ 17.481] (II) config/udev: Adding input device FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad (/dev/input/event6) [ 17.481] () FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" [ 17.481] () FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: always reports core events [ 17.481] () FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Device: "/dev/input/event6" [ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found 11 mouse buttons [ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found scroll wheel(s) [ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found relative axes [ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found x and y relative axes [ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Configuring as mouse [ 17.500] () FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 [ 17.500] (**) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 [ 17.500] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad" (type: MOUSE) [ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: initialized for relative axes. [ 17.500] (II) config/udev: Adding input device FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad (/dev/input/mouse0)

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• Is a university education really worth it for a good programmer?

  - by Jon Purdy

  The title says it all, but here's the personal side of it: I've been doing design and programming for about as long as I can remember. If there's a programming problem, I can figure it out. (Though admittedly StackOverflow has allowed me to skip the figuring out and get straight to the doing in many instances.) I've made games, esoteric programming languages, and widgets and gizmos galore. I'm currently working on a general-purpose programming language. There's nothing I do better than programming. However, I'm just as passionate about design. Thus when I felt leaving high school that my design skills were lacking, I decided to attend university for New Media Design and Imaging, a digital design-related major. For a year, I diligently studied art and programmed in my free time. As the next year progressed, however, I was obligated to take fewer art and design classes and more technical classes. The trouble was of course that these classes were geared toward non-technical students, and were far beneath my skill level at the time. No amount of petitioning could overcome the institution's reluctance to allow me to test out of such classes, and the major offered no promise for any greater challenge in the future, so I took the extreme route: I switched into the technical equivalent of the major, New Media Interactive Development. A lot of my credits moved over into the new major, but many didn't. It would have been infeasible to switch to a more rigorous technical major such as Computer Science, and having tutored Computer Science students at every level here, I doubt I would be exposed to anything that I haven't already or won't eventually find out on my own, since I'm so involved in the field. I'm now on track to graduate perhaps a year later than I had planned, which puts a significant financial strain on my family and my future self. My schedule continues to be bogged down with classes that are wholly unnecessary for me to take. I'm being re-introduced to subjects that I've covered a thousand times over, simply because I've always been interested in it all. And though I succeed in avoiding the cynical and immature tactic of failing to complete work out of some undeserved sense of superiority, I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned by the lack of intellectual stimulation. Further, my school requires students to complete a number of quarters of co-op work experience proportional to their major. My original major required two quarters, but my current requires three, delaying my graduation even more. To top it all off, college is putting a severe strain on my relationship with my very close partner of a few years, so I've searched diligently for co-op jobs in my area, alas to no avail. I'm now in my third year, and approaching that point past which I can no longer handle this. Either I keep my head down, get a degree no matter what it takes, and try to get a job with a company that will pay me enough to do what I love that I can eventually pay off my loans; or I cut my losses now, move wherever there is work, and in six months start paying off what debt I've accumulated thus far. So the real question is: is a university education really more than just a formality? It's a big decision, and one I can't make lightly. I think this is the appropriate venue for this kind of question, and I hope it sticks around for the sake of others who might someday find themselves in similar situations. My heartfelt thanks for reading, and in advance for your help.

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• Standards for how developers work on their own workstations

  - by Jon Hopkins

  We've just come across one of those situations which occasionally comes up when a developer goes off sick for a few days mid-project. There were a few questions about whether he'd committed the latest version of his code or whether there was something more recent on his local machine we should be looking at, and we had a delivery to a customer pending so we couldn't wait for him to return. One of the other developers logged on as him to see and found a mess of workspaces, many seemingly of the same projects, with timestamps that made it unclear which one was "current" (he was prototyping some bits on versions of the project other than his "core" one). Obviously this is a pain in the neck, however the alternative (which would seem to be strict standards for how each developer works on their own machine to ensure that any other developer can pick things up with a minimum of effort) is likely to break many developers personal work flows and lead to inefficiency on an individual level. I'm not talking about standards for checked-in code, or even general development standards, I'm talking about how a developer works locally, a domain generally considered (in my experience) to be almost entirely under the developers own control. So how do you handle situations like this? Are the one of those things that just happens and you have to deal with, the price you pay for developers being allowed to work in the way that best suits them? Or do you ask developers to adhere to standards in this area - use of specific directories, naming standards, notes on a wiki or whatever? And if so what do your standards cover, how strict are they, how do you police them and so on? Or is there another solution I'm missing? [Assume for the sake of argument that the developer can not be contacted to talk through what he was doing here - even if he could knowing and describing which workspace is which from memory isn't going to be simple and flawless and sometimes people genuinely can't be contacted and I'd like a solution which covers all eventualities.]

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• Android - Rendering HUD View to SurfaceView

  - by Jon

  I have developed a relatively simple game in android, to get my head around it all, and on the back of it developed a crude game engine (in the loosest sense!). I use a SurfaceView and canvas (no OpenGL) - I'll cross that bridge another time! I have implemented a game HUD, title screens etc. by overlaying standard Android view widgets over my SurfaceView. This all works reasonably well maintaining an acceptable frame-rate, but it is a simple game with not a lot happening on or off screen. What I am wondering now is whether one could (and whether one would get any advantage by) drawing all my views to the one SurfaceView, all controlled by the main game thread. At the moment I have handlers flinging messages around and runOnUiThreads here, there and everywhere. Quite cumbersome. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated (before I perhaps waste time trying to do it!)

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• What to do?! Upgrading from 12.10 to 13.04 failed :(

  - by Jon Ramirez

  I got an update reminder to go from 12.10 to 13.04. I followed the instructions, was able to download the package, and started installing. Up to a point where my computer (seemed to) restart and there was just a black screen (with the backlight on) for more than an hour. Then I decided that this was too long for an installation and forced my laptop to shut down. I think that messed it up. Now I'm stuck in what seems to be 13.04 with bits of 12.10 in it. I tried to upgrade again through software updater but it goes to Partial Upgrade. But when I try that, I get this error message: "An upgrade from 'raring' to 'quantal' is not supported by this tool." Help! What should I do! I'm running my Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron.

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• Is what someone publishes on the Internet fair game when considering them for employment as a programmer?

  - by Jon Hopkins

  (Originally posted on Stack Overflow but closed there and more relevant for here) So we first interviewed a guy for a technical role and he was pretty good. Before the second interview we googled him and found his MySpace page which could, to put it mildly, be regarded as inappropriate. Just to be clear there was no doubt that it was his page (name, photos, matching biographical information and so on). The content was entirely personal and in no way related to his professional abilities or attitude. Is it fair to consider this when thinking about whether to offer them a job? In most situations my response would be what goes on in someone's private life is their own doing. However for anyone technical who professes (implicitly or explicitly) to understand the Internet and the possibilities it offers, is posting things in a way which can so obviously be discovered a significant error of judgement? EDIT: Clarification - essentially it was a fairly graphic commentary on porn (but of, shall we say, a non-academic nature). I'm actually more interested in the general concept than the specific incident as it's something we're likely to see more in the future as people put more and more of themselves on-line. My concerns are not primarily about him and how he feels about such things (he's white, straight, male and about the last possible victim of discrimination on the planet in that sense), more how it reflects on the company that a very simple search (basically his name) returns these things and that clients may also do it. We work in a relatively conservative industry.

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• How can I identify unknown query string fragments that are coming to my site?

  - by Jon

  In the Google Analytics content overview for a site that I work on, the home page is getting many pageviews with some unfamiliar query string fragments, example: /?jkId=1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef&jt=1&jadid=1234567890&js=1&jk=key words&jsid=12345&jmt=1 (potentially identifiable IDs have been changed) It clearly looks like some kind of ad tracking info, but noone who works on the site knows where it comes from, and I haven't been able to find any useful information from searching. Is there some listing of common query string keys available anywhere? Alternatively, does anyone happen to know where these keys (jkId, jt, jadid, js, jk, jsid and jmt) might come from?

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• Using OData to get Mix10 files

  - by Jon Dalberg

  There has been a lot of talk around OData lately (go to odata.org for more information) and I wanted to get all the videos from Mix ‘10: two great tastes that taste great together. Luckily, Mix has exposed the ‘10 sessions via OData at http://api.visitmix.com/OData.svc, now all I have to do is slap together a bit of code to fetch the videos. Step 1 (cut a hole in the box) Create a new console application and add a new service reference. Step 2 (put your junk in the box) Write a smidgen of code: 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var mix = new Mix.EventEntities(new Uri("http://api.visitmix.com/OData.svc")); 4:   5: var files = from f in mix.Files 6: where f.TypeName == "WMV" 7: select f; 8:   9: var web = new WebClient(); 10: 11: var myVideos = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyVideos), "Mix10"); 12:   13: Directory.CreateDirectory(myVideos); 14:   15: files.ToList().ForEach(f => { 16: var fileName = new Uri(f.Url).Segments.Last(); 17: Console.WriteLine(f.Url); 18: web.DownloadFile(f.Url, Path.Combine(myVideos, fileName)); 19: }); 20: } Step 3 (have her open the box) Compile and run. As you can see, the client reference created for the OData service handles almost everything for me. Yeah, I know there is some batch file to download the files, but it relies on cUrl being on the machine – and I wanted an excuse to work with an OData service. Enjoy!

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• Continuous integration never results in build errors

  - by Jon

  Hi, I'm working with a variety of Java EE websites which use internal libraries we've developed. For each website, we only upgrade to new versions of our internal libraries as needed, and before committing we make sure that the site compiles fine. What this means is that when TeamCity does a build of one of our sites, the site compiles fine, but later when the site is updated to the latest version of internal libraries, there might be a compile error. Is there a good way to handle this? We're not using Maven yet; would using Maven mean that our websites could automatically use the latest version of internal libraries? Thanks. Clarification: What we sometimes run into is this: Project A depends on a library, and is currently using library version 1.0 Project B also depends on that library. I make changes to the library so that it is now version 1.5. Project B now uses 1.5. Project A and project B have both been built just fine by the CI server (TeamCity) Working on project A again, I update to 1.5 and discover that 1.5 has breaking changes in it. Is there a way for the CI server to discover these kinds of breaking changes?

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• Appropriate level of granularity for component-based architecture

  - by Jon Purdy

  I'm working on a game with a component-based architecture. An Entity owns a set of Component instances, each of which has a set of Slot instances with which to store, send, and receive values. Factory functions such as Player produce entities with the required components and slot connections. I'm trying to determine the best level of granularity for components. For example, right now Position, Velocity, and Acceleration are all separate components, connected in series. Velocity and Acceleration could easily be rewritten into a uniform Delta component, or Position, Velocity, and Acceleration could be combined alongside such components as Friction and Gravity into a monolithic Physics component. Should a component have the smallest responsibility possible (at the cost of lots of interconnectivity) or should related components be combined into monolithic ones (at the cost of flexibility)? I'm leaning toward the former, but I could use a second opinion.

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• How to get windows back? Lubuntu?

  - by Jon

  I installed lubuntu and I don't like it. I did a clean install to lubuntu rather than making it dual. Now when I want to go back to Windows it won't work. I put the Windows Vista CD in and it won't load. It just loads lubuntu back. I know for a fact that the CD works just fine. I don't know what to do? I did a little research and it says I deleted the windows loader or the partition. Can someone help me?

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• Redgate ANTS Performance Profiler

  - by Jon Canning

  Seemingly forever I've been working on a business idea, it's a REST API delivering content to mobiles, and I've never really had much idea about its performance. Yes, I have a suite of unit tests and integration tests, but these only tell me that it works, not how well it works. I was also about to embark on a major refactor, swapping the database from MongoDB to RavenDB, and was curious to see if that impacted performance at all, so I needed a profiler that supported IIS Express that I can run my integration tests against, and Google gave me:   http://www.red-gate.com/supportcenter/content/ANTS_Performance_Profiler/help/7.4/app_iise   Excellent. Following the above guide an instance of IIS Express and is launched, as is Internet Explorer. The latter eventually becomes annoying, I would like to decide whether I want a browser opened, but thankfully the guide is wrong in that it can be closed and profiling will continue. So I ran my tests, stopped profiling, and was presented with a call tree listing the endpoints called and allowing me to drill down to the source code beneath.     Although useful and fascinating this wasn't what I was expecting to see, I was after the method timings from the entire test suite. Switching Show to Methods Grid presented me with a list of my methods, with the slowest lit up in red at the top. Marvellous.     I did find that if you switch to Methods Grid before Call tree has loaded, you do not get the red warnings.   StructureMap was very busy, and next on the list was a request filter that I didn't expect to be so overworked. Highlighting it, the source code was presented to me in the bottom window with timings and a nice red indicator to show me where to look. Oh horror, that reflection hack I put in months ago, I'd forgotten all about it. It was calling Validate<T>() which in turn was resolving a validator from StructureMap. Note to self, use //TODO: when leaving smelly code lying around.     Before refactoring, remember to Save Profile Results from the File menu. Annoyingly you are not prompted to save your results when exiting, and using Save Project will only leave you thankful that you have version control and can go back in time to run your tests again.   Having implemented StructureMap’s ForGenericType, I ran my tests again and:     Win, thankyou ANTS (What does ANTS stand for BTW?)   There's definitely room in my toolbox for a profiler; what started out as idle curiosity actually solved a potential problem. When presented with a new codebase I can see enormous benefit from getting an overview of the pipeline from the call tree before drilling into the code, and as a sanity check before release it gives a little more reassurance that you've done your best, and shows you exactly where to look if you haven’t.   Next I’m going to profile a load test.

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• Desktop switcher appears to be broken for quick double-switches

  - by Jon Blackburn

  I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this. I have three virtual desktops aligned in a horizontal row. In the middle desktop I have only a single application window. I have keyboard shortcuts mapping to navigate between the desktops. Obviously, I never use the up/down arrows because I only have one row of workspaces. Here's the problem, which only started to happen after I installed 12.04.1: When I rapidly hit to go from workspace 1 to workspace 3, the window on workspace 2 gets moved to workspace 1. I have checked using both Unity and Gnome3, and the behavior is the same under both. If I change back to the default workspace setup (a 2x2 grid of desktops) things seem to settle down (i.e., no wandering windows). Not every type of application window behaves the same way. I couldn't get a Chrome browser to jump from 2 to 1, but both Terminal and Terminator exhibit the behavior. Any thoughts? Better workarounds? Thanks in advance.

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• Nvidia 740M still not working after Bumblebee installation

  - by Jon

  first of all, I have checked a lot of similar topics, but I still can't get my laptop to use Nvidia 740M. So first things first. I have a laptop Asus X550V(i5-3230, 4gb RAM, Nvidia 740M + Intel HD4000). I installed Ubuntu 13.10 alongside Win8(preinstalled) and both systems are running without problems. However, I have problem with second graphic card(Nvidia 740M), as Ubuntu doesn't recognize it. I installed bumblebee with this tutorial https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee#Installation, but I still get error "Cannot access secondary GPU" error when trying to run ''optirun Steam'' in terminal. Then I tried to do this: [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) No devices detected. you need to edit the /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia (or /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nouveau if using the noveau driver) and specify the correct BusID by following the instructions therein. But with lspci / VGA i get only info about Intel 4000, but no Nvidia. When I type only lspci, I get the line for Nvidia 740M,but after I edit the config file I still get second card error. Also, in /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia there wasn't BusID or anything similar, so I just added the whole line in device section. As I sad, I tried a lot of things to get it working, avoiding this forum(as I din't want to bother people with some solutions possible), but alas!, I had to bother you. If there is a need for some additional info, just say, no problem at all. Thank you very much in advance. :)

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• Has programming ruined your perception of round numbers?

  - by Jon Purdy

  Most of the world works in base 10 nowadays, but as programmers working on binary systems, we constantly find ourselves working with powers of 2. While most people consider integer multiples of powers of 10 "nice and round" and somehow aesthetically superior, I found early on in my programming adventures that multiples of powers of 2 feel much more intuitively round to me: fewer factors, of course. I'm much more likely to lay out a Web site using, say, 8- or 16-pixel margins rather than 10 or 20, and when someone remarks that 128 is an insanely arbitrary number of ounces to be in a gallon, I have to smile a little inside at how, just perhaps, the U.S. system might be superior to metric in one small way. I'm just curious: has programming ruined (read: altered) your perception of the roundness of a number?

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• List of eCommerce sites that use end-to-end SSL?

  - by Jon Schneider

  My development team is considering implementing an eCommerce site using end-to-end SSL -- that is, every page on the site is accessed via an https:// URL -- rather than the more traditional "mixed mode" where most pages are accessed via http:// and only "secure" pages such as login and credit card entry are redirected to https://. Pros of doing such a "pure SSL" approach include avoidance of some session-hijacking attacks such as Firesheep; cons include performance considerations. My question is: Is anyone aware of a list of eCommerce websites (especially USA-based sites), or even specific websites, that use this end-to-end SSL approach? I'm especially interested in "regular" eCommerce sites rather than banks or other "financial" sites.

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• Has any language become greatly popular for something other than its intended purpose?

  - by Jon Purdy

  Take this scenario: A programmer creates a language to solve some problem. He then releases this language to help others solve problems like it. Another programmer discovers it's actually much better for some different category of problems. By virtue of this new application, the language then becomes popular for that application primarily. Are there any instances of this actually occurring? Put another way, does the intended purpose of a language have any bearing on how it's actually used, or whether it becomes popular? Is it even important that a language have an advertised purpose?

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• How do I adjust the origin of rotation for a group of sprites?

  - by Jon

  I am currently grouping sprites together, then applying a rotation transformation on draw: private void UpdateMatrix(ref Vector2 origin, float radians) { Vector3 matrixorigin = new Vector3(origin, 0); _rotationMatrix = Matrix.CreateTranslation(-matrixorigin) * Matrix.CreateRotationZ(radians) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(matrixorigin); } Where the origin is the Centermost point of my group of sprites. I apply this transformation to each sprite in the group. My problem is that when I adjust the point of origin, my entire sprite group will re-position itself on screen. How could I differentiate the point of rotation used in the transformation, from the position of the sprite group? Is there a better way of creating this transformation matrix? EDIT Here is the relevant part of the Draw() function: Matrix allTransforms = _rotationMatrix * camera.GetTransformation(); spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.BackToFront, null, null, null, null, null, allTransforms); for (int i = 0; i < _map.AllParts.Count; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < _map.AllParts[0].Count; j++) { spriteBatch.Draw(_map.AllParts[i][j].Texture, _map.AllParts[i][j].Position, null, Color.White, 0, _map.AllParts[i][j].Origin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0f); } } This all works fine, again, the problem is that when a rotation is set and the point of origin is changed, the sprite group's position is offset on screen. I am trying to figure out a way to adjust the point of origin without causing a shift in position. EDIT 2 At this point, I'm looking for workarounds as this is not working. Does anyone know of a better way to rotate a group of sprites in XNA? I need a method that will allow me to modify the point of rotation (origin) without affecting the position of the sprite group on screen.

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• Best language or tool for automating tedious manual tasks

  - by Jon Hopkins

  We all have tasks that come up from time to time that we think we'd be better off scripting or automating than doing manually. Obviously some tools or languages are better for this than others - no-one (in their right mind) is doing a one off job of cross referencing a bunch of text lists their PM has just given them in assembler for instance. What one tool or language would you recommend for the sort of general quick and dirty jobs you get asked to do where time (rather than elegance) is of the essence? Background: I'm a former programmer, now development manager PM, looking to learn a new language for fun. If I'm going to learn something for fun I'd like it to be useful and this sort of use case is the most likely to come up.

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• Removing 301 redirect from site root

  - by Jon Clements

  I'm having a look at a friends website (a fairly old PHP based one) which they've been advised needs re-structuring. The key points being: URLs should be lower case and more "friendly". The root of the domain should be not be re-directed. The first point I'm happy with (and the URLs needed tidying up anyway) and have a draft plan of action, however the second is baffling me as to not only the best way to do it, but also whether it should be done. Currently http://www.example.com/ is redirected to http://www.example.com/some-link-with-keywords/ using the follow index.php in the root of the Apache2 instance. <?php $nextpage = "some-link-with-keywords/"; header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); header( "Status: 301 Moved Permanently" ); header("Location: $nextpage"); exit(0); // This is Optional but suggested, to avoid any accidental output ?> As far as I'm aware, this has been the case for around three years -- and I'm sorely tempted to advise to not worry about it. It would appear taking off the 301 could: Potentially affect page ranking (as the 'homepage' would disappear - although it couldn't disappear because of the next point...) Introduce maintainance issues as existing users would still have the re-directed page in their cache Following the above, introduce duplicate content Confuse Google/other SE's as to what the homepage actually is now I may be over-analysing this but I have a feeling it's not as simple as removing the 301 from the root, and 301'ing the previous target to the root... Any suggestions (including it's not worth it) are sincerely appreciated.

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• What do you do about content when someone asks you to build a website

  - by Jon

  I am an experienced asp.net developer and asp.net mvc and I have my own CMS that I have written but starting to think there should be another approach. When someone asks you to develop them a website how do you develop it so that they can add pictures,slideshows, content, news items, diary events. On a side note do you give them a design for the home page and inner page and thats it. I'm just thinking if they turn around and say 6 months down the line I want a jquery slideshow on the right hand side of this page how do you or CMS's handle it?

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• What's your most controversial programming opinion?

  - by Jon Skeet

  This is definitely subjective, but I'd like to try to avoid it becoming argumentative. I think it could be an interesting question if people treat it appropriately. The idea for this question came from the comment thread from my answer to the "What are five things you hate about your favorite language?" question. I contended that classes in C# should be sealed by default - I won't put my reasoning in the question, but I might write a fuller explanation as an answer to this question. I was surprised at the heat of the discussion in the comments (25 comments currently). So, what contentious opinions do you hold? I'd rather avoid the kind of thing which ends up being pretty religious with relatively little basis (e.g. brace placing) but examples might include things like "unit testing isn't actually terribly helpful" or "public fields are okay really". The important thing (to me, anyway) is that you've got reasons behind your opinions. Please present your opinion and reasoning - I would encourage people to vote for opinions which are well-argued and interesting, whether or not you happen to agree with them.

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• Is there a language more general than Lisp?

  - by Jon Purdy

  I've been programming for a long time, and writing in Lisp (well, mostly Scheme) for a little less. My experience in these languages (and other functional languages) has informed my ability to write clean code even with less powerful tools. Lisp-family languages have lovely facilities for implementing every abstraction in common use: S-expressions generalise structure. Macros generalise syntax. Continuations generalise flow control. But I'm dissatisfied. Somehow, I want more. Is there a language that's more general? More powerful? As great as Lisp is, I find it hard to believe no one has come up with anything (dare I say) better. I'm well aware that ordinarily a question like this ought to be closed for its argumentative nature. But there seems to be a broad consensus that Lisp represents the theoretical pinnacle of programming language design. I simply refuse to accept that without some kind of proof. Which I guess amounts to questioning whether the lambda calculus is in fact the ideal abstraction of computation.

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• What are some reasonable stylistic limits on type inference?

  - by Jon Purdy

  C++0x adds pretty darn comprehensive type inference support. I'm sorely tempted to use it everywhere possible to avoid undue repetition, but I'm wondering if removing explicit type information all over the place is such a good idea. Consider this rather contrived example: Foo.h: #include <set> class Foo { private: static std::set<Foo*> instances; public: Foo(); ~Foo(); // What does it return? Who cares! Just forward it! static decltype(instances.begin()) begin() { return instances.begin(); } static decltype(instances.end()) end() { return instances.end(); } }; Foo.cpp: #include <Foo.h> #include <Bar.h> // The type need only be specified in one location! // But I do have to open the header to find out what it actually is. decltype(Foo::instances) Foo::instances; Foo() { // What is the type of x? auto x = Bar::get_something(); // What does do_something() return? auto y = x.do_something(*this); // Well, it's convertible to bool somehow... if (!y) throw "a constant, old school"; instances.insert(this); } ~Foo() { instances.erase(this); } Would you say this is reasonable, or is it completely ridiculous? After all, especially if you're used to developing in a dynamic language, you don't really need to care all that much about the types of things, and can trust that the compiler will catch any egregious abuses of the type system. But for those of you that rely on editor support for method signatures, you're out of luck, so using this style in a library interface is probably really bad practice. I find that writing things with all possible types implicit actually makes my code a lot easier for me to follow, because it removes nearly all of the usual clutter of C++. Your mileage may, of course, vary, and that's what I'm interested in hearing about. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages to radical use of type inference?

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• OData &ndash; The easiest service I can create: now with updates

  - by Jon Dalberg

  The other day I created a simple NastyWord service exposed via OData. It was read-only and used an in-memory backing store for the words. Today I’ll modify it to use a file instead of a list and I’ll accept new nasty words by implementing IUpdatable directly. The first thing to do is enable the service to accept new entries. This is done at configuration time by adding the “WriteAppend” access rule: 1: public class NastyWords : DataService<NastyWordsDataSource> 2: { 3: // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. 4: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 5: { 6: config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead | EntitySetRights.WriteAppend); 7: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; 8: } 9: }   Next I placed a file, NastyWords.txt, in the “App_Data” folder and added a few *choice* words to start. This required one simple change to our NastyWordDataSource.cs file: 1: public NastyWordsDataSource() 2: { 3: UpdateFromSource(); 4: } 5:   6: private void UpdateFromSource() 7: { 8: var words = File.ReadAllLines(pathToFile); 9: NastyWords = (from w in words 10: select new NastyWord { Word = w }).AsQueryable(); 11: }   Nothing too shocking here, just reading each line from the NastyWords.txt file and exposing them. Next, I implemented IUpdatable which comes with a boat-load of methods. We don’t need all of them for now since we are only concerned with allowing new values. Here are the methods we must implement, all the others throw a NotImplementedException: 1: public object CreateResource(string containerName, string fullTypeName) 2: { 3: var nastyWord = new NastyWord(); 4: pendingUpdates.Add(nastyWord); 5: return nastyWord; 6: } 7:   8: public object ResolveResource(object resource) 9: { 10: return resource; 11: } 12:   13: public void SaveChanges() 14: { 15: var intersect = (from w in pendingUpdates 16: select w.Word).Intersect(from n in NastyWords 17: select n.Word); 18:   19: if (intersect.Count() > 0) 20: throw new DataServiceException(500, "duplicate entry"); 21:   22: var lines = from w in pendingUpdates 23: select w.Word; 24:   25: File.AppendAllLines(pathToFile, 26: lines, 27: Encoding.UTF8); 28:   29: pendingUpdates.Clear(); 30:   31: UpdateFromSource(); 32: } 33:   34: public void SetValue(object targetResource, string propertyName, object propertyValue) 35: { 36: targetResource.GetType().GetProperty(propertyName).SetValue(targetResource, propertyValue, null); 37: }   I use a simple list to contain the pending updates and only commit them when the “SaveChanges” method is called. Here’s the order these methods are called in our service during an insert: CreateResource – here we just instantiate a new NastyWord and stick a reference to it in our pending updates list. SetValue – this is where the “Word” property of the NastyWord instance is set. SaveChanges – get the list of pending updates, barfing on duplicates, write them to the file and clear our pending list. ResolveResource – the newly created resource will be returned directly here since we aren’t dealing with “handles” to objects but the actual objects themselves. Not too bad, eh? I didn’t find this documented anywhere but a little bit of digging in the OData spec and use of Fiddler made it pretty easy to figure out. Here is some client code which would add a new nasty word: 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var svc = new ServiceReference1.NastyWordsDataSource(new Uri("http://localhost.:60921/NastyWords.svc")); 4: svc.AddToNastyWords(new ServiceReference1.NastyWord() { Word = "shat" }); 5:   6: svc.SaveChanges(); 7: }   Here’s all of the code so far for to implement the service: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Data.Services; 4: using System.Data.Services.Common; 5: using System.Linq; 6: using System.ServiceModel.Web; 7: using System.Web; 8: using System.IO; 9: using System.Text; 10:   11: namespace ONasty 12: { 13: [DataServiceKey("Word")] 14: public class NastyWord 15: { 16: public string Word { get; set; } 17: } 18:   19: public class NastyWordsDataSource : IUpdatable 20: { 21: private List<NastyWord> pendingUpdates = new List<NastyWord>(); 22: private string pathToFile = @"path to your\App_Data\NastyWords.txt"; 23:   24: public NastyWordsDataSource() 25: { 26: UpdateFromSource(); 27: } 28:   29: private void UpdateFromSource() 30: { 31: var words = File.ReadAllLines(pathToFile); 32: NastyWords = (from w in words 33: select new NastyWord { Word = w }).AsQueryable(); 34: } 35:   36: public IQueryable<NastyWord> NastyWords { get; private set; } 37:   38: public void AddReferenceToCollection(object targetResource, string propertyName, object resourceToBeAdded) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:   43: public void ClearChanges() 44: { 45: pendingUpdates.Clear(); 46: } 47:   48: public object CreateResource(string containerName, string fullTypeName) 49: { 50: var nastyWord = new NastyWord(); 51: pendingUpdates.Add(nastyWord); 52: return nastyWord; 53: } 54:   55: public void DeleteResource(object targetResource) 56: { 57: throw new NotImplementedException(); 58: } 59:   60: public object GetResource(IQueryable query, string fullTypeName) 61: { 62: throw new NotImplementedException(); 63: } 64:   65: public object GetValue(object targetResource, string propertyName) 66: { 67: throw new NotImplementedException(); 68: } 69:   70: public void RemoveReferenceFromCollection(object targetResource, string propertyName, object resourceToBeRemoved) 71: { 72: throw new NotImplementedException(); 73: } 74:   75: public object ResetResource(object resource) 76: { 77: throw new NotImplementedException(); 78: } 79:   80: public object ResolveResource(object resource) 81: { 82: return resource; 83: } 84:   85: public void SaveChanges() 86: { 87: var intersect = (from w in pendingUpdates 88: select w.Word).Intersect(from n in NastyWords 89: select n.Word); 90:   91: if (intersect.Count() > 0) 92: throw new DataServiceException(500, "duplicate entry"); 93:   94: var lines = from w in pendingUpdates 95: select w.Word; 96:   97: File.AppendAllLines(pathToFile, 98: lines, 99: Encoding.UTF8); 100:   101: pendingUpdates.Clear(); 102:   103: UpdateFromSource(); 104: } 105:   106: public void SetReference(object targetResource, string propertyName, object propertyValue) 107: { 108: throw new NotImplementedException(); 109: } 110:   111: public void SetValue(object targetResource, string propertyName, object propertyValue) 112: { 113: targetResource.GetType().GetProperty(propertyName).SetValue(targetResource, propertyValue, null); 114: } 115: } 116:   117: public class NastyWords : DataService<NastyWordsDataSource> 118: { 119: // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. 120: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 121: { 122: config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead | EntitySetRights.WriteAppend); 123: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; 124: } 125: } 126: } Next time we’ll allow removing nasty words. Enjoy!

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