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• Is taking a semester or year off from college a good idea?

  - by astrieanna

  I am currently a Junior majoring in Computer Science at a top university (in the USA). As I'm really getting tired of taking classes, I was wondering if taking a semester or year off to do an internship(s) is a reasonable idea? It seems like it would give me more experience programming (making classes a bit easier), and give me a chance to recover from the burnout that comes from taking 18 credits a semester. A friend suggested that I just take a lighter course load, but I only have 2 more semesters of financial aid, so I need to take 18 credits in each of them in order to finish. Taking time off from school is not a normal thing to do, at least at this school. Since more internships are advertised for the summer (that I've seen), I was wondering if there are internships available in times other than the summer? If I took off for a whole year, would it be more valuable to try to stay at the same company for the whole time or to try to get a series of internships at different ones? Valuable in both the sense of resume value and personal value. Would it be easier or harder to get multiple shorter internships?

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• Does concurrency inherently introduce "randomness" into a game?

  - by Jeff

  When a game is implemented with concurrency (as most games are), does this necessarily, by its very nature, introduce an element of randomness into the game that is outside of the players' control? Note that when I use the word "random", I'm not meaning to launch into a philosophical debate about the deterministic nature of the system. I understand that concurrency is deterministic in the sense that the operating system decides which processes to allow time on the CPU and in what order (or the JVM controls which Thread's turn it is to execute, etc). But my understanding of this is that there is no way to control or predict whether one thread's next command will execute before or after another. The reason I'm asking is because this seems like a fundamental difficulty for game development where a game is supposedly designed around a player's skill. Consider a game like League of Legends. Assume that two players are battling it out. It's a very close contest between the two and it's coming down to the wire -- so much so that whoever gets their last attack off will be the one to kill the other and win the game for their team. If the players are implemented using concurrency and the situation really was like this, is it essentially out of the players' hands at this point? Is the outcome of this match all up to whatever system is arbitrarily deciding which player's thread/process will execute next? If not, what am I misunderstanding about concurrency? If so, is there any way around this problem so that a game of skill can always be a game of skill, especially in those most crucial moments?

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• Convenience of mySQL over xml

  - by Bonechilla

  Currently I use XML to store specific information to correctly load a few things such as a list of specfied characters, scenes and music, Once more I use JAXB in combination with standard compression/decompression(ZIP) functionality to store a list of extrenous data. This data is called to add functionality to the character, somewhat like Skills in an RPG. Each skill is seperated into its own XML file with a grandlist which contains the names of each file with their extensions omitted and zipped in folder that gets encrypted. At first using xml was working fine however as the skill list grow i worry about its stability. I was wondering if I should begin storing the data in mySQL. Originally I planned to simply convert everything to JSON over xml but i think possibly mySQL would be a better move. Can anyone inform me of the key difference and pros and cons of each I guess i'm looking for the best way to store the data more conviently and would be easier to operate on. The data is mostly primatives and strings and the only arraylist of values i have i can just concat into a single field and parse later Edit: If I am going in the right direction with XML would it make sense to convert it to JSON and use maybe Kyro or EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy)

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• Stackify Gives Devs a Crack at the Production Server

  - by Matt Watson

  Originally published on SDTimes.com on 7/9/2012 by David Rubinstein.It was one of those interviews where you get finished talking about a company’s product, and you wonder aloud, “Well, THAT makes sense! Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?” Matt Watson, CEO of Kansas City, Mo.-based startup Stackify, was telling me that the 10-person company is getting ready to launch its product in August (it’s in beta now) that will give developers an app-centric look into production servers so they can support and troubleshoot apps and fix bugs. Of course, this hasn’t happened in the past because of the security concerns of IT administrators, and a decided lack of expertise on the part of developers. Stackify installs on a server and acts like a proxy for developers, collecting data about the environment, discovering all the applications, scanning for config file changes, and doing server monitoring. “We become the central point that developers can see everything they need to know about their applications,” he said. “Developers can look at the files that are deployed, and query databases in a safe way.”  In his words:“The big thing we’re hoping is just giving them (developers) visibility. Most companies want to hire the junior developers that they pay $50,000 a year right out of college to do application support and troubleshooting and fix bugs, but those people don’t have access to production servers to troubleshoot. It becomes very difficult for them to do their job, so they end up spending all of their day bugging the senior developers, the managers or the system administrators to track down this stuff, which creates a huge bottleneck. And so what we can do is give that visibility to those lower-level people so that they can do this work and free up the higher-level people so they can be working on the next big thing.”Stackify itself might just prove to be the next big thing.

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• How to facilitate code reviews in a small team for embedded software?

  - by Adam Lewis

  Short Question Does a cost-effective tool / workflow exist to facilitate code reviews in a small team? More specifically, a small team that relies on post-commit code reviews. Background Our team currently consists of 3 full time and 1 part time software engineers, with plans on hiring more in the near future. Due to our team size and volume of projects we all must juggle, the pre-commit workflow that major tools (such as Review Board and Code Collaborator) use is not obtainable for us right now. The best we can do at the moment is to perform post-commit reviews before major releases or as time permits. Nearly all of our projects are hosted on RepositoryHosting.com (which I highly recommend) and contain a mixture of SVN and GIT repositories. Current Thoughts Since I cannot find a tool that fits our needs right now, I am turning to TRAC that is built into our repository's site. At the moment we use TRAC to file tickets and track milestones, so to me this seems like a natural fit for code review results as well. The direction I am heading in right now is to use a spread sheet(s) to log all of the bugs and comments. Do some macro magic to get it in a format that I can use TRAC's import ticket method and use TRAC's ticketing system to create the action items / bug reports automatically. The auto ticket generation is darn near a must have, adding in bugs and comments one at a time from a web-gui is really painful. Secondary Question If this workflow makes sense, is there a good / standard template to use as a code review log?

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• storing data for maps database

  - by Timigen

  I am working on an application that displays choropleth maps. These maps are of all different types, some display state by county, country by state/province, or world by country. How should I handle storing the map information in the database? My Thoughts: I won't need to do queries to find POI inside a region, so I don't think there is a need to use spatial datatypes. I am considering storing a map as a geoJSON object (I am using JS mapping library that accepts geoJSON). The only issue is what if I want a map of the US northeast. Then I would have geoJSON for the US and a separate one for the US northeast, which would be redundant. Would it make sense to have a shape database where I had each state then when I needed a map of the US I could query for each state, and when I needed a map of the US Northeast I could again query for what I need? Note: I am not concerned with storing the data for each region, just the region itself. I will query for the data on the fly for the specific region.

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• Validating allowed characters or validating disallowed characters

  - by Tom

  I've always validated my user input based on a list of valid/allowed characters, rather than a list of invalid/disallowed characters (or simply no validation). It's just a habit I picked up, probably on this site and I've never really questioned it until now. It makes sense if you wish to, say, validate a phone number, or validate an area code, however recently I've realised I'm also validating input such as Bio Text fields, User Comments, etc. for which the input has no solid syntax. The main advantage has always seemed to be: Validating allowed chars reduces the risk of you missing a potentially malicious character, but increases the risk the of you not allowing a character which the user may want to use. The former is more important. But, providing I am correctly preventing SQL Injection (with prepared statements) and also escaping output, is there any need for this extra barrier of protection? It seems to me as if I am just allowing practically every character on the keyboard, and am forgetting to allow some common characters. Is there an accepted practice for this situation? Or am I missing something obvious? Thanks.

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• PublishingWeb.ExcludeFromNavigation Missing

  - by Michael Van Cleave

  So recently I have had to make the transition from the SharePoint 2007 codebase to SharePoint 2010 codebase. Needless to say there hasn't been much difficulty in the changeover. However in a set of code that I was playing around with and transitioning I did find one change that might cause some pain to others out there that have been programming against the PublishingWeb object in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace. The 2007 snippet of code that work just fine in 2007 looks like: using (SPSite site = new SPSite(url)) using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()) {      PublishingWeb publishingWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(web);     publishingWeb.ExcludeFromNavigation(true, itemID);     publishingWeb.Update(); } The 2010 update to the code looks like: using (SPSite site = new SPSite(url)) using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()) {     PublishingWeb publishingWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(web);     publishingWeb.Navigation.ExcludeFromNavigation(true, itemID); //--Had to reference the Navigation object.     publishingWeb.Update(); } The purpose of the code is to keep a page from showing up on the global or current navigation when it is added to the pages library. However you see that the update to the 2010 codebase actually makes more "object" sense. It specifies that you are technically affecting the Navigation of the Publishing Web, instead of the Publishing Web itself. I know that this isn't a difficult problem to fix, but I thought it would be something quick to help out the general public. Michael

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• Junior developer introduction to job industry

  - by lady_killer

  I am a junior developer at my second working experience, the first one using PHP with WordPress and currently on Groovy on Grails. I like coding, I attend meetup to discuss technology etc but I still did not understand how to become a real professional with the "know how" attitude. I read Clean Coder, the author advises to spend 20 hours per week of my spare time to learn new technologies and to keep myself up to date. I do not find this realistic, if you want to have a bit of a social life, and I also noticed that learning at work, at least in the places where I worked, is not ideal. No support from seniors for new projects, no pair programming and code reviews, no company trainings, one hour a week tech meetings where seniors walk away after a bit because they already know the topic discussed and so on. Sometimes is quite hard to keep the motivation... My questions are: Is our industry supposed to be like this? Is there real team working in the sense of sharing knowledge and help juniors to get up to speed? Are we supposed to learn new technologies or technology features just in our spare time?Clean Coder says football players do not train during official matches and our working hours are like official matches, we should just perform and learn in other moments. Is it really like this? How can I improve my skills with no support? Is it enough to read books and try out the exercises and perhaps some katas? In almost 5 month of Groovy on Grails experience at work, I have never had the opportunity to create anything from scratch, just worked on existing issues where it was even really difficult to get the domain knowledge from senior devs.

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• "Don't do programming after a few years of starting career" Is this a fair advice?

  - by Muhammad Yasir

  I am a little experienced developer having around 5 years experience in PHP and somewhat less in Java, C# and trying to learn some Python now a days. Since the start of my career as a programmer I have been told every now and then by fellow programmers that programming is suitable for a few early years of carrier (most of them take it as 5 years) and that one must change the direction after it. The reason they present is that headaches and pressures associated with programming. They also say that programmers are less social and don't usually like to give time to their families etc. and specially "Oh come on, you can not do programming in your entire life!" I am somewhat confused here and need to ask others about it. If I leave programming then what do I do?! I guess teaching may be a good option in this case but it will require to first earn a PhD degree perhaps. It may also be noteworthy that in my country (Pakistan) the life of a programmer is not very good in that normally they must give 2-3 extra hours in office to accomplish urgent programming tasks. I have a sense that situation is somewhat similar in other countries and regions as well. So the question is, do you think it is a fair advice to change career from programming to something else after spending 5 years in this field? Thanks for sharing thoughts!

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• How common is prototyping as the first stage of development?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself: You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do. You can't tell anything about the user experience from the requirements document, even though it can include quality requirements. Sequence diagrams are a good description of how the software works as the call stack, but are very limited, and give a highly partial view of the overall system. Class diagrams are great for describing how the system is built, but are utterly useless in helping you figure out what the software needs to be. Where in all this formalism is the bottom line: how the program looks, operates, and what experience it gives? Doesn't it make more sense to design off of that? Isn't it better to figure out how the program should work via a prototype and strive to implement it for real? I know that I'm probably suffering from being taught engineering by theoreticians, but I need to ask, do they do this in the industry? How do people figure out what the program actually is, not what it should conform to? Do people prototype a lot, or do they mostly use the formal tools like UML and I just didn't get the hang of using them yet?

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• How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or Sarbanes–Oxley.)   From something as simple as relating Tasks to Check-in’s or being able to see the top 10 files in your codebase that are causing the most Bugs, to identifying which Bugs and Requirements are in which Release. All that information is available and more in TFS. Although all of this tradability is available within TFS you do need to understand that it is not for free. Well… I say that, but if you are using TFS properly you will have this information with no additional work except for firing up the reporting. Using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server you can relate every line of code changes all the way up to requirements and back down through Test Cases to the Test Results. Figure: The only thing missing is Build In order to build the relationship model below we need to examine how each of the relationships get there. Each member of your team from programmer to tester and Business Analyst to Business have their roll to play to knit this together. Figure: The relationships required to make this work can get a little confusing If Build is added to this to relate Work Items to Builds and with knowledge of which builds are in which environments you can easily identify what is contained within a Release. Figure: How are things progressing Along with the ability to produce the progress and trend reports the tractability that is built into TFS can be used to fulfil most audit requirements out of the box, and augmented to fulfil the rest. In order to understand the relationships, lets look at each of the important Artifacts and how they are associated with each other… Requirements – The root of all knowledge Requirements are the thing that the business cares about delivering. These could be derived as User Stories or Business Requirements Documents (BRD’s) but they should be what the Business asks for. Requirements can be related to many of the Artifacts in TFS, so lets look at the model: Figure: If the centre of the world was a requirement We can track which releases Requirements were scheduled in, but this can change over time as more details come to light. Figure: Who edited the Requirement and when There is also the ability to query Work Items based on the History of changed that were made to it. This is particularly important with Requirements. It might not be enough to say what Requirements were completed in a given but also to know which Requirements were ever assigned to a particular release. Figure: Some magic required, but result still achieved As an augmentation to this it is also possible to run a query that shows results from the past, just as if we had a time machine. You can take any Query in the system and add a “Asof” clause at the end to query historical data in the operational store for TFS. select <fields> from WorkItems [where <condition>] [order by <fields>] [asof <date>] Figure: Work Item Query Language (WIQL) format In order to achieve this you do need to save the query as a *.wiql file to your local computer and edit it in notepad, but one imported into TFS you run it any time you want. Figure: Saving Queries locally can be useful All of these Audit features are available throughout the Work Item Tracking (WIT) system within TFS. Tasks – Where the real work gets done Tasks are the work horse of the development team, but they only as useful as Excel if you do not relate them properly to other Artifacts. Figure: The Task Work Item Type has its own relationships Requirements should be broken down into Tasks that the development team work from to build what is required by the business. This may be done by a small dedicated group or by everyone that will be working on the software team but however it happens all of the Tasks create should be a Child of a Requirement Work Item Type. Figure: Tasks are related to the Requirement Tasks should be used to track the day-to-day activities of the team working to complete the software and as such they should be kept simple and short lest developers think they are more trouble than they are worth. Figure: Task Work Item Type has a narrower purpose Although the Task Work Item Type describes the work that will be done the actual development work involves making changes to files that are under Source Control. These changes are bundled together in a single atomic unit called a Changeset which is committed to TFS in a single operation. During this operation developers can associate Work Item with the Changeset. Figure: Tasks are associated with Changesets   Changesets – Who wrote this crap Changesets themselves are just an inventory of the changes that were made to a number of files to complete a Task. Figure: Changesets are linked by Tasks and Builds   Figure: Changesets tell us what happened to the files in Version Control Although comments can be changed after the fact, the inventory and Work Item associations are permanent which allows us to Audit all the way down to the individual change level. Figure: On Check-in you can resolve a Task which automatically associates it Because of this we can view the history on any file within the system and see how many changes have been made and what Changesets they belong to. Figure: Changes are tracked at the File level What would be even more powerful would be if we could view these changes super imposed over the top of the lines of code. Some people call this a blame tool because it is commonly used to find out which of the developers introduced a bug, but it can also be used as another method of Auditing changes to the system. Figure: Annotate shows the lines the Annotate functionality allows us to visualise the relationship between the individual lines of code and the Changesets. In addition to this you can create a Label and apply it to a version of your version control. The problem with Label’s is that they can be changed after they have been created with no tractability. This makes them practically useless for any sort of compliance audit. So what do you use? Branches – And why we need them Branches are a really powerful tool for development and release management, but they are most important for audits. Figure: One way to Audit releases The R1.0 branch can be created from the Label that the Build creates on the R1 line when a Release build was created. It can be created as soon as the Build has been signed of for release. However it is still possible that someone changed the Label between this time and its creation. Another better method can be to explicitly link the Build output to the Build. Builds – Lets tie some more of this together Builds are the glue that helps us enable the next level of tractability by tying everything together. Figure: The dashed pieces are not out of the box but can be enabled When the Build is called and starts it looks at what it has been asked to build and determines what code it is going to get and build. Figure: The folder identifies what changes are included in the build The Build sets a Label on the Source with the same name as the Build, but the Build itself also includes the latest Changeset ID that it will be building. At the end of the Build the Build Agent identifies the new Changesets it is building by looking at the Check-ins that have occurred since the last Build. Figure: What changes have been made since the last successful Build It will then use that information to identify the Work Items that are associated with all of the Changesets Changesets are associated with Build and change the “Integrated In” field of those Work Items . Figure: Find all of the Work Items to associate with The “Integrated In” field of all of the Work Items identified by the Build Agent as being integrated into the completed Build are updated to reflect the Build number that successfully integrated that change. Figure: Now we know which Work Items were completed in a build Now that we can link a single line of code changed all the way back through the Task that initiated the action to the Requirement that started the whole thing and back down to the Build that contains the finished Requirement. But how do we know wither that Requirement has been fully tested or even meets the original Requirements? Test Cases – How we know we are done The only way we can know wither a Requirement has been completed to the required specification is to Test that Requirement. In TFS there is a Work Item type called a Test Case Test Cases enable two scenarios. The first scenario is the ability to track and validate Acceptance Criteria in the form of a Test Case. If you agree with the Business a set of goals that must be met for a Requirement to be accepted by them it makes it both difficult for them to reject a Requirement when it passes all of the tests, but also provides a level of tractability and validation for audit that a feature has been built and tested to order. Figure: You can have many Acceptance Criteria for a single Requirement It is crucial for this to work that someone from the Business has to sign-off on the Test Case moving from the  “Design” to “Ready” states. The Second is the ability to associate an MS Test test with the Test Case thereby tracking the automated test. This is useful in the circumstance when you want to Track a test and the test results of a Unit Test designed to test the existence of and then re-existence of a a Bug. Figure: Associating a Test Case with an automated Test Although it is possible it may not make sense to track the execution of every Unit Test in your system, there are many Integration and Regression tests that may be automated that it would make sense to track in this way. Bug – Lets not have regressions In order to know wither a Bug in the application has been fixed and to make sure that it does not reoccur it needs to be tracked. Figure: Bugs are the centre of their own world If the fix to a Bug is big enough to require that it is broken down into Tasks then it is probably a Requirement. You can associate a check-in with a Bug and have it tracked against a Build. You would also have one or more Test Cases to prove the fix for the Bug. Figure: Bugs have many associations This allows you to track Bugs / Defects in your system effectively and report on them. Change Request – I am not a feature In the CMMI Process template Change Requests can also be easily tracked through the system. In some cases it can be very important to track Change Requests separately as an Auditor may want to know what was changed and who authorised it. Again and similar to Bugs, if the Change Request is big enough that it would require to be broken down into Tasks it is in reality a new feature and should be tracked as a Requirement. Figure: Make sure your Change Requests only Affect Requirements and not rewrite them Conclusion Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server together provide an exceptional Application Lifecycle Management platform that can help your team comply with even the harshest of Compliance requirements while still enabling them to be Agile. Most Audits are heavy on required documentation but most of that information is captured for you as long a you do it right. You don’t even need every team member to understand it all as each of the Artifacts are relevant to a different type of team member. Business Analysts manage Requirements and Change Requests Programmers manage Tasks and check-in against Change Requests and Bugs Testers manage Bugs and Test Cases Build Masters manage Builds Although there is some crossover there are still rolls or “hats” that are worn. Do you thing this is all achievable? Have I missed anything that you think should be there?

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• Keeping game model and graphics/animation separate but in sync

  - by AJM

  Suppose I'm building a chess game where I want to have animations. Pieces glide to their new squares when moved. Pieces perform attack animations when capturing other pieces. I'm not sure how to effectively separate the data and logic needed for these animations and the actual game model (in the MVC sense). The pieces themselves should ideally not have to worry about their pixel coordinates or current animation frame. At the same time, many changes to the model are effectively driven by animations. A moved piece changes its position after (before?) its sprite is done gliding. A piece is removed from the board after the capturing piece is finished its attack animation. How would you suggest I manage the game model, the graphics and animations, and their relationships? For example, where would the animations "live"? How would animations be created and managed in response to player moves? How would animations drive updates to the game model, or how would the game model drive animations?

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• SQLAuthority News – Microsoft Whitepaper – AlwaysOn Solution Guide: Offloading Read-Only Workloads to Secondary Replicas

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server 2012 has many interesting features but the most talked feature is AlwaysOn. Performance tuning is always a hot topic. I see lots of need of the same and lots of business around it. However, many times when people talk about performance tuning they think of it as a either query tuning, performance tuning, or server tuning. All are valid points, but performance tuning expert usually understands the business workload and business logic before making suggestions. For example, if performance tuning expert analysis workload and realize that there are plenty of reports as well read only queries on the server they can for sure consider alternate options for the same. If read only data is not required real time or it can accept the data which is delayed a bit it makes sense to divide the workload. A secondary replica of the original data which can serve all the read only queries and report is a good idea in most of the cases where there is plenty of workload which is not dependent on the real time data. SQL Server 2012 has introduced the feature of AlwaysOn which can very well fit in this scenario and provide a solution in Read-Only Workloads. Microsoft has recently announced a white paper which is based on absolutely the same subject. I recommend it to read for every SQL Enthusiast who is are going to implement a solution to offload read-only workloads to secondary replicas. Download white paper AlwaysOn Solution Guide: Offloading Read-Only Workloads to Secondary Replicas Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: AlwaysOn

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• Domains with similar names and issues

  - by abel

  I recently purchased one of those domain names like del.ico.us. While registering I found that delicious.com was being used. Argument: I found that delicious.com belonged to the same category as my to-be website. It served premium delicious dishes. Counter Argument: My to-be domain though belonging to the same category, specialized in serving free but delicious dishes or in giving out links(affiliate) to other sites serving premium delicious dishes. Additional Counter Arguments: 1.delicious.com was not in English. 2.the del.icio.us in my domain name though having the same spelling, is not going to be used in the same fashion. For eg.(this may not make sense, because the names have been changed)the d in delicious on my website actually stands for the greek letter Delta(?/d) and since internationalized domains are still not easily typable, I am going for the english equivalent.The prefix holds importance for the theme of the service which my website intends to offer. My Question: Can I use the domain name del.icio.us for my website? How are these kinds of matters dealt? (The domain names used are fictitious. And I have already registered the domain but have not started using it.I chanced upon this domain name because it was short, easy to remember and suited the theme of my website.)

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• Insurance Outlook: Just Right of Center

  - by Chuck Johnston Admin

  On Tuesday June 21st, PwC lead a session at the International Insurance Society meeting in Toronto focused on the opportunity in insurance.  The scenarios focusing on globalization, regulation and new areas of insurance opportunity were well defined and thought provoking, but the most interesting part of the session was the audience participation. PwC used a favorite strategic planning tool of mine, scenario planning, to highlight the important financial, political, social and technological dimensions that impact the insurance industry. Using wireless polling keypads, the audience was able to participate in scoring a range of possibilities across each dimension using a 1 to 5 ranking; 1 being generally negative or highly pessimistic scenarios and 5 being very positive or more confident scenarios. The results were then displayed on a screen with a line or "center" in the middle. "Left of center" was defined as being highly cautious and conservative, while "right of center" was defined as a more optimistic outlook for the industry's future. This session was attended by insurance carriers' senior leadership, leading insurance academics, senior regulators, and the occasional insurance technology executive. In general, the average answer fell just right of center, i.e. a little more positive or optimistic than center. Three years ago, after the 2008 financial crisis, I suspect the answers would have skewed more sharply to the left of center. This sense that things are generally getting better for insurers and that there is the potential for positive change pervaded the conference. There is still caution and concern around economic factors, regulation (especially the potential pitfalls of regulatory convergence with banking) and talent management, but in general, the industry outlook is more positive than it's been in several years. Chuck Johnston is vice president of industry strategy, Oracle Insurance. 

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• IIS cache control header settings

  - by a_m0d

  I'm currently working on a website that is accessed over https. We have recently come across a problem where we are unable to view .pdf files or any other type of file that is sent as an attachment (Content-Disposition:attachment). According to Microsoft Knowledge Base this is due to the fact that Cache-Control is set to no-cache. However, we have a requirement that all pages be fully reloaded every time they are visited, so we have disabled caching on all pages (through our ASP code, not through IIS settings). However, I have made a special case of this one page that shows the attachment, and it now returns a header with Cache-Control:private and the expiry set to 1 minute in the future. This works fine when I test it on my local machine, using https. However, when I deploy it to our test server and try it, the response headers still return Cache-Control:no-cache. There is no firewall or anything between me and the server, so IIS itself must be adding these headers and replacing mine. I have no idea why it would do this, and it doesn't really make any sense, but it seems to be the only option at the moment (I haven't yet found any other place in the code that will change the cache headers). Can anyone point me to a possible place where IIS might be setting these header values?

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• Masters or Second Bachelors Degree..or neither

  - by drD

  I have a degree in Business Administration, because at the time I didn't know what I wanted to do. I have been interested in programming for the past 2 years and have taken some action to self-teach. My experience/ knowledge base is limited to the following: -Read Kochan's Programming in C -Read IOS and Objective-C from the Big Nerd Ranch series -Obtained a C++ at NYU - thought it would be a good way to start to get a grasp on OO & design I would like to continue developing my skills, but most of all, re-orient how I am perceived as a professional. I am fully aware of how much a novice to this subject and would greatly appreciate any guidance anyone could give me. I currently have a job so full-time is not an option My goal is to become a software/ applications developer My questions are: -Should i take up a second bachelors in computer science? or a masters? or continue taking professional certificate programs (how are these viewed?) -If masters in computer science, would that make sense, if I dont have the formal foundation? (being a chief without ever being an Indian) -General advice for a novice to develop skill Thank You in advanced for helping me out.

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• Applying WCAG 2.0 to Non-Web ICT: second draft published from WCAG2ICT Task Force - for public review

  - by Peter Korn

  Last Thursday the W3C published an updated Working Draft of Guidance on Applying WCAG 2.0 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies. As I noted last July when the first draft was published, the motivation for this guidance comes from the Section 508 refresh draft, and also the European Mandate 376 draft, both of which seek to apply the WCAG 2.0 level A and AA Success Criteria to non-web ICT documents and software. This second Working Draft represents a major step forward in harmonization with the December 5th, 2012 Mandate 376 draft documents, including specifically Draft EN 301549 "European accessibility requirements for public procurement of ICT products and services". This work greatly increases the likelihood of harmonization between the European and American technical standards for accessibility, for web sites and web applications, non-web documents, and non-web software. As I noted last October at the European Policy Centre event: "The Accessibility Act – Ensuring access to goods and services across the EU", and again last month at the follow-up EPC event: "Accessibility - From European challenge to global opportunity", "There isn't a 'German Macular Degernation', a 'French Cerebral Palsy', an 'American Autism Spectrum Disorder'. Disabilities are part of the human condition. They’re not unique to any one country or geography – just like ICT. Even the built environment – phones, trains and cars – is the same worldwide. The definition of ‘accessible’ should be global – and the solutions should be too. Harmonization should be global, and not just EU-wide. It doesn’t make sense for the EU to have a different definition to the US or Japan." With these latest drafts from the W3C and Mandate 376 team, we've moved a major step forward toward that goal of a global "definition of 'accessible' ICT." I strongly encourage all interested parties to read the Call for Review, and to submit comments during the current review period, which runs through 15 February 2013. Comments should be sent to public-wcag2ict-comments-AT-w3.org. I want to thank my colleagues on the WCAG2ICT Task Force for the incredible time and energy and expertise they brought to this work - including particularly my co-authors Judy Brewer, Loïc Martínez Normand, Mike Pluke, Andi Snow-Weaver, and Gregg Vanderheiden; and the document editors Michael Cooper, and Andi Snow-Weaver.

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• Kingston SD reader not working for USB3

  - by user1146334

  I have a Kingston 4-in-1 Multimedia reader. When my PC was formatted with Win7 it worked fine. I decided to change to Ubuntu 14.04 and now it doesn't work. If I plug it into one of the USB2 ports it works fine, but whenever I plug it into one of the USB3 ports, it thinks about it for a minute and then dies. Here's the output of dmesg when it dies [110262.148656] usb 4-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd [110262.170330] usb 4-1: Parent hub missing LPM exit latency info. Power management will be impacted. [110262.266379] usb 4-1: New USB device found, idVendor=11b0, idProduct=6348 [110262.266386] usb 4-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [110262.266390] usb 4-1: Product: USB3.0 Media Reader [110262.266394] usb 4-1: Manufacturer: Kingston [110262.266398] usb 4-1: SerialNumber: 08735314400198 [110262.272929] usb-storage 4-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected [110262.273239] scsi15 : usb-storage 4-1:1.0 [110263.290056] scsi 15:0:0:0: Direct-Access FCR-HS3 -0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [110263.306622] scsi 15:0:0:1: Direct-Access FCR-HS3 -1 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [110263.323292] scsi 15:0:0:2: Direct-Access FCR-HS3 -2 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [110263.339858] scsi 15:0:0:3: Direct-Access FCR-HS3 -3 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [110263.340332] sd 15:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 [110263.340706] sd 15:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0 [110263.340850] sd 15:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0 [110263.340975] sd 15:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0 [110264.651847] sd 15:0:0:1: [sde] 31116288 512-byte logical blocks: (15.9 GB/14.8 GiB) [110264.667049] sd 15:0:0:1: [sde] Write Protect is off [110264.667055] sd 15:0:0:1: [sde] Mode Sense: 2f 00 00 00 [110264.682767] sd 15:0:0:1: [sde] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [110264.694975] sd 15:0:0:2: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk [110264.697933] sd 15:0:0:3: [sdg] Attached SCSI removable disk [110264.729918] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk [110264.754189] sde: sde1 [110264.760114] sd 15:0:0:1: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk [110275.377368] usb 4-1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd [110275.398453] usb 4-1: Parent hub missing LPM exit latency info. Power management will be impacted. [110275.436592] xhci_hcd 0000:05:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8802e4fb9980 [110275.436600] xhci_hcd 0000:05:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8802e4fb99c0 [110277.263444] usb 4-1: USB disconnect, device number 3

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• Is it customary to write Java domain objects / data transfer objects with public member variables on mobile platforms?

  - by Sean Mickey

  We performed a code review recently of mobile application Java code that was developed by an outside contractor and noticed that all of the domain objects / data transfer objects are written in this style: public class Category { public String name; public int id; public String description; public int parentId; } public class EmergencyContact { public long id; public RelationshipType relationshipType; public String medicalProviderType; public Contact contact; public String otherPhone; public String notes; public PersonName personName; } Of course, these members are then accessed directly everywhere else in the code. When we asked about this, the developers told us that this is a customary performance enhancement design pattern that is used on mobile platforms, because mobile devices are resource-limited environments. It doesn't seem to make sense; accessing private members via public getters/setters doesn't seem like it could add much overhead. And the added benefits of encapsulation seem to outweigh the benefits of this coding style. Is this generally true? Is this something that is normally done on mobile platforms for the reasons given above? All feedback welcome and appreciated -

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• Optimization ended up in casting an object at each method call

  - by Aybe

  I've been doing some optimization for the following piece of code : public void DrawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int color) { _bitmap.DrawLineBresenham(x1, y1, x2, y2, color); } After profiling it about 70% of the time spent was in getting a context for drawing and disposing it. I ended up sketching the following overload : public void DrawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int color, BitmapContext bitmapContext) { _bitmap.DrawLineBresenham(x1, y1, x2, y2, color, bitmapContext); } Until here no problems, all the user has to do is to pass a context and performance is really great as a context is created/disposed one time only (previously it was a thousand times per second). The next step was to make it generic in the sense it doesn't depend on a particular framework for rendering (besides .NET obvisouly). So I wrote this method : public void DrawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int color, IDisposable bitmapContext) { _bitmap.DrawLineBresenham(x1, y1, x2, y2, color, (BitmapContext)bitmapContext); } Now every time a line is drawn the generic context is casted, this was unexpected for me. Are there any approaches for fixing this design issue ? Note : _bitmap is a WriteableBitmap from WPF BitmapContext is from WriteableBitmapEx library DrawLineBresenham is an extension method from WriteableBitmapEx

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• beginner - best way to do a 'Confirm' page? [closed]

  - by W_P

  I am a beginning web app developer, wondering about the best way to implement a "Confirm Page" upon form submission. I have heard that it's best for the script that a form POSTs to to be implemented by handling the POST data and then redirecting to another page, so the user isn't directly viewing the page that was POSTed to. My question is about the best way to implement a "Confirm before data save" page. Do I Have my form POST to a script, which marshals the data, puts in a GET, and redirects to the confirm page, which unmarshals and displays the data in another form, where the user can then either confirm (which causes another POST to a script that actually saves the data) or deny (which causes the user to be redirected back to the original form, with their input added)? Have my form POST directly to the confirm page, which is displayed to the user and then, like #1, gives the user the option to confirm or deny? Have my form GET the confirm page, which then does the expected behavior? I feel like there is a common-sense answer to this question that I am just not getting.

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• How common is prototyping as the first stage of development?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I still feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself. You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do, and you can't tell anything about the user experience from the requirements document, even though it can include QA requirements. ...sequence diagrams are as good a description of how the software works as the call stack, in other words- very limited, highly partial view of the overall system, and a class diagram is great for describing how the system is built, but is utterly useless in helping you figure out what the software needs to be. Where in all this formalism is the bottom line- how the program looks, operates, and what experience it gives? Doesn't it make more sense to design off of that? Isn't it better to figure out how the program should work via a prototype and strive to implement it for real? I know that I'm probably suffering from being taught engineering by theoreticians, but I got to ask, do they do this in the industry? How do people figure out what the program actually is, not what it should conform to? Do people prototype a lot? ...or do they mostly use the formal tools like UML and I just didn't get the hang of using them yet?

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• Supporting copy 'n paste in your Windows Phone app

  - by Daniel Moth

  Some Windows Phone 7 owners already have the NoDo update, and others are getting it soon. This update brings, among other things, copy & paste support for text boxes. The user taps on a piece of text (and can drag in either direction to select more/less words), a popup icon appears that when tapped copies the text to the clipboard, and then at any app that shows the soft input panel there is an icon option to paste the copied text into the associated textbox. For more read this 'how to'. Note that there is no programmatic access to the clipboard, only the end user experience I just summarized, so there is nothing you need to do for your app's textboxes to support copy & paste: it just works. The only issue may be if in your app you use static TextBlock controls, for which the copy support will not appear, of course. That was the case with my Translator by Moth app where the translated text appears in a TextBlock. So, I wanted the user to be able to copy directly from the translated text (without offering an editable TextBox for an area where user input does not make sense). Take a look at a screenshot of my app before I made any changes to it. I then made changes to it preserving the look and feel, yet with additional copy support (see screenshot on the right)! So how did I achieve that? Simply by using my co-author's template (thanks Peter!): Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone.   (aside: in my app even without this change there is a workaround, the user could use the "swap" feature to swap the source and target, so they can copy from the text box) Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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