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  • Bump the Bill

    - by David Dorf
    I'm writing this from 3,400 feet in the air somewhere between Chicago and Austin. GoGo In-flight strikes again. Is there anywhere I can't get a WiFi connection? While listening to Deacon Blues by Steely Dan and skimming the news, I just came across an interesting article on mobile payments. Remember when I wrote about the iPhone Bump application and its possible use in retail? Well it looks like PayPal updated their mobile payments application to include the bump technology. Now its possible to transfer money between individuals by bumping iPhones. According to the WSJ, Paypal did 24 million transactions in 2008 and 140 million in 2009 on mobile phones. As the technology gets easier to use, that number is bound to increase. Alternatives to Paypal include Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, wireless carriers ("put it on my phone bill"), smart cards (using your phone's SIM card), and iTunes. That last one comes courtesy of a story Joe Skorupa wrote on mobile payments. It looks like Apple allows iPhone apps to take micro-payments via iTunes accounts, so there may come a time when its possible to use your iPhone to make a purchase in a retail store and have your credit card charged via your iTunes account. There are still some improvements in usability to be made before using a phone will be easier than swiping a credit card, but its already better than fussing with cash.

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

    - by Michael Williamson
    Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • How to advertise (free) software?

    - by nebukadnezzar
    I'm not sure if this fits on SO, but other SE sites don't seem to fit either, so I understand when this question gets moved, Although I'd like to avoid getting it closed due to being offtopics, since I think that this question might fit, considering this part of the FAQ: Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, ... covers … a specific programming problem ... matters that are unique to the programming profession Sorry for the lengthy Introduction, though. When Software is advertised, it is usually Software for one (or more) specific purpose, such as: Mozilla Firefox - A Web Browser Ubuntu - An Operating System Python - A Programming Language Visual Studio - A Development Studio ... And so on. But when writing Libraries, that is, Software that doesn't necessarily serve one specific purpose, but instead multiple purposes, which are usually supposed to be used inside an application, such as: Irrlicht - A 3D Engine Qt - An Application Framework I'm a developer of the latter kind of Software, and I naturally want to advertise my Software. It's not commercial Software; It's not GPL either. It's completely free (Licensed under the MIT License :-)). I naturally host my stuff at github, which technically makes it very easy to access the software, and I thought that these might be possible options, although I have no experience with them: Submit the Software to Freshmeat, and hope for the best Submit the Software to Sourceforge, and hope someone accidently stumbles over it Write spammails, and get death threats via Mail ... But something tells me that these methods are probably not the best Methods. So, my final question would be, How does the Average Joe Hobby Programmer advertise his/her Software Library? Yes, I know this question is probably getting closed due to being Offtopic on SO. But maybe a move might be better instead.

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  • West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 Meeting Recap

    - by Sam Abraham
    As the saying goes, it’s better late than never. Such is the case with my overdue West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 meeting report. Our August meeting was full of both knowledge and adventure. It comes as no surprise that the knowledge was brought to us by our favorite DotNetNuke Technical Evangelist, Will Strohl. Will introduced and thoroughly presented the new social features in DNN 6.2. Unfortunately, our meeting date coincided with Hurricane Isaac having just passed us by. Aside from road closures and floods that kept public schools closed for two days, our meeting host, PC Professor, had to close the school the day of our meeting on a short notice due to flooding which we found out about at midnight on the day of the event.  This left us scrambling to find an available alternate meeting location close enough to our original venue. Cancelling the meeting was always an option, but we opted to keep it as the very last resort. Luckily, we were fortunate to find a meeting room at the Hampton Inn only a few minutes away from our original location. Having heard of our challenge, our event sponsor, Applied Innovations, stepped-in and covered the meeting room cost in addition to the food and beverages. We would like to thank our volunteers and sponsors who made that event a success: Jess Coburn, CEO and Cara Pluff, Director of Sales at Applied Innovations, Dave Noderer for suggesting the alternate venue and Venkat Subramanian for his hard work keeping our members informed of the venue change and for being our event photographer.   We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming meetings: -September 25th, 2012 with Jonas Stawski, Microsoft MVP -October 23rd, 2012 with our Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe “DevFish” Healy -Ending an exciting year will be our November 27th meeting with Dycom Industries’ Senior Software Developer, Tom Huynh.   All the best, --Sam

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  • Abstraction: The War between solving the problem and a general solution.

    - by Bryan Harrington
    As a programmer, I find myself in the dilemma where I want make my program as abstract and as general as possible. Doing so usually would allow me to reuse my code and have a more general solution for a problem that might (or might not) come up again. Then this voice in my head says, just solve the problem dummy its that easy! Why spend more time than you have to? We all have indeed faced this question where Abstraction is on your right shoulder and Solve-it-stupid sits on the left. Which to listen to and how often? What is your strategy for this? Should you abstract everything?

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  • what, why, when, should I learn computer science?

    - by dramasea
    I'm 16 years old and really an enthusiast on web programming. I know (X)HTML, css, javascript and php. And i heard about computer science. Below are my question: What is computer science? Should a web programmer learn computer science? If the answer of question 2 is yes, then what programming language(s) should I learn before I get into computer science (I saw the video of 'Introduction to computer science' which is one of the MIT opencourse and it started to use python without teaching you from scratch.) Can I learn computer science now? (Without a university degree, I can watch open courseware.)

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  • A project idea for project ideas!?

    - by Auxiliary
    First take a look at this question which I asked a few months ago. I still can't find a place where programmers and computer specialists can discuss their projects and ideas. I found OpenHatch.com. It's good but not sufficient, it's only for open-source projects and is not really a place to discuss ideas. OK, so here's an idea, Why don't we make one? The question is do you think there is a need for such a social programmer's lounge? A place where they can discuss their ideas? Do you think it's worth the time and money to start such a website? Do you think it has the potential of getting enough traffic to keep it alive? Many thanks

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  • C++ skills higher than C skills?

    - by h0b0
    I feel that the often seen C/C++ doesn't really describe my skills in my CV. So I'm planning to separate it into advanced C++ knowledge and mediocre C skills. Do you think this is confusing for the reader? She could think: "C is a subset of C++, so what is this guy trying to tel me?" Well, what I'm trying to tell is: I have done several real world C++ projects while pure C projects where just a hobby thing. Do you agree that a skilled C++ programmer not necessarily is a qualified C guy or do you think that this switch is done easily?

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  • GTK equivalent to MS Spy++

    - by zetah
    Spy++ comes with paid version of MS Visual Studio as utility that gives you a graphical view of the system’s processes, threads, windows, and window messages. and it's not only utility on Win32 that offers this feature, but I use it as popular example. It lists all UI elements of all running applications, and user can use "Find Tool" to locate UI element of interest and get response dialog with versatile information about that object, like UI control name, text contents, and many other data of potential interest to a programmer. I'm interested in similar GTK application which can at least return GTK UI element (widget) name and extracted text contents of that element of arbitrary running process. I couldn't find anything related using Google

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  • Xaudio2 XAPO Effects

    - by Jason Champion
    I've been working with XAudio2. After looking at the samples, example code, and sparse documentation available from Microsoft and the MSDN, I've found that there aren't any easy-to-find resources on creating and using XAPO effects, nor any XAPO effects produced by third parties that I can download and/or buy. What it looks like is that if I create an app that uses XAPO effects, I'll have to create them all myself because there's no community of existing applications like there is with technologies like Apple's AU or Steinberg's VST. Is this true, or are there others using XAudio2 and XAPO and I just haven't found them? Is there a place to ask programmer-support-related questions about XAudio2 and related technologies (or is this the best destination)? The best I've found so far are the XNA forums, which are game-specific and sparsely populated in the audio area.

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  • Can my ikmnet test results say something about career choice I should take?

    - by Nicke
    I took 2 tests via ikmnet and scored 70 % on SQL and 65 % on Java. While not bad, it can be improved. The subskills I need to improve according to the test are interfaces and inheritance, compilation and deployment, flow control, The java.lang package and "Java Program Construction" and these topics seems rather broad to me. Rather than just learning by programming, could you advice me to take a certification, follow a course or otherwise improve my skills? By the way, I enjoy python more than Java so should I market myself more of a python programmer or even a role that some companies search for which seems like a system developer with more technical writing where the title is system analysts (evaluating systems in cooperation with management rather than programming.) Thank you for any comment and/or answer.

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  • How to override the default dir alias in Powershell?

    - by Ashwin
    I wanted to see colorized filenames when I typed dir in Powershell. So, I added the Set-ChildItemColor function from here to my profile file. I also added this line at the end of the profile file to override the dir alias: Set-Alias dir Get-ChildItemColor Now, when I open Powershell, I get this error: Set-Alias : The AllScope option cannot be removed from the alias 'dir'. At C:\Users\joe\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1:82 char:10 + Set-Alias <<<< dir Get-ChildItemColor + CategoryInfo : WriteError: (dir:String) [Set-Alias], SessionStateUna uthorizedAccessException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : AliasAllScopeOptionCannotBeRemoved,Microsoft.PowerShe ll.Commands.SetAliasCommand What is this AllScope? How do I remove that option to get colorized dir?

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 77: Donald Smith on the OpenJDK and Java

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet An interview with Donald Smith about Java and OpenJDK. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Jersey 2.0 Milestone 2 available Oracle distribution of Eclipse (OEPE) now supports GlassFish 3.1.2 Oracle Linux 6 is now part of the certification matrix for 3.1.2 3rd part of Spring -> Java EE 6 article series published Joe Darcy - Repeating annotations in the works JEP 152: Crypto Operations with Network HSMs JEP 153: Launch JavaFX Applications OpenJDK bug database: Status update OpenJDK Governing Board 2012 Election: Results jtreg update March 2012 Take Two: Comparing JVMs on ARM/Linux The OpenJDK group at Oracle is growing App bundler project now open Events April 4-5, JavaOne Japan, Tokyo, Japan April 11, Cleveland JUG, Cleveland, OH April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 17-20, GIDS, Bangalore April 21, Java Summit, Chennai April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India May 5, Bangalore, Pune, ?? - JUG outreach May 7, OTN Developer Day, Mumbai May 8, OTN Developer Day, Delhi Feature InterviewDonald Smith, MBA, MSc, is Director of Product Management for Oracle. He brings worldwide enterprise software experience, ranging from small "dot-com" through Fortune 500 companies. Donald speaks regularly about Java, open source, community development, business models, business integration and software development politics at conferences and events worldwide including Java One, Oracle World, Sun Tech Days, Evans Developer Relations Conference, OOPSLA, JAOO, Server Side Symposium, Colorado Software Summit and others. Prior to returning to Oracle, Donald was Director of Ecosystem Development for the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit foundation supporting the Eclipse open source community. Mail Bag What’s Cool OpenJDK 7 port to Haiku JEP 154: Remove Serialization Goto for the Java Programming Language

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  • How to be more logical? (less bugs/errors)

    - by SamB
    I have been programming for 6 years and I am in high school (I prefer not to disclose my age). I have dabbled in many different languages. Just to list a few: Java, PHP, C++, Python, Autohotkey, Mathematica and many more. I have a very good understanding of the basics of general programming. The only problem is I still create bugs all the time. I think too often. Do you have any hints besides continuing to program that will help me become a better programmer and make less errors?

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  • html/css vs CMS

    - by Matt
    I am currently a CS student and an aspiring programmer/web developer. I am wondering whether it is worth taking the time to master html and css to make websites when these CMS services/wysiwyg editors (wordpress, squarespace) seem to be becoming more and more functional. Does anyone think these publishing services might eventually make the need to design websites from raw code unnecessary? If not, please explain why. If designing a website eventually becomes as simple as using Photoshop I would much rather invest my time in programming languages.

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  • what, why, when, should I learn computer science?

    - by dramasea
    I'm 16 years old and really an enthusiast on web programming. I know (X)HTML, css, javascript and php. And i heard about computer science. Below are my question: What is computer science is? Should a web programmer learn computer science? If the answer of question 2 is yes, then what programming language should i learn before i get into computer science(I saw the video of 'Introduction to computer science' which is one of the MIT opencourse and it started to use python without teaching u from scratch) Can I learn computer science now?(Without a university degree, i can watch opencourseware)

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  • ATI proprietary driver performance?

    - by Axel
    I'm about to (at least, want to..) buy a laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 4250, and I haven't a good opinion on ATI's drivers. How is the actual performance of the open/proprietary driver (currently I have nVidia, and I'm very satisfied)? The intended use for the laptop is: watching videos, programming in Java/PHP/maybe Qt... but, I like to know if Compiz runs well. Yes, I'm a hardcore (?) programmer that uses Compiz. :P Someone has this GPU? Experiences? Thoughts? Thanks! :D

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  • I made a 2D ENGINE for Android, looking for cooperation.

    - by Roger Travis
    My name is Robert, I am an Android programmer and wanted to show off my latest project - a 2d game engine. You can see it in action here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=engineDemo.com My engine's main advantage is its ease of use. To have your level up and running, you'll need only 3 lines of code. ABoxView aboxView = new ABoxView(this); setContentView(aboxView); aboxView.loadLevel("level/level02"); Level are created in a special level constructor and object physical properties are stored in a corresponding XML file. I am looking to cooperate with those, who might be interesting in using my engine in their games. You can email me at [email protected] or post here. Thanks, Robert

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  • What's the value of a Facebook fan?

    - by David Dorf
    In his blog posting titled "Why Each Facebook Fan Is Worth $2,000 to J. Crew," Joe Skorupa lays out a simplistic calculation for assigning a value to social media efforts within Facebook. While I don't believe the metric, at least its a metric that can be applied consistently. Trying to explain the ROI to management to start a program, then benchmarking to show progress isn't straightforward at all. Social media isn't really mature enough to have hard-and-fast rules around valuation (yet). When I'm asked by retailers how to measure social media efforts, I usually fess-up and say I can't show an ROI but the investment is so low you might was well take a risk. Intuitively, it just seems like a good way to interact with consumers, and since your competition is doing it, you better do it as well. Vitrue, a social media management company, has calculated a fan as being worth $3.60 per year based on impressions generated in Facebook's news feed. That means a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year. Don't believe that number either? Fine, Vitrue now has a tool that let's you adjust the earned media value of a fan. Jump over to http://evaluator.vitrue.com/ and enter your brand's Facebook URL to get an assessment of the current value and potential value. For fun, I compared Abercrombie & Fitch (1,077,480 fans), Gap (567,772 fans), and Wet Seal (294,479 fans). The image below shows the results assuming the default $5 earned media value for a fan. The calculation is more complicated than just counting fans. It also accounts for postings and comments. Its possible for a brand with fewer fans to have a higher value based on frequency and relevancy of posts. The tool gathers data via the Social Graph API for the past 30 days of activity. I'm not sure this tool assigns the correct value either, but hey, its a great start.

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  • In general, are programmers or artists paid better?

    - by jokoon
    I'm in a private game programming school where there also are 3D art classes; sadly, there seems to be a lot more students in those latter classes, something like 50% or 100% more. So I was wondering: in the real video game industry, which of the artist/modeler or the programmer is more likely to be wanted in a company, so who will be paid more ? I'm sure there are artists which are obviously paid better than other programmers and I'm sure there are other sorts of jobs in the game industry (sound, management, testers), but I wanted to know if there is a general tendency for one or the other. And sometime I wonder even if an artist can happen to write scripts...

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  • Why isn't SSL/TLS built into modern Operating Systems?

    - by Channel72
    A lot of the basic network protocols that make up the infrastructure of the Internet are built in to most major Operating Systems. Things like TCP, UDP, and DNS are all built into Linux, UNIX and Windows, and are made available to the programmer through low-level system APIs. But when it comes to SSL or TLS, one has to turn to a third-party library such as OpenSSL or Mozilla NSS. SSL is a relatively old protocol, and it's basically an industry standard as ubiquitous as TCP/IP, so why isn't it built into most Operating Systems?

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  • Determining if you&rsquo;re running on the build server with MSBuild &ndash; Easy way

    - by ParadigmShift
    When you're customizing MSBuild in building a visual studio project, it often becomes important to determine if the build is running on the build server or your development environment. This information can change the way you set up path variables and other Conditional tasks.I've found many different answers online. It seems like they all only worked under certain conditions, so none of them were guaranteed to be consistent.So here's the simplest way I've found that has not failed me yet. <PropertyGroup> <!-- Determine if the current build is running on the build server --> <IsBuildServer>false</IsBuildServer> <IsBuildServer Condition="'$(BuildUri)' != ''">true</IsBuildServer> </PropertyGroup>   Shahzad Qureshi is a Software Engineer and Consultant in Salt Lake City, Utah, USAHis certifications include:Microsoft Certified System Engineer 3CX Certified Partner Global Information Assurance Certification – Secure Software Programmer – .NETHe is the owner of Utah VoIP Store at www.UtahVoIPStore.com and SWS Development at www.swsdev.com and publishes windows apps under the name Blue Voice.

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  • how important is usability to your workplace/employer?

    - by Dana
    If asked, I would bet that every manager would agree that software usability is important. Unfortunately, when it comes time to put their money where there mouths are, they shy away and tell the programmer to just make it usable. What is everyone's experience with usability in the workplace? Is there a usability team? How many people have usability as their primary job role? What is the ratio of usability experts to programmers? Is the usability team taken seriously? If there is no usability team, what does your company do to address usability of software? Does it work?

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  • Upcoming events 2011 IT Camp Saturday Tampa and Orlando Code Camp 2011

    - by Nikita Polyakov
    I’ll be speaking at a few upcoming events: Saturday March 19th 2011 IT Camp Saturday Tampa http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa This is a first of it’s kind – IT Pro camp, a more topic open then many traditional Code Camp and no so much code focused. Here is just a small sample: Adnan Cartwright Administrating your Network with Group Policy Nikita Polyakov Intro to Phone 7 Development Landon Bass Enterprise Considerations for SharePoint 2010 Michael Wells Intro to SQL Server for IT Professionals Keith Kabza Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Overview Check out the full session schedule for other session, if you are in the IT Pro field – you will find many sessions of interest here: http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa/2011/03/01/schedule/   Saturday March 26th 2011 Orlando Code Camp http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/ Just a highlight of a few sessions: Design & Animation Chris G. Williams: Making Games for Windows Phone 7 with XNA 4.0 Diane Leeper: Animating in Blend: It's ALIVE Diane Leeper: Design for Developers: Bad Design Kills Good Projects Henry Lee: Windows Phone 7 Animation Konrad Neumann: Being a Designer in a Developer's World Nikita Polyakov: Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend WP7 Henry Lee: Learn to Use Accelerometer and Location Service (GPS) in Windows Phone Application Joe Healy: Consuming Services in Windows Phone 7 Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 1) Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 2) Nikita Polyakov: WP7 Marketplace Place and Monetization Russell Fustino: Making (More) Money with Phone 7

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  • how should I network my turn based game?

    - by ddriver1
    I'm writing a very basic turn based strategy game which allows a player to select units and attack enemy units on their turn. The game is written in Java using the slick2d library and I plan to use kyronet for the networking api. I want the game to be networked, but I do not know how I should go about it. My current idea is to connect two users together, and the first one to join the game becomes the game host, while the other becomes the client. However after reading http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/what-every-programmer-needs-to-know-about-game-networking/ it seems my game would be suited to a peer to peer lockstep model. Would that make programming the networking side much easier? Any suggestions on how I should structure my networking would be greatly appreciated

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