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• How much am I worth hourly as a software/web developer? [closed]

  - by luckysmack

  I may be starting a new job very soon as a developer for both web and desktop software. The primary languages I will be using is ASP.NET with C# with some php for existing projects(I've already had one interview which went very well). The job deals primarily in advertising. But this is my first real job in the market, I have no degrees, but have some college time(~1yr). So I am primarily self taught. They are fully aware of my skill set and lack of degrees or certificates. I applied as an entry level developer. It will be a permanent and full time/hourly position, and not a per contract job. So since it my cherry job, im not really sure what to ask for. even though im self taught im pretty confident in my skills and know what im doing fairly well. I pick up on new concepts very well and find new things fairly easy to learn. Here is a very brief summary of my skills: PHP: ~2years C#/.NET: 2 months Python: Basics only. ~1 month OOP Familiarity: Great (1 year) MVC Familiarity: Great (1 year) PHP Frameworks used: CakePHP(6 months), Yii(3 months), Lithium(3 months) CMS Familiar with: Drupal(1.5 years), Wordpress(only basics) I also have ~2yrs experience in maintaining my own VPS server and the hassles all that entails (linux/debian) Pretty much all the above will be used at this job. Although I will be using C# a vast majority of the time. I only recently started learning it but am moving along fairly rapidly and its all going smooth as butter. So what have I built? I have one proprietary site built in drupal which is used an an order log for products, inventory, and their shipments. It is also able to process payments through paypal merchant services. I have worked on a handful of other small apps used here and there I'm not able to show but which worked fairly well (all in php using frameworks though). The business does fairly well and is far from a a typical corporate type environment. It is much closer to a small development studio. And it is based out of northern California. I don't know how/what more info I can give on them. I also want this to be able to be referenced by other people possibly so I am looking for general tips and ideas to get an answer as well. I had trouble finding a reasonable range on other websites which seemed to be either way to low, or showed what a veteran developer makes. I know this is a fairly subjective question, but it is difficult to get a reasonable answer or guesstimate anywhere else. Even if only a little bit help, its much appreciated. So as for the direct question, based on all this info (did I miss anything?), how much should I ask for hourly? How much am I worth as a software developer?

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• What Counts for a DBA: Skill

  - by drsql

  “Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skill sets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit.

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• Is Your Company Social on the Inside?

  - by Mike Stiles

  As we talk about the extension of social from an outbound-facing marketing tool to a platform that will reach across the entire enterprise, servicing multiple functions of that enterprise, it might be time to take a look at how social can be effectively employed for internal communications. Remember the printed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Remember the emailed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Why not? Shouldn’t your employees care about the company more than anything else in life and be voraciously hungry for any information related to it? The more realistic prospect is that a company’s employees don’t behave much differently at work where information is concerned than they do in their personal lives. They “tune in” to information that’s immediately relevant to them, that peaks their interest, and/or that’s presented in a visually engaging way. That currently makes an internal social platform the most ideal way to communicate within the organization. It not only facilitates more immediate, more targeted (and thus more relevant) messaging from the company out to employees, it sets a stage for employees to communicate with each other and efficiently get answers to questions from peers. It’s a collaboration tool on steroids. If you build such an internal social portal and you do it right, will employees use it? Considering social media has officially been declared more addictive than cigarettes, booze and sex…probably. But what does it mean to do an internal social platform “right”? The bar has been set pretty high. Your employees are used to Twitter and Facebook, and would roll their eyes at anything less simple or harder to navigate than those. All the Facebook best practices would apply to your internal social as well, including the importance of managing posting frequency, using photos and video, moderation & response, etc. And don’t worry, you won’t be the first to jump in. WPP's global digital agency Possible has its own social network called Colab. Nestle has “The Nest.” Red Robin’s got one. I myself got an in-depth look at McGraw-Hill’s internal social platform at Blogwell NYC. Some of these companies are building their own platforms, others are buying them off the shelf or customizing readymade solutions. But you won’t be the last either. Prescient Digital Media and the IABC learned 39% of companies don’t offer employees any social tools. Not a social network, not discussion forums, not even IM. And a great many continue to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter on the premises. That’s pretty astonishing since social has become as essential a modern day communications tool as the telephone. But such holdouts will pay a big price for being mired in fear while competitors exploit social connections unchallenged. Fish where the fish are. If social has become the way people communicate and take in information, let that be the way communication is trafficked in the organization.

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; JustTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  JustTrace is made by Telerik which is mainly known for its collection of UI controls. The current version (2012.3.1127.0) does include a performance and memory profiler which does cost 614€ and is currently with a special offer for 306€ on sale. It does include one year of free upgrades. The uneven € numbers are calculated from the 799€ and 50% dicsount price. The UI is already in Metro style and simple to use. Multi process, attach, method recording filter are not supported. It looks like JustTrace is like Ants a Just My Code profiler. For stuff where you do not have the pdbs or you want to dig deeper into the BCL code you will not get far. After getting the profile data you get in the All Methods grid a plain list with hit count and own time. The method list for all methods is also suspiciously short which is a clear sign that you will not get far during the analysis of foreign code. But at least there is also a memory profiler included. For this I have to choose in the first window for Profiling Type “Memory Profiler” to check the memory consumption of VS.  There are some interesting number to see but I do really miss from YourKit the thread stack window. How am I supposed to get a clue when much memory is allocated and the CPU consumption is high in which places I should look? The Snapshot summary gives a rough overview which is ok for a first impression. Next is Assemblies? This gives you a list of all loaded assemblies. Not terribly useful.   The By Type view gives you exactly what it is supposed to do. You have to keep in mind that this list is filtered by the types you did check in the Assemblies list. The By Type instance list does only show types from assemblies which do not originate from Microsoft. By default mscorlib and System are not checked. That is the reason why for the first time my By Type window looked like The idea behind this feature is to show only your instances because you are ultimately responsible for the overall memory consumption. I am not sure if I do like this feature because by default it does hide too much. I do want to see at least how many strings and arrays are allocated. A simple namespace filter would also do it in my opinion. Now you can examine all string instances and look who in the object graph does keep a reference on them. That is nice but YourKit has the big plus that you can also look into the string contents.  I am also not sure how in the graph cycles are visualized and what will happen if you have thousands of objects referencing you. That's pretty much it about JustTrace. It can help the average developer to pinpoint performance and memory issues by just looking at his own code and instances. Showing them more will not help them because the sheer amount of information will overwhelm them. And you need to have a pretty good understanding how the GC and the CLR does work. When you have a performance issue at a customer machine it is sometimes very helpful to be able a bring a profiler onto the machine (no pdbs, …) and to get a full snapshot of all processes which are in the problematic use case involved. For these more advanced use cased JustTrace is certainly the wrong tool. Next: SpeedTrace

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• Criminals and Other Illegal Characters

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  SQLTeam's favorite Slovenian blogger Mladen (b | t) had an interesting question on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MladenPrajdic/status/347057950470307841 I liked Kendal Van Dyke's (b | t) reply: http://twitter.com/SQLDBA/status/347058908801667072 And he was right!  This is one of those pretty-useless-but-sounds-interesting propositions that I've based all my presentations on, and most of my blog posts. If you read all the replies you'll see a lot of good suggestions.  I particularly like Aaron Bertrand's (b | t) idea of going into the Unicode character set, since there are over 65,000 characters available.  But how to find an illegal character?  Detective work? I'm working on the premise that if SQL Server will reject it as a name it would throw an error.  So all we have to do is generate all Unicode characters, rename a database with that character, and catch any errors. It turns out that dynamic SQL can lend a hand here: IF DB_ID(N'a') IS NULL CREATE DATABASE [a]; DECLARE @c INT=1, @sql NVARCHAR(MAX)=N'', @err NVARCHAR(MAX)=N''; WHILE @c<65536 BEGIN BEGIN TRY SET @sql=N'alter database ' + QUOTENAME(CASE WHEN @c=1 THEN N'a' ELSE NCHAR(@c-1) END) + N' modify name=' + QUOTENAME(NCHAR(@c)); RAISERROR(N'*** Trying %d',10,1,@c) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC(@sql); SET @c+=1; END TRY BEGIN CATCH SET @err=ERROR_MESSAGE(); RAISERROR(N'Ooops - %d - %s',10,1,@c,@err) WITH NOWAIT; BREAK; END CATCH END SET @sql=N'alter database ' + QUOTENAME(NCHAR(@c-1)) + N' modify name=[a]'; EXEC(@sql); The script creates a dummy database "a" if it doesn't already exist, and only tests single characters as a database name.  If you have databases with single character names then you shouldn't run this on that server. It takes a few minutes to run, but if you do you'll see that no errors are thrown for any of the characters.  It seems that SQL Server will accept any character, no matter where they're from.  (Well, there's one, but I won't tell you which. Actually there's 2, but one of them requires some deep existential thinking.) The output is also interesting, as quite a few codes do some weird things there.  I'm pretty sure it's due to the font used in SSMS for the messages output window, not all characters are available.  If you run it using the SQLCMD utility, and use the -o switch to output to a file, and -u for Unicode output, you can open the file in Notepad or another text editor and see the whole thing. I'm not sure what character I'd recommend to answer Mladen's question.  I think the standard tab (ASCII 9) is fine.  There's also several specific separator characters in the original ASCII character set (decimal 28-31). But of all the choices available in Unicode whitespace, I think my favorite would be the Mongolian Vowel Separator.  Or maybe the zero-width space. (that'll be fun to print!)  And since this is Mladen we're talking about, here's a good selection of "intriguing" characters he could use.

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• Can someone explain the true landscape of Rails vs PHP deployment, particularly within the context of Reseller-based web hosting (e.g., Hostgator)?

  - by rcd

  Currently, I have a reseller account with the company HostGator. I design websites, which up until now have occasionally been wrapped in Wordpress CMSs and the like (PHP applications). I then sell hosting (of the site I've designed) to the client, which is pretty simple, in that I can simply click a button and add a new shared hosting account/site with whatever settings I want. Furthermore, I then utilize WHMCS to automate billing and account management. It's a nice package and pretty simple. I pay something like $25 a month, and can sell a hundred accounts under this (because my clients bandwidth requirements are low). Now I am finding the need to develop more customized applications, including a minimalist CMS and several proprietary things. I soon anticipate developing these apps for clients as well. Thus, I've spent the past few months learning Rails, and it's coming along well now. The thing that has nagged at me all along, though, is the deployment issue. I can't wrap my brain around it. It seems like all of the popular options (Heroku, etc) have nice automation with git and are set up in the "Rails Way". I get that (sort of). But it's terribly expensive... a single dyno, a helper, and the cheapest database (which they say is mainly suitable for testing) that isn't limited to 5MB runs $51. This is for ONE app!!! Throw in a "production" DB and you're over $200. This is like... the same prices as getting a server somewhere, right? Meanwhile, going back to what I guess is a "traditional" hosting environment with Hostgator, their server only has Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.5... No Rails 3. AND, no Passenger (not that I really understand the difference in CGI or mod_rails or whatever, but they say Passenger is the simplest). So I'm to understand that if I build an app in Rails 3, it won't run at all on this host? But damn, I already have these accounts under my reseller account there, all running static html and/or PHP stuff, right? So what now? How do I get all of this under one simple (and affordable) roof? Forgive my ignorance, but I just don't get it. Managing a VPS is cool and all, but entails learning server admin stuff and security... And it's expensive. I get that a shared and/or reseller "server-based" (forgive the terminology) may be inadequate for large-scale apps that use a lot of bandwidth... But what about for those of us who are building real (but small and low bandwidth) apps (with Rails) and who want to deploy them simply, cheaply, using the same conceptual approach as PHP? Even after learning all of this Ruby and Rails stuff for months, I'm questioning whether it's worth it when it comes to deployment. I want to build a small app, upload it to my home directory on a shared server account, and just make it run. Why should that be so hard? Am I just choosing the wrong language/framework? Forgive my ignorance in the subject; these questions are not rhetorical; just trying to learn here. So: 1) I'd appreciate if someone could give me a good rundown of how to understand deployment in Rails vs. PHP. 2) I'd appreciate if someone could address my issue with running a hosting/web business around reseller hosting (Hostgator) while also being able to host Rails apps. Can it be done? And how can a company like Hostgator completely ignore what's current in Rails/Ruby? Thanks.

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• Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

  - by haylem

  I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

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• Getting 2D Platformer entity collision Response Correct (side-to-side + jumping/landing on heads)

  - by jbrennan

  I've been working on a 2D (tile based) 2D platformer for iOS and I've got basic entity collision detection working, but there's just something not right about it and I can't quite figure out how to solve it. There are 2 forms of collision between player entities as I can tell, either the two players (human controlled) are hitting each other side-to-side (i. e. pushing against one another), or one player has jumped on the head of the other player (naturally, if I wanted to expand this to player vs enemy, the effects would be different, but the types of collisions would be identical, just the reaction should be a little different). In my code I believe I've got the side-to-side code working: If two entities press against one another, then they are both moved back on either side of the intersection rectangle so that they are just pushing on each other. I also have the "landed on the other player's head" part working. The real problem is, if the two players are currently pushing up against each other, and one player jumps, then at one point as they're jumping, the height-difference threshold that counts as a "land on head" is passed and then it registers as a jump. As a life-long player of 2D Mario Bros style games, this feels incorrect to me, but I can't quite figure out how to solve it. My code: (it's really Objective-C but I've put it in pseudo C-style code just to be simpler for non ObjC readers) void checkCollisions() { // For each entity in the scene, compare it with all other entities (but not with one it's already compared against) for (int i = 0; i < _allGameObjects.count(); i++) { // GameObject is an Entity GEGameObject *firstGameObject = _allGameObjects.objectAtIndex(i); // Don't check against yourself or any previous entity for (int j = i+1; j < _allGameObjects.count(); j++) { GEGameObject *secondGameObject = _allGameObjects.objectAtIndex(j); // Get the collision bounds for both entities, then see if they intersect // CGRect is a C-struct with an origin Point (x, y) and a Size (w, h) CGRect firstRect = firstGameObject.collisionBounds(); CGRect secondRect = secondGameObject.collisionBounds(); // Collision of any sort if (CGRectIntersectsRect(firstRect, secondRect)) { //////////////////////////////// // // // Check for jumping first (???) // // //////////////////////////////// if (firstRect.origin.y > (secondRect.origin.y + (secondRect.size.height * 0.7))) { // the top entity could be pretty far down/in to the bottom entity.... firstGameObject.didLandOnEntity(secondGameObject); } else if (secondRect.origin.y > (firstRect.origin.y + (firstRect.size.height * 0.7))) { // second entity was actually on top.... secondGameObject.didLandOnEntity.(firstGameObject); } else if (firstRect.origin.x > secondRect.origin.x && firstRect.origin.x < (secondRect.origin.x + secondRect.size.width)) { // Hit from the RIGHT CGRect intersection = CGRectIntersection(firstRect, secondRect); // The NUDGE just offsets either object back to the left or right // After the nudging, they are exactly pressing against each other with no intersection firstGameObject.nudgeToRightOfIntersection(intersection); secondGameObject.nudgeToLeftOfIntersection(intersection); } else if ((firstRect.origin.x + firstRect.size.width) > secondRect.origin.x) { // hit from the LEFT CGRect intersection = CGRectIntersection(firstRect, secondRect); secondGameObject.nudgeToRightOfIntersection(intersection); firstGameObject.nudgeToLeftOfIntersection(intersection); } } } } } I think my collision detection code is pretty close, but obviously I'm doing something a little wrong. I really think it's to do with the way my jumps are checked (I wanted to make sure that a jump could happen from an angle (instead of if the falling player had been at a right angle to the player below). Can someone please help me here? I haven't been able to find many resources on how to do this properly (and thinking like a game developer is new for me). Thanks in advance!

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• What do you need to know to be a world-class master software developer? [closed]

  - by glitch

  I wanted to bring up this question to you folks and see what you think, hopefully advise me on the matter: let's say you had 30 years of learning and practicing software development in front of you, how would you dedicate your time so that you'd get the biggest bang for your buck. What would you both learn and work on to be a world-class software developer that would make a large impact on the industry and leave behind a legacy? I think that most great developers end up being both broad generalists and specialists in one-two areas of interest. I'm thinking Bill Joy, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, K&R and so on. I'm thinking that perhaps one approach would be to break things down by categories and establish a base minimum of "software development" greatness. I'm thinking: Operating Systems: completely internalize the core concepts of OS, perhaps gain a lot of familiarity with an OSS one such as Linux. Anything from memory management to device drivers has to be complete second nature. Programming Languages: this is one of those topics that imho has to be fully grokked even if it might take many years. I don't think there's quite anything like going through the process of developing your own compiler, understanding language design trade-offs and so on. Programming Language Pragmatics is one of my favorite books actually, I think you want to have that internalized back to back, and that's just the start. You could go significantly deeper, but I think it's time well spent, because it's such a crucial building block. As a subset of that, you want to really understand the different programming paradigms out there. Imperative, declarative, logic, functional and so on. Anything from assembly to LISP should be at the very least comfortable to write in. Contexts: I believe one should have experience working in different contexts to truly be able to appreciate the trade-offs that are being made every day. Embedded, web development, mobile development, UX development, distributed, cloud computing and so on. Hardware: I'm somewhat conflicted about this one. I think you want some understanding of computer architecture at a low level, but I feel like the concepts that will truly matter will be slightly higher level, such as CPU caching / memory hierarchy, ILP, and so on. Networking: we live in a completely network-dependent era. Having a good understanding of the OSI model, knowing how the Web works, how HTTP works and so on is pretty much a pre-requisite these days. Distributed systems: once again, everything's distributed these days, it's getting progressively harder to ignore this reality. Slightly related, perhaps add solid understanding of how browsers work to that, since the world seems to be moving so much to interfacing with everything through a browser. Tools: Have a really broad toolset that you're familiar with, one that continuously expands throughout the years. Communication: I think being a great writer, effective communicator and a phenomenal team player is pretty much a prerequisite for a lot of a software developer's greatness. It can't be overstated. Software engineering: understanding the process of building software, team dynamics, the requirements of the business-side, all the pitfalls. You want to deeply understand where what you're writing fits from the market perspective. The better you understand all of this, the more of your work will actually see the daylight. This is really just a starting list, I'm confident that there's a ton of other material that you need to master. As I mentioned, you most likely end up specializing in a bunch of these areas as you go along, but I was trying to come up with a baseline. Any thoughts, suggestions and words of wisdom from the grizzled veterans out there who would like to share their thoughts and experiences with this? I'd really love to know what you think!

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• Hosted Monitoring

  - by Grant Fritchey

  The concept of using services to take the place of writing a lot of your own code goes way, way back in computing history. The fundamentals of the concept go back to the dawn of computing with places like IBM hosting time-shares for computing power that you could rent for short periods of time. But things really took off with the building of the Web. Now, all the growth with virtual machines, hosted machines, hosted services from vendors like Amazon and Microsoft, the need to keep all of your software locally on physical boxes is just going the way of the dodo. There will likely always be some pieces of software that you keep on machines on your property or on your person, but the concept of keeping fundamental services locally is going away. As someone put it to me once, if you were starting a business right now, would you bother setting up an Exchange server to manage your email or would you just go to one of the external mail services for everything? For most of us (who are not Exchange admins) the answer is pretty easy. With all this momentum to having external services manage more and more of the infrastructure that’s not business unique, why would you burn up a server and license instance setting up monitoring for your SQL Servers? Of course, some of you are dealing with hyper-sensitive data that might require, through law or treaty, that you lock it down and never expose it to the intertubes, but most of us are not. So, what if someone else took on the basic hassle of setting up monitoring on your systems? That’s what we’re working on here at Red Gate. Right now it’s a private test, but we’re growing it and developing it and it’ll be going to a public beta, probably (hopefully) this year. I’m running it on my machines right now. The concept is pretty simple. You put a relay on your server, poke a hole in your firewall for it, and we start monitoring your server using SQL Monitor. It’s actually shocking how easy it is to get going. You still have to adjust your alerting thresholds, but that’s a standard part of alerting. Your pain threshold and my pain threshold for any given alert may be different. But from there, we do all the heavy lifting, keeping your data online and available, providing you with access to the information about how your servers are behaving, everything. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m really excited by this. I think we’re getting to a place where we can really help the small and medium sized businesses get a monitoring solution in place, quickly and easily. All you crazy busy, and possibly accidental, DBAs and system admins finally can set up monitoring without taking all the time to configure systems, run installs, and all the rest. You just have to tweak your alerts and you’re ready to run. If you are interested in checking it out, you can apply for the closed beta through the Monitor web page.

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• Entity Framework with MySQL - Timeout Expired while Generating Model

  - by Nathan Taylor

  I've constructed a database in MySQL and I am attempting to map it out with Entity Framework, but I start running into "GenerateSSDLException"s whenever I try to add more than about 20 tables to the EF context. An exception of type 'Microsoft.Data.Entity.Design.VisualStudio.ModelWizard.Engine.ModelBuilderEngine+GenerateSSDLException' occurred while attempting to update from the database. The exception message is: 'An error occurred while executing the command definition. See the inner exception for details.' Fatal error encountered during command execution. Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. There's nothing special about the affected tables, and it's never the same table(s), it's just that after a certain (unspecific) number of tables have been added, the context can no longer be updated without the "Timeout expired" error. Sometimes it's only one table left over, and sometimes it's three; results are pretty unpredictable. Furthermore, the variance in the number of tables which can be added before the error indicates to me that perhaps the problem lies in the size of the query being generated to update the context which includes both the existing table definitions, and also the new tables that are being added to it. Essentially, the SQL query is getting too large and it's failing to execute for some reason. If I generate the model with EdmGen2 it works without any errors, but the generated EDMX file cannot be updated within Visual Studio without producing the aforementioned exception. In all likelihood the source of this problem lies in the tool within Visual Studio given that EdmGen2 works fine, but I'm hoping that perhaps others could offer some advice on how to approach this very unique issue, because it seems like I'm not the only person experiencing it. One suggestion a colleague offered was maintaining two separate EBMX files with some table crossover, but that seems like a pretty ugly fix in my opinion. I suppose this is what I get for trying to use "new technology". :(

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• managing images in an iphone/ipad universal app

  - by taber

  Hi, I'm just curious as to what methods people are using to dynamically use larger or smaller images in their universal iPhone/iPad apps. I created a large test image and I tried scaling down (using cocos2d) by 0.46875. After viewing that in the iPhone 4.0 simulator I found the results were pretty crappy... rough pixel edges, etc. Plus, loading huge image files for iPhone users when they don't need them is pretty lame. So I guess what I will probably have to do is save out two versions of every sprite... large (for the iPad side) and small (for iPhone/iPod Touch) then detect the user's device and spit out the proper sprite like so: NSString *deviceType = [UIDevice currentDevice].model; CCSprite *test; if([deviceType isEqualToString:@"iPad"]) { test = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"testBigHuge.png"]; } else { test = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"testRegularMcTiny.png"]; } [self addChild: test]; How are you guys doing this? I'd rather avoid sprinkling all of my code with if statements like this. I want to also avoid using .xib files since it's an OpenGL-based app. Thanks!

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• ASP.Net MVC2 (RTM) breaks response filtering - "Filtering is not allowed"

  - by womp

  I've just done a test run of upgrading a project to ASP.Net MVC 2 (RTM) in anticipation of the full official .Net 4.0 release coming later this month. Our application is using a minimizer for our CSS and javascript. To do so, it is making use of the HttpResponse.Filter property to set a custom filter. With the upgrade, the setter for this property is throwing an HttpException saying "Filtering is not allowed." Looking that the HttpResponse.Filter property in reflector shows this: set { if (!this.UsingHttpWriter) { throw new HttpException(SR.GetString("Filtering_not_allowed")); } ... private bool UsingHttpWriter { get { return ((this._httpWriter != null) && (this._writer == this._httpWriter)); } } Clearly something has changed in the way the HttpResponse is writing to the output stream in MVC2. Does anyone know what the change is, or at least a workaround for this? EDIT: This seems pretty radical. Some further investigation shows that ASP.Net MVC 2 RTM is using a System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage.SwitchWriter as the Output property of an HttpResponse, whereas MVC 1 was using a plain old HttpWriter. That explains why the exception is being thrown. But that doesn't explain why they've chosen to completely break this functionality. This thread seems to indicate that this is just temporary... but this makes me pretty nervous... this is the RTM after all. Any further comments appreciated on this.

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• WPF touch and slide/drag animation

  - by George

  I'm trying to create a pretty simple WPF interface, and from what I know this should be mostly possible using pure XAML. What I know I have a pretty basic understanding of WPF so far, however I have a decent grasp on XAML. I know or can work out how to put content in these panels. This isn't the topic of this question. What I don't know I don't know how to animate this interface. I'm not very proficient at binding, however again, that's not the topic of this question. The topic of this question is what would be the best way to animate panels 1-4 (images below) so that they may be dragged (via touch) into view. The number of panels here may be static for the purpose of this question. The panels (1-4) can be stack panels, grids or whatever; their content isnt important. What is important is the container that would contain all 4 panels. The complication in this animation is the other two containers here (Item One/TODO), as they're in the way of a smooth animation. If it makes this question simpler, the touch features can be ignored for now, and a simple button push can slide the containers across. One Two

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• What's the best way to refresh a UITableView within a UINavigationController hierarchy

  - by Steve Neal

  Hi, I'm pretty new to iPhone development and have struggled to find what I consider to be a neat way around this problem. I have a user interface where a summary of record data is displayed in a table inside a navigation controller. When the user clicks the accessory button for a row, a new view is pushed onto the navigation controller revealing a view where the user can edit the data in the corresponding record. Once done, the editing view is popped from the navigation controller's stack and the user is returned to the table view. My problem is that when the user returns to the table view, the table still shows the state of the data before the record was edited. I must therefore reload the table data to show the changes. It doesn't seem possible to reload the table data before it is displayed as the call only updates displayed records. Reloading it after the table has been displayed results in the old data changing before the user's eyes, which I'm not too happy with. This seems to me like a pretty normal thing to want to do in an iPhone app. Can anyone please suggest the best practice approach to doing this? I feel like I'm missing something. Cheers - Steve.

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• Scrolling issues with GridView in Android

  - by Jared Thigpen

  I am having weird scrolling issues in my pretty simple GridView. Each item in the Grid is simply and ImageView and a TextView. The activity itself is simply an application selector. It looks like a rough version of the basic App Tray in Android. The issue is that after spending some times scrolling through my view, it will inevitably allow me to continue scrolling past the top row of icons, to a blank screen, and the scroll bar will disappear, leaving me stuck. It doesn't happen every time I go to the top of the view, only sometimes, and usually only after some excessive scrolling. If I happen to notice the problem and catch it before the top row disappears off the bottom of the screen, I can usually scroll back through the view and spot some icons missing. There are empty spaces in the grid, and I can only assume that those icons have been moved to some bizarre position, which is allowing the view to scroll past the top. This is my first Android app beyond a basic Hello World, so it's likely that I've just screwed up something in my layout files. I also realize that this is probably a pretty confusing description, so I'm hoping someone has experienced this and my search abilities simply were unable to find it. I can post my layout files or other code if someone thinks that's useful. Oh, and the program is built against 1.5, but is running on 2.2 (whatever state of 2.2 that was that snuck out last week) on my phone. I don't have enough apps to test this on an emulator, but could probably set something up if someone felt it necessary. Thanks in advance for any help on the issue.

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• Scaling gwt's "Contacts" (sample project) AppController with MVP

  - by brad

  I'm just learning GWT so I'm still trying to sort out all of its quirks and features. I'm reading through the example they give illustrating the MVP pattern, and I pretty much get it, except I'm wondering about one thing. The AppController they use implements the ValueChangeHandler interface and the onValueChange method is triggered when history changes. My problem is with this onValueChange in the AppController (i've included it below for anyone who hasn't seen the sample project). It's doing a string comparison on the history token sent in and instantiating the appropriate presenter to handle the action. This is all fine and dandy for the sample app with 3 actions, but how would one scale this to a real app with many more actions? Sticking to this pattern would lead to a pretty large/ugly else if, but I'm still too new to GWT (and java) to infer a better pattern for larger apps. Any help is greatly appreciated! public class AppController implements Presenter, ValueChangeHandler<String> { ... public void onValueChange(ValueChangeEvent<String> event) { String token = event.getValue(); if (token != null) { Presenter presenter = null; if (token.equals("list")) { presenter = new ContactsPresenter(rpcService, eventBus, new ContactsView()); } else if (token.equals("add")) { presenter = new EditContactPresenter(rpcService, eventBus, new EditContactView()); } else if (token.equals("edit")) { presenter = new EditContactPresenter(rpcService, eventBus, new EditContactView()); } if (presenter != null) { presenter.go(container); } } } }

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• C# average function for large numbers without overflow exception

  - by Ron Klein

  .NET Framework 3.5. I'm trying to calculate the average of some pretty large numbers. For instance: using System; using System.Linq; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var items = new long[] { long.MaxValue - 100, long.MaxValue - 200, long.MaxValue - 300 }; try { var avg = items.Average(); Console.WriteLine(avg); } catch (OverflowException ex) { Console.WriteLine("can't calculate that!"); } Console.ReadLine(); } } Obviously, the mathematical result is 9223372036854775607 (long.MaxValue - 200), but I get an exception there. This is because the implementation (on my machine) to the Average extension method, as inspected by .NET Reflector is: public static double Average(this IEnumerable<long> source) { if (source == null) { throw Error.ArgumentNull("source"); } long num = 0L; long num2 = 0L; foreach (long num3 in source) { num += num3; num2 += 1L; } if (num2 <= 0L) { throw Error.NoElements(); } return (((double) num) / ((double) num2)); } I know I can use a BigInt library (yes, I know that it is included in .NET Framework 4.0, but I'm tied to 3.5). But I still wonder if there's a pretty straight forward implementation of calculating the average of integers without an external library. Do you happen to know about such implementation? Thanks!!

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• What's slowing for loops/assignment vs. C?

  - by Lee

  I have a collection of PHP scripts that are extremely CPU intensive, juggling millions of calculations across hundreds of simultaneous users. I'm trying to find a way to speed up the internals of PHP variable assignment, and looping sequences vs C. Although PHP is obviously loosely typed, is there any way/extension to specifically assign type (assign, not cast, which seems even more expensive) in a C-style fashion? Here's what I mean. This is some dummy code in C: #include <stdio.h> int main() { unsigned long add=0; for(unsigned long x=0;x<100000000;x++) { add = x*59328409238; } printf("x is %ld\n",add); } Pretty self-explanatory -- it loops 100 million times, multiples each iteration by an arbitrary number of some 59 billion, assigns it to a variable and prints it out. On my Macbook, compiling it and running it produced: lees-macbook-pro:Desktop lee$ time ./test2 x is 5932840864471590762 real 0m0.266s user 0m0.253s sys 0m0.002s Pretty darn fast! A similar script in PHP 5.3 CLI... <?php for($i=0;$i<100000000;$i++){ $a=$i*59328409238; } echo $a."\n"; ?> ... produced: lees-macbook-pro:Desktop lee$ time /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/php test3.php 5.93284086447E+18 real 0m22.837s user 0m22.110s sys 0m0.078s Over 22 seconds vs 0.2! I realize PHP is doing a heck of a lot more behind the scenes than this simple C program - but is there any way to make the PHP internals to behave more 'natively' on primitive types and loops?

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• C# average function without overflow exception

  - by Ron Klein

  .NET Framework 3.5. I'm trying to calculate the average of some pretty large numbers. For instance: using System; using System.Linq; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var items = new long[] { long.MaxValue - 100, long.MaxValue - 200, long.MaxValue - 300 }; try { var avg = items.Average(); Console.WriteLine(avg); } catch (OverflowException ex) { Console.WriteLine("can't calculate that!"); } Console.ReadLine(); } } Obviously, the mathematical result is 9223372036854775607 (long.MaxValue - 200), but I get an exception there. This is because the implementation (on my machine) to the Average extension method, as inspected by .NET Reflector is: public static double Average(this IEnumerable<long> source) { if (source == null) { throw Error.ArgumentNull("source"); } long num = 0L; long num2 = 0L; foreach (long num3 in source) { num += num3; num2 += 1L; } if (num2 <= 0L) { throw Error.NoElements(); } return (((double) num) / ((double) num2)); } I know I can use a BigInt library (yes, I know that it is included in .NET Framework 4.0, but I'm tied to 3.5). But I still wonder if there's a pretty straight forward implementation of calculating the average of integers without an external library. Do you happen to know about such implementation? Thanks!! UPDATE: The previous example, of three large integers, was just an example to illustrate the overflow issue. The question is about calculating an average of any set of numbers which might sum to a large number that exceeds the type's max value. Sorry about this confusion. I also changed the question's title to avoid additional confusion. Thanks all!!

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• Open source Java CMS for Google App Engine?

  - by markvgti

  I am looking for an open source Java CMS (Web CMS, actually) to run on Google App Engine. I have looked at related older questions on this topic (What CMS runs on Google AppEngine?, CMS over Google App Engine, with SEO etc.) but the problem is that they all largely list Python-based CMSes. Plus these questions are pretty old, and since GAE is a fast-moving target, I thought it might be worthwhile to ask again. I want a CMS for creating some websites (for myself and for others), but would rather not start writing one from scratch. A "good" (very subjective, I know) open source WCMS allows me to start using a product, while still being able to add to/extend the product/project. On the one hand I am looking for a somewhat mature product/project, on the other hand it's easier to start contributing to the development cycle of a young product/project (conflicting, I know :-). Here are some features that would be preferable: [X]HTML/XML/CSS based templating Ability to create multiple blogs Galleries Ability to create a "Downloads" section (is this pretty much standard?) Separate management for digital assets (images, PDFs, binary files etc.) Roles like "Administrator", "Editor", "Contributor" etc. (or their equivalents) Ability to move/reorganize pages Export to PDF Reformat content for printing Is the CMS you are about to suggest especially well-suited to publishing an online book? My idea is that while the book may be offered as a downloadable eBook, the latest, most current version will be the one available on the website.

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• Programming language shootout: code most like pseudocode for Dijkstra's Algorithm

  - by Casebash

  Okay, so this question here asked which language is most like executable pseudocode, so why not find out by actually writing some code! Here we have a competition where I will award a 100 point bounty (I know its not much, but I am poor after the recalc) to the code which most resembles this pseudocode. I've read through this a few times so I'm pretty sure that this pseudocode below is correct and about as unambiguous as pseudocode can be. Personally, I'm going to have a go in Python and probably Haskell as well, but I'm just learning the later so my attempt will probably be pretty poor. Note: Obviously to implement anything looking like this you'll have to define quite a few library functions. define DirectedGraph G with: Vertices as V, Edges as E define Vertex A, Z declare each e in E as having properties: Boolean fixed with: initial=false Real minSoFar with: initial=0 for A else infinity define PriorityQueue pq with: objects=V initial=A priority v=v.minSoFar create triggers for v in V: when v.minSoFar event reduced then pq.addOrUpdate v when v.fixed event becomesTrue then pq.remove v Repeat until Z.fixed==True: define Vertex U=pq.pop() U.fixed=True for Edge E adjacentTo U with other Vertex V: V.minSoFar=U.minSoFar+length(E) if reducesValue return Z.name, Z.minSoFar

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• MKMapView loading all annotation views at once (including those that are outside the current rect)

  - by jmans

  Has anyone else run into this problem? Here's the code: - (MKAnnotationView *)mapView:(MKMapView *)mapView viewForAnnotation:(WWMapAnnotation *)annotation { // Only return an Annotation view for the placemarks. Ignore for the current location--the iPhone SDK will place a blue ball there. NSLog(@"Request for annotation view"); if ([annotation isKindOfClass:[WWMapAnnotation class]]){ MKPinAnnotationView *browse_map_annot_view = (MKPinAnnotationView *)[mapView dequeueReusableAnnotationViewWithIdentifier:@"BrowseMapAnnot"]; if (!browse_map_annot_view) { browse_map_annot_view = [[[MKPinAnnotationView alloc] initWithAnnotation:annotation reuseIdentifier:@"BrowseMapAnnot"] autorelease]; NSLog(@"Creating new annotation view"); } else { NSLog(@"Recycling annotation view"); browse_map_annot_view.annotation = annotation; } ... As soon as the view is displayed, I get 2009-08-05 13:12:03.332 xxx[24308:20b] Request for annotation view 2009-08-05 13:12:03.333 xxx[24308:20b] Creating new annotation view 2009-08-05 13:12:03.333 xxx[24308:20b] Request for annotation view 2009-08-05 13:12:03.333 xxx[24308:20b] Creating new annotation view and on and on, for every annotation (~60) I've added. The map (correctly) only displays the two annotations in the current rect. I am setting the region in viewDidLoad: if (center_point.latitude == 0) { center_point.latitude = 35.785098; center_point.longitude = -78.669899; } if (map_span.latitudeDelta == 0) { map_span.latitudeDelta = .001; map_span.longitudeDelta = .001; } map_region.center = center_point; map_region.span = map_span; NSLog(@"Setting initial map center and region"); [browse_map_view setRegion:map_region animated:NO]; The log entry for the region being set is printed to the console before any annotation views are requested. The problem here is that since all of the annotations are being requested at once, [mapView dequeueReusableAnnotationViewWithIdentifier] does nothing, since there are unique MKAnnotationViews for every annotation on the map. This is leading to memory problems for me. One possible issue is that these annotations are clustered in a pretty small space (~1 mile radius). Although the map is zoomed in pretty tight in viewDidLoad (latitude and longitude delta .001), it still loads all of the annotation views at once. Thanks...

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• How to get decent MySQL driver perfomance in Ruby

  - by Zombies

  I notice that I am getting very poor performance for either or both inserts and queries. The queries themselves are basic and can execute with no delay directly from mysql. The ruby script that I wrote is only 1 thread, so only 1 connection is being used, and never closed unless the script is terminated. Pretty basic, I am just trying to insert a lot of rows. There is a look-up or two to get a surrogate key, or to check for duplicates, but the complexity is just O(n). Also, it isn't like there are millions of records, so again the queries themselves take no time to run. I am using: Ruby 1.9.1 Gem/driver:ruby-mysql 2.9.2 MySQL 5.1.37-1ubuntu5.1 ^ all 32 bit versions on a 32bit ubuntu distro I am getting about 1-2 inserts per second, pretty slow. I know a lot of people will suggest to change drivers, but that means I have some refactoring and resting to do. So I would really appreciate any help, but please if you do recomend that at least say why you do (eg: if you have used ruby-mysql x.x.x before and found another mysql driver to be better).ruby-mysql 2.9.2 What I would like to know: How can I improve performance with ruby-mysql 2.9.2 If and only if I cannot do this with ruby-mysql 2.9.2, what should I do?

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• Using Hibernate's ScrollableResults to slowly read 90 million records

  - by at

  I simply need to read each row in a table in my MySQL database using Hibernate and write a file based on it. But there are 90 million rows and they are pretty big. So it seemed like the following would be appropriate: ScrollableResults results = session.createQuery("SELECT person FROM Person person") .setReadOnly(true).setCacheable(false).scroll(ScrollMode.FORWARD_ONLY); while (results.next()) storeInFile(results.get()[0]); The problem is the above will try and load all 90 million rows into RAM before moving on to the while loop... and that will kill my memory with OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space exceptions :(. So I guess ScrollableResults isn't what I was looking for? What is the proper way to handle this? I don't mind if this while loop takes days (well I'd love it to not). I guess the only other way to handle this is to use setFirstResult and setMaxResults to iterate through the results and just use regular Hibernate results instead of ScrollableResults. That feels like it will be inefficient though and will start taking a ridiculously long time when I'm calling setFirstResult on the 89 millionth row... UPDATE: setFirstResult/setMaxResults doesn't work, it turns out to take an unusably long time to get to the offsets like I feared. There must be a solution here! Isn't this a pretty standard procedure?? I'm willing to forgo Hibernate and use JDBC or whatever it takes. UPDATE 2: the solution I've come up with which works ok, not great, is basically of the form: select * from person where id > <offset> and <other_conditions> limit 1 Since I have other conditions, even all in an index, it's still not as fast as I'd like it to be... so still open for other suggestions..

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