| last updated:26 Jan 2004 16:43 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 25 Jan 2004) | View Other Weeks |
| your freeware collection/recommendation | Sun 25 Jan | Praba Hardian |
| Hi, As a developer and general Windows user what freeware (not shareware) that you use and recommend? Mine: 1. Sygate firewall 2. Spybot & Ad-aware 3. Abilon RSS 4. JEdit 5. The Python suites (compiler, wxwindows, boa etc) 6. Winuscon 7. JDiskReport 8. Inforapid search & replace 9. Winamp 5 standard 10 Xsetup Thanks n regards |
| Sun 25 Jan | Daryl Oidy | * Mozilla * putty * vim * cygwin * openoffice * wincvs and/or tortoise cvs * virtuawin * gaim |
| Sun 25 Jan | Andy | http://www.pricelessware.org/ Great site, has almost all the freeware I use. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Robert Jacobson | Ghostscript/GSView. Opens and displays raw Postscript files (not PDF) and prints them to non-PS printers. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ |
| Sun 25 Jan | sgf | Beyond Compare FileSync IrfanView |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | Why free? I'm just curious - I second Winamp and IrfanView, but there are some inexpensive shareware utils I use as well (Ultraedit, Fineprint) and I really have to wonder why the absolute insistence that you not pay a cent for the tools you use? ...unless you're doing research for an article or something. :-) Philo |
| Walked a Mile in the Other Guys Shoes | Sun 25 Jan | Bill Rushmore |
| I just did a small C# project over the past month. I have to say I really like .NET. From my background I would probably surprise a lot of people by saying that. I have been a Java developer for seven years and you can probably call me a Java advocate. I even went so far to start a pretty big local Java Users Group several years ago. I really never took anything from the MS side very seriously; it was like those guys weren’t real developers. VB seemed like a sick joke and all that Hungarian notation, MFC stuff appeared so backward. I started to take a look at .NET about a year ago. I went into the whole thing believing that .NET was just a cheap knock off from Redmond. But now that I have some hands on time with writing a C# app that does real work I have to say, I have a completely different view. First of all, Visual Studio has got to be the best IDE known to man. Although my first experience with .NET was not as mind blowing as C to Java, .NET is definitely the bigger monkey on the evolution chart compared to Java. I too have been impressed by the whole MS programmer culture. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html) Microsoft gets a bad rap but they do how to treat developers. Take the MSDN library; it is nice to see some useful documentation for a change. I have a couple more enhancements for my C# app but after that I’ll probably be going back to the world of J2EE. Don’t get me wrong, I still like Java. But given the choice I would choose .NET. But I’ll continue to code in what people will pay me for. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mister Fancypants | For me, one of the coolest things about .NET is that through Managed C++ you can wrap all your existing legacy code and then use it in your future .NET applications. There are many languages I'd kinda like to use (like Walter Bright's 'D') but don't simply because I can't really fathom throwing out compatibility with all of my existing code, not to mention the tons of terrific third party C++ libraries... With .NET it isn't as much of an issue since it is very easy to use PInvoke and/or create a Managed C++ wrapper. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | And I'm sure if you would have had to develop for MS using VB instead of C++/MFC you would have been saying the same thing. |
| Sun 25 Jan | snotnose | I'm a linux guy, most of my work is embedded using kernels like VxWorks, pSos, and embedded Linux. I also do a lot of Linux device driver work. Most of it is C, with some assembly hooks. But I've done my share of C++, sh, awk, Perl, and Python scripting. That said, I learned C# last summer. I love it. It's simpler than C++ (gak! I hate that fsck'in language). It's better than C. Java sux (don't go there). Python is pretty good, but slow. C# seems to combine the best features of everything. Haven't done anything in .net yet, but I'm looking forward to my next C# project. |
| Talking to USB ports on Windows with Java | Sun 25 Jan | Walter Rumsby |
| Hi, Does anyone know of any implementations that allow communication with a device attached to a USB port for Windows. The comm API supports serial ports and the JSR for USB support is targetted at Linux. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Scot Doyle | Possibility listed at http://jusb.sourceforge.net/ |
| Sun 25 Jan | Walter Rumsby | I think they're only working towards a Linux solution (too). Going to have a play with serial port emulators for USB. I just bought a 'USB to Serial' adapter only to find it's what I would classify as a 'Serial to USB' adapter (i.e. serial port is male). Hmm. |
| MyIE2 kicks some serious @ss! | Sun 25 Jan | Mr Curiousity |
| Ive been a MyIE2 user for almost a year now. I think that on Windows it is the next best thing after sliced bread. It is especially convenient for heavy-duty multi-threaded web surfing with 20 and more locations opened at once. Pros (in order of importance to me): a) opens everything in Tabs - no clutter with multiple windows b) uses standard Windows components which are most of the time already loaded in memory - thus very fast c) easy to open follow-up links in new tabs when reading something, let them load over the modem while still reading the original document, then switch to those tabs d) compatible with IE6 e) blocks pop-ups Cons: uses standard Windows dlls, so when there are holes in IE, MyIE2 is susceptible as well. I use mozilla under Linux so it is a fine browser. And it has all the usability features I need. However, under Windows it feels heavy and sluggish. So, as they say, the best is the enemy of the good. I still keep Mozilla around to go to untrusted cites and avoid being trojaned through IE holes. I tried Firebird, and it also felt sluggish. Any other opinions? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Brad Wilson | I use Firebird for all the reasons you use MyIE2 (the only thing 'sluggish' about it is the loadup time, and since I generally keep it running all the time, I don't pay that penalty very often). Firebird also has a really killer Extension system, where developers can changed just about any behavior they want. Things like the Live HTTP Headers and the Flash Click-to-Play extensions are total dreams for me. In the end, that one Con -- IE's bugs are MyIE2's bugs -- is enough to keep me away. IE is an absolute disaster for bugs at times. |
| Sun 25 Jan | FredF | ... and I use Opera for the same reasons you guys use FireBird or the IE-based browser that is MyIE... except Opera loads faster and crashes less :-D |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | What I want is a browser that automatically blocks forum spam. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Jimmy Jo-Jo | I tried using sliced bread on my Win2K machine but it gummed up my floppy drive. Not recommended. |
| Searching web pages you have visited? | Sun 25 Jan | The real Entrepreneur |
| Hi, Anyone know of a good, simple program that searches the web pages that youve visited? e.g., lets say I know I visited a site about turtle mating habits, but I cant remember the site name. if I could do a google search, restricted to the sites in my BROWSER HISTORY I could probably find it. There WAS a program called MantaDB, but it was for ie 5 only. Any suggestions? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mike Swieton | Hmm... it should be pretty easy to write a proxy that saves information for searches... Maybe that'll be my next project :) |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | Oh yeah, what about hitting CTRL + H and clicking Search (assuming you're in IE), in Firebird you don't even have to hit Search, it pops up automatically. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Sam Livingston-Gray | I've wanted something like this for years. Of course, I use multiple computers and platforms, so it's probably not all that practical. I did see such a feature in the OmniWeb browser for Mac OS X, though: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gallery/ |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | I had a java program that did this a few years ago, but the database got pretty bloated after a while, depending on your browsing habits. |
| Anyone tried/used ZOOT info manager | Sun 25 Jan | The real Entrepreneur |
| Hi, Ive been on a long quest for a good program for storing bits of information, and organizing projects (to-dos, etc.) for some time. Treepad (treepad.com) is a top contender. I even wrote my own knowledgebase program about 7 years ago. Just ran across ZOOT which seems interesting. ANYONE using or tried it? http://www.zootsoftware.com/ BTW, My Criteria (in the event of the inevitable suggestions of a better alternative to Zoot or Treepad): 1. Easy to enter info. 2. Easy to search (including boolean searches) 3. Nice heirarchal structure (so I can have tasks, sub tasks, etc.) 4. Calender type feature for scheduling tasks that have a firm due date. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mike Swieton | On a similar note, does anyone know of a Unix-friendly program for similar purpose? I'm currently writing a Java knowledgebase because I've not found one. Must be desktop, no web apps. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mike Swieton | Btw,: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=72360&ixReplies=8 Previous discussion |
| Sun 25 Jan | The real Entrepreneur | Mike, There are several (lots I think) KB's i the SourceForge.com projects. I think several of them are java based and many others are also unix-capable (if memory serves. I'm Windows-0nly so wasn't paying much attention to that). Try a search on SourceForge.com for: knowledge knowledgebase pim etc. They don't always do a good job of writing clear descriptions, so you have to fiddle with your search terms. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | I didn't get Zoot at all when I used it, but there is a pretty funny (from 2001) person who calls the author on doing some Stealth Marketing: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PatternImposter Problem: How do you on-line market your software to hoards of cynical developers? Solution: Write up the commercial as a pattern and dump it on wiki. Under solution, say 'sorry, I don't have a general solution, but you can buy this...' Example: ZootSoftware ==== I love Treepad Free. Searchable, quick even though my database is approaching a megabyte of text, stable, and all around good. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Herbert Sitz | You might want to check out Ecco, an old Windows program -- similar to Zoot in some ways -- that is no longer sold but which has the advantage of now being available for free. It has a tool similar to Zoot's of quickly 'shooting' outside info into the Ecco database. There is still an active Ecco community with, e.g., user group on Yahoo, which Zoot has also, I believe. You can read more about Ecco (and some other outlinging and KB tools) and get the necessary web references at this site: http://john.redmood.com/organizers.html |
| Sun 25 Jan | Herbert Sitz | BTW, I mentioned Ecco because it's particularly strong at your hierarchical requirement (it's based around an excellent outliner) and it also has strong calendaring tools. |
| Sun 25 Jan | FredF | Does someone know where Ecco can be downloaded? The link in the page below is no longer valid: http://supportweb.netmanage.com/ts_viewnow/downloads/patchesUnsupported/ecco.asp |
| Sun 25 Jan | FredF | Stupid me :-) My firewall was silently banning my browser from connecting out in FTP. Sorry about that. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Andy | Is there a good one that can be shared easily between multiple computers? I like the Wiki solution sort of, because you can access it from anywhere, but I'm not sold on its usability yet. I like the treepad interface (at least from an initial glance), but it doesn't seem like you can easily access it. I need to be able to access it equally from home and work. I have some web/ftp space to use. It would be nice if I wouldn't have to remember to upload it from home once a night, and download it at work in the morning, etc. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | If you've got money to burn: http://www.treepad.com/treepadx/ |
| Sun 25 Jan | SC | > Anyone tried/used ZOOT info manager Wish they'd consider placing some screenshots of the program on their site or if they have, make them more prominent.... |
| Technical Ladder -- myth or reality | Sun 25 Jan | Floridian |
| Colleagues, does your company provide a technical career path (a.k.a technical ladder) and is it for real? The company I work for does have such a concept, but its a Fortune 500 shop. Theoretically, you can move up to a VP of Engineering. However, I see more Management Ladder people around at higher positions. Which leads me to believe that the technical ladder is much more difficult to climb. Any thoughts/observations are welcome! |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | I climbed a ladder once.... fell off the top of it, now I'm at the bottom again. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Cynic | It's a myth. |
| Sun 25 Jan | son of parnas | Mostly myth. Even if it's real your chances are remote. |
| Sun 25 Jan | anonymizer | Engineering types tend to be introverted and reserved, and generally temper any confidence with realism. Many management types tent to be extroverted and outgoing, and generally speak about anything with great confidence. Given that success is business is almost entirely associated with the latter attributes, it isn't surprizing who comes out on top. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | Noname, why did you fall off? Got laid off and had to accept an entry level position again to have ends meet? |
| Sun 25 Jan | T. Norman | A person with a technical experience who is a CxO is likely to be someone who played a role in founding the company. Climbing the ladder through the technical path is much more difficult. Nowadays even most CIOs have nontechnical backgrounds. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Steve | It's a myth. There is no ladder. No company will take care of you, you must take care of yourself. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | So the consensus is that the management ladder is the way to go? It's kinda sad... |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | And yeah, my company is an engineering company, or so it claims. Would it make a difference? |
| Sun 25 Jan | mackinac | The small ( 50 employees, mostly technical) company that I worked for a few years ago had technical and management career paths. The problem with the technical track, from the engineer's perspective, is that the higher levels in the technical track required a lot of customer interaction. That is, to some extent they were sales positions. To me this presented a conflict. I wanted to get to the higher technical levels to be able to do more interesting engineering work, but didn't want to do anything that looked like sales. That company disappeared by aquisition during the growth of the dotcom bubble. Any effort to climb the technical ladder would have been wasted anyway. It is not clear what one might expect from a technical career ladder. The opportunity to work on more advanced technology, but that would depend on the nature of the work the company does. A Fortune 500 company would be big enough to require a few layers of management but might not need any engineering work that couldn't be done by someone with a couple years experience. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Unfocused Focused | Only one company I worked at had a Tech Ladder that was more than a running joke - Texas Instruments under Jerry Junkins. Don't know what it's like now, but there was actually a path where you could be rewarded for providing value through technical merit rather than being the bearer of status reports to upper management. I was an incredible atmosphere, and one I haven't seen anyone else interested in reproducing, much less able to pull it off. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | machinac, in the company I work for, higher technical positions do involve dealing with customers, choosing technologies, providing general architecture and technical leadership. They don't code or even do a low-level design. But they don't have direct reports, do performance assessments and all that crap. Which I like, to be honest. The problem is that even though the ladder does exist, it seems more difficult to climb. PM ladder seems easier, but I'd hate to be a PM here. My company is of TI caliber; that may explain why there is a technical ladder that is more than a joke. Anybody else out there whose company has a meaningful technical ladder? (MS and Fog Creek excluded ;) ) |
| Sun 25 Jan | mackinac | >>> So the consensus is that the management ladder is the way to go? It's kinda sad... <<< No. It depends on what you want to accomplish and that is not yet clear from your postings. If you want to climb a career ladder at a Fortune 500 company, then management probably is the way to go. If you want to do technical work, then stay off the management ladder. But what do you really want to do? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | I want to do technical work but I realize that in 20 or so years I may neither be able to nor want to compete with younger coders. I enjoy technical work, so technical leadership/architecture definition/high-level design would appeal to me, and I want to work towards that goal. These positions do exist, but what's the probability of getting them? In other words, what's the path from developing software to a more high-level work; the path that provides career development, reasonable $$, job satisfaction, moving higher up the food chain and _not_ involving management? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | When you say 'climb' what are you looking for? More money? More authority? The ability to just read journals all day? Or are you trying to age-proof your career? It makes a difference. Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Sassy | At my current gig (backup software) nearly all the management-level jobs are either sales or finance. There is one technical VP and he's the guy who wrote the product. |
| Sun 25 Jan | TK | The technical career paths are at places like Bell Labs and Universities. Your career is documented in patents and papers. Big income is from consulting. Technical careers don't end in management / sales (where real bucks are). At my former real big company the theory was to pay the very best techies more without actually changing their jobs. They didn't reach high levels in the company or organization (they didn't want to) but they got a few more bucks than their peers and some recocognition. Of course, there are tech folks who are also extraordinary managers who want to and do break out. The person who is a tech wiz, management wiz, and a sales wiz is the total package. I've met some, you probably have too. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | Philo Quote: When you say 'climb' what are you looking for? More money? More authority? The ability to just read journals all day? Or are you trying to age-proof your career? It makes a difference. /End Philo Quote More money -- yes More authority -- yes Only reading journals -- NO Age-proofing -- yes Is it a lot to ask for? |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | If I was in a factory I don't think I'd be grooming the guy who operates the heavy machines to become management unless he was obviously good at dealing with the rest of th employees (i.e. showing management already and I noticed it). Even then I'd probably hire someone else to manage them and tell him that in order to win over the floor you just have to win over this one guy. After all, once the guy who is on the inside becomes management, he becomes 'one of them' and loses his ability to influence the rest of the workers. Though if you pump your resume up and get the right people to vouch for you, you may be able to jump into a management position by going to another company. That's much more feasable, I think. |
| Sun 25 Jan | anon | Oh, come on. I'm sick and tired of hearing about how amazing good managers are. Let's f'ing face it. Good managers are good because they mastered the fine art of being tall and having good hair. Perhaps they've also got a bunch of Jane Goodall's apes (e.g. suck-ups, brown nosers, yes men, etc.) picking termites out of their butt cracks. There's absolutely nothing a manager can accomplish that thousands of generations of alpha-chimps haven't accomplished before them. Good technologists, on the other hand, are thinking thoughts that have never been thought before. They represent the absolute pinnacle in abstract thought - intellectual discipline and 99.99 percentile ability in mathematics & reasoning. As such, there is nothing left for the alpha-bonobo-managers to do, but outsource the technologists' jobs to other tribes across the globe. Technical track? Bobo the manager make smart, smart man go away. Bobo no like smart man. Bobo outsource man what got good brain. Bobo no like feel like dumb. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | Anon, I beg to disagree. Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | Floridian, you want to move into management. Your one 'no' answer was the major thing senior technologists are expected to do - research and learn the tech. Also, let's face facts - a given company only needs a few senior technologists. One relational database god will be plenty, whether you're Amazon, Apple, or IBM. Sure in huger companies he may get apprentices to answer the mail, but for the most part when the 'go to guy' spot is filled, it's filled and he's not going anywhere for a decade or two. On the other hand, teams need managers. When a company grows, it has more teams and needs more managers. Managers need managers, and they need execs. Even the flattest organization needs leadership. Sad but true fact of life. :-/ Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mike Swieton | Anon, I believe my current employer definately is a good counter-example to that. We're only a couple years old, but we've grown a lot. We've had many clients and projects (of varying sizes) and we've never delivered late or under-delivered. I think that our good management has a significant impact on this. Sure, I think our people are pretty good, but we're not 10 Don Knuth's or K&Rs here. Good developers matter, but so do good managers. |
| Sun 25 Jan | anon | >> 'Even the flattest organization needs leadership.' I never put forth the proposition that companies don't need management... Companies need janitors, too. And it's simply a fact that Bobo the manager no like da man what got good brain. Brain man got go away to India. Bobo make good brain man go away. Maybe take woman. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Tom Vu | >>>One relational database god will be plenty, whether you're Amazon, Apple, or IBM. I hope this was an exageration or else you have no idea how large scale systems are designed. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | I was actually thinking of 'God' as in 'published respected industry authority' level. However, one step down - the 'god' level, you're right that as a business grows they will need more expertise at every level. But I also still maintain they will need more managers than raw technical talent. Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Christopher Wells | > I hope this was an exageration or else you have no idea how large scale systems are designed. How are large scale systems designed? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Bored Bystander | The notion of a technical career ladder isn't a myth; it existed once and was the prevalent carrot on the stick to create a sense of historical continuity in the engineering ranks, IE the idea that you could some day 'amount to something' by being technical. But it's eroded to insignificance over the years. Probably only Microsoft has the long term vision to support a class of 'principal engineers' who formulate long range technical strategies. 20+ years ago - AT&T had Bell Labs; HP, Xerox, RCA, ditto. I can't think of one major American company that bothers keeping more than a small handful of consultative senior contributors around. Every other company is pretty much into making its numbers for the current quarter. 'Brain trust' and 'highly compensated senior engineers with lots of pull' today translates into one thing: 'unnecessary expense and waste'. To answer Floridian's original question, I think the only way to stay on a technical career track without becoming layoff/outsourcing victim fodder is to become a consultant and in turn become VERY VERY good at self marketing and branding of yourself. Which in turn implies that you're no longer 'only' technical, you must also run your own business, but at least you then have a choice as to how much brainwork and substance you choose to retain in your work. Working for someone else you may have no choice but to get out of technology work at some point if you want to survive. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Tom Vu | >>>How are large scale systems designed? For a large company, usually half-hazardly with many architects, project managers, and consultants implementing another company's product. For a company that is looking to make a profit instead of not make a large loss, usually a small group of really smart people. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Smitty | I kept climbing the ladder, thinking there was no obstacles, but I kept hitting a glass cieling. OUCH my head hurts... In my experience, it's has become an old legend to be classified next to unicorns, dragons and wizards. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | Philo, I meant I didn't want to ONLY read journals. On a personal level, why did you move into sales? The thread has been extremely informative and provided some weight to my casual observations of the company I work for. Thanks everyone! |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | The sales part - because I enjoy convincing other people how cool MS tech is. I did it a lot as a consultant, so it was a fairly natural transition for me. However, as I learned about the role, I also grew enamoured of the idea of actually being able to spend time learning about stuff. I didn't have to always be running after the next deliverable - I'm expected to 'get good' on stuff. It's nice. Philo |
| Does C# owe its success to Java or VB ? | Sun 25 Jan | Kentasy |
| Obviously, its cool and sexy factor comes from using curly braces and semi-colons, but does it owe its success to a language runtime, memory management and a intuitive forms designer ? At the very least, would you say C# is a mixture of the best of Java and the best of VB ? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Kentasy | I do not mean this in any kind of negative way towards Java, nor do I want to start a language war debate. I just haven't heard many people talk about C# borrowing a lot from VB or it being a 'souped up VB clone'. |
| Sun 25 Jan | 123 | Specify "success" |
| Sun 25 Jan | veal | Umm... I don't think C# owes *anything* to VB. It's primary architect was Anders Hejlsberg who sold Turbo Pascal to Borland and then evolved it into Delphi. You can certainly see a lot of Java's influence, and I rather think we'd never have seen a C# if Microsoft didn't have to answer the massive programmer productivity advantage of Java over C and C++. Of course it also goes beyond Java and Delphi in some ways, so I tend to wonder if the upcoming Java features are not frantic attempts to bolt on C# features that would have been obvious requirements in the mid-90s to any language designer with large-scale application programming experience and should have been in Java 1, not Java 6. |
| Sun 25 Jan | | Sure, the things missing from Java are 'obvious' now, just like the 'obvious' productivity enhancements that are missing from C++. Remember that the people who designed Java had to come up with all the ideas (many of which were borrowed, but some which were not), make sure they panned out, and then implement. I would argue that C# took more from Java than Java took from C++/Smalltalk/etc. However, the CLR is a different story altogether - *that* is an amazing piece of work. And when all is said and done, yes, C# is a better language than Java or VB. I mean... come on. |
| Sun 25 Jan | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | The forms designer is part of Visual Studio and nothing to do with C# per se. 'However, the CLR is a different story altogether - *that* is an amazing piece of work.' Over and above the JVM? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Steve | I'd say it owes its success to Java only because most of its lessons were learned from that. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Who says C# is successful? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Justin Johnson | 'And when all is said and done, yes, C# is a better language than Java' As an incremental improvement on mature Java, it almost has to be (leaving aside the current size and scope of the libraries available). The question is whether or not Java 1.5 will catch up, seeing as they're taking from C# all the best enhancements. Bottom line is that we're all better off. |
| Sun 25 Jan | anonymizer | Have you ever looked at automobiles on the road and wondered in amazement how of dozens of manufacturers, with hundreds of products, there really are just a couple of basic auto designs that everyone copies? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Kentasy | Did the JVM evole from the idea of the VB runtime ? Did the forms designer originate in VB, then get added to the entire suite of Visual Studio ? (In the beginning of Visual studio, it was simply a collection of VB, VC, InterDev etc) In any case, yes we are much better off with all the advancements and borrowing from other languages. I hope the next advancements in Java blow us all away, and then the next versions of Visual Studio blow us all away... |
| Sun 25 Jan | Robert Jacobson | It's not entirely fair to separate the 'Visual Studio' features from the pure language features. Visual Basic relied on a tight coupling between the IDE and the application code itself, in particular with a RAD, forms designer approach for GUI applications. This seems to have had a strong influence on C# (and VB.Net.) Although you can theoretically code a rich C# GUI app using Notepad, it wouldn't be a fun experience. Sure, the Forms Designer might really just be a neat productivity enhancement of the IDE instead of a true language feature, but it in practice it seems fairly integral to the language. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Brad Wilson | 'Over and above the JVM?' Yes. I find the CLR to be much more consistent and more fleshed out than the Java Runtime Libraries. |
| Sun 25 Jan | veal | Blank, I did *not* say that Java's main deficiencies are obvious in *retrospect*. They were *immediately* obvious the day Java emerged 'in the mid-90s to any language designer with large-scale application programming experience'. (Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear which specific ideas in Java were not borrowed, because off the top of my head I can't think a single one.) Missing some things, say a good gui library, is not a big deal in a version 1. At OOPSLA '98, Guy Steele gave an interesting talk 'Growing a Language', but he unfortunately missed a crucial point: missing some things is far worse than missing others. For instance if version 1 had parameterized types, 'generics', much of J2EE would be different. As it is, getting them in the sixth major update 7 years later, because of backwards compatibiliy concerns we'll probably *never* have a really clean and fully coherent set of core libraries in Java. But Java, problematic as it is, composed entirely (I think) of borrowed ideas, made one fantastically important contribution to the programming world. Java lured serious programmers away from C en masse. I never expected that to happen. That's opened a door for the really superb languages I think will see emerge over the next decade. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | well, as a c++ programmer that's looking for a new language to market myself with, c# is successful in terms of number of jobs out there. there's still more c++ and java jobs right now, but the number of c# is significant and gaining. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Brad Wilson | I don't think .NET will be pulling many people away from Java. While it's a competitor to Java in some ways, it's not in others. People can choose Java for all-Windows development work, but I expect by and large, that's a very small piece of Java development. The all-Windows shops are more likely to have stuck with VB and C++, and THOSE are the people who will be converting over to .NET en masse over time. Especially on the server side, where there's huge benefits to move (ASP.NET is much better than ASP), it makes little sense to wait if you're committed to all-Windows development. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Smitty | 'Does C# owe its success to Java or VB ?' Not sure if it owes anything to VB, but I definitely see more of the Java and Delphi influence (which MS will never admit). As been stated before, Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, was the creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi. IMO, C# has taken the best of Delphi and Java to the next level. Kudos to Anders and his team for their work. Hopefully this will cause the Java and Delphi teams to take their respective languages to the next level as well. |
| Blocking users from viewing website | Sun 25 Jan | Chi Lambda |
| Whats the best way using classic ASP to block someone from viewing your website? I know how to get a persons IP address by using: Request.ServerVariables(REMOTE_HOST) But IP addresses change -- especially those who use dial-up connections.... (But I read somewhere that an ISP issues IP addresses with the first two blocks of numbers always remaining the same. True? ) Any suggestions would be a great help. Thanks. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk.com/ | It is better to block IPs in firewall, web server or application server to reduce overhead, which new custom code may add. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Eric Debois | IPs do change for most people. Atleast where I live you have to pay extra if you want your own IP so its not a reliabale method. One way the works with non techie surfers is to put a cookie on their computers, but thats very easy to get around for those with only some basic knowlege. |
| Sun 25 Jan | i like i | Blocking by IP-address is common-enough, although it blocks legitimate users too. Others within 'range' of your blocked IP address will also be blocked. Sometimes users can appear to have the same IP address too, e.g. they are behind a NAT proxy (as is common in network environments and many cheap dialup ISPs) |
| Sun 25 Jan | FredF | The only reliable way would be to have the user fill in a form, send it by snail-mail, do some background to make sure they are who they say they are, and generate an account that they need to use to log on and have access to your web server. Mmm.... |
| Sun 25 Jan | anon | You can do a whois lookup on the IP block to determine who owns the IP address/block and ehcne to which country it is registered. There are four whois servers because there are four IP address registries. Try ARIN first. Then RIPE, LACNIC and APNIC. That's assuming you want to do it by country/company. As someone else mentioned, it's better to do this at the network level rather than the application level to reduce overhead. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Ted | A certain CxO asked me to do this constantly - 'How can we block our competitors from viewing our site?' The only really accurate technical solution is with rdns as the poster above says, but that sure is a (resource )expensive way to go. There is another solution, one which works 100% of the time, cannot be defeated, and is essentially, foolproof: DONT PUT STUFF YOU WANT TO KEEP PRIVATE ON A PUBLIC WEB SITE! It's a technology with great methods for keeping things private (http auth)- why fight the obvious? It's not a technical problem. |
| Sun 25 Jan | the artist formerly known as prince | Ted, Maybe you underestimated the level of his ignorance, maybe he was talking about the intranet at your offices? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Ted | My boss or the poster? My boss was talking about our regular ol' corporate web site. I eventually wrote a treatise which contained a phrase like : 'We don't want to appear nervous about our competition looking at our site ' (or something like that), and he did a 180 on that idea immediately. |
| Sun 25 Jan | anonQAguy | Chi Lambda - Ted's hit the crux of the matter -- if you are trying to prevent people from selected groups from accessing information via your website, the only sure way to do it is to not put the info on the website, or anywhere that's reachable from the website. Your post doesn't spell out the actual operational situation giving rise to your need to limit access, so I'm making an assumption that somebody in your organization has asked you (again, as in Ted's post) how to keep competitors (or any arbitrary target group) from accessing info on your otherwise public website, and this is the basis for your post. My response is based on this assumption. If my assumption's wrong, then it'd be helpful for you to tell us more about the underlying problem. As it is, this really looks to me like somebody in your organizaiton is trying to solve the wrong problem. Anyway, proceding with assumption firmly in hand, there's no way to do what you asked that's meaningfully effective. Big deal, so you could implement one or more ways to prevent a machine from your competitors' domains from accessing your website. That doesn't do anything to prevent people who work for your competitors from accessing your website from their home/personal machines and capturing whatever info they might want from your public site. Or, when they find themsevles blocked, of using their friends' machines that might not have been blocked. This whole approach is effectively like trying to build a big 'deny' list, and there are too many ways to get around it, let alone dealing with all the folks you'd want to give access to that you'd be blocking out unintentionally. Fredf's solution makes more sense, i.e. effectively constructing an 'accept' list, but the effectiveness of that approach is completely dependent upon the quality of whatever vetting process you apply to the requests for access. And if your intent is to have the 'benign public' (i.e. people not in your list of forbidden groups) able to generally access your site (another assumption on my part), then you'd have let the general public into your accept list. Again, not practical to do while still limiting access. So, we get back to the most practical solution to this assumed situation -- don't put stuff you don't want seen on a public website. Ever. Period. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Did it occur to you anonQAguy that your post is a total waste of space? Why not think of something original instead of summarizing what every else says. No wonder you work QA. |
| "The Apprentice" (spoilers) | Sun 25 Jan | Philo |
| Ive seen managers like Sam in the workplace. This week was definitely the proof that he is flat out incompetent. All he cared about during the entire show was his own ego. The team winning was about him. The debriefing in the boardroom was about him. The thirty seconds of his phone conversation with the guys who were running to finish the job may be in the top ten of leadership teaching tools. Hey, are we still a team? Do you think were going to win? And my god, I *love* Trump for calling him out on the respect thing - isnt this just rhetoric? Finally, a shout out to my passive voice buddies, because Sam did *exactly* what I was talking about: We had a plan, and at the end of the day, the plan was not adhered to Given his character (or lack thereof), this was pure weaselly it wasnt anybodys fault, it just happened crap. Also of note - Sams disbelief that he was actually fired. By that point it shouldve been quiet resignation, but he *still* allowed himself to show surprise that he got the bullet. Im interested to see what the women do next week that gets them the lecture. Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | Hmmm. I think someone's seen Coyote Ugly one too many times. ;-) |
| Sun 25 Jan | Nick | >>Finally, a shout out to my passive voice buddies, because Sam did *exactly* what I was talking about: 'We had a plan, and at the end of the day, the plan was not adhered to' Good catch on the passive voice usage, Philo. I hate that and have called people on it. I have a higher regard for people who admit that they screwed up than those who take the 'it just happened' stance. Passive conveys not only failure but also ignorance of what's going on. In Sam's case, he was ignorant because he refused to listen to his field crew. Lemonade kisses, phallic jets, and dancing for gold => I'm guessing that in next week's episode the women will be running the restaurant like something in between a Hooters and Coyote Ugly. If they run it like a Girls Gone Wild, I want to see the Cinemax version. BTW, CNBC runs second airings for any of you who miss an episode. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | Oh, I also thought that unless they cut a lot of footage, the guys gave up WAY too quickly on the leg waxing. I would've gotten a throwaway camera first, then offered the waxing company before and after photos for advertising. :-) Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Nick | They gave up too quickly and didn't go about it right. Whenever I've bargained for a cheaper price, I always talked to the manager in private - quietly and away from other customers. It's surprising how often it works. I've even gotten a Nordstrom's manager to sell me a Joseph Aboud jacket for $100 off. If I'd tried that by talking to the sales clerk or out in front of other customers, there's no way he would have cut me that deal. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | Good points Nick. Again, it's not about the product, and in this case it's not about the price. The men, as always, took the direct approach - with selling, with advertising, and now with negotiations. The women *never* sold the product directly, always attaching a secondary image (usually sex) to the main action. Also, the leg waxing place they went to was more upscale, probably on 57th Street or so and wasn't used to bargaining and didn't care if they lost some business. The place in Chinatown, on the other hand was probably more hungry for the business and used to haggling. So let's see, Sales, Advertising, Negotiations, Management. I wonder what's next. |
| Sun 25 Jan | T. Norman | Whoever gets this won't be worthy of the position they're going to win. They're just not going to be up to the standard Trump is looking for. Think about it ... which truly brilliant businessman or businesswoman would spend 13 weeks vying for a 1 in 16 chance of a mere $250K/yr job? |
| Sun 25 Jan | NathanJ | Is Trump really looking for someone worthy of the 250K? If the TV producers pay him $1 mill for his name then he gets net 750K, a lot of free advertising, and some ego stroking to boot. If the 250K is based on any sort of commission/performance criteria it might be a lot less real money to whoever wins. I don't know the details of the show. Is Trump sponsoring this at all? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Jorel on Software | I'm guessing the women get chewed out for simply slutting around town. While it makes for good TV it's not the type of behaviour a CEO should indulge in. Anyone see that one of the gals does soft core porn? http://www.wwwterminator.com/members/hothut/Gallery/All_Celebs/K/Kristi_Frank/ht_kristifrank01.jpeg http://www.nbc.com/nbc/The_Apprentice/contestants/about_kristi.shtml |
| Sun 25 Jan | T. Norman | The show is run by Trump's production company. It really is nothing more than a bid ad for Trump and his companies. But $250K is chicken feed in Trumpland. A person willing to give up 13 weeks for a far-from-guaranteed chance at only $250K isn't a person who is going to be worthy of Trump's time (they're going to spend a year under Trump's wing). He should have made it at least $1 million. |
| Sun 25 Jan | T. Norman | Oops, that first sentence should read "big ad for Trump..." |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | I've seen a lot of Trump on TV lately. Is he going into politics? He's got the money and women, now he wants power :) But he's doing it the wrong way. The right way is (sounding like Scarface): First, you got the power, then you got the money, and then you got a woman :)))) |
| Sun 25 Jan | Steve | Trump definitely pegged Sam -- he's a 'crash 'n burn'....'he'll either make a company great or destory it' [paraphrasing]. I've known a few crash 'n burns. It's extremely rare that those kind succeed. I don't know if I'll continue to watch it because I just wanted to see Sam get shit-canned. Trump did it sooner than I expected. Kudos to the guys for making him project lead so they could get rid of him. Too bad they sacraficed a win to do it. I couldn't stand they way Sam tried to weasel out of it. He should have assumed all the responsibility for losing. P.S. There is no doubt that the women are leveraging some of their good looks to win. Interesting. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | I'll bet if Sam had told Trump 'I only brought these two because it was a requirement. I am solely responsible for my team's failure and I take full responsibility' he would still be on. Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Sassy | If he had just owned his f*ck-ups, he still would have been canned, at least he could have gone out on his feet, rather than on his knees. I mean, it is national television. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | Philo, that's what I said about the guy last week. Has anyone noticed how into office politics Trump is? 'I'm surprised you chose him because he spoke highly of you, but you're gonna have to get used to this kind of thing in the real world.' 'You only chose them because they spoke poorly of you,' etc. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Jorel on Software | >I'll bet if Sam had told Trump 'I only brought these two > because it was a requirement. I am solely responsible for > my team's failure and I take full responsibility' he would > still be on. No way. Sam's only chance was to succeed in the mission. I don't think Trump wants a failure to win, even it's a responsible failure. At this point I'm impressed at how unimpressive the contestants are. Are these people Survivor rejects or what? |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | Mark - actually I think Trump is picking up on how transparent the choices are. The leaders aren't bringing people who they think will hurt the team in the big game; they're bringing spur-of-the-moment choices, or people they don't like. The choices are tactical at best, personal at worst, and never strategic. Jorel - agreed. The only two I've seen anything from that I'd really want in a leadership position are Troy (the guy who keeps working to get the team leaders refocused) and Kristi (the restaurant owner that so far has just made comments between sets, but they've been very good comments). I'd have to see more of them in action, but I suspect they're both very solid businesspeople. I just noticed this tidbit on the website: 'For the women, Jessie took over as Project Manager and she wisely divided the team into two, smaller groups - separating Omarosa and Katrina.' Brilliant. That alone may have been why the women won. [grin] Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | Philo - It could be, but it seemed to start pretty early on. I'm sure he's sized up just about anyone whose stuck their neck out to be sized up already. Troy is the 'close your eyes take a deep breath' guy? Yeah, despite his Brooklyn Thug Smarmy Salesman look, he seems the one most outwardly focused. I did notice they gave Kristi a lot of airtime. I always wonder about why they choose who for those in between slots. Assuming the editing started after taping wrapped, you wonder what they're trying to build up in the audience for later victories and defeats to be more surprising and emotionally satisfying. In other words, given what I've seen I don't expect anyone else had something as intelligent to say, but I do wonder why they weren't given the chance. It's not like Sam had anything inteligent to say either, but he got a lot of face time. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Troy is the country boy that runs a mortgage business. He's the only guy on that show I could work for. http://www.nbc.com/nbc/The_Apprentice/contestants/about_troy.shtml |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Or Nick. I could work for Nick too |
| Sun 25 Jan | T. Norman | 'At this point I'm impressed at how unimpressive the contestants are. Are these people Survivor rejects or what?' Like I said above, an impressive person would not waste their time on this show, given the relatively low stakes and low odds. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | Hmm looking at the bios, I'm reminded that Trump was giving advice to Nick during one of the elimination rounds, advising him to be still. I think Trump might have a soft spot or him, but he has to play his cards right and prove he's not a brown noser. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | > Like I said above, an impressive person would not waste their time on this show, given the relatively low stakes and low odds. < Oh, I dunno. There are more than monetary rewards. This is an experience they'll remember for the rest of their lives, learn about themselves by looking at themselves from ousdie, a chance to work, even briefly with someone who does business and publicity well, and one rather huge bit of free advertising. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | No wonder David was the first one to go: What is your definition of 'success'? Not working for The Man. Who do you admire most (personally and/or professionally)? DJ Gilles Peterson. What cartoon character do you most relate to and why? Fritz The Cat. Part human, part feline: is there a more sublime combination? |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | hmm. I guess it depends on what you define as impressive. |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | > looking at themselves from ousdie should be looking at themselves from outside |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | Mark - I think Trump was more interested in keeping the focus on the guy he wanted to get rid of. ;) Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | That must be it. I bet he found a bunch of incopetent men specifically so he could keep the women around longer too. Have fun watching Coyote Apprentice next week. ;) |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mister Fancypants | The vast majority of people cast to be on 'reality' shows are really just unknown actors or wanna-be actors, which explains why Kristi was on Red Shoe Diaries and various other contestants on other shows have been found doing foot fetish videos, other types of soft-core porn or older commercials, etc. The shows aren't really scripted or anything (though the producers can tell almost any story they want with creative editing), but they still want people who have on-camera experience (though not enough that they will be 'known') who know how to layer on the drama. |
| Want eat book | Sun 25 Jan | Tayssir John Gabbour |
| So, anyone want to recommend an offbeat book for the month? It can be esoteric or require a "background." But it has to be good. |
| Sun 25 Jan | anonymizer | Cookie good! |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mike | A Walk in the Woods : Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson (Author) |
| Sun 25 Jan | HeWhoMustBeConfused | Heck, read ANYTHING by Bill Bryson. Definitely one of the great 'travel' writers of all time. I must admit, though, to feeling very sorry for the guy who accompanied him on parts of the Appalachian walk, only to be pilloried in later publication. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Touching the Void by some other guy |
| Sun 25 Jan | Prakash S | If you want to write by Brenda Ueland. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555972608/qid=1075010383/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-4973514-6575317?v=glance&s=books Enjoy |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Here's a taste of Into Thin Air http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_into_thin_air_1.html |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect' Very worth reading, IMHO. http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/ Philo |
| Sun 25 Jan | Tony Edgecombe | Walden by Henry David Thoreau, written 150 years ago it says a lot about modern ways of living. |
Sun 25 Jan | Indian Developer in India | So, anyone want to recommend an offbeat book for the month? It can be esoteric or require a 'background.' But it has to be good.The Bible. It meets all the conditions. Make sure you read from the begining to end, just as you would any other book. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mongo | 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' - Julian Jaynes A stunning work, which, whether fully correct or not, will make your brains start to leak out of your ears - at the least you may start hearing voices (an inside joke if you've read the work). As an added inducement for Neal Stephenson fans (whose work could also arguably be presented as a response here), virtually all of Stephenson's work is predicated upon this book's central thesis. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618057072/qid=1075050603/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5478932-7157423?v=glance&s=books |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mongo | On second thought, I probably shouldn't have said all Stephensons's works are _predicated_ on TOOCITBOTBM. "The Big U" and "Snow Crash" are, and probably "The Diamond Age", but perhaps I should say instead that Stephenson himself is clearly influenced by Jaynes and this influence permeates his own work. |
| Sun 25 Jan | i like i | just finished reading Jane Austin's Mansfield Park again, and really recommend it. |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | It's Easier Than You Think : The Buddhist Way to Happiness by Sylvia Boorstein |
| Sun 25 Jan | Smitty | Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? by James W. Sire |
| Redhat Professional Workstation? | Sat 24 Jan | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) |
| Has anyone tried this? Comments? $79 at the local Staples, I am weary of wrestling with the various free Linux distros and their quirks. I just want to get some work done in a Unix-like environment on an x86 PC compatible machine without hassling with half-baked ... well, half-baked-quite-a-bit-of-stuff. I am looking for something that is stable and works well. Is this new Rehat offering it? |
| Sat 24 Jan | Dennis Forbes | No. Check out Mandrake 9.2 - extremely slick with a very easy to use installation. It's top notch. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Brad Wilson | +1 for Mandrake on the "easy to install, easy to use" list. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Nick | I have RH 7.3 and was considering an upgrade to 9.x until Red Hat announced they were dropping the non-enterprise versions of their distro. If you're not too concerned with support in the future, then Red Hat is easy to install and use. Reading around the internet, the other two distros that get the most praise are Mandrake and Suse. I'm leaning toward Suse. Since Novell bought out Suse and Ximian, they seem to be one of the few companies with a well-rounded Linux vision. Whether they are capable of executing that vision remains to be seen. |
| Sun 25 Jan | blargle | take a look at Fedora - http://fedora.redhat.com/ |
| Sun 25 Jan | Nick | From what I've read, fedora users will essentially be Red Hat's Linux lab rats since they'll be using it as a proving ground. I don't think that's the kind of distro you want to use for a development workstation. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Ori Berger | Fedora 1 _is_, for all practical purposes, RedHat 9, with much better package management ("yum"). If you like RedHat and don't want to shell out, use Fedora. RedHat is still financing most of the work and testing of Fedora, and so far everyone I know that uses Fedora is happy with it. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk.com/ | I use RedHat 9 on my personal machine. Yestarday I run Synaptic (I regularly run it, it is similar to up2date) and after reboot WOW I see Fedora! I needed to correct fonts in conqueror, mailer and terminal applications and the rest works as good as before. |
| Sun 25 Jan | David Roper | +1 for Mandrake Loaded it onto an 800Mhz Dell PIII. Installation was very easy, including repartitioning. Autodetected all the hardware and seems much more responsive and stable that the Windows 2000 Pro that it replaced, although I will say that this was an upgrade from the NT4.2 workstation edition originally bundled and has been patched and repatched and generally goofed with, getting slower and slower and slower all the time. PS Does anyone know of a tool like OmniOutliner that is available for Linux? |
| Sun 25 Jan | M | If you have the bandwidth and $.13 for a blank CD... http://www.linuxiso.org |
| Sun 25 Jan | Egor Shipovalov | If all you want is 'Unix-like environment', consider Cygwin: http://www.cygwin.com Be sure to have the bandwidth though, as the download can be hundreds of megs, and I'm not sure you can buy it on CD instead. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Professional Developer | Nick, what kind of distribution would you consider for a development workstation? |
| Gates ends spam | Sat 24 Jan | EAW |
| Bill Gates has promised an end to spam in 2 years. http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/news/story.jsp?story=484520 I have few complaints against Gates and MS, but this seems like hubris at its best, even for him. Although I think a good solution to spam will be techonological rather than legislative (eg., Bayesian filtering), Im surprised that Gates is honestly predicting a magic bullet in two years. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Ram Dass | This speech was made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This is where governmental and corporate big-wigs come together for a pow-wow. CEOs, like politicians, need publicity. What Gates was probably looking for was a sound bite - and he got it. It is a win for him. In two years time, the speech would have been forgotten and there may be another type of sound bite in the offing. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Tom H | And now there are reports circulating that the Queen will knight him. Will we have to start calling him Sir Bill now? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/25/ngates25.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/25/ixnewstop.html |
| Sun 25 Jan | Ram Dass | Bill Gates is not a British citizen - so although he can be knighted he cannot use the title "Sir" |
| Sun 25 Jan | Ged Byrne | It looks to me that Gates is really predicting the end of the internet. As things are this system would be impossible. However, given a closed environment controlled by Microsoft, it will all be feasible. |
| Upcoming VS.NET | Sat 24 Jan | Andy |
| http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vs2004_intro.asp Go down to the feature called Code Snippets. Is it just me, or is this feature absolutely begging for abuse. I can picture the code already, makes me shiver. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Prakash S | slowly, but surely we will be moving to what MS calls *powerpoint* programming, till that day....:-) |
| Sat 24 Jan | Kentasy | I think it is a Visual Basic only feature. There will also be lots of wizards and other helpful doo-dads for Visual Basic programmers. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Prakash S | I am sure it beats this though:-) http://www16.brinkster.com/messydesk/db/refactvb.asp |
| Sat 24 Jan | Hat | >> 'Terminology and structure of available features will be simplified to cater for the less rigorous intellect of the VB developer.' The stereotype that will never go away. There is no correlation between a person who codes in Visual Basic and how intelligent that person may or may not be. If an accomplished programmer chooses VB as the language to write code in, it is because they know from experience that it is the fastest, easiest way to accomplish what needs to be done. If the program they create is useful, it will be used. This is the nature of business. If it needs modification, it will probably be easily accomplished. This can be traced back to experience. If an inexperienced/weekend programmer chooses VB as the language to write code in, it is because they know that VB is intuitive, forgiving and easily learned. If the program they create is useful, it will be used. This is the nature of business. If it needs modification, it may take a lot of refactoring. This can be traced back to inexperience. |
| Sat 24 Jan | The real Entrepreneur | I think that VB's accessibility (because, it IS so productive) lowers the bar (barrier to entry) so that you get more casual programmers. Something like C++ has such a barrier to entry that only the strong(er) survive. The extra neophytes that use VB dilute the average IQ of a VB developers as a whole. That being said, using VB does not MEAN that you're a bad programmer. Your' just in a group that has statistically more 'poor' programmers. All that being said: I use VB and I'm largely self taught. And I have a very successful company. 'VB been berry gud to me' |
| Sat 24 Jan | Prakash S | DUH!!!, its meant to be a joke! |
| Sat 24 Jan | Matthew Lock | I have been using Textpad's version of code snippets (called clip libraries) in Textpad for years. It's such a cool time saving feature you'll wonder how you did without it. In Textpad you can create your own ones, like creating and querying database connections, opening a file and running through the contents, etc. Saves looking it up in a book, or the online help each time. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Andy | OK, well, I guess there should be a feature that limits the code snippet to 1 line. That will prevent you from having to memorize a lot of function names and parameter lists, and such. If it's more than one or two lines, that's what scares me. Copy and paste is evil. |
| Sat 24 Jan | anonymizer | 'The stereotype that will never go away. There is no correlation between a person who codes in Visual Basic and how intelligent that person may or may not be.' I most certainly would disagree with this sentiment based upon industry observation -- while there are some extremely intelligent VB programmers, they are definitely the exception. On the flip side I've met few professional C or C++ programmers who weren't highly intelligent, and the same can be said of Delphi programmers. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Robert Jacobson | There's a variation of this for C#:
'A Sneak Preview of Visual C# Whidbey'
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/whidbey_csharp_preview.asp
('Expansions,' which are 'fill in the blank snippets of code.') Just to keep you C# partisans from getting too smug. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Kentasy | Heh. That link is funny. :) 'Run to Blinky thing.' I use VB and I love it. I also hope all the current 'poor' VB types migrate to C# so they can be 'cool'. :) I think I will start calling it B# so I can be 'cool' too... :) |
| Sun 25 Jan | Kyralessa | One nice thing about coding in VB: less coding snobs. |
| Become Rich Selling Virtual Property | Sat 24 Jan | NumLock |
| Want to become rich? Try playing an MMORPG and selling the pixels. Apparently one of these guys was making something on order of 6 - 8 million a year selling virtual property. (Although he is said to have cheated and not used normal techniques for obtaining the items. i.e. duplicate virutal money through a bug in the game etc etc) http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/01/themis_group_pr.html http://fohguild.org/forums/showthread.php?s=f1cd8b290c188a5d50329523668a2264&threadid=10296&perpage=15&pagenumber=1 Right, wrong or indifferent it seems to be a big industry. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Ranter | Our society is absolutely bizarre in its priorities. If you want to buy absolutely worthless and meaningless bullsh*t like a character in an online RPG, you have the means to do so. If you demand to have a cell phone that flosses your butt and contains embedded Windows XP plus a built in webcam, it's prolly out there with great incentives for signing on... Affordable health insurance or even a decent job? Dream on! ROTFL! Nobody needs that sh*t! Ha! |
| Sat 24 Jan | the artist formerly known as prince | but the about it your job could be designing that ell phone, you just answered your own question |
| Sat 24 Jan | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | This is the stuff that scares me. The Matrix anyone? |
| Sun 25 Jan | www.marktaw.com | I read an interview with someone who sold exotic pets for a lot of money in The Sims Online (but in reality was just selling empty pet carriers) and used that money to build a Playboy Mansion. I don't think she got any real money for it, but I could be wrong. |
| Bizarre interview tip | Fri 23 Jan | Philo |
| Just thought of this from an interview past - I knew I had a few people to interview with, and it was a cattle call, so I took a book on remoting cause I wanted to start learning it. It was like a hypnotic disk - *every* interviewer kept asking me remoting questions. Problem was that I hadnt even had a chance to crack the cover. I was completely upfront that I was just starting out with remoting, but they were all over it. So apparently when you go on an interview, take a book covering whatever aspect of programming youre really comfortable with. [grin] Philo |
| Sat 24 Jan | Alex.ro | Spooky... |
| Sat 24 Jan | www.marktaw.com | And if you have a book on interview tips and techniques? |
| Sat 24 Jan | Eric Debois | >>And if you have a book on interview tips and techniques? Whoooa, trippy. Recursive! |
| Sat 24 Jan | Eta | [I was completely upfront that I was just starting out with remoting] [So apparently when you go on an interview, take a book covering whatever aspect of programming you're really comfortable with.] ... |
| Sat 24 Jan | Andrew Hurst | I think that the interviewers liked it so much, because it showed initiative and an interest to improve. How many people do you know and/or work with that read one book on $language_of_choice and stopped at that. Its like writing books after only reading a dictionary. By bringing a book and showing that you were interested in improving yourself (reading a book on grammar) you immediately set yourself out from the dictionary-programmers. Whenever I start participating in interviewing, thats definitely going to be one of my questions. 'What software book have you read lately that didn't just teach how to program in a given language?' |
| Sat 24 Jan | Brad Wilson | That's a pretty common question in my experience: "Tell me about the last tech book you read: why you read it, and what you got out of it." |
| Sat 24 Jan | Hat | >> 'What software book have you read lately that didn't just teach how to program in a given language?' ========== This may be a fine question to ask only for conversational purposes, but asking it to help determine a candidate will certainly not provide you with anything more than the knowledge that this particular person likes to read books. There is no correlation between what software books you've read and how good you are at programming a computer. It's like saying at an interview, 'I've read Joel Spolsky's articles!'.... and your point would be? Selecting/Interviewing a person for a job is like looking at prisoners through the one-way glass... They file in, line up, you look at each, you boss says, 'Which one is it?' You reply, 'It's that one.' |
| Sat 24 Jan | Philo | Hm. I suspect several people who replied didn't get my point. I took a book on Remoting, which I hadn't started reading yet. I didn't get a chance to even turn a page before the interview started. Interviewer: 'Oh, you're reading about remoting?' Me: 'Yeah, I want to start learning about it, but I haven't even started the book yet.' Interviewer: 'Okay, so tell me the different types of remoting.' Me: 'Uh, I haven't really gotten into it yet.' Interviewer: 'I see. What channels can you use in remoting?' Me: 'DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH? I NEVER SAID I KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT REMOTING.' [etc] Thus my point is that since taking a book on a subject seems to be like yelling 'don't think about sex,' then you should take a book covering a subject you DO know very well. Are we clear? Philo |
| Sat 24 Jan | no name | Aye, Aye Captain. Attention! |
| Sat 24 Jan | no name | Yeah, the best programmer I've ever known never read any programming books. Took him something like 2 weeks to go from a client/server mfc/windows world to an n-tier linux/java world. I have to think about design, but he was able to sit in front of the computer and channel the gang of four. |
| Sat 24 Jan | veal | Hat, if your interviewing is like that, remind me not to bother with your company. You guys must get some real turkeys with such an approach. Good programming ability is a function of innate qualities. I'd take an empty but brilliant and talented programming mind over a 30-year software veteran with PhD in CS but a brain not-so-superbly-suited for programming. So books read is not a surefire indicator, but I've yet to see such a talented mind that isn't compelled to read voraciously. Not one. And why settle for the unfulfilled talent when with a little effort you can yield better, unless you're looking for an apprentice? I ask the books question, but it isn't a deal killer. It just helps fill in the picture. If I'm looking for someone to hit the ground running, they'll need to really shine on the coding problems to make up for ignorance of the literature though. (Not that this has anything to do with Philo's post. Oh well.) |
| Sat 24 Jan | Hat | 1. I'm not a hiring authority. Never have been. Might be sometime in the future. Just stating my view on the hiring process. 2. Most of the people that I know that have read 'Design Patterns' still don't know how to apply that knowledge to their everyday coding practices. They're 'book smart.' 3. If you are going to ask what books a person has read at the very least ask them how they have (in the past) or how they would (in the future) apply the knowledge they gained from the book to a real world scenario. It is all too common for people to claim they 'read computer books.' You see computer books listed on almost every computer geeks blog. Great! It's the rare person who actually writes in their blog what knowledge they have gained and how they have applied it. |
| Sat 24 Jan | BSdetector | -- Yeah, the best programmer I've ever known never read any programming books. Took him something like 2 weeks to go from a client/server mfc/windows world to an n-tier linux/java world. I have to think about design, but he was able to sit in front of the computer and channel the gang of four. -- You are so full of bullshit it's not even funny. |
| Sat 24 Jan | no name | 'You are so full of bullshit ' Nope, swear to god. Maybe it was more than 2 weeks, but it _seems_ like it was only two weeks. He was the rare one that _really_ was 10-20X more productive than a 'good' programmer. One day he was asking for a 2nd machine to play around with Linux on, a few weeks later he was showing me large chunks of a new system he was putting together. That man could do in a weekend what it would take a whole team weeks on. Hey, it's not like he or I either one is gaining anything by posting this. |
| Sat 24 Jan | T. Norman | How do you know he didn't read any books? He could have dozens of books at home that he's read but you don't know about. Sounds like those students who get straight As and people think they don't study. They do study, just not when and where you're looking. |
| Sat 24 Jan | no name | cause he told me he didn't read many books. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Danil | If I had been on the other side of the table, you would have aced the interview by simply looking up the answer in the book. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Philo | Oh sweet mother of god I feel like an idiot. Why didn't *I* think of that? Philo <- banging head on desk |
| Sun 25 Jan | BSdetector | -- cause he told me he didn't read many books. -- The difference between 'never read any books' and 'didn't read many books' is huge. Your first post was an exaggeration at best and an outright lie at worst. How can we trust anything you say? |
| Sun 25 Jan | veal | Did the conversation go like this? 'No, I haven't read many books actually... umm... let's see... in high-school I read one called The Art of Computer Programming, by Knuth... umm, I read Transaction Processing, by Jim Gray... Operating Systems Design and Implementation, by Tanenbaum... there was this one that had a knight fighting a pixelated dragon on the cover... I can't remember the name. Shoot, what was that one by Hennessy and Patterson called? Oh and last year on and airplane I read a small one called Test Driven Development, by Kent Beck. But that's about it I think. So was Enterprise Java in 5 Days any good? I don't really like to read much.' :-) |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | bs detector == troll with little class and no style, highly insecure as evidenced by being threatened with the skills of an anonymous persona on the internet. veal: He actually read a lot of code and some online manuals. The 2 years I was around him he had bought only 1 book --and it was about data warehousing. |
| Sun 25 Jan | BSdetector | anonymous persona: Call me what you want. Your first story was implausible. I merely pointed out that fact. Now you start backpedaling. Each time you post your programmer friend continues to have read more and more. This further supports the notion that good developers read. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Johnny Simmson | 'good developers read' well duh! there's a difference between not reading programming books, 99.9% of which are LAME and not reading anything! |
| Sun 25 Jan | no name | Ok, yeah, you're right, I made it all up. |
| More Windows Brain death or Stealth Marketing? | Fri 23 Jan | Mike |
| Try searching for text strings in all files within a folder on Windows 2003 or XP. Chances are you wont find your string. Yet you know it exists. Guess what? Windows no longer searches all files. Just ones it thinks it should. WTF??? Gee, are we getting ready to tell the world how you cant find anything anymore and we all need WinFS to keep track of our stuff? This is bullshit. A MS MVP trys to address it here: http://tinyurl.com/2qmx6 Yes, Yes. This is the great time to throw out Unix cause this is enterprise ready Windows Server System. What a crock. Here I was looking at the possibility of migrating a website off Linux. I need to fix a shitload of urls in the bulletin board generated files. Can I do it. Yes. Can I do it in a reasonable amount of time that doesnt make me just give up and say to heck with it --Nope! I wonder what functionality they will strip next in the interest of creating demand for the next version. Perhaps vowel keys will quit wrkng. |
| Fri 23 Jan | whatever works | Try 'find' from the command-line, or the 'find in files' feature of a text editor. If you read http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;309173 explains why this filtering has changed: it now uses type-type specific 'filters' which can for example find text in HTML files while ignoring text in comments. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Mike | 'Try 'find' from the command-line, or the 'find in files' feature of a text editor.' Thanks. Ultra Edit has that. Am I wrong though? Is this 'new enhanced' search better? For what? |
| Fri 23 Jan | Brad Wilson | Here's the problem: you're not an average user. The mere fact that you're here proves that. Stop thinking that everything has to be designed for ultimate power and flexibility, or it's total shit. The search is a lot better for 99% of users. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Li-fan Chen | It's so cute when Brad taunt people because they come here to diss MS :-) Seriously Mike, you'll find mind-boggling limitations like this all the time in Windows world. At least you are clueful enough to be in a position to look for alternatives. Time wasted? No doubt. Billable? Duh |
| Sat 24 Jan | Mike | 'Stop thinking that everything has to be designed for ultimate power and flexibility, or it's total shit.' It's not even really that. I just expected find to find everything. I've course the first thing I do on a windows machine is uncheck the boxes to hide extensions, hidden files and protected system files. I don't think Windows is total shit. But their find now is for anyone above occasional home user level. What really pissed me off is this wasn't XP or any other 'home' user Windows, this was the flagship Windows Server System 2003. Clue to Microsoft: Give us a real server operating system. Not some souped up home user version. 'Time wasted? No doubt. Billable? Duh' I wish. I've got a RH9 server that runs a site for my father's business. Support dies in April. I wanted to look into Windows mainly to see if I could run the forum software there and I'm also more comfortable with SQL Server than mysql or anything else. Probably a stupid idea to start with. The software is perl which is much more comfortable on *nix. Currently I've got a backup server at my house that I sync up just about daily with rsync. It works excellent. I'll probably put the backup in place when Rh9 dies. (Backup is Trustix). Should have left well enough alone, but thought I'd check out Windows. You know, if it ain't broke... |
| Sat 24 Jan | Andy | I found out about this the hard way, and thought it sucked, but I see the rationale. If you're a coder, you have tons of ASCII text files on your hard drive. If you're not, then you maybe don't have ANY that you care about. You might have a lot of saved HTML files. And if you search for HTML with plain text strings, it doesn't always work. Like when you need special characters like < >, if you type them in literally it won't work. They just should have documented it more clearly for us 'advanced' users somehow. |
| Sat 24 Jan | x | For searches I use Total Commander (which was named Windows Commander before) and PowerGrep. They both allow regular expressions, and other powerful features. |
| Sat 24 Jan | M | Mike - Sounds like you need Cygwin. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Elephant | This problem with Windows has existed since XP came out. I stumbled across it almost two years ago when trying to find text in .java files. You're just now running into this problem? If I had to guess, the search tool has worked better for you 99% of the time, and just recently you found that 1% mark. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Dennis Forbes | He mentioned in a follow-up that he is recently looking into Windows (perhaps after a lapse), so I doubt that it was working great until then. Having said that, I entirely agree with him -- At the very least they should have put a 'smart search' checkbox or the like to utilize this content specific searching (and even THEN it should ascii/unicode search literally if there isn't a frickin' search extension for the file in question). Like virtually every software development friend, I encountered this 'feature' early on when I was wondering why finds for strings I was sure existed weren't resolving anything. Regarding the '99%' claim, I doubt that 99% of users use the find feature, and I'd bet a large portion are 'power users'. As a sidenote, you don't need Cygwin or any other tools -- use Findstr at the command line. It can search for regular expressions. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Myron A. Semack | http://www.thirdstar.net/beeline/Improve_XP_Search.htm |
| Sun 25 Jan | The real Entrepreneur | Free multi-term searching program: Wilbur http://wilbur.redtree.com/index.htm I could never get Windows to search for MULTIPLE words in a file. Single term searching is, for me, useless. I need to look for A AND B AND C, etc. Also, I don't have time to wait 10 minutes for each search to complete. Wilbur (while having a goofy name) does this well. It indexes your whole hard drive and searches in a few seconds. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Zahid | You'd have to be a real Microsoft apologist to claim that this is an improvement in functionality. If it's not going to search everything, it should state that clearly -- even if 99% of the world is better off not finding what they say they want to find. I discovered this issue early in my use of XP, but never imagined it was a 'feature' ... I use a freeware tool only because I assumed this was a bug. Stop excusing these horrible decisions. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Mr Curiousity | 'I've got a RH9 server that runs a site for my father's business. Support dies in April.' Actually, Fedora is trying to fix the braindead rpm maintanance system on RedHat and use apt instead. That makes keeping a system up to date a lot easier. http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO The cool feature with apt is that one can fully upgrade a running system without a single reboot! Of course, reboot is needed to load a new kernel later. Here somebody went from RedHat 7.3 to 9 in only few commands: http://tyrannical.org/page-1 So closer to the date when the support runs out you can upgrade to Fedora, and use apt for updates. Of course, Fedora is a bit experimental thing, but then a webserver is not a rocket science stuff either. Linux firewall and apache have matured a while ago, so things are reasonably stable there and bug fixes are released promptly. |
| convert an integer to a binary string in Java? | Fri 23 Jan | SR |
| Any API calls to do this? |
| Fri 23 Jan | Mike Swieton | The Integer class can do it. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Jimmy Jo-Jo | Yeah, you might find the Java API's to be really poorly documented. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Mike | java.io.DataOutputStream |
| Sat 24 Jan | SG | Hi, String s = Integer.toBinaryString(n); The returned String is not padded to 32 places, however; all leading '0's are dropped. |
| Sat 24 Jan | bar | public static String valueOf(int i) Returns the string representation of the int argument. The representation is exactly the one returned by the Integer.toString method of one argument. so you do something like: int x = 10; String foo = String.valueOf(x); |
| Sun 25 Jan | SG | String.valueOf(n) returns a base-10, 2's complement String representation of its argument, not a binary String representation. In other words: String.valueOf(-1) ---> '-1' Integer.toBinaryString(-1) --> '11111111111111111111111111111111' |
| Quit-Programming Tutorial | Fri 23 Jan | anonymous |
| Hi, I am looking for Quit-Programming tutorial. After years of working in programming I feel like I try to program every thing. Any problem, I like to solve with some kind of programming. Thats bad. I consider computer as my only tool and better tool then my mind. MindSet: I can write program which can solve the problem. even it the program takes days of efforts I am inclined to solve the problems only that way rather than applying my mind. |
| Fri 23 Jan | www.marktaw.com | A long vacation away from computers. And don't book it online. |
| Fri 23 Jan | anonymous | it's not about computers it's about programming |
| Fri 23 Jan | YAAP | Get married and have kids. You will be faced with all kinds of problems that a program can't solve. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Clay Dowling | In the mean time, investigate the opportunities to be provided by ice fishing or rabbit hunting. Do it for a long time and stay away from computers. Focus on getting something fresh and tasty to eat. That will clear your brain out. |
| Fri 23 Jan | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | Learn how to ski bumps. I've found it is the best zen meditation there is. All you can think about is next bump. No time to analyze, just time to react. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Alex.ro | Read humor. Humor isn't algorithmic. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Kraemer | F* off. |
| Fri 23 Jan | anonymous | I do the job.. computer programming, So I have to continue doing it.. It is just that I want to solve only those problem which are related to computing. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Alex.ro | That should have been F* off; =) |
| Sat 24 Jan | Simon Lucy | Hmmm the robots are becomng self aware again, time to deaden those empathy parameters once more. |
| Sat 24 Jan | Hoang Do | Quit Programming. Try to equate it to costs. Programming costs lots of time, effort, and frustration. If what you get back is worth what you put in, do it. If it doesn't, don't. You are the one who decides. For more common sense stuff, you can read: http://jotsite.com |
| Sun 25 Jan | x | YAAP, Care to elaborate? |
| trapped in the technical ghetto? | Fri 23 Jan | treefrog |
| Ive been in my post for 4 or 5 years now. Im a systems engineer at a major telecoms manufacturer. Im a pretty good developer (Im the goto guy), and an OK systems engineer (read fairly picky bastard who wants to get to the bottom of things). The problem is, Ive never ever seen a customer. Ever. Apparantly in a farway land called marketing there are people who deal with customers (and maybe also in network support, and in product management). Id lke to go and find some customers and understand what they want. In fact, Ive been saying this for several years. Id like to become a better systems engineer, by learning more about the way that customers want to use our kit But whenever I go and talk to my boss about actually doing it, or apply for a transfer or secondment to another group so I can actually find these things out, he blocks it! Why - because Im too good at what I do for him to let me go (we do have a recruitment freeze at the moment). Im beginning to feel that Im trapped in a technical ghetto, because my special technical skills mean Im too valuable to be allowed to do anything else. Any advice? regards |
| Fri 23 Jan | Sorry I have no advice | Stop being "goto guy". Become an "if then else" guy. :) |
| Fri 23 Jan | anonymizer | Become a gosub guy. Goto is so outdated. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Arrogant Prick | Your're the Goto Guy? Everyone knows you shouldn't use 'goto'. Change your name to Treefrog++ and become more Object Oriented. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Exception guy | I'm in a very similar situation - in my programming job several years, virtually never see customers. I think the problem with your approach is that you're asking for too large a change (transfer or part-time loan to another group) all at once. Doing this makes your boss see only negatives (he loses you) and no positives. Instead, get involved working with a customer in a small way to start with - for instance, find out who some of the support people are, and go chat with them over lunch, and mention that you'd like to find out more about what customers are thinking so you can design better products (support people will love you if you say that), and they'll start venting; then, tell them that if they've got a prickly customer issue you'd be delighted to help them out. You won't have to wait long, and there will be some customer issue you're involved in understanding and solving. Also, find out who some of the nearby sales people for your product line are, and tell them you'd like to tag along on some sales calls. Do this for a few months, and you'll be able to decide if you like it. If so, you'll have some contacts in other departments who will be able to pull you away from your current boss ('he's already doing such a great job working with us'), and you'll have much more leverage. Good luck! (I've discovered there are many interpersonal things that are very hard to accomplish immediately, but which are quite easy if you're willing to work at them a little bit at a time for several months). |
| Fri 23 Jan | YAAP | Leave. Seriously. IMO, one of the tenets of good management is to promote good people and/or provide them opportunities, even if it's painful. In the long run, not doing so will hurt the company more than the short term pain of their loss to another position within the organization. Some companies understand this, and it it pays off because they retain good people. But in your case, it you try to make this argument (move me or lose me), it will come off as a threat. It's a no win situation. So, your best bet is to bide your time, network, and keep an eye out for good opportunities. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Quicherbichin | ' I'm a pretty good developer (I'm the goto guy)' Is this Wayne again? |
| Fri 23 Jan | Wayne's homey | Don't be hatin' on Wayne! |
| Fri 23 Jan | Tom Smykowski | Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the !@%& !@^* customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people? |
| Fri 23 Jan | HeyCoolAid! | I work for a very small company, so contact with customers is inevitable... and let me tell you that it gets real old real fast. My worst days are the ones when I have to fill in on tech support, instead of doing my real job - programming. If you have a product development department, that would be another good place to search out people to talk to. They usually have a pretty good line on what customers are wishing for and talking about. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Artist | Exception guy has excellent advice for you. Follow it.!! What you are doing is beause it's what you have selected to do. Not just beause your boss wants. You have your own methods of dealing with technical things. You can get to know the detail in depth for systems. You can transfer your skill for human systems. Tow-way interactions may slow you down at times, but understanding the system is the key to start, atleast for you. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Shodan | I can comment on both aspects of this problem... ....when I joined my current job, there was a trench mentality and the developers minimised real dialogue with the users. Users have to write specs. Although I made suggestions that we should get involved in the users more, in the end, I had to just get out there and start making friends with the users by myself. The users know and trust me now. If I was in your situation, I would try to make some personal bridges with the sales people - sounds like they're your best chance to get a connection with the end users. ...on the subject of being blocked by the boss, I've been shafted by a bait-and-switch job. I was quite disenchanted with my position but I was persuaded to stay because I was told I could move to A Department More Interesting, a place I really wanted to go. This wasn't proposed by my boss, so after I agreed to stay, my boss has pretty much killed the offer behind the scenes. I'm faced with lots of official reasons why I can't move. My decision: I'm leaving in the summer. |
| Fri 23 Jan | HeWhoMustBeConfused | treefrog, if you are as "goto" as your post suggests, it is likely that the sales/marketing/design teams may already know you. Approach them directly. Say that you'd like to improve your understanding of the product from a customer perspective, and ask if you can get involved (perhaps) in some pre-sales activities. |
| Sat 24 Jan | veal | I agree with the people above who directed you to make direct contact with people closer to the customer as a first step. That's a specific form of what is generally perhaps the most important tactic of employeeship: get to know people throughout your company on a human level, and talk to them frequently and directly about everything. Drink with them whenever you can. And don't just strive to know the obvious movers and shakers, but everyone at every level. This will be very good for you, and (not that it matters as much) good for the company too. Plus, getting to know your fellow humans is universally good advice. If you're effective (and controllable), your manager will always fight to keep you. But if you're reaching out for a richer role, any superb manager (of the 3% out there) would try to keep you *and* help you gain that richer role at the same time. Chances are if he hasn't suggested ways other than transfer that you could get closer to the customer, he's of the most common type of manager I'll call the pigeonholing manager. The pigeonholer positions himself as the nexus of information, striving so that hardly anybody learns anything without his intervention, thereby securing his position. He is a menace to be thwarted. Thwarting his information hoarding will be good for the company, because having such information bottlenecks invariably leads to miscommunication and mistakes, and hoarders tend to withhold information that doesn't support their own agenda. But he's also easy to thwart. You simply act as if you have no manager and must discover and transmit all information without him. Never fully trust the information he gives you, and never fully trust that he's transmitting what you suggest outside your group. He can still harm you, so you'll probably need to act this way under the guise of social relationships rather than overt subversion, and don't let him become aware your efforts or nor confront him about his pigeonholing. Also, when in the pigeonholer's presence, avoid revealing to him who told you this or that, using phrasings like 'I overheard that...' so that he cannot move against your contacts. Also try to read a few books on the pop-psychology of the workplace. You might discover other fun things about your workplace and your coworkers that you had not noticed. Have fun, and welcome to the metaworld of corporate life. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Bella | Not dealing with customers can also be viewed as a huge plus. |
| Sun 25 Jan | Floridian | Bella, welcome back! How is it going? |
| Sockets versus RPC | Fri 23 Jan | Hugo Boss |
| I am pretty new to computing - mostly as an amateur programmer on the weekends. My question below may be dumb : What is the difference between socket communication and RPC calls? Do applications communicate to databases via sockets? |
| Fri 23 Jan | Christopher Wells | You can send anything over sockets: 'sockets' is equivalent to 'TCP' (or other low-level network protocols, like UDP). Specifically, 'sockets' are to 'network dialog' as 'file handles' are to 'disk files'. 'sockets' are a library available to application programs (on MS Windows the library is known as 'winsock') for initiating and receiving any network data. There's a good chance that our web messages are being sent via 'sockets' ... this message isn't RPC (in that I'm writing to a person, not invoking a procedure on a remote computer). RPC means 'remote procedure calls'. RPC requires specifically-formatted data, agreed-on by the software at both ends of the [network] connection, to specify which remote procedure to invoke, what its parameters are, what its return value is. RPC data may be (is usually) sent via sockets. There is more than one standard format for RPC data. > Do applications communicate to databases via sockets? Yes, except when they don't. Applications communicate to databases via database driver libraries. The libraries (on the application's computer) may use sockets to send data to the database's computer. Or, they may send the data using something other than sockets, for example if the database is on the same computer as the application ('IPC', inter-process communication, is a more general form of RPC, remote procedure call ... RPC is one of the types of IPC). |
| Fri 23 Jan | Elephant | Sockets I'd say are layer 5 in the OSI model. They provide the interface between applications and the transport layer (TCP/UDP). RDP is layer 6 or layer 7 (it's debatable) in the OSI model. They provide translation to a layer 5 protocol from an application. The interesting thing layer 6/7 is that all it 'depends' on is having a layer 5 below it. That layer 5 may be a socket, it may be DB connector, it could be any sort of translation device. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Dignified | '> Do applications communicate to databases via sockets? Yes, except when they don't.' Ah, I got a good chuckle out of that. :) |
| Fri 23 Jan | Andrew Burton | As I understand it, RPC is just a layer of abstraction over sockets. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Christopher Wells | > As I understand it, RPC is just a layer of abstraction over sockets I think RPC specifies what a function call looks like 'on the wire', i.e. it's the data format into which function calls (parameters, return codes) are serialised. An RPC implementation also includes tools that generate 'stub' code that serialises/deserialises your specific functions. It may (I don't know) have management (end-point discovery, security, reconnection) built in also. Finally it neededn't be over sockets (for example, 'RPC' also works between two processes on the same machine, in which case the transport might be for example 'pipes' instead of 'sockets'). |
| Fri 23 Jan | Andrew Burton | Oh, crud. I'm thinking XML-RPC, a web service over http. Ack! |
| Fri 23 Jan | Hugo Boss | Thanks for your posts :) |
| Sun 25 Jan | Keith Moore | 'Sockets' are a pretty low-level network abstraction. You're required to deal with potentially difficult issues like controlling socket handle lifetime, binding address to sockets, resolving human-readable (?) names into address, connecting, etc. Also, the two most common protocols used by applications on the Internet (TCP and UDP) each have some nasty 'gotchas' that can make their use challenging. 'RPC' is a higher level protocol. It's also somewhat protocol neutral -- As long as the client and server have some shared/common network protocol installed (and assuming their RPC implementations play nicely) then the two can communicate. Under Windows, RPC works over sockets, named pipes, LRPC (a local-machine IPC mechanism), and a few others. It's probably also worth mentioning that the programming model for the two are quite different. Sockets programs tend to see things in terms of bytes flowing back and forth across the network. RPC programs tend to use a request/response model: issue the request (RPC call), wait for a response. Then there's SOAP, which (based on my meager understanding) is sort of an object-ish RPC over HTTP (over sockets). Hope this helps. |
| Merits of Visio? | Fri 23 Jan | Joe |
| Hi Folks, Ive used Sybase PowerDesigner 8.0 for some time now for data modelling, and Ive found it a *great* tool. A new member of the company has suggested I now start to use MS Visio instead, but I have to admit, I dont like the look of it after the brief introduction Ive just given myself. What am I missing? Has anyone used either/both? Thanks in advance... |
| Fri 23 Jan | Nitin Bhide | I don't have idea about Data Modelling. I used it as a general purpose diagraming tool. (simple UML diagrams, some simple diagrams to explain geometry algorithms, etc). It was very useful. It can import lot of formats. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Elephant | My personal oppinion on Visio is that its a good all-around product. For data modeling, you can do almost anything you want to do with it. That's the major benefit. The major drawback is for anything you want to do with it, there is probably a better tool (albeit a more expensive tool) out there for your needs. i.e. Class Diagrams, UML Modeling, Circuit Diagrams, Wiring Diagrams, Process Flow, Floor Plan Layouts, etc. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Rick Watson | I'm not sure about designing software, be we use Visio for wireframe mockups. It lets us create user interfaces quickly during the early stages of a project while we are still gathering requirements. What do others use to mockup interfaces (besides a whiteboard, which we use even before Visio stage)? I'm not talking developers here, more product manager types. |
| Fri 23 Jan | M | What Elephant said! Visio is a good at 'modeling' which includes data modeling. If you already have it, try it and use it. If you already have one of the other great modeling tools, use it. Use whatever you are more productive in. One plus for visio though is that is is easy to share with your analyst friends. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Mata Kosmata | Hi, I don't think Visio is good in generating / updating the db schema from the drawing. IMHO it's incomparable with PowerDesigner. Also its code generation from UML diagrams is very poor. If you need anything more than good-looking pictures better use somethnig else. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Rob VH | If you're willing to invest a little effort, Visio lets you customize the "ShapeSheet" underlying each type of shape. You can program (in VBA) the behavior of the shape through the formulae in the sheet and the events that the shape receives. It takes a day or two to get the hang of it, but you can get some really neat effects. For example, I once used an estimation tool that a coworker wrote in Visio. You could connect up widgets, which looked up their current price from a database. The widgets were programmed to enforce the rules on which widgets could be connected to each other. At the end, you hit a menu button, and it produced a nice listing of the stuff on the diagram, and the total cost. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Albert D. Kallal | Visio is a nice drawing tool. Great product. However, a nice drawing tool that lets you put a bunch of cute chairs and desks on the screen is NOT what you need for a managing a database system. It turns out that Visio has some add-ins that does allow you to work with, and generate scripts etc for database schemas/diagrams. However, one must note that the ability of Visio to manage and work with databases is simply one of MANY features of the product. The product has VBA built in. While ms-word is not a great document management and filing system, you can add-in that feature. However, when word is compared to a dedicated document management system, the results will likely be less then perfect. The same applies to Visio. It is not a database management tool, but a nice drawing and flowcharting program with those database features added in. The versatility of Visio is both its strength, and it weakness. The strength is due to that Visio can do so many cool things. The weakness is that when you do everything, likely you don’t do each thing the best! However, since Visio is programmable, then you can do a lot of things...... I use Visio for all kinds of diagrams etc, but I never used Visio to actually maintain and build the DDL scripts for the database server. In my case, the enterprise tools for sql server, or the built in ER tools in ms-access are better, and more convenient to manage the database in question anyway. In fact, in ms-access you can right click any table in the ER diagram and jump right into table design mode (a lot of people don’t realize this!). The same goes for sql server and the included tools. Since they are better then Visio, then why use Visio? On the other hand, if you need to grab/create some diagrams of existing database systems, then Visio is not too bad. This fact is especially so, if you often have to walk into different clients for different database systems, and want/need a drawing tool. (why learn a new tool for each system) However, as a table management tool for a production database....hum, that is probably not the best use of Visio. It is a real fancy drawing tool, not a database managment system. So, keep this in mind when evaluation of the tool. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sun 25 Jan | Philo | The reason I don't use EM for schema design is that while you're fiddling around with renaming fields and tables, they're actually being created, changed, dropped in the database. When you get into larger schemas, the delays can become noticeable. The most important thing for an ER design tool is the ability to round-trip the design - Visio can do this against a number of databases. There are two downsides in your case - 1) You're used to the tool you're using. This may make Visio frustrating to transition to. 2) If you only work on Sybase databases, your current tool may hook into features no other ER designer will, so you need to find that out. But if you are working in multiple database platforms, this shouldn't be an issue. Here's the Visio fact sheet: http://www.microsoft.com/office/visio/prodinfo/facts.mspx [disclaimer: I work for Microsoft] Philo |
| Common sense software development | Fri 23 Jan | Nitin Bhide |
| I have put a my thoughts about a common sense software development in presentation. This doesnot follow any set methodology. It is available at http://www.geocities.com/nitinbhide/NitinsCommonSenseSoftDev.pdf I will appreciate some feedback/advice/constructive criticism. Nitin |
| Fri 23 Jan | M | Is the link wrong? I get a "page not available" msg. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Nitin Bhide | I just checked again. I could open it through IE and Mozilla both. Link seems to be working. http://www.geocities.com/nitinbhide/NitinsCommonSenseSoftDev.pdf |
| Fri 23 Jan | A cynic writes | The direct link you posted didn't work for me - however http://www.geocities.com/nitinbhide/ did work and I could get to the pdf from there. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Matt H. | Go up a level (chop off the file name) That'll bring you the default HTML. Then follow that link. that's how I got it. Overall, honestly, I wasn't all that impressed. If you do all those things without version control, for example, you're in trouble. I think you need to figure out who your potential audience is an tailor your presentation to that. If they are people working in Industry who know about version control, specs, and schedules, then It could be a cool 'Don't violate these common sense rules' kind of presentation. If it's newbies, I think you need more basic software engineering stuff. HOWEVER, I did see one awesome quote: 'If you don't like unit testing your product, most likely your customers won't like to test it either.' AWESOME QUOTE. That made the whole thing worth it. regards, |
| Fri 23 Jan | Nitin Bhide | Actually the 'Common Sense SoftDev' was prepared to consolidate my understanding and thoughts without than any specific target audience in mind. I though it come out well, hence put it on site. It was DEFINITELY NOT for newbies. If I want to present it, My target audience will be people with some development experience (1 to 2 years). For Newbies I have another presentation on the site 'Good Developers' which talks about the characteristics of Good Developers. |
| Fri 23 Jan | The real Entrepreneur | Nitin, I think the best part of your 'presentation' is the focus on USEABILITY. (I.e. 'one click', 'know your customer' , etc.) are really about making sure the features and interface of the program meets customer needs. And that is the most important factor SUCCESSFUL software. I'm not a great CODER or even architect. But I do a very good job of specing out the requirements. So, that can allow me to cut my task size in half, by eliminating features that don't meet customer needs. Thus I can be a mediocre 'coder', but a successful software developer. How many times have you seen something added to a product (software or otherwise) that is so poorly done or so uneccessary that it REDUCES the value of the product? Not only did they waste resources on the feature, but they then had to work HARDER on OTHER aspects of the product to COMPENSATE for the annoyance the feature causes. 'Put all your wood behind your arrowhead' - Larry Ellison |
| Fri 23 Jan | GiorgioG | Looks like the site has exceeded its max bandwidth - can anyone post this elsewhere? |
| Fri 23 Jan | JD | A guy posts link to his article on JoS. It gets marked as BOLD. And the website where his article is present becomes in accessible because of so many click-throughs! Is JoS turning in to Slashdot??? ;) JD http://jdk.phpkid.org/ |
| Fri 23 Jan | Dennis Atkins | Yahoo groups is quite fragile. Just a few hundred kb in an hour will trigger its shutdown mechanism... unless you pony up with cash for a pro account. Clever, yah? |
| Fri 23 Jan | Dennis Atkins | r/yahoo groups/yahoo geocities/ |
| Fri 23 Jan | Me | You wrote that the one click of Amazon "is a major of factor to make is popular" which I read meaning you think the use of one-click made Amazon popular. I would HIGHLY disagree with that. Other than this there wasn't much I haven't seen elsewhere and I stopped reading at that point. I would suggest paying a native English writer to fix it for you. Not bad stuff though. |
| Fri 23 Jan | deja vu | Its interesting material, most of which I've seen before.. but its nice to see all of it in one presentation.. Dont necesarily agree with the Amazon one-click thing myself, but I can see your point .. sorta .. More like this .. if anyone hasnt seen 'How to become a programmer '... go to http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto Its more 'common sense' stuff, but from a developer perspective. Lots of it is like Nitin's material.. /threadjacks'r'us |
| Sun 25 Jan | Robin Birtle | After a quick e-mail exchange with Nitin, I have put a copy of his presentation on a site with less bandwidth restrictions than its current geocities home. http://www.sumimasen.com/NitinsCommonSenseSoftDev.pdf Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing from here. |
| Web-based Project Management | Fri 23 Jan | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk.com/ |
| http://www.php-collab.com/ |
| Fri 23 Jan | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk.com/ | (clicked too early) I just found that software and want to know if you use it and how is it effective and safe for project management, including outsourcing management in other countries. |
| Fri 23 Jan | M | You get what you pay for. Seriously, for an OS project it looks pretty damn good (visually that is). Seems to be more focused than many other PM/Callab software I have looked at. I notice many of these callab programs are geered towards distributed OS teams. There is nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't alway feel like a comfortable fit for the average corporate development team. |
| Fri 23 Jan | Mary White | try http://www.easygen.com its quite smart, allows you to build all sorts of web based apps |
| Sun 25 Jan | intoodeep | www.digite.com Comprehensive collaborative program and life cycle management. You get what you pay for. |
| Sun 25 Jan | intoodeep | duh http://www.digite.com |
| About Face 2 | Fri 23 Jan | Dennis Atkins |