programming

"This thread is for programmers to pledge they will participate in NANY 2010. Feel free to tell us as little or as much about what kind of program you are planning on releasing -- but let's keep this thread just for pledges, not for discussions. I'd like to encourage everyone who wants to participate to make a pledge to do so -- and to treat this pledge as a real promise to release something." - April Russo (app103) from Bookmarklet

A good friend of mine entered a small application in the first event back in 2007 (I twisted her arm and made her do it). It wasn't a very impressive application, but when she mentioned participating in the event at a job interview, her perspective employer was impressed enough with the fact that she even participated, that it was the deciding factor that got her what she considers to... more... - April Russo (app103)

"Since March of this year I've been running a private web spider looking at the number of web tags on web pages belonging to the Fortune 1000 and the top 1,000 web sites by traffic. Using the spider I've been able to see which products are deployed where, and how those products are growing or shrinking. The web tags being tracked are those used for ad serving, web analytics, A/B testing, audience measurement and similar." - xero from Bookmarklet

I have volunteered for the task of archiving the complete tweet history of the top 1000 for historical preservation purposes and some twitter users have just talked way to much, and I seem to only be able to get their last 3200 tweets. Is there any way around this? - April Russo (app103)

"...the only fruitful way of considering computers, that I know of, is regarding them as mathematical machines. Knowing that, I came to this symposium with very low expectations, because this year's motto is "Computers and the educated individual". But mathematics, however, are no longer regarded as an essential ingredient of the cultural baggage of the educated man!" -- E.W.Dijkstra - Rudolf Olah

Here is my challenge to all of you with some coding skills. Join me in pledging to release a new program/utility/game on JANUARY 1st, 2010 to celebrate the new year! It doesn't matter how big it is, but it must go live to the public as freeware/donationware between Dec 31 and Jan 1st, 2010. We will give out fun prizes (custom dc mugs celebrating the event or something like that), for all coders who live up to their pledges. Ground rules: * You have to state you are participating well before the actual date (you shouldn't just wait until Dec 31 to reveal whether you decided to participate or not); ideally announce by posting a reply on this thread before dec 7, if possible. DECEMBER 7 is our goal to have the pledges. * This can't be an update of an existing program - has to be a new program. * You can post the program on your own website, etc. - you don't have to be affiliated with DonationCoder.com - you still get to announce it as part of the N.A.N.Y. Challenge. * The key thing here... more... - April Russo (app103) from Bookmarklet

I have participated in this every year, since it started. It is always a lot of fun. - April Russo (app103)

Microsoft will add transactional memory in .Net 4.0. Look qiute interesting and exciting. - Dag Blakstad from Bookmarklet

"10-4 is a weekly video podcast which gives you a look at what's coming in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Over and out!" - xero from Bookmarklet

"C++0x is the unofficial name of the planned new standard for the C++ programming language. It is intended to replace the existing C++ standard, ISO/IEC 14882, which was published in 1998 and updated in 2003. These predecessors are informally known as C++98 and C++03. The new standard will include several additions to the core language and will extend the C++ standard library, incorporating most of the C++ Technical Report 1 libraries — most likely with the exception of the library of mathematical special functions. Since the standard is not yet finalized, this article may not reflect the most recent state of C++0x. The most recent working draft, N2914, was published in June 2009." - xero from Bookmarklet

Series of blog post with insights on how to become a better developer by training, learning and improving work habits - Dag Blakstad from Bookmarklet

Example on how to migrate VB legacy code to C# - Dag Blakstad from Bookmarklet

Cool insight into what makes programmers revert to frentic hacking - Dag Blakstad from Bookmarklet

Looks underwhelming. You have to write a whole parser just to handle a diff language? The emacs way is better...you specify a list of keywords for the mode and maybe a few regular expressions for variables/function-definitions and you're set. - Rudolf Olah

Good point. I was just thinking about using it. There are several languages available at the moment. Hopefully they'll move to more flexible system at some point. - Vezquex: God of FF

"Virus writers have gone old school with the creation of a virus that infects Delphi files as they are built. When a Delphi file infected with Induc-A virus is run, it searches for Delphi programming installations on an infected machine and attempts to infect this installation. More specifically, the malware attempts to infect SysConst.pas, which it then compiles to SysConst.dcu. Once this process is completed the SysConst.dcu file is programmed to add the Induc-A virus to every new Delphi file that gets compiled on the system." - April Russo (app103) from Bookmarklet

More info: this malware targets only versions 4 thru 7. It's payload is to infect Delphi, get compiled into an app, seek out a copy of Delphi on the machine of anyone that runs it, repeat. Typical end users wouldn't be affected by it even if they received an infected file and ran it...average people don't have Delphi installed. - April Russo (app103)

Quite a few tips to pick up and not to say discuss - Dag Blakstad from Bookmarklet

I got this straight from the founder of Crafted Fun. - April Russo (app103)

"The guidelines specified here are taken from a broader set of C++ coding standards used by Symbian's own developers, and those that deliver code to Symbian. The standards arise from the many years worth of experience of a number of Symbian's software engineers, and reflect their wisdom and understanding of working in C++ on Symbian OS." - xero from Bookmarklet

Apple pulled an app from the app store after four months without giving any reason. Will not tell the devs how to fix it. And then... "As if that wasn't enough, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is reporting that the developer is now being flooded with refund requests from customers. The problem is Apple keeps its 30 percent commission, but the developer has to refund the entire amount to the customer." - xero from Bookmarklet

The idea that developers should recoil because "any app is at risk" is totally unfounded. - Robin Barooah

"The Guff (games-uff) project was initially developed for a Master's Thesis entitled "Guff: A System for Game Development" (In Portuguese). The goal of this project is to foster game development research at the Computer Science department of Universidade Federal Fluminense. It will serve as a testbed for new algorithms and models for game development. The Guff framework was designed for Windows and Linux applications and was written using C++. One of its goals is to apply open source libraries whenever possible in order to avoid implementing already available funcionality. For example, this project uses OpenGL, SDL, and DevIL, among other libraries." - xero from Bookmarklet

"Software Transactional Memory (STM.NET) is a mechanism for efficient isolation of shared state. The programmer demarcates a region of code as operating within a transaction that is “atomic” and “isolated” from other transacted code running concurrently. Transactional memory is considered a promising technology by the academic community and is repeatedly brought up as a welcome technology for the upcoming wave of applications which scale on modern multi-core hardware. The goal is to be able to exploit concurrency by using components written by experts and consumed by application programmers who can then compose together these components using STM. Transactional memory provides an easy-to-use mechanism to do this safely." - xero from Bookmarklet

Liferay Open CMS and portal server - Nayan

Yeah! Liferay it's really nice! I see...Thanks - green-creeper

I was actually hacking on a (failed) fork of Processing called OhProcessing. The point was to cleanup the code base which is horrendous. Processing is awesome, but the command-line options were unfinished and there's quite a bit of duplication in the source... - Rudolf Olah

Simple Example: You must validate the contents of a list of Widgets. The most complex case involves 3 seperate lookups from other lists, each lookup depending on the other. The least complex is a simple lookup in another list. I'd generally tackle this from the most complex case as it starts me with the most generic solution that can get scaled back in each similar, but less complicated (and separate), implementation. It may vary by the situation specifics, but I generally go after the most complicated so that I have no surprises on the less complicated one. If the most complicated one seems too complicated then I will try for something in the middle if it exists. - xero

I usually go for the simple one first while also thinking about how to generalize it or where I may have to make changes. - Rudolf Olah