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Upon further inspection I erred on the code part, they do not require this. My familiarity revolves around developing a webapp which generates code targeting multiple platforms, I'm familiar with handling the developer and provisioning profile keys and code commits but the part that talks to Apple (a series of scripts) specific to the checkout and build process were not my area. Sigh, can't let an opinion get in the way of facts now can we?

I'd like to begin by saying good job devs! As a developer: Yay, another version to support! IE Support already requires coddling especially for the long in the tooth IE6 & 7; granted IE9 is much better but there are still rough patches with border radius and gradients are used as well as transitions, see the table at the bottom. CSS transitions would be a very welcome addition. Maybe we can create a betting pool for how long until the next incarnation?

With their current strategy what are the chances it'll be a Windows 8 requirement? I'm off to find that guy who read the bones for Obama to do a browser reading.

I have no need for VM, but I think the opinion of those using it, in many different settings, is much more valuable that any wiki entry or manual.

His post is spot on. The question isn't profound and has been asked and answered many times over the years. There is more to the internet than wiki entries and manuals. Most of these software packages have forums and guides specifically about setting up, configuring, and using these packages. Failing that there are oodles of video tutorials on sites like Youtube and Vimeo. To top it off basic questions about "Recommented free VM software" have been asked (and answered). If you have technical questions those are best found where users of the software congregate, if you can't fathom where that would be, first try the vendors website.

Perhaps your time would have better spent giving us some information instead of a rant?

So your solution is to rant about a rant? Maybe you can make an ask slashdot question about this very topic!

References:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/997424/active-directory-vs-openldap

http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200507/msg00185.html

http://blog.is4u.be/search?q=openldap

Then perhaps the developer should submit each dictionary as a separate application. The user would install the specific language's dictionary as an application, and if that application detects that the IME is not present, it would direct the user to install the IME from Google Play Store using a market intent.

Maybe you should see this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5371442/does-interix-implement-fork

Presumably you can write them for iOS, and I have no doubt that there are plenty of apps on the AppStore that are playing fast and loose with SSL trust managers.

True fact: I have written Java code to allow for self-signed or any old cert over SSL, or even none. It's not hard to find plenty of sample code. In the course of my employment the code was used for testing only and either not part of a production build or disabled by default in production, but I cannot say what other developers or teams may have done in with my code in their systems.

Why the authors focused on Android and why they felt the need to blame the OS rather than alerting people to cruddy apps, one can only speculate.

I tried quite a few approaches to go from Web skills to iOS skills, and this book really got me there, because it starts basically from scratch and focuses on iPad, and it uses newer Xcode features like StoryBoard that will save you a lot of time versus learning the older techniques.

Learning iPad Programming

The book is available in iBookstore.

I don't really see why you would do anything other than iOS, because it is the only next-generation PC platform as yet, and it has the excitement of a young platform yet the maturity from Mac OS X that gives you all these frameworks to access to easily get a lot of functionality. So even though you are catching up, there are many iOS programmers who are also new to the platform, you can mix right in with them and share knowledge. And the platform is growing, so by the time you have caught up, there will still be work to be done.

Stack Overflow is also great when you get stuck on iOS programming. There were about 10 times I got stuck and the answer was on Stack Overflow, solved the problem right away.

Wrong. GET is supposed to be "nullipotent". You're correct about GET not supposed to have any side effects.

PUT and DELETE are idempotent - "multiple identical requests should have the same effect as a single request"

The reason browsers don't have them is because of the HTML/XHTML spec - "HTML forms (up to HTML version 4 and XHTML 1) only support GET and POST as HTTP request methods."[1] So if they implemented it, most likely would be done differently by each browser, and more so in IE as usual.

1: http://stackoverflow.com/a/166501/1431750

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big advocate for mind maps. See http://ploneglenn.blogspot.com/2010/10/mind-mapping-in-modern-age.html for a list of map mapping software that I have used over the years. I just don't see why you would use a mind map as a replacement for UML. Outside of them bothing being a type of diagram, I don't see much similariity or purpose. You use UML to model object oriented systems. Mind maps are a diagrammatic way to organize just about any cognitive activity. Using a mind map as a replacement for UML would be like attempting to drive to the super market with a pencil. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/423218/best-tool-to-create-architecture-diagrams-for-software/423288#423288 is what I recommend for diagramming in UML.

What I would like to see is support directly in the FORM element:

<form method="DELETE" action="blah.php" >

See also
http://amundsen.com/examples/put-delete-forms/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5177595/why-dont-the-modern-browsers-support-put-and-delete-form-methods

It gets even better.

"looking for transpiler: php to javascript" - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995362/looking-for-transpiler-php-to-javascript

And it would appear someone is working on a PHP to JS compiler. http://www.harmony-framework.com/

StackOverflow to the rescue! This is covered here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12523888/how-can-i-add-older-version-of-ios-sdk-in-xcode-4-5.

You can download older versions of Xcode so you can get that SDK by visiting Apple Developer Downloads.

Conceptually, version control is like having your own time machine for documents.

Here's a brief summary I wrote about the benefits.

Before you call MSE non-intrusive, you might want to read this... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5924707/fwrite-chokes-on-xml-version/ Overall, the other "AV" products are orders of magnitude worse in bloat and intrusiveness, but I can't believe they messed up something as fundamental as this...

On the whole, "interacting" via message boards is about as productive for education as typing with mittens on is for coding.

It depends on the message board. I have learned way more from Stack Overflow than I ever learned from a book. The content is well categorized, and both the questions and answers are rated in a way similar to Slashdot moderation. It seems to work very well.

Apparently there is a bug in Safari for IO6 that causes caching of POST requests, which is causing all sorts of web developers to scramble like crazy to implement cache busting in their apps.

Thanks apple.

Plus, no version of Visual Studio is 64bit.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2516436/visual-studio-64-bit

And this is why Linux will never be more than just an "alternative" desktop OS.

Things have changed since 1998. There are a ton of moderated Linux forums available these days to help the less experienced. The http://www.stackoverflow.com/ and it's associated channels are a great place to search for, and ask, questions. Chances are, whatever you're struggling with has already been answered there. The moderation/ranking system used keeps the useless garbage cut way down. There's a big enough userbase that questions get answered quickly and accurately. There's no reason to subject yourself to IRC anymore.

OS X has a /etc/services like every other operating system. Is that not what you need?

No. As far as I know, all etc/services does is provides what amounts to DNS for named TCP ports. What I'm talking about is a direct, program-to-program communications mechanism that transfers data between named ports without all the overhead of networking. As far as I know, in order to do this under OSX, TCP is the only option, and that is a *very* heavyweight mechanism to be invoking -- compare it to the Amiga's named ports and ARexx (Rexx scripting implementation) combo and you'll see what I mean. A fast IPC mechanism promotes all manner of good things, scripting for one, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg.

Are there some huge differences between OS X and others that I'm not aware of here?

My understanding ATM is the answer is yes. I refer you to the record of my adventures on the matter:

At Stack Exchange: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11074895/sharing-udp-broadcast-reception-python-example

To sum it up, multiple listeners works under linux, but not OSX.

UDP works exactly this way on Linux too, I don't have a BSD or Solaris system handy, but I bet it works the same way there.

What platform allows multiple UDP listeners on one port? I have never seen it.

This one was run up the flagpole on Stack Exchange, with demo code, and the fellows on Linux had no problem at all binding multiple times. It only failed under OSX. A finger was pointed at BSD in general, too.

Here are the Stack Exchange particulars: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11074895/sharing-udp-broadcast-reception-python-example

Apparently we need a nice high level 3D presentation library but we don't want to work out how to use libxml2. I shall leave http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags here and leave you to consider the error of your ways.

(Also, what language did you base that on? It's surprisingly hard to read.)

:s/\.\($\)\@!/m\./g

I agree now that it's fixed :-)

Proof of point, I learned something (negative look-ahead assertions) about vim since I started typing this comment ! I love my text editor!!!

The URL is encrypted:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499591/are-https-urls-encrypted

Since you can compile on an iOS device, you can write fully featured apps for it.

Editing? You could always grab one of the iPad code editors, use the FTP support to read and write local files on your device, and switch to a terminal to compile.

It's all a bit primitive now if you were insistent on doing the whole thing on an iPad, but it can be done.

Someone else pointed out a more fundamental problem: you cannot write iPad software using your iPad.

They are wrong.

Once you jailbreak an iOS device, you can also compile on it. Why would you not be able to?

The developer of the alternate Cydia app store used to ssh to his iPhone in from his netbook (yes, really) and compile software on the device.

You can do all GUI creation in code; you do not ever have to use Interface Builder or other GUI tools if you do not wish to. There is no limitation on what you can do.

If you mean something along the lines of "it's not possible to type long on an iPad", the same keyboard I am typing on now attached to my computer can also be attached to the iPad.

But even going outside Jailbreaking, there are already ways to develop subsets of iPad applications - using an app called Codify. In fact it even represents a crude start at thinking about how you would realistically have a good code editor work on a touchscreen. They have a video, you should watch it.

I've been responsible for converting more than a dozen people from Apple to Android now, and Apple's bad acting is all the encouragement I need to redouble my efforts. Not that it takes much convincing. Basically, demonstrate the Google connectivity, show the hardware features (standard usb is a big deal for just about everybody) compare the free and open Android app scene to Apple and it's a done deal. Oh and the price of course, especially the Nexus 7.The bottom line is, a Google logo is just a lot more sought after these days than a half eaten apple.

Another way to seal the deal, bring along a couple of Nexus tablets and demo a video chat using Google Talk, which is based on free-and-open Jabber/XMPP. A pair of magic videochat devices for $200 each, how can you beat that?

Google around.

around didn't provide relevant results.

But with the literal-minded housekeeper costume off, forge referer and spoof referer still don't. This page is from 2006, and this page likewise explains a flaw that has since been fixed. This page claims that it's possible to forge a referer in the visitor's browser using redirection, but only from a domain that the attacker controls. This result claims that the only way is to get the user to install a plug-in: "If you want to redirect a visitor to another website and set their browser's referer to any value you desire, you'll need to develop a web browser-plugin or some other type of application that runs on their computer. Otherwise, you cannot set the referer on the visitor's browser." A bunch of results were links to such plug-ins, but the viewer is likely to decline the plug-in installation. What am I missing?

It seems you're not really familiar with how this works in PHP, so I'll explain it:

If you're on the server as shell user, you can both 1) create a PHP file in your home directory (or wherever you have perms) and execute it via the command line. 2) Execute dynamic PHP (i.e., code that you make up on the spot) via the exec("php code goes here") function. That goes without saying.

Additionally, the mod_php Apache module allows the webserver to execute PHP files. Also, many PHP-based CMS's allow you to enter PHP to be executed at specified time or events. This PHP is saved in the database, retrieved, and then executed (via exec).

But that doesn't mean anybody who signs up as a user on the website can execute PHP.

If, somehow, you could impersonate the admin, then anything is fair game.

However, of course, anything would be fair game in a Java-based setup, too, since DB passwords are stored in plain text there, too. Also, you can run dynamic Groovy (Java scripting language).

In addition, CMSs such as Drupal which allow you to execute dynamic PHP also warn you not to do so. You can turn off the facility, as well. I would say that all your PHP should be in files. And you should turn off perms for "other". The files should be owned by you, and the webserver should run as you (meaning your user), not as "www-data" or whatever. That prevents nice and easy updates, but it's better.

I think it only ignores them with backends that don't support foreign keys, such as MyISAM. I was using 5.0.86 at work until very recently, and made heavy use of the cascade options. And when I went to delete rows with foreign keys linked to them, the rows in child tables did indeed delete. I never gave it a second thought. But I use InnoDB, like every other sane person out there.

See this for an example with someone with the problem you described: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5308255/on-delete-cascade-not-working-in-mysql

The Android Open Accessory library provides a basic communication channel with devices via USB. What you do with it is up to you.

(It doesn't have any inherent support for audio, and you can't route the system audio over it. But you could write code which outputs a custom audio channel from your app.)

Keep in mind that the Open Accessory library uses a custom protocol, so won't work with things such as a standard USB DAC.

(For that, you'd want to use the USB Host mode APIs: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/usb/host.html. The same caveats about not being able to route the system audio still apply.)

Doesn't the Azure SQL Server get throttled?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10420721/sql-azure-throttling-the-effect-of-indexes
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3507.windows-azure-sql-database-performance-and-elasticity-guide.aspx#SQL_Azure_Engine_Throttling

So basically it's nice till you really have to use it then you get throttled- the last I checked it didn't take that many rps to get throttled, has that changed already? If you could shard things so easily with federation you might as well use the azure table and blob stuff. Many people like to use SQL DBs for stuff that doesn't shard well, and "NOSQL" for the shard stuff.

From what I see they are still playing catch up with Amazon. The service isn't that stable yet. Don't bet your job/project on it, unless Microsoft is paying you $$$$$$ for it. AND you don't mind spending hours publishing, redeploying your stuff and hoping for the best. Even Microsoft doesn't know why their stuff sometimes doesn't work.

Maybe in 2 or 3 years time, they'd be a serious contender. They are trying very hard to add features and improve things.

p.s. And Azure only works 365 days a year, so beware of leap years... I guess when they said 24 x 365 they weren't joking ;).

Whichever language you choose, I recommend going to Stack Overflow, clicking the tag for your language, and sorting the resulting list of questions by number of votes. This will give you a concentrated collection of very useful practical knowledge about that language, nicely arranged in a Q&A format. Here it is for C++:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%2B%2B?sort=votes&pagesize=15

and here it is for Python:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python?sort=votes&pagesize=15

I've been reading a few C++ questions per day over my morning cuppa for the last few years, and the difference this has made has been fantastic. You learn about pitfalls you had no idea existed, tips and tricks which can be of enormous benefit, and fun and interesting quirks and corners of the language - which can help keep you interested and enthusiastic. You'll also find the community is very friendly and helpful, which I'm sure will provide some much-needed encouragement. Good luck to you, mate. :-)

Whichever language you choose, I recommend going to Stack Overflow, clicking the tag for your language, and sorting the resulting list of questions by number of votes. This will give you a concentrated collection of very useful practical knowledge about that language, nicely arranged in a Q&A format. Here it is for C++:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%2B%2B?sort=votes&pagesize=15

and here it is for Python:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python?sort=votes&pagesize=15

I've been reading a few C++ questions per day over my morning cuppa for the last few years, and the difference this has made has been fantastic. You learn about pitfalls you had no idea existed, tips and tricks which can be of enormous benefit, and fun and interesting quirks and corners of the language - which can help keep you interested and enthusiastic. You'll also find the community is very friendly and helpful, which I'm sure will provide some much-needed encouragement. Good luck to you, mate. :-)

You have the makings of a stack overflow there.

Any decent compiler should be able to recognize tail-recursion and optimize out the function call. It should require no stack space.

X11 support was removed from the OS as default. It's not supported via XQuartz.

This will answer the GCC question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353444/how-to-use-install-gcc-on-mac-os-x-10-8-xcode-4-4

I feel like a support person or something, when all i do is take less than a minute to search for answers.

Most development platforms suffer from some degree of fragmentation. Even Apple's desktop platform, which is happier than most to just leave behind older versions of the software, took a while to shake off cruft leftover from the PowerPC days (which was itself shaking off cruft from the 68K days).

That doesn't mean you can't rate platforms on the degree of fragmention though. And here Android loses, badly, to just about everything else. There are 4 major versions of the Android software still in heavy use, with Jelly Bean adding a fifth one. Each of those major releases has multiple vendor customizations and some disparity in major application design issues like screen sizes and input methods. It's a QA nightmare.

The situation is no better for Windows, but variation in desktop capabilities doesn't seem to hamstring application developers too badly anymore. How long has it been since you found a desktop app that couldn't deal with the screen being resized or with the type of mouse changing? Those things used to be serious fragmentation issues too; nowadays that's faded into something application designers can safely ignore most of the time when developing on Windows. It looks like Windows 8 might alter things badly enough to bring the display issues back into the limelight again, at which point I expect class of "Windows fragmentation" to increase.

The iPhone has kept the variations along these two major axes (screen/inputs) low enough to keep fragmentation from being a drag on the platform. Apple has also done a decent job of keeping the software platform moving forward for older devices. Android has done neither of those things, which is why it deservedly gets beat with the "fragmentation" hammer so often. 80% of the Android market is running 2.2 or 2.3 stil by Google's own figures, so software from 2010. Any iPhone user will tell you the idea of still running the software version from 1.5 years ago would be crazy. Platform statistics easily show how fast iPhone users update; the update times on that platform is weeks for most users, not months or years.

While I agree that iOS should extend support for "opt-in" background downloading,

Already there.

I have used, in the past, Teamatic (http://www.teamatic.com) and http://www.elementool.com/ - their offering may have changed in the last few years so check exactly what you can do for "free".

Also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/966404/does-anyone-know-of-a-decent-free-online-bug-tracker-for-web-development-purpose

Really? I do iOS development on Snow Leopard on my MBP. I had to hack a few files here and there, but it works fine.

I know it's a bit late, but a quick google reminded me of this, which is what I believe I used.

Actually, structs can be used to provide inheritance and polymorphism. And if you add a bunch of function pointers to the struct, now you have a what is essentially an object in every sense of the word. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/351733/can-you-write-object-oriented-code-in-c for more information.

You seriously think C++ exceptions are zero cost?? The compiler saving the stack for you at a "try" instead of you having to explicitly call setjmp will make no difference to overall performance.

I do not know how major C++ compilers do it (*). I personally made a Standard ML compiler that implemented zero-cost exceptions handling. The compiler will NOT save the stack at a try, it does not need to. Instead the compiler will generate a static map of the stack. At the "throw" point the code will check the return address on the stack. You then take this address and make a lookup in a table that maps the address space for all functions, this tells you what function called you. Then you lookup the static stack map for that function, which tells how to unwind the stack correctly.

There are plenty of papers on the subject. Look it up, you might learn something.

(*) A quick google search shows that GCC does indeed use zero-cost exceptions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/691168/how-much-footprint-does-c-exception-handling-add

In the present context at least, Objective-C seems like an even better counterexample, given that its syntax, however convenient, is not required to use the underlying object system provided by the lightweight runtime.

With an EBS backed root volume, take a snapshot, make volumes as needed and attach volume to a new instance. Or, make an AMI of the configured instance and make your instances from that new AMI.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2181849/ec2-instance-cloning
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=47881&

It is also often easier to give instructions on how to fix something using a CLI as opposed to giving screen shots of every step the user has to follow.

for example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5291039/cant-upload-app-an-error-occurred-uploading-to-the-itunes-store on a mac no less. you can even write a script to do it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-complete

and then there is javascript.

Flash is alive only in the same sense that a chicken which has had its head cut off is alive.

Mike lived for 18 months after his beheading. How does that figure into your analogy?

Adobe management decided it would be better to throw in the towel and shift resources to writing HTML5 authoring tools.

Let me know when it becomes possible to make Homestar Runner or Weebl and Bob with those tools. Or to make an application that uses a device's camera or microphone because unlike Flash's media capture API, HTML5's has gone largely unimplemented. Without media capture, how would one make video chat or a barcode scanner app?

My friend who goes by the alias of paperhorse has had a universal lossless compression algorithm up on Stackoverflow for over two years and it hasn't even received an up vote. They're incredibly easy to make and understand. Just make sure you write down how many times you compress your file, otherwise you won't be able to reinflate all your zero byte avi's back up to their normal size.

I tested it in Opera before I posted my comment. Same effect as you: nothing happens.

Probably this bug.

"What do you recommend then? A 100% interpreted language like python or ruby?"

The question is flawed, since Python is not a 100% interpreted language. From stackoverflow:

The classical implementation, CPython, is often called just "Python" for short -- but it's just one of several production-quality implementations, side by side with Microsoft's IronPython (which compiles to CLR codes, i.e., ".NET"), Jython (which compiles to JVM codes), PyPy (which is written in Python itself and can compile to a huge variety of "back-end" forms including "just-in-time" generated machine language). They're all Python.