Well, I think you'll probably pick up those best practices as part of your "training".
Every shop does things differently.. from simple stuff like naming conventions right up to core design methodologies and team management.
My advice would be to just spend as much time as possible listening and observing. Read through existing code.. pay close attention in meetings to how the brainstorming and final solution tends to evolve.
Some companies take a "we are paying you for your intellegence.. part of your job is to argue your design and beliefs" attitude whilst others take more of a "we are paying you.. so shut up and do it the way we want" approach.
As a side note.. check out the book "Beautiful Code"... It's good mind food. "Pragmatic Progammer" is also good.
Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
Well, convenience will always be a commodity. It's like how web hosting companies will sell domains at $30 a year for the convenience of not having to learn how domains work.
In all honesty, with mdadm.. repairing a broken raid array is very simple. Most of it is automatic. You replace the drive, add it into the array, and it does most of the work for you.
If your just a regular computer user, chances are the pre-built click-n-drool NAS cube is worth the extra money. But if your tech savy, it's probably worth it (and fun) to learn how software raid works. And of course knowledge is always a good thing.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I don't know why AC got modded troll... it's good advice. I built my file server as raid5 and am regretting it. It's the most economical, and you do get some redundancy.. but if I had to do it all over again, I'd totally go raid10.
With Raid5.. two drives fail and your done. Unless you buy every drive at a different time from a different manufacturer, chances are under the same wear conditions, two will fail around the same time. With a raid10.. you put all one brand on one side, all of another brand on the other side... possibly on a separate controller. Raid10 can withstand a much larger failure... and you also get some serious performance++.
I understand why you`d want to go pre-built
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
.. but unfortunately all the pre-built NAS cubes I`ve seen are way over priced. They usually end up costing about as much as a home built file server _without_ the drives.
The way I look at it, by building your own, at least you can also use it for other things (if it's just a personal file server). I have a 3 TB file server that I also host virtual machines on. Even in software raid, with many drives, there is not much resource usage. If you buy a NAS cube, you are paying the same price or higher, and _just_ getting a file server.
.. as a programmer and havn`t moved between countries, so I can`t really provide a direct answer.
What I can say is that I`ve found Canadian companies want to see work samples rather than long lists of certifications. Not really sure what would constitute a work sample in your field though.
References are also very important here (and probably there as well). Generally employers want to talk to previous employers. Seeing as how that would be difficult due to timezones and long distance fees, having a few written letters of reference before you leave might be a good idea. Email might work as well.
Also there tends to be a defacto job posting site for every province, where most of the jobs in the area will be posted. Here in Nova Scotia, it is CareerBeacon. Finding out what your areas job posting site of choice is, is probably a good first step.
.. this was a really dull article. It sounded interesting... but I literally had to try very hard to get through it.
I think it's because it's basically the same story over and over again, with the names and numbers changed. That, and the basic premise, "where are they now", is pretty boring.
I`ll save you all the trouble:
The started well, got a metric ass-tonne of venture capital, failed because they tried to grow way too fast, and now the CEOs are now doing quite well for themselves as consultants at companies you have never even heard of and probably don`t care about.
This is probably obvious to most people, but any x86 server is good out of the box today running Linux. Same for the vast majority of desktops. I don`t agree with that at all. There is still plenty of hardware out there that is simply not supported, and even more so hardware that is supported, but requires some tweaking. To an experienced Linux user, having to patch alsa to get line in support might not be a big deal, and checking against hardware compatibility lists before buying parts is always a good idea, but the point stands that neither of these are things which someone who is new to Linux is going to want to go through.
And I think thats really what pre-installed Linux is about. It's not for experienced Gentoo users who have no issue tweaking and who know what hardware is well supported. It's for people who have heard a lot about this "Linux" thing lately and what to give it a try.
With a pre-installed machine you are getting hardware which has been chosen for you and is known to work well with Linux. You are also getting a certain amount of "polish". Chances are the media buttons on your keyboard/case will do something sensible right out of the box, your video capture card will work without any configuring, etc..
It's ability to deal with multiple languages, and especially it's perspective system makes my job a lot easier.
I think there are really two reasons people don't like eclipse.
The first is obvious. It's a bloated resource hungry Java application. I definitely agree with this. For eclipse to be usable you need a pretty beefy machine. A lot of people refuse to use eclipse, even if they have a powerful machine, just on the principle that it is so damned bloated.
The second is that the "out of the box" settings are terrible. Toolbars are in awkward places, important options are buried, and of course things like "highlighting occurrences", something I have _never_ understood the point of, are enabled by default. Eclipse takes a fair bit of tweaking before it becomes usable.
Lightsabers and transporters and all that can wait..
I always found the stuff they did in the holodeck kinda boring.. re-enacting old books and walking around scenic places.. I`d be jumping motorcycles across buildings GTA4 style.
This isn`t about "fighting the good fight".. it is about trying to get out of dodge using an argument she had probably never even heard of until this all came up.
I think the sentence is definitely total overkill. Thats what she should be fighting. Not trying to convince people she is innocent (as she obviously wasn't).
The concept to write an article about the boot process actually sounds cool, seeing as how there is quite a bit text that whips by on start up which many (even long time) Linux users don`t understand.
This article however, was a really lame attempt to do so. It was very general, without even so much as a sample of text from dmesg. And what was there was very distro-specific. It just provided a quick over view of the major parts of the boot process, and didn`t even do that very well.
Anyway, as someone said before, don`t even bother reading TFA..
I`ve long thought that the work day is way to long. 8 hours is just too much time to spend sitting in a chair... or really doing any kind of work.
I find that after 6 hours, I generally have no capacity to write any serious code, and usually spend the remainder of the day picking at what i`ve written (which is actually probably a good thing, because I find a lot of minor bugs/typos/etc..)
I find that taking a 5 minute break to walk around the building or even pace around your office every hour or so makes _all_ the difference in the world. I guess it depends on who your working for, but most people I`ve worked for take the attitude that as long as the work load gets taken care of, how you manage your time is your responsibility. If it comes down to it, you could argue it's a health issue (as many medical authorities recommend such breaks for people who sit in front of a computer all the time).
I can`t say I`ve ever actually fallen asleep on the job... but I`ve definitely had days where I did absolutely nothing. Kind of like sleeping with your eyes open I guess.
I`ve never been a huge fan of netbeans. It's fine if your the only one on a project, and netbeans is the only tool in use, but I find beyond that it gets painful fairly quickly.
I find netbeans UI designer particularity painful. It's clunky, and the whole greyed out code you can`t edit, lest you never use the UI designer again really gets on my nerves.
And on top of all this, Eclipses main feature as far as I`m concerned is that it allows you to work seamlessly with multiple languages without having to close windows/change preferences/etc. The whole perspectives concept is, in my opinion, genius.
Oh well, different stokes for different folks and all that.
Well, it might be the nature of the code I work on. It's a fairly large, poorly organized code base, and I am often required to have large portions of it open at a time. Additionally I am also commonly working with multiple languages at a time, flipping back and forth frequently, which might make some kind of impact (ie. having C++, Perl, and Java plugins going at the same time?)
Other IDE's I have tried (including Visual Studio on similarly large projects) don't seem to have much trouble.
And of course, vim has no problem at all;)
I guess considering all that Eclipse does, it can be expected to be a little resource hungry, but nothing like the experience I`ve had with it.
I like the idea of running eclipse on a dedicated server, but I think that highlights it's resource hungry nature;)
Personally I love Eclipse. Working in an environment where I was required to rapidly switch between Perl, C++, Java, and Oracle, Eclipses perspective system is a godsend.
The only problem is it's so damned bloated. It wasn't until I used it on a powerful server-turned-into-a-workstation box that I found eclipse usable. On a standard system, it's just too laggy.
Even disabling some of the heavier features, I find it hard to get any work done when not using it on a system with 4 GB of ram and two processors.
Visual studio on the other hand I think is the perfect IDE for.NET. I think the main reason for this is that Microsoft holds all the cards. They don`t have to accommodate a million developers tool preferences, because they define the tool set. I`m not saying this is a good thing, just that it makes a perfect foundation for building a powerful IDE.
I`ve always preferred thumb controlled trackballs. Specifically the logitech trackman.
My main problem with traditional computer mice is that you frequently have to re-position them. Especially when you have several monitors. You can set the speed really high, but then you loose precision. I find a trackball gives me precision, then when I need to quickly move a large distance (like, across two monitors), I can just spin the ball and let it glide over.
I have never found my thumb getting tired, but I tried a trackball that used the index finger, and found my hand got sore fairly quickly.
Should be noted that I`m not into graphics at all.
I find the thing that really makes code unreadible is inconsistency. This is particularly true of languages like C++ where there is no well defined one true coding convention. If all your code is in house, this is not such a problem, because you can define your own coding convention and stick to it. If however you are relying on other libraries, chances are your going to end up with one library that names its function like_this, and one likeThis, and another fnct_LikeThis...
Worse is when you don't even define a coding convention for the code you throw into the mix. Now you have libraries with inconsistent naming, and multiple developers all using their own favorite notation.
Additionally, their is inconsistency in the functioning of libraries. Some use function pointers, some work by inheritance, some (like glade) read the export list..
I'm not a huge Java fan, but I think they have maintainability down pat. Very consistent language, well defined coding convention, and a mature set of defacto tools (JUnit, javadoc, log4j, struts, spring, hibernate, etc..) make it a lot easier to jump into older code because everything feels familiar. In most other languages you have to spend quite a bit of time just decrypting the existing code, and then more time learning the particular API's they've chosen.
The scary thing is that even if Microsoft carried through on some of the most sinister predictions made here, people would still put up with it.
I remember thinking that the whole Windows XP "works 25% of the time" product activation dealie was gonna be the last straw that pushed people into abandoning windows. Then it was WGA.
Yes, this sounds like the worst thing they`ve come up with yet to torture their customers, but people are so attached to Microsoft's hip that Bill Gates could probably personally go around to everyones house, piss on the shoe of whoever opens the door, and Windows would still have a massive market share.
For the record, my house is a Linux (Gentoo and slack) house, but I'm realistic. Distro's like Ubuntu are getting their, but we are still a long way from being practical for the "how do I open an attachment" types that make up a good portion of the computer using populous. Not to mention that being a Linux user in a windows world brings a massive amount of problems:
Someone: could you send me that in microsoft word format You: uses abiword/oo/whatever Someone: mmm.. the formatting was all messed up.. and the whole thing was in bold.. what version of word did you use?
Java is about the last language id use for anything involving graphics.
I'm no Java hater, I think it owns when it comes to developing maintainable applications and deployment across multiple platforms, but lets be realistic, it's slow.
One could argue that it still has merit in an academic sense, for teaching the basics of graphics programming, but even that is kind of flawed. You probably want to avoid OOP in general when it comes to the actual graphics component of an application, as it adds overhead. Not only is Java itself slow, but the way in which it approaches graphics is probably the worst way to approach it in any language performance wise.
I sure hope google doesn`t change the name of gmail globally.
I personally use my gmail address for just about everything. It scares me to think about how long it would actually take to go around and change my email address on all the various services I use.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think you'll probably pick up those best practices as part of your "training".
Every shop does things differently.. from simple stuff like naming conventions right up to core design methodologies and team management.
My advice would be to just spend as much time as possible listening and observing. Read through existing code.. pay close attention in meetings to how the brainstorming and final solution tends to evolve.
Some companies take a "we are paying you for your intellegence.. part of your job is to argue your design and beliefs" attitude whilst others take more of a "we are paying you.. so shut up and do it the way we want" approach.
As a side note.. check out the book "Beautiful Code"... It's good mind food. "Pragmatic Progammer" is also good.
WHO CARES!
My first troll :) .. but seriously.. meh
Evil distro 1 acquires lame distro 2 and proceeds to make it more like evil distro 3 (which it is based upon itself)
.. this can't end well
Well, convenience will always be a commodity. It's like how web hosting companies will sell domains at $30 a year for the convenience of not having to learn how domains work.
In all honesty, with mdadm.. repairing a broken raid array is very simple. Most of it is automatic. You replace the drive, add it into the array, and it does most of the work for you.
If your just a regular computer user, chances are the pre-built click-n-drool NAS cube is worth the extra money. But if your tech savy, it's probably worth it (and fun) to learn how software raid works. And of course knowledge is always a good thing.
I don't know why AC got modded troll... it's good advice. I built my file server as raid5 and am regretting it. It's the most economical, and you do get some redundancy.. but if I had to do it all over again, I'd totally go raid10.
With Raid5 .. two drives fail and your done. Unless you buy every drive at a different time from a different manufacturer, chances are under the same wear conditions, two will fail around the same time. With a raid10 .. you put all one brand on one side, all of another brand on the other side... possibly on a separate controller. Raid10 can withstand a much larger failure... and you also get some serious performance++.
.. but unfortunately all the pre-built NAS cubes I`ve seen are way over priced. They usually end up costing about as much as a home built file server _without_ the drives.
The way I look at it, by building your own, at least you can also use it for other things (if it's just a personal file server). I have a 3 TB file server that I also host virtual machines on. Even in software raid, with many drives, there is not much resource usage. If you buy a NAS cube, you are paying the same price or higher, and _just_ getting a file server.
.. as a programmer and havn`t moved between countries, so I can`t really provide a direct answer.
What I can say is that I`ve found Canadian companies want to see work samples rather than long lists of certifications. Not really sure what would constitute a work sample in your field though.
References are also very important here (and probably there as well). Generally employers want to talk to previous employers. Seeing as how that would be difficult due to timezones and long distance fees, having a few written letters of reference before you leave might be a good idea. Email might work as well.
Also there tends to be a defacto job posting site for every province, where most of the jobs in the area will be posted. Here in Nova Scotia, it is CareerBeacon. Finding out what your areas job posting site of choice is, is probably a good first step.
.. this was a really dull article. It sounded interesting... but I literally had to try very hard to get through it.
I think it's because it's basically the same story over and over again, with the names and numbers changed. That, and the basic premise, "where are they now", is pretty boring.
I`ll save you all the trouble:
The started well, got a metric ass-tonne of venture capital, failed because they tried to grow way too fast, and now the CEOs are now doing quite well for themselves as consultants at companies you have never even heard of and probably don`t care about.
Old habit.. :(
And I think thats really what pre-installed Linux is about. It's not for experienced Gentoo users who have no issue tweaking and who know what hardware is well supported. It's for people who have heard a lot about this "Linux" thing lately and what to give it a try.
With a pre-installed machine you are getting hardware which has been chosen for you and is known to work well with Linux. You are also getting a certain amount of "polish". Chances are the media buttons on your keyboard/case will do something sensible right out of the box, your video capture card will work without any configuring, etc..
I actually like eclipse.
It's ability to deal with multiple languages, and especially it's perspective system makes my job a lot easier.
I think there are really two reasons people don't like eclipse.
The first is obvious. It's a bloated resource hungry Java application. I definitely agree with this. For eclipse to be usable you need a pretty beefy machine. A lot of people refuse to use eclipse, even if they have a powerful machine, just on the principle that it is so damned bloated.
The second is that the "out of the box" settings are terrible. Toolbars are in awkward places, important options are buried, and of course things like "highlighting occurrences", something I have _never_ understood the point of, are enabled by default. Eclipse takes a fair bit of tweaking before it becomes usable.
Lightsabers and transporters and all that can wait..
I always found the stuff they did in the holodeck kinda boring.. re-enacting old books and walking around scenic places.. I`d be jumping motorcycles across buildings GTA4 style.
I have a hard enough time typing in my plain text password in the morning when I get into work through my one blood shot eye.
I think it would be a major pain in the ass to have to draw a picture every time I wanted to log into my computer.
Totally agree.
This isn`t about "fighting the good fight".. it is about trying to get out of dodge using an argument she had probably never even heard of until this all came up.
I think the sentence is definitely total overkill. Thats what she should be fighting. Not trying to convince people she is innocent (as she obviously wasn't).
That article was just pathetic.
The concept to write an article about the boot process actually sounds cool, seeing as how there is quite a bit text that whips by on start up which many (even long time) Linux users don`t understand.
This article however, was a really lame attempt to do so. It was very general, without even so much as a sample of text from dmesg. And what was there was very distro-specific. It just provided a quick over view of the major parts of the boot process, and didn`t even do that very well.
Anyway, as someone said before, don`t even bother reading TFA..
I`ve long thought that the work day is way to long. 8 hours is just too much time to spend sitting in a chair... or really doing any kind of work.
I find that after 6 hours, I generally have no capacity to write any serious code, and usually spend the remainder of the day picking at what i`ve written (which is actually probably a good thing, because I find a lot of minor bugs/typos/etc..)
I find that taking a 5 minute break to walk around the building or even pace around your office every hour or so makes _all_ the difference in the world. I guess it depends on who your working for, but most people I`ve worked for take the attitude that as long as the work load gets taken care of, how you manage your time is your responsibility. If it comes down to it, you could argue it's a health issue (as many medical authorities recommend such breaks for people who sit in front of a computer all the time).
I can`t say I`ve ever actually fallen asleep on the job... but I`ve definitely had days where I did absolutely nothing. Kind of like sleeping with your eyes open I guess.
Anyway, just my $.02
I`ve never been a huge fan of netbeans. It's fine if your the only one on a project, and netbeans is the only tool in use, but I find beyond that it gets painful fairly quickly.
I find netbeans UI designer particularity painful. It's clunky, and the whole greyed out code you can`t edit, lest you never use the UI designer again really gets on my nerves.
And on top of all this, Eclipses main feature as far as I`m concerned is that it allows you to work seamlessly with multiple languages without having to close windows/change preferences/etc. The whole perspectives concept is, in my opinion, genius.
Oh well, different stokes for different folks and all that.
Well, it might be the nature of the code I work on. It's a fairly large, poorly organized code base, and I am often required to have large portions of it open at a time. Additionally I am also commonly working with multiple languages at a time, flipping back and forth frequently, which might make some kind of impact (ie. having C++, Perl, and Java plugins going at the same time?)
;)
;)
Other IDE's I have tried (including Visual Studio on similarly large projects) don't seem to have much trouble.
And of course, vim has no problem at all
I guess considering all that Eclipse does, it can be expected to be a little resource hungry, but nothing like the experience I`ve had with it.
I like the idea of running eclipse on a dedicated server, but I think that highlights it's resource hungry nature
Personally I love Eclipse. Working in an environment where I was required to rapidly switch between Perl, C++, Java, and Oracle, Eclipses perspective system is a godsend.
.NET. I think the main reason for this is that Microsoft holds all the cards. They don`t have to accommodate a million developers tool preferences, because they define the tool set. I`m not saying this is a good thing, just that it makes a perfect foundation for building a powerful IDE.
The only problem is it's so damned bloated. It wasn't until I used it on a powerful server-turned-into-a-workstation box that I found eclipse usable. On a standard system, it's just too laggy.
Even disabling some of the heavier features, I find it hard to get any work done when not using it on a system with 4 GB of ram and two processors.
Visual studio on the other hand I think is the perfect IDE for
I`ve always preferred thumb controlled trackballs. Specifically the logitech trackman.
My main problem with traditional computer mice is that you frequently have to re-position them. Especially when you have several monitors. You can set the speed really high, but then you loose precision. I find a trackball gives me precision, then when I need to quickly move a large distance (like, across two monitors), I can just spin the ball and let it glide over.
I have never found my thumb getting tired, but I tried a trackball that used the index finger, and found my hand got sore fairly quickly.
Should be noted that I`m not into graphics at all.
Is slashdot trying to advertise this service or something?
Seriously.. I`ve seen stories about this site like 3 times in the last month. And every time I visit the site it's the same 3 lame exploits.
I find the thing that really makes code unreadible is inconsistency. This is particularly true of languages like C++ where there is no well defined one true coding convention. If all your code is in house, this is not such a problem, because you can define your own coding convention and stick to it. If however you are relying on other libraries, chances are your going to end up with one library that names its function like_this, and one likeThis, and another fnct_LikeThis ...
Worse is when you don't even define a coding convention for the code you throw into the mix. Now you have libraries with inconsistent naming, and multiple developers all using their own favorite notation.
Additionally, their is inconsistency in the functioning of libraries. Some use function pointers, some work by inheritance, some (like glade) read the export list..
I'm not a huge Java fan, but I think they have maintainability down pat. Very consistent language, well defined coding convention, and a mature set of defacto tools (JUnit, javadoc, log4j, struts, spring, hibernate, etc..) make it a lot easier to jump into older code because everything feels familiar. In most other languages you have to spend quite a bit of time just decrypting the existing code, and then more time learning the particular API's they've chosen.
The scary thing is that even if Microsoft carried through on some of the most sinister predictions made here, people would still put up with it.
I remember thinking that the whole Windows XP "works 25% of the time" product activation dealie was gonna be the last straw that pushed people into abandoning windows. Then it was WGA.
Yes, this sounds like the worst thing they`ve come up with yet to torture their customers, but people are so attached to Microsoft's hip that Bill Gates could probably personally go around to everyones house, piss on the shoe of whoever opens the door, and Windows would still have a massive market share.
For the record, my house is a Linux (Gentoo and slack) house, but I'm realistic. Distro's like Ubuntu are getting their, but we are still a long way from being practical for the "how do I open an attachment" types that make up a good portion of the computer using populous. Not to mention that being a Linux user in a windows world brings a massive amount of problems:
Someone: could you send me that in microsoft word format
You: uses abiword/oo/whatever
Someone: mmm.. the formatting was all messed up.. and the whole thing was in bold.. what version of word did you use?
Goodbye karma!!
Java is about the last language id use for anything involving graphics.
I'm no Java hater, I think it owns when it comes to developing maintainable applications and deployment across multiple platforms, but lets be realistic, it's slow.
One could argue that it still has merit in an academic sense, for teaching the basics of graphics programming, but even that is kind of flawed. You probably want to avoid OOP in general when it comes to the actual graphics component of an application, as it adds overhead. Not only is Java itself slow, but the way in which it approaches graphics is probably the worst way to approach it in any language performance wise.
I sure hope google doesn`t change the name of gmail globally.
I personally use my gmail address for just about everything. It scares me to think about how long it would actually take to go around and change my email address on all the various services I use.