The Whiteboard

6:48 AM

@GlenH7 do you plan to update analysis for clarified hotness formula? if yes, please note that current analysis most likely still applies to per site hot list which is same crap, only the damage is less prominent - ie worth keeping at very least a link to current analysis revision

Neil

8:43 AM

I can understand if install and uninstall programs made by non-Microsoft companies don't work. What blows my mind everytime is the fact that MICROSOFT SQL Server freezes upon uninstall.

Find a registry key that you don't like? BLAST IT TO HELL! You OWN the operating system afterall

RhysW

10:11 AM

Morning all

fredley

10:22 AM

You can't Javascript under pressure

RhysW

10:56 AM

@fredley haha this is fun

user41796

11:10 AM

@gnat Yes, I'll re-run the base numbers. Doesn't make sense to re-run the comparisons of the suggestions though since they've been rejected. There may be some patterns that come across with the new numbers to suggest other ways of tamping down top bar collider values.

gnat

@GlenH7 sounds good! do you consider also keeping a part of (or at least a link to) a current analysis? I wouldn't want it to get buried too deep as it might turn out helpful to deal with per-site lists

gnat

11:58 AM

good food for thought...

99

Q: The problem with extrinsic motivation

As a preface, I've stopped using Stack Overflow after participating in the beta and using the system for a while. I'm not trying to stir up controversy or ruffle feathers, though that seems likely to happen. Rather this is a postmortem of one user's experience with Stack Overflow. I've always ...

enderland

@gnat my problem with rep is it kills all extrinsic motivation to answer questions which are on not frequented tags

posting 2 answers on C# or C++ or java get you the same rep as 10x as many (or more) in less popular tags

Thomas Owens

12:51 PM

I'm just going to drop this link in here and then sit back and hope something interesting and/or amusing erupts.

Best Coding Practices

Best coding practices are a set of informal rules that the software development community has learned over time to improve the quality of applications and simplify their maintenance. They can be broken into many levels based on the coding language, the platform, the target environment and so forth. Using best practices for a given situation greatly reduces the probability of introducing errors into your applications, regardless of which software development model is being used to create that application. There are standards that originated from the intensive study of industry experts who...

enderland

@ThomasOwens my thoughts on the importance of comments have changed significantly over the past few years

maple_shaft

1:07 PM

shameless self bump...

0

Q: Rebuild IBM Portal embedded Derby database without a full reinstall

After exhausting all conceivable options over a matter of weeks, and after the drudgery of the back and forth with subpar IBM support, I have come to the conclusion that the only explanation for why my specific development environment fails to run a custom theme where other environments have no p...

websphere derby websphere-portal

Go home IBM... your drunk

user41796

@ThomasOwens I'm sure that article infringes upon some consultancy's intellectual property rights. Because there can be only one set of best practices.

user41796

@maple_shaft True story: TJ Watson Jr was a roaring alcoholic when he was younger. Shaped IBM's anti-booze policy for decades

user41796

@gnat I have the analysis built out within a spreadsheet. It's just as easy for me to copy the data portion over to a new tab and work from there given the clarification on the rules. I still don't believe that the time decay is working as they expect it to / how it's advertised.

user41796

But I'll verify that and post a clarifying comment to the answer with the current formula

user41796

Wikipedia says my anecdote about TJ Watson and alcohol is a little off base. That article claims it was Sr. who had the issue and then banned the whole company.

enderland

1:20 PM

@GlenH7 working hard on friday eh? :)

user41796

@enderland As always. I have found memories of working at Big Blue. And maple shaft's comment brought back an anecdote I had remembered.

enderland

hmmm I wonder what the best way to handle a database connection class is

if I should connect/disconnect whenever I need to, or keep a standing connection at all times the app is open?

user41796

read the documentation on the connection class. For some types of connections, windows will create a pool of connections for you

user41796

and then it will keep the connections open for you. So the driver is handling the optimization that you're looking for by trying to balance when to open & close

enderland

hmmm, I've got it somewhat wrapped into a class I wrote which goes in/out of scope (and presumably cleans up any database connections)

I suspect VBA is too dumb to do that, too, unfortunately

user41796

1:28 PM

It's not at the VBA layer, it's at the ODBC / whatever type of DB connection layer instead.

enderland

@GlenH7 oh gotcha. hm.

user41796

for example, with SQL Server and ADO connections: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8xx3tyca.aspx

user41796

AFAIK, ADO and the other MS connection technologies have some sort of pooling for most / all of the major DB providers. This is the article for Oracle: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms254502.aspx

enderland

yeah, I think that's what probably is happening

When the application calls Close on the connection, the pooler returns it to the pooled set of active connections instead of closing

I'm using ADO and SQL server

I'm curious how cleanup happens when my wrapper class goes out of scope

this article seems to suggest it doesn't have to "reconnect"

user41796

IIRC, There is some funniness regarding the connection string and credentials, but it should be called out in that article

enderland

1:31 PM

which honestly is pretty awesome

I'll always be connecting using the same connection string fortunately :-)

it looks like it adds a separate connection to the pool if you use diff string/credentials

this is actually pretty neat. I did not expect it to work like this, though, in retrospect it makes complete sense

I wonder when the connection pool is actually cleared? or when that happens?

user41796

It used to be that connecting to the DB was very expensive. So people would open the connection and leave it open. But then you had issues with the connection being closed on the SQL Server, and developers not verifying the connection was still okay before starting to use it again. So this was MS's way of resolving the cost of connection issue to fix bad programming behavior

user41796

I believe there are timeouts built into the pool connections. I don't know if the pool persists beyond the application's lifespan.

enderland

this actually makes a lot of sense, tbh, I've always been curious why some of my queries are so much faster - I bet it's because it's just finding the existing connection rather than creating a new one

user41796

that could certainly be part of the issue, yes. First connection is typically pretty expensive.

enderland

it looks like the pooling happens not at the application level but the ODBC level so I'd guess it persists beyond application lifetime

user41796

1:38 PM

Sounds like it yes. Which is kind of crazy in a way. Two apps could theoretically be sharing the same pool.

enderland

this makes my program architecture way nicer

at least this element of it

trying to write apps to be maintainable by non-devs is obnoxiously hard

user41796

@enderland um, yeah. No thanks. eek

enderland

@GlenH7 fortunately it's reasonably small scale

man I wish I had known about SE when I was in undergrad

I'm pretty sure I would have learned 10x as much

user41796

depending upon how long you've been out of Uni, it wouldn't have mattered

user41796

SO kicked off in 2008 or so. P.SE kicked off in ~2010.

enderland

1:43 PM

so let's amend that to, "wish I had known about and had it be around" :)

user41796

yeah... I hear you on that one. I'm kind of surprised Usenet is alive and kicking though

user55340

@enderland Man... I wish SE was around when I was an undergrad... I had usenet instead...

user55340

2:01 PM

That, and swedish programmers. Let me explain.. I was a 'wizard' on a 'mud' (LP style, object oriented message passing Cish language). It was in Sweden. Sometimes, when I had a bug in my homework, I'd upload it to the mud and talk it through with the other wizards (who were programmers themselves most of the time).

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