The Whiteboard

Robert Harvey

7:00 PM

@GlenH7 They begrudgingly admit that it's... sort of amusing.

user41796

@RobertHarvey How dare you force them to evolve their views....

user41796

Can't. Star. Removed. Messages!

user55340

Thats a 'yes'?

Robert Harvey

Ohh, I like that idea.

Comic sans font.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Let's not get carried away....

user55340

7:03 PM

We've already got a font for the site...

user41796

@MichaelT yeah, I think it would be hilarious

Robert Harvey

fontspace.com/david-kerkhoff/dk-crayon-crumble

user55340

@RobertHarvey tangent - did you see my bit about code monospace font yesterday?

Robert Harvey

Didn't see it.

user55340

blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html

user55340

7:05 PM

Robert Harvey

That's pretty nice. Why, oh why, do they have to put the dot in the middle of the zero, though?

I've look many times at programming fonts, always come back to Consolas.

This one is a contender, though.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Its not too obnoxious when you're reading.

user55340

But it avoids having to make the 'O' a circle in order to make it distinct from 0

user55340

(like this font does)

durron597

Hi all

user55340

7:09 PM

0

Q: Are meta-"opinion based" questions opinion based?

Imagine a question: I have to do <some task>. I am trying to do this task in <some situation>. I can think of two technically valid ways to do this task. Here they are: Way 1: //snip Way 2: //snip Does there exist a clear cut advantage to Way 1 over Way 2 (or vice versa),...

user55340

(just adding some context to the impending discussion)

durron597

:)

user41796

I think you have a valid question, but I was obligated to vote-to-close as "primarily opinion based." — GlenH7 11 secs ago

durron597

Actually I was going to talk about how that had no views and that the last question posted in Meta was 11 hours ago

was going to ask if meta programmers is always that dead

i spend most of my time on stack overflow so I really have no basis for comparison

Ampt

8 minutes and 5 views?

durron597

7:11 PM

@Ampt more that the last question was 11 hours ago than the views.

Ampt

@durron597 compared to SO, every other SE site is "dead"

user55340

MSO gets as much activity as P.SE...

Ampt

look at some of the network stats. It's staggering

durron597

@Ampt: are you including SuperUser and ServerFault?

user55340

correction: MSO 54/d, P.SE 35/d

user55340

7:12 PM

@durron597 stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday

Ampt

@durron597 No.

even SuperUser and ServerFault are slow compared to SO

user55340

SO: 8.7k/day. SU: 184/day, SF 99/day

durron597

damn

Ampt

look at Q per day and visits per day

durron597

hmmm... i'm sure this has been asked already (I could search MSO but I don't care enough)

but even mathematics has math.stackexchange.com vs mathoverflow.net

user55340

7:14 PM

And then the meta sites tend to be < 1/week unless there's something getting some attention.

Ampt

Visits: SO - 6.7m/d SU - 463k/d SF - 154k/d

@durron597 you can combine them any way you want. SO is bigger.

durron597

i wonder if stack overflow should be split the same way, like stack overflow beginners

user55340

@durron597 standard MSO question, rapidly downvoted and duped.

durron597

figures :-P

Ampt

they are happy with SO right now

user55340

7:15 PM

1

Q: Stack exchange for beginners?

I am just learning how to program, and I have been using Stack Exchange. I think it is a fantastic idea for a website, and I think the moderations helps the community as a whole. However, for someone new to programming like myself, it is hard to ask and answer questions in a constructive way. ...

discussion

Ampt

minus the close reviews, but thats a whole other story

durron597

the burn down the close queue thing inspired me to finally get my steward badge

i was in the 600s before i got bored last year

user55340

4

Q: How to get more people doing reviews?

We're nowhere near the point of Stack Overflow with (at the time of this writing) 65.9k questions in the close queue. I've noticed an uptick in the queue of people flagging questions. In a batch of 20, I often see a question that is not an audit that has no votes on it - this is from a flag. T...

discussion review

user55340

The increase in participation moves you from a "person using the site" to a "person concerned about the site"

user55340

Its an important distinction.

Robert Harvey

7:18 PM

@MichaelT 8.7K questions, ~2K flags.

It's probably more like 16K questions. Many questions never make it through the quality filters.

durron597

i think i would review more if i had 10k tools

user55340

@durron597 7k on SO... not that far away.

user55340

Its within sight...

durron597

yeah, i know

if you look at the questions i get rep for and the ones i don't

i get lots of rep for stupid answers to easy questions

and no rep for difficult interesting questions

or even answers to difficult questions

like, i get 1 upvote for this:

1

A: How to implement TypeAdapterFactory in Gson?

When you register a regular type adapter (GsonBuilder.registerTypeAdapter), it only generates a type adapter for THAT specific class. For example: public abstract class Animal { abstract void speak(); } public class Dog extends Animal { private final String speech = "woof"; public void spe...

user55340

@durron597 Yep... answer something about haskell here, get nothing... well, no state change so it is a monad. Answer a bike shed and find yourself with a repcap.

durron597

7:22 PM

but seven for this: stackoverflow.com/questions/22416769/…

the former question, i only knew the answer because i had previously read through Gson's source

the latter probably 80% of SO knows the answer

if not more

Robert Harvey

@Mike: Why would you ever need to mock a static method? I'm getting awfully tired of this fallacious argument that static methods are not testable. If your static methods are holding state or creating side effects, that is your fault, not the fault of your testing methodology. — Robert Harvey 2 mins ago

durron597

here are the latest high upvote questions:

79

A: Too many if statements?

If you cannot come up with a formula, you can use a table for such a limited number of outcomes: final int[][] result = new int[][] {{ 0, 0, 1, 2 }, { 0, 0, 2, 1 }, { 2, 1, 3, 3 }, { 2, 1, 3, 3 }}; return result[one][two];

61

Q: “And you can avoid using free()...” Wait, what?

I'm studying computer engineering, and I have some electronics courses. I heard, from two of my professors (of these courses) that it is possible to avoid using the free() function (after malloc(), calloc(), etc.) because the memory spaces allocated likely won't be used again to allocate other me...

c++ c memory-management memory-leaks heap

seriously?

user41796

@RobertHarvey Don't let the fanatics get to you

durron597

So, yeah, I basically am sick of SO. I like programmers though :)

user41796

@durron597 pandering to the crowd works wonders here

user55340

7:27 PM

163

A: Is it OK to split long functions and methods into smaller ones even though they won't be called by anything else?

Testing code that does lots of things is difficult. Debugging code that does lots of things is difficult. The solution to both of these problems is to write code that doesn't do lots of things. Write each function so that it does one thing and only one thing. This makes them easy to test with...

user41796

@MichaelT That one was Ars'd though, wasn't it?

user55340

Though I'll point out that with the smaller audiance here, things don't tend to get quite as carried away... and with 40-50 q/day, we're able to look at every question.

user55340

@GlenH7 worse /r/programming reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1d2mff/…

user41796

/r was enough to know where it was from

user55340

Yea, but there's the link to it if you want to read that bit.

Robert Harvey

7:30 PM

@durron597 The way to get rep for answers to difficult or obscure questions is to explain things. The voters will have a basis to upvote your answer, because they will understand it. Take a look at any of Eric Lippert's answers; he tackles very complex subjects, but in a way that is educational.

user55340

And yep, it did get ars'ed too.

durron597

@RobertHarvey are you suggesting that in the Gson question I did not explain things?

My experience is that questions with weird tags don't even get read

Robert Harvey

Well, that question only has 20 views, so yeah.

It is what it is.

durron597

and it makes sense... an obvious example is that I do all my DI with Guice, and I've never used Spring, so I ignore all questions tagged Spring

Robert Harvey

The SO community seems to favor obscure questions nowadays, even though nobody is interested in them.

user55340

7:32 PM

(I'm going to have to read it more closely... but consider too...

user55340

1

Q: Deserializing map key with Gson expects an object

I get the error: Exception in thread "main" com.google.gson.JsonParseException: Expecting object found: "com.shagie.app.SimpleMap$Data@24a37368" when trying to deseralize a Map that uses non-trivial keys: package com.shagie.app; import com.google.gson.Gson; import com.google.gson.GsonBuilde...

java json serialization deserialization gson

user55340

66 views over a month.

durron597

straightforward questions are basically a duplicate just about always too

There you go, two upvotes and a comment

user55340

> P.S: Please don't close this thread because its opinion-based, I don't know any other place where I can ask this question and receive useful answers.

user55340

sigh

Ampt

7:37 PM

@MichaelT link!

user55340

1

Q: Should quality be constrained by time?

A development team usually has quality standards for its work, such as severity of bugs allowed in the released product, unit test coverage, prevalence of code reviews, frequency of design and refactoring, and more. The standard is not always explicitly defined, but there is always a standard, or...

project quality

user55340

@durron597 Thank you. I'm gonna have to read your answer in the other question (I realized it had application to the one that I had)

Robert Harvey

0

A: Is it a code smell if you are frequently creating an object just to call a method on it

I would consider it an architecture smell in that UpdateData probably should belong to a 'service' class. Where the data is an Apple. Where AppleAdapter is service/business-intelligence class. Where AppleService is a Singleton reference to an AppleAdapter that exists outside of the current metho...

Ampt

@MichaelT Translation: I've read the rules and understand them, but care enough to apply them to my own question because I'm above the rules.

Robert Harvey

^^---I'm drowning in software patterns.

Ampt

7:38 PM

@RobertHarvey Got to the P in patterns and thought this was going a whole other direction.

Robert Harvey

Fixed that for you. No, not Jello.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Got to the S in software and thought this was going a whole other direction.

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT That one is true.

user41796

@RobertHarvey some days you just need to close off all of the browser tabs pointed to the main sites.

user55340

@RobertHarvey just give me and Glen your credentials, and we'll handle your mod powers at SO. Don't worry, that close queue will be gone the next day... and the flag queue... and the rest of the database. Maybe the lounge too.

user41796

7:43 PM

@MichaelT I was just gonna stop at the queues...

Ampt

@MichaelT .... And the rest of the site

user41796

Although we could pull up Undo's Charcoal...

Ampt

404: Can't find the requested StackExchange. It was deleted for reasons of moderation.

user41796

His algorithm is close enough. Just script that one up to auto-fire and watch it have fun

user41796

@Ampt Gotta lern me sum Haskellez

Ampt

7:44 PM

That F almost got away from me

user55340

If you are a haskell programmer, do you haskillz?

3

Robert Harvey

@Ampt It was funnier the other way.

durron597

@MichaelT: What I've learned about Gson is that the default serialization behavior is almost never what you want, but it's a good tool if you write your own adapters

the problem is, doing so takes forever

user55340

@durron597 there is question about how this particular code is going to move next.

Ampt

woah... VIMCeption

multiple windows what?

durron597

7:46 PM

if you put an SO question about it that I can answer, link it to me and I'll do my best to answer it

user41796

@Ampt old hat for emacs what?

user55340

We've got some huge data chunks that gson chokes on, so there are things like "well, its internal only... would jaxb be able to handle it better - network isn't that precious between two vms on the same machine/cluster?" or "just let java serialize it and do RMI instead"

Ampt

@GlenH7 I have a hard time taking an editor seriously when It sounds like my lunch.

durron597

how exactly does it choke?

user55340

dunno... gotta dig into that too. Megabytes of data it looks like on first glance.

durron597

7:48 PM

trying to send megabytes of data in a single gson request?

user55340

Yep.

durron597

is this initialization or updates?

user55340

We've got an app, someone runs a large report, that data gets sent to another app via gson serialization to another app that then creates an excel file from it and returns that stream which is sent back to the user.

user55340

Its choking on somewhere on the path... and I've gotta dig into that at some point.

user55340

But I'm not sure if the solution will be "use a different method for getting the data there"

user55340

7:51 PM

It isn't a high enough priority at the moment to dig into too far... but its on my radar.

user55340

I know the problem exists though.

durron597

well, unfortunately i didn't do enough research when i was doing my initial investigation for how to send my data over the network

however, if i ever have time

i'm going to remove gson entirely for protobuf

that should get you some pretty massive compression.

@MichaelT developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview

user55340

I don't think its a network problem, but it could be.

durron597

well, what i'm saying is that if you have to go to the trouble to write all your serialization from scratch, you may consider just going to protobuf

user55340

And if it is, then changing from the data structure that is used to print the html version (no logic) to one that is needed for creating an excel spreadsheet (just the data, don't bother with string format and integer for some data...) I might be able to make it smaller that way too.

user55340

7:54 PM

(don't need to pass around the sum of the data this set of data - excel will do that for me nicely when I make the spreadsheet use formulas)

durron597

again, feel free to ask a question on SO if you have a question about TypeAdapters

they are very confusing and not documented well.

I migrated from Redmine to YouTrack

I'm not prepared to ask my boss to pay for IDEA yet

but youtrack has the agile features i need and the ability to host it locally that trello doesn't have

I just wish the agile board were less buggy :-/

Ampt

@durron597 NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

user55340

@durron597 I used to be an internal redmine maintainer... youtrack looks very nice.

user55340

@durron597 You owe @Ampt $0.05

durron597

lol why

user55340

8:02 PM

He claims I owe him a nickel for every time I talk about it... I like it.

durron597

for every time you talk about youtrack or redmine? :-P

Ampt

@durron597 IDEA

Pretty sure it's his one passion in life

durron597

haha

well i hate eclipse sooooooooooooooooo

and nothing i've heard about netbeans suggests i should switch to that

user41796

@Ampt nah, that's photography

user41796

and pointing out how much better he is at XYZ game than we are

user55340

8:04 PM

@GlenH7 I'm gonna get a lightfield camera!

user41796

@MichaelT Is that the 3D thingy from the other day?

user55340

That one Jimmy linked the other day.

user55340

lytro.com/camera

user55340

Yep.

user41796

that did look really cool

user41796

8:05 PM

I have a long list of toys I want to purchase already, but I was tempted by that one

user55340

Its something you need to really think about - its not a traditional camera... and if you grab one focus plane from it, you'll find that its only about a 1MP camera.

user41796

I think that's what makes it so interesting. It forces you to look at things in a different manner

user55340

Its frustrating to the guy comparing it to the point and shoot because they've got a 6mp point and shoot, but this only does 1mp as a square image? Meh.

Ampt

@MichaelT they haven't shoved that sensor into a DSLR yet?

user55340

And then to the person who is a photographer, its also quite limited in that you can't use it for professional work.

user55340

8:07 PM

Its a toy... and an expensive one... but a neat one if you realize what it is and how it can be used.

user55340

@Ampt Image density of the pixels.

user55340

When you grab all the pixels on a single focus plane, you can put them really tight together.

Ampt

@MichaelT Yeah I remember them launching it a while back

And that was the big idea was to shove it into a DSLR and change the way pictures were taken

no more focusing

ever

user55340

But this doesn't grab the end points of the light... it grabs the paths of the light... somehow. So it can't grab as dense image.

user55340

also it really needs lots of light - thats why it has an f/2.0 lens. Thats a fairly fast lens.

user55340

8:09 PM

You couldn't use it with an f/3.5 or f/4 or f/5.6 that you find in zooms.

user55340

Even 2.8 which is 'fast' by SLR standards isn't fast enough for this camera.

user55340

I've only got 3 lenses (heh... 'only') that are fast enough for this camera: 35mm f/2.0, 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.8. Thats it.

user55340

Most people don't even have those lenses.

Ampt

eh, it depends a lot on your focal length too. f1.8 is fast for a short lens, but f4 feels ridiculous at 200mm

user55340

Hmm... Oh yea, I've got a 135 f/2.0 too.

Ampt

8:15 PM

@MichaelT what do you shoot?

user55340

@Ampt Umm... Nikon F100, Nikon D200, Nikon FM3A, Hasselblad Xpan, Mayimya 645e, Horseman HD, Horseman rail.

user55340

Rarely used the rail camera though... its an indoor only camera that requires lots of setup... so I'm only pulling that out if I'm doing an equal amount of setup for the scene.

user55340

Lugging that around in the field isn't practical... lugging is a key word there.

Ampt

yeah I was looking up that stuff

so they are like oldschool... but digital?

user55340

8:21 PM

user55340

So, I use that one if I'm in the field.

user55340

@Ampt Those are true old school 4x5" film.

user55340

Though I can pay $$$$$ for a digital back. Essentially a 4x5" scanner you put where the film is.

user55340

Since its all modular, doesn't care one bit what you put where.

user55340

Something like betterlight.com/products4X5.html

Ampt

8:23 PM

so what do these offer above your run of the mill DSLR?

other than street cred with the fixie gang

user55340

> Better Light scan backs are acknowledged as the industry leader in producing a level of image quality that is far greater than fixed-array digital cameras. The company's scan back utilizes pure red, green and blue pixel data (in the instance of the 6000E, 144 megapixels of data, 6000 x 8000 X 3 colors), with no interpolation data, digital artifacts, or moiré patterns.

user55340

So dSLR... 20 megapixels is about the limit you can put on a 24x32mm size sensor.

user55340

Thats 144 megapixels.

durron597

take care everyone

user55340

8:25 PM

Also the DSLR 20 megapixels isn't 20 megapixels of RGB. Its 10 megapixels of green, 5 of red, and 5 of blue.

user55340

Then a given pixel gets the color of the nearest R + G + B.

user55340

That 144 is not interpolated. Its a scanner... but it scans 3 times, once for each channel.

Ampt

I feel like multiplying by colors to get 144 megapixel isn't exactly honest

user55340

Well, its as honest as calling 10g + 5r + 5b = 20

user55340

8:28 PM

Bayer filter

A Bayer filter mosaic is a color filter array (CFA) for arranging RGB color filters on a square grid of photosensors. Its particular arrangement of color filters is used in most single-chip digital image sensors used in digital cameras, camcorders, and scanners to create a color image. The filter pattern is 50% green, 25% red and 25% blue, hence is also called RGBG, GRGB, or RGGB. It is named after its inventor, Bryce Bayer (/ˈbaɪər/; August 15, 1929 – November 13, 2012) of Eastman Kodak. Bayer is also known for his recursively defined matrix used in ordered dithering. Alterna...

Ampt

so its just giant sensor size then?

user55340

Its not a single sensor. Its a 6000 pixel scanner that steps 8000 times across 5"

Ampt

I'm just curious. This is the first I've heard of someone using one of these

what kind of shutter speed can you get to with that?

user55340

@Ampt Its a big version of:

user55340

amazon.com/Nikon-9238-Nikon-Super-CoolScan-5000-ED-Film-Scanner/…

user55340

8:32 PM

Though that instead does a pass of 4000 pixels 3x, with different LED light shining through it on each pass.

user55340

@Ampt You leave the shutter open until it moves across the frame. Shutter speed is a different concept there.

user55340

9:56 PM

I do appreciate the upvote on my comment: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/232962/… (10k link). (and thank you for self cleaning up)

durron597

10:09 PM

I just want to say

I wish I could somehow get rep for starting to type a question, and either 1) typing the question makes a suggested question appear that gives me my answer, or 2) typing the question organizes my thoughts enough that I figure it out on my own

(and I don't hit submit)

145

A: How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?

A lot. An absurd amount. More than you think you are capable of. In fact, asking a question on Stack Overflow is the absolute last thing you ever want to do. You want to avoid it at all costs. You want to think of it as a horrible shame1 that will forever haunt you and pass down from you to your ...

user55340

@RobertHarvey I've got some 'consistency check' tests in some places that are essentially "if these fail, you've got bigger problems and should ignore all the other tests results"

Robert Harvey

But do those tests map directly to requirements?

user55340

Nope. They're things like "if you can't ping localhost, all these other tests are going to fail and you should diagnose why this doesn't work first"

user55340

If certain assumptions about the environment don't work that really should, the other test results are meaningless.

user55340

ping localhost was just an example... but I've had situations where strange things break on Windows machines in ways that really shouldn't have been the case. The developer's machine was messed up.

user55340

10:19 PM

And they were hunting down why a unit test didn't work... well, its because this basic assumption about the proper functioning of something wasn't valid on your machine - don't debug the unit test, fix your machine.

user55340

The ping localhost situation, if I recall it correctly... the test opened up a service on the local machine that had some logic in it to emulate another service. A mock from the days before all the mocking tools. And then requests were sent to this service as part of the unit test.

user55340

In one case, the dev had another service running on the port the unit test was trying to run on so the 'HELO' type message didn't even work (that was a consistency check). Another developer hadn't defined localhost on their machine (old windows). Another had localhost.localnetwork or something else non-standard.

Robert Harvey

Yeah, that one of the problems with a TDD mindset... It binds you to a process that doesn't map well to things like your "consistency tests."

durron597

A quick google of "consistency test" doesn't reveal a consistent definition for the term

user55340

And the consistency check was just "Can I connect to the service set up in the setup method? - if no, bail out now"

durron597

10:25 PM

You might even say that the term "consistency test" does not pass the consistency test

user55340

@RobertHarvey This was still early... Junit was a new thing then. TDD wasn't even a buzzword yet.

Robert Harvey

Well, the OP's question boils down to a vocabulary problem anyway.

user55340

(This was early 2000s... and apparently TDD was a buzzword by 2002, so maybe it was buzzworded then... I still like the original name "Test First Programming")

durron597

exactly

Robert Harvey

Then it got worse when the faithful began referring to it as Test-Driven Design.

durron597

10:29 PM

It should be something pronounceable

maybe TIR

Test - Implement - Refactor

Robert Harvey

It's not design at all. Maybe Test-Assisted Design. But the world doesn't need another TLA.

user55340

TDM TLA.

user55340

And then you've got the eTLA

durron597

YATLA

user55340

(Too Damn Many Three Letter Acronyms && extended Three Letter Acronym)

durron597

10:31 PM

YAMTLA (yet another meta-three letter acronym)

Robert Harvey

Setec Astronomy.

durron597

Montereys coast

Millie Smith

10:54 PM

how do you deal with two objects that are the same kind of object? they repeat a lot of the same properties but may not have the same behaviors

i may have to put them in the same object

for example

suppose i own the astros, but i'm going to buy the yankees too.

my it department for the astros has a Player object, but the Yankees also have a player object

I want to combine operations, but the Yankees players have a lot of data that they store that the Astros don't use

and the Astros players have a lot of properties we store (for various reasons like statistics and business processes) that the Yankees never used

i hate to have a lot of properties that are unused for the Astros and a lot that are unused by the Yankees players, but that looks like it may be the best option right now.

I can't make an interface because interfaces don't have data

I could use an abstract class, but I still don't like the idea of having a bunch of similar properties stuck in the abstract class. Eh.

This is for C#

Robert Harvey

Presumably, all this data is going to eventually make it into a database?

Ampt

text file actually

Robert Harvey

You mean an XML file, right?

In general, if you have a database of some kind, and there are fields that are not going to be used a lot, you use EAV.

Entity–attribute–value model

Entity–attribute–value model (EAV) is a data model to describe entities where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that can be used to describe them is potentially vast, but the number that will actually apply to a given entity is relatively modest. In mathematics, this model is known as a sparse matrix. EAV is also known as object–attribute–value model, vertical database model and open schema. There are certain cases where an EAV schematic is an optimal approach to data modelling for a problem domain. However, in many cases where data can be modelled in statically relational...

But EAV is not an ideal solution.

You would only use it if you had a lot of fields, but only a few are used for any given record.

EAV is difficult to work with, so only use it if you have to.

Millie Smith

11:10 PM

robert harvey, eh, it should down the line

but it may not immediately as we're kind of racing a very short deadline

sorry for the afk guys

in this situation, each record would probably be using more than 50% of the fields

interesting link.. i'll read this through

thanks

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