The Whiteboard

12:13 AM

...trying to find cale gibbards blog to give the opposite make-your-head-go-smushy to the extreme example for kicks, but he seems to have eaten his footprint off the internets.

I'll just leave you with a piece from Wadler I guess in case you would rather try to make sense out of the scribblings of insane programmers as opposed to James Iry's reasoned practical articles heh homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/dual-revolutions/…

Dynamic

12:30 AM

Is the Review queue empty for anybody else?

user20683

@Dynamic nope

Dynamic

12:49 AM

@WorldEngineer Hmmmm.... peculiar, very peculiar.

user20683

@Dynamic to quote Teal'c: "Indeed"

Jimmy Hoffa

2:07 AM

my review queue is usually empty

Likely because my score is relatively close to empty

baffles me how people have scores like Robert Harvey's

gnat

7:43 AM

@Dynamic found this in your Awelon Blue article: "By stateless sound, I mean an audio abstraction and API that... does not require the observer". This remionded me of a project where...

...my colleagues developers thought they've got that

Made testers happy, because they could run all their tests automatically

Developers were happy too - because testers didn't bother them with weird bugs. They all went in sweet harmony...

...until they reached final release milestone.

when it was found that end users can't hear audio

This entered their whole team into the state of trouble

Per my recollection they tend to stick to stateful audio ever since. :)

...the one that requires observer

Yannis Rizos

9:28 AM

Our latest hilarious tag: best-pactice

gnat

9:52 AM

_best practice- for stuff like that would be I think...

Yannis Rizos

0

Q: Please blacklist [best-pactice]

The latest in our seemingly endless stream of hilarious tags is [best-pactice]. I've removed it, and it might not seem like a good candidate for blacklisting, but: Two [best-pactice] questions appeared as I was cleaning the tag Most of the [best-pactice] questions had been visited by some of ou...

gnat

11:47 AM

with all due respect, this answer is short, simplistic, and it... somehow doesn't work for me — gnat 14 hours ago

originally I wrote it as "this answer is short, simplistic, and it sucks" but decided to reword to protect it from nicety police

then...

...I thought I am not limited to one-liners when commenting am I? :)

To counter this brief answer, I will explain what I don't like in it in really lengthy comments. For the record, I generally believe that one liners can sometimes make great answers; it is just this one is not the case. Okay, let's see... — gnat 1 hour ago

Jim G.

12:20 PM

-3

Q: Question about DataBases

EMPLOYEE (Emp_no, Emp_Ename, Job, Dept_No, Sal, MGR_No, Comm, hiringdate) DEPT (Dept_No, Dname, Loc) SALGRADE ( Grade, Lowsal, HighSal) I have three tables with the fields mentioned above and I want to convert the following queries into Relational Algebra. How do I do the following? Find...

database relational-database

^^^ This isn't a homework question, I swear! ;)

edmicman

3:20 PM

Would programmers.SE be an appropriate place to ask about what I might need to consider if I were interested in writing a a from-scratch image gallery web app? I'm looking for pointers on architecture mainly I think.

maple_shaft

@edmicman It depends

user55340

@edmicman The broad "pointers" is poor. A specific questions or "evaluate this architecture" would be better placed. However, chat is likely free of such constraints.

2

maple_shaft

@MichaelT I agree... asking for pointers isn't very constructive and might lead to the question being closed.

@edmicman Feel free to toss ideas around in chat if they aren't well formed yet, but if you have a specific design or architecture question, and you demonstrate some research or thought, then it would be a perfect question.

user55340

@edmicman So, this gallery - what are you thinking about for its functionality?

user55340

(over the years, I've put more than a little thought into web based gallery structure... some of that thought even lead to a software patent (good or bad, I was employed at a company and they requested an invention report on it and continued through the process - and it was awarded))

edmicman

3:30 PM

Sure. The short of it is I'm thinking about writing a new web app to use as an image and video gallery. I'm currently using picasa/g+ but it's clumsy to manage and flickr doesn't meet my needs for video hosting. I've used gallery (I think it's up to gallery3?) in the past but I"m not sure if it'll do exactly what I want without some adjusting. What I'm looking for:

I want to host images and video for friends and family: specifically pics and video we've taken of our kid. I'm thinking self-hosted since picasa/google+ doesn't give friendly links very well and flickr caps the video at a …

Ah, and another thing that came to mind - I was thinking instead of albums using an "album tagging" structure, a la gmail. So if a certain pic was a birthday party, and Cousin Tom was there, the image could be tagged with both instead of being hardslotted into "1st Birthday"

maple_shaft

Interesting...

You sound like you have three major facets of your architecture:

edmicman

I dunno, maybe I should just stick it out with the hosted options that are out there

maple_shaft

1) Custom web application for comments, tagging, etc...

2) OAuth integration through social media accounts to handle authentication...

3) High storage demand through a content delivery network

edmicman

@maple_shaft that seems about right

maple_shaft

I easily see the makings for three great questions

h/o

Did you see the following link?

calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Amazon has a really useful pricing tool, it makes them one of the more transparent cloud services providers out there

edmicman

3:38 PM

I think I've played with it before, I do already use AWS for my online backup solution (JungleDisk)

user55340

@edmicman The 'tagging' and structure is what I did the most work on a decade(?! ghads..) ago. The idea was separate independent hierarchies of tags.

maple_shaft

@edmicman Check out Amazon Cloudfront...

the pricing calculator covers that too, but for hosting images and streaming video/audio outside of your web application a CDN is certainly the way to go

user55340

Consider trees of tags - one for "location", one for "people", one for "event". Under event, one could have the tags of "birthday" and "vacation". Under people one could have "Cousin Tom". As one drills down a tree, tags that don't match any are filtered out.

edmicman

Neat, I like that

user55340

So, if you click on "Cousin Tom" in the people, and he has never been on a vacation photo with you, the "Vacation" set of tags disappear from the navigation panel, but the "birthday party" set is still there.

user55340

3:45 PM

The key is to make certain that each tag in the tree is a strict subset of its parent.

user55340

This was conceived of in response to the old yahoo structure where one would drill down only one tree, realize that you made a wrong choice 4 clicks ago and have to go back up. Instead of a tag cloud or a single deep directory structure, multiple shallow trees.

edmicman

That sounds interesting, I'll have to play with that for sure!

user55340

The first implementation for my gallery had a single directory of all photos and then symlinks to them from multiple directories that I would be navigating "simultaneously". I would show the subset of files that were symlinked from all the directories that I had navigated to.

user55340

The patent based on this is...

user55340

google.com/patents/US7769752?dq=7769752

user55340

3:50 PM

And if I read the claims right, it also involves the automatic discovery of items based on searches against stored queries.

maple_shaft

I just ran pricing for CloudFront serving out 4TB/Month with a median size of 6MB file size, and it came back for about $450/month

user55340

The drawings may be helpful in conceptualizing what I am talking about. There are multiple ways of implementing this.

maple_shaft

4TB/month in requests is what I would expect from a modestly successful video sharing site

with active users

edmicman

Sure....but initially this would be really only used by one "user", or specific to really just me posting things and family viewing them. I'm not looking to put up a youtube clone yet. Although I would probably end up having the source to this thing available anyway so anyone else could set it up for their own uses, too.

Hah 4TB/month sounds like overkill for what I'd estimate it would be used. We do'nt have a ton of videos yet, it's mostly pics and a few short video clips.

maple_shaft

@edmicman Sure... but I do like to oversize for pricing purposes just to figure out if an idea is financially feasible... if I can't at least make enough to cover my overestimated expenses then it is not worth it to me

You will be surprised how quickly 4TB gets used up by a couple thousand users when sharing videos

edmicman

3:59 PM

Good point. Hmmm, I'll try and see if I can determine what my usage is on picasa at the moment and see how that would translate. I do know that if I'm on the hook for $450/month this is a no go :-)

Can you use CloudFront just for serving videos and have images come directly from S3? Or would there be no point in that?

maple_shaft

@edmicman Well look at it this way... if you can get advertisting revenue on a couple thousand active users then $450 might be feasible

Jimmy Hoffa

@edmicman have you thought about easing your burden on a lot of this functionality by simply making a client that does everything you want that acts against the flickr/g+/whatever APIs?

What I'm hearing from you is you don't like the UI feature set in flickr/g+ but they have public APIs so you can just put together a UI with your own feature set and not have to worry about putting together a back-end

maple_shaft

@edmicman I believe Cloudfront works on top of S3... it is basically a more sophisticated interface for cloud storage and it is tailored for high data transfer speed

edmicman

oooo that's interesting. I hadn't thought about just making a separate client. I've already got a bunch of stuff in picasa, I'll have to check on their APIs and what's available

Jimmy Hoffa

@edmicman start with this: Write out the list of UI features you want, then throw away all the ones you just wrote down that you don't need and slate those for "phase 2", then try and design an API that you would want to use that would give you all of the functionality to complete your list of "needed" features. Then look at the picassa API and figure out how you would backfill your API to return what you want from each of it's calls by calling that API and implement

Then you have 2 pieces, your picassa client (that API you just defined) and your UI client that you write that does whatever you want while using your picassa client API you wrote.

no backend, just your picassa client library and your UI

if picassa's API can't easily be used to fill in the API you want in your client lib, look at flickr/g+/whatever else to see if any others have an API that meets all your needs.

edmicman

4:08 PM

@JimmyHoffa cool thanks!

user55340

4:39 PM

I wish that more people would move their broad questions into chat to either be pointed in the right direction (avoiding an off topic / too localized closed question) or refine the question itself into something answerable.

Dynamic

Meta.SO is filled with people trying to be very high and mighty :P It's kind of annoying.

maple_shaft

@Dynamic lol

its true

Dynamic

@maple_shaft It's like, since Jeff left, they're all trying to be the next Jeff Atwood :-)

user55340

@Dynamic 'very high' -- with or without the use of recreational additives possibly legal in Washington and Colorado?

Dynamic

@MichaelT I can't actually answer that... :P

Jimmy Hoffa

4:56 PM

"Jeff left" Eh?? Atwood moved on from SE?

user55340

@Dynamic Dude... this keyboard has... keys. But no lock. Oh wait, there's one. Its a scroll lock. How does one like, lock a scroll? Or a Num? I'm feeling kind of num... comfortably so. Oh, there's a cops lock too. The cops! Hide the keys!

Dynamic

@JimmyHoffa He's still here, just... well... read this: codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exchange.html

Jimmy Hoffa

6:55 PM

Ah, yeah. I hear that, frustrates me the number of cool jobs that would have been working on stuff I could believe in, I've had to turn my nose up to because frankly lots of the good jobs in the industry require the job to come first and the family to come third behind the job again

maple_shaft

8:49 PM

@gnat @YannisRizos @ThomasOwens @ChrisF I wanted to keep that homework question from being deleted just a bit longer... I sent an email to the professor of that class with the link to the question and he won't be able to see the link if we delete it :)

THe user was brilliant enough to create an account with his real name so ...

user55340

It frustrates me that students ask here first rather than their instructor...

2

Dynamic

I know right?

user55340

My favorite "oops" experience of programming was when a classmate used gcc to compile to assembly rather than machine code and then handed in the assembly for a class. It used structures that we hadn't learned yet.

user55340

So, the prof hauled the student up to the front of the class, put the code on the overhead and asked him to explain how he got such a superb approach, step by step through the code. He floundered after the 3rd opcode. The teacher then explained the options to gcc and how to use them, and how it is very obvious when that is done.

Dynamic

Wait, what?

0

Q: why there are differences between programming languages

For example C and C++,they differ in many ways. C++ have classes,it is high level programming language while C is low level. We all know that compilers translate human readable code into assembly and then binary code(in reality linker does it),so if languages are finally translated into binary co...

programming-languages

user55340

8:57 PM

(whoo! 3 stars in a row for me!)

Jimmy Hoffa

There are some seriously braindead questions being asked lately

like whoa.

That one you just listed, and then there's just yesterday:

0

Q: What is the reason behind methods with return values and methods with void?

I want to uderstand why there is a method in C# that could reurn a value, for example: public int Accelerate() { Speed++; return Speed; } and a method that does not reurn a value (void)? What is the difference in the following example of the above one: public void Accelerate() { Spee...

c# programming-languages methods

and yesterday there was a fellow using Goto (Where does anyone even learn to use goto anymore?? It's got to have ben elided from every technical instruction book (sure, not reference manuals) for the past 2 decades)

Thomas Owens

9:54 PM

@maple_shaft Sorry about that. Feel free to undelete.

Scratch that. I just did for you.

It was flagged with a link to this post.

user55340

10:14 PM

Poking about meta, I saw a mention of "flag weight" in a comment. Is there such a thing? or is this a mythical metric?

user20683

11:05 PM

@MichaelT it's deprecated, it used to be this complicated logarithmically growing rating. Higher flag weight meant your flags on q/a pushed that higher in the mod queue.

user20683

11:53 PM

@JimmyHoffa I kind of want to build a program that uses only Goto (and isn't assembly) just to mess with people

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