Geek(Wisdom).com - Programming/Architecture

Jesse's Favorite Interview Question

geekwisdom — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:38:19 +0000

Jesse Robbins elegantly described the kind of person that would be a good candidate for the Internet Services Engineering aspects of my job in his O'Reilly Radar post.

My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: "What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?"

Estimated Relative Impact on Resources

geekwisdom — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:37:59 +0000

Problem: I need to explain the relative magnitude of one project in comparison of another.

Possible Solution: Estimated Relative Impact on Resources (ERIR)

I came up with the idea to use the estimated number of person hours, money, number of people involved, and an educated guess as to the riskiness of the project to calculate a number. I call the calculated number the "Estimated Relative Impact on Resources" because it's an estimate, it's useless without comparing it to other projects therefore, it's relative, and it's designed to show the impact on the resources of an organization. When this formula is used for multiple projects (probably applied by the same person who uses the same basis for assigning the estimates) it can provide some idea as to impact of one project on an organization's resources in relation to another project.

Inline MP3 Audio Player Insertion with JavaScript

geekwisdom — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:08:17 +0000

Using simple JavaScript it is possible to automatically insert inline audio players after hyperlinks to MP3 files. If multiple player types are desired simple CSS can be used to control the visibility of the players.

Consolidating Quality Attribute Scenarios

geekwisdom — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:39:03 +0000

One of the steps in a Quality Attribute Workshop is to consolidate the raw quality attribute scenarios that have been gathered. A helpful question to apply to each scenario when evaluating it for consolidation is, "Can this be abstracted without losing the essence of the scenario while at the same time covering more scenarios?"

Understanding Software Architecture

geekwisdom — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:08:19 +0000

Software architecture is a discipline focused on the quality attributes of a system, the "ilities". While functional requirements and constraints are important to understand, the software architect is primarily concerned with the quality attribute requirements. The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University uses the following definition of software architecture.

The software architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which comprise the software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them.

Greylisting for your telephone

geekwisdom — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:45:00 +0000

Greylisting is "method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will try again and the email is accepted. If the mail is from a spammer it will probably not be retried since a spammer goes through thousands of email addresses and can not afford the time delay to retry."

Why not apply a similar technique to your telephone? It could be done without much effort in this day of caller-id. Imagine if you had a device that, when plugged into your telephone line, would allow you to automatically answer the phone for unknown numbers and give the caller a message. The message could be generic or it could be instructions to do something specific. You could be program the device with a list of white listed (allowed) telephone numbers as well as blacklisted (denied) numbers. The device could give a different message based on whether the number is in the blacklist or simply unknown. If the calling number is on the white list the device does nothing, allowing standard telephonic devices to continue operating.

Extracting distinct e-mails from a large text file

geekwisdom — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:51:10 +0000

perl -wne'while(/[\w\.\-]+@[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}' BigFileContainingEmails.txt | sort -u > output.txt

Populating a PostgreSQL Calendar Table

geekwisdom — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:01:59 +0000

I'm using PostgreSQL for my data warehouse. I needed a calendar table for doing joins and a quick way to populate it. So I created my calendar table with:

CREATE TABLE "CALENDAR" (

    "YYYYMMDD" date NOT NULL

);

Then I populated it with the following SQL:

INSERT INTO "CALENDAR" ("YYYYMMDD") select to_date('20000101', 'YYYYMMDD') + s.a as dates from generate_series(0,36524,1) as s(a);

This quickly puts records into the CALENDAR table for every day starting with 1/1/2000 and ending with 12/31/2099.

Stop form spam by using CSS to hide a field

geekwisdom — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:10:07 +0000

I hate form spam. Whether the form is a contact form, a survey, or something else spamming can make life a pain. SANS has an interesting piece on techniques that can be used to reduce or prevent form spam. In my opinion the best solution is the one that has the least impact on legitimate users, is easy to implement, can be implemented in numerous ways, and has the highest negative impact on spammers. That's why I like the idea of including a form field that is required to be empty. To make it easier on legitimate users the field can be hidden using CSS. This way legitimate users aren't bothered with it, yet spambots are compelled to fill it in.

.Net Developers Community

hemalkotak — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:37:38 +0000

Hey , this is new to here
pl. post very new interesting points or newly explored things here See u soon....