SE, University and other topics

There are strong reasons to believe that Silverlight is dead?

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 12:32:00 +0000

Follow latest changes in MS top team and considering facts described in this article, there are string reasons to beliveve that Silverlight is dead or dying. ... or no... let read the post carefully ... is is dying everywhere?

.. but do not rush to through away. Consider also facts and thought described here.

PS: it is interesting that it is also believed that dynamic languages are lacking the public attention and so is under the danger

A topic for diploma: performance testing strategies.

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:57:00 +0000

Another interesting topic for the bachelor and master diploma: performance testing strategies.

In order to start listen carefully this presentation.

Thereafter
1. follow it in writing - consume the known strategies, steps etc
2. Think what questions this presentation raises?! For example, what is most important - test on stable code,i.e. branch the code to be performance tuned or to ensure performance of the most recent code? When one or another scenario can be used?

On incorrect attitude of being agile

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:31:00 +0000

Another interesting article that races important questions: "Bad attitudes of Agile".

First of all the common believe into the self-organising leads a lot of people to a believe that managers are not needed any longer. Well, although it is partly true, self-organising is an important aspect of been agile, still there is no points to underestimate the role of manager and its duties, which can be fulfilled by people under different labels (names).
1. The leadership role. Somebody need to draw the line following which we arrive to the success and encourage the team in difficult times
2. The secretary or administrative role. We all would like to be self-organised, but don't want to be organising meetings, keeping notes and putting together a budget. Hey, we are developers and that is what we will be doing - is the biggest mistake to make as it produces a chaos instead

Secondly. The iterational development leads us to a believe that there is no end date (we are done right after everything is developed). We easily forget that each iteration should be a ready to deliver software, especially basing on the fact that several iterations in the beginning will not be such. So instead of saying: there is a deadline with a varying content we say - no deadline

Finally the motto "all are equal and no docs" are clearly over prioritised. We cannot build a document in the beginning especially the full one, since we don't know how the prioritisation will be during, what will be added or skipped, how we change the project after each demo. But it doesn't mean we should not keep the track of made decisions and do not doc the functional behaviour of the software. How we later can test it or let know customers how to use without it? Regarding testers. Well everybody is equal and this system is a socialism. In fact "some persons are more equal than others" :) - practically the software engineering skills and much more rare than software testing skills and therefore it is sometimes impractical to make all tests unless we luck testing resources. So we need testing and we need a constant testing of being in development and released software to guarantee a certain level of quality

Software architect role in agile projects

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:39:00 +0000

Discussing the role of software architect we need to consider the following:

In the agile development we are moving away from the waterfall method. This means that we have no way to build the full architecture of the system in the beginning phase since we have no basis for this, no specification to follow, no full description of features that will be implemented and no time to be spent on this task.

In the result we are urning around the process of building the architecture - from the concept in the beginning to the periodic refactoring after x iterations and the constant control of what is happening in the system, monitoring of problems developers are dealing with due undecided or new gaps in the architecture.

All this (but in the more structure way) is described in this article, and presented here.

TDD is great for some project, but in many it gives just a false feeling that errors are under control

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 14:46:00 +0000

Comments following "Agile Ruined My Life" post

TDD is great, for SOME things. In other cases it can just add hassle and has the danger of providing a false sense of security. If I come across a project that does nothing but TDD and sees that as the only validation of their work that is necessary (this happens very often) I can pretty much guarantee I can find higher level functional, flow and integration cases that break the carefully constructed classes.

TDD is good for braindead simple crap programming where you have a well defined set of requirements and need to slog through them. I used it today when I needed to write about 30 java classes to fill in the functionality of an app I had built. That allowed me to both ensure that I had all the details working and test the framework itself and ensure it did everything I intended it to do correctly.

Now the core of the app itself involved juggling about 50 complex files at the speed of vim with multiple teardowns and rewrites over the course of a few days. Lots of experimentation and learning. Any tests that I would have written would have broken irreparably within minutes. It was a purely creative endeavor. You cannot do that with TDD and if you try you will spend weeks refactoring tests and not seeing the forest for the trees.
By far the best thing TDD has brought to the table is test frameworks though. Having a nice place to throw all your throwaway assertions on acid is awesome and really does add to the confidence level even if it affirms that you just broke an assumption you intended to break.

TDD - is a very popular technique nowadays. Unfortunately there is very little number of tools that are universal. Therefore it is necessary to clearly identify for yourself - where the tool should be used and can save a project from failure and where appliing the tool can be either pointless or even harmfull.

IKT TTU

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:10:00 +0000

FYI:

Lugupeetud doktorandid,

IKT doktorikool kuulutab välja stipendiumikonkursi. Stipendiumi saavad taotleda kõik doktorikooli doktorandid, kes õppivad doktoriõppes täiskoormusega, ei saa doktoranditoetust teistest allikatest, ei viibi akadeemilisel puhkusel ning ei ole ületanud nominaalse õppeaja. Määratakse 10 stipendiumi. Ühe stipendiumi suurus on 6000 krooni kuus ning stipendium määratakse üheks õppeaastaks.

Stipendiumi taotlemiseks tuleb esitada taotlus.

Taotluse elektrooniline vorm on kättesaadav doktorikooli kodulehel aadressil http://iktdk.dcc.ttu.ee/form_3.html

TAOTLUSTE ESITAMISE TÄHTAEG ON 18. OKTOOBER 2010.

Are we close to the dot agile crash?

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 21:19:00 +0000

One of the best articles I have recently read - "Agile Ruined My Life". The situation, from my point, is very like described and greatly reminds to me our position before the dot com crash - the idea by itself is very good, but we were trying to make it work too fast without properly thinking, using wrong tools and with a lot of people who factually lied consuming the idea, not developing that.

Repost: Wanted: new scientific talent

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 11:49:00 +0000

Repost

Wanted: new scientific talent to support EU policy-making - The Joint Research Centre launches recruitment drive

Researchers from across the EU are encouraged to apply for a challenging and rewarding job in the European Commission's own research body, the Joint Research Centre (JRC). Working for the JRC brings together research excellence in state-of-the-art facilities, and an opportunity to support EU policy makers by providing independent scientific and technical advice. Competitions are open for researchers in the following fields: chemistry, biology and health sciences; physics; structural mechanics; quantitative policy analysis; spatial sciences; environmental sciences; energy sciences and communication/information technology. Candidates can apply on-line between 30 September and 4 November at: www.eu-careers.eu

Read more:
http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm&id=2300&dt_code=PRL&obj_id=2840

___________________________________________________________________________
EUROPEAN COMMISSION - Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Internal and external communication
SDME 10/78, B-1049 Brussels
http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu
Email: jrc-press@ec.europa.eu
Tel: +32 2 2957624, Fax: +32 2 2996322

Simple rules to remember binding business objects to UI in xaml in .Net 4.0

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 17:14:00 +0000

A post for those who are novice in xaml, binding and .Net 4.0

Remeber that
1. variables cannot be bind in xaml, only properties, so when we write in xaml something like
Text="{Binding MyVar, Mode=TwoWay}"

we need to remember to write declaring the classs: instead of

Public MyVar as integer

the following

Public Property MyVar as integer

although

2. You will need to push a notification if you want UI to be updated updating the business object, so use OnPropertyChanged (link) and so writting the full notation (with Get and Set) instead of the short notation we seen above.

3. Don't forget that you either need to rebind lists, or use instead of simply collections like lists and dictionaries an observablecollection etc (link)

Slightly more advance
1. Don't foget that you can use converters binding a property to UI to represent, for example, a boolean value as a picture

<controls:ChildWindow.Resources >

        <loc:RO_FavImageTypeConverter  x:Key="FavConverter" />
    </controls:ChildWindow.Resources>

....

<Image Source="{Binding Favorite, Converter={StaticResource FavConverter}}"/>

Public Class RO_FavImageTypeConverter
  Implements IValueConverter
 
  Public Function Convert(ByVal value As Object, ByVal targetType As Type, ByVal parameter As Object, ByVal culture As Globalization.CultureInfo) As Object _
  Implements System.Windows.Data.IValueConverter.Convert
 
    If value Is Nothing Then Return Nothing
    Dim bIsFav = DirectCast(value, Boolean)
    If bIsFav Then
      Return Utility.ImageHelper.GetImageSource("Resources/favor_yellow.png")
    Else
      Return Utility.ImageHelper.GetImageSource("Resources/favor_grey.png")
    End If
 
  End Function

PS: you can easily find in net how to apply the converter in xaml. Besides Utility.ImageHelper.GetImageSource is just illustrative - you will need to write your own code

2. Notice that you can use converter parameters. For example:

Text="{Binding Amount, Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource nmbFormat}, ConverterParameter='n0'}"

but be aware that nature of them is quite static. I mean that you can pass (bind) a property to that, but unfortunately you cannot bind two properties in the effective two way interaction.

Consider for example a simple case: you have a class, which contains an amount and a format to be applied on the amount in UI. you can bind Amount as above, but then you bind the number format, as the parameter is static. OK, you can change it by using the valueconverter as in the item 1 above, to get the entire instance of the class into the convertion function to read both amount and the number format, but then you will lose the two way nature of binding: the convert back will get a number enter, for example, into a text box, but were after convertion it will go? into the entire class? obviously it will not work any longer since you have no reference to the instance to which the inputted property should be placed to. If two way need to be working bind a simple property to make it automatically routed to the right places within the binded instance to be updated following UI update.

Simple conclusions from P!=NP battle

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:37:00 +0000

All this battle around P!=NP paper can give to an ordinal student a very important hint.

It is nearly clear that there will be a huge demand for algorithms considering NP problems and inventing algorithms that can solve it faster - obviously not as fast as a P problem ... but each, even simple improvement can lead to a huge improvement (in total) on such complex tasks. Besides we still will have to consider
1. Heuristic approaches as those will still be demanded
2. Finding and isolating classes or subclasses of tasks (problems, graphs) which can be solved in P

A post on the scheduling problem

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:05:00 +0000

Here is an extremely motivating post about the scheduling problem for beginners with a background in math. Clearly stated easiness for small and ordinal problem and complexity for large scale problems or those, which have different kinds of restrictions. Actually it also refers to this paper, which should be the next step getting into the scheduling problem.

Personally I think it is quite an opportunity for writing a master work for those who hasn't decided yet on a title of their thesis. A lot of work-places has such problems (hospitals, educational centers etc) so it can be treated within the organisation specific restrictions set and so be analytic as well.

End of story II

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:09:00 +0000

In continue the previous story. The worst thing about that fact is that you cannot really rely on Google since the technology their are offering on the market can be closed at any moment. They are so new, so modern and so risky to follow.

Here is a short story of such fact a Google graveyard.

End of story

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:23:00 +0000

A quickly ended history of one well-known and widely marketed technology - Google wave.

Another interesting topic for a master work

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:34:00 +0000

Here is another, interesting, unusual and for some people risk-free theme for a master work in SE.

One more interesting article on the same topic

Clouds performs in ... (what? number of rains, size?)

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:44:00 +0000

"Measuring and Comparing the Performance of 5 Cloud Platforms"

Interesting that Salesforce performs quite nicely.

Distinguished lectures

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:55:00 +0000

I join to fans of this lecture :) RailsConf 09: Robert Martin, "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too"

that is how it should be done

WTF per minute metric :) superb

Gräfin Mariza - best memories of my life

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:24:00 +0000

I was lucky enough in my life to see the following wonderfull performance in Wien city "Gräfin Mariza" by "Volksoper" in 2006.

I spent a lot of time searching for this or similar performance in Net, but no success - only much weaker alternatives performed by others... and finally today I discovered one, which is extremly close to what was happening back in 2006 and so can share that with You

and

Other fragments are here and here.

All parts can be found by the person who kindly uploaded them to youtube: here at the right hand.

VS 2010 Beta 2 installer

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:32:00 +0000

A nice dialog I got installing VS 2010 Beta 2

PS: Actually Silverlight 3 SDK installation failed causing this dialog

Popularity of programming languages

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:49:00 +0000

Have a problem to pick up a programming language to learn?

First of all decide, what area you are most interested in (embedded dev: C, C++; commercial: Java, C#, VB, PHP etc; Logical: LISP etc) and then follow the programming languages popularity chart below (which was compiled by TIOBE Software).

The more a language is in use the higher the probability you will find a workplace if you know it.

As usually there is an exception for persons who are smart and brave enough to follow it: the less a language is common (spread among devs) the higher salary gets the persons who knows it... but there is a high risk that you will not find a company interested in hiring you (especially in such a small country like EE)

PS: Ideally you should know 2-3 language from TOP-10.

although you are likely to be a professional in only one of them using it constantly.

Stephen Fry on twitter, blog and some other stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:44:00 +0000

A problem of choice

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:28:00 +0000

There is a well known statement on selecting something among alternatives

The more alike two items are the more complex it is to choose one of them .... although the actual cost of been wrong is minimal in this case.

Initially I like this statement since it seemed to be exactly correct... but after some thinking I disliked it too since I felt it is incorrect as well.

Now, I believe I should reformulate it into

The more alike two items seems to be the more complex it is to choose one of them. [full stop]

Comment: I thing the catch in the original statement: you actually feel that items are not similar, otherwise you would simply select one of those... but you just have not enough information to distinguish those items by pros and contras.

ORACLE joke

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:28:00 +0000

Unfortunately I cannot trace the original source.

An ORACLE specialist, who acquired all certificates and actually did all exams can, known just an ip address, kill a person by a single SQL statement.

Greetings from Tallinn - 2009 Christmas Is Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:40:00 +0000

Fair rate for .Net devs outsourcing functionality development: Estonia and USA case

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:06:00 +0000

How would you answer the following question "What is a fair rate for .Net devs (per hour or per man-day) in Estonia and USA if a project lasts circa 2 months?" Comment: that is an amount one company would pay to another company, so the last one will have to pay all taxes. We are not talking about a salary that devs would get into their bank accounts. Moreover here we are talking here about one-time work. Not a long-term cooperation or stable income for the dev company.

Obviously the answer depends on the involved devs level. An experience from our company when we had the maximum number of developers – abilities of devs to generate correct code were varying circa 3-15 times, i.e. one dev was able to produce a code in one day, while another will do the same code in 3 man-days or even 3 man-weeks.

It also depends on time-frame. The faster result should be delivered the more costly it will be to produce. If there is no rush, then professional consultants will not be involved, so the price will drop sufficiently.

What answeres do we have at the moment?

1. quote " I work in a startup. Think 1-3 person teams who release v1.0 in 4-6 months. In this scenario, $5k or $10k goes a long way towards bringing a product to fruition. $10k can pay for a senior offshore developer ($15/hour) full-time for 4 months (so 120$ man-day)"

My comment: seems that „indian universal devs' are involved here – sometimes they even offer to write a code solving NP != P problem in a week :)

2. USA – well it depends on the dev level - from 50 to 75$ an hour (s 400-600$ a day), but sometimes miracles happen also by having 120-180$ an hour.

3. My friends recently did a project of 40 man-days. For a company they have very good relationship with. The cost was 2500 ЕЕК per day - so 240$ per day. The price was fixed for functions which were estimated including risks, so I would rate it as 240 - 320$ per day in other cases. An important fact – it was outsourced so, that the work-force was involved basing on a free schedule, so they could work on the main workplace doing extra when they willing to spent their time on it (although a deadline was also set).

4. It used to be 500-800 EEK an hour in Estonia some time ago. Not sure how much it is at the moment. Here I talk about highly qualified devs. You can find a student for 100EEK as well, but obviously the quality will be different as well as the time required to build the desired functionality. So here we get again circa 400-600$ per day.

5. Europe company got a rate from my friends - 500$ per day. They are a bit in rush, so they easily accepted that.

.. what answeres do you know? Could you share those with us?

WCF: limits

noreply@blogger.com (Deniss) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:52:00 +0000

Today I have lost a half of the day trying to understand a problem occurring when a .Net client was communicating to a server talking via WCF - when the posted byte array size was over circa 2MB.

Both client and server looked to be fine in term of limits:

Client

moWsHttpBinding = New WSHttpBinding(System.ServiceModel.SecurityMode.None) moWsHttpBinding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = Integer.MaxValue
moWsHttpBinding.ReaderQuotas.MaxArrayLength = Integer.MaxValue
moWsHttpBinding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = Integer.MaxValue
moWsHttpBinding.MessageEncoding = WSMessageEncoding.Mtom
moWsHttpBinding.ReaderQuotas.MaxBytesPerRead = Integer.MaxValue
moWsHttpBinding.ReaderQuotas.MaxNameTableCharCount = Integer.MaxValue
moWsHttpBinding.UseDefaultWebProxy = False
moWsHttpBinding.BypassProxyOnLocal = True
moWsHttpBinding.ReceiveTimeout = New TimeSpan(20, 0, 0)
moWsHttpBinding.SendTimeout = New TimeSpan(20, 0, 0)

Server (from web config - omitting a lot of detals on how they are bounded)

... and as usually a solution was simple and laid outside of this code (and actually well known for me from asp.net development experience): you have to add into web.config something like:

<system.web>
<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="131072"/>
</system.web>

to increase the limit to circa 128MB.

which makes me wonder why remaining binding settings disallow to overcome this simple general one.