.NET can suck my dick. Spent all morning troubleshooting a problem with a .NET client connecting into a load balancer that was set up to do SSL hardware acceleration. The client would negotiate the SSL session just fine, but then invariably the LB would just reset and kill the socket. Turns out that if you're wanting to do TLS communication using the .NET 2.0 library, you have to have the client set to enable SSLv3 as well. It'll still negotiate and use TLS, but only if SSLv3 is enabled as well. 8 of us across 2 continents spent all fucking day trying to figure this out. Fucking Microsoft has known about this for a while, but hasn't addressed it or added it into their official bug/doc databases. Fuck Microsoft. PS: Putting this here in case any other programmers run into this, they might get a heads up... and 99.9% of the members in the rant thread would have their eyes glaze over.
I'm interesting in learning a bit of programming in my spare time. I'm generally quite computer savvy but have very limited knowledge of programming - is it a good idea to learn Java to begin with? Any resources in particular that I should check out?
In my opinion, don't try and learn a technology or language... pick a project. Have something concrete and interesting to you, and it'll motivate you to keep working on it, and give you a rather nice scope of work that you'll be doing. I've seen more failed self-learning projects going on because they tried reading reference books without actually having a realistic/fun project in mind. Pick the project, then come back, and I'm sure we can provide some insight into what language/tech stack you'd choose to implement it in.
Most on the TiB won't get this, but some will. XKCD is the all-time best comic strip ever. Other than Calvin and Hobbes, of course.
My friends are crazy into Magic the Gathering and hate Apprentice and asked me to "make a program for us to play magic against each other!" I figure, why the hell not, I'll give it a try. I've gotten my hands dirty with Java and C# a fair bit in the past (mostly in school), and have occasionally brushed with Python, but I've never really looked into networking from a programming perspective. I'm likely going to give this a shot in Java as I've already gotten XML parsers set up for deck management - any potential hangups I might run into before I dive into the networking documentation / any resources out there more simple than just "rtfm"? And yes xkcd is brilliant.
I'd start with how you envision the users interacting. Web page? Custom/native client? Personally, I'd stick with web page, as it's probably the easiest to deal with from a networking standpoint. You just have to deal with issues of concurrency, etc. From there, you can build it with whatever tech stack you want, pretty well. I'd also think ahead to hosting... where will this run? Off your own machine? Co-located? Amazon Cloud? Figure out the basic architecture of the app first, then figure out how you're going to do it based on your options and skill set.
What I was thinking was desktop based program, which does a simple connection to another client just off of IP addresses, mostly as I don't want to devote server resources to hosting card games for a hobby project outside of letting them download the executable.
First problem will be that the vast majority of end-users connect through a NAT'd firewall. Peer-to-peer socket connections in such a situation can be very problematic to set up and get working. In the case of the work we did with Need For Speed World, we had to build specialized proxies and repeaters to get around it. I'd start by doing a simple prototype, proof-of-concept of just a simple "hello world" network app, and see how it goes. If it were me, I'd look into using a simple web server (even if it's a stand-alone app), web sockets (which exist in chrome, coming soon in FF and other browsers), and some AJAXy type stuff on the browser client. Works for Google Apps.
Oh, never mind the ass-ton of HTTP libraries and frameworks that exist to assist with the data transfer. If you keep with a "web 2.0" (god I hate that fucking term) tech stack, you'll also get a crapload of online samples and tutorials that can help you. Roll your own shit, and it'll be more difficult.
I'm with you on how much I hate the term "Web 2.0" I twitch when I read it But I'll look into that, thanks for the starting point. (And yeah, I used to play an app that NAT and firewalls screwed with. A lot of people got around it with either port forwarding or using LogMeIn's Hamachi. I'd rather something work more smoothly)
Hi guys. I've been wanting to get familiar with Linux since my computer runs both Windows and Linux (my father put Fedora on there just as a backup.) However looking around the net I can't find anything particularly geared towards people who have little experience with it. Anyone have any ideas?
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Administration-Handbook-2nd-Nemeth/dp/0131480049" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Administrat ... 0131480049</a> I can't recommend that book enough to learn the basics of Linux sys admin. I started with her Unix sys admin book years ago (15+?) and I've done very well by it. It also comes in Kindle format, but for that, I prefer hardcover. Call me old-school.
If you do the PHP thing, there's something that hit last night, specifically a bug in GCC that can potentially cause PHP to die a horrible death, zombie process, 100% CPU. I've had 3 government (drupal-running) customers that have been targeted/hit by some scripts going around, and have spent the morning recompiling PHP with the appropriate CFLAG to deal with the issue. Issue is described here. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2-2250738585072011e-308/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hang ... 2011e-308/</a> Some quasi-interesting info here: <a class="postlink" href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066084" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066084</a>
So yeah, this is me on a cold and rainy Friday night; drinking some warm spiced rum, and cruising software. Just spent the last couple of hours fucking around with a new Apache project called OODT. <a class="postlink" href="http://oodt.apache.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://oodt.apache.org</a> It's just become a top-level Apache project, and is pretty damn cool. So yeah, might not get your motor running, but it's pretty damn cool if you're into that kind of thing. I've already hacked together a quick proof of concept adapter to one of my own software products to enable this functionality. Just in case you've not heard of it yet, I thought I'd throw it out there.
Can anyone help me out with a book recommendation? I need a crash course in Beginner/Intermediate principles of UI design. For context, I freelance by building Excel macros and optimizing workbooks. As an extension of those services, I'm developing a PHP/mySQL/JavaScript/jQuery reporting product so that my clients can break out their data with a with browser. The functionality is actually coming along quite nicely. The UI has the visual appeal of goatse. I have some pretty buttons and menus thanks to jQuery UI ThemeRoller, but I need a much better grasp of layout fundamentals. Thanks in advance!
I'd say start here. <a class="postlink" href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think?wasRedirected=true" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Ma ... ected=true</a>
Hey guys, I'm sure someone must be able to help me out here. I'm trying to create a mobile application in VB 2005. I created a mobile database called restaurants. The fields are named: Restaurant name, Primary food type, street address, city, province, telephone, e-mail. I need to allow searching by the following fields: Restaurant name, City, and most importantly food type. The selection options should populate a pulldown list and there should be an 'All' option (example: search All cities for italian food) Display results of search in a data grid where the user can select a row to obtain more information. I could do this easily if it wasn't a mobile application. I have no idea how to do it in a mobile applications. Thanks everyone
So, basically, you're asking how to make a specific mobile app? Probably not going to be answered here... it's not like it's something that can be answered in a post or 6. I'd say Google for a sample app somewhere, or buy a book.
Yeah, I have a book on VB 2005 but it doesn't really cover mobile applications that well and Google doesn't seem to be much help. Oh well, thanks anyway.