Do you mind giving us some of the questions from the technical interview? I'm curious as to what sort of questions get asked.

Interesting - I like the spacial nature of it, but the "cannot overlap" part makes me wonder how it would work out as you tried to display more and more.

Juk

This is such a geek thing to say, but whatever I'm a geek, when I was a kid I used to play Runescape, apparently now it's ****ing huge but I was the 262nd player to ever sign up:

http://services.runescape.com/m=foru...1,848,60865440

Which is kinda cool! (not really!)

Was fun back in the day, 56k, 16 people playing on one server was a busy game, you got to chat with the devs as well every now and then. Was a fun game.

This interview was pretty easy. The questions I can remember:

1. Define MVC, ACL, TDD
2. Create the PHP & HTML part of a login system (no need for a database), with Remember Me functionality.
3. Create a box with specific dimensions/colour scheme in CSS
4. Vertically center text in a box with CSS
5. Write a javascript function to change the text in a hidden div and then show it
6. From a multi-dimensional php array, create an HTML table with rows of alternating colours
7. Using a regular expression, extract a date from a string, and output it in a different format.

There was also a pretty basic SQL question on there, and a multiple choice "which of these 5 commands doesn't print something with PHP". There's one more, but I forget what it was.


I did one last week that was in classic ASP Jscript (they said so nobody had an advantage in terms of language knowledge). It was, imo, a much better test. We had 3.5 hours, and all 3 of us took the full time. It had us

1. Using a database table containing tree data (it was a company org chart), build a Windows Explorer type tree, with images to draw the lines
2. Improve on the tree to have the expand/contract buttons to hide/show children
3. Build a simple HTML form, so it looks decent & usable
4. A dozen or so SQL questions, where we had to use a simple 3 table database and write queries to match their sample output
5. One more question, that did something with form processing. Maybe a login system, but I forget.

Thanks! Was curious, hope you hear back from them!

Gullanian, tried reading your avatar but it came up with an error, is it a real QR code?

Oops! I'll see if I can fix it tonight It's just meant to come up with troll face lol.

Ha, brilliant. I think its possibly because the resolution is too low.

Probably not much interest in COM, but where else would I post this?

The COM interface for late binding is called IDispatch. Lots of very different kinds of software use IDispatch. I'm working on some .NET stuff that exposes its object model to COM because there's a lot of interoperability that way.

Classic VB / vbscript is a language that's often used as a client, so if you are exposing an IDispatch automation interface it makes sense to do stuff so it works from vb / vbscript -- they have extra limitations. One language quirk of classic vb is LET / SET.

1. SET x = y
2. LET x = y
3. x = y

(1) means "y is an object reference (a COM interface), please assign the same object reference to x". It (should be) an error if y is not an object.
(2) & (3) are equivalent statements in VB. They mean "y is an expression. please evaluate it and assign the result to x". A source of much pain is how the expression y is evaluated when y is an object reference. Then VB queries the object for its default property and treats that as the result. This is a similar pain to if(a = b) in C -- sometimes it's what you want, and sometimes it isn't. Consider a TextBox object:

Quite often the author will know he means to assign the object based on variable names, but forget to add the "set". The result is a bit of russian roulette depending on what the type of the default property is.

Anyways, all of this is well known and experienced VB programmers learn to be paranoid about using set correctly. VB.NET fixed the problem by eliminating the default property shortcut -- breaking a lot of VB6 code. What I realized today is I can actually fix this problem in the objects I expose to VB clients.

The solution is to add a hidden default property named "Self" that returns an object reference to this object. This makes the let / set distinction meaningless for my objects, and prevents a very common source of bugs.

That video made me hard.

I definitely find myself CTRL+TABing a lot in IDEs, or scrolling back and forth between two places in the same file, without wanting to go through the hassle of setting up window splitting or whatever. Something like that on a 30" monitor would be sickkkkk.

Looks very sick indeed. Dual 30" + this =

fyp

Juk

how would you guys go about determining what stakes a player is playing on a site? ive only thought about checking window titles, but some poker sites dont even display the information. just curious if anyone has other ideas

What do you mean? In what context?

This is probably better suited for Software since it is about poker.

hand histories.

Run spy++ to find a (maybe child) window that contains the info you need. Find that window in your program and try GetWindowText (should work if spy displayed the text). FindWindow(Ex)(), EnumWindows, EnumChildWindows...

A lot of lobbies have things that look like SysListView32 controls. They are easy to talk to. The answer will be different for each site.

And if you can't you'll have to write some app to listen for a "new hand" event.

When that event fires you would scrape the SB and BB values (maybe pot size too so you can determine if an ante is involved). Juk probably knows a lot about this. I remember asking him a similar question like 3 years ago.

yeah that looks incredible. i signed up for the beta.

So everyone put off their bug fixes until Monday on the off chance the world ends tomorrow?

I don't use Java though so I can't get any release Let us know if it's as awesome as it looks!

I don't know, I work for a defense contractor. I figure business is going to be booming with all the craziness that is supposed to go down between the rapture and the end of the world.

Huh, why don't you use Java? I remember not using Java on my PPC-laptop because well Linux-PPC-Java was kind of horrible.
Don't blame you though I kind of hate Java :P

What's all this end of the world talk about? I thought it was supposed to end in 2012? Guess it's those bible billboards?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13468131

Juk

Sooo I want to make web pages... Start with html/css? Should I head over to W3school or is there a better resource?