One of our customers asked for what should be a very simple request: Send over the SQL file for our products to that his developer can upload those SQL files and input it into the their product catalog.

The manager calls me and asks if I could do it. She's proficient in MyAdminPHP so I told her that all she has to do is select * from Products or whatever the table name is. Shouldn't be a problem.

"Are you teaching me how to do it?"

"Not really, just telling you that's about all you have to do, I guess."

"No, it won't be that easy, I have Admin open right now and I am looking at over 40 different tables."

Glad I'm learning how to use SQL as a calculator right now.

That is pretty cool, thanks for sharing it! I totally agree on the issue of multiple-agents vs. global controller. Regardless, I might try to dig into this if I can find some spare time.

dave,

it seems your business model involves technology yet you have (had?) a web guy who can't write html and now you have a sql database and no one who knows how to use databases.

has your company considered hiring someone who knows how to really use a computer?

I'm not sure about this competition - just I wish I'd known about the Tron completion they ran last year

Juk

Don't be silly. Those people are very expensive and it can't be that hard, it's just a computer. I use that every day.

...oh ****, what are all these wires for?

how anal is it that I just reorganized like 100 declarations of a class so they would be grouped by type?

i.e.


CString strFristName;
int function (x);
double variablex ;
double function();
CString strHazard;

Became

CString strFristName;
CString strHazard;

double variablex ;

int function (x);
double function();



Is there anything that will do this for me automatically?

Its not a huge deal in the above but when the class has 20+ variables that need to be set at different times, its tedious discovering all the string names to do so..

seems like a random criterion for grouping them. grouping them conceptually, rather than by type, makes more sense to me.

Agreed, most of the CStrings are used for display, the functions are read database things, so it mostly works out that way

I have been trying to make this code easier to understand for the last couple weeks, and well its a cluster so every little bit helps...

Any ideas on the big things to start with?

An Example:
I have a class which is implemented with fuctions A, B, C, D, E, F, G for 5000 lines.
Another class is implemented that has functions A,B,C and X, Y, Z for for 6000 lines

They both have access to third class which also has functions A, B but neither call this.

Its like the entire project was cut and pasted everywhere, which makes fixing bugs extremely difficult as they are in many locations

useful book: http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effect.../dp/0131177052

$20 kindle edition

thanks, ill look at it next time i go to the book store.

been browsing the internet looking for ideas etc, definitely alot of work but once i have changed something (hopefully for the better) I have been reusing it alot and it seems to make the really bad bugs very very obvious and solve some of them

+1 on the feathers book. i've heard martin fowler's _refactoring_ is good for this stuff too.

If by "technology" you mean a website that has 150 ways to Error404, then yes, our business model involves technology. If you mean that they were using a scanner to send paper work via email up until one month ago, then you are right on.

The industry I am involved in, though quite interesting in a multi-layered way, isn't very techno-savvy, and if my impression is correct, quite resistant to technology.

With all of this in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise to you that they simply have no idea where to start looking for someone with this job description: they only know that craigslist is a great place to look for a computer guy/gal.

Now you know why less than 400 products just ~has~ to be spread over 40+ relations.

Don't get me wrong, they ~do~ want to creep into the year 2000 at some point, but there's really no place to start that isn't a massive expenditure and overhaul of the entire business, so within these parameters, it isn't surprising they are slow to change.

My company is pretty dysfunctional. I'm now the head of marketing and this is about the only position that translates to "big ****ing woop" and "I'm everyone's b*." I made the decision to pull an ad that ended up costing us $10/click with $0 sales and everyone thought I was nuts. I explained to them that this is an outrageous price to pay and of course, they looked at me as if I'm crazy and told me to put it on, which I didn't do.

One of our sales people asked if she could have an excel doc or a database of our entire catalog. No such thing exists.

I finally opened my mouth about the web, uh, developers they been hiring and now interviewing. I told them that I am 10x as qualified to build their site than any 3 people they brought in combined, and I would never, in a millions years, walk in that joint and try to find a developer job. I went ahead and stuck my neck out and told them that I would help them find someone with 45%+ of a brain.

Oh, right, and now that I am marketing, that means I need data: past sales, expected sales, things like that to analyze, and they have zero siftable records of anything.

At least I know enough math, SQL, and Python to create some analysis programs, so I'm stuck building this entire department from scratch.

The company decided to wait until Jan/Feb/sometime to get a web person. I mean, yeah, for marketing purposes, I would love to get a great CS major. Hopefully by that time, I have enough classes under my belt that finding someone smarter than me is meaningful.

We've got a directory with so many files in it ls just spins and spins. When I try to glob it in a python script I lose my nerve when the CPU usage for the python process exceeds 100% and the load on the box starts to climb too close to 1. I guess dumping 10k or so files a day in there wasn't a very good idea...

lol wtf

What file system do you use? I can see it becoming a problem if it's millions of files total. But if not, I would consider writing a perl/ruby script that lists the dir just to see if it's a python specific thing.

I don't know if it is anything but a vanilla *nix file system. I'm using the glob.glob python method and it returns a lot faster than ls does on 100k lists of files, so I'm pretty timid when it doesn't come back and the load on the box starts to climb. It's a production box so I can't **** with it too much. This is what happens when you don't test at scale; this crap wasn't an issue with a couple hundred files a day...

sticking this (glob.glob python) into the google led me to an article suggesting glob.iglob is faster on hudge lists of files since it returns an iterator and not an in-memory list: http://everydayscripting.wordpress.c...s-really-cool/

Maybe worth a try! tbh tho I have no idea, I only googled it because I know zero python yet and wondered wtf glob.glob meant

****, we're using 2.4.3 which doesn't have it. I guess we'll see how much of a pita asking for a later version will be.

We just ran a competition on our site to make a space themed HTML5 game:
http://www.scirra.com/blog/54/competition-winners

Just shows what HTML5 can do! Some of these games are great

This video is cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...v=WaUzu-iksi8#!

The internet weighs as much as a stawberry

Hey guys!

I am not a regular poster in this forum, but I'm looking for some help with some of my java programming assignments

I'm currently getting a good grade in the class, but I have a couple more programming assignments left to go that I'm not currently capable of completing. Id be willing to exchange a few hours of No Limit Cash game coaching for a similar amount of help completing my remaining 2 Java programming assignments.

please pm me ASAP if this interests you!

Thanks,

Jeremy

feel free to just make a thread for help with making a specific function work properly or whatever

Nice vid.... loled at this quote

"Like us on facebook to show that you're classy"

So, I don't use C++ a lot and just became quite confused when I figured out that instances of child classes can't actually use virtual functions defined (only) in their parent unless you cast it to an instance of the parent class:

Is there a good reason for this?