Please save this silly promise on a notecard somewhere so that you can laugh at your naivete years from now. On the back write, "gaming_mouse says hi"

There's your mistake!

I don't know the specifics of your case but in general if an old employer wants you to do stuff that you don't really want to do the best thing to do is set a high (not astronomical of course) hourly wage. You're not totally screwing them over but you're making money and incentivizing them to only bother you when they really really need something.

This is probably the best advice I'll ever receive on the entirety of 2+2...


irt the pay. As long as I don't take more than a week, my hourly is acceptable. I was very upfront and wrote out what I can, cannot do, and what I may be able to do before I started this.

Negotiating flat fees isn't something I'm new at, but in other fields. Win some / lose some, but this is pretty b/e. They don't expect the moon and they recognize that I can't be replaced by a computer. They just want somethin that can pop out a few lists and charts and something they can use without too much headache.

I "finished" the project now. I have to go back sometime after Christmas and show everyone how to "use" it.

After finishing, I'm torn on the who reasoning for it. I mean, I can't automate my old job, as that was too much about timing, how-to, and other stuff, which the new marketer doesn't have any interest in learning about, so aside from minor things here and there, I know the program will be wasting away into oblivion.

I just have to remember to keep a copy of the program for myself so I can do (?) with it. Maybe MAAS*, as AAS seems to be the buzzword of the day.

*Marketing As A Service?

Regardless, I am 100% burned out from programming right now: I don't think I'll write a single line of code until after Christmas.

anyone here used fiverr.com for graphics or icons? i've started playing around making some iphone apps but have on skill or desire to make graphics. i'm also not really selling much so i don't want to spend a ton of graphics, which makes the $5 pretty appealing.

if not, any suggestions on other places to look for reasonably priced graphic design?

ive used fiverr, was good, would do it again

If I record a video at anywhere from 10fps to 30fps (I'm using Camtasia), does anyone know any good software I can use on the video to interpolate it to 60fps? I'm struggling to find any and would like to try it! The video I'm making is mainly sourced from self screen recordings which is quite choppy, would like to try interpolation to see if it improves it.

SVP (smooth video project). or some AVISynth magic.

Awesome thanks am checking them out now

i went ahead and hired a fiverr guy to make my icon. was pleased with the results, and had it within ~8hrs too. not bad for $5

I've been playing around with Java, using Eclipse. I've been watching a guy on Youtube do some coding and he is debugging in real-time without having to close the application and hit F11.

Does anyone know how to do that? I looked up Hotswapping and Incremental Build, but it doesn't seem to give me the answer.

This is actually good advice in many situations in life. If there's some job request and you don't immediately think "well I'd love to do that heck I'd do it for free it sounds that fun but might as well take the money" then setting a really high price is good. You'll filter for serious offers. Even a mediocre programmer (not saying you are one lol) is a very valuable resource.

I've heard people from all walks of life use this approach in different variations. "Would you be interested in this research cooperation"..."Sure first class tickets please" etc.

Take a break and don't do anything code related. Everyone's been there. Usually if you take a break you'll itch to do something eventually. If you don't you can start worrying :P

It's probably handled by CRM systems.

Actually I'm sure you all have read a blog post or something similar along the lines of "if you don't want to do a hypergrowth startup there's plenty of good companies to be started doing X but better". I've been thinking about venturing back into ERP/CRM and all that recently. It's not rocket science there's some room to try cool stuff and you fix real issues. The downside is that you have to be in contact with business types a lot :P

I posted a while back about joining something called Boston Startup School which I think a few people had heard of (founded by some techstars Boston people).

It was a really awesome experience (60 people, sales/marketing/product/dev tracks, 6 weeks)... unsustainably busy, but great. You start out with basically no network, and leave knowing a crapload of peers and mentors within the community. Lots of partying, fun, and hard work. The web dev track used mostly rails, which I had been using for like 8 months before joining. Learned a lot being able to get help from all the smart people that came into the school to teach from various companies.

Interestingly enough the company I'm most interested in joining is using PHP/javascript (I had never written a line of PHP until yesterday when I did a little project for them in it). They're an 8 person team with a seemingly awesome culture and some really really smart/accomplished devs. Seems like I'd be able to learn a crapload, regardless of using a language I'm less interested in. Javascript is a lot of fun though. Otherwise I'm looking at some more mid-sized rails shops if that doesn't work out.

The startup scene is a blast... my liver needs a few weeks off right now.

Yeah, the Boston startup scene is incredibly good. Glad you enjoyed the experience. We seriously considered having an office there because it's such a good scene and there are some incredibly talented people around.

We had one investor tell us that we could raise about 25% more money if we were in Boston instead of NYC. I think that was an exaggeration but still an interesting comment.

Eclipse does this by default. Do a debug launch instead of a run launch. Then once you hit a break point, you can edit the code and save the file. Sometimes it can't do the hot-swap and it prompt you to terminate, restart or abort the swap.

Sorry, I'm pretty new to eclipse and coding in general.

How do I do a debug launch? All I do is double-click the eclipse icon, accept the workspace, and then the interface pops up. To test the code I hit the debug icon rather than the run icon.

Also, I don't know what a breakpoint is or how that works.

The videos I'm following move pretty quickly and sometimes he uses shortcuts to get to where he wants to go. He was doing something where he split up the screen with eclipse on the left and then an empty space on the right that had the application so he could see both at the same time. I have no idea how he did it or what he was doing so I couldn't follow those actions.

I think I'm getting pretty close to mediocre... (laugh at me. thx)

There's a ton of ideas still bouncing around, and the itch is really there, it's just that my thinking is muddied, and I haven't been able to clearly think through problems, and the code is getting pretty bad over the past 3 or 4 weeks. Just look at the submissions I showed the forum for the recent 600 midterm to get an idea of how much my brain is falling apart.

I've also read, and I'm not entirely convinced, that doing X but better is a viable idea because the internet is basically a world where that can only be one. There can only be one Google, for example. The thread continues that if you enter a place where there is a lot of competition, you are entering an area where no one is trusted and that you actually have an advantage because no one really conquered the arena, which is somewhat encouraging for that job portal idea (still in prototype stage).

Your English is so good, I tend to forget you aren't American, so maybe this next part is a cultural thing, or more specifically: an L.A. thing.

The nice thing about talking to business types is that they are sitting ducks. The threshold of entrance with them, if you are a budding programmer, is much much lower than sitting across from a grizzled vet who is going to ask about hash maps.

The wonderful thing, if you are a total POS, is buzzwords: SEO, SEM, PPC, blah blah blah. All you have to say is that one of your clients show up on the front page of Google (of course you never mention that that only happens with a focused query).

Several web companies out here just have a basic template that they reuse, or even just set up Drupal and install modules. They then charge 5k to 7k and take 6 to 9 months to "complete" the site, even though they really only took about 2 days total. This works in their favor because it looks like they offered and amazing deal, when in reality, they at best, created a template in Dreamweaver (the *really* good ones actually edit the CSS files) and let the site rot on their computer for months at a time, only thinking about it when the client calls and delivers a line of BS when they do talk.

I've thought about just doing something like that, more extreme: Set up a basic Drupal site and pop it up on Heroku, which unbeknownst to the client, is free, yet I'd charge $15/month + fees to "maintain" the site. Or even place a basic HTML site on git-pages and do the same. Unfortunately, I have a conscience and an unhealthy sense of pride, so I wouldn't be able to bring myself to do this.

On the other hand, I think it would be pretty cool to create stuff in Clojure. Hire an amazing designer and create custom sites or something. Of course, I'd be honest and tell the customer the real price for hosting.

In regards to marketing and automating it, I just don't see how that could be a viable plan. I've read the wiki article on CRM and it enumerated all of the problems CRM companies face. The point is that without a knowledgeable human, the tool is virtually worthless. The issue is that 90% of the companies out there are completely clueless on basic data issues in regards to marketing and sales. The industry I used to work in is a perfect example of this trend. There are a handful of companies that really know the data game, and their rise is double-digits every year. The funny part is that the things they do are blatantly obvious to anyone who bothers to look and read chapter one of a stats and game theory book, yet the entire industry is blind-sided by these companies. I actually pulled up an interesting stat and every looked at me like I was nuts for a few months. Then one of the big companies introduced a program that blatantly exploited the stat I had shown, and everyone all of a sudden took the stat seriously. Unfortunately, executing anything useful from the stat was never done.

To point out the human-side of marketing, and why CRMs fail, IMO. Target couldn't have done this w/o a human brain churning the data:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/ma...anted=all&_r=0

Our teacher told us to use whatever IDE we want but suggested Netbeans, so that's what I used the whole first semester. All the videos I see of people teaching or using Java they seem to use Eclipse. Should I switch?

I think it depends on your comfort level. At one point I looked at the best IDEs to use for teaching new programmers and Eclipse did poorly. It's not always the easiest to use and it has a lot of features that aren't necessary for students. It's definitely a professional tool and if you're willing to put in some effort well worth learning.

I figured it out as far as debugging on the go. I have to hit Ctrl+S to save the code and then it automatically changes in the application without having to close it. Like I said the guy uses a lot of quick shortcuts so I don't always know what he is doing.

I still don't exactly know what breakpoints are, but I'm learning as I go.

Keep in mind that Eclipse has various perspectives as well. So in the video, the demonstrator may have just hit a shortcut key to switch into the debug perspective. In have the Java EE, Debug, and the SVN perspective in my work workspace. In my home workspace, I have scala, python, and maybe a javascript one as well.

With the various perspectives, you can set your windows up where you want them. So for example, when I switch to debug, I have the console popup on my other monitor so I can see my logging statements. I have also popped out my debugging window so I can use those tools more effectively. You will learn more about breakpoints down the road, but they are extremely useful.

My opinion is that most of the IDE's are the same. Just pick one and learn it really well and you will be productive in it right off the bat when you take a professional position.

I would choose Eclipse over NetBeans but I don't think you can go wrong with either one.

A few questions:

Why did you decide to work with a full-blown IDE instead of Vim or Emacs? Is that a function of working with Java and Scala?

What does Eclipse for javascript offer above using the browser tools available?

How do you like working with Scala?

I'm just asking these things out of curiosity. My first exposure to IDE was Eclipse, but my understanding of it is too superficial to see the difference between it an say, PgAdmin. Obviously it's better than Python's IDLE, but I think was bothers me about IDE's in general is that they tend to be language-specific and tend to be slower than just using an editor. For example, how hard is it to find plug-ins or customize Eclipse for languages that aren't officially supported?

It is just what I am comfortable with. I know just about every shortcut there is in Eclipse. Keep in mind that I work for a Fortune 100 with a ton of red tape and Eclipse is one of the IDE's that is on our 'approved' list by our legal department. While our severs are unix, our desktops are Windows so it just easier to use Eclipse.

To be honest, I haven't done much with the javascript development tools in Eclipse. I guess the benefit is just having everything in a single IDE. If you are writing server code in Java and your front-end code in JS, then you can keep all that in a single workspace. My project at work is just a Java client that uses Swing for the GUI so I don't get to play around with the cool front-end web stuff at work.

I have started playing around some with CoffeeScript and I have just used notepad++ as my editor. I enjoy that as well since it is so lightweight and I just type and go.

It is pretty awesome for someone who has never played with a functional language before. The stuff you can do is really cool. It is also really beneficial for a Java developer since I can make use of any Java code. It is made me a better Java developer just by learning some of the basics of it.

I think I could increase my coding productivity ten-fold if I could use it on an everyday basis. Unfortunately, I can't see my company approving its use anytime soon. We are way behind the tech curve, but that is the price you pay for working at a major corporation.

So, I have never wrote any production code with it. If I had more free time to devote to some ideas I have for projects, I would def. do some of that work in Scala. I am that impressed with it.

I agree that IDE's can be slow at times, but it is a trade-off if it speeds up your development time. At work, it is a no-brainier. I know Eclipse and Java so well that I just fly along when I am writing code. I don't even think about it. But Eclipse was built as a Java workhorse, so your point does make sense.

I think when learning a new language, using a light-weight editor is the way to go. When I have some free time and try to write some Scala code, I do use the IDE but I don't use any of the auto-complete functionality.

The developers of Eclipse plug-ins do the best job of attempting to keep it updated for that particular language, but it may not be worth your time to fool with it if you are already efficient in VIM or whatever.

When I first started using Scala, the Eclipse plug-in was awful. But then the creators of Scala (name slips my mind at the moment as I am half-drunk on this Christmas Eve) took it over and it has been much improved since then. It still takes a while to build a project though and scala build tool still sucks.

I use vim for Python, Ruby, and javascript dev but Eclipse for Java. There's just so many useful features for Java.

And with an SSD Eclipse isn't even that slow.

Ha. This makes me think of Crockford's "legal disclaimer" of not using JSON for evil, and how that upends many legal departments.

Cool. I thought I was nuts for building a Clojure project using Notepad++. Really sucked w/o parenthesis matching, but it was sort of a good thing because it forced me to rethink how certain functions were created and how to shorten them.

Now, I just use Emacs w/ paredit. Still don't use auto-complete or anything.

I find the Eclipse ecosystem fairly impressive overall, though that is more outsider looking in. I think it's impressive that a full-blown IDE is so well-regarded for just about every language under the sun.

Does the build tool suck for Windows or does it suck for all OS's? I'm saying this from using a JVM-hosted language as well. Setting up Clojure on Windows is a painful experience, and in fact, several useful tools aren't even available for Windows at all. So much for the line about it "just being a .jar file." With (Arch) Linux, everything just installs and works right out of the box.

I didn't suspect that Eclipse is slow.

I assume using anything but Eclipse or NetBeans for Java would be suicide. I was just curious why he used it for other languages as well.