Well I wouldn't print with a JPG, but a PNG could work if the resolution's high enough...

well said

Does anyone know of any programming "immersion" schools?

Similar to this:
http://flatironschool.com/

I'm also curious as to opinions on these. I'm sure they can be very hit or miss. This one seems pretty legit and cheap from what I've heard.

cool story bro

re: paypal

i didnt know, apparently STRIPE is from the paypal guys
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/ste...stripe-paypal/

Stripe is now backed by Paypal <> Stripe is Pay Pal. If Pay Pal bought Stripe, yeah, I'd be worried.

Seems like the Paypal guys really aren't even significant investors in the company.

Here is the Clojure Form Pages article I talked about writing. It's just north of 3,500 words:

http://www.coderedux.com/on-clojure/...orm-in-clojure

Is anyone here good with networks? Been scratching our heads for ages with this one:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...ong-ip-address

Even if we hard code the right IP/port into the UDP send the UDP messages still don't arrive and we're server/networking noobs

It seems likely the response you got about NAT is basically correct, although given that the IP you see is at your ISP, it seems like it might not be NAT at the client side but some other kind of port forwarding, like a load balancer. In any case there is a gateway involved that is forwarding TCP but not UDP.

Given what you said about hardcoding the address, I think you are also having trouble in this setup dealing with clients which are behind NAT on their end, unless their gateways are also configured to forward UDP packets.

The reason that it all works with the TCP connection is most likely that the client initiates that connection to your server IP address, and the gateways involved are all configured to automatically setup the right forwarding during the TCP handshake.

For NAT configurations that automatically setup forwarding for outbound packets for UDP, you could use something like UDP hole punching to get around the client-side NAT issue by having the client also send the first UDP packet, rather than having the server initiate it, but that won't help if the packet the server receives contains your ISP's address and not the client's public gateway. Although you could also fix that by having the client send the server it's proper public IP address and port to send UDP back on, and having the server use those values when it responds in UDP, i.e

1) client sends UDP to server on port X (and you have to make sure your ISP's configuration for the server gets that packet to you properly, although it sounds like it does). This shoudl hopefully initialize NAT on the client end to realize incoming UDP packets from your server IP to port X should be forwarded properly

2) Your server uses the IP value contained in intial setup datagram from the client, rather than the source address in the packet, to respond, to get around whatever weird gateway setup your ISP has

Although, if you're not networking experts, I would say maybe the first question is, does the application really need to use UDP? You might be able to avoid all of this

I am thinking of switching my major to CS and came across this...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...ng_mits_4year/

Business graduate completes all of MITs online coursework in twelve months..! whoa.

Thanks for awesome reply!

We're making a real-time multiplayer game, we use TCP to send control and chat messages, UDP for streaming players positions.

I would post it in Reddit, except I'd get seriously downvoted: Bull ****!

Seriously though: if that was possible, would MIT really have any reputation worth discussing. Let's not ignore the fact that the students actually *do* spend 60 hours+ week on learning, competitions, etc. Think about the size of the books he would have to be reading:

Intro To CS: Okay, fine, he could finish this one in about a month.

SICP: 600 pages with about 300 - 400 exercises. Several months. I don't care how fast you are at programming.

Mathematics for Computer Science, lecture notes: 500 pages + exercises.

Introduction to Algorithms: 1350 pages with a ton of exercises.

He may have had some advantage, since as a business major, he would be familiar with linear algebra, statistics and probability.

Programming languages for only those 4 classes?

Intro: Python
SICP: Scheme
Algorithms: C++ & Java. Probably helps to know C as well.

Prerequisites at the minimum: Probability, Statistics, Linear Algebra, Single Variable Calculus, Multi-variable Calculus, Discrete mathematics, Proof-based math.

Maybe he should have a database class as well tucked in there as well.

Oh, yes, he also claims to have taken the circuits class as well.

So add in some SQL like PostgreSQL, MySQL or something to the list of learned programming languages.

So, at the very very least, he would have to have taken 5 hands-on programming classes and one proof course. He claimed to have worked through several thousands of small-print pages with tons of exercises and did the tests, and became proficient enough in 5 programming languages to do all of the course work as described in the OCW, and that is assuming he didn't bother doing the Learning C, Learning Java, Learning C++ courses.

I think he did read through the stuff, which is totally possible, but I don't think he did nearly what he said he accomplished.

I didn't go to a University nearly as reputable as MIT, but here in the UK the 3 year course I went on to get my degree I'm basically 90% sure you could complete it in 12 months if you worked 9-5 on it. From speaking to friends from other Universities the majority of them agree with me (exception being top Unis such as Cambridge).

Year 1 is basically a giant drink up and then fingers crossed you pass your exam, for the majority of people on my course it was a totally unnecessary year. I think a lot of the UK University's are broken. It should be work hard play hard, but it's just play hard work a bit.

If you look at his website, he claims to have finished 33 classes on 12 months. I understand that there is a thin line between unhealthy and healthy skepticism, but seriously? It would take 24 hours at a minimum (with not pausing, ~ 800 hours) to watch any one series of lectures. Now he states he read the books, did the coursework, and did the exams to top it off.

** I didn't look at the site before my last post. Turns out he didn't do the Databases or SICP, but he did all of those math classes and did quite a few physics classes, so he didn't really do the CS courses. Still pretty herculean to do all of it even if it took him 3 years, but the one year claim is definitely fishy.

Might be fishy, but if he was already adept at maths and physics it he could of breezed through a lot of it. Me on the other hand, maths and physics are like brick walls lol.

I thought it seemed a little crazy, but my zero knowledge caused serious wtf reaction.

I am so amped to get into this stuff, I have been reading everything I can online about CS, programming, etc. When I come across stuff like this or the girl who has a blog about how she became a "programmer" (self-taught) in eight months, it confuses me as a thirty-year-old finally going back to school.

Thanks a lot for the explanations and analysis.

She learned how to use Ruby and RoR in 8 months and learned a few useful algorithms to pass a whiteboard test.

You can most certainly learn enough in 8 months to get a job doing certain things. If you spent 8 months learning HTML / Responsive CSS / Photoshop, I am pretty sure you'd be able to find a decent job. If you focus strictly on a small subset of programming as that girl did, you can probably do it too. It also helps if you are "in transition" between jobs.

Learning how to bend a computer to your will and writing efficiently fast and well-designed software is a different story all together. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "programmer." That word seems to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

There is a newer pet-peeve of mine of late: It used to be websites that, once you fill in 50% of a form, that reload and erase all the information entered. Haven't seen this one for a while though. Now days, a ton of sites are built that, when you go to them, freeze up the entire browser and your mouse. Not loving this at all. The other thing that is starting to irritate me is the light-on-light text. Developers only testing on their retina Macs are to blame for this one.

Anyways, when do you start going to school?

Wow for her.

I just finished ten years in the military, five of them on ships. Zero IT experience.

I start my second semester as a "physics major" (I have only taken intro physics and prep math) at community college next week. So I have a long road ahead of me. I definitely want to quit my third shift job and start looking for an internship. The latter before the former of course. I also plan on hitting codecademy hard.

Thanks for asking.

This is your fault for not having an awesome retina Mac.

Oh, wow. That is all really cool. I used to live in San Diego, so I knew a lot of people who were in the Navy (guessing that is where you were).

I bet physics is seriously mind-expanding at the college level. Sort of like how learning programming tears away the illusion that your computer is intelligent, I would imagine that Physics tears away many illusions about how you see the world.

I'm also sick of websites not rendering correctly on my FF + No Script on my 32-bit LXDE VM Linux OS and I wish they would focus more efforts on making their sites look good on my Nokia 109. Don't those designers care about me at all?

/not serious.

Some of the absolute best developers I've ever had the pleasure of working with did NOT have CS majors, but majored in some other discipline. One told me that his son wanted to go into programming and he urged him to major in some other field and minor in cs. Use CS to solve problems in his other field. I forget his field of study but at the time we were working on genetic algorithms to solve logistics problems. Those were fun times.

Another guy has a PhD in quantum physics but chooses to do development. The guy is so far above anyone else I've ever worked with in my 13 years in software development, and a damn nice guy.

I don't think this is all that impressive. Most impressive thing is sticking to it and not aborting halfway through.
Pretty sure many 4 year programs can be done in 1 year if you have good learning habits in place. Not attending class helps a lot, for the most part it's just a huge overhead with very little to gain (networking aside) for good self learners.

Then again maybe I'm suffering from the curse of knowledge a bit and that's why I think it's not all that impressive (it's just CS duh). I guess I'd actually be quite impressed by someone doing physics or math in a year now that I think abut it.

Can't you just wrap all stuff in TCP packages? In many cases I really don't see a good reason for insisting on stateless and the overhead isn't an issue in most cases.
Not a network expert by any stretch, I never even finished "TCP/IP Illustrated". Read and workthrough has been on my todo list for about 4 years or so :P

Free career advice: If you weren't dishonorably discharged concider taking whatever IT skills you'll learn to the military/government contracting sector. You can basically print money there and 10 year military will be a major plus for anything that involves getting clearances of any sort.
Learn some programming, relocate to DC area = $$$.

Did tests with TCP, it worked but barely. TCP packets are often held up by various routers, this causes players to freeze randomly. TCP guarantees packets to arrive in order as well, 1 packet being delayed causes everything to delay. Definitely not good enough for real time games, for puzzle and turn based games it would be fine though.

Also we're aiming to have 128 up to 300+ players in one game So it's quite a challenge, but we think we have a good shot at it.

UDP is currently the only viable option for real time data. Clients updating their positions 30 times per second and receiving updates 30 times a second seems to be about right in our tests.

The resume site looks pretty odd in FF. I'm assuming you just didn't optimize it for browsers etc. since it's just a fun project. Will post a screenshot this weekend if you want.

Edit:
Vagrant+VirtualBox+Chef/Puppet are pretty nice btw. I'm currently setting up some dev-boxes for fun/to play around with it a bit (a Prolog-dev box). Recommended for anyone who doesn't do it yet.