Does anyone have any general idea of how much penetration testers make, and how would one go about trying to get hired at a company that does that? Obviously the basic certifications are necessary for basically any IT I'd think, but beyond that?

Also, how much would an associates in electronics engineering technology help employability?

UK magazine PC Pro have a carreers column and back in Nov 2012 issue had on eon being a pen-tester - they suggest average between ?42k and ?50k, higher positions ?70k+. Freelancers ?225-?500+/day. Couldn't find a copy online, but this seems very similar at a quick glance (numbers a little higher) http://www.itpro.co.uk/641470/so-you...ethical-hacker

edit: it seems itpro.co.uk is a "sister site" of PC Pro, so same sources most likely.

That's always been one of the jobs on my list that seemed really cool (but will probably get somewhat repetitive after a bit). The entire security field seems pretty huge though

lol

about as much as any 2 year degree, which is to say: work on your portfolio.

I think it can be tough tho, penetration testing requires quite a lot of skill

Rails form objects are awesome.

I saw something about them the other day. They seem like a nice alternative to using nested_attributes_for. Didn't get a chance to use form objects yet though.

Gullanian's blog post on bitcoins is #1 on HN right now

I just had a form for a model that essentially had 5 different tabs (between associations, and breaking up a big form into multiple pages). Instead of having tons of conditional validations in the model, I could just break each tab up into its own form object to make sure each save method (different controllers) was validating against a form object instead of just the model.

Cleans up the model a ton, and makes it a lot easier to keep track of. Small amounts of duplication, but no problem.

I'm also about done with this stupid recursive javascript tree thing I've been doing for the last 10 days. Really painful (each level might be a select box, radio buttons, select boxes)... backbone was super useful at organizing everything.

I'm sure there's an easier way to do it, but w/e. No plugins fit the bill.

not sure if this is the correct place?

i'd do it this way (untested; probably a fencepost error on b13 == 850):

=floor( (b13 - 540) / ( (850 - 540) / 5 ) ) + 1

This:

600>b13>650

is wrong. Assuming the syntax is fine (not familiar with Excel) it'll always be false since 600 is never > (greater than) 650 regardless of whatever b13 is.

You probably wanted something like:

600 <= b13 < 650

Edit: Note the equals sign. You need to check for equality on one end or the other. If you just reversed the signs above you'd miss exactly 600, exactly 650, etc.

noob Q here:

I'm nearing the end of my intro to OOP class (java) and we're doing a lot of work with classes lately. The problem is, we're learning how they work and interact, the difference between private/public data, static variables, etc., but not a whole lot of practical applications for it.

The only thing we've really been taught is that using multiple classes are useful for encapsulation purposes. Anything else? What other practical uses are there? We haven't really done a lot of practical programming, which kinda bugs me, because a lot of the exercises we're learning feel pretty worthless, even though I know it's not.

for instance, she's having us define a class with a bunch of methods that do pointless String manipulation, and then defining another class with a main method that calls the methods from the other class. I absolutely do not see the point of this unless it's just to demonstrate how encapsulation works.

Also, should I move on to C++ next semester, or continue into advanced java? The uni I'm transfering to wants a background in both, so I figured I'd just take everything. I don't really like java that much compared to the other languages I've seen. How similar is an advanced C++ class gonna be to an advanced java class?

This is hard to teach because to really see a lot of the use you need more complex programs - which aren't really useful for introductory teaching.

It's good to get into good habits. A sort-of-****ty analogy is with books. Sentences/Paragraphs/Chapters/Books are useful concepts. But if you're teaching an introductory writing class its kind of hard to have people use Chapters in practical ways since they're really only useful with lots of text.

Edit: Also, lots of courses do a really ****ty job of explaining why these concepts are useful. Maybe its because some profs have themselves never worked with large scale applications?

It depends. I doubt C++ is that different than Java wrt the things you dislike about it. Given the courses I'm familiar with from my school I'd recommend sticking with Java for an advanced course. It lets you focus more on the concepts being taught instead of also having to worry about learning the differences in C++.

Java and C++ share a common heritage, you would probably be better off staying with Java until it makes more sense before switching over.

You may not have a complete grasp on encapsulation. What benefit do you see to fewer classes?

Yea, I really doubt my professor has worked much on large projects, much less with java. This is her first course on java, and it's a language she's not super familiar with. I'd like to go straight into advanced java but with class availability I may not be able to. I think intro to C++ would just be reiterating basic stuff I learned in java anyway. I never heard of the book analogy - we're taught with a "car" or "bicycle" analogy.

Yea, I doubt I have a grasp on it. I mean, I know what it's doing, I just don't see the point. For simplicity, maybe? We're taught encapsulation makes a program less complex, but I guess I'm not really seeing how.

Practical advice: Composition > inheritance

Thanks for the comments!

raise your hand if you're surprised a phd wrote this

practical advice: C++ is horrible

Practical advice: 100% of programming advice is grossly overstated.

icwudt

I'm not really a huge OOP guy but I would say upon reflection the things about it I like all have to do with cohesion/coupling. Inheritance is sometimes useful but most of the time when I see classes with very long inheritance chains they are just a pain in the ass to make changes to, and most of the time I encounter some design pattern I feel like it's marginally useful for the situation at hand and instantly aggravating as soon as some new requirement occurs that doesn't easily fit the pattern.