Also embarassingly when I talked about getting the button to work I meant literally putting the HTML on the page lol, in ASP.net webforms the entire page is inside a <form> tag, nested forms don't work

Found out my position in Australia is worth $25k more than I started at, that's going to make salary negotiation this year fun...

For weeks I thought this was the C discussion thread and ignored it while at the same time thinking this forum really needed a LC thread. Reading comprehension ftw!

How does everyone deploy their websites? Is everyone using a custom 1 cmd deployment scripts or other for purpose frameworks?

I have a loads of information on this regarding drupal which I'll talk about if anyone is interested.

Thoughts on CMS's versus bespoke? Is the learning curve for the CMS development offset by the community, patching/bug catches/security updates? The freedom of bespoke (or reinvent the wheel)?

What OS do you deploy on?

Lately I've been using Debian 5, but I really like the look of OpenSuse in combination with the open build service. The prospect of having a ready to roll ISO with apache, ssl, memcached, varnish, git etc preconfigured plus a few other custom things is very attractive. Get the hosting service to load up the ISO on my VPS and push my site using git.

What the fastest web stack going at the minute? How much do you factor in the server processor/RAM costs regarding the stack you use?

you guys sound surprised that a company as ****ty as paypal would have a ****ty product with ****ty docs and ****ty support. what's up with that?

Paypal is OK I don't think it's ****ty tbh. Could be miles better but the whole IPN thing has always worked really well for everything I've written with it and it has a great customer reach.

Paypal sucks on so many levels. I guess I'm biased because I got my identification stolen because of their lack-luster security.

Unfortunately, I ~still~ have to use them to get paid by certain companies and that makes me sad. I can't tell you how many times I had problems withdrawing and receiving money because of their new-found love of hyper-vigilant security.

You'll see, trust me: they suck suck suck unless you actually enjoy calling them once a week. There has been many times where I went to spend money off the card only to get declined and ~still~ get my account billed. They offer a "credit" until their "invesitigation" is over. Oh yeah, using my PayPal card to pay for gas only to get declined is something I look forward to all the time. Problems withdrawing money from the ATM? Check. Why not use PayPal to transfer money to the bank account? Do you want to wait 2 months for your money? I didn't think so.

I have several more complaints, but they aren't worth listing here. It's not like Paypal is so huge that you need to put that on your site. People can't use PayPal unless they have a bank account anyway, so there is really no benefit to receiving funds via PayPal over Visa/Mastercard/Amex, especially when those cards offer superior speed, security, fraud protection, et. al. The entire premise of paying and receiving money via your email account should give you pause from a security standpoint.

I just want to make it clear that I really hate PayPal even though I am a reluctant costumer.

I actually wasn't being facetious. When I think academic programming, I think of a fixation on algorithms and complexity, of Knuth's concept of provably correct code, to the exclusion of interface, usability, maintainability. Big O notation is a great tool if you need it... but in the real world, most of the time, if you have a tricky algorithm to use you're just going to use a library. And in fact, only fools rewrite their own in cases such as cryptographic algorithms.

And on top of that you have stuff like this going on.

Anyone know any good 2D sprite artists/animators? I'm looking for some, please PM me if you know any good ones!

I don't want to get into another debate about academic programming, but I have two main comments:

1. The assumption that universities exclude "interface, usability, maintainability". I had courses on all of these things (including a 3 semester sequence on good design). Obviously it's not going to cover everything but its a lot easier to master a subject when you've gotten a solid introduction to the basic ideas in a field.

2. I've never met a good programmer that didn't have a solid understanding of basic Big-O analysis. Not necessarily the terminology, theory, or advanced analysis - but things like being able to tell you that a functions run time will depend on the linear growth of the input variable. This is something that is easy to pick up in an academic environment (it's 1st year stuff) but can easily be missed by self-taught programmers.

I had a bizzare thing on my website today, a single Russian IP downloading our 13MB download ~500 times (6.5gb). Downloads would be requested in bursts around 6 seconds apart. Any ideas why anyone would want to do this? Is this an attack? (If so I don't get what it's trying to achieve?)

world's worst DoS? scam by your ISP to extract more bandwidth and hence more $$$ from you?

everyone in russia is a bot anyway so i wouldn't worry about it .

edit: sorry, you're english. i meant to say "more £££".

Could be a 'kid' playing around with DoS software.

how did you find this out? i ask, because if something like this happened to me, i dont' know that i would ever notice. what logs did you check?

For each download of the file I wrote a script that logs the IP, request date etc basic details. I just store it in the db. (The file is served via a handler so I can do this) It's pretty important as a signal for how healthy our website is and is a good growth statistic to show any potential investors later down the line.

Scheme is a great language.

Emacs. is. just. HORRIBLE!
In this day and age, there is no good reason to use a text-editor that you can't use a mouse to highlight an area.

Downloaded Dr Racket, which was Dr Scheme and find that I can now have a love affair with Lisp's minimal descendent.

Nice! Great choice, on Scheme. I really like it as an introductory programming language. I'd love to use a Lisp-like language for a real project some day.

Edit: Don't bad mouth emacs until you've really given it a decent try. I'm a VI guy, but I won't deny that emacs has great power.

There's no need to use a mouse while writing code. It's a completely extraneous device

http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

watch some code katas done with vim and you will see how much time you waste by highlighting with a mouse. watching some fast people edit with vim is really impressive

that said, i can't be bothered devoting the time to learn it, unless i was certain i would be coding for many years in the future, which i'm not

Dave, not even your PL/SQL thread has marked you a newb as much as this comment

But everyone feels the way you do when learning either emacs or vim. It takes a while to become proficient but never having to leave the keyboard make you much faster.

For the most part, this.

back in my day when i wrote QBASIC code on my laser 286 etc etc

but yeah i generally agree the mouse is a giant pain in the balls. i have been using it less and less as i get older and older.

and i really did learn how to use the x86 architecture on a laser 286! the video card took 4 AA batteries

There is a gui-wrapper for emacs if you really need a mouse. However, even when I am using it, I only use the mouse sporadically. I understand where you are coming from, but if you get a feel for even the basic vi/emacs commands, you will understand why people still use them.

1) become proficient at using CTRL, HOME, END, DEL, SHIFT, arrow keys
2) ?
3) never use the mouse again
4) ?
5) increase coding speed by about 1.4% but gain the ability to laugh at everyone who uses the mouse

meh computing in general is much much faster if you dont use mouse. obviously you have to in certain places (surfing web) but most things are better left to tab / enter or alt / key press imo....

not to mention the physical problems of using the mouse: RSI/Carpal Tunnel

but a trackball helps with that