Created after the Coding Help category, this is for other serious requests for help that don't fit in there (or any other subcategories that may be created.)
Does anyone here know gRPC / protobuf?
I'm passing large-ish chunks of data between my own client and server and have implemented streaming because the overall dataset to pass is larger than the max message size (default is 4 MB, I know I could increase that but probably not to the point where it would cover all my use cases, so streaming it is in any case).
The issue I have is how to find out what size of messages to send in my streaming implementation?
Searching the interwebz I can find tons of discussions on how to set the maximum message size when starting the server, but this is not what I want. What I want is querying an existing server to find out what is that maximum size. Either my google-fu is weak, or nobody ever discusses that?
Currently I need this in two places and in one I've hard-coded a 4 MB (minus a small margin for headers etc.) limit. In the other one I've been smarter and implemented a horrible hack where I parse the string from the error message (!!!) to read the maximum size.
I find Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror and Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen invaluable for programming and general tech advice. Rands in Repose is also worth a read, again from a techincal point of view.
I'm more of a casual gamer so I've no good blogs for you but happy hunting.
@morbiuswilters said:Speaking of beer that is pleasurable to drink...
The Boston-area What-The-Fuckers should get together and engage in the sport we are best at: no, not baseball, drinking! Who would be interested in meeting for beers sometime? (I promise I'm not a felon or anything -- the charges were thrown out on a technicality.) I know there are a few of you from around here, so if you are interested, post here and we'll see if we can work something up. Thanks!
Well I'll be free this sunday if anyone else is available. I'm gonna be out shooting and drinking tonight and tomorow so sunday is open. And just to clarify by shooting I mean photo. And yes I know its father's day.
"http://forums.thedailywtf.com/Forums/" Wait, forums.../Forums? Are you kidding? Yes, we are kidding. It is an elaborate joke. @nerdler said:Can you put the links to the previous/next entry at the bottom of each post as well as the top? My scrolling finger is getting tired.
@BeenThere said:Nelle I heard you have a thing for farm animals, but feel free to set the record straight if that's not true. Only if those farm animals are female shaped, two legged and preferably redheads ... Like in "wow that farmgirl is a real animal" ... @BeenThere said:Testing if Nelle actually blacklisted JB and, if so, I am assuming this post will never be seen by him(her,it?). you are right ... it was by pure chance that i debugged the script using this thread and saw your post ... ps. somethimes i do feel like "it", but most of the time i'm "him"
@tster said:And I seriously doubt that you read the entire thing in 4 hours.Fair point. I read the whole back-log of posts (not comments) about a year and a half ago when I first found the site. Even that took me the better part of a "work" day.@tster said:maybe more since you couldn't possibly survive a full day of reading that.I'll video demo some of you have free time and don't read at first. (Never Done a lot of text. It's a dog or cat always works good in video. You'll only need to re-enter "rand" to have file size limits or they would market it along.
@bstorer said:@MasterPlanSoftware said:I would like to see the two churches
do epic battle and kill each other.... But that is probably way off in
the future....No kidding. We don't even have buildings that can move, let alone fight one another! You
haven't seen the advance trailers for Transformers 2, then?
A car that turns into a giant space robot fighting a battle against a
church that turns into a giant mecha-Ron L. Hubbard, with eye-beams!
@ammoQ said:True. If you are lucky enough that your coworkers have produced a large asset of good code, and you are not one of those write-only-programmers, you can pick up about any language in little time. The problem is that this is exactly how WTFs get spread around in a projects - not necessarily by newbies to the language, but by newbies to the project. If the codebase is big (and not organized and documented magnificently), pretty much everyone ends up reinventing a lot of wheels.
@ulzha said:In Latvian the prime choice actually is the guy who dubbed MacGyver series. Very distinctive, and doesn't leave place for wondering about directions. And can also whip up a 6 lane super-highway out of a couple walking paths, an alley, and a couple stop signs.
@Nandurius said:@zzo38 said:http://zzo38computer.cjb.net/xym/xymasm.flog Should I even bother to ask what language that is written in? n/m. I should have known not to..
FlogScript - Esolang
Wow. That makes sed look like downright verbose.
Control characters, and NUL are pretty hard to write in some languages that do text IO and won't survive some IO media. That's the first WTF. ASCII NUL may be impossible to read over a cooked stdio FILE because it typically counts as an alternate line terminator as well. While I appreciate your use of real numbers in the spec files, (the telnet RFC for example buries the code for IAC at the bottom of the document), it's a little hard to read when you really mean (NUL Service-Code Function-Id) as a three byte sequence. Abstract a little. Probably the biggest WTF is that you can already do this with AWK (to files, pipes, and TCP sockets) and even specify your own commands. The code looks pretty average for a python app of that size, but you'd be better off not scrunching it all onto the module top. How about making a stateful PSOX object and invoking it in an if __name__ block? Having comments consisting of debug prints disturbs the eye a bit. Admittedly I do this too, but it's a better habit to either explain a bit or be terse. All this having been said, thinking out these kinds of things, even as an exercise, improves your skills. Sometimes you do a little project and learn a good deal, even if the outcome is pretty mundane.I say, go on learning wheels by inventing them! You might be the only person nearby who *really* understands why they come out round some day.
@MarcB said:If only there was some kind of a device that RELIABLY indicated a vehicle's fuel levels. Perhaps a gauge of some sort. With a little light that comes on when levels are low. Whoever invents that will own the world.Fixed that for you.(and yes I know the original was sarcasm)
@davidyorke said:I think both are really important. I agree, and you'll have to pick what's best for your specific instance. Over here, we have lectures that are accompanied by weekly assignments (sometimes mandatory, sometimes optional.) I think that for a lecture on operating systems, the pre-build OS "Box of LEGO bricks" is the best choice, as it allows you to focus on a single concept at a time, and assign work that is independent of previous assignments.When you're building an OS from scratch, the above mentioned theory should already be known, as the focus will be on the actual hardware interface and "making that damn task switching work without corrupting registers" rather than "evaluating performance of different scheduling strategies." The "from scratch" approach also requires a LOT more time, why is why it's a "lab" here, meaning that it has a lot more time allocated to it than a lecture would.@davidyorke said:Although I think some hiring managers might be put off by someone who only did the "from scratch" option. It may be indicitive, in their minds, of a "wheel re-inventor". I'm going to have to disagree strongly here. This isn't re-inventing the wheel, nobody has any expectation of actually *using* the resulting operating system. It's merely a teaching tool -- a very effective one at that -- just like writing "hello world" programs, quicksort, heapsort, and other algorithms, or any of the other stuff you tend to do while studying computer science.I'm sure that anyone in a related field (embedded systems work, OS/driver development, etc) would appreciate that someone's already familiar with this specific kind of low level work.
@Grovesy said:Though, I am a big fan of Tortoise, I have to hates in this world... one is integrated source control into Visual Studio.. for some reason it feels so clunky and 1/2 the time the plugin is so badly coded that it hands VS.net. The other is thick client source conrol IDE's where you have to go in and manullay checkout files and check them back-in... for me, the thick client seperate IDE is the lesser of the two evils.. I would rather use command line toosl....So when I found Tortoise and Subversion... I could just navigate within Explorer, find the director I wanted to check changed in.. right click.. .commit... comment... go... no conflicts. done.. (and it's all transactional on a changelist.. which is oddly enough if you have used things like VSS or any Serna product such as Dimmensions a luxury!) Ya, perforce integration with VS was so annoying I turned it off. It must be that the API for source control plugins is a bit gross, otherwise somebody would write one that works well. I notice that Perforce' visual studio plugin doesn't pick up the current clientspec correctly, causing all sorts of woe.p4 command line and p4win are perfectly analogous to svn command line and tortoise, when you're using 'out of the box' perforce. They're good and also don't assume too much. I'd say the main problem I have with perforce is as yours; that you have to be online to 'check out' a file. Perforce' documentation and interface encourage integration with other software, and programmers get complacent and call it from inappropriate places (even the UI). Imagine the sorrow when 100 artists spend an hour with an empty white rectangle where the art tool should be, waiting for a dead router to be reconfigured and put in place, so that perforce can set the 'checked out' flag on a file in the server. Now imagine the further woe when the router comes back and all 100 do it at once :-). Despite this, network outages are rare enough, and if you don't write yourself into such a dreadful corner, the situation isn't bad.
Must be one of those numerous people I see every few weeks asking [url=http://www.google.com/search?q=build+a+virtual+pet+site&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a]Can someone help me plz make a virtual pet site?[/url]
@upsidedowncreature said: I've got experience of C# and I'm learning Java; the biggest hurdle is figuring out what's in the framework (is it called that in Java?) and where. Nope, what you mean are (most likely) just the standard libraries. Frameworks in general do not "contain" things.
@morbiuswilters said:
@bstorer said:
I don't know that any employer I've ever interviewed for has asked for my portfolio. I think they mostly expect that if you worked on it elsewhere, you can't show it to them anyway.
I think providing a URL with your cover letter or resume would be a good move, though. And I have been asked for code samples of previous work I've done, so have some handy can't hurt.
I think we need to see some of the ideas the OP has to be able to offer suggestions, though. I have no idea what his strengths/weaknesses are, what technologies he's working with and what type of position he is applying for.
Morbiuswilters and I have had similar experiences in interviews. Potential employees would like to see example of your apps or sample code. Everything that I've made lately has been for internal use only. That is why I've decided to create a portfolio section on my site.
Currently I am not planning on applying for any new positions and I would put myself as a mid-level developer. My goal is in 2-3 years to be a senior-level developer.
There are 2 projects I am thinking about making:
1. "Average Moe's Gym" would be a web app where users could create workouts, track their diet, manage their gym membership, and they could also buy products(I may not do the last 2 parts). Average Moe's Gym is a fictious company. I'm basing it off of Average Joe's Gym from the movie Dodgeball.
2. The other project would be a college & career chooser application. The data for this application would come from this site: http://online.onetcenter.org/
These apps would be coded asp.net. I might do one in C# and the other in VB.net. I'm also thinking testing out Asp.net MVC on one of them. I'd like to 1-2 more apps in ASP.net. I'm thinking later on I will do the same thing but for different languages.
There's a "mashups tab"? Good thing you didn't mention that in the title or SS would land on this thread like a bag of hammers. As it is, the thread title brings some pretty horrific images into my mind.
@sniederb said:In my case, we're developing standard software, so there is no single customer we're dealing with. Rather, our internal requirement department acts as a customer.Yeah, but the same thing pretty much applies. I always treat the rest of the company as my customer and let them worry about the end-customer. @sniederb said:In such a scenario, you might be under the impression that we still have a design, a construction and a test phase; but really, we have a 'build a prototype'-phase followed by a code-and-fix phase. How do we prevent the slip to such a "process"?Just make it clear that every late requirements change pushes the project back and may end up deferring the feature until a future release. It sounds like most of the people in your org are pretty comfortable with the development cycle but some things are just slipping due to a lack of rigor. Sometimes it takes a reminder like a delayed release to remind people why up-front requirements are a good idea, but it doesn't sound like you have a big political battle ahead of you.
@jetcitywoman said:...
Which kind of relates back to the topic title: our spineless management who lets customers walk all over us. Oh, and a side comment: yearly maintenance fees should cover *reasonable* amounts of tech support. Customers who try to suck your staff into the role of their own full-time help desk should pay extra, IMHO. Either that or the support organization/policies need to be reworked somehow. Are your support prices clearly documented? Would you have scope to increate the charge for that one particular customer? The company I work for was trying to get rid of a customer so upped their rates by 35%, and they ended up paying it!Yeah, you're right about the 'reasonable' bit, there should always be that kind of clause in contracts, unfortunatly it's a trap a lot of companies get sucked into, desperatly worrying that they might loose a customer whilst ignoring the fact that the financial rewards aren't actually /that/ great. The company I used to work at was a great example, they would always charge very little (otherwise customers might go elsewhere! The horror!!), but then projects would invariably overrun (as we had to do several at once due to not charging enough) and customers would pay even less as we were late.
@MasterPlanSoftware said:
You have to admit though, it would be hilarious to find a woman that would go on a blind date with SS and record the whole thing. It would be like the most awful blind date show ever...
The problem is that Spectate swamp might break the camera. And certainly any woman who stayed for more than a minute would have to be so hideous as to break the camera.
@mfah said:Time to jump ship. If they're looking to charge money for something as basic as bug fixes, they're in trouble!
Actually that alone isn't bad, the fact that the service agreement apparently states that they will receive bug-fixes as part of that agreement and they refuse to push them out without more money is the WTF.
If you think about developing WinForms applications, you might want to have a look at dotGNU portable.net too. This is a project similar to Mono, though it receives less attention in the media; last time I looked (well, some years ago, *cough*) its WinForms support worked much better than Mono's.Considering IDEs, Visual Slickedit supports C# well and is also available for Linux. Though the USD 299,- pricetag might be a bit too high for your CD catalogue project ;-)
Owner of file gets 'not owner' error for chgrp
Hi Folks, I know that changing users and groups is pretty basic admin, but this one has got me stumped. When I try to change the group of a file for which I am the owner for, it still gives me a 'Not | The UNIX and Linux Forums
@chebrock said:Sir, I feel your lack of appropriate emoticon use is making it difficult for me to understand your sense of humor. I shouldn't have stripped the orange rule :/. Anyways, refer to the "Medical WTF" thread. It's the rule about talking to MPS.
@pitchingchris said:Did it keep rebooting and throwing a bunch of unknown error codes along with some audible garbage ?
Nah. It said something about an incompatible format.
@chebrock said:The last paragraph of the 3D printer article is priceless: Perhaps people will eventually use the printer to replicate Seagate drives, since those are only used to store pr0n.
@russ0519 said:I've been running VMWare server on server and workstations and it performs well. How would VMware Player be any lighter? I've had machines where server was really painful to use, but player worked very well. I'm assuming that there's some extra overhead that server has that can affect certain machines more than others, but it can be very noticeable.
@Lingerance said:@AbbydonKrafts said:Now you know. And, you can do like I did to clear out the list. click, back, click, back, click, back...Middle click X 40. Right click current tab. Close all other tabs. Refresh. GOTO Middle click X 40.You can also go to each subsection ("Sidebar," "General Discussion," etc.), click the "More Options" button at the bottom, and mark them all as read.
@flop said:void qsort(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size,
int(*compar)(const void *, const void *));
The library routing takes a function pointer to do the actual comparision - I'd expect that Java has some similar way to sort arrays or lists, where the actual comparision has to be in some data-dependent routine. Java does this via that Comparable and Comparator interfaces, i.e. either the objects to be compared have to know how to compare each other (most of the stuff you usually sort, like Strings and numeric types know this), or you have to supply an object that knows how to compare those objects.It's a bit more wordy than function pointers, but essentially the same thing. However, this is not relevant for the code benchmarked above - both the Java and the C++ code sort ints using direct comparisons. @flop said: I'd just think that a normal java runtime wouldn't normally
include a fully optimizing JIT compiler (although that's of course
possible) - so that your Java performance is not just dependent on your
hardware (as C is), but on your local java installation, too.A normal desktop or server Java runtime (almost exclusively supplied by Sun or IBM) indeed does include a very sophisticated, fully optimizing JIT compiler. Sun's started doing this with its Hotspot engine 9 years ago and has continually improved its performance.Of course, the situation is rather different on embedded systems. Then again, embedded systems nowadays often have dozens of Megabytes of RAM and CPUs running at several hundred MHz as well.
@MasterPlanSoftware said:Have you SEEN half the wtfs here? I would say ATMs can be stricken from that list. I've programmed them, and I agree. In fact, the first big WTF-plagued company I mentioned above was an ATM maker. The basic architecture was questionable, the development process was barely existent, and the management did nothing to improve this. The biggest WTF was probably the issue with one quite large and central in-house API library that was a core part of the ATM software. There were two sub-divisions of development, one for cash ATMs and one for non-cash machines (statement printers, terminals for doing money transfers and the like). At one point the development leaders for the two divisions disagreed intensely on new features for this API library. Management let them get away with forking the library and doing further development of it separately. Imagine the fun when a few years later banks started to merge the cash and non-cash functionalities into one machine... I'd be careful about judging the ATM screenshots though. Especially the one which showed the debug option. If it were taken on a development/test machine, that would not constitute a WTF. In fact, I could have taken all kinds of wild ATM screenshots when I worked there - too bad I didn't know about this site back then. An ATM running Doom, now that would have been something...
Yeah, that's one thing I thought of after I posted my last reply. We probably should switch to the business model that Taxcut and Quicken use where they stop supporting older versions of the product after about 5 years or whatever. I've read on blogs like Ed Foster's Gripeline that this really ticks off your customer base, though, so I'm not sure it's the right approach. On the other hand, you really can't expect to support old code forever. (Or actually, maybe the problem with those examples isn't the support cessation as much as when they deliberatey BREAK functionality to force the user's to upgrade.)
Although we've rewritten our product using modern technologies, we haven't addressed support for it yet. Not that I can see anyway. I don't work for those groups so I may be wrong, but it seems like customers go straight to the project manager or lead developer. Just like they do for our group. I don't think we (as a company) have fully figured out how to support our software, which is where I'd like to fit in when I move up to management.
I think it's kind of interesting that you're the only one who is replying to this thread. I do value your comments. But I wonder if this indicates how very few people here are support/maintenance programmers or if it's just a lack of interest. Anybody else want to chime in?
Also, this doesn't address the topic, but you mentioned it, so I thought I'd throw this back just to make your skin crawl. The Cobol/Assembler product has always since the beginning been modified at customer request. Part of the reason it's still around and still so loved by our customer base is that very reason. If they're willing to pay for it, we're willing to do it. So no two customers have exactly the same system, we long ago lost the ability to point to one version as the "base". Amazingly (or perhaps appallingly to our management), the "post-sales enhancement" business has always been so lucrative for us that we haven't been able to drop it. The product been astoundingly stable despite all that, since it's lasted so long. But perhaps the reason it's seen as stable is that when we do introduce errors in our modifications (and we do, yes), we're lightening quick to fix them. The customers don't have to wait for the next release of the product. We dial into their computer and fix it asap. But of course that's the old paradigm. We definitely do NOT do that for the newer products. So the challenge for me personally, is to bring my mindset away from that old paradigm where I'm used to working, up to the new software development and maintenance models.
@Lingerance said:@Spectre said:Seriously, fixed-width layout? In a forum?When is a fixed layout useful? It always looks ugly to me.
Me too, I just thought that in would be obviously inappropriate in this case.
OTOH, it can make sense if the content has fixed width. E.g. if [url=http://icanhascheezburger.com/]ICHC[/url] used all the available width, there'll be a lot of superfluos whitespace, especially on widescreen monitors.
@ZiggyFish said:Just wondering what you guys think about OOXML and weather it should be an ISO standard? Figured I'd tag this onto the convo - just got posted on Groklaw today.Basically it boils down to:Microsoft's "we won't sue" promise only covers FULLY compliant implementations of OOXML. If you forget to cross a T or dot an I somewhere in your code and don't implement something properly, Microsoft can sue you.OOXML is supposedly the official and final specification of Office 2007's file formatsOffice 2007 produces files which are not compliant with OOXML by default. '07's files are a derivative of OOXML, but they are NOT OOXML. Face it, anyone who's trying to create an OOXML parser is doing so to interoperate with Office and Office users.Since you're trying to comply with what Office '07 spits out, you cannot by definition comply with the OOXML specs, which leaves you in violation of Microsoft "we won't sue" promise.
