aarku - Slashdot User

Submission + - Are you proud of your code? 6

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09, 2007 @07:35PM

An anonymous reader writes: I have a problem and I am hoping /. group therapy is the cure, so get on with the +5 comments, post haste! I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my work; specifically, my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Documentation, requirements, automated tests? Does not exist. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it? This picture, which many of you have already seen, captures several project failure modes. It would be humorous if it weren't so depressingly true. I enjoy programming and have from a young age (cut my teeth on BASIC on an Apple IIe). I have worked for companies large and small in a variety of languages and platforms. Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding and the project is abandoned. Like many young and idealistic university graduates I hoped to spend my life programming passionately, but ten years later I look in the mirror and see a whore. I'm just doing it for the money. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices? I'm not talking about the methodology-of-the-week, I'm referring to good old fashioned advice like keeping SQL out of the UI layer. For the big prize: has anyone convinced their superiors that the customer isn't always right and saying no once in awhile is the best course of action? Thanks in advance for your helpful advice.

Submission + - Quake Ported to Nintendo DS

Submitted by Croakyvoice on Sunday February 18, 2007 @01:41PM

Croakyvoice writes: Simon Hall has ported the classic First Person Shooter Quake over to the Nintendo DS

the program, working state and game data have been squeezed into the four megabytes of main memory it requires either shareware or commercial pak files, Amiga and PC paks have been successfully used total conversions and mods should work, assuming they respect the tiny memory size networking currently has been removed, but will return at a later date.

Submission + - Women selling eggs

Submitted by PhilipMarlowe9000 on Sunday February 18, 2007 @12:36PM

PhilipMarlowe9000 writes: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,20 15789,00.html "Women will be paid to donate their eggs for scientific research in a landmark decision that will prompt a fierce backlash from leading figures in the medical world."

Submission + - New Blender.org Website and Blender 2.43 Released

Submitted by

Jasonlan

on Sunday February 18, 2007 @11:45AM

Jasonlan writes: "The http://www.blender.org/ website has been fully remade and the New Blender 2.43 Released.
Matt Ebb(Elephants Dream) and Bart Veldhuizen(BlenderNation) have been busy creating the new Blender.org Website.

"The 2.43 release could be nicked the "Multi" version; with multi-resolution Meshes, multi-level UV, multi-layer images and multi-pass rendering, to name some highlights."

Blender 3D 2.43 Sports a new Sculpted Mesh, by Giuseppe Canino
Modifier stack upgrades, new modifiers: Edgesplit and Displace and UV Project
Sculpt Modeling, Multiresolution Mesh, Retopo, editing Mesh topology, Fluid Dynamics supporting animated Objects, Multiple UV's and vertex colors, Image Painting and Face Duplicators.

Animation has improved Walk Cycle Modifiers, Proxy Objects, for local control over referenced data from Libraries.

Render features: alpha masks, node shader speedup, tangents and normal maps, Irregular Shadow Buffers, Shadow buffer, Halfway average, Render Baking, Render Passes

Compositing has improved UV Map, Index Mask and Z-Combine, Defocus, Matte Nodes.

Multi-layer images, Sequence images, flipbooks added.

New physics examples including constraints and compound objects.

All in All another GREAT Release!"

Submission + - Smart iWeb Publishing with iWebFlinger

Submitted by Anonymous Cow-Ward on Sunday February 18, 2007 @04:03AM

Anonymous Cow-Ward writes: http://www.shullian.com/iWebFlinger/iWebFlinger.ht ml
iWebFlinger allows an iWeb user to choose a site to upload, an ftp server to upload to, and to optionally insert a favicon and your own html code. Best of all, your ftp passwords are secured via OS X's Keychain.
Whats more, once you set up the source folder (which is the folder you publish your site to), and ftp server, the iWebFlinger daemon automatically checks for changes to the source folder. Then it finds only those files which have actually changed (not just their creation/modification times since iWeb changes them all), and uploads them.

Submission + - Microsoft blasts IBM in open letter

Submitted by carlmenezes on Thursday February 15, 2007 @08:58PM

carlmenezes writes: Arstechnica has an article on Microsoft's open letter to IBM that adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: "When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats." In contrast, the authors charge that IBM "led a global campaign" urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright.
Could MS actually be getting a taste of their own medicine?

Submission + - Possible 25 million year old frog found

Submitted by dispatch on Thursday February 15, 2007 @03:47PM

dispatch writes: A frog was found that researchers in Mexico City are saying could be 25 million years old! According to the article, "The chunk of amber containing the 0.4-inch frog was uncovered by a miner in southern Chiapas states in 2005 and was bought by a private collector, who lent it to scientists for study." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though the scientists will be allowed to drill into the rock at the owner's request which means we're going to have to wait a while longer before we can make Jurassic Park a reality...

Submission + - Female Gamers have More Sex

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15, 2007 @01:50PM

An anonymous reader writes: A Belgian research firm found that girls who never play computer games have less sex than girls who do play games on their PC or gaming consoles. Breeze says the girls who do play games have sex 4.3 times a week, while the girls who never play games only go to bed 3.2 times a week.

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