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Posted by Dr. Blip in Hardware, Hot Topic at 17:52 | Tuesday, February 19. 2008

Toshiba raised the white flag this weekend on HD DVD, essentially ceding the market to the Blu-Ray camp. What do you think? Did they give up too soon? Did the best technology win?

If you're too lazy to comment, at least vote in the survey below in the left column. You might have to scroll down to see it.

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Tools for Writing a Parser

Posted by fred.bertsch in Software at 17:26 | Wednesday, February 13. 2008

People have been writing tools to generate scanners and parsers for decades. YACC is probably the most famous. It was created in the 1970s, and, since it stands for Yet Another Compiler Compiler, it probably wasn't the first attempt at the problem.

YACC is a pain to use, though. It uses a parsing algorithm that has great worst case performance but causes massive headaches for programmers. Essentially, you have to ensure that your grammar conforms to the LARL(1) rules. You'd better know what that means before you use it, too!

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Scriptaculous - InPlaceEditor using Checkboxes

Posted by Andy Koch in Software at 10:56 | Tuesday, February 12. 2008

Last week I posted a question on the "Ruby on Rails: Spinoffs" group - generally a place for ProtoType/Scriptaculous discussions. My post was wondering how to do the InPlaceEditor of Scriptaculous using checkboxes for the form controls. This seems like it could be a derivative of the InPlaceCollectionEditor, after all I have a defined set of choices - some of which may be selected - only I don't want a drop-down for selecting. But as you can see from the post, only one person responded and while I didn't read his response in detail - it sure looks like a lot of code. There is also a Rails plugin, oh - this is for a Rails app - of course, "SuperInPlaceControls" but it's targeted to Rails 2.0, I'm on 1.2 still, and it employs classic Rails javascript helpers - and I'm not such a big fan of those. I prefer to manage, as much as possible, my on-page controls via LowPro behaviors in a standard application.js file.

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Understand the Problem, Then Fix it

Posted by Daniel Walker in Hardware at 16:04 | Wednesday, February 6. 2008

I'm from the PC-Doctor QA lab. I won't mention the name of my former employer here, but I can say that I gathered considerable PC troubleshooting expertise while driving a distinctive black and white vehicle and that I was not involved in law enforcement.

The biggest challenge to successful troubleshooting is to make very sure that you understand as much as possible about problem. When and under what conditions does the problem occur? What environment causes the problem? Ideally, you will be able to reproduce the problem at will. If you can do that, it's a simple thing to fix it and then verify that it is fixed.

However, we all get many problems that we can't reproduce. Sometimes when you are stumped, it's because the problem is just too simple. Try dumbing it down? looking at it from the simpler perspective of a non-technical user. For example: a customer was not getting any display on the monitor, even though the monitor and system were powered up. The tech checked the video card, changed modes and resolution, but finally found that the monitor was not plugged into the back of the computer. Sometimes the environment is the culprit, as in the classic case of a printer that began spewing paper every afternoon. After many on-site visits and replacement parts, a savvy tech finally discovered that the afternoon sun shined through the window at just the right angle to hit the paper sensor for a few minutes every afternoon.

Tools can help you understand problems. Say, for example, that a client says, "My computer is slow and sometimes I notice data missing." He could need more RAM (common problem!), or might have a hard drive problem, or it might be something else entirely. Problems like this can become expensive time sinks if you don't have a good diagnostic tool like PC-Doctor Service Center to quickly confirm suspected hardware problems.

Remember that you can't know everything. Cultivate every source of information you can find, including colleagues, books, and internet sites. You would be amazed at how often you can Google a problem and find a perfect description of how to reproduce it and/or how to fix it!

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Interfaces, Friends, and the .NET Framework

Posted by fred.bertsch in Software at 10:11 | Tuesday, February 5. 2008

The .NET Framework has a lot of really great things in it. I've just started playing with a few corners of it, and I love the amount of stuff that it's got in it. Some things really irritate me, though, and it's a lot more satisfying to talk about that stuff!

C# and the CLR make it really hard to hide information. First of all, the .NET framework is built around inheritance. Everything is inherited from something else, and if you want to extend an object, then you're going to inherit, too. Inheritance hides almost nothing, but you already knew that, and, presumably, you don't use it as much as the programmers in Redmond.

That's not what I want to talk about here. I'm going to complain about the member access rights that C# and the CLR support.

In C#, there are four different member access rights. The usual private, protected, and public member access rights are supported. They also support "internal", which is the same as not exporting a function from your DLL in C++. The CLR supports one additional one called "Family and Assembly" which is the same as a protected member that is not exported from the DLL.

It's missing two extremely useful access rights, however. Java's package level scope and C++'s friendship. Both of these allow a programmer to grant access to a limited number of functions and classes. Java's package level scope is the optimal one, in my opinion. This allows a programmer to give limited access to a limited number of classes. Friendship allows complete access to individual classes and functions.

In the C# world, you're expected to grant public access to functions that should only be used by one other function outside your class. You're supposed to be happy about it, too!

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