I need to access all the posts from a blogspot blog in chronological fashion. I've thus had to rely almost solely on the updated-min and updated-max parameters provided by the Blogspot API.
However, I've found that the accuracy of these two parameters leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes I'll query for a feed using a particular updated-min but the feed won't 'go back in time' far enough. It will stop short by a few posts. I've been compensating for this particular issue by minusing 3 hours and adding 7 seconds to each updated-min. That's somehow been able to fix it. Now the feeds I get are acceptable. I'm just wondering if this is a known issue or whether or not I'm needlessly overcomplicating a simple problem.
Thanks in advance fellas.
incidentally this is my first question ever on here, so if this question doesn't fit here, or I've committed some sort of egregious offence then it was all done by mistake.
A week later, and my 'hack' is still reeling in acceptable feeds. I don't know how long this is going to hold up. I'm still really disappointed in blogspot api's unreliability and the general lack of info concerning this issue on the web. if anybody ever finds this q on the web, i'd be glad to hear what your thoughts are on this.
Related
i want to discuss about a problem: i've lately had discussions with some customers to which i've asked money for projects written in Drupal: when they know that i use a CMS they immediately say that they want to pay less "because I use a CMS".
I develope since 15 years and i've made many many projects without using a CMS and by using my libraries; i'm lately using a CMS but this does not mean that i don't write code ...
Which could be the best response to give to a similar question?
Ciao
c.
Explain it to them very simply.
If you have to install and configure any Content Management System, that takes you more time and therefore costs a bit more than a static website. You need be as transparent as possible when you detail the costs, so tell them how much time will be spend designing the theme, how much time will be spend configuring Drupal for their website and so on.
It would be interesting to ask them why they think it should be cheaper, as you will then understand what misconception they have about CMS. You can then explain things better to them so that they understand what using a CMS actually means.
I would say that they are paying for your expertise and experience, regardless of the tools you use. If they want it cheaper, they can ask someone else. The CMS helps to add stability, security and expandability to what they would get if they had a custom solution.
Plus, if it was all custom code it would be extremely difficult to hire someone else to take over if, God forbid, you were hit by a bus. The CMS gives THEM more options.
I would agree that you should explain where the money is going, in general terms, but you shouldn't have to justify every detail. Otherwise how do you itemize "dealing with stupid customers who need their password reset for the millionth time" or "explaining the difference between a 100x100 thumbnail JPG and a 3600x2700 BMP". It could also open the door to a lot of haggling that will just waste your time and frustrate you.
I had a client who asked me over and over again the same kind of question.
If your client doesn't perceive the value you're adding to an Open Source application then give them the source code and point them to the documentation. Tell them to build it themselves.
I'm wondering building a website like StackOverFlow (approximately the same features using ASP.NET ) How much Work-power and time does it take in your opinion .
My boss has asked me to estimate for work-power , time , cost and suitable technologies .
I appreciate any direction .
I believe that the site would take plenty of time to implement. If I'd have to pull a guess of thin air I'd say somewhere between 800-1200 man hours.
Then comes the setting up servers, ensuring scalability, testing, fine-tuning algorithms.
So depending on how good you or your team is it could take anywhere up to a year to write something like this.
Disclaimer: I am just talking based on 10 years of experience with web-development. But I could be COMPLETELY wrong.
Buddy, there is a website similar to this called http://startups.com
You can probably ask this question there. Its specifically designed to answer questions like this. Whereas stackoverflow is intended for programmers and programming related questions. I see this question being asked here a bit isolated.
People come to this site and think wow stackoverflow this is an easy site to create.
I mean all it is is post a question then people submit an answer. I think that is a big misconception. Maybe just maybe the database is quite simple, a question has multiple answers and an answer has multiple comments associate with it. If you dig deep into it the questions and answers could actually be stored in the same table...with some indicator as to whether it is a question or an answer. But to answer your question, I don't think it is as simple as one might think. It's definitely not difficult in the logical sense (it's doable). What I am saying is it is more then a one week job :).
it is not that hard to do the site. the design is nice but simple. the engine isint THAT complicated (or so it looks). biggest problem is the load that falls on this site and the hard task of moderating/maintaining it. and the best part of it is the idea ;)
I think that the diffuclt of stackoverflow is to get community (very good quality community, not like yahoo answers).
Not only that, also use cases from stack overflow are pretty cool and adapt very well to get a good community.
About work-power a good skilled programmer could start it, if at full time like a month or less could do it. BUT! the programmer should have the idea,not a freelance or something like that, freelance or slave monkey coder could take a more time to do it.
But there are more problems, like money to invest at very begin of the app for example in hosting / server power costs.
Also stack overflow, could be compared to forums...its like a forum evoled or something similar.
Someone said that requires a lot of work power, I disagree if you start something to get the best scability,etcs (like project of big scale) you are going to death of that project.
Start something simple, very simple when there are scability problems start with that but no at begin!
Probably longer than you expect:
Code: It's Trivial (by Jeff Atwood)
Let's say I've come up with what I think is a clean and elegant solution to a common generic requirement in coding projects. I'm happy to share my code but my main motivation for publishing it would be to get feedback from a quality audience about my solution and to determine if it has been done better elsewhere, if it could be done better, if it is buggy, etc. The normal sorts of reasons a programmer would want feedback for.
The Code Project - ugly forum/comment interface and a serious pain when you want to update the article after it has been categorised. Can also be horribly slow at times.
CodePlex - not really a general code community; people would have to know what they're looking for in advance to find my code.
It would be fantastic if something like a simplified version of The Code Project were produced by the Stack Overflow team with a view to allow users to show off pieces of code and get feedback, thus leading to general skills improvement of everyone participating. A bit like Scott Hanselman's Weekly Source Code blog posts, but with more of a communal purpose. In the mean time, however, what do you suggest?
It would be fantastic if something like a simplified version of The Code Project were produced by the Stack Overflow team with a view to allow users to show off pieces of code and get feedback, thus leading to general skills improvement of everyone participating.
There's now a sister Q&A website exactly for this purpose — Code Review.
You could post your solutions here, as an answer to a question describing the problem that it proposes to solve.
You're likely to get at least a little feedback, and see other edits/version of a similar solution.
This question is not coming from a programmer. (obviously) I currently have a programmer making a website for me and I am realizing that he isn't going to completely work out.
He has already done quite a bit of work and the site is almost there but I need someone who is better to take it the rest of way. The site has been done in asp.net and I am wondering how hard it would be for a more experienced programmer to take over and finish the work he has already done?
In general, is it hard for an asp.net programmer to come in towards the end of a project and fix what needs to be fixed?
There is five different pages on the site with two overlays for a signup and sign in. (Five pages with many different versions) There is a database and client-side scripting. AJAX was also used. It's a site somewhat similar to SO only not quite as complex and about something completly different. I would say think of something that falls somewhere between Stackoverflow and Craig's List. Thats all I can say now as I don't know the technical words.
You'll probably find that the new programmer will want to rewrite most of the code from scratch. If you are on a tight deadline or tight budget and can't accept a complete rewrite then you will need to hire someone that is not just good at writing good code, but good at reading, refactoring and improving bad code. It is two completely different skillsets and the second is much rarer. Depending on the quality of the existing code (and I'm assuming here that it is not good), your new programmer may end up rewriting much of the existing codebase just to understand what is going on.
Depends on how good the previous programmer was and on the complexity of the project. It might be anything between trivial (well commented source, some high-level docs, unit tests, modular or simple project), to "this crap needs a complete rewrite" (no docs, custom "let's try this" solutions, etc.). If you're not a developer it might be really hard to tell. And other people won't be able to answer without more details.
I'm no asp.net expert, but I suspect the ease with which the replacement will be able to finish the project will depend mostly on just how bad a job the first programmer actaully did. Bad code is painful to fix in any language. :)
A good idea will be to have them work together,for say, a week or two. This will help the new programmer get some much needed training about your current system.
You may find that although the site is almost complete, the successor will have to spend more time than anticipated when performing alterations, as this person will have the mental model of the software that the current developer has. Hence the need to next developer to "re-write" the code base.
If you can, you'll want to ensure that the code base that you have built is maintainable. That is, the solution is built in such a way that it can support alterations easily. As Mark Byers suggested, you'll want to get someone who can not only program but can also re-work your existing code with the goal being that someone else will inevitably implement future changes. If the software is something that you need to keep working for an extended period you'll want to make the investment in making sure that it new functionality can be added easily.
Remember this experience described at The Daily WTF. Take appropriate precautions.
Generally if the site is set up in some sort of standard fashion then another programmer should be able to pick it up easily. if the existing programmer did things to obscure the code then it will be hard for another programmer to pick it up. Basically the question is how readable is the code?
If the current programmer is unwilling to communicate the true status of the project in a professional, non-technical manner, then give him an ultimatum - your way or the highway. Odds are he will be more forthcoming if he knows you mean business. Make sure you have a copy of the latest code before broaching the subject.
It sounds like you are going to end up hiring someone else anyway, especially if you're asking these kinds of questions at this stage, so you might as well go for broke.
As Mark Byers said, it takes a seasoned developer to take someone else's code and resist the urge to "pretty it up" in order to bring the project to a working conclusion!
For various common reasons I wanted to use tracing for my ASP.NET application. Especially since I found out about the possibility to use the Service Trace Viewer tool which allows you to examine your traces in a powerful way.
Since I had never used this trace thing before, I started stuying it. After a while of Google, SO and MSDN I finally have a good idea of how things work. But I also found one very distrubing thing.
When using trace in ASP.NET applications it makes a lot of sense to group the trace messages together by web requests. Especially since one of the reasons I want to use it is for studying performance problems. The above mentioned tool also supports this by using <Corrleation> tags in the generated XML files. Which in turn come from System.Diagnostics.Trace.CorrelationManager. It also allows other nice features like Activity starting/stopping, which provides an even better grouping of trace messages. Cool, right?
I though so too, until I started inspecting where the CorrelationManager actually lived. After all - it was a static property. After some playing around with Reflector I found out something horrifying - it's stored in CallContext! Which is the kind of thing we shouldn't be using in ASP.NET, right?
So... am I missing something here? Is tracing really fundamentally flawed in ASP.NET?
Added: Emm, I'm kinda on the verge of rewriting this stuff myself. I still want to use the neat tool for exploring the traces. Any reason I shouldn't do this? Perhaps there is something better yet? It would be really nice if I got some answers soon. :)
Added 2: A colleague of mine confirmed that this is not just a theoretical issue. He has observed this in the system he's working on. So it's settled. I'm going to build a new little system that does things just the way I want it to. :)
Added 3: Wow, cool... the guys at Microsoft couldn't find anything wrong with using Correlation Manager in ASP.NET. So apparently we're not getting a fix for this bug after all...
You raise a very interesting question. After looking at Reflector, I also see that CorrelationManager is using the CallContext to store the activity id. I have not worked with tracing much, so I can't really speak on behalf of what types of activities it tracks, but if it tracks a single activity across the entire life cycle of a page request, per the article you referenced above, there is a possibility that the activity id could become disassociated with the actual activity. This activity would appear to die halfway through.
HttpContext would seem ideal for tracking an entire page request from beginning to finish, since it will be carried over even if the execution changes to a different thread. However, the HttpContext will not be transferred to your business objects, where as the CallContext would. On a side note, I saw that CallContext can also be transferred when using remoting between client and server apps which is pretty nifty, but in the case of tracking the website, this would not really be all that useful.
If you haven't already, check out this guy's site. The issue described in this article isn't specifically the same issue that Cup(Of T) article mentioned, but it's still pretty interesting. He also provides several very informative links on the page that describe components of the CorrelateionManager.
Unfortunately, I don't really have an answer to your question, but I definitely find the topic interesting and will continue looking into it. So please update this post as you learn more. I'm curious to see what you or others (hopefully someone out there can shed some light on the topic) find while looking into this.
Anyway, good luck. I'll talk to some of the peeps at my work about this and post more later if I find anything.
Chris
OK, so this is how it ended.
My colleague called Microsoft and reported this bug to them. Being certified partners means we get access to some more prioritized fixing queue or something... don't know that stuff. Anyway, they're working on it. Hopefully we'll see a patch soon. :)
In the mean time I've created my own little tracing class. It doesn't support all the bells and whistles that the default trace framework does, but it's just what I need. :) More specifically:
It writes to the same XML format as the default XmlWriterTraceListener so I can use the tool to analyze the logs.
It has a built in log rotation - something my colleague had to do himself on top of XmlWriterTraceListener.
The actual logging is deferred to another thread so performance can be measured more accurately.
Correlations are now stored in HttpContext.Items so ASP.NET threading peculiarities don't affect it.
Happy end, I hope. :)