Advice about forming Hackers Club [closed] - ansi

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I'm thinking of forming a Hackers Club at work. My idea is that we would meet monthly and at each meeting one member would present an interesting hack he had created. (The hacks presented wouldn't necessarily have to be software hacks; they could also be the sort of things you read about in MAKE magazine.)
There would also be ANSI standard pizza, veggie pizza, and beer and pop available for socializing afterward. I'm even thinking of calling the club "TMRC" even though it will have nothing to do with model railroads.
Has anyone ever tried doing something like this or have any advice?

We do this at the office. I call it 'Developer Fight Club'
Usually do challenges of varying difficulty and compete against one another.
At the end of it, we go over our solutions, do code-reviews and discussions, and then use either benchmark results or other people as the deciding factor for who wins.
Typically, the loser has to buy lunch for the winner :)
For ideas of things to do, try stuff from Top Coder, programming questions on Stack Overflow, or even simple "crackme" applications available on different programming sites.
The main rules you'll need to adhere to are:
Make It Fun
Make It Educational Make
Make It Fair
Try to rotate the challenges, so either everyone is really good at the subject, equally bad, or at least mix it up often enough that it doesn't favor one person's skillset too much.

If there are women in your 'hacker' group, consider the advice given in the Howto Encourage Women in Linux. Especially the 'meeting places and times' section.

This is a little beyond what you asked, but there is good info on how to plan for hackers and how to resolve issues among members in a polite, hackerly manner.
Overview:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2133.en.html
Videos:
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/23c3_m4v_1500.html
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2133.html
My favorite is the Tuesday Pattern:
If there's a scheduling conflict such that no day of the week is good for everybody, just hold the event on Tuesday. No exceptions! Simple and fair :-)

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Mixed little Teams - Scrum feasible? [closed]

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We are a team of 30 people, consisting of business managers, developers and software testers.
Our developers are on different projects that have partially different - partially the same products. They help each other where ever they can. As we are all in the same room this is quite easy.
Now I asked why we do not use Scrum.
One answer I got is: Because we are all in the same room and we are helping each other. This goes quite quick and so we might not need scrum. Some of our products are developed only by 2 people. So this would be kind of weird to have a standup meeting with only two of us. Also our colleagues come to work at different times and some are doing home office sometimes.
Is it true that in such a setting Scrum is not feasible or does not bring any value to the company?
Hope for your comments, ideas, thoughts...
Best,
Marc
As literature states (see here) ideal Teamsize is between 4-8. Smaller Teams should use XP.
My persional Opinion is, yes do scrum, even if you are a single developer!
Scrum is about your customer and team and about the way how they communicate. You always talk about your team. But even more is important how is the communication with the "customer/stakeholder", how is the project management done. If you have a customer involved than have a look at these processes if they are also that good as within your dev team. Most of the problems of softwaredevelopment lay here (requirements specifiction, customer expectations, being in budget/time...)
Some aspects you loose not using scrum (and therefore I would suggest using scrum even in a team of 2). You also have to not pick everything but only theparts you like
Backlog (what is planned in the next x weeks) and its documented!
Burndown Chart (where are we standing at the moment)
Continouus improvements (in Scrum you capture impediments, you reflect what was good and bad..)
Daily Scrum (makes even sense for a single person reflecting what I did and do the next day! and what problems happened.)
Most other apsects of scrum...
I am currently starting to implement/use all this for me as a single person/developer and I can only say it makes my work and me better as a programmer. And I am even saying this, being my own customer and PO (I develop my own products/business for me)! And even than it makes sense. The advantage is, that this is with scrum all extremely lightweight (no overhead).
The Scrum Guide suggests a team size of 3-9 people.
There is a reason for the lower limit. Teams smaller than 3 people have less interaction and may lack the skills to deliver a potentially releasable increment in a sprint. It can be a challenge to keep the Product Owner engaged when you have a very small team.
My personal experience is that 4 people is a more realistic lower limit due to the impact of holidays and other absences on a team.
It is also important that a Scrum team is consistent over time. One of the benefits of the Scrum approach is it lets us calculate the capacity of the team and this is complicated by frequently changing team members.
Team members working from home and having different core hours should not be a major problem when working with Scrum. This is common in a lot of Scrum teams and can be mitigated with careful synchronisation and the use of technologies such as messaging applications and voice/video conferencing.

How can I learn advanced game programming? [closed]

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I am Computer Science student, but there is no particular provision or course for learning game programming in our college. I have been studying allegro API for the past year. But I am still unsure how to apply physics in games and realistic games. Its overwhelming and lack of resources is quite confusing.
I think the best thing you can do at this point is simply start making games. They may not be complex or realistic, but getting some experience under your belt will set the stage for learning more complex things. I would disagree that there is a "lack of resources", a plethora of advanced game development tutorials are a web search away. I think the problem here is more related to those resources seeming "overwhelming", as you said.
If your experience studying computer science is anything like mine was, you likely spend a lot of time studying relative to a small amount of time actually doing. Use your interest in game development to get practical experience doing something that interests you. The important thing here is to complete games. When working on simple games, its easy to stop as soon as the bare minimum feature set is completed (I've got a paddle and a bouncing ball -- my pong game is complete!). Take the time to create a title screen, add sounds and music, can work out bugs.
As you gain confidence making smaller games, you'll have a better basis for learning more advanced concepts. It's not a matter of being 'smart' enough to understand complex tutorials, its a matter of being able to retain and absorb that knowledge because you are able to immediately apply it. College computer science teaches a ton of knowledge, but, at least in my experience, a large portion went to waste because I wasn't regularly applying it.
The bottom line is: just develop things. Make games. Even the ones that seem simple will end up being more complex that you expected, and as you progress you will gradually assimilate more advanced knowledge. Look up advanced concepts as you need them, not because you anticipate needing them.
That being said, here are a smattering of tutorials I really like:
Entity Component Framework
Programming Game AI by Example
Procedural Terrain
Collision Detection
Of course, don't try to read these all at once. Read these and similar tutorials as you need them, and in the meanwhile, just keep on developing.
And of course:
Allegro5 Tutorials.

How can I manage multiple Scrum Backlogs with Agilo? [closed]

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We have now installed Agilo to manage our Scrum projects, and we have that proble: we can handle just one backlog. How can we have different backlogs?
Thanks for your time!
Maybe you should try other tools? :)
Here are some other tools you might like to try.
Installable onsite are Rally, Version One. I think Thoughtworks' Mingle is available onsite but they prefer to host it for you.
You may also like to try some of the new online Lean tools: LeanKitKanban, AgileZen.
If possible, get one or more big whiteboards and some post-its, then back it up / produce reports etc. electronically. Excel worked well for this for me. Also there's nothing like the tactile and immediate visual feedback from moving post-its around. You can use index cards and holders or blue-tack if the post-its fall off.
You can also represent the multiple backlogs at different scales; for instance, showing whole features, apps or systems completed at a project or programme level while tracking the smaller stories and tasks at a team level.
Do you have multiple products? There should only be one product backlog for each product - having more than one doesn't make much sense.
To break down a product backlog, it often makes sense to add extra columns to the backlog for different categories within that product. That would make it easier to filter and see different areas of the backlog quickly and efficiently.

iFrames and Law [closed]

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Suppose an actor A has the site of an actor B in iFrames. There is no difference in the sites except the url. Urls are totally different. Should the actor A ask a permission of the actor B for using B's site? Is there any law that forbid placing other site on a site in iFrames?
Not a programming question, but at least let me help you with a link to a site. The owner of plagiarismtoday.com have had some of your concerns and, although not a lawyer, have collected quite a bit of information.
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2009/04/07/is-the-diggbar-content-theft/
Read The Law on Framing and follow the link to the case of Washington Post v. TotalNews
You should also check your country and local state laws, there is no such thing as a standard legal solution because it changes from one place to the other and many countries do not have laws on what you are asking. However, let me tell you, the web seems to be dominated by two frame of mind, or law philosophy:
lex mercatoria: these folks tend to think the web is commerce and commerce laws should apply, which are mostly derived by mores and civil laws
lex retis: these folks say the web is anarchy, no law should govern it
PS: I am a lawyer. Even if this is a bit complicated, I hope you can get an idea.
As far as I can tell, it only becomes a legal problem if the iframe is used to perpetrate fraud, deceptive marketing, or somesuch. Short of that, it's merely annoying. You can always use framebusters/framekillers if it bothers you enough.

What workshops / user groups / conventions do you attend? [closed]

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I haven't been to enough of these "live" events to really determine which, if any, are worth the time / money. Which ones do you attend and why?
For conventions, if you're still in university, and can make it to Montreal, Canada, the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) has been extremely enjoyable. See the 2009 site for the next event, and for a take on what previous years have been like, take a look at the 2008 speakers (note: it included Jeff Atwood).
I attend CUSEC primarily because our software engineering society on campus makes a point of organizing a trip to it, but also because of the speakers that present there, and the career fair.
I used to belong to my local Linux User Group which I co-founded but I treated it more as a social event than anything else but obviously a social event full of geeks is still a great way to get a great debate going :)
Conventions and the like I've not got much out of other than being pestered by businesses who can offer me nothing that is apart from a bunch of Linux and Hacker ones where I've met loads of people who I consider friends offline, again great for the social aspect but pretty worthless to me in other respects.
That's not to say I never got any business out of attending various events it's just that treating them as social occasions meant any business that did come my way was a bonus so I never left an event feeling like it was a waste of time.

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