Rizwan's Blog -Developer's hangout!

In my experience, there are many ways to use automation to assist people with work, and reduce the load needed, but ultimately we always need a human in the loop. Someone should be available to check that the calculation or the change in process is the correct one. Someone also has to be able deviate from what seems to be the rule for some process and override it. I've seen this in the past in a few places. Once where I worked with a chef trying to automate his ordering process. He was sure that he could input recipes, make guesses about usage, and then inventory constantly, adjusting his predictions and a well designed inventory system would calculate purchase orders for him. I don't know if his predictions were poor, or if the logic wasn't correct, but he didn't ever seem to have as good a hand on his inventory as he needed. I used that as a basis for a liquor inventory system when I was bartending, but took the "recommendations" from the system and adju...

 I will start with a question, if you have a spare £400 in your development budget do you A) Reward your star programmer with a £400 bonus or B) Buy him a 24 Inch 1920x1200 LCD screen? If you answered 'A' then you need to read on. If you answered 'B' then you understand what motivates programmers but I suggest you still read on and comment later if you have any ideas beyond what I cover. One of the things that they never teach non-programmer managers is how to motivate programmers. You may think the programmers are motivated by the same things as the rest of your staff, you are WRONG. Programmers tend to be counted within the higher IQ brackets and are therefore harder typically to second guess. The average programmer may be projecting an image of superiority but non-programmers miss-read this and think it is aimed at them. It is not. You have to understand that programmers rate themselves against other programmers not against anyone else. This is impor...

After reading a question on HN, I started thinking again about programming languages. Does it matter if you know one or plenty? Can you know 5 languages equally well? Or even well enough to claim that you actually know them?.. What's the actual difference? If we're talking just of statically-typed, object-oriented languages, there's not much difference. Only thing you should always be aware of, is memory management. If there's a garbage collector, you don't really care about pointers and disposing objects yourself. You also sacrifice part of performance and memory (not always true, for certain, since Garbage Collection most of time allows you to avoid memory fragmentation / segmentation, and you always get single slice of allocated data, and free memory for further allocations). Although, better understanding of heap and stack, pointers, values, passing messages comes from languages, where GC is not available by default. Hence, in c++ you still can use Boehm...

Ramadan   is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar , and the month in which the Qur'an was revealed. Ramadan is the holiest of months in the Islamic calendar. Fasting in the month of Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam . The month is spent by Muslims fasting during the daylight hours from dawn to sunset. The name came from the time before the Islamic calendar, when the month of Ramadan fell in the summer. Fasting during this month is often thought figuratively to burn away all sins. Muslims believe that the Qur'an was sent down to the lowest heaven during this month thus being prepared for gradual revelation by angel Gibril (Gabriel) to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him)told his followers that the gates of Heaven would be open all the month and the gates of Hell would be closed. The first day of the next month is spent in celebrations and is observed as the ‘Festival of Breaking Fast’ or `Eid ul-Fitr ...

Ever since the induction of IIS 7, there came a cool new feature for developers to leverage called Integrated Pipeline. This feature in a short explanation closely couples ASP.NET and IIS more closely. It allows allows writing of IIS Modules in managed code, how neat is that? This also slightly changes the behavior of ASP.NET, such as introducing new events on the HttpApplication (Global.asax) and the event cycle. A classic example is where in Integrated mode you cannot access the current request using HttpContext.Current.Request during theApplication_Start event, which makes sense. Now for obvious reasons this can break existing applications, and cannot be used for applications that will be installed in mixed environments, such as Server 2003 and Server 2008. Fortunately, IIS 7 make it easy to switch it back back to its old behavior using the Classic Pipeline by configuring the IIS AppPool. Most commonly, if you make a web-based product then your application will usually require C...

My past employer's office have windows next to each individual cabin. There I had the good fortune of working next to a window in our office. Though the joke around the office is we’re going to suffer from a Vitamin D deficiency. Why? It’s because there is no window or place that natural light gets in. I never really considered how much of a difference it makes, I always wanted to think “lamps are good enough”. Honestly though, I found myself having more energy and being much perkier in natural light.  I’m not usually one known to be “perky” either. So I want opinions, how important is a window in the office to you?

… is that most of the time, they won’t work for you or me. They worked for somebody, some time, in some situation, in the past. Sure, the idea of best practices is attractive. Supposedly you or I can follow along, obediently, and succeed using so-called best practices. Too bad it doesn’t work. For example, Jim Collins’ blockbuster business book Good to Great , published in 2001, featured 11 supposedly great companies. All of them did extraordinarily well on the stock market for 10-20 years. But by 2008, when Steven Levitt posted Good to Great to Below Average on Freakonomics, two of them had died. He wrote: Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500. I don’t mean to criticize Jim Collins, his book, o...

You have learnt so much And read a thousand books. Have you ever read your Self? You have gone to mosque and temple. Have you ever visited your soul? You are busy fighting Satan. Have you ever fought your Ill intentions? You have reached into the skies, But you have failed to reach What's in your heart! (Baba Bulleh Shah)

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really need to know? 1.Caffeine – You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. Mine is black coffee, early and often. Others may prefer diet soda throughout the day. There are always the classics as well, Mountain Dew and Jolt. 2.Logic – As a programmer, you deal with logic constantly. Your true mettle will be defined by how you deal with the insanity (real or perceived) of the customer. The customer could be your project manager, the business analyst or the users. For any given project, you can count on someone sounding completely insane. 3.Hours – Expect to be working a lot of them. Program...

It's the year 1942 and a strike force of commandos is sent for a task in Nazi-occupied France. The team consists of Colonel Brown, the "spy", Captain O'Brien, the "muscle", and Lieutenant Hawkins, the "sniper". After France they are sent to Norway, and then to Stalingrad, where the game ends. Below are some Screen Shots.

Hi,  I was thinking for a long time to contribute, to an open source project, for the betterment of other people. I just found Microsoft's powered website codeplex.com and started to contribute in two projects Each project's description is given as under. Sea Quail is a library for building SQL queries using objects in .Net. It's intended to work with any mainstream RDBMS. Add/remove tables, columns, and foreign keys, insert, update, delete, and select programmatically, without string building. It's developed in C#. Fractal is a os that is designed to be fast, and Graphical.