The first time i came across this data structure, i was quite ashamed of the fact that i did not know of it earlier. This seemingly simple concept eases the complicated process of search by leaps and bounds. Most of what i know about this is really a whiff of the top layer of this amazing heap of brilliance. I got most of my introductory notes about this concept from its Wikipedia page.
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Yes sir!! it is a battle of clans! Today all thoughts all ideas are going to come down here. And i am holding nothing back. It is a great war this. In the world of software development there are those believe that it is the Coding that matters more than the logic! startling claims indeed. And maybe that is the reason why they have been loosing as well. Logic undeniably is ultra important when it comes to developing software. Those who somehow claim that coding skills can outshine logical abilities, obviously have issues with their logic. But then i sat down thinking all these years and more so in the past few months, thinking if there was/is any logic in what they said. Can coding truly be as important as the logic, where it is built upon that very logic?
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In the current UI of Facebook if you want to add a relationship you really have to do a little bit of a treasure hunt. That is unless you know exactly where it is. You have to go to Profile>Edit Profile (a grey colored button right below the Home-Profile-Account tab strip)> Featured People. There are issues with this whole mechanism. And this is just one of those things that does not make Facebook's UI "idiot proof".
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I think i have written a few posts on popups and the issues with layer development before. Today, I was encountered with another classical situation involving Pages, views and pop-ups. And for a change i was invited to be a part of the debate. The scenario was as follows: We had a page, which was in all essence a master page dealing with the background service. This page fundamentally had a tab control with every tab's container having its own control. Now each of these controls led out to one or more popups (again effectively more controls). The issue was to treat the controls as controls and try to relinquish them of all Svc calls. Mind you at this stage no calls were being made from any of the controls but we just wanted to come up with a solution where in we could once and for all decide a standard protocol by which we could completely avert situations involving svc calls being made from the controls.
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I was finally able to clean up my comp today off all the trash i had accumulated over the years in college. Saved up a lot of space!! :D That is when i found this rather interesting document worth having a look at. It was a simple straight forward guideline to writing an SRS. I used it while documenting my analysis and design aspects of my final year project. It is to the point and comprehensive to say the least. I guess one such document should always be by your side while working on any project. :)
I could never quite locate the true source of this document. It was a life saver for me. So here is the link to it: SRS.pdf
Hope this helps you in your documentation and analysis of your projects. Cheers!!!
This is a graphic plus logo, i developed today while at office for a WebSite team in my undergraduate college. It was really supposed to be a proof of concept. It finally did not meet the purpose simply because the idea was too tangential for the ultimate group in mind. Having said that it turned out to be a pretty decent grapic. Here is it:
[caption id="attachment_219" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Logo POC for the Website Team of my college."]
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The other day at office, there was some general talk on how people get some really retarded ideas when it comes to making a login process really secure. The particular feature that was in focus concerned the idea of temporarily deactivating a person's login after 3 unsuccessful tries. The simple issue with this method is thus: any one, can deactivate your account if he knows your user-id by making 3 unsuccessful log in attempts using incorrect passwords. This can make life hell for you. So, what are the possible work-arounds? Well, take a look at the core issue that you are trying to address by deactivating accounts after 3 unsuccessful login attempts. I think the core issue is to make it difficult for the person/bot who is trying to login, in case of 3 unsuccessful attempts. Now, try and understand this: the person or bot may not be the actual user himself. So the locality of the issue and its solution should be at the client side of the application where the login attempts are being made, not at the data level where the respective user information is being stored. In a nutshell, make it difficult for the person who is logging in by creating trouble at the UI not by completely deactivating the account itself from the DB.
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For a long time i have been using a scheme of things in developing UIs which has started to bug me, literally in every sense of the word. What i do is this:
For any page/view, i create the control, which in essence is a form or a configuration controller. Now, this control is independent from everything else, and i can use it as i deem fit. It has its own set of hooks using which i can feed and retrieve information from it. Mind you, these controls are very specific to the application itself and do not form a very integral part of a generic sdk. So, the freedom i get with these controls is absolute flexibility. I can place them in a page, a view, a pop up or a sidebar. But the only issue is that i have to play with some ground rules. Just one ground rule actually: I cannot make service calls from any of these controls. Like i discussed this in a previous post of mine in detail, doing so makes the control tightly bound with the service or the backend, hence limiting its usability in another part of the application. While this gives me a lot of freedom of where and how i want my UI to appear and look it gives me hell when i sit down to develop most of my app.
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The overlaying of UI Elements or controls is something all UI Developers and Designers do. While it may be pretty useful, it can bring a lot of questions on efficiency, ease of code and logic.
So, lets get down to basics: Why have overlaying or overlapping controls? Well, for one, i have been using it a lot for variable functionality. It basically means making your UI possess a different set of UI elements or controls altogether, offering radically different functionalities in varying scenarios. One in specific is having a ComboBox (drop down menu) on top of a Read-only Textbox. This can be used in a form to great effects. While the user is entering a new Form, there might be a predefined selected set of values which he might have to select from for a given field in the form. But, after saving it once, the selection should no longer be accessible and the value of the field should be permanent for the entire lifetime of the form.
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