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2:19 AM
Okay, anyone here?
I just got off the first Microsoft Student Partner meeting.
Seems like Microsoft is making a move towards students. They want each MSP to encourage 15 apps this months.
They recommend.... ::drumroll:: ... AppMakr!
Really?
2:31 AM
I don't see why that's surprising.
3:00 AM
howdy
where can i read about what staring does?
From an ophthalmologist's perspective?
@John Do you mean on a question or in chat?
@mootinator AppMakr is terribly underdeveloper on the WinPhone side.
You make RSS feeds or photo stream apps.
Seem like a silly way to bolster a platform. Hey (college) kiddies, ready to make 15 (RSS reader) apps? big smile Let's go!
Geez it should at least support fart apps.
Fart of the day RSS feed!
No, but it should support some sort of basic scripting, or be more like the Lego Robotics platform.
I just think it's like what Joel was talking about in one of the podcasts - that site that businesses wouldn't pay for it's developers to use, so they spent time churning out c**p to get free memberships.
Make college kids, some of whom are not technical majors, make garbage apps to fill your app store?
Sheesh, looks like a dumb idea, driven by numbers to please board members.
I'm going to try and write some real stuff.
True, but all the same; to some people it is a numbers game.
3:14 AM
Shame, because I love the Windows Phone interface.
Ok, running an install of some dev tools, bbiab.
Not that having more apps than some other platform will get people to convert. I don't think we're that stupid.
I sure could use one of them dealies that slows down the passage of time.
Boredom?
Too busy to become bored.
@mootinator - I don't know. Apple like touting numbers, and executive boards seem to operate on figures as well. Regardless, shoving two thousand (134*15) poorly written apps into the market seems silly.
3:25 AM
@Moshe Yep.
 
5 hours later…
8:51 AM
Yay for (well-deserved) sarcasm on @Dori's part
1
A: Ifound out that SO joined 2 of of my accounts. I had 3. how to append last one?

DoriI've merged them. Congratulations - you now have: 9 answers 1116 questions You must be so proud.

 
2 hours later…
10:23 AM
5
A: November 2011 Community Moderator Election

Yi Jiang's 独角兽The Stack Exchange Moderator Candidate Statistics page can help you make informed decisions about which moderator to choose. The page aggregates information about the candidates from the Stack Exchange API, and allows you to easily evaluate the worthiness of each candidate in terms of their recen...

@RebeccaChernoff Can you add the badges to the JavaScript files on the SE server? The second line, add "Deputy" and "Marshal" to the array of default badges
Hang on a second... the badges.js file is still the old version
Can you update that file too?
11:06 AM
A user called Vote up and accept... yeah
Unsurprisingly his posts are terrible.
11:19 AM
Huh? Is it me or is every gravatar on the site suddenly broken?
not just you
Nick says it's okay for him, so I guess it's just some of their CDN nodes
seems to be DNS issues
both gravatar and imgur fail to resolve for me
using one of google's DNS servers makes it work
I'm also failing to see gravatars.
11:35 AM
11:51 AM
@balpha doesn't look like it - Gravatar.com seems to be simply down, and unreachable.
nope
I change my DNS server to 8.8.8.8, and gravatar is fine
Ah. Weird
change back to ISP default DNS server, and I get "DNS couldn't be resolved"
I have a few gravatars showing up, but those might be cache
12:10 PM
issues also noticed in ServerFault chat...looks like we're gonna have to wait this out.
yawns
 
1 hour later…
1:20 PM
Quick c# question:
Dos it make sense to put in an interface a method with a paramater?
Does it force you to use it?
1:31 PM
@Trufa It would be silly if it didn't.
@GeorgeMarian hehe it would, wouldn't it?
 
2 hours later…
3:15 PM
Ahoy hoy
'Ello
What's going on?
Not too much on my end, trying to figure out why I'm behind on several things.
because you haven't completed them yet...?
So @jonskeet was literally answering a SO question while queuing for lunch causing @haacked to hold his plate http://t.co/wLk4rG5m
3
Fair point. :P
Hahahah
3:28 PM
sigh Is there anything that can be done about the number of "How do I add placeholders to my input" questions on SO?
There are half a gazillion of them out there, and almost none of them are been closed as dupe because the descriptions all vary wildly, but in the end they're all asking the same thing
And most of the solutions are rubbish, too
I guess we could go smash a few fingers...?
3
A: HTML/CSS Making a textbox with text that is grayed out, and disappears when I click to enter info, how?

FloernHTML: <input type="text" name="firstname" title="First Name" style="color:#888;" value="First Name" onfocus="inputFocus(this)" onblur="inputBlur(this)" /> JavaScript: function inputFocus(i){ if(i.value==i.defaultValue){ i.value=""; i.style.color="#000"; } } function inputBlur(i...

Really? I mean, really?
The worst part is that Data Explorer was using that until I changed it. |:
Well, not quite that, but.
@TimStone It was copied from SE main, which still is using that
Stack Exchange uses HTML5 placeholders now, though?
3:32 PM
Does it? Oh great joy!
Aye
For great justice!
SWUUUT
The question form uses...uh...something else
Overlayed spans. No idea why.
But the search field does indeed use placeholders.
Yeah, @balpha's sekret blend of HTML tags and stuff, to create a truly unique placeholder experience for all of SE
It's strange really. At least it works better than the old one.
It's done because it needs to show up both when the input is unfocused, and when its focused but there's nothing in it
Ahhh, makes sense.
3:35 PM
Then they also need to make sure those two are distinctive
So this is the best solution I guess
I'm not so sure about the accessibility though
@ircmaxell Now that is the kind of insightfulness I'm looking for in an SO moderator.
@PopularDemand :-P
@YiJiangs独角兽 -1 no jQuery.
@PopularDemand You should probably give him bonus points for putting me in my place, too.
@YiJiangs独角兽 To be fair, there's a user named "Click upvote" who's almost at 10k (although that's due in part to old poll/discussion questions). Disregard that; now that I look more carefully, most of that rep is for stuff that would be closed today.
3:47 PM
...The hell SQL Server Management Studio
The hell Oracle
I'm just practising, I haven't gone anywhere near Oracle yet.
@mootinator I have no idea what you're talking about, but I can get on board with this.
IF db.fn|'someString', where | is the cursor...autocompleting the fn puts the function name into the string, so I get IF db.fn'fnSomeName'.
 
3 hours later…
6:28 PM
My head hurts now.
Went near Oracle, did you?
No, went near a question involving concurrency issues reading a row from a database and writing a value somewhere else based on it having four answers none of which had anything to do with transactions.
This is what MySQL has done to people's brains!
I attempted to add that thought, but am not a fan of my answer really. (Worth noting the OP says he's using InnoDB)
3
Q: How to get next alpha-numeric ID based on existing value from MySQL

DaveRandomFirst, I apologize if this has been asked before - indeed I'm sure it has, but I can't find it/can't work out what to search for to find it. I need to generate unique quick reference id's, based on a company name. So for example: Company Name Reference Smiths Joinery ...

6:50 PM
@mootinator wouldn't that lock a 'new' row, but fail to stop a second 'new' row from getting the same calculation?
I like the top-voted answer for using a compound key with auto-increment, or just changing the design to not use stupid prefix codes like the OP wants.
@Fosco I do agree, just perplexed that a transaction didn't occur to anyone as the obvious solution to that problem.
@Fosco I don't know exactly how it works in MySQL but I think the FOR UPDATE causes another transaction to wait to read the row until the first transaction is committed (at which point the new row would be the correct result)
It would be considerably less cool if it did actually require a table lock.
I really don't think your method will solve the issue, unfortunately.. It would require a table lock to use the transaction method.
That one row would be isolated, but the issue was about multiple rows going in at the same time.
Right, but the issue was two IDs being generated based on the same row, if you block reading that row after the first read, how would the subsequent rows go in at the same time?
It was about id's being generated based on the result of a query, not about a specific row. If there are 8 rows smit0001 through smit0008, and 2 new rows starting with 'smit' are inserted at the same time the query may return 9 for both of them.
@Fosco How?
Transaction 1 does the SELECT...WITH UPDATE query, and retrieves smit0008
Transaction 2 does the same select and is forced to wait for transaction 1.
Transaction 1 INSERTS smit0009
7:04 PM
why is transaction 2 forced to wait? it's not a table lock
It's an exclusive lock on the returned record, though
Because it has to do the same read.
Alrighty... haven't used that qualifier before.
Dark voodoo magic.
Hmm, although I'm not convinced that Transaction 2 would end up with the correct record anyway?
7:10 PM
@TimStone No, I'm going on the assumption it has to re-run the query, because the result has been invalidated by the prior transaction. Normally you would be updating the same row you selected in this scenario.
I'm not either.
Hmm how to test :P
Oh wait, that should be easy.
there isn't even an update statement, so I don't get it.
it holds the lock until commit, testing right now I'll get back to you in a few minutes lol
Nope, I was right.
The second instance returned the newly inserted row after waiting.
7:23 PM
Very cool, thanks for clearing that up. :)
Makes sense. I think the documentation hints at that being the case, but it's kind of implicit, so I wanted to be sure. Good stuff.
Hey, @you - stop in when you find the time...
7:46 PM
Hi all. I'm constantly struggling with the differences between down-voting, voting to close, and flagging a question. Should they be inclusive of each other? If I flag something, I assume it also warrants closing and a down vote. Is that always the case? If so, shouldn't all closed questions have a minimum of 5 downvotes?
I wouldn't think so, no... If I vote to close, that's usually all I do, but it's up to the individual.
I've been reading a couple questions on meta about it.. but wanted to strike up my first chat as well :)
@Fosco Is that b/c you figure if it's closed there's no reason to downvote it since it's a 'dead question' ?
What's the point in downvoting something that's closed?
Right... why bother, when the regulators are going to close it within a few minutes.
True
So what about flagging a question. If you flag something do you also vote to close?
I've struggled with whether to flag a question as off topic if I've already VtC as off topic.
7:49 PM
I usually down-vote things I think are stupid or bad, like 'give me the codez plz' questions.
I feel like people can filter the questions by [CLOSED] and spam the flag link on them to get their rep up
A well asked question can be off-topic, not really deserving of a down-vote imho... A terribly asked question can be on-topic, and I'll down-vote it twice if I could.
Since a lot of CLOSED questions are eventually removed
On the topic of flag weight... if you have over 10k rep, flag weight farming is too easy. Just look through the flag list and find the "Not an answer" ones and jump on the flag-wagon.
I don't think a duplicate is necessarily downvote worthy either, except when there are hundreds of blatantly obvious duplicates.
7:52 PM
lol. What about voting to close b/c something it's "Not a real Question"? Won't that ALWAYS mean the "Not welcome in our community" flag is valid?
There just seems to be a lot of overlap
I don't like flagging unless it's a serious infraction... rude/offensive.
The system won't let you actually use those flags that correspond to close reasons, if you have the ability to vote to close, so it's a bit of a non-issue.
@TimStone Ah, didn't know that
Well, not welcome in our comunity is really for spam or inapropriate posts...
8:09 PM
Hey all.
Any C# coders want to give me some tips?
Gladly.
Learn C#.
Waitwaitwait.
1409
Q: Hidden Features of C#?

Serhat ÖzgelThis came to my mind after I learned the following from this question: where T : struct We, C# developers, all know the basics of C#. I mean declarations, conditionals, loops, operators, etc. Some of us even mastered the stuff like Generics, anonymous types, lambdas, LINQ, ... But what are t...

That's what you want, right?
@mootinator Looks like a useful place to start. Thanks!
(Yes, this is for the MSP Windows Phone App thing.)
I got hung up not wanting to figure out Expression blend before I ever wrote an app. </lazy>
I need to learn Expression Blend for this?
The darn thing doesn't recognize my Dev Tools install.
@mootinator - If you write an app this month, then it can go towards my quota. :P
Even if it isn't an RSS feed reader?
8:19 PM
Yup. Even if.
:-)
Are there any alternatives to AppMakr for WinPhone?
ummm
You mean like PhoneGap?
Maybe... Let me look at it.
Phonegap doesn't have a "Getting Started" for WinPhone.
Meh.
blergh
Native code is cooler than PhoneGap anyhow.
I know, but the development cycle is a little much to churn out 15 apps in a month.
Was there a tool to mount iso's in Windows 7?
I thought it was native, but apparently not.
@Moshe No.
Burn them, yes. Mount them, no.
The official MS support page recommended... Virtual Clone Drive, I believe
8:32 PM
Daemon Tools lite is just fine as well if you're careful to unselect all the other crap it tries to install.
@Shog9 Ah, that was it. Thanks!
I'm installing VS 2010 Pro over the WinPhone SDK, bad idea?
I have the ISO from DreamSpark, but in class, so I can't burn it.
@Moshe I don't recall having any issues doing that.
Installification in progressification.
2
9:29 PM
New smoke detector: installed.
Visual Studio 2010 : installed.
That took waay too long.
@mootinator It's funny, every time my Mom grills chicken on the stovetop "grill" our smoke detector goes insane.
Yes. Though nowhere near as long as 2003. They made that somehow take incredibly long nearly 10 years later.
@mootinator Oh good, I've been worried about a fire breaking out here in the Tavern.
5
Indeed. I should probably mount that smoke detector on the wall at some point.
@mootinator The help library manager is merging indexes. I'm hoping that having local help is a good idea.
9:32 PM
I just can't figure out where it is.
@Moshe I've never used it.
Ok, not rebooting, since I risk making the Apple startup noise in class. However, I'm hoping that rebooting won't be necessary.
I'm considering using VB for WinPhone, is that stupid of me?
why VB over C#? I think you'd need a pretty good reason to choose VB's terrible syntax.
Only if you hate yourself.
Some weird stuff shows up on the /review pages.
I've played with VB before and C# is more of a "real" language.
Well, okay, let's see C#...
9:38 PM
C# syntax has more in common with Objective C than VB does.
A valid point.
Class ends in four minutes.
And the help files are still downloading.
@mootinator It also doesn't come along with that "Let me shoot myself in the head" feeling.
Expression Blend can't find the Windows Phone developer tools. Ugh.
@TimStone I'm surprised VB isn't at the top of this list with ms-access: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/86/…
It's possibly a side-effect of knowing many other (similar) languages, but I find VB very annoying to work with because the syntax is just...argh. Of course, by the same token Objective-C irritates me, but less so.
Oh wow, no love over in land, heh.
9:45 PM
I hate any language which requires me to write out the word THEN
So this is a no go?
Except T-SQL, because it has an excuse.
@Moshe That's last year's version.
@mootinator Oh? That's what DreamSpark offers. There's a newer one?
Oh, no it just downloads the latest anyway I think, nvm.
Oh, the MSP program is sending me an Xbox, so I can make a game!
9:47 PM
ooo
Or maybe not.
different .exe name!
@mootinator - Thanks! I'll be back later once I'm home, class is kinda finishing up now.
I can't wait for the MSP starter kit to arrive. I'll be glad to have Windows keyboard shortcuts on a non-Mac keyboard.
@TimStone No and then

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