Hello, I figured this was the best place to put this since it's not language specific (in fact it's about choosing a language so I couldn't put it in the General Programming section). I'm about to start a project for a small company that publishes a kind of Top 500 Companies yearly magazine in my country. They want to try putting this data in a CD instead and sell it to a small-ish group of customers (500-1000 customers tops I assume). I'm experienced in several languages including Java, .NET (VB, C#), C/C++, some Flash, etc. I need to decide what platform I'm going to use according to these criteria: 1) Minimize setup (this one would probably rule out .NET with its big... .NET libraries that I just can't assume the users have by default) - the idea is that, barring a couple registry changes and maybe a desktop icon, no dependencies need to be installed. 2) Minimize programming time (so doing it in pure C/C++ for Windows would be a big hassle, unless there's some really cool framework I could use. Something easy like Windows Forms would be nice). 3) Free or Open-Source libraries if possible (this is a small project, with a really small profit margin). 4) Some degree of protection for the database (I'm thinking SQLite, with encryption at the column-level). This is just to avoid people double-clicking the database and opening it in Access or Excel or notepad or whatever. The application should mostly display a grid, allow some sort of drill-down (500 records for 500 companies, each with a small number of contacts). Perhaps have an intro of some sort, a splash screen, a menu, whatever. But mostly it's just a data browser with a read-only database, with the ability to sort and/or filter half a dozen columns, export to Excel or equivalent. Anyway... all I'm asking is for anyone experienced in this kind of work, which development language could be ideal for this. Like I said, unless there's some sort of fully functional stand-alone library that can be included in the disc without needing for install, .NET (and maybe Java?) are unlikely, and pure C would be a really error-prone and take too long (if everything else fails I'm going to have to use anyway). Any comments are welcome.

Part of the issue is that their reaction to the first estimate is "is this some kind of sick joke?" I've already raised that point with the manager. What we got in exchange was a meeting of 8 hours (including break time for lunch) with the original developer so we could pick his brain as much as possible during that time, like that's supposed to account for any understanding of that system we'd need during the rest of the project. Is punching the manager in the face an option at this point?

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

You can't be given an estimate. You have to give the estimate. You are the person doing the work, and this means that only you know how long it will take.

I agree with the first part of the post, but this part contradicts the first part. How can I give an estimate if I have no idea how long it will take? As a side note, they don't call them "estimates" either. They just call them "times", as in delivery times, and if you're late you're in trouble.

Wow, neat, I'll be sure to forward that to the management. Cool buzzword too ;) To everyone else: thanks for the info, I do feel a bit relieved that I'm not failing to be as "productive" as expected. Now, if anyone has any tips, what can be done about it? (I'm not a manager and they've apparently done things like this for a decade, so I don't know how to make anyone listen to me about these silly things, that I learned, like, doing this useless thing called Analysis and, um, entity-relationship diagrams for the database, or to write anything down... at all, even on a paper napkin, please). Other than quitting, which I'm considering, I'm willing to exhaust the possibility of helping to bring this development company at least up to the mediocre level.

modified on Friday, September 12, 2008 2:36 PM

Ok, so I got this job, my company sent me over to its USA branch to help with development of their Web Application, made in JDeveloper and based on a 10 year old database that's has been growing with not much structure (the data model itself is used for an in-house developed ERP/CRM system that manages Telco stuff, and it runs on powerbuilder, and I've been doing stuff in that system for a few months). So, I arrive, go to the office, spend about a week with meetings and some explanations of how the system works, what each screen does, yadda yadda. Very light "training", if it can even be called that. So, next thing I know, I get dumped a dozen requirements and asked to estimate the times. I'm like, ok... I don't even know what tables are used for these requirements, so I account for that, you know, learning how it works right now, roughly, something like, 10 simple maintenance screens, in one week. And they go, "WTF? You can make a maintenance table in Powerbuilder in 20 minutes! Surely you mean that you can make about 10 screens in a single day, right?" so they adjust the time accordingly in the project file, 0.13 days per requirement - literally. I'm on the third week and I'm still trying to reverse engineer their custom in-house java framework and haven't been able to get a single maintenance. I'm making progress, but it's not like I'm dragging controls left and right and "making tables" or whatever, I'm trying to understand their freakin' program, which is a mess of Oracle tables and java files. And I keep getting harassed for the slow pace I work at (half a dozen temp programmers have had a similar "success story" as me in this before me). Now I'm told, ok, drop everything you're doing, and we need you to make a Job in Oracle that checks all these tables and updates all those other tables accordingly. I'm *given* an estimate of 4 hours. I spend 2 hours just trying to figure out what fields I'm supposed to match between these tables (no foreign keys!), until I get hold of the "project manager" and he kinda tells me. Many more hours have gone by and I'm still trying to make the SQL statements that make sense for this stored procedure. Do I just suck at this or what? Is a newcomer to a big app like this supposed to churn out 3 or 4 stored procedures per hour? Maybe I'm wrong and I *do* suck, so I just wanted to make sure of that, maybe have a change of career or something, perhaps quitting my day job and get one for Valet Parking or whatever - probably pays more too. It also involves less thinking, a

Thanks for the tip, I will certainly try it... although I tried running Restore to see what points I have, and I can only see the last 4 or 5 points that of my attempts to fix it by uninstalling programs like VS. (I mean, all my restore points are for "uninstalled x or y"). I hope rebooting from the DVD will show me more points than these. Alternatively, I may just be forced to scour the evil 'internets' for some method to rip this crap out by force. Note: I've read about that "frankenbuild buster" update thing, but the odd thing is that I have an untouched installation - maybe Visual Studio replaced files and now Microsoft considers the OS corrupt? The oddest thing is that I have NO way to activate Windows. If I went to the internet and bought a new activation key or whatever with my credit card, I simply would have no way to enter it on Windows, since the program just plainly doesn't work. It doesn't refuse keys, it just doesn't run at all! Any and every attempt to run slmgr.vbs (directly, or with wscript or cscript, as shown in the MSDN pages) is met with an "unable to find detailed error description" error. Even if I do slmgr /? or without parameters, or just querying the current status of my license :confused: It's not that it isn't finding the server either, because that's a two step process: 1st step merely tells the thing what the new "url" is going to be, without actually connecting... and it gets the same error. Seems to me like some sort of runtime/syntax error/whatever. That's why my prime suspect is Visual Studio. -- modified at 15:20 Monday 18th December, 2006

Same thing happens to me. I install to a computer that has a SATA disk and an older, IDE disk. The IDE disk doesn't even have the first partition formatted. I install, select the SATA drive, which is also the active bootable volume, it installs, and in the end I find out the IDE partition (that isn't even "active" so it doesn't boot) got all the system files, boot manager, boot loader, whatever. So I had to install twice, after getting into the CMOS and disabling the IDE drive (funny thing, Vista setup still shows the partitions even if they're disabled in the BIOS). Sometimes I wish I could read the minds of the Microsoft developers, and figure what their thought processes look like.

Ok, I've been asked to troubleshoot some Vista installation, which for no apparent reason refuses to activate. It activated just fine, then at some point a couple days later gives a message that it can't activate, and will expire in twenty-something days, whatever. I can't find what's wrong with it, it activates against a volume license server whatchamacallit, but the license manager script now simply fails: it doesn't give a warning, or ask for a valid key, or threatens to sue or send every single person in the company to jail or whatever. It simply won't run, it won't even show the command-line help. Okay, whatever, we can't find the problem, so we reinstall. Same deal, same computer. I reformat everything, install, validate against the license server that's setup somewhere in the building (I don't know or care where), then a week later it fails again. Same error (0xE0000204, "can't find detailed error description", even Vista has no idea what the error is). So I think, maybe there was some product installed that broke the script thingy. I check, and both times the failure and message of impending doom coincided with about the installation of Visual Studio 2005. It makes sense to me, after all, the smart people at Microsoft decided to have Vista validate using freakin' VBSCRIPT crap, and Visual Studio installs some sort of JIT/compiler for VBSCRIPT crap, right? So, I can't just prove it yet, but it seems that Visual Studio breaks Vista. Not just an incompatibility, or that it won't run, but it makes it so that Vista cannot run its own damn ACTIVATION VISUAL BASIC SCRIPT that it's completely vital for it's operation! Isn't the new Activation scheme just grrrreat?! :wtf: PS: Uninstalling Visual Studio won't fix it. It seems I'll have to reformat and reinstall, and stick a million postits on the workstation warning against installing anything remotely Visual Studio related... I hope the server doesn't run out of activations :mad: /end rant

Your definition of bloatware seems to differ from everyone else's though... bloatware means features that (mostly) nobody uses that make the program bigger and bigger. Like adding webcam support, voice synthesis, a barcode reader, peer-2-peer networking, Pong, a sliding puzzle game, custom background images, a neko cat and DVD-recording functions to Notepad. You're talking about unoptimized code.

Oh, I don't disagree that they're complete idiots :D Anyone with half a brain would realize that it's just an "upgrade" and backwards compatibility will make sure some of the old malware keeps working. The rest will work as long as you turn Compatibility Mode on ;) I was just commenting on your remark about "as long as they're computers, they'll have viruses/etc", because their speculation would have been valid had it been a "new" OS. (say Microsoft was crazy and the new Vista was based in, I dunno, AmigaOS, my old spyware is effectively "obsolete"). Their stupidity lies in not realizing it wasn't, it's just the same old with some new whistles. Or maybe they're even more stupid because they thought some magical wonderful new feature would destroy all existing malware. Then again, their job is to speculate, as useless as it may be. I'm still waiting for my flying car and robot butler. Don't know if all that makes sense. I'm just bored at work right now. :|

What I read into that speculation is whether Vista is different enough so that malware companies will have to recompile their apps / change bits of code. Not whether it will be possible at all to make new malware. Like, switching from MacOS 9 to MacOS X as opposed to switching from MacOS 8 to 8.1. Note the 'existing' in 'existing malware'.

Ok, to sum up, I think we all agree on these things: -Either avoid humour completely, or try to use humour in your presentation. -Speak very slowly, or very fast, or at a normal speed. -Use a high volume of voice, or not. -Never deviate from your script, or ad-lib if you want. -Let people ask their questions during your presentation, or make them wait till the end. If you follow very closely all, some or none of these guidelines, you definitely cannot go wrong. Maybe. ;)

I think a lot of presenters have no problem with this "interactive stuff", but they do have a schedule they usually have to stick to, so often it is better to have time to do all the show and answer questions in the remaining time. It depends on the audience, but I've seen many times that the presenter gets so waylaid that he has to cut the presentation short, because the watchers just wouldn't shut up and would object to nearly everything. "But... but... what if... can you do this... and that... how about that..." It wasn't even me doing the presentations, but I did notice.

I was asked in an interview to write the algorithm to find n numbers in the Fibonacci series, or whatever. I misunderstood them so I accidentally wrote a program that printed on the screen a large phallic figure, and to decode the words corresponding to the acronym "YUCK FOU", and quickly left.

God is like drugs... everyone else's doing them, so why don't you?

Michael Martin wrote:

Same way we don't know if the bible is God's word or the incoherent ramblings of some headcase of a few hundred years ago.

Is there a difference? :~