This is a vocabulary question. I do now know where else to ask a question like that, because forums related to the English language are not filled with people who would be aware of what terms feel right to use in a plant.
I have a concept of a "get ready to run" mode in my project. This mode is not manual at all, it is just an automatic mode the intent of which is to get ready to switch to the main "run" mode.
I am looking for the right name for this mode. I am not a native English speaker, and I am not sure my current favorite, "stanbdy", is a good choice. This term is going to be used all over the place, both in code and in HMIs (including as a button label). Getting it right is important. A short, meaningful and intuitive term is required.
Is "standby" a good choice, and are there other, better options?
Yes. From Merriam-Webster:
standby adjective
1 : held near at hand and ready for use
a standby power plant
standby equipment
Also it is something everyone knows, so I wouldn't go with some other term. Not that I would know an alternative.
You could look at the PackML guidelines for standard names for various machine states: PackML State Model
PackML would use either 'Idle' or 'Starting' in your case I think.
Related
I have a multiplayer project which has some forever loops with checking code inside of them.
The problem is, multiple computers might process this and change crabx or craby due to lag in the variables dvotes, uvotes, lvotes, or rvotes. Only one machine should change this, though.
This can be easily solved by giving each player an ID like many people do in SQL. I would just check if the ID is 1, and that would be the "operating machine". I would then do all of these checks on that one machine. It would do things a Scratch server would do if you could program it...
The problem with this is that there is no way to detect when a player leaves the game. There is no block that is called "on exit" or "on stop button pressed". How would I go about doing this? I have seen people have a button which people click to exit, but some people will not click it/not even see it.
Thanks in advance!
Option 1
I've never been especially successful with cloud data myself, but I've heard the theory on this before:
Essentially, each player gets a "counter". Their computer then constantly increases that counter. If the counter ever stops increasing (which will be detected by the other computers, who are all looking after one another), the project will know that the user has left and one of the computers will take care of removing their ID and other data.
Obviously, this is much easier said than done. (As I said, I've never gotten complex cloud data to work well for myself, but I've seen it done successfully and explained.)
Option 2
Alternatively, you might be better off taking advantage of this cloud api created by MegaApuTurkUltra. I find that stealing from others tends to be the best way of solving problems when it comes to code. ;)
I have a question regarding workflow in Kanban. Can I have two activities in my name in the "in progress" column? For example, I started the activity 'A' but not concluded and will continue at another time, then I get the activity 'B.' Makes sense to have activities A and B in the "in progress," but I'm doing only one.
I am a certified Kanban Coaching Professional, and this would be my advice:
Sure you can. Kanban itself won't say whether you can or not, it depends on how you use Kanban. The WIP limits might prevent you from starting another task, in which case you should do some or any of the following:
Discuss the issue with the team, perhaps it is ok to raise the WIP limit (or even temporarily breach it)? Perhaps you can solve the impediments together and continue working on the original task.
Perhaps you can "swarm" or help someone else with something else on the board. I usually like to start from the right-hand-side of the board and see if I can help some other item move closer to done.
You can also treat this as "slack" time, and work on improving the process, learning a new skill, or checking emails, or some of the other tasks that everyone has to do that are not directly related to the value stream. "Preparing for working on the item" is what a lot of people consider doing, but is usually just cheating against the WIP limits.
Is there a way to simulate user activity on desktop on Windows? This is the situation: A friend of mine works from his home. His company recently decided to provide their employees with a communication tool which they have to keep running in the background. Apart from its main functionality it also has a very intimidating side effect: It tracks user activity. This means that the programm monitors keystrokes and mouse movements. If a user is idle for say 5 minutes or something, an icon next to his name indicates his idle status to all other users, much similar to instant messengers like skype for example. Now while this may be useful in IM programms, we both find it a bit disturbing in a work related context, for obvious reasons.
Doing some google search only gave me shareware links or cheating tools for MMORPGs. But maybe I searched for the wrong terms. My first guess would have been to have a small process running in the background which imitates keystrokes or mouse movement in regular intervals. But maybe there is another way to deal with this. (Oh, and complaining about lack of privacy to the employer is not an option ;) Also please note that I don't want to promote laziness or question an employer's rights over his employees.)
Any comments and help appreaciated. Thanks!
There is an easy way to make cursor move in C++.
its something like:
pos.X = 10;
pos.Y = 10;
I dont know if this is the best way, but it works.
If you dont want to program your own program, Im sure there are a lot of programs on the internet. You just need to google :) .
I was working on something for a client today when I found a way to break some functionality in our program.
(The code is really legacy code, it's been in development for about 10 years and I've only been working here for about a year.)
It didn't cause an error, or cause the program to crash, but if a user was using the program and duplicated the behavior I'm pretty sure they'd be holding up their "WTF?" flag.
In our program we have named fields (textboxes) and static text (labels) that can be linked with the textboxes. When the textbox is not filled in the label(s) that were linked to them disappear.
The functionality that I broke was, when you change the name of a textbox that already has one label or more linked to it, and save the file, without re-associating the one or more labels associated with the textbox, the formerly-associated labels appear when the textbox is blank.
Now my thinking on the matter is that a simple observer pattern could have solved this problem in the first place, but then I didn't write the code.
I was thinking that if I could dig up more situations like this with the guys in my shop, that maybe I could talk them into considering unit testing, decoupling, applying patterns where they are called for and the like.
So for this reason I was wondering if anyone had any tips for finding broken (but not error causing) functionality in any sort of app (web-based, desktop, etc...)
For an app to fail usability, it has to have a defined set of expected behaviors.
"Is this textbox SUPPOSED to do nothing when the enter key is pressed?" Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I've seen apps where a tester/reviewer reports something that they ASSUME should work another way, when in actuality the client specifically asked that they DON'T want the form submitted on a return key press, but only a submit button click.
So basically you have to define proper behaviour before you can determine incorrect behavior.
Hire some testers.
If it has an interface, then one of my favorite unconventional test is putting 5-10 year old children in front of it. You'd be surprised what they can come up with (especially the younger ones). While this may sound like a joke, it isn't -- it really works, because children don't have the mindset of only going through "mindset" paths.
And yeah, children are the experts in "breaking things" xP.
Code inspections, i.e. reading the source code: if you had taken time to read/inspect the source code, looking for "smells" or even just looking for code whose behaviour you don't immediately understand and agree with, you might have been holding up your "WTF?" flag too.
Test, test, test.
Do unexpected things. Start doing one task and switch another to see if anything goes haywire. Use the back button when you're not supposed to. Open it in two windows. Let it time out.
Test in all browsers, especially IE.
You can find database connections/sessions aren't released by:
working out the minimum number of connections you need to do something
setting resource limits to that minimum number
ensuring one "run" of the scenario that should use exactly that number (and release it afterwards)
then run it again a few times... do you run out of connections?
I used to work in a company where programmers regularly used to forget to de-allocate db connections. The standard answer was to reduce the resource to a minimum to see if there's a leak - and to try to work out where it is by restarting the system and running different scenarios repeatedly.
The first hour of code review, with the first reviewer, will do the most to find quality problems. But here's the thing: You don't need to convince people of quality problems. You need to convince them of the value of fixing bugs, and of rewriting only when the present quality absolutely justifies it.
I've dealt with some seriously bad code in my time. But you can't just rewrite. You need a spec before you can even tell if the rewrite is an improvement.
Sometimes, you have to infer the spec from the code and then check it against some human somewhere. But by the time you've done that, you understand the code as written and are now better prepared to repair than to rewrite -- most of the time.
Repair proceeds by a process of small behavior-preserving modifications that render the spec more clear in the code. Then, when you find something that looks wrong, you don't just change it. You ask around until you find the person responsible for that decision, and you get them to show you where in the spec it says that behavior X is correct. (This conversation can take many forms.) If you're lucky, they'll tell you that behavior X is in fact incorrect, and then you've earned your pay.
assert()
Also unit testing with coverage analysis.
This is particular to the Visual Studio IDE, although it probably also applies to others:
During testing, always at some point run in the debugger with "Break when an exception is thrown" turned on.
This can often help expose exceptions which are incorrectly being silently caught and which represent bugs, but otherwise may not be evident.
Code reviews should always also include reviews of the unit test code.
The problem is that with ad-hoc testing it's impossible to know how much or how well a developer has tested their code. So, you're at the mercy of different developers definition of the word "done".
If you include reviews of the unit test code at the same time you review the production code you should have a good idea of whether the code is really complete; in that "complete" includes "tested". Not just "Hey, I'll throw it over the wall to the testers!".
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Closed 10 years ago.
Re the recent question at when are modal dialogs truly necessary?. WHY are modal dialog boxes evil? Is it because people don't read them anyway? Because they are often implemented so poorly? Something else?
About half of the answers so far are addressing the flaws of confirmation dialogs, not of modal dialogs. While the vast majority of confirmation dialogs are modal, this does not mean that the two terms are synonymous.
A modal dialog is one which puts the program into a specific mode and does not allow you to do anything which doesn't correspond to that mode while it is open. In the most common implementation, this means you can't access any other windows.
This is evil.
Consider an address book application. Suppose you have an existing person in the address book and you wish to add their roommate.
If the "add person" dialog is non-modal, you can flip back and forth between the old record and the new one copying and pasting your data.
If the "add person" dialog is modal, you can't do anything with the old record while the add dialog is open. You can select something to copy before selecting "add", but just one thing. Everything else has to be manually retyped.
On rare occasions, you run into something which truly must be done in one piece without allowing the user to diverge from that task until it is complete. Modal dialogs are appropriate for such cases. But these cases are very rare! Which is basically the point of the other thread referenced by this question.
People don't read them, and that's a good thing. You want people to form habits around your UI, but having an important choice in popup is just going to make the user hit OK.
They interrupt the user, they prevent the user from doing other things.
What if you wanted to copy and paste something off the main window? What if you wanted to copy the message in the modal dialog? What if you don't care.
Just compare IE's Find dialog vs Firefox
Compare IE's "Do you want us to remember this password for you?" to Firefox
The best UIs are modal. As are the worst.
A modal UI - regardless of whether it is built from dialog boxes, toolbar buttons, or text prompts - is only desirable so long as each mode matches the expectations of the user transitioning to it. When the program transitions into a mode unexpectedly... or the mode requires the user to possess information he does not have readily available... then it will cause the user hardship, either forcing him to revert to a previous mode or guess at the proper action with potentially undesirable results.
A non-modal UI is a complete set of tools. Some are relevant to the job at hand, some are not. A user must have sufficient skill both to choose the correct tools, and to apply them in the correct manner. While a non-modal UI can therefore never be as optimal as a good modal UI (the right tool for the current task already in hand), it can also never be as sub-optimal as a bad modal UI (the wrong tool for the current task slamming into your careless fingers).
Designing a good modal UI can be a fiendishly difficult task for non-trivial applications, especially for general-purpose programs intended to be used by a wide variety of users for an even broader range of purposes. Menu systems and dialog boxes attempt to bridge the gap, allowing small, task-specific modal sections in a larger, non-modal application. Neither one scales particularly well however, and mis-use and overuse have left them with a bad reputation, often seen as the first refuge of the lazy programmer. Dialog boxes in particular are often used more as a means of forcing users into a programmer's (or designer's) idea of how an application should be used, or punting difficult design decisions and tricky error handling at the user, rather than for their namesake goal of communication.
Indeed, the rise of web applications has brought such tendencies to the surface in numerous forums, newsgroups, and Q&A sites such as this one, as programmers accustomed to writing ultra-linear logic which prompts users for input when needed by the program rather than when available to the user... are forced into a system where users can navigate non-linearly, and may well view any attempt to restrict this freedom as a quaint annoyance to be subverted rather than a necessary evil. The plaintive wails of these poor coders echo around the 'Net as their attempts to force this crude modal behavior onto a non-modal system come crashing down around them. For those of us who have long suffered under their cruel "dialogs", it is a lovely tune indeed.
Before you get to read my answer, you must carefully read the following message in it's entirety. All processes, subprocesses, tasks, and threads are suspended indefinitely pending your answer. And, once you completely understand the message, and possibly agree to some legal stuff, and all the implications of all of this, then and only then can you proceed.
In a consumer style application, they are more or less useless; users don't read them, learn to dismiss them, and when they DO read them, usually end up being confused. I think a Yes/No/Cancel dialog is downright lazy UI design. The "buttons say what they do" dialog is slightly better, because the user doesn't have to read much.
That being said: In data-critical intranet/"enterprise" applications, they are more or less necessary to confirm destructive actions or to sanity check non-standard workflows that may be allowed but not recommended.
So, I don't think they are conceptually "evil", but more often than not, the result of bad UI design.
They are evil because they violate the basic principle that the user is supposed to be able to direct the software's action. Modal dialogs (the evil form of dialog boxes in general) constrain the user to only one action.
Some answers seem to misapprehend that it's any popup that asks for e.g. user confirmation. This could be accomplished without tieing up the entire app or computer; it's this behavior that people object to.
In some environments, modal dialogs only constrain the user in the context of a single application (or maybe less). Really bad modal dialogs prevent the user from doing anything else in the entire operating system (say, Windows).
One of the reasons that I don't like them is because they are showing information in serial(one lot of information at a time) and not parallel(all the information you need to see at once), parallel will allow the user to choose what they want to look at where as in serial you are pretty much forcing them to pick an option.
Plus also the fact that they break a users flow of control(eg steals focus from the object you working on) which I really don't like doing. So in effect from this the user will just hit OK so that they can get back to what they where doing and ignore the information in the dialog box.
Mind you you still need them in some cases.
I don't remember where I saw this first, but a better approach to a modal dialog is often to allow an easy to find and use "undo" capability. Windows Explorer actually does both when you delete a file. It asks for confirmation (modal dialog), then, immediately after deleting the file, the Edit menu has an "Undo Delete" option. just a simple way to access the Recycle Bin, for sure, but in this case, Microsoft really could have just done away with the dialog.
The point being, you can often do without the dialog with a bit of thinking, and perhaps a bit of extra code, but it's just too easy an option for a lazy, or perhaps, more generously, a time-constrained developer.
That said, sometimes you really want a dialog. Think about all of the options on a typical Print dialog. Which printer? All pages, or just a few? How many copies? I don't know how you'd do that without a dialog box...
Noboy reads them, and they interrupt the program flow. Often when used as error notification they are the precurrsor to a program failure. By the time the user realizes what is going on, the message is gone and they are left to recall or invent the message as best they can.
Personally I think it depends entirely on how it is done.
Try copying 10 files where every file exists in the target directory, do it using Windows Explorer.
Is a single modal dialog for each file really the correct answer in such an operation. I know you have "Yes to all", but the entire loop system should've been built differently. It should've gathered all the files that exists into one big list and asked once "What do you want to do with these files", and then let me decide for each file down the list what to do before clicking OK and resuming the operation.
And lots of times dialog boxes just interrupt the normal workflow.
And yes, people don't read dialog boxes. So a golden tip if you must use a dialog box is to reword it.
Instead of "Do you want to delete this row in the database?", try wording it so that you're asking (but this isn't worded right) "Do you want to not delete this row in the database?" This way, if they just hit Yes, which is the typical response from a user who just wants to get on with it, they'll end up doing nothing.