News

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

I was recently asked a question about merge conflicts in source-control systems.

“[…] there keep being issues of files being over written, changes backed out etc. from people coding in the same file from different teams.”

My response was as follows:

“tl;dr: The way to prevent this is to keep people who have no idea what they’re doing from merging files.”

Extended version

Let’s talk about bad merges happening... [More]

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

“tl;dr: If your Windows 8 is mysteriously moving your Windows and taskbar around, it might be because of your Windows Live account synchronizing settings from one machine to another.”

Starting with Windows 8, you can connect your local user account to your Windows Live account, sharing your preferences and some Windows-App-Store application settings and logins.

I had this enabled for a while but recently... [More]

The pictures of our first networking event in 2013 last friday can be found in the gallery by now. Enjoy viewing!

In der Galerie findet ihr ab sofort einige Impressionen zu unserem ersten Networking Event im 2013 letzten Freitag. Viel Spass beim Anschauen!

Our first networking event of the year is scheduled for tonight (19.04) with a presentation on HTML5 development. The talk, to be presented by Marco, will cover our experiences developing a larger project for the web.

Here’s the main overview:

• Project parameters: what did we build?
• Components, libraries and features

  • HTML5 tags & objects
  • CSS3 concepts
  • jQuery basics
• Tools

  • IDE & Browser
  • Testing & Optimization

You can find the entire presentation in the documents section.

Encodo freut sich über weitere Verstärkung des Teams! Frank Baumann (Lernender Informatiker im 1. Lehrjahr) ergänzt das Entwickler Team der Encodo ab sofort.

Encodo is pleased to announce that it has a new employee! Frank Baumann (1st-year apprentice in computer science) is a welcome addition to the Encodo development team.

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

The paper Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism by Colin S. Gordon, Matthew J. Parkinson, Jared Parsons, Aleks Bromfield, Joe Duffy (Microsoft Research) is quite long (26 pages), detailed and involved. To be frank, most of the notation was foreign to me—to say nothing of making heads or tails of most of the proofs and lemmas—but I found the higher-level discussions and conclusions quite interesting.

The abstract is concise and describes the project very well:

“A key challenge for... [More]”

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

• QNO-4153, QNO-4170: Cache fixes; added a cache-validation debugging tool
• QNO-4112, QNO-4119, QNO-4157, QNO-4158: Reporting UI fixes
• QNO-4030: Fixed issue with metadata-wrapper classes when using the remoting data-driver

Breaking changes

No known breaking changes

Do you recall what we promised? A reward for anyone who played our game all the way to the end and entered their code. The best of the Encodo Gamers have been acknowledged according to rank. You’re all important to us, though, and that’s why we spent a whole afternoon pouring, painting and detailing chocolate bunnies for you at a local chocolate-maker’s shop.

You can find a bunch of pictures from that afternoon on our events page.

Erinnert ihr euch noch? Wer unser Game fertig spielt und sich mit seinem Code registriert, dem haben wir eine Belohnung versprochen. Die Besten Encodo Gamer wurden jetzt standesgemäss ausgezeichnet. Ihr seid uns aber alle wichtig und drum haben wir einen Nachmittag lang für euch Osterhasen geschminkt, gepinselt und gegossen.

Hier finden sich ein paar Bilder des süssen Anlasses.

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

In order to program in 2013, it is important not to waste any time honing your skills with outdated tools and work-flows. What are the essential pieces of software for developing software in 2013?

Runtime

A runtime is a given for all but the most esoteric of programming exercises. Without something to execute your code, there is almost no point in writing it.

Debugger

Programming without an integrated debugger... [More]

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

I was recently redesigning a web page and wanted to make it easier to use from touch-screen browsers. Links made only of text are relatively easy to click with a mouse, but tend to make poor touch targets. If the layout has enough space around the link, this can be remedied by applying CSS.

The basic box

Suppose we have a box with three links in it, as shown to the right.

Setting the height

... [More]

We recently noticed that our Facebook page was a bit chaotic. It consisted mostly of a semi-private group called “Encodo” that we initially created much earlier—when Facebook didn’t offer pages for companies yet. Facebook evolved this page through various incarnations but also offered an ad-hoc, “Encodo Systems AG” page because users had entered that name as their place of employment. Because of this, we had two main problems:

1. Unlike “pages”, old-style Facebook “groups” offer few to no... [More]

Vor Kurzem ist uns aufgefallen, dass unsere Facebook-Präsenz etwas chaotisch ist. Zum Einen gab es die in die Jahre gekommene, geschlossene Gruppe “Encodo”, welche noch aus der Zeit stammt, als es auf Facebook keine “Seiten” für Firmen gab. Neben dieser Gruppe hat Facebook auch noch eine imaginäre Firmenseite eröffnet, nachdem Mitarbeiter die “Encodo Systems AG” als Arbeitsort eingetragen hatten. Damit gab es zwei Probleme:

1. Auf “Gruppen” hat man bei Facebook − im Gegensatz zu “Seiten” − wenig... [More]