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- Written by: Jason Ross
So, you need a web publishing system and you've decided that WordPress is just too mainstream, so you've gone with the extra functionality of Joomla. Welcome to the club!
Of course the extra flexibility brings some extra complexity, but it's nothing that can't be overcome and it will result in your having a great site. In the rest of this article I'll assume that you know about as much about Joomla as I did when I started this site, which is pretty much nothing.
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- Written by: Jason Ross
When you start out as a software developer it's easy to get fixated on one particular language. It might be the first language you learned, or the first you used professionally, but you'll probably form a serious attachment to it. You might view this language as perfect, or at least much better than any other, and you'll tend to use it for pretty much everything you need to do.
After a while though, you'll start looking around at other languages and seeing why other people think they're good. Initially you may think they're nowhere near as good as your favourite language, and stick purely with your own. This is really the wrong approach.
Read more: Programming Languages - They're Just A Bunch Of Tools!
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- Written by: Jason Ross
A while ago my laptop decided that it wasn't going to download and install Windows Updates in the background any more. I tried to open the Windows Updates window and all it said was that the service could not be started. I decided to dig around on the web and was unsurprised at the number of "Try stopping it and starting it again" suggestions, as well as "Switch off your anti-virus", all of which were useless.
A little more digging led me to the right way to fix it...
Read more: Windows 7 Has Stopped Applying Updates - Fixing It
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- Written by: Jason Ross
Looking through your system’s source code, you’ll almost certainly find code that’s been commented out without being deleted. This might strike you as an odd thing to do, and it is. Why would anyone clutter up their source code in this way?
Read more: Don’t Comment Out Unwanted Source Code, Just Delete It!
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- Written by: Jason Ross
The Original Simulation
In The Monty Hall Problem – A Simulation In JavaScript we wrote a simulation for the Monty Hall Problem. The simulation consisted of two separate iterations through some JavaScript code that recorded the results of the competitor either changing their selection, or keeping their original choice, respectively.
Looking again at this, the idea of there being two iterations through the same code seemed a little excessive and made me start to idly wonder: could this be done in one iteration? This might make the simulation faster, although it would need to be timed to make sure of this, and it doesn’t take long to run anyway. It might improve the integrity of the simulation though. After all, what if something happens during those two iterations so that the odds involved in the second iteration change? It’s not likely but it’s just about possible – maybe the random number generator has a bug or some other strange side effect occurs, and then we can’t be sure what would happen.
If we could get all the information we need from a single game that should eliminate this possibility.
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- Written by: Jason Ross
The Problem
You are a contestant on a game show, and are allowed to select one of three doors. Behind one of the doors there is a car that you can win, and behind the other two doors are goats (You don’t get to keep the goats!). You choose a door and then the host, who knows what is behind every door, opens another door to reveal a goat. You are then given the chance to change your selection to the remaining door.
Should you stick with your original selection, or choose the other door instead?
Read more: The Monty Hall Problem – A Simulation In JavaScript
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- Written by: Jason Ross
Nobody likes work-related phone calls in the early hours of the morning; they have a nasty tendency to ruin your day, if not your weekend, and even worse they’re usually avoidable. The most avoidable of all are those caused by import data being, for want of a better word, garbage.
In the early days of a system things might work fairly well – the system has been developed to handle the data formats described in the “Data Transfer Specification” - but it doesn’t take long before things seem to go downhill quickly. Comparing the data you’re receiving to the specification, you’ll often discover that the description in the specification and the actual data your system receives are getting further and further apart. What should you do?
