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In Depth: The school that gives every student an iPad

<img src="http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/5273/mac228showfeatipadclass.jpg"> Fraser Speirs is talking about changes caused by his school's radical shift in technology deployment. Every pupil at Cedars School of Excellence, in Greenock, Scotland, is now armed with an iPad, creating an environment a world away from the typical 'computer room', and providing the potential for seamless integration of technology and traditional teaching. The iPad project arose from day-to-day demands within the school. As Head of Computing, a dozen iMacs were fixed in Fraser's classroom, and a dozen MacBooks were available for booking; but with teachers increasingly wanting to provide pupils with web access, pressure and demand grew. "In January 2010, we started looking for answers," recalls Fraser. The school couldn't afford enough laptops to make a meaningful difference, but the iPod touch was considered, since internet access was a big factor. "We realised the iPod touch was cheap enough to give one to everybody," says Fraser, "but teachers had issues with what it couldn't do." At the time, the iPod touch couldn't output to a projector nor connect to a mechanical keyboard, but the school nonetheless continued forming its plans. And then the iPad arrived. Fraser says Apple's tablet dealt with every problem the school had with the iPod touch: it boasted a decent software keyboard and projector connection, and Apple made office apps available for sale. On importing his own iPad from the US, Fraser was sold: "On the first day, it ran and ran. I couldn't make the battery die, and I realised this alone would transform the technology experience in the classroom." With many of the school's teachers being iPhone owners, few needed convincing. A leasing arrangement with the local Apple Store soon saw dozens of iPads winging their way to Greenock. (Fraser notes that leasing was done through the Glasgow Apple Store's business team, and isn't a special school lease.) Even teachers who weren't confident with technology and didn't see a place for their laptops in school started bringing their iPads with them every day, and everyone found different ways for Apple's tablet to enhance their classes. Ultimately, this is driven by the blank-slate aspect of the iPad. "This is a device we bought, but it's not just a textbook or an instrument, or a set of art tools – it's all of those things and more," says Fraser, adding that one teacher's putting together a band, purely comprising children playing iPad apps. <img alt="iPad 1" src="http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/5273/mac228showfeatipadclass.jpg" width="420"></IMG> "The thing is, to do this we're not adding anything to the classroom – it's just more software on the devices." When the discussion turns to specific use-scenarios for the iPad, it's clear Apple's 'there's an app for that' approach could revolutionise the classroom. For infants, the school uses the likes of wood-puzzle-style apps to develop motor skills, abc PocketPhonics for tracing letters, and Math Bingo (which Fraser calls a "sensational hit") for basic maths. Elsewhere, older pupils are immersed in iBooks, which replaces the class's paper books with eBooks, and Keynote for presentations. And with any child aged 10 or older allowed to take their iPad home, homework is sent and received via email; this enables teachers to set more flexible tasks in sensible chunks, eliminates most excuses and has reduced the amount of incomplete homework. Interestingly, many apps are also being used in new and innovative ways. For example, Fraser says Numbers is employed in situations where people may not have reached for a spreadsheet before, such as to create formulae for testing expected output in programming classes, or for capturing live information about experiments as they progress. The nature of the App Store helps, providing countless specialised apps that can be used to teach a particular aspect of a course. In his computing class, Fraser has utilised the game Binary Madness HD, which has you convert random decimal numbers to binary as quickly as possible: "It's not something I use every day, but small apps like this reinforce specific parts of learning." He rightly adds this is something that you rarely find on other platforms: "No-one would write a Mac app like Binary Madness HD, but on iOS it seems to be the kind of thing developers find interesting – creating simple apps for only 59p." iPad for all The benefit of the school's 'iPad for all' philosophy is particularly evident in art. Brushes is popular, as are quirkier apps such as TypeDrawing (where you fingerpaint with letters); most importantly, though, instead of replacing traditional media, the iPad has given pupils newfound confidence in all areas of art. "The iPad is not a substitute for existing media, and it requires artistic skill to master, but in some ways it more effectively helps pupils develop confidence in their abilities and enthusiasm to try," asserts art teacher Jenny Oakley. She says a combination of immediacy, security (due to 'undo') and usability means pupils "do not have to overcome the hindrance of learning to manipulate another tool – rather, they use one they've developed dexterity in since birth". With this newfound confidence, pupils are more willing to try, which Oakley says is "half the battle". The iPad also provides assistance regarding experimentation – pupils can use filters and effects to visualise how something would look in a different medium and then use real-world tools to mimic what they see on the screen. The move to digital While it's clear Cedars School of Excellence has integrated iPads into the learning environment, critics remain concerned; they claim the school's pupils are being denied access to technology that would supposedly prepare them for the real world and that 'everything' is being replaced by electronic content. Such inaccurate statements annoy Fraser: "In reality, we're sometimes using the iPad exclusively and sometimes not. Truth be told, I'd like to move to the iPad more, but we're constrained by resources – some textbooks aren't available electronically, for example. Anyone against such iPad use should bear in mind that society itself is in the process of replacing everything with electronic content – it's happened with CDs, and Amazon and Apple are doing the same with books." <img alt="iPad 2" src="http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/5273/mac228showfeatipadclass.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Fraser adds that a child starting school today won't leave until 2023, by which point, who knows what technology will be commonplace? His thoughts are the same regarding anyone who says children should solely work on Windows PCs – instead, he argues that they should use whatever tools enable them to best learn: "The iPad beats a PC because it removes that whole layer of 'we're doing computers now', and you end up with 'we're doing maths' or 'we're doing music'." The iPad also eliminates some of the menial aspects of schooling: "In traditional teaching, you spend time learning how to write a sum properly, how to lay out a jotter, how to lay out text on a page. You must do that before you can express thoughts and ideas. But with an iPad, open Pages and you can immediately start writing an essay or play." This is why even if a Mac OS X tablet arrived, Fraser wouldn't switch, and he thinks the same regarding the recent slew of iPad wannabes. "There's something about the iPad's size that's just right – make it a 7-inch widescreen and the keyboard would be tiny, but the iPad's screen enables you to have a good-sized keyboard and see your content. Also, the form factor enables you to have a long-lasting battery," he says. And while iPad competitors brag about hardware, Fraser says that's irrelevant: "As good as the iPad's hardware is, it's the software that makes the device interesting in education – and I'm not just referring to big brands, but to small apps as well." User focus The reality of using a platform that focuses on what you can do with it rather than what's under the hood has resulted in focused pupils. Fraser says teachers throughout the school are finding that pupils now just get on with tasks, "because they have some way of working that's not just 'write it down on a piece of paper' – schooling has become more flexible and therefore more engaging and interesting." <img alt="iPad 3" src="http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/5273/mac228showfeatipadclass.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Fraser nonetheless admits that the speed of adoption and the 'invisible' nature of the technology has surprised him: "We didn't think the iPad would become embedded quite so quickly. Already, it's a problem if a child forgets their iPad – in fact, on the day of the interview, one pupil did just that and convinced his mother to drive his device to the school. "It's funny, because we'd had this idea about disciplining a child by taking away their iPad, but doing that would break someone's school day, because we now operate under the assumption that digital technology is as available as paper!" Fraser adds that it's also crucial to consider the technology 'everyday' and not 'special'. "For example, it's important to not use the iPad as a reward. Technology is the way we do business – it's how we teach. It's not a reward for doing traditional education well." Although using an iPad is simple, setting up the school's system was anything but for Fraser, and limitations in Apple's ecosystem soon became apparent. The school currently has an Xserve providing user-login services to iMacs and notebooks, and Fraser's "beloved" iMac suite was dismantled, to enable each classroom to house an iMac. Each morning, pupils log in to accounts to sync their iPads with their class's iMac. Secondary pupils each have their own library, enabling a certain amount of customisation (such as podcast subscriptions); in primary, every iPad is synchronised to the same account. In terms of app purchase and deployment, Fraser buys apps on his computer and copies them elsewhere via Home Sharing. "This doesn't do updates, so teachers have to press 'update all' on some iPads each day," says Fraser. And due to the lack of app volume purchasing in the UK, the system requires a certain amount of jumping through hoops, in order to ensure developers get their fair share. "No iTunes account can buy an app more than once, and it would take too long to create an account for each pupil. Also, no-one under 13 can have an account, unless it's set up by a parent or guardian," explains Fraser. His devised workaround is the use of 'gifts' apps to dummy email accounts at the school, which are not accessed, so the right number of apps is always purchased; nonetheless, it's clear Fraser is hopeful when he says "there are better times ahead" regarding this part of the project. The downside Elsewhere, problems exist. Due to leasing iPads from the Apple Store, faulty units are replaced with ease, and on-site spares ensure pupils end up with just 30 minutes of downtime while their content is synced to a replacement. (Fraser discloses the iPads have so far proven durable, and the only two major faults have been down to commonplace screen failures.) Even the thorny issue of funding never became a block. The school funds the iPads out of its general budget, and with it being an independent school, Fraser says the portion from fees that goes towards iPads is "a mathematically provable trivial fraction"; furthermore, savings made elsewhere (less printing, mostly sleeping iMacs, fewer book replacements) are already starting to offset the relatively small iPad leasing fees. <img alt="iPad 4" src="http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/5273/mac228showfeatipadclass.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Whether there's a wider future for the iPad in the classroom remains to be seen. Fraser thinks many aspects of his project are scalable, to state schools as well as independents, but local authorities and a lack of administration tools are likely to be stumbling blocks. He notes that "magic money" (from election years or companies looking for favours from councils) often pays for school technology, but computers end up being mothballed when there's no funding for a refresh. Also, money disappears into systems that teachers don't ask for, such as interactive whiteboards. Therefore, it's "policy that usually dictates whether something is 'possible', rather than the benefits, drawbacks and limitations of a system". On administration tools, Fraser says Apple needs to devise something for schools with larger classes (Fraser's school has classes with as few as a dozen pupils, rather than the UK average of 25), particularly regarding remote inspection facilities: "With a small class, I can walk around and see what everyone's doing, but that would be hard with twice as many pupils." He'd like to see Apple-enabled iPad administration and access through Apple Remote Desktop, for pulling browser histories over the air, updating apps, locking devices and capturing screens, but without a system administrator having to pay for enterprise-grade infrastructure. Time to relax On the software side, at least, things are better; Fraser says he's having the quietest time he's ever experienced as the 'IT guy' at school, despite having multiplied by five the number of deployed devices he's responsible for. Next he's keen to assist teachers who are less confident about using iPads by figuring out how and why some teachers are speeding ahead and helping everyone get to the same level. "I'm trying to move on the pupils' minds too – in class, someone will ask if they can go online to find something. I'll say of course – as long as it's relevant, use whatever you want." Perhaps it will be a while before everyone's fully comfortable with iPads in the classroom, but then Fraser says that's hardly surprising, given that classrooms worldwide remain largely traditional, and technology is usually prescriptive: "We've done something that's not often tried – we brought in technology and didn't tell people how to use it". Instead of thinking of the iPad as a digital textbook, it's become a research and creativity tool across all subjects; because of this, minds are being expanded and experiences broadened, not restricted. Once, the school focused on iWork, iLife and Safari, but now pupils access dozens of varied apps. "Apple pundit John Gruber once described the iPad as an app console, and I think he's right. It's something for doing work on or playing games – but it's not a generalised platform," says Fraser as the interview concludes. "That's good for me, because I want kids to learn – I don't want them to work through the computer stuff just to get to the learning." We think that should be enough to silence his critics.

In Depth: The school that gives every student an iPad

Fraser Speirs is talking about changes caused by his school's radical shift in technology deployment. Every pupil at Cedars School of Ex...

Telus to bundle free Xbox 360 with every WP7 activation or renewal for a limited time, says leak

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwuknwM418u9GIoU-n0OWPd4II8qPYzqPIRl2Om35zEYJpEVnfl_iZnyTst5KnjoRiIRg1zYjT9G-9IOp4eyxF4iT3EVsFBZW05Pwq-px3sXlpZEov3soU9DBokkUQAjz4P9oqyRiesEw/s1600/10x1215bu23telus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwuknwM418u9GIoU-n0OWPd4II8qPYzqPIRl2Om35zEYJpEVnfl_iZnyTst5KnjoRiIRg1zYjT9G-9IOp4eyxF4iT3EVsFBZW05Pwq-px3sXlpZEov3soU9DBokkUQAjz4P9oqyRiesEw/s320/10x1215bu23telus.jpg" width="320"></a></div> 
<iframe align="right" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=latesttecompu-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B003C1VPEY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>Buy this phone, won't you please buy this phone? We've no idea why Telus has to try so hard to convince Canadian buyers to grab themselves a Windows Phone 7 handset, but the carrier's expected to sweeten the deal dramatically over the next few days by bundling a freebie Xbox 360 with every WP7 device activation or renewal.

Telus to bundle free Xbox 360 with every WP7 activation or renewal for a limited time, says leak

Buy this phone, won't you please buy this phone? We've no idea why Telus has to try so hard to convince Canadian buyers to grab the...

Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know

The future of software development is about good craftsmen. With infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and an abundance of basic libraries, it no longer takes a village to build a good piece of software.These days, a couple of engineers who know what they are doing can deliver complete systems. In this post, we discuss the top 10 concepts software engineers should know to achieve that. A successful software engineer knows and uses design patterns, actively refactors code, writes unit tests and religiously seeks simplicity. Beyond the basic methods, there are concepts that good software engineers know about. These transcend programming languages and projects - they are not design patterns, but rather broad areas that you need to be familiar with. The top 10 concepts are:1. Interfaces 2. Conventions and Templates 3. Layering 4. Algorithmic Complexity 5. Hashing 6. Caching 7. Concurrency 8. Cloud Computing 9. Security 10. Relational Databases1.INTERFACE:The most important concept in software is interface. Any good software is a model of a real (or imaginary) system. Understanding how to model the problem in terms of correct and simple interfaces is crucial. Lots of systems suffer from the extremes: clumped, lengthy code with little abstractions, or an overly designed system with unnecessary complexity and unused code.Among the many books, Agile Programming by Dr Robert Martin stands out because of focus on modeling correct interfaces.2.CONVENTIONS AND TEMPLATES:Naming conventions and basic templates are the most overlooked software patterns, yet probably the most powerful.Naming conventions enable software automation. For example, Java Beans framework is based on a simple naming convention for getters and setters. And canonical URLs in del.icio.us: del.icio.us/tag/software take the user to the page that has all items tagged software.Many social software utilise naming conventions in a similar way. For example, if your user name is johnsmith then likely your avatar is johnsmith.jpg and your rss feed is johnsmith.xml.Naming conventions are also used in testing, for example JUnit automatically recognizes all the methods in the class that start with prefix test.The templates are not C++ or Java language constructs. We're talking about template files that contain variables and then allow binding of objects, resolution, and rendering the result for the client.3.LAYERING:Layering is probably the simplest way to discuss software architecture. It first got serious attention when John Lakos published his book about Large-scale C++ systems. Lakos argued that software consists of layers. The book introduced the concept of layering. The method is this. For each software component, count the number of other components it relies on. That is the metric of how complex the component is.Lakos contended a good software follows the shape of a pyramid; i.e., there's a progressive increase in the cumulative complexity of each component, but not in the immediate complexity. Put differently, a good software system consists of small, reusable building blocks, each carrying its own responsibility. In a good system, no cyclic dependencies between components are present and the whole system is a stack of layers of functionality, forming a pyramid.Lakos's work was a precursor to many developments in software engineering, most notably Refactoring. The idea behind refactoring is continuously sculpting the software to ensure it'is structurally sound and flexible. Another major contribution was by Dr Robert Martin from Object Mentor, who wrote about dependencies and acyclic architecturesAmong tools that help engineers deal with system architecture are Structure 101 developed by Headway software, and SA4J developed by my former company, Information Laboratory, and now available from IBM.4.ALGORITHMIC COMPLEXITY:There are just a handful of things engineers must know about algorithmic complexity. First is big O notation. If something takes O(n) it's linear in the size of data. O(n^2) is quadratic. Using this notation, you should know that search through a list is O(n) and binary search (through a sorted list) is log(n). And sorting of n items would take n*log(n) time.Your code should (almost) never have multiple nested loops (a loop inside a loop inside a loop). Most of the code written today should use Hashtables, simple lists and singly nested loops.Due to abundance of excellent libraries, we are not as focused on efficiency these days. That's fine, as tuning can happen later on, after you get the design right.Elegant algorithms and performance is something you shouldn't ignore. Writing compact and readable code helps ensure your algorithms are clean and simple.5.HASHING:The idea behind hashing is fast access to data. If the data is stored sequentially, the time to find the item is proportional to the size of the list. For each element, a hash function calculates a number, which is used as an index into the table. Given a good hash function that uniformly spreads data along the table, the look-up time is constant. Perfecting hashing is difficult and to deal with that hashtable implementations support collision resolution.Beyond the basic storage of data, hashes are also important in distributed systems. The so-called uniform hash is used to evenly allocate data among computers in a cloud database. A flavor of this technique is part of Google's indexing service; each URL is hashed to particular computer. Memcached similarly uses a hash function.Hash functions can be complex and sophisticated, but modern libraries have good defaults. The important thing is how hashes work and how to tune them for maximum performance benefit.6.CACHING:No modern web system runs without a cache, which is an in-memory store that holds a subset of information typically stored in the database. The need for cache comes from the fact that generating results based on the database is costly. For example, if you have a website that lists books that were popular last week, you'd want to compute this information once and place it into cache. User requests fetch data from the cache instead of hitting the database and regenerating the same information.Caching comes with a cost. Only some subsets of information can be stored in memory. The most common data pruning strategy is to evict items that are least recently used (LRU). The prunning needs to be efficient, not to slow down the application.A lot of modern web applications, including Facebook, rely on a distributed caching system called Memcached, developed by Brad Firzpatrick when working on LiveJournal. The idea was to create a caching system that utilises spare memory capacity on the network. Today, there are Memcached libraries for many popular languages, including Java and PHP.7.CONCURRENCY:Concurrency is one topic engineers notoriously get wrong, and understandibly so, because the brain does juggle many things at a time and in schools linear thinking is emphasized. Yet concurrency is important in any modern system.Concurrency is about parallelism, but inside the application. Most modern languages have an in-built concept of concurrency; in Java, it's implemented using Threads.A classic concurrency example is the producer/consumer, where the producer generates data or tasks, and places it for worker threads to consume and execute. The complexity in concurrency programming stems from the fact Threads often needs to operate on the common data. Each Thread has its own sequence of execution, but accesses common data. One of the most sophisticated concurrency libraries has been developed by Doug Lea and is now part of core Java.8.CLOUD COMPUTING:In our recent post Reaching For The Sky Through Compute Clouds we talked about how commodity cloud computing is changing the way we deliver large-scale web applications. Massively parallel, cheap cloud computing reduces both costs and time to market.Cloud computing grew out of parallel computing, a concept that many problems can be solved faster by running the computations in parallel.After parallel algorithms came grid computing, which ran parallel computations on idle desktops. One of the first examples was <a href="mailto:SETI@home">SETI@home</a> project out of Berkley, which used spare CPU cycles to crunch data coming from space. Grid computing is widely adopted by financial companies, which run massive risk calculations. The concept of under-utilized resources, together with the rise of J2EE platform, gave rise to the precursor of cloud computing: application server virtualization. The idea was to run applications on demand and change what is available depending on the time of day and user activity.Today's most vivid example of cloud computing is Amazon Web Services, a package available via API. Amazon's offering includes a cloud service (EC2), a database for storing and serving large media files (S3), an indexing service (SimpleDB), and the Queue service (SQS). These first blocks already empower an unprecedented way of doing large-scale computing, and surely the best is yet to come.9.SECURITY:With the rise of hacking and data sensitivity, the security is paramount. Security is a broad topic that includes authentication, authorization, and information transmission.Authentication is about verifying user identity. A typical website prompts for a password. The authentication typically happens over SSL (secure socket layer), a way to transmit encrypted information over HTTP. Authorization is about permissions and is important in corporate systems, particularly those that define workflows. The recently developed OAuth protocol helps web services to enable users to open access to their private information. This is how Flickr permits access to individual photos or data sets.Another security area is network protection. This concerns operating systems, configuration and monitoring to thwart hackers. Not only network is vulnerable, any piece of software is. Firefox browser, marketed as the most secure, has to patch the code continuously. To write secure code for your system requires understanding specifics and potential problems.10.RELATIONAL DATABASES:Relational Databases have recently been getting a bad name because they cannot scale well to support massive web services. Yet this was one of the most fundamental achievements in computing that has carried us for two decades and will remain for a long time. Relational databases are excellent for order management systems, corporate databases and P&L data.At the core of the relational database is the concept of representing information in records. Each record is added to a table, which defines the type of information. The database offers a way to search the records using a query language, nowadays SQL. The database offers a way to correlate information from multiple tables.The technique of data normalization is about correct ways of partitioning the data among tables to minimize data redundancy and maximize the speed of retrieval.

Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know

The future of software development is about good craftsmen. With infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and an abundance of basic librar...

Rubin: 300,000 Android activations every day

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//classifications/Mobile%20Phones/Google/Nexus_S4x3-200-200.jpg"> Andy Rubin has revealed that there are now a whopping 300,000 Android activations a day. The Android chief <a href="http://twitter.com/Arubin/status/12727540783251456">tweeted</A> the news out of the landmark figure, further underlining the growing power of the mobile OS, which is beginning to have a real impact in not just phones but also the wealth of tablets that are arriving on the market. Of course, when Rubin announced that Android was getting 200,000 activations every day, Apple's Steve Jobs took exception to the figure. Disparaging Jobs made a number of disparaging remarks about the way in which the total had been arrived at and insisted that Apple's iOS was more successful. Regardless, that Android will (or already has) surpassed iOS seems inevitable given the sheer number of handsets that are being produced with the Google-powered operating system. The likes of <a href="">Samsung's Galaxy S</A>, the <a href="">HTC Desire HD</A> and, of course, the just-announced <a href="">Google Nexus S</A>, are providing real competition for the Apple iPhone, with iOS present in only Apple-made devices. Rubin recently stated that <a href="">Android is making money for Google</A>, despite being offered to manufacturers for no cost due to the advertising revenue generated.

Rubin: 300,000 Android activations every day

Andy Rubin has revealed that there are now a whopping 300,000 Android activations a day. The Android chief tweeted the news out of the lan...

10 mistakes every programmer makes

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/PC%20Plus/PCP%20300/PCP300.theory.pc_tower-200-200.jpg"> When you start programming, you get disillusioned quickly. No longer is the computer the allinfallible perfect machine – "do as I mean, not as I say" becomes a frequent cry. At night, when the blasted hobgoblins finally go to bed, you lie there and ruminate on the errors you made that day, and they're worse than any horror movie. So when the editor of <a href="http://pcplus.techradar.com/">PC Plus</A> asked me to write this article, I reacted with both fear and knowing obedience. I was confident that I could dash this off in a couple of hours and nip down to the pub without the usual resultant night terrors. The problem with such a request is, well, which language are we talking about? I can't just trot out the top 10 mistakes you could make in C#, Delphi, JavaScript or whatever – somehow my top ten list has to encompass every language. Suddenly, the task seemed more difficult. The hobgoblins started cackling in my head. Nevertheless, here goes… 1. Writing for the compiler, not for people When they use a compiler to create their applications, people tend to forget that the verbose grammar and syntax required to make programming easier is tossed aside in the process of converting prose to machine code. A compiler doesn't care if you use a single-letter identifier or a more human-readable one. The compiler doesn't care if you write optimised expressions or whether you envelop sub-expressions with parentheses. It takes your human-readable code, parses it into abstract syntax trees and converts those trees into machine code, or some kind of intermediate language. Your names are by then history. So why not use more readable or semantically significant identifiers than just i, j or x? These days, the extra time you would spend waiting for the compiler to complete translating longer identifiers is minuscule. However, the much-reduced time it takes you or another programmer to read your source code when the code is expressly written to be self-explanatory, to be more easily understandable, is quite remarkable. Another similar point: you may have memorised the operator precedence to such a level that you can omit needless parentheses in your expressions, but consider the next programmer to look at your code. Does he? Will he know the precedence of operators in some other language better than this one and thereby misread your code and make invalid assumptions about how it works? Personally, I assume that everyone knows that multiplication (or division) is done before addition and subtraction, but that's about it. Anything else in an expression and I throw in parentheses to make sure that I'm writing what I intend to write, and that other people will read what I intended to say. The compiler just doesn't care. Studies have shown that the proportion of some code's lifecycle spent being maintained is easily five times more than was spent initially writing it. It makes sense to write your code for someone else to read and understand. 2. Writing big routines Back when I was starting out, there was a rule of thumb where I worked that routines should never be longer than one printed page of fan-fold paper – and that included the comment box at the top that was fashionable back then. Since then, and especially in the past few years, methods tend to be much smaller – merely a few lines of code. In essence, just enough code that you can grasp its significance and understand it in a short time. Long methods are frowned upon and tend to be broken up. The reason is extremely simple: long methods are hard to understand and therefore hard to maintain. They're also hard to test properly. If you consider that testing is a function of the number of possible paths through a method, the longer the method, the more tests you'll have to write and the more involved those tests will have to be. There's actually a pretty good measurement you can make of your code that indicates how complex it is, and therefore how probable it is to have bugs – the cyclomatic complexity. Developed by Thomas J. McCabe Sr in 1976, cyclomatic complexity has a big equation linked to it if you're going to run through it properly, but there's an easy, basic method you can use on the fly. Just count the number of 'if' statements and loops in your code. Add 1 and this is the CC value of the method. It's a rough count of the number of execution paths through the code. If your method has a value greater than 10, I'd recommend you rewrite it. 3. Premature optimisation This one's simple. When we write code, sometimes we have a niggling devil on our shoulder pointing out that this clever code would be a bit faster than the code you just wrote. Ignore the fact that the clever code is harder to read or harder to comprehend; you're shaving off milliseconds from this loop. This is known as premature optimisation. The famous computer scientist Donald Knuth said, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97 per cent of the time: premature optimisation is the root of all evil." In other words: write your code clearly and cleanly, then profile to find out where the real bottlenecks are and optimise them. Don't try to guess beforehand. 4. Using global variables Back when I started, lots of languages had no concept of local variables at all and so I was forced to use global variables. Subroutines were available and encouraged but you couldn't declare a variable just for use within that routine – you had to use one that was visible from all your code. Still, they're so enticing, you almost feel as if you're being green and environmentally conscious by using them. You only declare them once, and use them all over the place, so it seems you're saving all that precious memory. But it's that "using all over the place" that trips you up. The great thing about global variables is that they're visible everywhere. This is also the worst thing about global variables: you have no way of controlling who changes it or when the variable is accessed. Assume a global has a particular value before a call to a routine and it may be different after you get control back and you don't notice. Of course, once people had worked out that globals were bad, something came along with a different name that was really a global variable in a different guise. This was the singleton, an object that's supposed to represent something of which there can only be one in a given program. A classic example, perhaps, is an object that contains information about your program's window, its position on the screen, its size, its caption and the like. The main problem with the singleton object is testability. Because they are global objects, they're created when first used, and destroyed only when the program itself terminates. This persistence makes them extremely difficult to test. Later tests will be written implicitly assuming that previous tests have been run, which set up the internal state of the singleton. Another problem is that a singleton is a complex global object, a reference to which is passed around your program's code. Your code is now dependent on some other class. Worse than that, it's coupled to that singleton. In testing, you would have to use that singleton. Your tests would then become dependent on its state, much as the problem you had in testing the singleton in the first place. So, don't use globals and avoid singletons. 5. Not making estimates You're just about to write an application. You're so excited about it that you just go ahead and start designing and writing it. You release and suddenly you're beset with performance issues, or out-of-memory problems. Further investigations show that, although your design works well with small number of users, or records, or items, it does not scale – think of the early days of Twitter for a good example. Or it works great on your super-duper developer 3GHz PC with 8GB of RAM and an SSD, but on a run-of-the-mill PC, it's slower than a Greenland glacier in January. Part of your design process should have been some estimates, some back-back-of- the-envelope calculations. How many simultaneous users are you going to cater for? How many records? What response time are you targeting? Try to provide estimates to these types of questions and you'll be able to make further decisions about techniques you can build into your application, such as different algorithms or caching. Don't run pell-mell into development – take some time to estimate your goals. 6. Off by one This mistake is made by everyone, regularly, all the time. It's writing a loop with an index in such a way that the index incremented once too often or once too little. Consequently, the loop is traversed an incorrect number of times. If the code in the loop is visiting elements of an array one by one, a non-existent element of the array may be accessed – or, worse, written to – or an element may be missed altogether. One reason why you might get an off-by one error is forgetting whether indexes for array elements are zero-based or one-based. Some languages even have cases where some object is zero-based and others where the assumption is one-based. There are so many variants of this kind of error that modern languages or their runtimes have features such as 'foreach loops' to avoid the need to count through elements of an array or list. Others use functional programming techniques called map, reduce and filter to avoid the need to iterate over collections. Use modern 'functional' loops rather than iterative loops. 7. Suppressing exceptions Modern languages use an exception system as an error-reporting technique, rather than the old traditional passing and checking of error numbers. The language incorporates new keywords to dispatch and trap exceptions, using names such as throw, try, finally and catch. The remarkable thing about exceptions is their ability to unwind the stack, automatically returning from nested routines until the exception is trapped and dealt with. No longer do you have to check for error conditions, making your code into a morass of error tests. All in all, exceptions make for more robust software, providing that they're used properly. Catch is the interesting one: it allows you to trap an exception that was thrown and perform some kind of action based upon the type of the exception. The biggest mistakes programmers make with exceptions are twofold. The first is that the programmer is not specific enough in the type of exception they catch. Catching too general an exception type means that they may be inadvertently dealing with particular exceptions that would be best left to other code, higher up the call chain. Those exceptions would, in effect, be suppressed and possibly lost. The second mistake is more pernicious: the programmer doesn't want any exceptions leaving their code and so catches them all and ignores them. This is known as the empty catch block. They may think, for example, that only certain types of exceptions might be thrown in his code; ones that they could justifiably ignore. In reality, other deadly runtime exceptions could happen – things such as out-of-memory exceptions, invalid code exceptions and the like, for which the program shouldn't continue running at all. Tune your exception catch blocks to be as specific as possible. 8. Storing secrets in plain text A long time ago, I worked in a bank. We purchased a new computer system for the back office to manage some kind of workflow dealing with bond settlements. Part of my job was to check this system to see whether it worked as described and whether it was foolproof. After all, it dealt with millions of pounds daily and then, as now, a company is more likely to be defrauded by an employee than an outsider. After 15 minutes with a rudimentary hex editor, I'd found the administrator's password stored in plain text. Data security is one of those topics that deserves more coverage than I can justifiably provide here, but you should never, ever store passwords in plain text. The standard for passwords is to store the salted hash of the original password, and then do the same salting and hashing of an entered password to see if they match. Here's a handy hint: if a website promises to email you your original password should you forget it, walk away from the site. This is a huge security issue. One day that site will be hacked. You'll read about how many logins were compromised, and you'll swallow hard and feel the panic rising. Don't be one of the people whose information has been compromised and, equally, don't store passwords or other 'secrets' in plain text in your apps. 9. Not validating user input In the good old days, our programs were run by individuals, one at a time. We grew complacent about user input: after all, if the program crashed, only one person would be inconvenienced – the one user of the program at that time. Our input validation was limited to number validation, or date checking, or other kinds of verification of input. Text input tended not to be validated particularly. Then came the web. Suddenly your program is being used all over the world and you've lost that connection with the user. Malicious users could be entering data into your program with the express intent of trying to take over your application or your servers. A whole crop of devious new attacks were devised that took advantage of the lack of checking of user input. The most famous one is SQL injection, although unsanitised user input could precipitate an XSS attack (crosssite scripting) through markup injection. Both types rely on the user providing, as part of normal form input, some text that contains either SQL or HTML fragments. If the application does not validate the user input, it may just use it as is and either cause some hacked SQl to execute, or some hacked HTML/JavaScript to be produced. This in turn could crash the app or allow it to be taken over by the hacker. So, always assume the user is a hacker trying to crash or take over your application and validate or sanitise user input. 10. Not being up to date All of the previous mistakes have been covered in depth online and in various books. I haven't discovered anything new – they and others have been known for years. These days you have to work pretty hard to avoid coming into contact with various modern design and programming techniques. I'd say that not spending enough time becoming knowledgeable about programming – and maintaining that expertise – is in fact the biggest mistake that programmers make. They should be learning about techniques such as TDD or BDD, about what SLAP or SOLID means, about various agile techniques. These skills are of equal or greater importance than understanding how a loop is written in your language of choice. So don't be like them: read McConnell and Beck and Martin and Jeffries and the Gang of Four and Fowler and Hunt & Thomas and so on. Make sure you stay up to date with the art and practice of programming. And that concludes my top 10 list of mistakes programmers make, no matter what their language stripe. There are others, to be sure, perhaps more disastrous than mine, but I would say that their degree of dread is proportional to the consequences of making them. All of the above were pretty dire for me the last time I made them. If you have further suggestions or calamities of your own, don't hesitate to contact me and let me know.

10 mistakes every programmer makes

When you start programming, you get disillusioned quickly. No longer is the computer the allinfallible perfect machine – "do as I mean...

Microsoft 'busily' buying every memory card it can

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/classifications/Mobile%20Phones/Hands%20on%20pictures/HTC/HTC%20Mozart/HTC_Mozart9-200-200.jpg" /> 
Microsoft is aiming to bring microSD expansion to its <a href="http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/software/operating-systems/microsoft-windows-phone-7-902194/review">Windows Phone 7</a> range as soon as possible, according to the Windows Phone team. 
Microsoft's decision to lock down the memory cards and not allow users to expand their microSD allowance drew ire from some users who wanted more than the 8GB or 16GB on offer, but that looks set to change. 
In an interview with TechRadar, <a href="http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/windows-phone-7-microsd-card-why-you-can-t-change-it-910271">Microsoft's Windows Phone team told us</a> that it was "now busily buying every microSD card they can get their hands on and testing it in their phones, and when they have a list of which cards perform well enough to recommend they'll be distributing the information." 
Suddenly getting sloooowwwwww.... 
The reason is that some memory cards will cause the phone to slow down, as it need to access the microSD in short, sharp bursts at times to function - some memory cards don't work well under these conditions and the handset will become sluggish, which is why Microsoft is testing so comprehensively. 
"Yes, it's about read write speeds [which is what the SD class number indicates]," senior product manager Greg Sullivan told us. "The IO rate is part of it but actually what's equally important are the bit error rates. That will impact the speed of the checksum rewrite." 
This doesn't mean that it's going to be an easy task to upgrade your memory in your new Windows Phone 7 device; you'll need to wipe the card then perform a factory rest on the phone to 'lock' the two together. 
But if you're desperate to get your new HTC HD7 up to 40GB, then at least you should have an option soon.

Microsoft 'busily' buying every memory card it can

Microsoft is aiming to bring microSD expansion to its Windows Phone 7 range as soon as possible, according to the Windows Phone team. Mi...

Cyber-bullying, What Every Parent Should Know

Do you ever worry about your children getting beaten up on the school playground? Probably not, but many of us wonder if our children are being bullied online or having their reputations scorched on Facebook. Cyber-bullying is becoming an increasing source of anxiety for parents and the numbers show this behavior is quite common among tweens and teens.Here are some revealing statistics:• 58% of 4th-8th graders haven't told their parents or an adult about something mean or hurtful that happened to them online.• 42% of these kids have been bullied while online. • 35% have been threatened online.• 21% have received mean or threatening e-mail or other messages.• 53% of kids admit having said something mean or hurtful to another person  while online.          Based on 2004 i-SAFE survey of 1,500 students grades 4-8  Definitions of cyber-bullying:• Any kind of insult, humiliation or threat which uses text-messaging or internet technology to hurt another person.• Posting photos without permission online/sending photos via e-mail or cell phone.• Forwarding IM conversations and/or spreading rumors online.• Public posting of telephone numbers, home addresses and passwords.Our first and best option as parents is to talk to our kids about cyber-bullying. This begins with explaining the different types of wired/wireless bullying. The next step is to teach your child how to respond, ignore and block unwanted senders. Ideally, your child will talk to you when this is happening, but more than likely, you'll need to discover this on your own (more about internet monitoring software in a moment).  According to Internet Safety expert, Richard Shuster, M.S.W., "Girls are far more likely to be cyber-bullied than boys (practically double the likelihood). This is significant as girls statistically are more prone to depression than boys AND tend to have suicidal thoughts more than adolescent males do as well. When we were in school if a kid was bullied, they had a reprieve after they got off the bus and on weekends. Now, cell phones and computers allow bullies to add horrific stressors to their victims at all times without any real break for a child to recover. This is unprecedented and I would not be shocked to see someone draw a comparative study between PTSD and kids who have been victimized by cyber bullying."   There have been cases where children have committed suicide as a result of being emotionally wounded by a cyber-bully.  A Yale University study shows that bully victims are two to nine times more likely to report having suicidal thoughts than other kids. If your child has been bullied online or in person, be sure to ask directly or indirectly if he or she has had thoughts of suicide. Seek professional help immediately if the answer is affirmative.Here are some ways to help your child with an online issue: Report problems to your Internet Service Provider (ISP)Most cyber-bullying and harassment incidents violate the ISP's terms of service. Many ISPs will close a cyber-bully's account (which can also close their parents' household account). You should report incidents to the sender's ISP, not yours. If you use an internet monitoring software, this is much easier to discover. If your child's account has been hacked or their password compromised, or if someone is posing as your child, you should make a formal report to your ISP as well.  But, before changing your password, you should scan your computer for any hacking programs or spyware, such as a Trojan horse virus. If one is on your computer, the cyber-bully may be able to access the new password. Most good anti-virus programs can find and remove a hacking program.  Report problems to your child's school or the bully's school.Most cases of cyber-bullying occur off school grounds and outside of school hours. In the United States, often the school has no legal authority to take action relating to an off-premises and after hours activity, even if it has an impact on the welfare of their students. However, you should notify the school (especially if your child suspects who is behind the attacks). They may not be able to take disciplinary action, but they can monitor the situation in school.Report to Police If someone threatens you or your child physically and/or is posting personal contact information; report this to the police immediately. Richard Shuster adds, "Many of the cyber-bullies are pretty adept at "covering their tracks" and a great deal of the victims may not actually know (at least initially) who's harassing them. This is important for parents of children who are committing the acts. An act of bullying may be intended as an innocent joke without the consequences being considered. Once the authorities get involved, they have little trouble tracing the identity of the bully. In this instance, an unsuspecting parent (if the child is under 18) may themselves face criminal charges if they don't know what their children on doing on the computer."Shuster Solutions, is an organization specializing in helping parents protect their children from internet dangers. President, Richard Shuster, M.S. W., tells the story of a high school girl whose parents noticed a marked change in her grades and behavior. This popular, honor-roll student became depressed, withdrawn and suffered academically. Her parents had purchased internet monitoring software from Shuster Solutions and discovered she was being pursued by a student known as a drug dealer at school. She was rebuffing him, but feared the repercussions of turning him down. The father (unbeknownst to the daughter) took computer printouts of their conversations to the school principal. The principal alerted the school policeman, the boy's locker was raided, drugs were found and he was arrested on the spot. With the boy no longer a threat, the girl went back to being her normal, cheerful self and never knew what precipitated the boy's arrest. This story has a happy ending because her parents saw the signs of trouble and were on top of their child's internet use.Warning signs that your child may be involved in some form of unwanted online/wired activity:• Your child's behavior has changed dramatically (withdrawal, depression, abusing alcohol/drugs, dropping grades, violent outbursts).• They're spending more time online or texting.• Your cell phone bills suddenly escalate because of additional web or text usage.• They become very secretive about computer usage or text messaging.While there is no substitute for parental involvement, it's impossible to guard the computer 24 hours a day.  We recommend using internet monitoring software which takes screenshots, shows all e-mails, passwords, IM chats and every keystroke. The software will alert you via e-mail when certain words are typed on the child's computer.  While we've focused here on the negative impact of the internet, I believe it's important to remember the benefits. The internet offers information,  education and networking to the entire world in a way never before imagined. After all, you're reading this now....via the internet!	 	 		 			 				 					 						Lisa Smith Henderson, author of this article and radio personality, hosts the multi-CD parenting series, Teens Talk Truth. Henderson interviews today's teens on hot topics and then talks to an expert in each field to guide parents. For more information about internet safety, go to the Teens Talk Truth website, <a href="http://www.teenstalktruth.com" target="_new">http://www.teenstalktruth.com</a> and for internet monitoring software, <a href="http://www.shustersolutions.com" target="_new">http://www.shustersolutions.com</a> which was established by Richard Shuster, MSW. Today's parents have a more complex world in which to raise children and this calls for new education, new approaches and most importantly, TRUTH. Teens Talk Truth distinguishes itself by being a direct source of information from teens and tweens on subjects from Sex to Eating Disorders. Lisa Smith Henderson is based in Atlanta, Georgia and is the parent of a 20 year-old and a 14 year-old. She knows firsthand the trials and triumphs associated with parenting teens.

Cyber-bullying, What Every Parent Should Know

Do you ever worry about your children getting beaten up on the school playground? Probably not, but many of us wonder if our children ar...