Once a mathematician told me a project is possible on the condition that we got a language. Could you help me understand how we know when we do and when we don't? Like examples or whether an automated test can know what's a "language" and what isn't. Thanks
It is hard to understand what (s)he might have meant without any context. However, my personal (and highly speculative) association to this is domain languages. Users of a specific domain have their own terminology and logic, which the analyst/programmer must understand and translate into code in order to develop a successful sw product. If the users and developers speak the same ubiquitous language, the project has good chances to succeed. If not, however, even if something gets "successfully" developed, it will not be very useful for the end users, thus the project is in fact a failure.
The fundamental book for this is Domain Driven Design.
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I'm trying to figure out how to properly fill in PCI SAC D compliance form for a startup business with the only one owner/architect/developer/admin/QA/etc - all of them is me alone.
It's a web app for selling a particular intangible service. No card information is going to be stored. The reason for SAC D - I'd prefer to do some validation logic on my server side and have a total review and confirmation page that match the rest of UI.
Hosting environment will be AWS Beanstalk + RDS.
When I read it, common sense tells me to ignore statements like "Interview personnel" or "Review policies & procedures", but I expect that large corporate minds are not usually driven by common sense but by rules.
I can hardly imaging formal process of interviewing myself and documenting what I've asked and what I've said, especially the benefits of doing that.
Most of the questions in Requirement 8 make no sense either.
Questions that assume that stuff is more then one employee make no sense.
Can those be skipped (N/A-ed) or should I formally do the exercise and generate some funny nonsense?
Thank you!
You can N/A those questions.
Remember the SAQ is a SELF Assessment Questionnaire, not a test you are taking. The payment card industry is more concerned about your adherence to the "spirit" of PCI-DSS rather than hard fast rules. It's more about protecting cardholder data than it is complying with things that don't apply to your case. (Although anything that does apply should definitely be followed as a hard rule.)
If you did get audited, it would probably only be because you had a breach, which obviously would NOT be because you didn't "interview yourself" and put on a security ID badge when you sat down in front of your development computer :-D and I don't think you'd have any trouble at all getting that point across to the QSA.
Now, having all your security policies and procedures, network diagrams, firewall, etc. documented and reviewed periodically does apply, since for security guidelines to be followed on a continual basis, they must be reviewed on a continual basis. For these, just use common sense. In other words, go over your firewall rules and such at least as often as PCI-DSS requires and ask yourself, "Do I still need this ALLOW SNMP port 161 rule to be in effect?" etc. etc...Oh dear I think I just told you to interview yourself... :-D
Anyway, you get the idea.
Are you really really sure you need SAQ D? It's a pretty big undertaking if you're starting from scratch. Is the money flowing into your merchant account? If so you could potentially get away with SAQ A which is going to make your life WAY easier. If not, then you're probably SAQ D service provider and you'll have no choice but to do SAQ D. In terms of styling and validation you could use an iFrame solution like Braintree, you have quite a lot of control and it reduces your PCI scope significantly.
In my experience talking with the bank that holds the merchant account is a good place to start, they're keen for secure systems to be developed, so are likely to give you advice on what you need to do. You could also engage a QSA but they are not cheap in general.
I don't think (though i'm not 100% sure) interviewing yourself is required, those instructions are for auditors to use to ensure that policy and procedures are being followed. For lone developers, a big problem is code reviews, you will need someone else to do that.
I would like to make a bot that can carry on a simple conversation. I would like to be able to supply the bot with parameters about the things it knows and how it responds to certain subjects. I am wondering if anyone knows of any freely available source code or an API for a decent conversational bot.
I would like to use this to facilitate gaming by having computer-controlled characters that interact with the real players without having completely pre-scripted, static dialog. I am hoping that I can find something capable of holding a simple, generic conversation unless asked about a specific topic, at which point it can give specific replies to a pre-set list of specific topics.
I am asking more about the conversational-processing aspect and not so much about a front end or hooks to other apps or anything like that. Initially, I will just make this a local command-line based thing, then if satisfied I am looking into libpurple as an API to access various communication networks once I have the dialog processing ready.
So, does anyone know of any source code or API for something like this? Google brings up mostly tools for things like imified. I'm not expecting there to be a lot. A source code for something that exists that can handle various emotions and topics and such would be awesome, but I'd be happy with something that just holds the simplest of conversations, as there should be something somewhere that does this, seeing how there are multiple IM bots in existence.
In the absence of a good source or API, would anyone happen to know of any good materials about programming an AI that can have a conversation? Again, I'm not talking about PhD papers discussing robots that can pass believably as humans or anything like that; I mean materials that discuss some simple programming techniques that common conversational bots use to hold rudimentary conversations.
Because of the libpurple API, I'll probably be doing this in C++. So C++ resources are preferable but not required.
(edit) I just stumbled onto AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). I am currently looking into that, and it sounds like it might be promising, especially if there are any pre-made conversational resources available for it, as then I could just add topics to it in the manner I mentioned, if I am understanding it correctly.
AIML is old, obsolete and is a torture to create his database. I suggest you follow this gamasutra's article about chatbot languages. This article describes the ChatScript language, is a great alternative for AIML.
Another language is RiveScript that have a cool clean style, but it seem like a copy of AIML with the same bad concepts.
I'm developing the Aerolito language that is based on YAML, it's just a hobby project and it's not usable yet. =]
In my opinion, ChatScript is the best option for now.
I understand this question is old, but things have changed in the time since the question has posted. Check out the following projects, these bots learn from either text files, irc chat logs or in the case of triplie, they can read websites (albeit not perfectly).
triplie-ng: https://github.com/spion/triplie-ng
cobe: https://github.com/pteichman/cobe
Giorgio Robino mentioned http://superscriptjs.com/ but it's more than just chatscript - it's a superset of rivescript and chatscript and also includes a built-in triple store to implement WordNet etc.
I'm building an application as part of a course project which allows users to rate an place/event .
My basic question is how should I proceed in this ?
In what language should I write my code ?
If a user provides a 5-star rating, how do I collect it and put it in the database ?
Any guidelines on how to put the initial steps would be very helpful as my knowledge relating to web services is very weak.
Any help/pointers to more information would be very appreciated
Your question is overly vague and isn't related to system administration, so it's probably going to get closed once someone comes along with the appropriate privileges. However, as long as it's here...
My basic question is how should I proceed in this ?
If you are completely at a loss you may want to spend some time consulting with your instructor, who may be able to suggest likely sources of information and provide some direction for your work.
In what language should I write my code ?
You should write your code in a language with which you are familiar that allows you to fulfill the requirements of the project. Anything else will needlessly extend the amount of time it takes to complete the project. If your goal is to learn a new language, you face a mind-numbing number of choices. Python, Ruby, and PHP are all see wide use in web applications. On Microsoft platforms, .NET is quite popular. You will find proponents and detractors for all of them.
If a user provides a 5-star rating, how do I collect it and put it in the database ?
This looks suspiciously like you're asking us to do your assignment for you.
I have a small course project that would best have a user-friendly front end.
It's a network sniffer, I coded the program with C and Linux. And now I am hoping to make it more ``user-friendly".
In c: Getopt
In c++, if relevant: Boost program options
Try to behave like other programs (at the very least provide a useful --help message, and print some sort of simple usage description for invalid arguments). I find the easiest way to understand how to use a program is when its manual page, or even --help message gives examples of common usage cases.
If by user friendly you mean you want to make a gui for it then I would definitely recommend GTK. GTK is one of the more widely use Xserver tool kits and it is written in C. Another plus is that it is written in an object oriented manner. IMO being exposed to how OO programming is accomplished in C is a great thing for all CS students.
If your sniffer has a command line front end, have a look at Eric S. Raymond's The of Unix Programming. In chapter 10, there's a whole section on how to name and format your command line arguments. There's also a POSIX standard for utility syntax.
These approaches won't directly make your program user friendly, only research on your users and analysis of your interfaces will help with this. However, providing an interface that works in ways that users expect will certainly help.
Im no expert in UI Design, or anything in that matter, but taking an interest in the quality of User Interface Design, I came across Aza Raskin, an interface design expert that is head of design for Mozilla Labs. I have followed some lectures and conventions that Aza has done on UI Design, and he said something that is simple, yet makes more sense then anything I have ever learned with UI Design...I may butcher it but its along the lines of
If The User has to think about the design,then it is a bad design
This may seem like an insult to everybody's intelligence, but it makes sense. Something that is user friendly cant be ambiguous to the user. This means that when a user is performing some task/operation, the UI should be presented to them corresponding to the current event or situation.
The UI should be designed so that anybody who picks up your software should be able to navigate through it. This DOESNT mean that they should understand the underlying problem domain, but it does mean that if asked to find a certain functional part of the software, that they could generally navigate themselves there.
Some things to things to think about when using your software:
1) -Do you ever ask yourself, "Do I go here or here?
2) -Do I use tools like bold fonts and italicizing to show emphasis?
3) -Am I sacrificing anything by making certain features "idiot proof"(Read Below)
4) -Am I trying to do too much anywhere just to save time(programming time)
These are just some things that can help straighten out some of your design decisions. In no way is this following any pattern. Like I said, my education in this field is minimal, it is just an interest I have followed.
Regarding #3, It is important that you don't sacrifice any feature or design decision when implementing certain accommodations. If you have something where 99% of your users are using a certain feature, but 1% can be expected to make a different decision, then take this into consideration. Don't sacrifice the design for the 99% of the users to accommodate the other 1%. This doesn't mean don't accommodate the other users, I just mean don't sacrifice the integrity of the design.
If you don't need to interact with the app "live" or only need limited interaction as a command line app then you can write a frontend using PyGTK. If you need to access C libraries then you can use Cython to load and call them.
But regardless of what you choose, be sure to find a professional interface designer. A bad interface can destroy the potential popularity of any app.
As much as we would all like to say it is a benefit to programmers to be language agnostic, is it really feasible to support multiple enterprise Web applications of the same type all written in different languages? Think about how complicated a CMS or e-commerce system can be -- now imagine supporting three different CMS platforms all written in different languages. I would hate to be known as a .NET or Java or PHP shop, but I also don't want to be the vendor who says they can support a solution they have never worked with, upsetting a client who wonders why we can't get something done right on time. Can anyone speak from experience on this? Does your company usually just suck it up, and try and to learn a new platform on the fly? Do you bill up-to-speed, or eat those costs?
I think it all depends on who your clients are and what they expect. I think knowing about different technologies is good, but really when you're hired by someone, they expect you to know what you are doing. Personally, I would much rather be known that I do a really good job with a certain type of technology and when hired, I get the job done well.
If you try and go after every contract without regard to what your core competencies are, you aren't going to succeed. You'll anger the people who do hire you and make mistakes, and you'll potentially miss opportunities where you can really shine. Sometimes you have to make compromises to pay the bills, but if you aren't careful, it can bite you in the end.
The large consulting firms I've worked with throw resources at it and hope they don't anger too many people. They mainly do this because they know that the people who work with the consultants and get angry when they don't get the job done aren't the ones making the decisions to keep them hired. To them (not all of them I know, but some definately), don't care if they screw up because they ultimately know they can convince the VPs and SVPs to keep them around.
To be honest, I think you tend to see this kind of thing happen over time, no matter how disciplined the organization is. It's natural for new methodologies to come bundled in the form of new libraries, frameworks, or even languages. Keep in mind that a .NET shop may well have been a ASP/VB shop at one time. They'll probably still maintain older systems for clients, because there's little benefit to rewriting everything from scratch.
I'm not sure anyone has the luxury to keep everything "the same," because language issues are minor compared to library or framework issues -- especially the ones you build yourself.