₦airaland Forum

@kadeerna: Wow, last day ninja entry. Oh my.

It was just an April Fools joke.

spambot error

Chuks84: Yamukazi abi what.is your name, its threads like this I dislike? Why are you even asking? Do you have any authority on the site? Can u determine the thread that come on the front page? I see how you eagerly answer almost every post; its seems you have nothing better to do with your time.

yamakuza is now a super-moderator, so it makes sense for him to create threads such as this. Please respect him!

Really, guys, really? So there are programmers on this forum??

@techytom Can we chat? Would like to find out more about you.

Any updates?

Hmm.

If God created all good & evil in the universe, how can God not be at least partly evil?

Who created God? If the universe is to intricate to not have been intelligently designed, then a creature who designed such an intricate world must have been intricate himself, so we have to ask who designed him. If God could just exist without a designer, then the universe could have sprung up the same way!!

toluxa1: Seun please I have a question. I am currently learning Python and you were actually the one that inspired me to pick it up. Am not a beginner to programming though. I want to know if Python has a Certification they do like Microsoft, JAVA etc? If yes can one do it in Nigeria?

You didn't enter the contest. It would have been an excellent certification for you. ;-)

Mine stopped working. How can I repair it. I love the battery life so much.

I did not change the view for the mobile version of Nairaland yesterday. Send me a screenshot from your phone.

@maclatunji: when last did you check the mobile look. It's exactly the same as the desktop look now!

fellis: Seun you don come again.
Who is Umari Ayim and why do you put her stories on front page?
na your babe?

[s]I'm trying to promote Nairaland as a place to publish serious content like opinion pieces and short stories that are really good.[/s]
The above is quite true but, to be more honest, I'm trying to help her to get her name out there. She's very good.

--

Don't waste your time on the live website. It's not part of the competition and it's not very important. Focus.

solomon111: If she cant get there,then no african woman will ever head an institution as big as that again.

Are you saying that no African woman can be as good as Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala ever again? I seriously doubt that.

I've instructed the two mods to clean up this section. You can PM me if you want to be a moderator. Topic locked.

afrobaby: The owner of the site says he is open to ideas, no business oriented person would want to see his/her business collapse, please, if we actually have programmers, I mean good programmers in the house, please lend him ideas

I appreciate your concern but I assure you that if my business was in trouble, I would be the first to raise the alarm.

You can record your bandwidth usage in kbps while streaming a match with other browser windows closed.

Once we have that figure, we can use it to help you to calculate the number of megabytes downloaded per hour of streaming.

Slyr0x: How do you intend encouraging "webmasters" to participate actively on a board where "few lines of codes" gets eaten by the SpamBot and the "supposed offender" gets banned?

A good moderator doesn't wallow in lame excuses. It's true that the old Nairaland antispam bot got out of hand, but the primary reason that used to happen is when a moderator stubbornly refused to follow our anti-spam protocol. When a post was wrongly banned, you were supposed to immediately report such posts to me, so I would retrain the spam filter not to recognize them as spam. But mods refused to do that, causing the antispam bot to become more and more aggressive because it thought it was making the right decisions. Yawa-ti-de had the same problem of not wanting to submit reports when she was a mod. It's a geek thing.

However, New Nairaland has solved the problem in two ways: (1) The new antispam bot is less aggressive. (2) Mods are now able to mark and unmark spam posts at the click of a button themselves, without having to report the posts to me. Every moderator can mark and unmark spam posts in any section of the forum. Moreso, all members can now send emails to mods directly from the moderators' profile at any time, so all spam-related issues can be reported without opening extra user accounts or posting to threads. So if we see any spam on this section, or any post wrongly marked as spam, it's appropriate to blame the mods. They have been empowered.

As I said, I'm open to any "ideas" about how to get a Python programmer. If you feel the site is ugly, I'm also open to "ideas" about which web designer I should hire to make the site look better. I don't have a vision problem, but I probably have an execution problem. I need "ideas" about how to bring my plans to reality. If your "ideas" are too expensive, then I will need cost-saving "ideas" too.

The emails contain a link to replies made to every topic you followed.

jacob05: I'm IN.

Please, please, do participate. We need to have some competition here, to make this a real contest. Start right away.

I just ran the website in a virtual environment and it worked perfectly,
I've setup a wiki on setting up a virtual environment, like I did http://code.google.com/p/emergency-jamb-result-checker/wiki/HowToRun

Got it to work yesterday. The instructions were not sufficient - I also had to install memcache.py from github. The problem I have now is that the registration numbers I got from the database did not show any results.

@Fayimora: Thanks. Isn't a web developer a type of programmer, though?

To develop PHP on your PC, get XAMPP for Windows:
* http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
To develop Java on your PC, get Netbeans:
* http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk-7-netbeans-download-432126.html

I'm currently trying to find a very good Python web programmer. Do you have any "ideas" about how to get this?

Throughout the life of this forum, and I mean from the very first month, people have been lamenting the departure of "old timers" and the "fact" that Nairaland is no longer what it used to be. And the forum keeps growing. Nairaland has been simultaneously declining and growing for 7 years; it's not a miracle; it's turnover.

When people start posting about the demise of Nairaland in a particular section, it simply means they are no longer enjoying that section, which is their favourite section, and that is usually because the mod has stopped moderating or the supermod stopped posting topics from the section on the home page because the mod stopped recommending topics to her. It could also be that some popular users stopped posting regularly (after getting banned, married, or employed). And when your favourite section is no longer bubbling, you assume that it means the whole forum is dying, because for you, that section is your personal Nairaland.

When aisha2 and jarus stopped moderating because Buhari lost the presidential election, people started lamenting the decline of Nairaland in the politics section. I take this thread as a sign that the webmaster section needs more attention. I think yawa-ti-de and dhtml (when he's not high) are the main celebs of this section and the section struggles when they stop posting. The section dies completely when there are ads all over the place and the ads are not removed. I'm going to look into the antispam bot's activities.

If people are involved in fights, I guess we can block them from seeing each others' posts.

As you know, I like to sponsor web application programming contests, for example, this, this, and this

In a recent conversation with an Android programmer, he asked why I don't follow Google's practice of asking people to solve puzzles. According to him, people who can solve programming puzzles can definitely build webapps, but many people who build webapps can't solve programming puzzles. I asked why these programming puzzle solving geniuses can't learn Python to write simple webapps for cash, and I think he said it's because basic webapps are not cool enough to interest them.

What do you think? If interviewing a programmer for a role on your team, would you ask the programmer to solve programming puzzles or would you ask them to develop something simple but complete like a mini-webapp? Which approach will result in the best hire?