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• Surface RT: To Be Or Not To Be (Part 1)

  - by smehaffie

  So the Surface RT has been out for 9 months and Microsoft just declared a $900 million dollar write-down. So how did this happen and what does it mean for Microsoft’s efforts to break into the tablet market? I have been thinking a lot about most of the information below since the Surface product line was released. If you are looking for a “Microsoft Is Dead” story, then don’t read any further. But if you want an honest look at what I think led Microsoft to this point and what I think can be done to make Surface RT devices better, then please continue reading. What Led Microsoft To The $900 Million Write-Down Surface Unveiling:Microsoft totally missed the boat when they unveiled the Surface product line on June 18th, 2012. Microsoft should’ve been ready to post the specifications of both devices that night. Microsoft should’ve had a site up and running right after the event so people could pre-order the devices. This would have given them a good idea what the interest was in each device.  They could also have used this data to make a better estimate for the number of units to to have available for the launch and beyond.  They also lost out on taking advantage of the excitement generated by the Surface RT and Surface Pro announcement. They could have thrown in a free touch keyboard to anyone who pre-ordered. The advertising should have started right after the announcement and gotten bigger as launch day approached. Push for as many pre-order as possible and build excitement for the launch. Actual Launch (Surface RT): By this time all excitement was gone from the initial announcement, except for the Micorsoft faithful. Microsoft should have been ready to sell the Surface in as many markets as possible at launch. The limited market release was a real letdown for a lot of people.  A limited release right after the initial announce is understandable, but not at the official launch of the product. Microsoft overpriced the device and now they are lowering it to what it should have been to start with. The $349 price is within the range I suggested it should be at before pricing was announced. (Surface Tablets: The Price Must Be Right). Limited ordering options online was also a killer. User should have been able to buy the base unit of each device and then add on whatever keyboard they wanted to (this applies more to the Surface Pro).  There should have also been a place where users could order any additional add-ins that they wanted to buy (covers, extra power supplies, etc.) Marketing was better and the dancing “Click In” commercial was cool, but the ads comparing the iPad with Siri should have been on the air from day one of the announcement (or at least the launch).  Consumers want to know why you tablet is better, not just that is has a clickable keyboard and built-in kickstand. They could have also compared it to some of the other mid-range tablets if they had not overprices it to begin with. Stock Applications (Mail, People, Calendar, Music, Video, Reader and IE): This is where Microsoft really blew it. They had all the time in the world to make these applications the best of breed and instead we got applications that seemed thrown together.  Some updates have made these application better, but they are all still lacking in features that should have been there from day one. This did not help to enhance a new users experience any. ** I will admit that the applications that were data driven were first class citizen’s and that makes it even more perplexing why MS could knock it out of the park with the Weather, Travel, Finance, Bing, etc.) and fail so miserably on the core applications users would use the most on a tablet. Desktop on Tablet: The desktop just is so out of place on the tablet  I understand it was needed for Office but think it would have been better to not have the desktop in Windows RT, but instead open up the Office applications in full screen mode, in a desktop shell (same goes for  IE11).That way the user wouldn’t realize they are leaving Metro and going to the desktop. The other option would have been to just not include Office on Windows RT devices. Instead they could have made awesome Widows Store Apps for Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. In addition, they could have made the stock Mail, People, and Calendar applications contain all the functions that Outlook gives desktop users. Having some of the settings in desktop mode and others under “Change PC Settings” made Windows RT seemed unfinished and rushed to market. What Can Be Done To Make Windows RT Based Tablets Better (At least in my opinion) Either eliminate the desktop all together from Windows RT or at least make the user experience better by hiding the fact the user is running Office/IE in the desktop. Personally I ‘d like them to totally get rid of it and just make awesome Windows Store Application version of Word, Excel PowerPoint & OneNote.  This might also make the OS smaller and give the user more available disk space. I doubt there will ever be a Windows Store App versions of Office, but I still think it is a good idea. Make is so users can easily direct their documents, picture, videos and music to their extra storage and can access these files from the standard libraries.  A user should not have to create a VM on their microSD card or create symbolic links to get this to work properly. Most consumers would not be able to do this. Then users get frustrated when they run out or room on their main storage because nothing is automatically save to their microSD card when saved to libraries.  This is a major bug that needs to be fixed, otherwise Microsoft’s selling point of having a microSD slot is worthless. Allows users to uninstall and re-install any of the Office product that come with the Surface. That way people can free up storage space by uninstalling the Office applications they do not need. Everyone’s needs are different, so make the options flexible. Don’t take up storage space for applications the user will not use. Make the Core applications the “Cream of the Crop” Windows App Store applications. The should set the bar for all other Store applications. Improve performance as much as possible, if it seems to be sluggish on a tablet consumer will not buy it. They need to price the next line of Surface product very aggressive to undercut not only iPad but also Android low end tablets (Nook, Kindle Fire, and Nexus, etc.) Give developers incentives to write quality applications for the devices. Don’t reward developers for cranking out cookie cutter, low quality applications. I’d even suggest Microsoft consider implementing some new store certification guideline to stop these type of applications being published. Allow users to easily move the recover disk “partition between their microSD card and main storage. My Predictions for the Surface RT and Windows RT I honestly think even with all the missteps MS has made since the announcement  about the Surface product line, that they are on the right path. I was excited the Surface tablets when they were announced, and I still am. The truth be told, Windows 8 on a tablet (aka: Windows RT) is better than both iOS and Android. My nephew who is an Apple fan boy told me after he saw and used Windows 8 (he got the beta running on his iPad), that Windows 8 kicked Apples butt as a tablet OS. So there is hope for all Windows RT based tablets. I agree with my nephew and that is why whenever anyone asks me about my Surface, I love showing it off and recommend it. The 6 keys to gaining market share in the tablet market are; Aggressive pricing by both Microsoft and their OEM’s Good quality devices put out by Microsoft and their OEM’s (there are some out there, but not enough) Marketing, Marketing, Marketing from both Microsoft and their OEM’s (Need more ads showing why windows based tablets are better than iPads and Android tablets) Getting Widows tablets in retails stores all over, and giving sales people incentive to sell them. Consumers like to try electronics out before they buy them, and most will listen to what the sales person suggest. Microsoft needs sales people in retail stores directing people to buy windows based tablets over iPads and Android tablets. I think the Microsoft Stores within Best Buy is a good start, but they also need to get prominent displays in Walmart, Target, etc.. Release a smaller form factor Surface, Hopefully the 8”-10” next generation Surface is not a rumor. Make “Surface” the brand name for all Microsoft tablets and hybrid devices that they come out with. They cannot change the name with each new release.  Make Surface synonymous with quality, the same way that iPad  is for Apple. Well, that is my 2 cents on the subject. Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below. Soon to follow will be my thought on the Surface Pro, so keep an eye out for it. var addthis_pub="smehaffie"; var addthis_options="email, print, digg, slashdot, delicious, twitter, live, myspace, facebook, google, stumbleupon, newsvine";

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• Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

  - by Jeff

  (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

  - by raul.goycoolea

  Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

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• Tweak Conky Layout via a script

  - by begtognen

  I'm using a script in Conky in order to display my new gmail on my desktop. It works beautifully, but is kind of ugly, and I'm not sure how to fix it. What I've currently got looks like this: And what I'd like is this: Any ideas for how to make that happen are much appreciated. Here's the script I'm currently using (I think I've snipped out the correct part, if I haven't please let me know.) #!/usr/bin/perl use Switch; use Text::Wrap; my $what=$ARGV[0]; $user="username"; #username for gmail account $pass="password"; #password for gmail account $file="/tmp/gmail.html"; #temporary file to store gmail #wrap format for subject $Text::Wrap::columns=65; #Number of columns to wrap subject at $initial_tab=""; #Tab for first line of subject $subsequent_tab="\t"; #tab for wrapped lines $quote="\""; #put quotes around subject #limit the number of emails to be displayed $emails=-1; #if -1 display all emails &passwd; #give password the proper url character encoding switch($what){ #determine what the user wants case "n" {&gmail; print "$new\n";} #print number of new emails case "s" { #print $from and $subj for new email &gmail; if ($new0){ my $size=@from; if ($emails!=-1 && $size$emails){$size=$emails;} #limit number of emails displayed for(my $i=0; $i$emails){print "$emails out of $size new emails displayed\n";} } } case "e" { #print number of new emails, $from, and $subj &gmail; if($new==0){print "You have no new emails.\n";} else{ print "You have $new new email(s).\n"; my $size=@from; if ($emails!=-1 && $size$emails){$size=$emails;} #limit number of emails displayed for(my $i=0; $i$emails){print "$emails out of $size new emails displayed\n";} } } else { print "Usage Error: gmail.pl \n"; print "\tn displays number of new emails\n"; print "\ts displays from line and subject line for each new email.\n"; print "\te displays the number of new emails and from line plus \n"; print "\t\tsubject line for each new email.\n"; } #didn't give proper option } sub gmail{ if(!(-e $file)){ #create file if it does not exists `touch $file`; } #get new emails `wget -O - https://$user:$pass\@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom --no-check-certificate $file`; open(IN, $file); #open $file my $i=0; #initialize count $new=0; #initialize new emails to 0 my $flag=0; while(){ #cycle through $file if(//){$flag=1;} elsif(/(\d+)/){$new=$1;} #grab number of new emails elsif($flag==1){ if(/.+/){push(@subj, &msg);} #grab new email titles elsif(/(.+)/){push(@from, $1); $flag=0;} #grab new email from lines } } close(IN); #close $file } sub passwd{ #change to url escape codes in password #URL ESCAPE CODES $_=$pass; s/\%/\%25/g; s/\#/\%23/g; s/\$/\%24/g; s/\&/\%26/g; s/\//\%2F/g; s/\:/\%3A/g; s/\;/\%3B/g; s/\/\%3E/g; s/\?/\%3F/g; s/\@/\%40/g; s/\[/\%5B/g; s/\\/\%5C/g; s/\]/\%5D/g; s/\^/\%5E/g; s/\`/\%60/g; s/\{/\%7B/g; s/\|/\%7C/g; s/\}/\%7D/g; s/\~/\%7E/g; $pass=$_; } sub msg{ #THE HTML CODED CHARACTER SET [ISO-8859-1] chomp; s/(.+)/$1/; #get just the subject #now replace any special characters s/\&\#33\;/!/g; #Exclamation mark s/\&\#34\;/"/g; s/\"\;/"/g; #Quotation mark s/\&\#35\;/#/g; #Number sign s/\&\#36\;/\$/g; #Dollar sign s/\&\#37\;/%/g; #Percent sign s/\&\#38\;/&/g; s/\&\;/&/g; #Ampersand s/\&\#39\;/'/g; #Apostrophe s/\&\#40\;/(/g; #Left parenthesis s/\&\#41\;/)/g; #Right parenthesis s/\&\#42\;/*/g; #Asterisk s/\&\#43\;/+/g; #Plus sign s/\&\#44\;/,/g; #Comma s/\&\#45\;/-/g; #Hyphen s/\&\#46\;/./g; #Period (fullstop) s/\&\#47\;/\//g; #Solidus (slash) s/\&\#58\;/:/g; #Colon s/\&\#59\;/\;/g; #Semi-colon s/\&\#60\;//g; s/\>\;//g; #Greater than s/\&\#63\;/\?/g; #Question mark s/\&\#64\;/\@/g; #Commercial at s/\&\#91\;/\[/g; #Left square bracket s/\&\#92\;/\\/g; #Reverse solidus (backslash) s/\&\#93\;/\]/g; #Right square bracket s/\&\#94\;/\^/g; #Caret s/\&\#95\;/_/g; #Horizontal bar (underscore) s/\&\#96\;/\`/g; #Acute accent s/\&\#123\;/\{/g; #Left curly brace s/\&\#124\;/|/g; #Vertical bar s/\&\#125\;/\}/g; #Right curly brace s/\&\#126\;/~/g; #Tilde s/\&\#161\;/¡/g; #Inverted exclamation s/\&\#162\;/¢/g; #Cent sign s/\&\#163\;/£/g; #Pound sterling s/\&\#164\;/¤/g; #General currency sign s/\&\#165\;/¥/g; #Yen sign s/\&\#166\;/¦/g; #Broken vertical bar s/\&\#167\;/§/g; #Section sign s/\&\#168\;/¨/g; #Umlaut (dieresis) s/\&\#169\;/©/g; s/\©\;/©/g; #Copyright s/\&\#170\;/ª/g; #Feminine ordinal s/\&\#171\;/«/g; #Left angle quote, guillemotleft s/\&\#172\;/¬/g; #Not sign s/\&\#174\;/®/g; #Registered trademark s/\&\#175\;/¯/g; #Macron accent s/\&\#176\;/°/g; #Degree sign s/\&\#177\;/±/g; #Plus or minus s/\&\#178\;/²/g; #Superscript two s/\&\#179\;/³/g; #Superscript three s/\&\#180\;/´/g; #Acute accent s/\&\#181\;/µ/g; #Micro sign s/\&\#182\;/¶/g; #Paragraph sign s/\&\#183\;/·/g; #Middle dot s/\&\#184\;/¸/g; #Cedilla s/\&\#185\;/¹/g; #Superscript one s/\&\#186\;/º/g; #Masculine ordinal s/\&\#187\;/»/g; #Right angle quote, guillemotright s/\&\#188\;/¼/g; s/\¼\;/¼/g; # Fraction one-fourth s/\&\#189\;/½/g; s/\½\;/½/g; # Fraction one-half s/\&\#190\;/¾/g; s/\¾\;/¾/g; # Fraction three-fourths s/\&\#191\;/¿/g; #Inverted question mark s/\&\#192\;/À/g; #Capital A, grave accent s/\&\#193\;/Á/g; #Capital A, acute accent s/\&\#194\;/Â/g; #Capital A, circumflex accent s/\&\#195\;/Ã/g; #Capital A, tilde s/\&\#196\;/Ä/g; #Capital A, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#197\;/Å/g; #Capital A, ring s/\&\#198\;/Æ/g; #Capital AE dipthong (ligature) s/\&\#199\;/Ç/g; #Capital C, cedilla s/\&\#200\;/È/g; #Capital E, grave accent s/\&\#201\;/É/g; #Capital E, acute accent s/\&\#202\;/Ê/g; #Capital E, circumflex accent s/\&\#203\;/Ë/g; #Capital E, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#204\;/Ì/g; #Capital I, grave accent s/\&\#205\;/Í/g; #Capital I, acute accent s/\&\#206\;/Î/g; #Capital I, circumflex accent s/\&\#207\;/Ï/g; #Capital I, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#208\;/Ð/g; #Capital Eth, Icelandic s/\&\#209\;/Ñ/g; #Capital N, tilde s/\&\#210\;/Ò/g; #Capital O, grave accent s/\&\#211\;/Ó/g; #Capital O, acute accent s/\&\#212\;/Ô/g; #Capital O, circumflex accent s/\&\#213\;/Õ/g; #Capital O, tilde s/\&\#214\;/Ö/g; #Capital O, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#215\;/×/g; #Multiply sign s/\&\#216\;/Ø/g; #Capital O, slash s/\&\#217\;/Ù/g; #Capital U, grave accent s/\&\#218\;/Ú/g; #Capital U, acute accent s/\&\#219\;/Û/g; #Capital U, circumflex accent s/\&\#220\;/Ü/g; #Capital U, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#221\;/Ý/g; #Capital Y, acute accent s/\&\#222\;/Þ/g; #Capital THORN, Icelandic s/\&\#223\;/ß/g; #Small sharp s, German (sz ligature) s/\&\#224\;/à/g; #Small a, grave accent s/\&\#225\;/á/g; #Small a, acute accent s/\&\#226\;/â/g; #Small a, circumflex accent s/\&\#227\;/ã/g; #Small a, tilde s/\&\#228\;/ä/g; #Small a, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#229\;/å/g; #Small a, ring s/\&\#230\;/æ/g; #Small ae dipthong (ligature) s/\&\#231\;/ç/g; #Small c, cedilla s/\&\#232\;/è/g; #Small e, grave accent s/\&\#233\;/é/g; #Small e, acute accent s/\&\#234\;/ê/g; #Small e, circumflex accent s/\&\#235\;/ë/g; #Small e, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#236\;/ì/g; #Small i, grave accent s/\&\#237\;/í/g; #Small i, acute accent s/\&\#238\;/î/g; #Small i, circumflex accent s/\&\#239\;/ï/g; #Small i, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#240\;/ð/g; #Small eth, Icelandic s/\&\#241\;/ñ/g; #Small n, tilde s/\&\#242\;/ò/g; #Small o, grave accent s/\&\#243\;/ó/g; #Small o, acute accent s/\&\#244\;/ô/g; #Small o, circumflex accent s/\&\#245\;/õ/g; #Small o, tilde s/\&\#246\;/ö/g; #Small o, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#247\;/÷/g; #Division sign s/\&\#248\;/ø/g; #Small o, slash s/\&\#249\;/ù/g; #Small u, grave accent s/\&\#250\;/ú/g; #Small u, acute accent s/\&\#251\;/û/g; #Small u, circumflex accent s/\&\#252\;/ü/g; #Small u, dieresis or umlaut mark s/\&\#253\;/ý/g; #Small y, acute accent s/\&\#254\;/þ/g; #Small thorn, Icelandic s/\&\#255\;/ÿ/g; #Small y, dieresis or umlaut mark s/^\s+//; return $_; }

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• The Changing Face of PASS

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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• How to export SSIS to Microsoft Excel without additional software?

  - by Dr. Zim

  This question is long winded because I have been updating the question over a very long time trying to get SSIS to properly export Excel data. I managed to solve this issue, although not correctly. Aside from someone providing a correct answer, the solution listed in this question is not terrible. The only answer I found was to create a single row named range wide enough for my columns. In the named range put sample data and hide it. SSIS appends the data and reads metadata from the single row (that is close enough for it to drop stuff in it). The data takes the format of the hidden single row. This allows headers, etc. WOW what a pain in the butt. It will take over 450 days of exports to recover the time lost. However, I still love SSIS and will continue to use it because it is still way better than Filemaker LOL. My next attempt will be doing the same thing in the report server. Original question notes: If you are in Sql Server Integrations Services designer and want to export data to an Excel file starting on something other than the first line, lets say the forth line, how do you specify this? I tried going in to the Excel Destination of the Data Flow, changed the AccessMode to OpenRowSet from Variable, then set the variable to "YPlatters$A4:I20000" This fails saying it cannot find the sheet. The sheet is called YPlatters. I thought you could specify (Sheet$)(Starting Cell):(Ending Cell)? Update Apparently in Excel you can select a set of cells and name them with the name box. This allows you to select the name instead of the sheet without the $ dollar sign. Oddly enough, whatever the range you specify, it appends the data to the next row after the range. Oddly, as you add data, it increases the named selection's row count. Another odd thing is the data takes the format of the last line of the range specified. My header rows are bold. If I specify a range that ends with the header row, the data appends to the row below, and makes all the entries bold. if you specify one row lower, it puts a blank line between the header row and the data, but the data is not bold. Another update No matter what I try, SSIS samples the "first row" of the file and sets the metadata according to what it finds. However, if you have sample data that has a value of zero but is formatted as the first row, it treats that column as text and inserts numeric values with a single quote in front ('123.34). I also tried headers that do not reflect the data types of the columns. I tried changing the metadata of the Excel destination, but it always changes it back when I run the project, then fails saying it will truncate data. If I tell it to ignore errors, it imports everything except that column. Several days of several hours a piece later... Another update I tried every combination. A mostly working example is to create the named range starting with the column headers. Format your column headers as you want the data to look as the data takes on this format. In my example, these exist from A4 to E4, which is my defined range. SSIS appends to the row after the defined range, so defining A4 to E68 appends the rows starting at A69. You define the Connection as having the first row contains the field names. It takes on the metadata of the header row, oddly, not the second row, and it guesses at the data type, not the formatted data type of the column, i.e., headers are text, so all my metadata is text. If your headers are bold, so is all of your data. I even tried making a sample data row without success... I don't think anyone actually uses Excel with the default MS SSIS export. If you could define the "insert range" (A5 to E5) with no header row and format those columns (currency, not bold, etc.) without it skipping a row in Excel, this would be very helpful. From what I gather, noone uses SSIS to export Excel without a third party connection manager. Any ideas on how to set this up properly so that data is formatted correctly, i.e., the metadata read from Excel is proper to the real data, and formatting inherits from the first row of data, not the headers in Excel? One last update (July 17, 2009) I got this to work very well. One thing I added to Excel was the IMEX=1 in the Excel connection string: "Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;IMEX=1". This forces Excel (I think) to look at all rows to see what kind of data is in it. Generally, this does not drop information, say for instance if you have a zip code then about 9 rows down you have a zip+4, Excel without this blanks that field entirely without error. With IMEX=1, it recognizes that Zip is actually a character field instead of numeric. And of course, one more update (August 27, 2009) The IMEX=1 will succeed importing data with missing contents in the first 8 rows, but it will fail exporting data where no data exists. So, have it on your import connection string, but not your export Excel connection string. I have to say, after so much fiddling, it works pretty well.

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• The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

  - by Rick Strahl

  High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Im getting fatal errors... can anyone help me edit my program!

  - by user350217

  The errors i am getting are: Error 1 error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "double __cdecl getDollarAmt(void)" (? getDollarAmt@@YANXZ) referenced in function _main hid.obj Error 2 fatal error LNK1120: 1 unresolved externals this is my program: #include<iostream> #include<cmath> #include<string> using namespace std; double getDollarAmt(); void displayCurrencies(); char getCurrencySelection (float amtExchanged); bool isSelectionValid(char selection); double calcExchangeAmt (float amtExchanged, char selection); void displayResults(double newAmount, float amtExchanged, char selection, char yesNo); const double russianRubles = 31.168; const double northKoreanWon = .385; const double chineseYuan = 6.832; const double canadianDollar = 1.1137; const double cubanPeso = 1.0; const double ethiopianBirr = 9.09; const double egyptianPound = 5.6275; const double tunisianDinar = 1.3585; const double thaiBaht = 34.4; /****** I changed the variables to global variables so you don't have to worry about accidentally setting them to 0 or assigning over a value that you need ********/ float amtEchanged = 0.0; char selection; char yesNo; double newAmount; int main() { float amtExchanged = 0.0; selection = 'a'; yesNo = 'y'; newAmount = 0.0; getDollarAmt (); displayCurrencies(); getCurrencySelection (amtExchanged); isSelectionValid(selection);/**** you only need to use the selection variable ****/ calcExchangeAmt (amtExchanged, selection); displayResults(newAmount, amtExchanged, selection, yesNo); return 0; } double getDollarAmt (float amtExchanged) // promt user for eachange amount and return it to main { float amtExchanged0;//created temporary variable to set amtExchanged to cout<< "Please enter the total dollar amount to exchange: "; cin>> amtExchanged0; amtExchanged = amtExchanged0;//setting amtExchanged to the right value return amtExchanged; } void displayCurrencies() // display list of currencies { cout<<"A Russian Ruble"<<endl <<"B North Korean Won"<<endl <<"C Chinese Yuan"<<endl <<"D Cuban Peso"<<endl <<"E Ethiopian Birr"<<endl <<"F Thai Baht"<<endl <<"G Canadian Dollars"<<endl <<"H Tunisian Dinar"<<endl <<"I Egyptian Pound"<<endl; } char getCurrencySelection (float amtExchanged) // make a selection and return to main { char selection0;//again, created a temporary variable for selection cout<<"Please enter your selection: "; cin>>selection0; selection = selection0;//setting the temporary variable to the actual variable you use /***** we are now going to see if isSelectionValid returns false. if it returns false, that means that their selection was not character A-H. if it is false we keep calling getCurrencySelection *****/ if(isSelectionValid(selection)==false) { cout<<"Sorry, the selection you chose is invalid."<<endl; getCurrencySelection(amtExchanged); } return selection; } bool isSelectionValid(char selection) // this fuction is supposed to be called from getCurrencySelection, the selction // must be sent to isSelectionValid to determine if its valid // if selection is valid send it bac to getCurrencySelection // if it is false then it is returned to getCurrencySelection and prompted to // make another selection until the selection is valid, then it is returned to main. { /**** i'm not sure if this is what you mean, all i am doing is making sure that their selection is A-H *****/ if(selection=='A' || selection=='B' || selection=='C' || selection=='D' || selection=='E' || selection=='F' || selection=='G' || selection=='H' || selection=='I') return true; else return false; } double calcExchangeAmt (float amtExchanged,char selection) // function calculates the amount of money to be exchanged { switch (toupper(selection)) { case 'A': newAmount =(russianRubles) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'B': newAmount = (northKoreanWon) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'C': newAmount = (chineseYuan) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'D': newAmount = (canadianDollar) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'E': newAmount = (cubanPeso) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'F': newAmount = (ethiopianBirr) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'G': newAmount = (egyptianPound) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'H': newAmount = (tunisianDinar) * (amtExchanged); break; case 'I': newAmount = (thaiBaht) * (amtExchanged); break; } return newAmount; } void displayResults(double newAmount, float amtExchanged, char selection, char yesNo) // displays results and asked to repeat. IF they want to repeat it clears the screen and starts over. { switch(toupper(selection)) { case 'A': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Russian Rubles."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'B': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" North Korean Won."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'C': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Chinese Yuan."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'D': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Cuban Pesos."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'E': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Ethiopian Birr."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'F': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Thai Baht."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'G': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Canadian Dollars."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'H': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Tunisian Dinar."<<endl<<endl; break; case 'I': cout<<"$"<<amtExchanged<<" is "<<newAmount<<" Egyptian Pound."<<endl<<endl; break; } cout<<"Do you wish to continue? (Y for Yes / N for No)"; cin>>yesNo; if(yesNo=='y' || yesNo=='Y') { getDollarAmt(); } else { system("cls"); } }

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• Having trouble returning a value from a method call when sending an array and the program is error out when run in reference to the sort

  - by programmerNOOB

  I am getting the following output when this program is run: Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 0: 111111111 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 0: 20000 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 1: 555555555 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 1: 50000 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 2: 333333333 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 2: 5464166 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 3: 222222222 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 3: 645641 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 4: 444444444 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 4: 29000 Taxpayer # 1 SSN: 111111111, Income is $20,000.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 2 SSN: 555555555, Income is $50,000.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 3 SSN: 333333333, Income is $5,464,166.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 4 SSN: 222222222, Income is $645,641.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 5 SSN: 444444444, Income is $29,000.00, Tax is $0.00 Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Failed to compare two elements in the array. --- System.ArgumentException: At least one object must implement IComparable. at System.Collections.Comparer.Compare(Object a, Object b) at System.Collections.Generic.ObjectComparer`1.Compare(T x, T y) at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.SwapIfGreaterWithItems(T[] keys, IComparer`1 comparer, Int32 a, Int32 b) at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.QuickSort(T[] keys, Int32 left, Int32 right, IComparer`1 comparer) at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.Sort(T[] keys, Int32 index, Int32 length, IComparer`1 comparer) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.Sort(T[] keys, Int32 index, Int32 length, IComparer`1 comparer) at System.Array.Sort[T](T[] array, Int32 index, Int32 length, IComparer`1 comparer) at System.Array.Sort[T](T[] array) at Assignment5.Taxpayer.Main(String[] args) in Program.cs:line 150 Notice the 0s at the end of the line that should be the tax amount??? Here is the code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace taxes { class Rates { // Create a class named rates that has the following data members: private int incLimit; private double lowTaxRate; private double highTaxRate; // use read-only accessor public int IncomeLimit { get { return incLimit; } } public double LowTaxRate { get { return lowTaxRate; } } public double HighTaxRate { get { return highTaxRate; } } //A class constructor that assigns default values public Rates() { int limit = 30000; double lowRate = .15; double highRate = .28; incLimit = limit; lowTaxRate = lowRate; highTaxRate = highRate; } //A class constructor that takes three parameters to assign input values for limit, low rate and high rate. public Rates(int limit, double lowRate, double highRate) { } // A CalculateTax method that takes an income parameter and computes the tax as follows: public int CalculateTax(int income) { int limit = 0; double lowRate = 0; double highRate = 0; int taxOwed = 0; // If income is less than the limit then return the tax as income times low rate. if (income < limit) taxOwed = Convert.ToInt32(income * lowRate); // If income is greater than or equal to the limit then return the tax as income times high rate. if (income >= limit) taxOwed = Convert.ToInt32(income * highRate); return taxOwed; } } //end class Rates // Create a class named Taxpayer that has the following data members: public class Taxpayer { //Use get and set accessors. string SSN { get; set; } int grossIncome { get; set; } // Use read-only accessor. public int taxOwed { get { return taxOwed; } } // The Taxpayer class should be set up so that its objects are comparable to each other based on tax owed. class taxpayer : IComparable { public int taxOwed { get; set; } public int income { get; set; } int IComparable.CompareTo(Object o) { int returnVal; taxpayer temp = (taxpayer)o; if (this.taxOwed > temp.taxOwed) returnVal = 1; else if (this.taxOwed < temp.taxOwed) returnVal = -1; else returnVal = 0; return returnVal; } // End IComparable.CompareTo } //end taxpayer IComparable class // **The tax should be calculated whenever the income is set. // The Taxpayer class should have a getRates class method that has the following. public static void GetRates() { // Local method data members for income limit, low rate and high rate. int incLimit = 0; double lowRate; double highRate; string userInput; // Prompt the user to enter a selection for either default settings or user input of settings. Console.Write("Would you like the default values (D) or would you like to enter the values (E)?: "); /* If the user selects default the default values you will instantiate a rates object using the default constructor * and set the Taxpayer class data member for tax equal to the value returned from calling the rates object CalculateTax method.*/ userInput = Convert.ToString(Console.ReadLine()); if (userInput == "D" || userInput == "d") { Rates rates = new Rates(); rates.CalculateTax(incLimit); } // end if /* If the user selects to enter the rates data then prompt the user to enter values for income limit, low rate and high rate, * instantiate a rates object using the three-argument constructor passing those three entries as the constructor arguments and * set the Taxpayer class data member for tax equal to the valuereturned from calling the rates object CalculateTax method. */ if (userInput == "E" || userInput == "e") { Console.Write("Please enter the income limit: "); incLimit = Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); Console.Write("Please enter the low rate: "); lowRate = Convert.ToDouble(Console.ReadLine()); Console.Write("Please enter the high rate: "); highRate = Convert.ToDouble(Console.ReadLine()); Rates rates = new Rates(incLimit, lowRate, highRate); rates.CalculateTax(incLimit); } } static void Main(string[] args) { Taxpayer[] taxArray = new Taxpayer[5]; Rates taxRates = new Rates(); // Implement a for-loop that will prompt the user to enter the Social Security Number and gross income. for (int x = 0; x < taxArray.Length; ++x) { taxArray[x] = new Taxpayer(); Console.Write("Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer {0}: ", x + 1); taxArray[x].SSN = Console.ReadLine(); Console.Write("Please enter the gross income for taxpayer {0}: ", x + 1); taxArray[x].grossIncome = Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); } Taxpayer.GetRates(); // Implement a for-loop that will display each object as formatted taxpayer SSN, income and calculated tax. for (int i = 0; i < taxArray.Length; ++i) { Console.WriteLine("Taxpayer # {0} SSN: {1}, Income is {2:c}, Tax is {3:c}", i + 1, taxArray[i].SSN, taxArray[i].grossIncome, taxRates.CalculateTax(taxArray[i].grossIncome)); } // end for // Implement a for-loop that will sort the five objects in order by the amount of tax owed Array.Sort(taxArray); Console.WriteLine("Sorted by tax owed"); for (int i = 0; i < taxArray.Length; ++i) { Console.WriteLine("Taxpayer # {0} SSN: {1}, Income is {2:c}, Tax is {3:c}", i + 1, taxArray[i].SSN, taxArray[i].grossIncome, taxRates.CalculateTax(taxArray[i].grossIncome)); } } //end main } // end Taxpayer class } //end Any clues as to why the dollar amount is coming up as 0 and why the sort is not working?

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