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• Kill a tree, save your website? Content strategy in action, part III

  - by Roger Hart

  A lot has been written about how driving content strategy from within an organisation is hard. And that's true. Red Gate is pretty receptive to new ideas, so although I've not had a total walk in the park, it's been a hike with charming scenery. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Lots of people are involved in content, and depending on your organisation some of those people might be the kind who'll gleefully call themselves "stakeholders". People holding a stake generally want to stick it through something's heart and bury it at a crossroads. Winning them over is not always easy. (Richard Ingram has made a nice visual summary of how this can feel - Content strategy Snakes & ladders - pdf ) So yes, a lot of content strategy advocates are having a hard time. And sure, we've got a nice opportunity to get together and have a hug and a cry, but in the interim we could use a hand. What to do? My preferred approach is, I'll confess, brutal. I'd like nothing so much as to take a scorched earth approach to our website. Burn it, salt the ground, and build the new one right: focusing on clearly delineated business and user content goals, and instrumented so we can tell if we're doing it right. I'm never getting buy-in for that, but a boy can dream. So how about just getting buy-in for some small, tenable improvements? Easier, but still non-trivial. I sat down for a chat with our marketing and design guys. It seemed like a good place to start, even if they weren't up for my "Ctrl-A + Delete"  solution. We talked through some of this stuff, and we pretty much agreed that our content is a bit more broken than we'd ideally like. But to get everybody on board, the problems needed visibility. Doing a visual content inventory Print out the internet. Make a Wall Of Content. Seriously. If you've already done a content inventory, you know your architecture, and you know the scale of the problem. But it's quite likely that very few other people do. So make it big and visual. I'm going to carbon hell, but it seems to be working. This morning, I printed out a tiny, tiny part of our website: the non-support content pertaining to SQL Compare I made big, visual, A3 blowups of each page, and covered a wall with them. A page per web page, spread over something like 6M x 2M, with metrics, right in front of people. Even if nobody reads it (and they are doing) the sheer scale is shocking. 53 pages, all told. Some are redundant, some outdated, some trivial, a few fantastic, and frighteningly many that are great ideas delivered not-quite-right. You have to stand quite far away to get it all in your field of vision. For a lot of today, a whole bunch of folks have been gawping in amazement, talking each other through it, peering at the details, and generally getting excited about content. Developers, sales guys, our CEO, the marketing folks - they're engaged. Will it last? I make no promises. But this sort of wave of interest is vital to getting a content strategy project kicked off. While the content strategist is a saucer-eyed orphan in the cupboard under the stairs, they're not getting a whole lot done. Of course, just printing the site won't necessarily cut it. You have to know your content, and be able to talk about it. Ideally, you'll also have page view and time-on-page metrics. One of the most powerful things you can do is, when people are staring at your wall of content, ask them what they think half of it is for. Pretty soon, you've made a case for content strategy. We're also going to get folks to mark it up - cover it with notes and post-its, let us know how they feel about our content. I'll be blogging about how that goes, but it's exciting. Different business functions have different needs from content, so the more exposure the content gets, and the more feedback, the more you know about those needs. Fingers crossed for awesome.

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• Polite busy-waiting with WRPAUSE on SPARC

  - by Dave

  Unbounded busy-waiting is an poor idea for user-space code, so we typically use spin-then-block strategies when, say, waiting for a lock to be released or some other event. If we're going to spin, even briefly, then we'd prefer to do so in a manner that minimizes performance degradation for other sibling logical processors ("strands") that share compute resources. We want to spin politely and refrain from impeding the progress and performance of other threads — ostensibly doing useful work and making progress — that run on the same core. On a SPARC T4, for instance, 8 strands will share a core, and that core has its own L1 cache and 2 pipelines. On x86 we have the PAUSE instruction, which, naively, can be thought of as a hardware "yield" operator which temporarily surrenders compute resources to threads on sibling strands. Of course this helps avoid intra-core performance interference. On the SPARC T2 our preferred busy-waiting idiom was "RD %CCR,%G0" which is a high-latency no-nop. The T4 provides a dedicated and extremely useful WRPAUSE instruction. The processor architecture manuals are the authoritative source, but briefly, WRPAUSE writes a cycle count into the the PAUSE register, which is ASR27. Barring interrupts, the processor then delays for the requested period. There's no need for the operating system to save the PAUSE register over context switches as it always resets to 0 on traps. Digressing briefly, if you use unbounded spinning then ultimately the kernel will preempt and deschedule your thread if there are other ready threads than are starving. But by using a spin-then-block strategy we can allow other ready threads to run without resorting to involuntary time-slicing, which operates on a long-ish time scale. Generally, that makes your application more responsive. In addition, by blocking voluntarily we give the operating system far more latitude regarding power management. Finally, I should note that while we have OS-level facilities like sched_yield() at our disposal, yielding almost never does what you'd want or naively expect. Returning to WRPAUSE, it's natural to ask how well it works. To help answer that question I wrote a very simple C/pthreads benchmark that launches 8 concurrent threads and binds those threads to processors 0..7. The processors are numbered geographically on the T4, so those threads will all be running on just one core. Unlike the SPARC T2, where logical CPUs 0,1,2 and 3 were assigned to the first pipeline, and CPUs 4,5,6 and 7 were assigned to the 2nd, there's no fixed mapping between CPUs and pipelines in the T4. And in some circumstances when the other 7 logical processors are idling quietly, it's possible for the remaining logical processor to leverage both pipelines. Some number T of the threads will iterate in a tight loop advancing a simple Marsaglia xor-shift pseudo-random number generator. T is a command-line argument. The main thread loops, reporting the aggregate number of PRNG steps performed collectively by those T threads in the last 10 second measurement interval. The other threads (there are 8-T of these) run in a loop busy-waiting concurrently with the T threads. We vary T between 1 and 8 threads, and report on various busy-waiting idioms. The values in the table are the aggregate number of PRNG steps completed by the set of T threads. The unit is millions of iterations per 10 seconds. For the "PRNG step" busy-waiting mode, the busy-waiting threads execute exactly the same code as the T worker threads. We can easily compute the average rate of progress for individual worker threads by dividing the aggregate score by the number of worker threads T. I should note that the PRNG steps are extremely cycle-heavy and access almost no memory, so arguably this microbenchmark is not as representative of "normal" code as it could be. And for the purposes of comparison I included a row in the table that reflects a waiting policy where the waiting threads call poll(NULL,0,1000) and block in the kernel. Obviously this isn't busy-waiting, but the data is interesting for reference. _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } _td { border: 1px green solid; } _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } Aggregate progress T = #worker threads Wait Mechanism for 8-T threadsT=1T=2T=3T=4T=5T=6T=7T=8 Park thread in poll() 32653347334833483348334833483348 no-op 415 831 124316482060249729303349 RD %ccr,%g0 "pause" 14262429269228623013316232553349 PRNG step 412 829 124616702092251029303348 WRPause(8000) 32443361333133483349334833483348 WRPause(4000) 32153308331533223347334833473348 WRPause(1000) 30853199322432513310334833483348 WRPause(500) 29173070315032223270330933483348 WRPause(250) 26942864294930773205338833483348 WRPause(100) 21552469262227902911321433303348

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• Thought Oracle Usability Advisory Board Was Stuffy? Wrong. Justification for Attending OUAB: ROI

  - by ultan o'broin

  Looking for reasons tell your boss why your organization needs to join the Oracle Usability Advisory Board or why you need approval to attend one of its meetings (see the requirements)? Try phrases such as "Continued Return on Investment (ROI)", "Increased Productivity" or "Happy Workers". With OUAB your participation is about realizing and sustaining ROI across the entire applications life-cycle from input to designs to implementation choices and integration, usage and performance and on measuring and improving the onboarding and support experience. If you think this is a boring meeting of middle-aged people sitting around moaning about customizing desktop forms and why the BlackBerry is here to stay, think again! How about this for a rich agenda, all designed to engage the audience in a thought-provoking and feedback-illiciting day of swirling interactions, contextual usage, global delivery, mobility, consumerizationm, gamification and tailoring your implementation to reflect real users doing real work in real environments.  Foldable, rollable ereader devices provide a newspaper-like UK for electronic news. Or a way to wrap silicon chips, perhaps. Explored at the OUAB Europe Meeting (photograph from Terrace Restaurant in TVP. Nom.) At the 7 December 2012 OUAB Europe meeting in Oracle Thames Valley Park, UK, Oracle partners and customers stepped up to the mic and PPT decks with a range of facts and examples to astound any UX conference C-level sceptic. Over the course of the day we covered much ground, but it was all related in a contextual, flexibile, simplication, engagement way aout delivering results for business: that means solving problems. This means being about the user and their tasks and how to make design and technology transforms work into a productive activity that users and bean counters will be excited by. The sessions really gelled for me: 1. Mobile design patterns and the powerful propositions for customers and partners offered by using the design guidance with Oracle ADF Mobile. Customers' and partners' developers existing ADF developers are now productive, efficient ADF Mobile developers applying proven UX guidance using ADF Mobile components and other Oracle Fusion Middleware in the development toolkit. You can find the Mobile UX Design Patterns and Guidance on Building Mobile Apps on OTN. 2. Oracle Voice and Apps. How this medium offers so much potentual in the enterprise and offers a window in Fusion Apps cloud webservices, Oracle RightNow NLP and Nuance technology. Exciting stuff, demoed live on a mobile phone. Stay tuned for more features and modalities and how you can tailor your own apps experience.  3. Oracle RightNow Natural Language Processing (NLP) Virtual Assistant technology (Ella): how contextual intervention and learning from users sessions delivers a great personalized UX for users interacting with Ella, a fifth generation VA to solve problems and seek knowledge. 4. BYOD Keynote: A balanced keynote address contrasting Fujitsu's explaining of the conceprt, challenges, and trends and setting the expectation that BYOD must be embraced in a flexible way,  with the resolute, crafted high security enterprise requirements that nuancing the BYOD concept and proposals with the realities of their world of water tight information and device sharing policies. Fascinating stuff, as well providing anecdotes to make us thing about out own DYOD Deployments. One size does not fit all. 5. Icon Cultural Surveys Results and Insights Arising: Ever wondered about the cultural appropriateness of icons used in software UIs and how these icons assessed for global use? Or considered that social media "Like" icons might be  unacceptable hand gestures in culture or enterprise? Or do the old world icons like Save floppy disk icons still find acceptable? Well the survey results told you. Challenges must be tested, over time, and context of use is critical now, including external factors such as the internet and social media adoption. Indeed the fears about global rejection of the face and hand icons was not borne out, and some of the more anachronistic icons (checkbooks, microphones, real-to-real tape decks, 3.5" floppies for "save") have become accepted metaphors for current actions. More importantly the findings brought into focus the reason for OUAB - engage with and illicit feedback though working groups before we build anything. 6. EReaders and Oracle iBook: What is the uptake and trends of ereaders? And how about a demo of an iBook with enterprise apps content?  Well received by the audience, the session included a live running poll of ereader usage. 7. Gamification Design Jam: Fun, hands on event for teams of Oracle staff, partners and customers, actually building gamified flows, a practice that can be applied right away by customers and partners.  8. UX Direct: A new offering of usability best practices, coming to an external website for you in 2013. FInd a real user, observe their tasks, design and approve, build and measure. Simple stuff to improve apps implications no end. 9. FUSE (an internal term only, basically Fusion Simplified Experience): demo of the new Face of Fusion Applications: inherently mobile, simple to use, social, personalizable and FAST, three great demos from the HCM, CRM and ICT world on how these UX designs can be used in different ways. So, a powerful breadth and depth of UX solutions and opporunities for customers and partners to engage with and explore how they can make their users happy and benefit their business reaping continued ROI from those apps investments. Find out more about the OUAB and how to get involved here ... 

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• Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution CUSTOMER AND PARTNER INFORMATION Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer Revenue – 73,515 Billion Euro (2011, Siemens AG total) Customer Quote – “The realization of our complex requirements within a very short amount of time was enabled through the competent implementation partner Sapient, who fully used the  very broad scope of standard functionality provided in the Oracle WebCenter Portal, and the management of customer services, who continuously supported the project setup. ” – Joerg Modlmayr, Project Manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. To ensure greater transparency, increased efficiency, higher user acceptance, and additional services, Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, replaced several existing legacy portal solutions that could not meet the company’s future needs with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Various existing portal solutions that cannot meet future demands will be successively replaced by the new central service portal, which will also allow for the efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts.  With Oracle, doctors and hospitals using Siemens medical solutions now have access to a central information portal that provides important information and services at just the push of a button.  Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer URL – www.siemens.com Customer Headquarters – Erlangen, Germany Industry – Industrial Manufacturing Employees – 360,000  Challenges – Replace disparate medical service portals to meet future demands and eliminate an  unnecessarily high level of administrative work caused by heterogeneous installations Ensure portals meet current user demands to improve user-acceptance rates and increase number of total users Enable changes and expansion through standard functionality to eliminate the need for reliance on IT and reduce administrative efforts and associated high costs Ensure efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts for all devices and systems Ensure hospitals and clinics to transparently monitor and measure services rendered for the various medical devices and systems  Increase electronic interaction and expand services to achieve a higher level of customer loyalty Solution –  Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure greater transparency, and as a result, a higher level of customer loyalty  Provided a centralized platform for doctors and hospitals using Siemens’ medical technology solutions that provides important information and services at the push of a button Reduced significantly the administrative workload by centralizing the solution in the new customer service portal Secured positive feedback from customers involved in the pilot program developed by design experts from Oracle partner Sapient. The interfaces were created with customer needs in mind. The first survey taken shortly after implementation came back with 2.4 points on a scale of 0-3 in the category “customer service portal intuitiveness level” Met all requirements including alignment with the Siemens Style Guide without extensive programming Implemented additional services via the portal such as benchmarking options to ensure the optimal use of the Customer Device Park Provided option for documentation of all services rendered in conjunction with the medical technology systems to ensure that the value of the services are transparent for the decision makers in the hospitals  Saved and stored all machine data from approximately 100,000 remote systems in the central service and information platform Provided the option to register errors online and follow the call status in real-time on the portal Made  available at the push of a button all information on the medical technology devices used in hospitals or clinics—from security checks and maintenance activities to current device statuses Provided PDF format Service Performance Reports that summarize information from periods of time ranging from previous weeks up to one year, meeting medical product law requirements  Why Oracle – Siemens AG favored Oracle for many reasons, however, the company ultimately decided to go with Oracle due to the enormous range of functionality the solutions offered for the healthcare sector.“We are not programmers; we are service providers in the medical technology segment and focus on the contents of the portal. All the functionality necessary for internet-based customer interaction is already standard in Oracle WebCenter Portal, which is a huge plus for us. Having Oracle as our technology partner ensures that the product will continually evolve, providing a strong technology platform for our customer service portal well into the future,” said Joerg Modlmayr project manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG. Partner Involvement – Siemens AG selected Oracle Partner Sapient because the company offered a service portfolio that perfectly met Siemens’ requirements and had a wealth of experience implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additionally, Sapient had designers with a very high level of expertise in usability—an aspect that Siemens considered to be of vast importance for the project.  “The Sapient team completely met all our expectations. Our tightly timed project was completed on schedule, and the positive feedback from our users proves that we set the right measures in terms of usability—all thanks to the folks at Sapient,” Modlmayr said.  Partner Name – Sapient GmbH Deutschland Partner URL – www.sapient.com

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• What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

  - by Louis Davidson

  If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

  - by Jeff

  This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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• Understanding the 'High Performance' meaning in Extreme Transaction Processing

  - by kyap

  Despite my previous blogs entries on SOA/BPM and Identity Management, the domain where I'm the most passionated is definitely the Extreme Transaction Processing, commonly called XTP.I came across XTP back to 2007 while I was still FMW Product Manager in EMEA. At that time Oracle acquired a company called Tangosol, which owned an unique product called Coherence that we renamed to Oracle Coherence. Beside this innovative renaming of the product, to be honest, I didn't know much about it, except being a "distributed in-memory cache for Extreme Transaction Processing"... not very helpful still.In general when people doesn't fully understand a technology or a concept, they tend to find some shortcuts, either correct or not, to justify their lack-of understanding... and of course I was part of this category of individuals. And the shortcut was "Oracle Coherence Cache helps to improve Performance". Excellent marketing slogan... but not very meaningful still. By chance I was able to get away quickly from that group in July 2007* at Thames Valley Park (UK), after I attended one of the most interesting workshops, in my 10 years career in Oracle, delivered by Brian Oliver. The biggest mistake I made was to assume that performance improvement with Coherence was related to the response time. Which can be considered as legitimus at that time, because after-all caches help to reduce latency on cached data access, hence reduce the response-time. But like all caches, you need to define caching and expiration policies, thinking about the cache-missed strategy, and most of the time you have to re-write partially your application in order to work with the cache. At a result, the expected benefit vanishes... so, not very useful then?The key mistake I made was my perception or obsession on how performance improvement should be driven, but I strongly believe this is still a common problem to most of the developers. In fact we all know the that the performance of a system is generally presented by the Capacity (or Throughput), with the 2 important dimensions Speed (response-time) and Volume (load) :Capacity (TPS) = Volume (T) / Speed (S)To increase the Capacity, we can either reduce the Speed(in terms of response-time), or to increase the Volume. However we tend to only focus on reducing the Speed dimension, perhaps it is more concrete and tangible to measure, and nicer to present to our management because there's a direct impact onto the end-users experience. On the other hand, we assume the Volume can be addressed by the underlying hardware or software stack, so if we need more capacity (scale out), we just add more hardware or software. Unfortunately, the reality proves that IT is never as ideal as we assume...The challenge with Speed improvement approach is that it is generally difficult and costly to make things already fast... faster. And by adding Coherence will not necessarily help either. Even though we manage to do so, the Capacity can not increase forever because... the Speed can be influenced by the Volume. For all system, we always have a performance illustration as follow: In all traditional system, the increase of Volume (Transaction) will also increase the Speed (Response-Time) as some point. The reason is simple: most of the time the Application logics were not designed to scale. As an example, if you have a while-loop in your application, it is natural to conceive that parsing 200 entries will require double execution-time compared to 100 entries. If you need to "Speed-up" the execution, you can only upgrade your hardware (scale-up) with faster CPU and/or network to reduce network latency. It is technically limited and economically inefficient. And this is exactly where XTP and Coherence kick in. The primary objective of XTP is about designing applications which can scale-out for increasing the Volume, by applying coding techniques to keep the execution-time as constant as possible, independently of the number of runtime data being manipulated. It is actually not just about having an application running as fast as possible, but about having a much more predictable system, with constant response-time and linearly scale, so we can easily increase throughput by adding more hardwares in parallel. It is in general combined with the Low Latency Programming model, where we tried to optimize the network usage as much as possible, either from the programmatic angle (less network-hoops to complete a task), and/or from a hardware angle (faster network equipments). In this picture, Oracle Coherence can be considered as software-level XTP enabler, via the Distributed-Cache because it can guarantee: - Constant Data Objects access time, independently from the number of Objects and the Coherence Cluster size - Data Objects Distribution by Affinity for in-memory data grouping - In-place Data Processing for parallel executionTo summarize, Oracle Coherence is indeed useful to improve your application performance, just not in the way we commonly think. It's not about the Speed itself, but about the overall Capacity with Extreme Load while keeping consistant Speed. In the future I will keep adding new blog entries around this topic, with some sample codes experiences sharing that I capture in the last few years. In the meanwhile if you want to know more how Oracle Coherence, I strongly suggest you to start with checking how our worldwide customers are using Oracle Coherence first, then you can start playing with the product through our tutorial.Have Fun !

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• In Email, Image (img) Source (src) Tags are rewritten as relative links. How to fix?

  - by Noah Goodrich

  I'm working on sending out an html based email, and every time it sends the image src tags and some of the anchor href tags are modified to be relative url's. Update 2: This is happening between when the body of the email is generated and sent and when it arrives in my inbox. Update: I am using Postfix on a LAMPP server. In addition, I am using Zend_Mail to send the emails out. For example, I have a link: src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/header.jpg" And it gets rewritten as: src="../../../../images/email/highpoint_2009_04/header.jpg" What can cause this to occur and how is it corrected? Email headers: Return-Path: <[email protected]> X-Original-To: [email protected] Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by mail.example.com (Postfix, from userid 0) id 6BF012252; Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:15:20 -0600 (MDT) To: Gabriel <[email protected]> Subject: Free Map to Sales Success From: Somebody <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:15:20 -0600 Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: multipart/related Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <[email protected]> Original content to be sent out: <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td valign="top"> <a href="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com"> <img moz-do-not-send="true" alt="The Furniture Training Company - Know More. Sell More." src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/header.jpg" border="0" height="123" width="600"> </a> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td valign="top"><img alt="Visit us at High Point to receive your free training poster" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/hero.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" height="150" width="600"><br> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_content_left.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" height="30" width="30"><br> </td> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#000000" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><big><small><big><b>See you at Market</b></big><br> </small></big></big></big></big></font> <font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#000000" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><big><small><br> </small></big></big></big></big></font><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Visit our space to get your free Map to Sales Success poster! This unique 24 X 36 color poster is your guide to developing high volume salespeople with larger tickets. Find us in the new NHFA Retailer Resource Center located in the Plaza. <br> <br> Don&#8217;t miss Mark Lacy&#8217;s entertaining seminar "Help Wanted! My Sales Associates Can&#8217;t Sell Water to a Thirsty Camel." He&#8217;ll reveal powerful secrets for turning sales associates into furniture experts that will sell. See him Saturday, April 25th at 11:30 AM in the seminar room of the new NHFA Retail Resource Center in the Plaza. <br> <br> Stop by our space to learn how our ingenious internet-delivered training courses are easy to use, guaranteed to work, and cheaper than the daily donuts. Over 95% report increased sales. <br> <br> Plan to see us at High Point. </font></small> <font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#000000" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><big><small><small><br> <br> <br> <br> </small></small></big></big></big></big></font><small><font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#000000" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><small> </small></big></big></big></font></small> <a href="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/map"><img alt="Find out more" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/image_content_left.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" border="0" height="67" width="326"></a><br> <br> </td> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"> <img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_content_middle.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" height="28" width="28"><br> </td> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="Roadmap to Sales Success poster" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/image_content_right.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" height="267" width="186"><br> <font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><small><font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#000000" size="1"><big><big><big><small><b>Road Map to Sales Success<br> </b><br> </small></big></big></big></font>This beautiful poster is yours free for simply stopping by and visiting with us at High Point. <span class="moz-txt-slash">Our space is located inside the </span>new NHFA Retailer Resource Center in the Plaza Suites, 222 South Main St, 1st Floor. We will be at market from Sat April 25th until Thur April 30th. </small></font><br> </td> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_content_right.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" height="30" width="30"><br> <br> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/disclaimer_divider.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true" height="25" width="600"><br> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_disclaimer_left.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true"></td> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_disclaimer_middle.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true"><br> <font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#666666" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><big><small><small><small>If you are not attending the High Point market in April but would still like to receive a free Road Map to Sales Success poster visit us on the web at <u><a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com">www.furnituretrainingcompany.com</a></u>, or to speak with a Furniture Training Company representative, call toll free (866) 755-5996. We do not offer free shipping outside of the U.S. and Canada. Retailers outside of the U.S. and Canada may call for more information. Limit one free Road Map to Sales Success per company. Other copies of the poster may be purchased on our web site.<br> <br> </small></small></small></big></big></big></big></font> <font color="#666666"><small><font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><small><small>We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you'd rather not receive future emails of this sort from The Furniture Training Company, please <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.furnituretraining.com/contact">click here to unsubscribe</a>.<br> <br> </small></small></big></big></big></font></small><small><font originaltag="yes" style="font-size: 9px; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><big><big><big><small><small>&copy;Copyright 2009 The Furniture Training Company.<br> 1770 North Research Park Way, <br> North Logan, UT 84341. <br> All Rights Reserved.</small></small></big></big></big></font></small></font><br> </td> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_disclaimer_right.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true"></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top"><img alt="" src="http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/footer.jpg" moz-do-not-send="true"> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <br> <br> Content that gets sent: <table border=3D"0" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" width=3D"600" al= ign=3D"center">=0D=0A<tbody>=0D=0A<tr>=0D=0A<td valign=3D"top"><a href= =3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com"> <img src=3D"http://www.fur= nituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/header.jpg" bor= der=3D"0" alt=3D"The Furniture Training Company - Know More. Sell More."= width=3D"600" height=3D"123" /> </a></td>=0D=0A</tr>=0D=0A</tbody>=0D= =0A</table>=0D=0A<table border=3D"0" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0"= width=3D"600" align=3D"center">=0D=0A<tbody>=0D=0A<tr>=0D=0A<td valign= =3D"top"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/emai= l/highpoint_2009_04/hero.jpg" alt=3D"Visit us at High Point to receive y= our free training poster" width=3D"600" height=3D"150" /><br /></td>=0D= =0A</tr>=0D=0A</tbody>=0D=0A</table>=0D=0A<table border=3D"0" cellspacin= g=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" width=3D"600" align=3D"center">=0D=0A<tbody>= =0D=0A<tr>=0D=0A<td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http:= //www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer= _content_left.jpg" alt=3D"" width=3D"30" height=3D"30" /><br /></td>=0D= =0A<td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><span style=3D"font-size: xx-s= mall; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; color: #000000;">= <big><big><big><big><small><big><strong>See you at Market</strong></big>= <br /> </small></big></big></big></big></span> <span style=3D"font-size:= xx-small; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; color: #0000= 00;"><big><big><big><big><small><br /> </small></big></big></big></big><= /span><small><span style=3D"font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;">Vi= sit our space to get your free Map to Sales Success poster! This unique= 24 X 36 color poster is your guide to developing high volume salespeopl= e with larger tickets. Find us in the new NHFA Retailer Resource Center= located in the Plaza. <br /> <br /> Don&rsquo;t miss Mark Lacy&rsquo;s= entertaining seminar "Help Wanted! My Sales Associates Can&rsquo;t Sell= Water to a Thirsty Camel." He&rsquo;ll reveal powerful secrets for turn= ing sales associates into furniture experts that will sell. See him Satu= rday, April 25th at 11:30 AM in the seminar room of the new NHFA Retail= Resource Center in the Plaza. <br /> <br /> Stop by our space to learn= how our ingenious internet-delivered training courses are easy to use,= guaranteed to work, and cheaper than the daily donuts. Over 95% report= increased sales. <br /> <br /> Plan to see us at High Point. </span></s= mall> <span style=3D"font-size: xx-small; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Hel= vetica,sans-serif; color: #000000;"><big><big><big><big><small><small><b= r /> <br /> <br /> <br /> </small></small></big></big></big></big></span= ><small><span style=3D"font-size: xx-small; font-family: Verdana,Arial,H= elvetica,sans-serif; color: #000000;"><big><big><big><small> </small></b= ig></big></big></span></small> <a href=3D"http://www.furnituretrainingco= mpany.com/map"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/image= s/email/highpoint_2009_04/image_content_left.jpg" border=3D"0" alt=3D"Fi= nd out more" width=3D"326" height=3D"67" /></a><br /> <br /></td>=0D=0A<= td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretr= ainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_content_middle.j= pg" alt=3D"" width=3D"28" height=3D"28" /><br /></td>=0D=0A<td valign=3D= "top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompan= y.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/image_content_right.jpg" alt=3D"Roa= dmap to Sales Success poster" width=3D"186" height=3D"267" /><br /> <spa= n style=3D"font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"><small><span style= =3D"font-size: xx-small; color: #000000;"><big><big><big><small><strong>= Road Map to Sales Success<br /> </strong><br /> </small></big></big></bi= g></span>This beautiful poster is yours free for simply stopping by and= visiting with us at High Point. <span class=3D"moz-txt-slash">Our space= is located inside the </span>new NHFA Retailer Resource Center in the P= laza Suites, 222 South Main St, 1st Floor. We will be at market from Sat= April 25th until Thur April 30th. </small></span><br /></td>=0D=0A<td v= align=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretraini= ngcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_content_right.jpg" a= lt=3D"" width=3D"30" height=3D"30" /><br /> <br /></td>=0D=0A</tr>=0D=0A= </tbody>=0D=0A</table>=0D=0A<table border=3D"0" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpa= dding=3D"0" width=3D"600" align=3D"center">=0D=0A<tbody>=0D=0A<tr>=0D=0A= <td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituret= rainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/disclaimer_divider.jpg= " alt=3D"" width=3D"600" height=3D"25" /><br /></td>=0D=0A</tr>=0D=0A</t= body>=0D=0A</table>=0D=0A<table border=3D"0" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpaddi= ng=3D"0" width=3D"600" align=3D"center">=0D=0A<tbody>=0D=0A<tr>=0D=0A<td= valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretrai= ningcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_disclaimer_left.jp= g" alt=3D"" /></td>=0D=0A<td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src= =3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_= 04/spacer_disclaimer_middle.jpg" alt=3D"" /><br /> <span style=3D"font-s= ize: xx-small; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; color: #= 666666;"><big><big><big><big><small><small><small>If you are not attendi= ng the High Point market in April but would still like to receive a free= Road Map to Sales Success poster visit us on the web at <span style=3D"= text-decoration: underline;"><a class=3D"moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href= =3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com">www.furnituretrainingcompan= y.com</a></span>, or to speak with a Furniture Training Company represen= tative, call toll free (866) 755-5996. We do not offer free shipping out= side of the U.S. and Canada. Retailers outside of the U.S. and Canada ma= y call for more information. Limit one free Road Map to Sales Success pe= r company. Other copies of the poster may be purchased on our web site.<= br /> <br /> </small></small></small></big></big></big></big></span> <sp= an style=3D"color: #666666;"><small><span style=3D"font-size: xx-small;= font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><big><big><big><small= ><small>We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you'd r= ather not receive future emails of this sort from The Furniture Training= Company, please <a href=3D"http://www.furnituretraining.com/contact">cl= ick here to unsubscribe</a>.<br /> <br /> </small></small></big></big></= big></span></small><small><span style=3D"font-size: xx-small; font-famil= y: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><big><big><big><small><small>&co= py;Copyright 2009 The Furniture Training Company.<br /> 1770 North Resea= rch Park Way, <br /> North Logan, UT 84341. <br /> All Rights Reserved.<= /small></small></big></big></big></span></small></span><br /></td>=0D=0A= <td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituret= rainingcompany.com/images/email/highpoint_2009_04/spacer_disclaimer_righ= t.jpg" alt=3D"" /></td>=0D=0A</tr>=0D=0A</tbody>=0D=0A</table>=0D=0A<tab= le border=3D"0" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" width=3D"600" align= =3D"center">=0D=0A<tbody>=0D=0A<tr>=0D=0A<td valign=3D"top" bgcolor=3D"#= ffffff"><img src=3D"http://www.furnituretrainingcompany.com/images/email= /highpoint_2009_04/footer.jpg" alt=3D"" /></td>=0D=0A</tr>=0D=0A</tbody>= =0D=0A</table>=0D=0A<p><br /></p><br><hr><a href=3D'http://localhost/ftc= /app/unsubscribe.php?action=3DoptOut&pid=3D6121&cid=3D19&email=3Dmarkl@f= urnituretrainingcompany.com'>Click to Unsubscribe</a>

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• What is in your Mathematica tool bag?

  - by Timo

  We all know that Mathematica is great, but it also often lacks critical functionality. What kind of external packages / tools / resources do you use with Mathematica? I'll edit (and invite anyone else to do so too) this main post to include resources which are focused on general applicability in scientific research and which as many people as possible will find useful. Feel free to contribute anything, even small code snippets (as I did below for a timing routine). Also, undocumented and useful features in Mathematica 7 and beyond you found yourself, or dug up from some paper/site are most welcome. Please include a short description or comment on why something is great or what utility it provides. If you link to books on Amazon with affiliate links please mention it, e.g., by putting your name after the link. Packages: LevelScheme is a package that greatly expands Mathematica's capability to produce good looking plots. I use it if not for anything else then for the much, much improved control over frame/axes ticks. David Park's Presentation Package ($50 - no charge for updates) Tools: MASH is Daniel Reeves's excellent perl script essentially providing scripting support for Mathematica 7. (This is finally built in as of Mathematica 8 with the -script option.) Resources: Wolfram's own repository MathSource has a lot of useful if narrow notebooks for various applications. Also check out the other sections such as Current Documentation, Courseware for lectures, and Demos for, well, demos. Books: Mathematica programming: an advanced introduction by Leonid Shifrin (web, pdf) is a must read if you want to do anything more than For loops in Mathematica. Quantum Methods with Mathematica by James F. Feagin (amazon) The Mathematica Book by Stephen Wolfram (amazon) (web) Schaum's Outline (amazon) Mathematica in Action by Stan Wagon (amazon) - 600 pages of neat examples and goes up to Mathematica version 7. Visualization techniques are especially good, you can see some of them on the author's Demonstrations Page. Mathematica Programming Fundamentals by Richard Gaylord (pdf) - A good concise introduction to most of what you need to know about Mathematica programming. Undocumented (or scarcely documented) Features: How to customize Mathematica keyboard shortcuts. See this question. How to inspect patterns and functions used by Mathematica's own functions. See this answer How to achieve Consistent size for GraphPlots in Mathematica? See this question.

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• Custom Annotation not showing all

  - by funatsg

  Okay, i have a number of pins on the mapkit. These pins showing different types of attractions. (E.g Parks, Farms and etc) I want to add custom images for these different types of pin. Parks have a park image and vice versa. However, when i added in, not all the images are showing successfully. For example, in parks, it should have 5 pins, but the image only came up in 2 pins, whereas other 3 is in default red pins. But if i used colours to differentiate them. For example, [pinsetPinColor:MKPinAnnotationColorGreen]; It works! Anyone knows what is the problem? Relevant codes below. Tell me if you need more. thanks! - (MKAnnotationView *)mapView:(MKMapView *)mapView viewForAnnotation:(id <MKAnnotation>)annotation{ if ([annotation isKindOfClass:MKUserLocation.class]) { //user location view is being requested, //return nil so it uses the default which is a blue dot... return nil; } //NSLog(@"View for Annotation is called"); MKPinAnnotationView *pin=[[MKPinAnnotationView alloc] initWithAnnotation:annotation reuseIdentifier:nil]; pin.userInteractionEnabled=TRUE; MapEvent* event = (MapEvent*)annotation; NSLog(@"thetype: %@", event.thetype); if ([event.thetype isEqualToString:@"adv"]) { //[pin setPinColor:MKPinAnnotationColorGreen]; pin.image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"padv.png"]; } else if ([event.thetype isEqualToString:@"muse"]){ //[pin setPinColor:MKPinAnnotationColorPurple]; pin.image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"pmuse.png"]; } else if ([event.thetype isEqualToString:@"nightlife"]){ pin.image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"pnight.png"]; } else if ([event.thetype isEqualToString:@"parks"]){ pin.image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"ppark.png"]; } else if ([event.thetype isEqualToString:@"farms"]){ pin.image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"pfarm.png"]; } else { [pin setPinColor:MKPinAnnotationColorRed]; } pin.canShowCallout = YES; pin.animatesDrop = YES; UIButton *rightButton = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeDetailDisclosure]; [rightButton addTarget:self action:@selector(clickAnnotation:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside]; [rightButton setTitle:event.uniqueID forState:UIControlStateNormal]; pin.rightCalloutAccessoryView = rightButton; return pin; }

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• How to build, sort and print a tree of a sort?

  - by Tuplanolla

  This is more of an algorithmic dilemma than a language-specific problem, but since I'm currently using Ruby I'll tag this as such. I've already spent over 20 hours on this and I would've never believed it if someone told me writing a LaTeX parser was a walk in the park in comparison. I have a loop to read hierarchies (that are prefixed with \m) from different files art.tex: \m{Art} graphical.tex: \m{Art}{Graphical} me.tex: \m{About}{Me} music.tex: \m{Art}{Music} notes.tex: \m{Art}{Music}{Sheet Music} site.tex: \m{About}{Site} something.tex: \m{Something} whatever.tex: \m{Something}{That}{Does Not}{Matter} and I need to sort them alphabetically and print them out as a tree About Me (me.tex) Site (site.tex) Art (art.tex) Graphical (graphical.tex) Music (music.tex) Sheet Music (notes.tex) Something (something.tex) That Does Not Matter (whatever.tex) in (X)HTML <ul> <li>About</li> <ul> <li><a href="me.tex">Me</a></li> <li><a href="site.tex">Site</a></li> </ul> <li><a href="art.tex">Art</a></li> <ul> <li><a href="graphical.tex">Graphical</a></li> <li><a href="music.tex">Music</a></li> <ul> <li><a href="notes.tex">Sheet Music</a></li> </ul> </ul> <li><a href="something.tex">Something</a></li> <ul> <li>That</li> <ul> <li>Doesn't</li> <ul> <li><a href="whatever.tex">Matter</a></li> </ul> </ul> </ul> </ul> using Ruby without Rails, which means that at least Array.sort and Dir.glob are available. All of my attempts were formed like this (as this part should work just fine). def fss_brace_array(ss_input)#a concise version of another function; converts {1}{2}...{n} into an array [1, 2, ..., n] or returns an empty array ss_output = ss_input[1].scan(%r{\{(.*?)\}}) rescue ss_output = [] ensure return ss_output end #define tree s_handle = File.join(:content.to_s, "*") Dir.glob("#{s_handle}.tex").each do |s_handle| File.open(s_handle, "r") do |f_handle| while s_line = f_handle.gets if s_all = s_line.match(%r{\\m\{(\{.*?\})+\}}) s_all = s_all.to_a #do something with tree, fss_brace_array(s_all) and s_handle break end end end end #do something else with tree

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• Pure sine wave inverter

  - by Nick

  Not exactly programming (sorry) but I think it's pretty close and can be of interest to other programmers. I'm trying to setup a battery power station so that I can work from anywhere. I go surfing a lot and my idea is to be able to work from wherever I can park my car (given there's coverage). So, I'm getting a deep cycle battery, a 240V charger (I'm in Australia), and an inverter. At the back of my laptop it says 19V and 4.62A. From the people I've spoken to that means it consumes about 90W at most. So my inverter needs to be able to output about 100W. Most of them seem to be 200W and up so this shouldn't be a problem. I want to be able run my laptop for 10 hours (plus the 2 hours I get from the laptop battery) straight. According to the people I've spoken to and from what I gather online I need a battery that has the amp hours for my "amp draw". I have no idea how to calculate this but I've been guesstimating. Most deep cycle batteries seem to be classified using amp hours (Ah)... 35Ah, 50Ah, 75Ah, 100Ah, and so on. However the amp hours on those batteries is for a 240V and I seem to be using 19V. According to an expert I spoke to you'd need a 100Ah battery to power a 5A appliance at 240V for 10 hours (you only get about 50% useful power). That to me is 5A * 240V = 100Ah battery. So, naive as I might be I take 240V and divide that by my 19V and reach the conclusion that I can get away with a battery that's about 12 times smaller than that 100Ah. The expert told me I needed a 50Ah battery so that's probably what I'll be getting, but it would be interesting to know what I theoretically would need to power my laptop for 10 hours. As for charging the battery the expert I spoke to said I needed a 3-5A charger to be able to charge that 50Ah battery from flat to full in about 10 hours (I will just leave it plugged in over night). Now to my question. The expert said it's not a matter of "if" more like a guaranteed "when" my computer will stuff up if I don't use a "pure sine wave inverter". From what I gather the power that comes out of that battery is not as clean as the power we get in the socket at home. Apparently it's "square" and the one in the socket is nice and smooth. I've already got an inverter, but it's not "pure". Do I really need to buy the $200-300 pure sine wave inverter or can I get away with something else? Perhaps the laptop adapter that sits in the middle of my laptop power cable already fixes that wave to be nice and smooth? Thanks!

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• What is the proper way to wrap this php loop around the javascript

  - by zac

  Hi, I am mashing together the Google Maps 2 script with a Wordpress loop so there is a CMS platform for the map data. I have this working fine : var point = new GLatLng(48.5139,-123.150531); var marker = createMarker(point,"Lime Kiln State Park", '<?php $post_id = 182; $my_post = get_post($post_id); $mapTitle = $my_post->post_title; $mapIMG = get_post_meta($post_id, 'mapImage', true); $snip = get_post_meta($post_id, 'mapExcerpt', true); echo "<div class=\"span-12\">"; echo "<div class=\"mapTitle\">"; echo $mapTitle; echo "</div>"; echo "<img class=\"mapImage\" src=\""; echo bloginfo('url'); echo "/wp-content/files_mf/"; echo $mapIMG; echo "\" /> "; echo "<div class=\"mapContent\">"; echo $snip; echo "</div>"; echo "<div class=\"moreLink\">"; echo "<a href=\""; echo $permalink = get_permalink( $post_id ); echo "\">Find out more &raquo; </a>"; echo "</div>"; echo "</div>"; ?>') map.addOverlay(marker); However I am hoping to also be able to include the two variables at the start within the php loop so that both of those can also be generated by custom fields. Can someone please show me that the proper way to write this would be so that all of the data can be pulled in from fields within that post id? So the lat/long and title could also be set from within the post 182 fields.

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• How can I use $(this) in a function called by the onClick event?

  - by tepkenvannkorn

  I want to set the current state to selected when clicking on each link. I can do this by: <ul class="places"> <li class="selected"> <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="myClick(0);"> <span class="date">Saturday November 2, 2013</span> <span class="time">10am – 12pm</span> <span class="location">Western Sydney Parklands</span> </a> </li> <li> <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="myClick(1);"> <span class="date">Saturday November 9, 2013</span> <span class="time">10am – 12pm</span> <span class="location">Bankstown High School</span> </a> </li> <li> <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="myClick(2);"> <span class="date">Tuesday November 12, 2013</span> <span class="time">9am – 11am</span> <span class="location">Greystanes Park</span> </a> </li> </ul> $(document).ready( function() { $('.places li a').click( function() { $('.places li').removeClass('selected'); $(this).parent().addClass('selected'); }); }); But this will double triggering onclick event an each link because the calling function myClick() is called to push data to map. Then I decided to implement these in the myClick() function: function myClick( id ) { google.maps.event.trigger(markers[id], 'click'); $('.places li').removeClass('selected'); $(this).parent().addClass('selected'); } The problem is that I cannot use $(this) to add class to its parent li. See what I have tried here. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

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• Installing a clean Python 2.6 on SuSE (SLES) 11 using system-wide libraries

  - by optilude

  Hi, I've spent most of the day on this, and it is driving me absolutely insane. On all other Unixes I've used, this is a walk in the park, but SLES 11 has me dumbfounded. I need to build Zope on SLES 11 64 bit: Linux <name> 2.6.27.45-0.1-default #1 SMP 2010-02-22 16:49:47 +0100 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux I first tried to just use the YaST-installed Python 2.6. I've also installed python-devel, libjpeg-devel, readline-devel, libopenssl-devel, libz2-devel, zlib-devel, and libgcrypt-devel. The global python2.6 has a lot of cruft in it, and seems to execute stuff in /etc/pythonstart when I use it, which doesn't help. However, the error I get is this: Getting distribution for 'Zope2==2.12.3'. src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:596: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:598: warning: ‘intargfunc’ is deprecated src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:598: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:599: warning: ‘intargfunc’ is deprecated src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:599: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:600: warning: ‘intintargfunc’ is deprecated src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:600: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:601: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:602: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:606: warning: ‘intargfunc’ is deprecated src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:606: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-suse-linux/4.3/../../../../x86_64-suse-linux/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libpython2.6.so when searching for -lpython2.6 /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-suse-linux/4.3/../../../../x86_64-suse-linux/bin/ld: cannot find -lpython2.6 collect2: ld returned 1 exit status error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1 An error occured when trying to install Zope2 2.12.3. Look above this message for any errors that were output by easy_install. I don't know what "incompatible" is referring to here; my guess would be the hardware architecture, but I'm not sure what's incompatible with what in the statement above. I've had problems with system-installed Pythons before, so I tried to compile my own (hence the list of -devel packages above), downloading the Python 2.6 tarball and running: ./configure --disable-tk --prefix=${HOME}/python make make install This installs, but it seems to be unable to find any system-wide libraries. Here's a sample interpreter session: Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Mar 29 2010, 17:04:12) [GCC 4.3.2 [gcc-4_3-branch revision 141291]] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/etc/pythonstart", line 7, in <module> import readline ImportError: No module named readline >>> from hashlib import md5 Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/home/osc/python-2.6/lib/python2.6/hashlib.py", line 136, in <module> md5 = __get_builtin_constructor('md5') File "/home/osc/python-2.6/lib/python2.6/hashlib.py", line 63, in __get_builtin_constructor import _md5 ImportError: No module named _md5 Both readline and hashlib (via libgrypt) should be installed, and the relevant -devel packages are also installed. On Ubuntu or OS X, this works just fine. On SuSE, no luck. Any help greatly appreciated! Martin

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• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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• Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspxThis week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure. Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area: MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used  Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed. In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools. The script I used is described below The Start & Variables The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets. You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this. Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestrictedcls $startTime = get-dateImport-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"# Azure Publisher Settings $azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'  # Subscription Details $subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>" $defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"  # Affinity Group Details $affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>' $dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation  # VM Details $baseVMName = 'TRN' $adminUserName = '<Your admin username>' $password = '<Your admin password>' $size = 'Medium' $vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>' $rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>' $machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'    Functions In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions: If the VM already exists it will be deleted Create the cloud service Create the VM from the template I have created Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via Write settings for the machine to a log file  function CreateVM($machineNo) { # Specify a name for the new VM $machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo" Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"       # Get the Azure VM Image      $myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate   #If the VM already exists delete and re-create it $existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName if($existingVm -ne $null) { Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it" Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName }   "Creating Service" $serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName" Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName   Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName" New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password  Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName" Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName ` | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 ` | Update-AzureVM    Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName" $machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp" Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"   WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName" }    The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.  function DeleteMachineSettings() { Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file" [System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath"); }    The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's    function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName) { Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"   $vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName $vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP   $sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder $sb.Append("Service Name: "); $sb.Append($vm.ServiceName); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("VM: "); $sb.Append($vm.Name); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("RDP Public Port: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("Public DNS: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip); $sb.AppendLine(""); [System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());  } # end functions    Rest of Script In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's  Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName  DeleteMachineSettings    "Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" $numberOfVMs = 16  for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++) { $vmNo = "$index" CreateVM($vmNo); }    "Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" # Give it a Minute Start-Sleep -s 60  $endTime = get-date "Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)    Conclusion As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too. A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit. In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing. As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

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• Effectiveness and Efficiency

  - by Daniel Moth

  In the professional environment, i.e. at work, I am always seeking personal growth and to be challenged. The result is that my assignments, my work list, my tasks, my goals, my commitments, my [insert whatever word resonates with you] keep growing (in scope and desired impact). Which in turn means I have to keep finding new ways to deliver more value, while not falling into the trap of working more hours. To do that I continuously evaluate both my effectiveness and my efficiency. EFFECTIVENESS The first thing I check is my effectiveness: Am I doing the right things? Am I focusing too much on unimportant things? Am I spending more time doing stuff that is important to my team/org/division/business/company, or am I spending it on stuff that is important to me and that I enjoy doing? Am I valuing activities that maybe I have outgrown and should be delegated to others who are at a stage I have surpassed (in Microsoft speak: is the work I am doing level appropriate or am I still operating at the previous level)? Notice how the answers to those questions change over time and due to certain events, so I have to remind myself to revisit them frequently. Events that force me to re-examine them are: change of role, change of team/org/etc, change of direction of team/org/etc, re-org, new hires on the team that take on some of the work I did, personal promotion, change of manager... and if none of those events has occurred since the last annual review, I ask myself those at each annual review anyway. If you think you are not being effective at work, make a list of the stuff that you do and start tracking where your time goes. In parallel, have a discussion with your manager about where they think your time should go. Ultimately your time is finite and hence it is your most precious investment, don't waste it. If your management doesn't value as highly what you spend your time on, then either convince your management, or stop spending your time on it, or find different management: Lead, Follow, or get out of the way! That's my view on effectiveness. You have to fix that before moving to being efficient, or you may end up being very efficient at stuff that nobody wants you to be doing in the first place. For example, you may be spending your time writing blog posts and becoming better and faster at it all the time. If your manager thinks that is not even part of your job description, you are wasting your time to satisfy your inner desires. Nobody can help you with your effectiveness other than your management chain and your management peers - they are the judges of it. EFFICIENCY The second thing I check is my efficiency: Am I doing things right? For me, doing things right means that I deliver the same quality of work faster [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. The result is that I can achieve more [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. Notice how the efficiency goal is a more portable one. If, by whatever criteria, you think you are the best at [insert your own skill here], this can change at two events: because you have new colleagues (who are potentially better than your older ones), and it can change with a change of manager (who has potentially higher expectations). That's about it. Once you are efficient at something, you carry that with you... All you need to really be doing here is, when taking on new kinds of work that you haven't done before, try a few approaches and devise a system so that you can become efficient at this new activity too... Just keep "collecting" stuff that you are efficient at. If you think you are not being efficient at something, break it down: What are the steps you take to complete that task? How long do you spend on each step? Talk to others about what steps they take, to see if you can optimize some steps away or trade them for better steps, or just learn how to complete a step faster. Have a system for every task you take so that you can have repeatable success. That's my view on efficiency. You have to fix it so that you can free up time to do more. When you plan a route from A to B - all else being equal - you try to get there as fast as possible so why would you not want to do that with your everyday work? For example, imagine you are inefficient at processing email: You spend more time than necessary dealing with email, and you still end up with dropped email threads and with slower response times than others. How can you improve? Talk to someone that you think is good at this, understand their system (e.g. here is my email processing system) and come up with one that works for you. Parting Thoughts Are you considered, by your colleagues and manager, an effective and efficient person at your workplace? If you are, what would you change if you were asked by your management to do the job of two people? Seriously, think about that! Your immediate reaction may be "that is not possible", but it actually is. You just have to re-assess what things that were previously important will now stop being important, by discussing them with your management and reaching agreement on relative priorities. For example, stuff that was previously on your plate may now have to be delegated or dropped. Where you thought you were efficient, maybe now you have to find an even faster path to completion, perhaps keeping in mind that Perfect is the Enemy of “Good Enough”. My personal experience (from both observing others and from my own reflection) is that when folks are struggling to keep up at work it is because of two reasons: They are investing energy in stuff that they enjoy doing which the business regards as having a lower priority than a lot of other things on their plate. They are completing tasks to a level of higher quality than what is required (due to personal pride) missing the big picture which almost always mandates completing three tasks at good enough quality than knocking only one of them out of the park while the other two come in late or not at all. There is a lot of content on the web, so I strongly encourage you to use your favorite search engine to read other views on effectiveness and efficiency (Bing, Google). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class (and a few helpers) with the following operation: Right click on the Solution and select Add, New Item from the context menu. From the dialog, select a Basic Page (not a Blank Page, which is another vanilla page). If you prefer, you can also use Split Page, Items Page, Item Detail Page, Grouped Items Page or Group Detail Page which are all LayoutAwarePages. Personally I like to start with a Basic Page, which gives me more creative freedom. Adding this new page will cause Visual Studio to show a prompt asking you for permission to add additional helper files to the Common folder. One of these helpers in the LayoutAwarePage class, which is where the magic happens. LayoutAwarePage offers some help for the detection of orientation and state (which makes it a pleasure to design for all these scenarios in Blend, by the way) as well as storage for the navigation state (more about that in a future article). Issue with LayoutAwarePage When you use UI elements such as a background picture, a watermark label, logos, etc, it is quite common to do a few things with those: Making them partially transparent (this is especially true for background pictures; for instance I really like a black Page background with a half transparent picture placed on top of it). Transforming them, for instance rotating them a bit, scaling them, etc. Here is an example with a picture of my two beautiful daughters in the Bird Park in Kuala Lumpur, as well as a transformed TextBlock. The image has an opacity of 40% and the TextBlock a simple RotateTransform. If I create an application with a MainPage that navigates to this LayoutAwarePage, however, I will have a very annoying effect: The background picture appears with an Opacity of 100%. The TextBlock is not rotated. This lasts only for less than a second (during the navigation animation) before the elements “snap into place” and get their desired effect. Here is the XAML that cause the annoying effect: <common:LayoutAwarePage x:Name="pageRoot" x:Class="App13.BasicPage1" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:common="using:App13.Common" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" Grid.RowSpan="2" /> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" Grid.Row="1" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> </Grid> </common:LayoutAwarePage> Solving the issue In order to solve this “snapping” issue, the solution is to wrap the elements that are transformed into an empty Grid. Honestly, to me it sounds like a bug in the LayoutAwarePage navigation animation, but thankfully the workaround is not that difficult: Simple change the main Grid as follows: <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid Grid.RowSpan="2"> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" /> </Grid> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <Grid Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> </Grid> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </Grid> Hopefully this will help a few people, I banged my head on the wall for a while before someone at Microsoft pointed me to the solution ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Action bar with Search View. Reverse compatibility issues

  - by suresh

  I am building a sample app to demonstrate SearchView with filter and other Action Bar items. I am able to successfully run this app on 4.2(Nexus 7). But it is not running on 2.3. I googled about the issue. Came to know that i should use SherLock Action bar. I just went to http://actionbarsherlock.com/download.html, downloaded the zip file and added the library as informed in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GJ6yY1lNNY&feature=player_embedde by WiseManDesigns. But still I am unable to figure out the issue. Here is my code: SearchViewActionBar.java public class SearchViewActionBar extends Activity implements SearchView.OnQueryTextListener { private SearchView mSearchView; private TextView mStatusView; int mSortMode = -1; private ListView mListView; private ArrayAdapter<String> mAdapter; protected CharSequence[] _options = { "Wild Life", "River", "Hill Station", "Temple", "Bird Sanctuary", "Hill", "Amusement Park"}; protected boolean[] _selections = new boolean[ _options.length ]; private final String[] mStrings = Cheeses.sCheeseStrings; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); getWindow().requestFeature(Window.FEATURE_ACTION_BAR); setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); // mStatusView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.status_text); // mSearchView = (SearchView) findViewById(R.id.search_view); mListView = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.list_view); mListView.setAdapter(mAdapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1, mStrings)); mListView.setTextFilterEnabled(true); //setupSearchView(); } private void setupSearchView() { mSearchView.setIconifiedByDefault(true); mSearchView.setOnQueryTextListener(this); mSearchView.setSubmitButtonEnabled(false); //mSearchView.setQueryHint(getString(R.string.cheese_hunt_hint)); } @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu); MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater(); inflater.inflate(R.menu.searchview_in_menu, menu); MenuItem searchItem = menu.findItem(R.id.action_search); mSearchView = (SearchView) searchItem.getActionView(); //setupSearchView(searchItem); setupSearchView(); return true; } @Override public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { if (mSortMode != -1) { Drawable icon = menu.findItem(mSortMode).getIcon(); menu.findItem(R.id.action_sort).setIcon(icon); } return super.onPrepareOptionsMenu(menu); } @Override public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) { String c="Category"; String s=(String) item.getTitle(); if(s.equals(c)) { System.out.println("same"); showDialog( 0 ); } //System.out.println(s); Toast.makeText(this, "Selected Item: " + item.getTitle(), Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); return true; } protected Dialog onCreateDialog( int id ) { return new AlertDialog.Builder( this ) .setTitle( "Category" ) .setMultiChoiceItems( _options, _selections, new DialogSelectionClickHandler() ) .setPositiveButton( "SAVE", new DialogButtonClickHandler() ) .create(); } public class DialogSelectionClickHandler implements DialogInterface.OnMultiChoiceClickListener { public void onClick( DialogInterface dialog, int clicked, boolean selected ) { Log.i( "ME", _options[ clicked ] + " selected: " + selected ); } } public class DialogButtonClickHandler implements DialogInterface.OnClickListener { public void onClick( DialogInterface dialog, int clicked ) { switch( clicked ) { case DialogInterface.BUTTON_POSITIVE: printSelectedPlanets(); break; } } } protected void printSelectedPlanets() { for( int i = 0; i < _options.length; i++ ){ Log.i( "ME", _options[ i ] + " selected: " + _selections[i] ); } } public void onSort(MenuItem item) { mSortMode = item.getItemId(); invalidateOptionsMenu(); } public boolean onQueryTextChange(String newText) { if (TextUtils.isEmpty(newText)) { mListView.clearTextFilter(); } else { mListView.setFilterText(newText.toString()); } return true; } public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String query) { mStatusView.setText("Query = " + query + " : submitted"); return false; } public boolean onClose() { mStatusView.setText("Closed!"); return false; } protected boolean isAlwaysExpanded() { return false; } }

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• <div> of images, retrieved by getJSON, disappear after append()

  - by Midiane

  Hi all I'm working on a GMaps application to retrieve images, via getJSON(), and to populate a popup marker. The following is the markup which I add to the marker dynamically: <div id="images"></div> <div id="CampWindow" style="display:none;width:550px;height:500px;"> <h4 id="camp-title"></h4> <p>View... (all links open in new windows)</p> <ul> <li><a id="camp-hp-link" target="_blank" href="">camp home page</a></li> <li>information: <a id="camp-av-link" target="_blank" href="">availability</a> | <a id="camp-vi-link" target="_blank" href="">vital information</li> </ul> <p id="message"></p> I've been clawing out my eyes and woohoo for the past couple of days, trying to get the images to show inside the CampWindow . Then, I decided to think laterally and to see if the images were being retrieved at all. I then moved the images outside and sure as Bob (Hope), the images were being retrieved and refreshed with every click. So, I decided to the keep the images outside and then once loaded, append it to the CampWindow . It's not working still; when I append the div to the main CampWindow div, the images won't show. I check in Firebug with the pointer thingy and it shows me the images as empty. I try it again with the images outside and it shows the images. I've tried before append and appendTo with no success. Am I missing something here? I have no more woohoo to claw out. Please, please help. marker.clicked = function(marker){ $("#images").html(''); $('#camp-title').text(this.name); $('#camp-hp-link').attr('href', this.url); $('#camp-av-link').attr('href', this.url + '/tourism/availability.php'); $('#camp-vi-link').attr('href', this.url + '/tourism/general.php'); // get resort images via jQuery AJAX call - includes/GetResortImages.inc.php $.getJSON('./includes/GetResortImages.inc.php', { park: this.park_name, camp: this.camp_name }, RetrieveImages); function RetrieveImages (data) { if ('failed' == data.status) { $('#messages').append("<em>We don't have any images for this rest camp right now!</em>"); } else { if ('' != data.camp) { $.each(data, function(key,value){ $("<img/>").attr("src", value).appendTo('#images'); }); } } } //.append($("#images")); $("#CampWindow").show(); var windowContent = $("<html />"); $("#CampWindow").appendTo(windowContent); var infoWindowAnchor = marker.getIcon().infoWindowAnchor; var iconAnchor = marker.getIcon().iconAnchor; var offset = new google.maps.Size(infoWindowAnchor.x-iconAnchor.x,infoWindowAnchor.y-iconAnchor.y); map.openInfoWindowHtml(marker.getLatLng(), windowContent.html(), {pixelOffset:offset}); } markers.push(marker); });

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• A Closable jQuery Plug-in

  - by Rick Strahl

  In my client side development I deal a lot with content that pops over the main page. Be it data entry ‘windows’ or dialogs or simple pop up notes. In most cases this behavior goes with draggable windows, but sometimes it’s also useful to have closable behavior on static page content that the user can choose to hide or otherwise make invisible or fade out. Here’s a small jQuery plug-in that provides .closable() behavior to most elements by using either an image that is provided or – more appropriately by using a CSS class to define the picture box layout. /* * * Closable * * Makes selected DOM elements closable by making them * invisible when close icon is clicked * * Version 1.01 * @requires jQuery v1.3 or later * * Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Rick Strahl * http://www.west-wind.com/ * * Licensed under the MIT license: * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php Support CSS: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Options: * handle Element to place closebox into (like say a header). Use if main element and closebox container are two different elements. * closeHandler Function called when the close box is clicked. Return true to close the box return false to keep it visible. * cssClass The CSS class to apply to the close box DIV or IMG tag. * imageUrl Allows you to specify an explicit IMG url that displays the close icon. If used bypasses CSS image styling. * fadeOut Optional provide fadeOut speed. Default no fade out occurs */ (function ($) { $.fn.closable = function (options) { var opt = { handle: null, closeHandler: null, cssClass: "closebox", imageUrl: null, fadeOut: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.each(function (i) { var el = $(this); var pos = el.css("position"); if (!pos || pos == "static") el.css("position", "relative"); var h = opt.handle ? $(opt.handle).css({ position: "relative" }) : el; var div = opt.imageUrl ? $("<img>").attr("src", opt.imageUrl).css("cursor", "pointer") : $("<div>"); div.addClass(opt.cssClass) .click(function (e) { if (opt.closeHandler) if (!opt.closeHandler.call(this, e)) return; if (opt.fadeOut) $(el).fadeOut(opt.fadeOut); else $(el).hide(); }); if (opt.imageUrl) div.css("background-image", "none"); h.append(div); }); } })(jQuery); The plugin can be applied against any selector that is a container (typically a div tag). The close image or close box is provided typically by way of a CssClass - .closebox by default – which supplies the image as part of the CSS styling. The default styling for the box looks something like this: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Alternately you can also supply an image URL which overrides the background image in the style sheet. I use this plug-in mostly on pop up windows that can be closed, but it’s also quite handy for remove/delete behavior in list displays like this: you can find this sample here to look to play along: http://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/Samples/Ajax/AmazonBooks/BooksAdmin.aspx For closable windows it’s nice to have something reusable because in my client framework there are lots of different kinds of windows that can be created: Draggables, Modal Dialogs, HoverPanels etc. and they all use the client .closable plug-in to provide the closable operation in the same way with a few options. Plug-ins are great for this sort of thing because they can also be aggregated and so different components can pick and choose the behavior they want. The window here is a draggable, that’s closable and has shadow behavior and the server control can simply generate the appropriate plug-ins to apply to the main <div> tag: $().ready(function() { $('#ctl00_MainContent_panEditBook') .closable({ handle: $('#divEditBook_Header') }) .draggable({ dragDelay: 100, handle: '#divEditBook_Header' }) .shadow({ opacity: 0.25, offset: 6 }); }) The window is using the default .closebox style and has its handle set to the header bar (Book Information). The window is just closable to go away so no event handler is applied. Actually I cheated – the actual page’s .closable is a bit more ugly in the sample as it uses an image from a resources file: .closable({ imageUrl: '/WestWindWebToolkit/Samples/WebResource.axd?d=TooLongAndNastyToPrint', handle: $('#divEditBook_Header')}) so you can see how to apply a custom image, which in this case is generated by the server control wrapping the client DragPanel. More interesting maybe is to apply the .closable behavior to list scenarios. For example, each of the individual items in the list display also are .closable using this plug-in. Rather than having to define each item with Html for an image, event handler and link, when the client template is rendered the closable behavior is attached to the list. Here I’m using client-templating and the code that this is done with looks like this: function loadBooks() { showProgress(); // Clear the content $("#divBookListWrapper").empty(); var filter = $("#" + scriptVars.lstFiltersId).val(); Proxy.GetBooks(filter, function(books) { $(books).each(function(i) { updateBook(this); showProgress(true); }); }, onPageError); } function updateBook(book,highlight) { // try to retrieve the single item in the list by tag attribute id var item = $(".bookitem[tag=" +book.Pk +"]"); // grab and evaluate the template var html = parseTemplate(template, book); var newItem = $(html) .attr("tag", book.Pk.toString()) .click(function() { var pk = $(this).attr("tag"); editBook(this, parseInt(pk)); }) .closable({ closeHandler: function(e) { removeBook(this, e); }, imageUrl: "../../images/remove.gif" }); if (item.length > 0) item.after(newItem).remove(); else newItem.appendTo($("#divBookListWrapper")); if (highlight) { newItem .addClass("pulse") .effect("bounce", { distance: 15, times: 3 }, 400); setTimeout(function() { newItem.removeClass("pulse"); }, 1200); } } Here the closable behavior is applied to each of the items along with an event handler, which is nice and easy compared to having to embed the right HTML and click handling into each item in the list individually via markup. Ideally though (and these posts make me realize this often a little late) I probably should set up a custom cssClass to handle the rendering – maybe a CSS class called .removebox that only changes the image from the default box image. This example also hooks up an event handler that is fired in response to the close. In the list I need to know when the remove button is clicked so I can fire of a service call to the server to actually remove the item from the database. The handler code can also return false; to indicate that the window should not be closed optionally. Returning true will close the window. You can find more information about the .closable class behavior and options here: .closable Documentation Plug-ins make Server Control JavaScript much easier I find this plug-in immensely useful especial as part of server control code, because it simplifies the code that has to be generated server side tremendously. This is true of plug-ins in general which make it so much easier to create simple server code that only generates plug-in options, rather than full blocks of JavaScript code.  For example, here’s the relevant code from the DragPanel server control which generates the .closable() behavior: if (this.Closable && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(DragHandleID) ) { string imageUrl = this.CloseBoxImage; if (imageUrl == "WebResource" ) imageUrl = ScriptProxy.GetWebResourceUrl(this, this.GetType(), ControlResources.CLOSE_ICON_RESOURCE); StringBuilder closableOptions = new StringBuilder("imageUrl: '" + imageUrl + "'"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.DragHandleID)) closableOptions.Append(",handle: $('#" + this.DragHandleID + "')"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ClientDialogHandler)) closableOptions.Append(",handler: " + this.ClientDialogHandler); if (this.FadeOnClose) closableOptions.Append(",fadeOut: 'slow'"); startupScript.Append(@" .closable({ " + closableOptions + "})"); } The same sort of block is then used for .draggable and .shadow which simply sets options. Compared to the code I used to have in pre-jQuery versions of my JavaScript toolkit this is a walk in the park. In those days there was a bunch of JS generation which was ugly to say the least. I know a lot of folks frown on using server controls, especially the UI is client centric as the example is. However, I do feel that server controls can greatly simplify the process of getting the right behavior attached more easily and with the help of IntelliSense. Often the script markup is easier is especially if you are dealing with complex, multiple plug-in associations that often express more easily with property values on a control. Regardless of whether server controls are your thing or not this plug-in can be useful in many scenarios. Even in simple client-only scenarios using a plug-in with a few simple parameters is nicer and more consistent than creating the HTML markup over and over again. I hope some of you find this even a small bit as useful as I have. Related Links Download jquery.closable West Wind Web Toolkit jQuery Plug-ins © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery   ASP.NET  JavaScript  

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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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• A Closable jQuery Plug-in

  - by Rick Strahl

  In my client side development I deal a lot with content that pops over the main page. Be it data entry ‘windows’ or dialogs or simple pop up notes. In most cases this behavior goes with draggable windows, but sometimes it’s also useful to have closable behavior on static page content that the user can choose to hide or otherwise make invisible or fade out. Here’s a small jQuery plug-in that provides .closable() behavior to most elements by using either an image that is provided or – more appropriately by using a CSS class to define the picture box layout. /* * * Closable * * Makes selected DOM elements closable by making them * invisible when close icon is clicked * * Version 1.01 * @requires jQuery v1.3 or later * * Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Rick Strahl * http://www.west-wind.com/ * * Licensed under the MIT license: * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php Support CSS: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Options: * handle Element to place closebox into (like say a header). Use if main element and closebox container are two different elements. * closeHandler Function called when the close box is clicked. Return true to close the box return false to keep it visible. * cssClass The CSS class to apply to the close box DIV or IMG tag. * imageUrl Allows you to specify an explicit IMG url that displays the close icon. If used bypasses CSS image styling. * fadeOut Optional provide fadeOut speed. Default no fade out occurs */ (function ($) { $.fn.closable = function (options) { var opt = { handle: null, closeHandler: null, cssClass: "closebox", imageUrl: null, fadeOut: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.each(function (i) { var el = $(this); var pos = el.css("position"); if (!pos || pos == "static") el.css("position", "relative"); var h = opt.handle ? $(opt.handle).css({ position: "relative" }) : el; var div = opt.imageUrl ? $("<img>").attr("src", opt.imageUrl).css("cursor", "pointer") : $("<div>"); div.addClass(opt.cssClass) .click(function (e) { if (opt.closeHandler) if (!opt.closeHandler.call(this, e)) return; if (opt.fadeOut) $(el).fadeOut(opt.fadeOut); else $(el).hide(); }); if (opt.imageUrl) div.css("background-image", "none"); h.append(div); }); } })(jQuery); The plugin can be applied against any selector that is a container (typically a div tag). The close image or close box is provided typically by way of a CssClass - .closebox by default – which supplies the image as part of the CSS styling. The default styling for the box looks something like this: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Alternately you can also supply an image URL which overrides the background image in the style sheet. I use this plug-in mostly on pop up windows that can be closed, but it’s also quite handy for remove/delete behavior in list displays like this: you can find this sample here to look to play along: http://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/Samples/Ajax/AmazonBooks/BooksAdmin.aspx For closable windows it’s nice to have something reusable because in my client framework there are lots of different kinds of windows that can be created: Draggables, Modal Dialogs, HoverPanels etc. and they all use the client .closable plug-in to provide the closable operation in the same way with a few options. Plug-ins are great for this sort of thing because they can also be aggregated and so different components can pick and choose the behavior they want. The window here is a draggable, that’s closable and has shadow behavior and the server control can simply generate the appropriate plug-ins to apply to the main <div> tag: $().ready(function() { $('#ctl00_MainContent_panEditBook') .closable({ handle: $('#divEditBook_Header') }) .draggable({ dragDelay: 100, handle: '#divEditBook_Header' }) .shadow({ opacity: 0.25, offset: 6 }); }) The window is using the default .closebox style and has its handle set to the header bar (Book Information). The window is just closable to go away so no event handler is applied. Actually I cheated – the actual page’s .closable is a bit more ugly in the sample as it uses an image from a resources file: .closable({ imageUrl: '/WestWindWebToolkit/Samples/WebResource.axd?d=TooLongAndNastyToPrint', handle: $('#divEditBook_Header')}) so you can see how to apply a custom image, which in this case is generated by the server control wrapping the client DragPanel. More interesting maybe is to apply the .closable behavior to list scenarios. For example, each of the individual items in the list display also are .closable using this plug-in. Rather than having to define each item with Html for an image, event handler and link, when the client template is rendered the closable behavior is attached to the list. Here I’m using client-templating and the code that this is done with looks like this: function loadBooks() { showProgress(); // Clear the content $("#divBookListWrapper").empty(); var filter = $("#" + scriptVars.lstFiltersId).val(); Proxy.GetBooks(filter, function(books) { $(books).each(function(i) { updateBook(this); showProgress(true); }); }, onPageError); } function updateBook(book,highlight) { // try to retrieve the single item in the list by tag attribute id var item = $(".bookitem[tag=" +book.Pk +"]"); // grab and evaluate the template var html = parseTemplate(template, book); var newItem = $(html) .attr("tag", book.Pk.toString()) .click(function() { var pk = $(this).attr("tag"); editBook(this, parseInt(pk)); }) .closable({ closeHandler: function(e) { removeBook(this, e); }, imageUrl: "../../images/remove.gif" }); if (item.length > 0) item.after(newItem).remove(); else newItem.appendTo($("#divBookListWrapper")); if (highlight) { newItem .addClass("pulse") .effect("bounce", { distance: 15, times: 3 }, 400); setTimeout(function() { newItem.removeClass("pulse"); }, 1200); } } Here the closable behavior is applied to each of the items along with an event handler, which is nice and easy compared to having to embed the right HTML and click handling into each item in the list individually via markup. Ideally though (and these posts make me realize this often a little late) I probably should set up a custom cssClass to handle the rendering – maybe a CSS class called .removebox that only changes the image from the default box image. This example also hooks up an event handler that is fired in response to the close. In the list I need to know when the remove button is clicked so I can fire of a service call to the server to actually remove the item from the database. The handler code can also return false; to indicate that the window should not be closed optionally. Returning true will close the window. You can find more information about the .closable class behavior and options here: .closable Documentation Plug-ins make Server Control JavaScript much easier I find this plug-in immensely useful especial as part of server control code, because it simplifies the code that has to be generated server side tremendously. This is true of plug-ins in general which make it so much easier to create simple server code that only generates plug-in options, rather than full blocks of JavaScript code.  For example, here’s the relevant code from the DragPanel server control which generates the .closable() behavior: if (this.Closable && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(DragHandleID) ) { string imageUrl = this.CloseBoxImage; if (imageUrl == "WebResource" ) imageUrl = ScriptProxy.GetWebResourceUrl(this, this.GetType(), ControlResources.CLOSE_ICON_RESOURCE); StringBuilder closableOptions = new StringBuilder("imageUrl: '" + imageUrl + "'"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.DragHandleID)) closableOptions.Append(",handle: $('#" + this.DragHandleID + "')"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ClientDialogHandler)) closableOptions.Append(",handler: " + this.ClientDialogHandler); if (this.FadeOnClose) closableOptions.Append(",fadeOut: 'slow'"); startupScript.Append(@" .closable({ " + closableOptions + "})"); } The same sort of block is then used for .draggable and .shadow which simply sets options. Compared to the code I used to have in pre-jQuery versions of my JavaScript toolkit this is a walk in the park. In those days there was a bunch of JS generation which was ugly to say the least. I know a lot of folks frown on using server controls, especially the UI is client centric as the example is. However, I do feel that server controls can greatly simplify the process of getting the right behavior attached more easily and with the help of IntelliSense. Often the script markup is easier is especially if you are dealing with complex, multiple plug-in associations that often express more easily with property values on a control. Regardless of whether server controls are your thing or not this plug-in can be useful in many scenarios. Even in simple client-only scenarios using a plug-in with a few simple parameters is nicer and more consistent than creating the HTML markup over and over again. I hope some of you find this even a small bit as useful as I have. Related Links Download jquery.closable West Wind Web Toolkit jQuery Plug-ins © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery   ASP.NET  JavaScript  

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 01, 2012Popular Releasesxyzzy+: April 1, 2012: SHA1: 6a07f0ed8d8006f26936a5bb45cf85405d8de8a4 WarningThis release is not for daily use, just for fun. keymaps are broken. (For example, C-g, #\TAB and #\RET will not work in minibuffer) dialogs are completely broken. Usual xyzzy+class lisp_object; typedef lisp_object *lisp; lsymbol *p = ldata <lsymbol, Tsymbol>::alloc (); Today's xyzzy+ref class lisp_object; typedef lisp_object ^lisp; lsymbol ^p = gcnew lsymbol (Tsymbol); PrerequisitesMicrosoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Pack...VidCoder: 1.3.2: Added option for the minimum title length to scan. Added support to enable or disable LibDVDNav. Added option to prompt to delete source files after clearing successful completed items. Added option to disable remembering recent files and folders. Tweaked number box to only select all on a quick click.MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Light Indexed Deferred Rendering: Implements light indexed deferred using per-tile light lists calculated in a compute shader, as well as a traditional deferred renderer that uses a compute shader for per-tile light culling and per-pixel shading.Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.6.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's in the 1.6.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner Calculator CalculatorUpDown CheckListBox - Breaking Changes CheckComboBox - New Control ChildWindow CollectionEditor CollectionEditorDialog ColorCanvas ColorPicker DateTimePicker DateTimeUpDown DecimalUpDown DoubleUpDown DropDownButton IntegerUpDown Magnifier MaskedTextBox MessageBox MultiLineTex...ScriptIDE: Release 4.4: ...Media Companion: MC 3.434b Release: General This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. If there are no major problems, by the end of the week it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable! The latest mc_com.exe should be included too! TV Bug fix - crash when using XBMC scraper for TV episodes. Bug fix - episode count update when adding new episodes. Bug fix - crash when actors name was missing. Enhanced TV scrape progress text. Enhancements made to missing episodes display. Movies Bug fix - hide "Play Trailer" when multisaev...Better Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.831 Alpha: - A new release with: - many bugfixes - changed icon - added code for more failsafe registry usage on x64 systems - not needed regfix anymore - added ribbon shortcut keys - Other fixes Note: If you have problems opening system libraries, a suggestion was given to copy all of these libraries and then delete the originals. Thanks to Gaugamela for that! (see discussion here: 349015 ) Note2: I was upload again the setup due to missing file!LINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.2.7: Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) New Align/Match extensions (1.0.2.6) Ready to use stable code with comprehensive unit tests and samples New Pivot extensions New Filter ExtensionsMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5: The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes, implements optimisations and adds key features. MonoGame now has the capability to use OpenGLES 2.0 on Android and iOS devices, meaning it now supports custom shaders across mobile and desktop platforms. Also included in this release are native orientation animations on iOS devices and better Orientation support for Android. There have also been a lot of bug fixes since t...SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks: Beta Release 1.1.15427: This update beta release base on feedback from a user. Also a coding error was corrected. The updates are as follows: Remove Redundant task: CreateDataSubscriptions. Updated CreateSubscriptions To handle both Subscriptions and Data-Driven Subscriptions. Also the change how the CreateSubscriptions works. If the report, for wihch if define for the subscription, already has subscription define then by default all the Subscriptions for that report are not deploy. This can be overr...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classPicturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxNew Projects.NET Micro Framework - String Extensions: String Extension class library for .NET Micro Framework. This includes basic type conversion from 'byte' to 'string'.AGS: AGSAtlas Engine: Atlas is a game object-component engine using XNA 4 for Windows Phone 7.1. It is currently very early in it's development and is very much a work in progress.Cet Open Toolbox: Public repository for open sources projects brought to you by CET Electronics. Featuring .Net, .Net Micro Framework and several related technologies.ClassM: ClassM is an app that uses Metro Style for Windows 8. This application is intended to facilitate the management of classes taught by a teacher.CommandLineHelp: CommandLineHelp is a framework for simplifying the automated execution of command-line programs and saving their output.Conectayas: Conectayas is an open source "Connect Four" alike game but transformable to "Tic-Tac-Toe" and to a lot of similar games that uses mouse. Written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML). Very configurable. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.Crudo: CRUDO - The MCG (Model-Controller-Generator) CGF (Code Generation Framework) Visit The Project HomePage: http://adityayadav.com/CRUDO_The_MCG_Model_Controller_Generator_CGF_Code_Generation_Framework.aspx Licenses: 1) GPL v2 2) Commercial (contact us for information)Desafio Dot.Net: Projeto para o Desafio DotNetFurcadia Heimdall Tester: An application that helps Furcadia technicians test the integrity of the game server. It checks for availability of each heimdall, its connectivity to the rest of the system (horton/tribble) and how often it receives a user compared to the rest of them.GS1: D is a 2D game demo written in C++ and using an API : HAPI for the graphic part and the audio part. All the xml files are handled with tinyXML. It is a vertical scrolling shoot'em up where the player controls a dragon flying in Central Park.GS2: In Zombies, you are a wizard, the most powerful wizard in the world, and two days ago, the Devil forces began to attack our world. The only person capable of stopping them is you, this is why the Devil himself came to you and took your powers. You're now alone, without any weaponHeterogeneous Data Centre: The Heterogeneous Data Centre project supersedes the Materials Data Centre, a JISC-funded initiative to build an infrastructure for materials scientists and engineers to publish their experimental data online. The HDC can support data from any discipline, not just engineering.HJJM Adv. Database Project: Advanced database project for Hughes, Johnson, Johnson, and McShannon.Hundiyas: Hundiyas is an open source "Battleship" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.IpSpy: IpSpy is a Windows Service Application that checks External IP address and if it changed, IpSpy sends Email with new IP to specified email addressMake calculator in asp.net: create calculator in asp.netMarTech SharePoint Sandboxed Solutions: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is missing some key functionalities to make sure SharePoint is easy to use. My Sandbox Solutions adds these missing functionalities and makes it easier for consultants to implement the wanted functionalities. By using sandboxed solutions no farm solution has to be installed and every site can have it own solutions. Sandbox solutions gives flexibility to the site administrator without disturbing the farm administrator and security risks.MDS Administration: Master Data Services Administrator. Compare MDS models from the same or different serversmicrostockUploader: Uploads multiple JPEG images with additional files (RAW, EPS) to multiple microstocks. Supports FTP resume. Supports buggy routers which drop FTP connection after some timeout.Min-Mang: A logical game implementation.Multiverse OS: A Cosmos based O.S.N2F Yverdon Database Helper: A class to aid in performing simple database queries within N2F Yverdon. Also provides the capability to store queries for later use.N2F Yverdon Scryle Manager: This extension will provide a way to manage javascript and stylesheet files for inclusion in your templates. Compression, combination and minification are included.OPSM: OPSM Miner & information projectPatternPro Regular Expression Engine: PatternPro RXE is a Regular Expression Engine coded entirely in C# that has some features not offered in the MS implementation. The PatterProRXE project also contains a multi-state text scanner that makes it easy to create multi-state text scanners and parsers.PinBeiWang: PinBeiWangProgram Options: Parse command line optionsrealestateanalytics: Analytics for real estateRegistrationManagement: registration management of our company using asp.netSchool Project 12: SchoolProject12SelfService: Simple self service projectSMVector3: Vector3 class implemented as float array or with SIMD instructions with the same interface so it is transparant whether you decide to use one version or another. You can also change version during the life cycle of the projects.SVNTAGWC - Tag a SVN working copy: SVNTAGWC will help users and configuration managers tag builds of their projects. It will automatically freeze all external revisions and add all unversioned files to a specified copy (or tag).WeiboImage: a weibo image projectweizhi: sina weibo readerWindows Media Autorization: Windows Media Autorizaton PlugIn for windows media 9 WinRtBehaviors: A project for WinRT Attached behaviorswpfPostgres: Started...ZLib: by zapline 278998871@qq.com???????????: ???????? «???????????», ???????????? ? ?????? ?????????????? ??????????? ???????? ?? C#. ???????? ?? C#.

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