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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by Red and the Community

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I’d spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it’s not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I’m very confident in my skills, but I’m also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn’t bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won’t bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I’d made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn’t made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. “Even if I hadn’t made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top.” There’s only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don’t let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom’n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don’t make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you’re more of a winner than you think. If you’re too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you’re the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you’re probably an Exceptional DBA. It’s time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As ‘Red Green’ says, "We’re all in this together and I’m pullin’ for ya". –Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I'd spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it's not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I'm very confident in my skills, but I'm also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn't bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won't bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I'd made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. "Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top." There's only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don't let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom'n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don't make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you're more of a winner than you think. If you're too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you're the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you're probably an Exceptional DBA. It's time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As 'Red Green' says, "We're all in this together and I'm pullin' for ya". --Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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• Do Great Work

  - by user12601034

  Have you ever attended an online conference and actually had a desire to attend all of it?? Yesterday I attended the first day of the Great Work MBA program, sponsored by Box of Crayons and hosted by Michael Bungay Stanier. The topic of the day was “Grounding Yourself,” and the day featured five speakers on five different topics. I have to admit that I started the first session with kind of a “blech” feeling that I didn’t really want to participate, but for some reason I did. So I listened to the first session, and I was hooked. I ended up listening to all of the sessions for the day, and I had some great take-aways from the sessions – my highlights included: The opposite of bravery isn’t fear, it’s settling. In essence, you need to be brave in order to accomplish anything. If you’re settling, you’re not being brave, and your accomplishments will likely be lackluster. Bravery requires confidence and permission. You need to work at being brave by taking small wins, build them up and then take slightly larger risks. Additionally, you need to “claim your own crown.” Nobody in the business world is going to give you permission to be a guru in X – you need to give yourself permission to become a guru in X and then do it. Fall in love with obstacles. Everyone is going to face some form of failure. One way to deal with this is to fall in love with solving the puzzle of obstacles. You don’t have to hit it if you can go around it. Understanding purpose brings out the best in people and the best people. As a leader, drawing in people who are passionate and highly motivated about their work creates velocity for your organization. Being clear about purpose is the first step in doing this. You must own your own story. Everything about you creates a “unique you” that is distinct from everyone else. As you take ownership of this, it becomes part of your strength. It’s not a strength if you’re running away from it. Focus on what’s right. Be aware of your tendency to interpret a situation a certain way and differentiate between helpful and unhelpful interpretations. Three questions for how to think differently: 1) Why? 2) Who says so? 3) What would happen if? These three questions can help you build alternative perspectives and options that can increase resiliency. Even though this first day was focused on “Grounding Yourself,” I see plenty of application in the corporate environment for both individuals and leaders of teams. To apply these highlights to my work environment, I would do the following: Understand the purpose – of my company, of my team and of my role on the team. If I know the purpose, I know what I need to bring to the table to make me, my team and my company successful. Declare your goals…your BEHAGS (big, hairy, audacious goals).Have the confidence to declare what you and/or your team is going to accomplish.Sure, you might have to re-state those goals down the line, but you can learn from that as well. Get creative about achieving your goals.Break down your obstacles by asking yourself what is going to stop you from achieving your goals and then, for each obstacles, ask those three questions:Why?Who says so? What would happen if? Focus on what’s right.I had a manager who asked us to write status reports every week.“Status” consisted of 1) What did I accomplish; 2) What will I accomplish next week; 3) How can my manager help me.The focus on our status report was always “what’s right”(“what’s wrong” was always a conversation at the point in time it was needed). I’m normally a skeptic of online webcasts/conferences, and I normally expect to take away maybe one or two ideas. I’m really glad, however, that I took the time to listen to all of the sessions yesterday, and I hope that my take-aways inspire you to think about how you might do great work also. --

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• D&rsquo;Arcy&rsquo;s Book Club - The New Strategic Selling

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  The New Strategic Selling Miller and Heiman Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters Everybody is a salesmen. Every day, without knowing it, we sell something to someone. Now, the typical vision people think of when they hear the word “sales” is the sleazy used car salesperson who does whatever they can to get you to buy the clunker on their lot. But selling is not an action tied to money and products. Selling is about convincing people to see your point of view and act on it. If you want your company to cover a trip to a conference, you may have to sell the idea to your boss. If you want to buy that new big screen TV, you have to sell the idea to your significant other. If you want to go on a weekend fishing trip with the boys you might be called in to help sell the idea to your buddies wife. We all sell, but we don’t all sell very well. So enter The New Strategic Selling, a book based on the sales course put on by the Miller-Heiman group. In fact, this isn’t really a “New” strategy to selling as its been around for a number of years. But the concepts they present, the ideas about selling, these are still very radical based on what most of us have experienced. Gone are the high pressure, win at all cost, GlenGarry-GlenRoss style of sales…instead the book presents a framework to switch to need-based selling. It’s the idea that instead of going in raving about a product or service, you build a relationship where the buyer expresses what their needs are and your response is to present a solution that best fits that need. Instead of focussing on the amount of money you can squeeze out of a client, you focus on whether everyone wins, that they receive win-results from the engagement, that repeat business is developed over time delivering value over and over again. The great thing about the book is that what it teaches…things like how to identify different buying influencers, how to prepare for meetings, techniques to solicit information about what the buyer is really thinking/feeling…these things are entirely applicable in *any* situation that you need to sell to someone…and remember: selling is convincing people to see your point of view and act on it. So that new big screen TV you want to buy but need to convince your wife on? This book can help you. That training opportunity you want your company to send you on? This book can help you. The upgrade to your community park that you want to lobby the local civic authorities for? This book can help you. The book is a bit wordy. I found that the length could have been reduced and the points still have gotten across. That’s really the only knock that I have though; the insight that it provides is so worthwhile that having to chew through extra words is well worth it. You definitely don’t have to be a professional salesperson to benefit from this book. Rating: 4/5

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• What Counts for a DBA: Skill

  - by drsql

  “Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skill sets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit.

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• Drive

  - by erikanollwebb

  Picking up where we left off, let's summarize.  People have both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and whether reward works depends a bit on what you are rewarding.  Rewards don't decreased intrinsic motivation provided you know what you are getting and why, and when you reward high performance.  But as anyone who has watched the great animation of Dan Pink's TED talk knows, even that doesn't tell the whole story.  Although people may not be less intrinsically motivated by rewards, the impact of rewards on actual performance is a really odd questions.  Larger rewards don't necessarily lead to better performance and in fact, some times lead to worse performance.  Pink argues that people are driven and engaged when they have autonomy, mastery and purpose.  If they can self-direct and can be good at what they do and have a sense of purpose for what they are doing, they show the highest engagement.   (Personally, I would add progress to the list.  My experience is that if you have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose but don't get a feeling that you are making any progress day to day, your level of engagement will drop rapidly.) So Pink is arguing if we could set up work so that people have a sense of purpose in what they do, have some autonomy and the ability to build mastery, you'll have better companies.  And that's probably true in a lot of ways, but there's a problem.  Sometimes, you have things you need to do but maybe you don't really want to do.  Or that you don't really see the point of.  Or that doesn't have a lot of value to you at the end of the day.  Then what does a company do?  Let me give you an example.  I've worked on some customer relationship management (CRM) tools over the years and done user research with sales people to try and understand their world.  And there's a funny thing about sales tools in CRM.  Sometimes what the company wants a sales person to do is at odds with what a sales person thinks is useful to them.  For example, companies would like to know who a sales person talked to at the company and the person level.  They'd like to know what they talked about, when, and whether the deals closed.  Those metrics would help you build a better sales force and understand what works and what does not.  But sales people see that as busy work that doesn't add any value to their ability to sell.  So you have a sales person who has a lot of autonomy, they like to do things that improve their ability to sell and they usually feel a sense of purpose--the group is trying to make a quota!  That quota will help the company succeed!  But then you have tasks that they don't think fit into that equation.  The company would like to know more about what makes them successful and get metrics on what they do and frankly, have a record of what they do in case they leave, but the sales person thinks it's a waste of time to put all that information into a sales application. They have drive, just not for all the things the company would like.   You could punish them for not entering the information, or you could try to reward them for doing it, but you still have an imperfect model of engagement.  Ideally, you'd like them to want to do it.  If they want to do it, if they are motivated to do it, then the company wins.  If *something* about it is rewarding to them, then they are more engaged and more likely to do it.  So the question becomes, how do you create that interest to do something?

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• Pinterest and the Rising Power of Imagery

  - by Mike Stiles

  If images keep you glued to a screen, you’re hardly alone. Countless social users are letting their eyes do the walking, waiting for that special photo to grab their attention. And perhaps more than any other social network, Pinterest has been giving those eyes plenty of room to walk. Pinterest came along in 2010. Its play was that users could simply create topic boards and pin pictures to the appropriate boards for sharing. Yes there are some words, captions mostly, but not many. The speed of its growth raised eyebrows. Traffic quadrupled in the last quarter of 2011, with 7.51 million unique visitors in December alone. It now gets 1.9 billion monthly page views. And it was sticky. In the US, the average time a user spends strolling through boards and photos on Pinterest is 15 minutes, 50 seconds. Proving the concept of browsing a catalogue is not dead, it became a top 5 referrer for several apparel retailers like Land’s End, Nordstrom, and Bergdorfs. Now a survey of online shoppers by BizRate Insights says that Pinterest is responsible for more purchases online than Facebook. Over 70% of its users are going there specifically to keep up with trends and get shopping ideas. And when they buy, the average order value is $179. Pinterest is also scoring better in terms of user engagement. 66% of pinners regularly follow and repin retailers, whereas 17% of Facebook fans turn to that platform for purchase ideas. (Facebook still wins when it comes to reach and driving traffic to 3rd-party sites by the way). Social posting best practices have consistently shown that posts with photos are rewarded with higher engagement levels. You may be downright Shakespearean in your writing, but what makes images in the digital world so much more powerful than prose? 1. They transcend language barriers. 2. They’re fun and addictive to look at. 3. They can be consumed in fractions of a second, important considering how fast users move through their social content (admit it, you do too). 4. They’re efficient gateways. A good picture might get them to the headline. A good headline might then get them to the written content. 5. The audience for them surpasses demographic limitations. 6. They can effectively communicate and trigger an emotion. 7. With mobile use soaring, photos are created on those devices and easily consumed and shared on them. Pinterest’s iPad app hit #1 in the Apple store in 1 day. Even as far back as 2009, over 2.5 billion devices with cameras were on the streets generating in just 1 year, 10% of the number of photos taken…ever. But let’s say you’re not a retailer. What if you’re a B2B whose products or services aren’t visual? Should you worry about your presence on Pinterest? As with all things, you need a keen awareness of who your audience is, where they reside online, and what they want to do there. If it doesn’t make sense to put a tent stake in Pinterest, fine. But ignore the power of pictures at your own peril. If not visually, how are you going to attention-grab social users scrolling down their News Feeds at top speed? You’re competing with every other cool image out there from countless content sources. Bore us and we’ll fly right past you.

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• Emacs 23.1 make error 139 in Mac OS X 10.6.3

  - by penyuan

  When I try to compile GNU Emacs 23.1 on my machine with Mac OS X 10.6.3 I repeatedly get the following ending: Directories: /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/. /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./calc /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./calendar /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./emacs-lisp /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./emulation /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./erc /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./eshell /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./gnus /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./international /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./language /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./mail /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./mh-e /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./net /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./nxml /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./org /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./play /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./progmodes /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./textmodes /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./url /bin/sh: line 1: 69491 Segmentation fault EMACSLOADPATH=/src/emacs-23.1/lisp LC_ALL=C ../src/bootstrap-emacs -batch --no-site-file --multibyte -l autoload --eval '(setq generated-autoload-file "/src/emacs-23.1/lisp/loaddefs.el")' -f batch-update-autoloads $wins make[2]: *** [autoloads] Error 139 make[1]: *** [/src/emacs-23.1/src/../lisp/loaddefs.el] Error 2 make: *** [src] Error 2 Does anyone know what this means and what I could do to resolve the issue? By the way, here is my ./configure settings: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --x-includes=/usr/X11/include --x-libraries=/usr/X11/lib --with-x I've tried to compile both with and without X with no success.

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• How to program a neural network for chess?

  - by marco92w

  Hello! I want to program a chess engine which learns to make good moves and win against other players. I've already coded a representation of the chess board and a function which outputs all possible moves. So I only need an evaluation function which says how good a given situation of the board is. Therefore, I would like to use an artificial neural network which should then evaluate a given position. The output should be a numerical value. The higher the value is, the better is the position for the white player. My approach is to build a network of 385 neurons: There are six unique chess pieces and 64 fields on the board. So for every field we take 6 neurons (1 for every piece). If there is a white piece, the input value is 1. If there is a black piece, the value is -1. And if there is no piece of that sort on that field, the value is 0. In addition to that there should be 1 neuron for the player to move. If it is White's turn, the input value is 1 and if it's Black's turn, the value is -1. I think that configuration of the neural network is quite good. But the main part is missing: How can I implement this neural network into a coding language (e.g. Delphi)? I think the weights for each neuron should be the same in the beginning. Depending on the result of a match, the weights should then be adjusted. But how? I think I should let 2 computer players (both using my engine) play against each other. If White wins, Black gets the feedback that its weights aren't good. So it would be great if you could help me implementing the neural network into a coding language (best would be Delphi, otherwise pseudo-code). Thanks in advance!

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• Code Golf: Leibniz formula for Pi

  - by Greg Beech

  I recently posted one of my favourite interview whiteboard coding questions in "What's your more controversial programming opinion", which is to write a function that computes Pi using the Leibniz formula. It can be approached in a number of different ways, and the exit condition takes a bit of thought, so I thought it might make an interesting code golf question. Shortest code wins! Given that Pi can be estimated using the function 4 * (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...) with more terms giving greater accuracy, write a function that calculates Pi to within 0.00001. Edit: 3 Jan 2008 As suggested in the comments I changed the exit condition to be within 0.00001 as that's what I really meant (an accuracy 5 decimal places is much harder due to rounding and so I wouldn't want to ask that in an interview, whereas within 0.00001 is an easier to understand and implement exit condition). Also, to answer the comments, I guess my intention was that the solution should compute the number of iterations, or check when it had done enough, but there's nothing to prevent you from pre-computing the number of iterations and using that number. I really asked the question out of interest to see what people would come up with.

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• Android Scoreloop, OpenFeint etc al

  - by theblitz

  I am looking to use one of the social networks in my Android program. Most important for me is the ability to build a continuous leadership board in which players move up and down depending their wins/loses to others. The idea is for players to challenge others head-to-head. The winner gains points and the loser loses points. Equally important, I want this feature to include the possibility to "charge" the player game coins. Scoreloop includes the possibility of challenges but they are there in order to win coins off other players. In other words, they are the means to the end. In my case I need it to be the other way around. The "ends" is to be higher in the leadership board and the "means" are to play others with coins. Scoreloop do have a continuos leadership board but it is not accessible from the program. I tried looking at OpenFeint but their site is a real mess. It is impossible to understand from there exactly what is and isn't available. I signed up and tried to add my program. I ended up adding it four times and cannot delete it!

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• Simplest possible voting/synchronization algorithm

  - by Domchi

  What would be a simplest algorithm one or more people could use to decide who of them should perform some task? There is one task, which needs to be done only once, and one or more people. People can speak, that is, send messages one to another. Communication must be minimal, and all people use the exact same algorithm. One person saying "I'm doing it" is not good enough since two persons may say it at a same time. Simplest that comes to my mind is that each person says a number and waits a bit. If somebody responds in that time, the person with lower number "wins" and does the task. If nobody responds, person says that she's doing it and does it. When she says that she does it, everybody else backs off. This should be enough to avoid two persons doing the task in the same time (since there is wait/handhake period), but might need a "second round" if both persons say the same number. Is there something simpler? For those curious, I'm trying to synchronize several copies of SecondLife LSL script to do something only once.

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• If I wanted to make a Pac-Man Game?

  - by SoulBeaver

  I am immediately placing this as a community wiki thing. I don't want to ask for help in programming yet or have even a specific question about programming, but rather the process and the resources needed to make such a game. To put it simply: My college friend and I decided to give ourselves a really big challenge to further our skills in programming. In six months time we want to show ourselves a Pac-Man game. Pac-Man will be AI-controlled like the Ghosts and whichever Pac-Man lives the longest after a set of tries wins. This isn't like anything we've done so far. The goal here, for me, isn't to create a perfect game, but to try and complete it, learn a whole bunch in the process. Even if I don't finish in the time, which is a good possibility, I would want to have at least tried this. So my question is this: How should I start preparing myself? I already have started vector math, matrices, all that fun stuff. My desired platform would be DirectX 9.0c; is that advisable? Keep in mind that this is not a preference just for this project, but I wish to have some kind of future in graphics develepment, so I want to pick a platform that is future-safe. As for the game development in general, what should I take into consideration? I have never done a real game before, so any and all advise to development of mid-scale projects( if this would be a mid-scale project ) is greatly appreciated. My main concerns are the pit-falls and demotivators. Sorry if the question is so vague. If it doesn't belong here, then I will remove it. Otherwise, any and all advise regarding making larger projects is greatly appreciated.

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• Wordpress.. Is it a CMS?

  - by madcolor

  I recently was contacted by a client who simply wanted to increase their organic rankings in Google. My approach was to do the following: A) Take them off of their overpriced host and move them to a nicer, cheaper, more feature-rich hosting solution which included a simple Wordpress install. B) Apply a theme to WordPress which followed the look and feel of their existing website. C) Train my client on how to login to their copy of Wordpress and create/manage pages/posts. This took me very little time.. Most of the work in converting asp forms into php and tweaking a theme to fit their design. Now my client is able to create/manage as many pages or posts as they desire. I believe, for this purpose, Worpress was the easiest solution. Would you categorize Wordpress as a CMS? Similar: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/250880/is-there-any-cms-better-than-wordpress-or-should-i-roll-my-own http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1101818/wordpress-as-a-cms-option http://stackoverflow.com/questions/490899/which-cms-to-choose http://stackoverflow.com/questions/629203/is-it-advisable-to-use-wordpress-as-cms-closed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1451326/is-wordpress-good-for-building-a-large-cms-site-with-many-pages-about-over-100-00 External: http://codex.wordpress.org/User%3ALastnode/Wordpress%5FCMS http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/

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• Straw Poll - K&R vs BSD

  - by Gordon Mackie JoanMiro

  No holy wars please - (ultimately a standardised and consistently-observed house-style on a project always wins out whatever is chosen), but I am genuinely interested in the preferences of people for K&R style formatting: public bool CompareObjects(object first, object second) { if (first == second) { return true; } else { return false; } } over BSD style: public bool CompareObjects(object first, object second) { if (first == second) { return true; } else { return false; } } K&R seems to be making a bit of a comeback recently (I'm an old programmer, so I've seen these things fluctuate); do people think K&R looks more professional, more cool, more readable, is compactness when viewing more important than extending the structure down the screen? Please use the 2 community wiki answers below to vote for K&R vs. BSD. Polls shouldn't earn rep for the first person that manages to type "BSD FTW!" My God! This question is nearly 2 years old and people are still down-voting it; ENOUGH!

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• Which JavaScript framework for me?

  - by LeonixSolutions

  This is not to be a subjective question; nor is it intended to start a religious war. Which JavaScript framework for me? Until now, I haven't coded any JS at all (no biggy, it's just another language). I have been set in my ways and eschewed any client-side code, lest the user have JS turned off, or try to "just change this a little, to see what happens" - and then expect me to support it. So, until now it has all been server-side, with PHP and an ODBC compliant database. However, I am beginning to see advantages to client-side input validation and improved graphical experience for users which would help me to produce more professional web-based applications. I am looking for a framework which : doesn't have a steep learning curve is full-featured, although that does not mean that the one with the most features wins (remember the 80/20 rule) is mature an stable (even if still in development) integrates well with common IDEs if possible. I use NetBeans for PHP (and occasionally MS visual studio for C# (I seem to have drifted away from Eclipse)) allows me to develop web sites/apps for mobile devices support for Goggle charts (or other charting) would be a bonus has good AJAX/JSON support, but I imagine that they all do Taking that into consideration, is there a "right" framework for me, or does it not really matter? I looked briefly at JQuery and JQueryGui and liked what I saw, but I really don't have time, owing to deadlines, to try them all out and see which one suits me, much as I know that I ought to.

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• Code Golf: Rotating Maze

  - by trinithis

  Code Golf: Rotating Maze Make a program that takes in a file consisting of a maze. The maze has walls given by '#'. The maze must include a single ball, given by a 'o' and any number of holes given by a '@'. The maze file can either be entered via command line or read in as a line through standard input. Please specify which in your solution. Your program then does the following: 1: If the ball is not directly above a wall, drop it down to the nearest wall. 2: If the ball passes through a hole during step 1, remove the ball. 3: Display the maze. 4: If there is no ball in the maze, exit. 5: Read a line from the standard input. Given a 1, rotate the maze counterclockwise. Given a 2, rotate the maze clockwise. Rotations are done by 90 degrees. It is up to you to decide if extraneous whitespace is allowed. If the user enters other inputs, repeat this step. 6: Goto step 1. You may assume all input mazes are closed. Note, a hole effectively acts as a wall in this regard. You may assume all input mazes have no extraneous whitespace. The shortest source code by character count wins. Example mazes: ###### #o @# ###### ########### #o # # ####### # ###@ # ######### ########################### # # # # @ # # # # ## # # ####o#### # # # # # # ######### # @ ######################

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• How do I improve this design for dealing with intersecting date ranges and resolving date range conf

  - by derdo

  I am working on some code that deals with date ranges. I have pricing activities that have a starting-date and an end-date to set a certain price for that range. There are multiple pricing activities with intersecting date ranges. What I ultimately need is the ability to query valid prices for a date range. I pass in (jan1,jan31) and I get back a list that says jan1--jan10 $4 , jan11--jan19 $3 jan20--jan31 $4. There are priorities between pricing activities. Some type of pricing activities have high priority, so they override other pricing activities and for certain type of pricing activities lowest price wins etc. I currently have a class that holds these pricing activities and keeps a resolved pricing calendar. As I add new pricing activities I update the resolved calendar. As I write more tests/code, it started to get very complicated with all the different cases (pricing activities intersecting in different ways). I am ending up with very complicated code where I am resolving a newly added pricing activity. See AddPricingActivity() method below. Can anybody think of a simpler way to deal with this? Could there be similar code somewhere out there? Public class PricingActivity() { DateTime startDate; DateTime endDate; Double price; Public bool StartsBeforeEndsAfter (PricingActivity pAct) { // pAct covers this pricing activity } Public bool StartsMiddleEndsAfter (PricingActivity pAct){ // early part of pAct Itersects with later part of this pricing activity } //more similar methods to cover all the combinations of intersecting } Public Class PricingActivityList() { List<PricingActivity> activities; SortedDictionary<Date, PricingActivity> resolvedPricingCalendar; Public void AddPricingActivity(PricingActivity pAct) { //update the resolvedCalendar //go over each activity and find intersecting ones //update the resolved calendar correctly //depending on the type of the intersection //this part is getting out of hand….. } }

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• Sync Framework Considerations for Smart Client app

  - by DarkwingDuck

  Microsoft Sync Framework with SQL 2005? Is it possible? It seems to hint that the OOTB providers use SQL2008 functionality. I'm looking for some quick wins in relation to a sync project. The client app will be offline for a number of days. There will be a central server that MUST be SQL Server 2005. I can use .net 3.5. Basically the client app could go offline for a week. When it comes back online it needs to sync its data. But the good thing is that the data only needs to push to the server. The stuff that syncs back to the client will just be lookup data which the client never changes. So this means I don't care about sync collisions. To simplify the scenario for you, this smart client goes offline and the user surveys data about some observations. They enter the data into the system. When the laptop is reconnected to the network, it syncs back all that data to the server. There will be other clients doing the same thing too, but no one ever touches each other's data. Then there are some reports on the server for viewing the data that has been pushed to the server. This also needs to use ClickOnce. My biggest concern is that there is an interim release while a client is offline. This release might require a new field in the database, and a new field to fill in on the survey. Obviously that new field will be nullable because we can't update old data, that's fine to set as an assumption. But when the client connects up and its local data schema and the server schema don't match, will sync framework be able to handle this? After the data is pushed to the server it is discarded locally. Hope my problem makes sense.

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• World's Most Challening MySQL SQL Query (least I think so...)

  - by keruilin

  Whoever answers this question can claim credit for solving the world's most challenging SQL query, according to yours truly. Working with 3 tables: users, badges, awards. Relationships: user has many awards; award belongs to user; badge has many awards; award belongs to badge. So badge_id and user_id are foreign keys in the awards table. The business logic at work here is that every time a user wins a badge, he/she receives it as an award. A user can be awarded the same badge multiple times. Each badge is assigned a designated point value (point_value is a field in the badges table). For example, BadgeA can be worth 500 Points, BadgeB 1000 Points, and so on. As further example, let's say UserX won BadgeA 10 times and BadgeB 5 times. BadgeA being worth 500 Points, and BadgeB being worth 1000 Points, UserX has accumulated a total of 10,000 Points ((10 x 500) + (5 x 1000)). The end game here is to return a list of top 50 users who have accumulated the most badge points. Can you do it?

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• Overlapping 2 Flash objects and controlling z-index

  - by Magnus Smith

  I have two Flash objects on a webpage (call them A and B), and they overlap so one partially obscures the other. I don't seem to have any control over the z-index, to force B in front of A. Whatever I try, A always 'wins' and stays on the top! I have read many people's posts about problem with getting HTML to show over the top of Flash...but nothing about when your two overlapping items are both Flash objects. I have tried various combinations of wmode=opaque/transparent/window I have tried CSS position:absolute/relative and z-index:0/999 I have tried placing the HTML sections in a different order The problem is the same in IE6 and Firefox 2.0 I do not want to use jQuery in this case In my particular situation B must have position:absolute and wmode=transparent, and sit above A. A needs relative positioning and transparency is not required. However, I have been testing without these restrictions, and I still have no control over the overlap. Are some SWFs (ours are adverts sent by clients) created in such a way as to override any code control of z-index? Thanks for any advice you can give.

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