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Low Level Software and Devices

- by user271619

I'm looking at a new chapter in my career. I'm a web developer, but now I'm starting to play around with C, compilers, and things I didn't have to work with before. It's all very intriguing! As I'm getting more and more into the "lower level" arena, I'm wondering how devices (mice, printers, webcams, microphones, etc...) are controlled, managed, detected, or used in general with software. I ask because I'm really having a hard time finding straightforward documentation online describing or giving examples of how hardware interacts with software. Does someone know of decent sites that can get me started learning this?

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Qt Mobility disponible en version 1.1.1, avec améliorations du binding Qt Quick et des performances sur Symbian

Qt Mobility disponible en version 1.1.1 Avec améliorations du binding Qt Quick et des performances sur Symbian Mise à jour du 02/03/2011 par dourouc05 Le Qt Mobility nouveau est arrivé. Il ne s'agit que d'une version de maintenance, n'apportant « que » des améliorations au niveau du binding Qt Quick et des améliorations de performances, principalement en ce qui concerne Symbian, sans oublier les habituelles corrections de bogues, améliorations de la documentation et des tests. Cette nouvelle version, la 1.1.1, est aussi incluse dans la nouvelle version du Qt SDK, la beta. Un certain nombre de bogues de priorité important...

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In-memory DB to perform intersects on set slices

- by IanC

I have a specific programming need where I need to efficiently store large sorted sets in memory, query them for ranges, and intersect them against other sets that are also queried for ranged. I am looking at Redis, but I can't see a range slice command. MongoDB can only use 1 index, so it has to perform row-level scans, whereas I wish to process using columns that are intersected. I'm also looking at Counchbase, but can't easily determine from the documentation if it is suited to this. I know it uses Memcached, which is AFAIK not suited to this usage. Could anyone share potential solutions for this specific problem? EDIT For example, I need to perform the following: Get the IDs of all cars where the price is between 2000 and 3000, and intersect that will all cars where the engine capacity is between 3000 and 4000.

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Can not login to Normal mode

- by Technology is good

I installed ubuntu 12 in my old PC Acer Power Series. After installation i got the Login Screen which appears unusally big. when i logged-in in some fail-safe mode. I got the normal ubuntu running. but if i restart the system i can login using fail-safe mode but i can't login normally. I think the problem must be i don't have a graphic card. Even if i do have one that must be very very low configuration one. Kindly help me with graphic card config if that is the problem with my PC. I just want to use ubuntu for normal documentation purpose. I am new to ubuntu so techcies help me with basic guidance. Thank you. Karthik Muralitharan

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Implementing cache system in Java Web Application

- by TGM

I worked with JPA (Eclipselink implementation) and Hibernate. As I understand these two have great caching systems. I am interested in caching in a Web application and in order to better understand the process I'm trying to implement something on my own. Sadly, I cannot find any in depth documentation about this subject. I'm interested in things like high scalability, sharing memory on different machines and other important theoretical matters. Is there any tutorial or open project I could check out? Thank you! *LE: * I want to cache DB information in POJOs just like JPA or Eclipselink

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Double equals (Not equality) during assigning Java

- by FabianCook

When I tried searching this I would just get things on equality. When I was reading through some documentation for navigation in Android I had come across something I had never seen before. I came across this: mTitle = mDrawerTitle = getTitle(); It almost looks like something you can do in JavaScript where you can take the first not-null variable and assign it to a variable. In JavaScript I would do this: mTitle = mDrawerTitle || getTitle(); And it would return the first not null, in Java, is this double equals usage the equivalent in Java? What is this type of expression called?

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JDK 7u10 Released !

- by user9148683

Java Development Kit 7 Update 10 (JDK 7u10) release is now live! You can download it from Java SE Downloads page. The Java™ SE Development Kit 7, Update 10 Release Notes contains information about this release. The highlights of this release include: New Certified System Configurations - Mac OS X 10.8 and Windows 8 Security Feature Enhancements: The ability to disable any Java application from running in the browser. This mode can be set in the Java Control Panel or (on Microsoft Windows platform only) using a command-line install argument. New dialogs to warn you when the JRE is insecure (either expired or below the security baseline) and needs to be updated. The documentation at Setting the Level of Security for the Java Client and Java Control Panel explains these features in detail.

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What should I do with my programming project?

- by rambodash

I've been working on a top secret project that has potential of becoming very popular. No one has done anything like it. The problem is I have no motivation to finish it, and its about 70% done. I also don't have the ability to sell & market the product. The documentation is a pain to write. I just want to finish the project , receive my reward and move on to other things. I know that if I were to release it as a product I'm going to have to do support, and do bug fixes. No thank you! I've thought of making it open source but I'm failing to see the benefits. My hard work is just going to be up for grabs isn't it? How can I abandon my project whilst getting rewarded for the work I've done so far?

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Release Notes for 10/15/2012

Below are the release notes from this week's deployment. Improvements and Bug Fixes Added the Action Bar to the project home and documentation tabs. CodePlex now 100% ASP.NET MVC (bye bye Web Forms). Updated publish project banner to improve the project setup experience. Fixed float behavior of action bar pop up dialog. Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Please visit our suggestions page! Vote for existing ideas or submit a new one. As always you can reach out to the CodePlex team on Twitter @codeplex or reach me directly @mgroves84

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Le SDK de Kinect compatible avec la preview de Windows 8 et les applications 64bits, la deuxième Beta est disponible en téléchargement

Le SDK de Kinect compatible avec la preview de Windows 8 Et les applications 64bits, sortie de la deuxième Beta Mise à jour du 14 novembre 2011 par Idelways Microsoft a mis à jour le SDK Windows de son capteur Kinect, en vue de son lancement commercial début 2012. Cette deuxième Beta gratuite est compatible avec la version Preview pour développeurs de Windows 8. La documentation de cette Beta proclame une amélioration significative des performances de suivi des silhouettes (jusqu'à 20 % plus rapide), tout en étant plus précis. Le support fraîchement introduit du multi-threading et des processeurs multicoeurs contribue à...

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Forbidding or controlling "Hidden IT..." Who should write and maintain ad-hoc software applications?

- by matcauthon

Bigger companies usually have the problem, that it is not possible to write all programs employees want (to save time and to optimize processes) due to a lack of staff and money. Then hidden programs will be created by some people having (at least some) coding experience (or by cheap students/interns...). Under some circumstances these applications will raise in importance and spread from one user to a whole department. Then there is the critical point: Who will maintain the application, add new features, ...? And this app is critical. It IS needed. But the intern has left the company. No one knows how it works. You only have a bunch of sources and some sort of documentation. Does it make sense to try and control or forbid application development done ad-hoc outside of the IT department (with the exception of minor stuff like Excel macros)?

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???Java (CPU 2013?6??)??????????????

- by OTN-J Master

6?18??Java SE???????????·??????(CPU)2013?6?????????????????Java????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Java?????????????????????????????? ?????? (JDK/Server JRE/JRE) Java SE 7 Update 25??????????????? (JRE)Java Version 7 Update 25?????????????The Oracle Software Security Assurance Blog? ???????????????Java SE Critical Patch Update - June 2013????????? ?????Java SE Critical Patch Update - June 2013????????????Critical Patch Update??????????????????40?????????37??????????????????????????????????Critical Patch Update??????????34?????????????????????????????????????????CVSS???????????10.0?????Critical Patch Update??????4??????????????????????????????????????????????????????CVSS???????7.5??????Critical Patch Update????????????1??Java????????????????????????????????????????????Critical Patch Update??????????1???Javadoc????????????????????????????Javadoc???1.5???????????????????HTML?????????·??????????????????????????????????(CVE-2013-1571???CERT/CC VU#225657)??Javadoc?????Web???????????HTML?????????????????????????????????????????????????????Web???????????????????????????????Web?????????????????????????Web???????????????????????????CVSS???????4.3??????????Critical Patch Update??????Javadoc???????????????????????????????????????Java API Documentation Updater Tool?????????????????????????(??????)HTML??????????????????????????CERT/CC?Web???????????????Critical Patch Update??????????????????????????????????????????????????Critical Patch Update???????????????????????????????????????Java??????????????????????????????????????????????????Java Autoupdate???????Java.com????????????????????????????????????Java SE Critical Patch Update???????????????????????????????????????????Java??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Java Critical Patch Update - June 2013???????Javadoc?????????????

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web.xml not reloading in tomcat even after stop/start

- by ajay

This is in relation to:- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2576514/basic-tomcat-servlet-error I changed my web.xml file, did ant compile , all, /etc/init.d/tomcat stop , start Even then my web.xml file in tomcat deployment is still unchanged. This is build.properties file:- app.name=hello catalina.home=/usr/local/tomcat manager.username=admin manager.password=admin This is my build.xml file. Is there something wrong with this:-    <project name="My Project" default="compile" basedir=".">   <property file="build.properties"/> <property file="${user.home}/build.properties"/>   <property name="app.name" value="myapp"/> <property name="app.path" value="/${app.name}"/> <property name="app.version" value="0.1-dev"/> <property name="build.home" value="${basedir}/build"/> <property name="catalina.home" value="../../../.."/>  <property name="dist.home" value="${basedir}/dist"/> <property name="docs.home" value="${basedir}/docs"/> <property name="manager.url" value="http://localhost:8080/manager"/> <property name="src.home" value="${basedir}/src"/> <property name="web.home" value="${basedir}/web"/>       <path id="compile.classpath">     <fileset dir="${catalina.home}/bin"> <include name="*.jar"/> </fileset> <pathelement location="${catalina.home}/lib"/> <fileset dir="${catalina.home}/lib"> <include name="*.jar"/> </fileset> </path>   <taskdef resource="org/apache/catalina/ant/catalina.tasks" classpathref="compile.classpath"/>   <property name="compile.debug" value="true"/> <property name="compile.deprecation" value="false"/> <property name="compile.optimize" value="true"/>   <target name="all" depends="clean,compile" description="Clean build and dist directories, then compile"/>   <target name="clean" description="Delete old build and dist directories"> <delete dir="${build.home}"/> <delete dir="${dist.home}"/> </target>   <target name="compile" depends="prepare" description="Compile Java sources">  <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes"/> <javac srcdir="${src.home}" destdir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes" debug="${compile.debug}" deprecation="${compile.deprecation}" optimize="${compile.optimize}"> <classpath refid="compile.classpath"/> </javac>  <copy todir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes"> <fileset dir="${src.home}" excludes="**/*.java"/> </copy> </target>   <target name="dist" depends="compile,javadoc" description="Create binary distribution">  <mkdir dir="${dist.home}/docs"/> <copy todir="${dist.home}/docs"> <fileset dir="${docs.home}"/> </copy>  <jar jarfile="${dist.home}/${app.name}-${app.version}.war" basedir="${build.home}"/>  </target>   <target name="install" depends="compile" description="Install application to servlet container"> <deploy url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}" path="${app.path}" localWar="file://${build.home}"/> </target>   <target name="javadoc" depends="compile" description="Create Javadoc API documentation"> <mkdir dir="${dist.home}/docs/api"/> <javadoc sourcepath="${src.home}" destdir="${dist.home}/docs/api" packagenames="*"> <classpath refid="compile.classpath"/> </javadoc> </target>   <target name="list" description="List installed applications on servlet container"> <list url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}"/> </target>   <target name="prepare">  <mkdir dir="${build.home}"/> <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF"/> <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes"/>  <copy todir="${build.home}"> <fileset dir="${web.home}"/> </copy>   <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/lib"/>    </target>   <target name="reload" depends="compile" description="Reload application on servlet container"> <reload url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}" path="${app.path}"/> </target>   <target name="remove" description="Remove application on servlet container"> <undeploy url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}" path="${app.path}"/> </target> </project>

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UIImagePickerController, UIImage, Memory and More!

- by Itay

I've noticed that there are many questions about how to handle UIImage objects, especially in conjunction with UIImagePickerController and then displaying it in a view (usually a UIImageView). Here is a collection of common questions and their answers. Feel free to edit and add your own. I obviously learnt all this information from somewhere too. Various forum posts, StackOverflow answers and my own experimenting brought me to all these solutions. Credit goes to those who posted some sample code that I've since used and modified. I don't remember who you all are - but hats off to you! How Do I Select An Image From the User's Images or From the Camera? You use UIImagePickerController. The documentation for the class gives a decent overview of how one would use it, and can be found here. Basically, you create an instance of the class, which is a modal view controller, display it, and set yourself (or some class) to be the delegate. Then you'll get notified when a user selects some form of media (movie or image in 3.0 on the 3GS), and you can do whatever you want. My Delegate Was Called - How Do I Get The Media? The delegate method signature is the following: - (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:(NSDictionary *)info; You should put a breakpoint in the debugger to see what's in the dictionary, but you use that to extract the media. For example: UIImage* image = [info objectForKey:UIImagePickerControllerOriginalImage]; There are other keys that work as well, all in the documentation. OK, I Got The Image, But It Doesn't Have Any Geolocation Data. What gives? Unfortunately, Apple decided that we're not worthy of this information. When they load the data into the UIImage, they strip it of all the EXIF/Geolocation data. Can I Get To The Original File Representing This Image on the Disk? Nope. For security purposes, you only get the UIImage. How Can I Look At The Underlying Pixels of the UIImage? Since the UIImage is immutable, you can't look at the direct pixels. However, you can make a copy. The code to this looks something like this: UIImage* image = ...; // An image NSData* pixelData = (NSData*) CGDataProviderCopyData(CGImageGetDataProvider(image.CGImage)); unsigned char* pixelBytes = (unsigned char *)[pixelData bytes]; // Take away the red pixel, assuming 32-bit RGBA for(int i = 0; i < [pixelData length]; i += 4) { pixelBytes[i] = 0; // red pixelBytes[i+1] = pixelBytes[i+1]; // green pixelBytes[i+2] = pixelBytes[i+2]; // blue pixelBytes[i+3] = pixelBytes[i+3]; // alpha } However, note that CGDataProviderCopyData provides you with an "immutable" reference to the data - meaning you can't change it (and you may get a BAD_ACCESS error if you do). Look at the next question if you want to see how you can modify the pixels. How Do I Modify The Pixels of the UIImage? The UIImage is immutable, meaning you can't change it. Apple posted a great article on how to get a copy of the pixels and modify them, and rather than copy and paste it here, you should just go read the article. Once you have the bitmap context as they mention in the article, you can do something similar to this to get a new UIImage with the modified pixels: CGImageRef ref = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmap); UIImage* newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:ref]; Do remember to release your references though, otherwise you're going to be leaking quite a bit of memory. After I Select 3 Images From The Camera, I Run Out Of Memory. Help! You have to remember that even though on disk these images take up only a few hundred kilobytes at most, that's because they're compressed as a PNG or JPG. When they are loaded into the UIImage, they become uncompressed. A quick over-the-envelope calculation would be: width x height x 4 = bytes in memory That's assuming 32-bit pixels. If you have 16-bit pixels (some JPGs are stored as RGBA-5551), then you'd replace the 4 with a 2. Now, images taken with the camera are 1600 x 1200 pixels, so let's do the math: 1600 x 1200 x 4 = 7,680,000 bytes = ~8 MB 8 MB is a lot, especially when you have a limit of around 24 MB for your application. That's why you run out of memory. OK, I Understand Why I Have No Memory. What Do I Do? There is never any reason to display images at their full resolution. The iPhone has a screen of 480 x 320 pixels, so you're just wasting space. If you find yourself in this situation, ask yourself the following question: Do I need the full resolution image? If the answer is yes, then you should save it to disk for later use. If the answer is no, then read the next part. Once you've decided what to do with the full-resolution image, then you need to create a smaller image to use for displaying. Many times you might even want several sizes for your image: a thumbnail, a full-size one for displaying, and the original full-resolution image. OK, I'm Hooked. How Do I Resize the Image? Unfortunately, there is no defined way how to resize an image. Also, it's important to note that when you resize it, you'll get a new image - you're not modifying the old one. There are a couple of methods to do the resizing. I'll present them both here, and explain the pros and cons of each. Method 1: Using UIKit + (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)image scaledToSize:(CGSize)newSize; { // Create a graphics image context UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(newSize); // Tell the old image to draw in this new context, with the desired // new size [image drawInRect:CGRectMake(0,0,newSize.width,newSize.height)]; // Get the new image from the context UIImage* newImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext(); // End the context UIGraphicsEndImageContext(); // Return the new image. return newImage; } This method is very simple, and works great. It will also deal with the UIImageOrientation for you, meaning that you don't have to care whether the camera was sideways when the picture was taken. However, this method is not thread safe, and since thumbnailing is a relatively expensive operation (approximately ~2.5s on a 3G for a 1600 x 1200 pixel image), this is very much an operation you may want to do in the background, on a separate thread. Method 2: Using CoreGraphics + (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)sourceImage scaledToSize:(CGSize)newSize; { CGFloat targetWidth = targetSize.width; CGFloat targetHeight = targetSize.height; CGImageRef imageRef = [sourceImage CGImage]; CGBitmapInfo bitmapInfo = CGImageGetBitmapInfo(imageRef); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpaceInfo = CGImageGetColorSpace(imageRef); if (bitmapInfo == kCGImageAlphaNone) { bitmapInfo = kCGImageAlphaNoneSkipLast; } CGContextRef bitmap; if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp || sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetWidth, targetHeight, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } else { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetHeight, targetWidth, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationLeft) { CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, 0, -targetHeight); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationRight) { CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, -targetWidth, 0); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp) { // NOTHING } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, targetWidth, targetHeight); CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-180.)); } CGContextDrawImage(bitmap, CGRectMake(0, 0, targetWidth, targetHeight), imageRef); CGImageRef ref = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmap); UIImage* newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:ref]; CGContextRelease(bitmap); CGImageRelease(ref); return newImage; } The benefit of this method is that it is thread-safe, plus it takes care of all the small things (using correct color space and bitmap info, dealing with image orientation) that the UIKit version does. How Do I Resize and Maintain Aspect Ratio (like the AspectFill option)? It is very similar to the method above, and it looks like this: + (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)sourceImage scaledToSizeWithSameAspectRatio:(CGSize)targetSize; { CGSize imageSize = sourceImage.size; CGFloat width = imageSize.width; CGFloat height = imageSize.height; CGFloat targetWidth = targetSize.width; CGFloat targetHeight = targetSize.height; CGFloat scaleFactor = 0.0; CGFloat scaledWidth = targetWidth; CGFloat scaledHeight = targetHeight; CGPoint thumbnailPoint = CGPointMake(0.0,0.0); if (CGSizeEqualToSize(imageSize, targetSize) == NO) { CGFloat widthFactor = targetWidth / width; CGFloat heightFactor = targetHeight / height; if (widthFactor > heightFactor) { scaleFactor = widthFactor; // scale to fit height } else { scaleFactor = heightFactor; // scale to fit width } scaledWidth = width * scaleFactor; scaledHeight = height * scaleFactor; // center the image if (widthFactor > heightFactor) { thumbnailPoint.y = (targetHeight - scaledHeight) * 0.5; } else if (widthFactor < heightFactor) { thumbnailPoint.x = (targetWidth - scaledWidth) * 0.5; } } CGImageRef imageRef = [sourceImage CGImage]; CGBitmapInfo bitmapInfo = CGImageGetBitmapInfo(imageRef); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpaceInfo = CGImageGetColorSpace(imageRef); if (bitmapInfo == kCGImageAlphaNone) { bitmapInfo = kCGImageAlphaNoneSkipLast; } CGContextRef bitmap; if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp || sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetWidth, targetHeight, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } else { bitmap = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, targetHeight, targetWidth, CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(imageRef), CGImageGetBytesPerRow(imageRef), colorSpaceInfo, bitmapInfo); } // In the right or left cases, we need to switch scaledWidth and scaledHeight, // and also the thumbnail point if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationLeft) { thumbnailPoint = CGPointMake(thumbnailPoint.y, thumbnailPoint.x); CGFloat oldScaledWidth = scaledWidth; scaledWidth = scaledHeight; scaledHeight = oldScaledWidth; CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, 0, -targetHeight); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationRight) { thumbnailPoint = CGPointMake(thumbnailPoint.y, thumbnailPoint.x); CGFloat oldScaledWidth = scaledWidth; scaledWidth = scaledHeight; scaledHeight = oldScaledWidth; CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-90)); CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, -targetWidth, 0); } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationUp) { // NOTHING } else if (sourceImage.imageOrientation == UIImageOrientationDown) { CGContextTranslateCTM (bitmap, targetWidth, targetHeight); CGContextRotateCTM (bitmap, radians(-180.)); } CGContextDrawImage(bitmap, CGRectMake(thumbnailPoint.x, thumbnailPoint.y, scaledWidth, scaledHeight), imageRef); CGImageRef ref = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmap); UIImage* newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:ref]; CGContextRelease(bitmap); CGImageRelease(ref); return newImage; } The method we employ here is to create a bitmap with the desired size, but draw an image that is actually larger, thus maintaining the aspect ratio. So We've Got Our Scaled Images - How Do I Save Them To Disk? This is pretty simple. Remember that we want to save a compressed version to disk, and not the uncompressed pixels. Apple provides two functions that help us with this (documentation is here): NSData* UIImagePNGRepresentation(UIImage *image); NSData* UIImageJPEGRepresentation (UIImage *image, CGFloat compressionQuality); And if you want to use them, you'd do something like: UIImage* myThumbnail = ...; // Get some image NSData* imageData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(myThumbnail); Now we're ready to save it to disk, which is the final step (say into the documents directory): // Give a name to the file NSString* imageName = @"MyImage.png"; // Now, we have to find the documents directory so we can save it // Note that you might want to save it elsewhere, like the cache directory, // or something similar. NSArray* paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES); NSString* documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0]; // Now we get the full path to the file NSString* fullPathToFile = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:imageName]; // and then we write it out [imageData writeToFile:fullPathToFile atomically:NO]; You would repeat this for every version of the image you have. How Do I Load These Images Back Into Memory? Just look at the various UIImage initialization methods, such as +imageWithContentsOfFile: in the Apple documentation.

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Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

- by ScottGu

This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure. These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps. Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites. This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them. You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM). You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address. SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with). Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites. This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases. See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode). This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary. Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here. Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing). Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications. Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it. These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require. In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services. The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium. Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs. You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here): You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly. With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable. Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale. Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site. I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances. The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below. If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use). If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application. You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected: Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set. If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red. Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users. Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test: This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today. If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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

- by raul.goycoolea

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

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DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

- by Rick Strahl

Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-). Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences ASP.NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

- by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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Tips for XNA WP7 Developers

- by Michael B. McLaughlin

There are several things any XNA developer should know/consider when coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This post assumes you are familiar with the XNA Framework and with the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0. It’s not exhaustive; it’s simply a list of things I’ve gathered over time. I may come back and add to it over time, and I’m happy to add anything anyone else has experienced or learned as well. Display · The screen is either 800x480 or 480x800. · But you aren’t required to use only those resolutions. · The hardware scaler on the phone will scale up from 240x240. · One dimension will be capped at 800 and the other at 480; which depends on your code, but you cannot have, e.g., an 800x600 back buffer – that will be created as 800x480. · The hardware scaler will not normally change aspect ratio, though, so no unintended stretching. · Any dimension (width, height, or both) below 240 will be adjusted to 240 (without any aspect ratio adjustment such that, e.g. 200x240 will be treated as 240x240). · Dimensions below 240 will be honored in terms of calculating whether to use portrait or landscape. · If dimensions are exactly equal or if height is greater than width then game will be in portrait. · If width is greater than height, the game will be in landscape. · Landscape games will automatically flip if the user turns the phone 180°; no code required. · Default landscape is top = left. In other words a user holding a phone who starts a landscape game will see the first image presented so that the “top” of the screen is along the right edge of his/her phone, such that the natural behavior would be to turn the phone 90° so that the top of the phone will be held in the user’s left hand and the bottom would be held in the user’s right hand. · The status bar (where the clock, battery power, etc., are found) is hidden when the Game-derived class sets GraphicsDeviceManager.IsFullScreen = true. It is shown when IsFullScreen = false. The default value is false (i.e. the status bar is shown). · You should have a good reason for hiding the status bar. Users find it helpful to know what time it is, how much charge their battery has left, and whether or not their phone is in service range. This is especially true for casual games that you expect someone to play for a few minutes at a time, e.g. while waiting for some event to start, for a phone call to come in, or for a train, bus, or subway to arrive. · In portrait mode, the status bar occupies 32 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 480x800 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 461x768 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 480x768 (or some resolution with the same 0.625 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. · In landscape mode, the status bar occupies 72 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 800x480 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 728x437 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 728x480 (or some resolution with the same 1.51666667 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. Input · Touch input is scaled with screen size. · So if your back buffer is 600x360, a tap in the bottom right corner will come in as (599,359). You don’t need to do anything special to get this automatic scaling of touch behavior. · If you do not use full area of the screen, any touch input outside the area you use will still register as a touch input. For example, if you set a portrait resolution of 240x240, it would be scaled up to occupy a 480x480 area, centered in the screen. If you touch anywhere above this area, you will get a touch input of (X,0) where X is a number from 0 to 239 (in accordance with your 240 pixel wide back buffer). Any touch below this area will give a touch input of (X,239). · If you keep the status bar visible, touches within its area will not be passed to your game. · In general, a screen measurement is the diagonal. So a 3.5” screen is 3.5” long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6 (480/800 = 0.6), this means that a phone with a 3.5” screen is only approximately 1.8” wide by 3” tall. So there are approximately 267 pixels in an inch on a 3.5” screen. · Again, this time in metric! 3.5 inches is approximately 8.89 cm. So an 8.89 cm screen is 8.89 cm long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6, this means that a phone with an 8.89 cm screen is only approximately 4.57 cm wide by 7.62 cm tall. So there are approximately 105 pixels in a centimeter on an 8.89 cm screen. · Think about the size of your finger tip. If you do not have large hands, think about the size of the fingertip of someone with large hands. Consider that when you are sizing your touch input. Especially consider that when you are spacing two touch targets near one another. You need to judge it for yourself, but items that are next to each other and are each 100x100 should be fine when it comes to selecting items individually. Smaller targets than that are ok provided that you leave space between them. · You want your users to have a pleasant experience. Making touch controls too small or too close to one another will make them nervous about whether they will touch the right target. Take this into account when you plan out your game initially. If possible, do some quick size mockups on an actual phone using colored rectangles that you position and size where you plan to have your game controls. Adjust as necessary. · People do not have transparent hands! Nor are their hands the size of a mouse pointer icon. Consider leaving a dedicated space for input rather than forcing the user to cover up to one-third of the screen with a finger just to play the game. · Another benefit of designing your controls to use a dedicated area is that you’re less likely to have players moving their finger(s) so frantically that they accidentally hit the back button, start button, or search button (many phones have one or more of these on the screen itself – it’s easy to hit one by accident and really annoying if you hit, e.g., the search button and then quickly tap back only to find out that the game didn’t save your progress such that you just wasted all the time you spent playing). · People do not like doing somersaults in order to move something forward with accelerometer-based controls. Test your accelerometer-based controls extensively and get a lot of feedback. Very well-known games from noted publishers have created really bad accelerometer controls and been virtually unplayable as a result. Also be wary of exceptions and other possible failures that the documentation warns about. · When done properly, the accelerometer can add a nice touch to your game (see, e.g. ilomilo where the accelerometer was used to move the background; it added a nice touch without frustrating the user; I also think CarniVale does direct accelerometer controls very well). However, if done poorly, it will make your game an abomination unto the Marketplace. Days, weeks, perhaps even months of development time that you will never get back. I won’t name names; you can search the marketplace for games with terrible reviews and you’ll find them. Graphics · The maximum frame rate is 30 frames per second. This was set as a compromise between battery life and quality. · At least one model of phone is known to have a screen refresh rate that is between 59 and 60 hertz. Because of this, using a fixed time step with a target frame rate of 30 will cause a slight internal delay to build up as the framework is forced to wait slightly for the next refresh. Eventually the delay will get to the point where a draw is skipped in order to recover from the delay. (See Nick's comment below for clarification.) · To deal with that delay, you can either stay with a fixed time step and set the frame rate slightly lower or else you can go to a variable time step and make sure to adjust all of your update data (e.g. player movement distance) to take into account the elapsed time from the last update. A variable time step makes your update logic slightly more complicated but will avoid frame skips entirely. · Currently there are no custom shaders. This might change in the future (there is no hardware limitation preventing it; it simply wasn’t a feature that could be implemented in the time available before launch). · There are five built-in shaders. You can create a lot of nice effects with the built-in shaders. · There is more power on the CPU than there is on the GPU so things you might typically off-load to the GPU will instead make sense to do on the CPU side. · This is a phone. It is not a PC. It is not an Xbox 360. The emulator runs on a PC and uses the full power of your PC. It is very good for testing your code for bugs and doing early prototyping and layout. You should not use it to measure performance. Use actual phone hardware instead. · There are many phone models, each of which has slightly different performance levels for I/O, screen blitting, CPU performance, etc. Do not take your game right to the performance limit on your phone since for some other phones you might be crossing their limits and leaving players with a bad experience. Leave a cushion to account for hardware differences. · Smaller screened phones will have slightly more dots per inch (dpi). Larger screened phones will have slightly less. Either way, the dpi will be much higher than the typical 96 found on most computer screens. Make sure that whoever is doing art for your game takes this into account. · Screens are only required to have 16 bit color (65,536 colors). This is common among smart phones. Using gradients on a 16 bit display can produce an ugly artifact known as banding. Banding is when, rather than a smooth transition from one color to another, you instead see distinct lines. Be careful to avoid this when possible. Banding can be avoided through careful art creation. Its effects can be minimized and even unnoticeable when the texture in question is always moving. You should be careful not to rely on “looks good on my phone” since some phones do have 32-bit displays and thus you’ll find yourself wondering why you’re getting bad reviews that complain about the graphics. Avoid gradients; if you can’t, make sure they are 16-bit safe. Audio · Never rely on sounds as your sole signal to the player that something is happening in the game. They might have the sound off. They might be playing somewhere loud. Etc. · You have to provide controls to disable sound & music. These should be separate. · On at least one model of phone, the volume control API currently has no effect. Players can adjust sound with their hardware volume buttons, but in game selectors simply won’t work. As such, it may not be worth the effort of providing anything beyond on/off switches for sound and music. · MediaPlayer.GameHasControl will return true when a game is hooked up to a PC running Zune. When Zune is running, any attempts to do anything (beyond check GameHasControl) with MediaPlayer will cause an exception to be thrown. If this exception is thrown, catch it and disable music. Exceptions take time to propagate; you don’t want one popping up in every single run of your game’s Update method. · Remember that players can already be listening to music or using the FM radio. In this case GameHasControl will be false and you should handle this appropriately. You can, alternately, ask the player for permission to stop their current music and play your music instead, but the (current) requirement that you restore their music when done is very hard (if not impossible) to deal with. · You can still play sound effects even when the game doesn’t have control of the music, but don’t think this is a backdoor to playing music. Your game will fail certification if your “sound effect” seems to be more like music in scope and length.

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Need example for BouncyCastle PGP File encryption in C#

- by Daniel Brink

Hi, I'm trying to write an c#.net app to encrypt files using my private key (in ascii format) and any other public key (also in ascii format). The BouncyCastle library looks like the correct thing to use, but I cannot find documentation for C#. Could anyone please give me an example of how to use BouncyCastle to encrypt a file. Thank you.

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jquery or extjs plugins for creating organization chart

- by tsurahman

I know we can create organization chart with http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/orgchart.html but my clients server doesn't have internet connection. is there any jquery or extjs plugins for creating it? thanks :D

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GlassFish v3 Domain Server cannot start. Port is occupied.

- by Kirby

I imagine this is a pretty generic error. I cant seem to find any documentation on it. I am simply attempting to run a java web project with jsp's and beans... using netbeans 6.8 on windows xp. Thoughts? apologies for such a newb question. -Kirb

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C# Open Source/Free Social Networking SDK

- by Nix

I am currently gathering some technology requirements for a site that will be a social network based. I don't want to re-invent the wheel so i am looking for some type of SDK or collection of tools that can provide me with a way of creating/managing a social network. I understand that no framework will probably fit my exact needs so I am also looking for a flexible/extendable framework. An example extension point would be allowing the user to provide sub networks, maybe a global network that could be sub classified as work and friends. Beyond that it would also be nice to somehow be able to import contacts from other networking sites (Facebook, Linked In, etc). My current technology suite will more than likely consist of the following: IIS 7.0 WCF Data Services SQL Server 2006 ASP.NET front end. So my two questions are 1) C# Open Source Social Network SDK 2) C# Open Source Social Netowrk APIs (facebook, linked in, etc) If there is any more information you may need please let me know.

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Space in search base OU causes error in Active Directory

- by Jared Farrish

Recently, while putting together some code to page Active Directory results beyond sizeLimit=1000, we ran into a strange behavior/bug of AD. Specifically, if we had an OU with a space in the search base, it caused an error: String base = "OU=Area X,OU=myserver,DC=my,DC=ad,DC=myserver,DC=com"; env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, "ldap://my.ad.myserver.com:389/" + base); This is the error we received: javax.naming.NamingException: [LDAP: error code 1 - 000020D6: SvcErr: DSID-031007DB, problem 5012 (DIR_ERROR), data 0 When we remove that OU, it works fine. What would cause this to occur? Do we need to encode the space somehow (+ and %20 only caused more issues)? Or is this generally illegal/unnecessary?

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jqGrid tableToGrid "options" parameter

- by Jimbo

Basics Hi all, I have see the tableToGrid method (by Peter Romianowski) defined as tableToGrid(selector, options) on the jqGrid wiki, but cannot find anywhere that has documentation of the options Does anyone know about these or where to find them? More What Im actually trying to do is encase the resulting jqGrid in a form, which will submit the checkbox values that are in a column of the table. My problem is that the tableToGrid method appears to be removing the name property from the checkbox elements and hence they are not being submitted with the form post.

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