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• Webby Nominations for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  The Webby Awards were created back in 1996 when the internet was just a baby. This is their 14th year of highlighting excellence on the Web, and there are lots of great nominations. Its quite amazing to see the rich content and interactivity of today's websites. Some interesting nominees for this year are: Sephora did a campaign at Christmas, and what remains of the Sephora Clause website is a bunch of wishes. The Starbucks "All you need is Love" campaign has lots of cool videos. The Sound Check from Walmart highlights raising music artists. Refinery29 has their fashion info hub. The five nominees in the retail category are: Bugaboo.com's website for selling high-end baby strollers. If you're looking for a high-end bag, check out Crumpler's flash-based e-commerce site. It's highly interactive, but a little on the slow side. I Make My Case sells custom designed iPod/iPhone and Blackberry cases. At MOO.com, they love to print. Tons of art for printing customized business cards, post cards, etc. If you want light shoes, check out Puma L.I.F.T. and see just how light shoes can weigh. Check them out, cast a few votes, and see if you're inspired to create something even better.

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• APT: Hold packages back from updates without APT Pin

  - by David

  I know about pinning packages with APT; that's not what I want to do. Other questions have been answered with either using pinning or by using pins temporarily. I don't want to do this... What I want to do is keep packages back the same way the kernel has been: # apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages have been kept back: linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic-pae linux-image-generic-pae The following packages will be upgraded: I want to add tomcat-* and mysql-* and sun-* to this list. In the past, there was a configuration parameter to do this - I've always thought it was something like Apt::Get::HoldPkgs or Apt::HoldPkgs but I can't find it. I want to have these packages held from updates until I specifically request them with an "apt-get install". I found the apt-get configuration Apt::NeverAutoRemove; will this do what I want? Added Question: I notice that Apt::NeverAutoRemove and Apt::Never-MarkAuto-Sections (among others) are not documented so far as I can see; they're not in the manpages. Neither is aptitude::Keep-Unused-Pattern and aptitude::Get-Root-Command. Is there any comprehensive and complete documentation for apt.conf?

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• Wired PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse do not work in 12.04 Live CD or after fresh 12.04 install - Foxconn D270S Atom Motherboard

  - by david krajewski

  My Wired PS/2 keyboard and mouse do not work in 12.04, either in a fresh install or from the Live CD. A USB keyboard and mouse will work. The PS/2 keyboard and mouse will work using the same hardware and a fresh 10.04 Ubuntu install or a fresh Windows 7 install. The motherboard is a Foxconn D270S Atom based motherboard. This problem is specific to this motherboard and Ubuntu 12.04. So far I've tried running in the fresh 12.04 install: sudo apt-get install sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get dist-upgrade After the apt-get upgraded the first time, I now get to the point where there are 0 items to be upgraded. Rebooted and still no PS/2 keyboard/mouse. I've also tried adding the following lines to GRUB at boot time (the PS/2 keyboard works in GRUB) acpi=noirq acpi=off Neither setting made any difference. The motherboard is a Foxconn D270S Atom based motherboard. Even more interestingly, 12.04 recognizes the same PS/2 keyboard and mouse on a separate Gigabyte AM3+ based motherboard. I only have this problem on this particular motherboard with Ubuntu 12.04. Any help would be appreciated. I bought this low-power motherboard specifically for the task of running Ubuntu 12.04 for the next five years... Update... I dug out an old PS/2 mouse that does not use a PS/2 to USB adapter but is directly wired for PS/2. Still no PS/2 keyboard or mouse after reboot. Again, I only have this problem with this motherboard and 12.04 Ubuntu. Other motherboards work fine with 12.04 and this motherboard works fine with 10.04. Update 2... I installed the 12.04 Server version. The text-based installer recognized the keyboard without issue, but after the first boot into the installed OS, the PS/2 keyboard would no longer respond. I tried installing Gnome on the Server install and the PS/2 mouse and keyboard don't work in Gnome either. I Opened bug #995570 for this issue

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• Best Practices for Renaming, Refactoring, and Breaking Changes with Teams

  - by David in Dakota

  What are some Best Practices for refactoring and renaming in team environments? I bring this up with a few scenarios in mind: If a library that is commonly referenced is refactored to introduce a breaking change to any library or project that references it. E.g. arbitrarily changing the name of a method. If projects are renamed and solutions must be rebuilt with updated references to them. If project structure is changed to be "more organized" by introducing folders and moving existing projects or solutions to new locations. Some additional thoughts/questions: Should changes like this matter or is resulting pain an indication of structure gone awry? Who should take responsibility for fixing errors related to a breaking change? If a developer makes a breaking change should they be responsible for going into affected projects and updating them or should they alert other developers and prompt them to change things? Is this something that can be done on a scheduled basis or is it something that should be done as frequently as possible? If a refactoring is put off for too long it is increasingly difficult to reconcile but at the same time in a day spending 1 hour increments fixing a build because of changes happening elsewhere. Is this a matter of a formal communication process or can it be organic?

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• Social Network Stalking

  - by David Dorf

  Think about this: By reading this blog, you and I are connected. We have this blog and its topics in common, so there's a chance we have other things in common as well. In any relationship there is a degree of trust and influence. If you trust me, at least in terms of particular subjects, then I have some influence over you. If I buy an iPad, then there's an opportunity for me to influence your possible purchase of an over-hyped tablet that you don't really need. So what could a retailer do with this? Retailers that have fans and followers should assume that the friends of those fans and followers are more susceptible to their marketing efforts. If I'm a fan of Apple, then Apple will be more successful marketing to my friends than marketing to random people. Intuitively that makes sense, at least to me. Companies like 33Across and Pursway are already putting this theory into practice, and achieving some interesting results. Jeff Jarvis, who by-the-way is speaking at CrossTalk this year, has been discussing the power of influencers in social networks. In his blog he rails against marketers and says "messages and influence aren't the future of marketing; conversations and relationships are." Valuable messages will be passed on because they are valuable, not because someone has the power to exert influence. True enough, but that won't stop the efforts underway to leverage social networks for more targeted advertising. From a business perspective, this sounds like a goldmine to me; on a personal level, it's a bit creepy.

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• I'm Not Bi-Polar, I'm Bi-Winning

  - by David Dorf

  On March 1st, Charlie Sheen joined Twitter and was able to amass 1M followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes, setting an official world record.  So why does it take your brand so long to collect followers?  Easy: you're brand isn't a train wreck.Wouldn't it be great if your customers we chatting about your products as much as they're talking about Charlie #winning?  There are a couple things retailers can do.  First, you can offer check-ins to your customers, which can occasionally get a "ooh, what are you buying there?" in the social network. Another methods is to allow customer to "like" particular products on your Web site.  Companies like Wet Seal excel at that.We've been experimenting with automatic posting from the POS, assuming a customer has opted-in.  When you buy something in a store, the POS can automatically post "Dave just bought something at Wet Seal" to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare simultaneously.  We stopped short of mentioning the specific product so we don't pull a Beacon.  The idea is the same: get the conversation started.  Give customers a virtual water-cooler where they can discuss products and influence buying decisions.The guys over at ShopSocially have done something very similar.  On the Facebook page for Cafe Press, customers can claim purchases, effectively bragging on their walls.  Each posting goes through the Facebook newsfeed and gets friends interested.  They are seeing over 1,000 purchases being shared daily, and that's generating over 300,000 brand impressions.Sounds like a winning idea.

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• Music Rhythm Game: Copyright Music Question for Independent (Indie) Game Developers

  - by David Dimalanta

  I have a curious question regarding on musics used in music rhythm game. In Guitar Hero for example, they used all different music albums in one program. Then, each album requires to ask permission to the owner, composer of the music, or the copyright owner of the music. Let's say, if you used 15 albums for the music rhythm game, then you have to contact 15 copyright owners and it might be that, for the game developer, that the profit earned goes to the copyright owner or owner of this music. For the independent game developers, was it okay if either used the copyright music by just mentioning the name of the singer included in the credits and in the music select screen or use the non-popular/old music that about 50 years ago? And, does still earn money for the indie game developers by making free downloadable game?

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• Forum software advice needed

  - by David Thompson

  Hello All ... we want to migrate our sites current forum (proprietary built) to a newer, more modern (feature rich) platform. I've been looking around at the available options and have narrowed it down to vBulletin, Vanilla or Phorum (unless you have another suggestion ?). I hope someone here can give me some feedback on their experiences either migrating to a new forum or working deeply with one. The current forum we have has approx 2.2 million threads in it and is contained in a MySQL database. Data Migration is obviously the first issue, is one of the major Forum vendors better or worse in this regard ? The software needs to be able to be clustered and cached to ensure availability and performance. We want it to be PHP based and store it's data in MySQL. The code needs to be open to allow us to highly customise the software both to strip out a lot of stuff and be able to integrate our sites features. A lot of the forums I've looked at have a lot of duplicate features to our main site, in particular member management, profiles etc. I realise we'll have to do a good bit of development in removing these and tieing it all back to the main site so we want to find a platform that makes this kind of integration as easy as possible. Finally I guess if 'future proofing' the forum (as best as possible) given the above. Which platform will allow us to customise it but also allow us to keep instep with upgrades. Which forum software has the best track record for bringing online new features in a timely manner ? etc. etc. I know it's a big question but if anyone here has any experience in some or all of the above I'd be very grateful.

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• IIS 7&rsquo;s Sneaky Secret to Get COM-InterOp to Run

  - by David Hoerster

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster/archive/2013/06/17/iis-7rsquos-sneaky-secret-to-get-com-interop-to-run.aspxIf you’re like me, you don’t really do a lot with COM components these days.  For me, I’ve been ‘lucky’ to stay in the managed world for the past 6 or 7 years. Until last week. I’m running a project to upgrade a web interface to an older COM-based application.  The old web interface is all classic ASP and lots of tables, in-line styles and a bunch of other late 90’s and early 2000’s goodies.  So in addition to updating the UI to be more modern looking and responsive, I decided to give the server side an update, too.  So I built some COM-InterOp DLL’s (easily through VS2012’s Add Reference feature…nothing new here) and built a test console line app to make sure the COM DLL’s were actually built according to the COM spec.  There’s a document management system that I’m thinking of whose COM DLLs were not proper COM DLLs and crashed and burned every time .NET tried to call them through a COM-InterOp layer. Anyway, my test app worked like a champ and I felt confident that I could build a nice façade around the COM DLL’s and wrap some functionality internally and only expose to my users/clients what they really needed. So I did this, built some tests and also built a test web app to make sure everything worked great.  It did.  It ran fine in IIS Express via Visual Studio 2012, and the timings were very close to the pure Classic ASP calls, so there wasn’t much overhead involved going through the COM-InterOp layer. You know where this is going, don’t you? So I deployed my test app to a DEV server running IIS 7.5.  When I went to my first test page that called the COM-InterOp layer, I got this pretty message: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {81C08CAE-1453-11D4-BEBC-00500457076D} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). It worked as a console app and while running under IIS Express, so it must be permissions, right?  I gave every account I could think of all sorts of COM+ rights and nothing, nada, zilch! Then I came across this question on Experts Exchange, and at the bottom of the page, someone mentioned that the app pool should be running to allow 32-bit apps to run.  Oh yeah, my machine is 64-bit; these COM DLL’s I’m using are old and are definitely 32-bit.  I didn’t check for that and didn’t even think about that.  But I went ahead and looked at the app pool that my web site was running under and what did I see?  Yep, select your app pool in IIS 7.x, click on Advanced Settings and check for “Enable 32-bit Applications”. I went ahead and set it to True and my test application suddenly worked. Hope this helps somebody out there from pulling out your hair.

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• Flash/Flex/Air and iOS

  - by David Archer

  I'm just a little confused with all of the news recently regarding the cancellation of mobile flash, so was hoping for a little help. I've had a search through and can't find the answers to these questions, so any help would be great. First up, I'm looking to create a game in Flash first, to test whether the concept works as a fun game (on Newgrounds/Kongregate/Facebook etc.). Would it be best to use Flash CS5.5, or Flash Builder? Secondly, with mobile flash now being discontinued by Adobe, could I still port this game over to iOS through the Flash platform, or would it be better at that point to re-write the whole game using Objective C? (NOTE: I'm not an Objective C developer, but am instead a Javascript and Actionscript dev). Any help would be great. Thanks!

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• New Rules of Retail

  - by David Dorf

  I've been on vacation and preparing for Crosstalk, so its been a while since I've posted. I've seen the agenda, and I can assure you Crosstalk will be lots of fun. In addition to hearing from lots of retailers, we'll also be doing a little bowling and racing on the track. I'll be around for the sessions, the ORUG meetings, and our Customer Advisory Board so please be sure to say hello. I also just completed a white paper based on a previous blog posting which in turn was based on learnings from reading What Would Google Do? For each of Jarvis' ten rules, I discuss the concept in the context of retail and provide real-world examples. No mention of products or sales pitches at all. You can download the paper here. It will put you in the right frame of mind for hearing Jeff Jarvis speak at Crosstalk. For those that can't make it, I'll post some highlights afterwards.

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• Distinctly LINQ &ndash; Getting a Distinct List of Objects

  - by David Totzke

  Let’s say that you have a list of objects that contains duplicate items and you want to extract a subset of distinct items.  This is pretty straight forward in the trivial case where the duplicate objects are considered the same such as in the following example: List<int> ages = new List<int> { 21, 46, 46, 55, 17, 21, 55, 55 }; IEnumerable<int> distinctAges = ages.Distinct(); Console.WriteLine("Distinct ages:"); foreach (int age in distinctAges) { Console.WriteLine(age); } /* This code produces the following output: Distinct ages: 21 46 55 17 */ What if you are working with reference types instead?  Imagine a list of search results where items in the results, while unique in and of themselves, also point to a parent.  We’d like to be able to select a bunch of items in the list but then see only a distinct list of parents.  Distinct isn’t going to help us much on its own as all of the items are distinct already.  Perhaps we can create a class with just the information we are interested in like the Id and Name of the parents.  public class SelectedItem { public int ItemID { get; set; } public string DisplayName { get; set; } } We can then use LINQ to populate a list containing objects with just the information we are interested in and then get rid of the duplicates. IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list = (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>() select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.ParentId, DisplayName = item.ParentName }) .Distinct(); Most of you will have guessed that this didn’t work.  Even though some of our objects are now duplicates, because we are working with reference types, it doesn’t matter that their properties are the same, they’re still considered unique.  What we need is a way to define equality for the Distinct() extension method. IEqualityComparer<T> Looking at the Distinct method we see that there is an overload that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T>.  We can simply create a class that implements this interface and that allows us to define equality for our SelectedItem class. public class SelectedItemComparer : IEqualityComparer<SelectedItem> { public new bool Equals(SelectedItem abc, SelectedItem def) { return abc.ItemID == def.ItemID && abc.DisplayName == def.DisplayName; } public int GetHashCode(SelectedItem obj) { string code = obj.DisplayName + obj.ItemID.ToString(); return code.GetHashCode(); } } In the Equals method we simply do whatever comparisons are necessary to determine equality and then return true or false.  Take note of the implementation of the GetHashCode method.  GetHashCode must return the same value for two different objects if our Equals method says they are equal.  Get this wrong and your comparer won’t work .  Even though the Equals method returns true, mismatched hash codes will cause the comparison to fail.  For our example, we simply build a string from the properties of the object and then call GetHashCode() on that. Now all we have to do is pass an instance of our IEqualitlyComarer<T> to Distinct and all will be well: IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list =     (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>()         select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.dahfkp, DisplayName = item.document_code })                         .Distinct(new SelectedItemComparer());   Enjoy. Dave Just because I can… Technorati Tags: LINQ,C#

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• How Hard Can It Be?

  - by David Totzke

  I mean seriously.  Let’s imagine for a moment that by some stroke of luck or genius or cosmic accident that you come to be the owner of sex.com.  You’d think you had won the lottery.  That would be like having a license to print money.  I mean really.  Sex is the most searched term on the entire Internet.  Even without any SEO you’d think that your site would show up on the first page of results on Google. You would think that; and you’d be wrong.  At least in the case of the current owners of that domain name anyways.  The details can be found here but suffice it to say that Escom LLC has managed to fuck it up.  They’ve been forced into bankruptcy by their creditors.  Something doesn’t smell quite right with the whole thing.  Some guy named Mike Mann (please God, don’t let it be this Mike Mann) is an investor in all three creditors.  WTF? Seriously.  How hard can it be? Dave Just because I can…

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• Using Oracle ADF Data Visualization Tools (DVT) Line Graphs to Display Weather Information

  - by Christian David Straub

  OverviewA guest post by Jeanne Waldman.I have a simple JDeveloper Fusion application that retrieves weather data. I wanted to compare the week's temperatures of different locations in a graph. I decided to check out the dvt:lineGraph component, and it took me a few minutes to add it to my jspx page and supply it with data.Drag and Drop the dvt:lineGraph onto your pageI opened my .jspx page in design modeIn the Component Palette, I selected ADF Data Visualization.Then I dragged 'Line' onto my page.A dialog popped up giving me options of the type of line graph. I chose the default.A lineGraph displayed with some default data. Hook up your weather dataNow I wanted to hook up my own data. I browsed the tagdoc, and I found the tabularData attribute.Attribute: tabularDataType: java.util.ListTagDoc:Specifies a list of data that the graph uses to create a grid and populate itself. The List consists of a three-member Object array for each data value to be passed to the graph. The members of each array must be organized as follows: The first member (index 0) is the column label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. If the graph has a time axis, then this should be a Java Date. Column labels typically identify groups in the graph. The second member (index 1) is the row label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. Row labels appear as series labels in the graph (usually in the legend). The third member (index 2) is the data value, which is usually a Double.The first member is the column label of the data value. This would be the day of the week.The second member is the row label of the data value. This would be the location name.The third member is the data value, usually a Double. This would be the temperature. I already had all this information, I just needed to put it in a List with a three-member Object array for each data value.   /**    * This is used for the lineGraph to show the data for each location.    */   public List<Object[]> getTabularData()   {      List<Object[]> tabularData = new ArrayList<Object []>();      List<WeatherForecast> weatherForecastList = getWeatherForecastList();      // loop through the list and build up the tabular data. Then cache it.      for(WeatherForecast wf : weatherForecastList)      {        List<ForecastDay> forecastDayList = wf.getForecastDayList();        String location = wf.getLocation();        for (ForecastDay fday : forecastDayList)        {          String day = fday.getPrettyDate();          String highTemp = fday.getHighF();          tabularData.add(new Object[]{day, location, Double.valueOf(highTemp)});        }             }      return tabularData;    }  Now I bound the lineGraph to this method by setting tabularData to#{weatherForAllLocationsBean.tabularData}weatherForAllLocationsBean is my bean that is defined in faces-config.xml. Adding a barGraphIn about 30 seconds, I added a barGraph with the same data. I dragged and dropped a bar graph onto the page, used the same tabularData as I did in the line graph. The page looks like this:  ConclusionI was very happy how fast it was to hook up my weather data to these graphs. They look great, and they have built in functionality. For instance, I can hide/show a location by clicking on the name of the location in the legend.

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• push email / email server tutorial

  - by David A

  Does anyone happen to know the current status of push email in the linux world? From my searching at the moment I have seen Z-push http://www.ifusio.com/blog/setup-your-own-push-mail-server-with-z-push-on-debian-linux and https://peterkieser.com/2011/03/25/androids-k-9-mail-battery-life-and-dovecots-push-imap/ Are there other solutions? Does anyone have any experiences with these? They're somewhat different in that Z-push seems to work in conjunction with an existing imap server? Some time ago I did manage to compile and build Dovecot 2 (since only Dovecot 1 was available in the Ubuntu repos at the time), it would have been a real fluke because I had no idea what I was doing but it seemed to work well with my mobile phone, that said, I can't say for sure that it was pushing, but it seemed like it. Anyway, I'm here again and looking to set up a mail server. I'm hoping to do a better of a job this time around with virtual users and such. Without installing ispconfig3 (or something similar), does anyone have any recent email server tutorials (that cover all aspects MTA, MDA...) that can supply push email on a Ubuntu 12.04 server? (I'm probably of slightly above newb status, but not far) Thanks a bunch

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• How can I use GPRename's regex feature to reinsert the matched-group into the 'replace'?

  - by David Thomas

  I've been using GPRename to batch-rename files; this is rather more efficient than individually correcting each file, but still seems to be less efficient than it might be, primarily because either I don't understand the regex syntax used, or because the regex implementation is incomplete1 Given a list of files of the following syntax: (01) - title of file1.avi (02) - title of file2.avi (03) - title of file3.avi I attempted to use the 'replace' (with the regex option selected, the case-sensitive option deselected): (\(\d{2}\)) The preview then shows (given that I've specified no 'replace with' option as yet): title of file1.avi title of file2.avi title of file3.avi Which is great, clearly the regex is identifying the correct group (the (01)). Now, what I was hoping to do (using the JavaScript syntax) in the 'replace with' option is use: $1 (I also tried using '$1', \1 and '\1') This was just to check that I could access the matched group, and it seems I can't, the matched group is, as I suppose might be expected, replaced with the literal replacement string. So, my question: is it possible to match a particular group of characters, in this case the numbers within the brackets, and then insert those into the replacement string? Therefore: (01) title of file1.avi (02) title of file2.avi (03) title of file3.avi Becomes: 01 title of file1.avi 02 title of file2.avi 03 title of file3.avi I absolutely suspect the former, personally.

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• Fast Fashion Freshness

  - by David Dorf

  Fashion retailers such as H&M, Zara, and Wet Seal have perfected the fast fashion retailing model. The concept requires no replenishment in order to maintain assortment freshness and to create a sense of urgency for the consumer to purchase now. However, maintaining assortment freshness results in high product turnover, making markdown optimization a necessity. Wet Seal, for instance, needed to move from ad-hoc markdowns and dealing with surplus inventory to handling markdowns methodically across 8,000 SKUs with only 12-15 week lifecycle (from DC receipt to exit). By optimizing and automating markdowns, Wet Seal is reaching their goal of assortment freshness, which in turn increases sales. If you're interested in learning more, register for a free webinar occurring on May 13th featuring Join Daniel Ryu, Vice President of Planning and Allocation at Wet Seal. He'll be discussing how the fast fashion retailer maintains their goal of assortment freshness.

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• Post-Purchase Social Media

  - by David Dorf

  When you make a particularly good purchase, the natural tendency is to share the experience with friends. You show them your cool new toy or garment, then explain how you discovered such a great deal, all the while implying you are the world's most savvy shopper. My wife does it with clothes, housewares, and books, and I do it with wiz-bang techie stuff. Post-purchase euphoria or Buyer's remorse are associated with most purchases beyond day-to-day needs. So now let's add social media to the mix. Haul videos are a YouTube phenomenon where a shopper describes their latest haul on video. Blair Fowler, aka juicystar07, is an excellent example. She and her older sister's haul videos have been viewed 75,000,000 times, at times causing particular items to sell out after being showcased. If you're not already on this bandwagon, checkout Blair's haul video from her trip to Forever21. There are a couple good articles on this trend from ABC's GMA, Slate, and NPR. Some retailers are already sending free products to these fashionistas in the hopes they'll be reviewed on camera. For those less willing to exert themselves, there's Blippy, a service that automatically tweets your purchases. Similar to Twitter, your purchases are tweeted so your friends can see what you've purchased and your network can make comments. In the example to the right, co-founder Philip Kaplan purchased a gift for his wife from the store Does Your Mother Know, proving the point that the need for privacy is overblown. Blippy has partnerships with selected merchants like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix and can also get purchases from the credit cards you've registered. When you register, you can configure whether to automatically tweet each purchase, or approve them first. No sense in broadcasting my need for Rogaine, right? This is a good thing for retailers, as it helps spread the word about purchases and gives other people ideas. Rick just bought an ooma from Amazon. What the heck is ooma? Oh, its like Vonage but no monthly bills. I'm there.

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• How is the Linux repository administrated?

  - by David

  I am amazed by the Linux project and I would like to learn how they administrate the code, given the huge number of developers. I found the Linux repository on GitHub, but I do not understand how it is administrated. For example the following commit: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/31fd84b95eb211d5db460a1dda85e004800a7b52 Notice the following part: So one authored and Torvalds committed. How is this possible. I thought that it was only possible to have either pull or pushing rights, but here it seems like there is an approval stage. I should mention that the specific problem I am trying to solve is that we use pull requests to our repo. The problem we are facing is that while a pull request is waiting to get merged, it is often broken by a commit. This leads to a seemingly never ending work to adapt the fork in order to make the pull request merge smoothly. Do Linux solve this by giving lots of people pushing rights (at least there are currently just three pull requests but hundreds of commits per day).

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• Ubuntu Installation Help for an IBM R31 Thinkpad

  - by David Taylor

  I recently acquired an old IBM R31 Thinkpad, and I'd figure I'd install Lubuntu on it. I've followed the quick steps for USB installation on the help wiki page, but I can't seem to get it to boot from my formatted flash drive. I've checked the boot priority on the BIOS page, but the option to boot from USB doesn't even seem to be there. The only bootable options are legacy and USB floppy drives. The CD drive is shot, so I can't install from there either. Do I have any other options for installation without having to pay for a floppy drive or a replacement CD drive? The wiki pages mentions something about installation from within Windows. Would it be possible to remove Windows using this option, or would it just create a partition? Thanks

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• Using Completed User Stories to Estimate Future User Stories

  - by David Kaczynski

  In Scrum/Agile, the complexity of a user story can be estimated in story points. After completing some user stories, a programmer or team of programmers can use those experiences to better estimate how much time it might take to complete a future user story. Is there a methodology for breaking down the complexity of user stories into quantifiable or quantifiable attributes? For example, User Story X requires a rich, new view in the GUI, but User Story X can perform most of its functionality using existing business logic on the server. On a scale of 1 to 10, User Story X has a complexity of 7 on the client and a complexity of 2 on the server. After User Story X is completed, someone asks how long would it take to complete User Story Y, which has a complexity of 3 on the client and 6 on the server. Looking at how long it took to complete User Story X, we can make an educated estimate on how long it might take to complete User Story Y. I can imagine some other details: The complexity of one attribute (such as complexity of client) could have sub-attributes, such as number of steps in a sequence, function points, etc. Several other attributes that could be considered as well, such as the programmer's familiarity with the system or the number of components/interfaces involved These attributes could be accumulated into some sort of user story checklist. To reiterate: is there an existing methodology for decomposing the complexity of a user story into complexity of attributes/sub-attributes, or is using completed user stories as indicators in estimating future user stories more of an informal process?

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• The Disloyalty Card

  - by David Dorf

  Let's take a break from technology for a second; please indulge me. (That's for you Erick.) A few months back, James Hoffmann reported that Gwilym Davies, the 2009 World Barista Champion, had implemented a rather unique idea for his cafe: the disloyalty card. His card lists eight nearby cafes in London that the cardholder must visit and try a coffee. After sampling all eight and collecting the required stamps, Gwilym provides a free coffee from his shop. His idea sends customers to his competitors. What does this say about Gwilym? First, it tells me he's confident in his abilities to make a mean cup of java. Second, it tells me he's truly passionate about his his trade. But was this a sound business endeavor? Obviously the risk is that one of his loyal customers might just find a better product at a competitor and not return. But the goal isn't really to strengthen his customer base -- its to strengthen the market, which will in turn provide more customers over the long run. This idea seems great for frequently purchased products like restaurants, bars, bakeries, music, and of course, cafes. Its probably not a good idea for high priced merchandise or infrequently purchased items like shoes, electronics, and housewares. Nevertheless, its a great example of thinking in reverse. Try this: Instead of telling your staff how you want customers treated, list out the ways you don't want customers treated. Why should you limit people's imagination and freedom to engage customers? Instead, give them guidelines to avoid the bad behavior, and leave them open to be creative with the positive behavior. Instead of asking the question, "how can we get more people in our stores?" try asking the inverse: "why aren't people visiting our stores?" Innovation doesn't only come from asking "why?" Often it comes from asking "why not?"

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• Measuring Social Media Efforts

  - by David Dorf

  So you're on the bandwagon and you've created a Facebook page, you're tweeting everyday, and maybe you've even got a YouTube channel. Now what? After you put any program in place, you need to measure, set new goals, then execute and this is no different. But how does one measure social media efforts? First, I guess we need some goals. Typical ones might be to acquire customers, engage them, then convert them. So that translates to: Increase Facebook fans and Twitter followers Increase comments/posting and retweets Increase redemption of offers via Facebook and Twitter Counting fans and followers is easy, and tracking the redemption of coupons isn't that hard either, but measuring engagement is a tough one. How do you know whether your fans are reading your posts, and whether your posts have any meaning to them? For Facebook, the fan page administrator has access to analytics called Facebook Insights. There you can check weekly metrics such as total fans, new fans, lost fans, demographics of fans, number of postings, numbers clicks, etc. Not nearly as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but well on its way. For Twitter, getting information is a little tougher. Again, its easy to track followers and you can use tools like TweetMeme to encourage and track retweets. An interesting website called WeFollow tries to measure influence for certain topics. For example, the top three influencers for the topic "retail" are retailweek, retailwire, and retailerdaily. Other notables are #10 BestBuy, #11 GapOfficial, #12 JeffPR, and #17 OracleRetail. I assume influence is calculated based on number of followers, number of retweets, frequency of tweets, and perhaps depth of dialogs. If you want to get serious about monitoring and measuring social marketing efforts, you'd be wise to invest in a strong tool. Several are listed on this wiki, including big ones like Radian6, Nielsen, Omniture, and Buzzient. Buzzient might be particularly interesting because its integrated with Oracle CRM OnDemand -- see the demo. As always, I'm interested in hearing how others approach goal setting and monitoring of social media efforts, so feel free to post comments.

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• Bump the Bill

  - by David Dorf

  I'm writing this from 3,400 feet in the air somewhere between Chicago and Austin. GoGo In-flight strikes again. Is there anywhere I can't get a WiFi connection? While listening to Deacon Blues by Steely Dan and skimming the news, I just came across an interesting article on mobile payments. Remember when I wrote about the iPhone Bump application and its possible use in retail? Well it looks like PayPal updated their mobile payments application to include the bump technology. Now its possible to transfer money between individuals by bumping iPhones. According to the WSJ, Paypal did 24 million transactions in 2008 and 140 million in 2009 on mobile phones. As the technology gets easier to use, that number is bound to increase. Alternatives to Paypal include Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, wireless carriers ("put it on my phone bill"), smart cards (using your phone's SIM card), and iTunes. That last one comes courtesy of a story Joe Skorupa wrote on mobile payments. It looks like Apple allows iPhone apps to take micro-payments via iTunes accounts, so there may come a time when its possible to use your iPhone to make a purchase in a retail store and have your credit card charged via your iTunes account. There are still some improvements in usability to be made before using a phone will be easier than swiping a credit card, but its already better than fussing with cash.

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• More Mobile Payments

  - by David Dorf

  In the previous post I discussed the Bump Payments from PayPayl, but that's not the only innovative way to make purchases using your phone. Verizon recently announced a partnership with Danal that allows shoppers to charge online purchases to their Verizon bill. For e-commerce sites that accept this type of payment, it's a two step process. At checkout, the shopper enters their mobile number and billing zip code. Then a SMS message is sent to the mobile phone that contains a one-time code that must be entered on the e-commerce site. This two-factor authentication seems pretty secure, and no pre-registration or credit card is necessary. There's a $25 a month maximum, but I bet the limit gets raised as Verizon gets more comfortable with security. Merchants are charged a fee similar to credit card fees. Another example of mobile payments is offered by BlingNation. Customers attach a small NFC sticker to their phones that allows them to "tap" the POS device to make a payment. The NFC chip is connected to their checking account, so the transaction is treated as a debit payment. Text messages are sent to the mobile that confirm the payments so shoppers can easily verify their purchases. BlingNation is working with banks like Adirondack Trust Company and The State Bank of La Junta in Colorado. Heck, you can even send money to inmates in the Arkansas prison system using your mobile phone now that the state of Arkansas supports payments via their mobile website. Everyone is getting into the act now.

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