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• Registering domain during christmas holydays

  - by arkascha

  One of the domain names I tried to register previously has been blocked by a domain grabber two days prior to my own attempt. That was about 1 year ago. The attempt to buy the domain from that person failed due to a totally exaggerated price. So I dropped the issue and watched the domain (offered at sedo.com). As expected there were no more offers, the domain was not sold. Now I learn from the whois database that the registration of that domain name ends on 25.12.2012 (christmas holyday). This raises two questions for me, I fail to find reliable answers on the internet. So maybe someone experienced here can drop a statement or a hint: is it reasonable that the domain name in question really will be free again when that date mentioned in the whois database up to when the domain is registered has passed? I certainly know that the registration can be prolonged, that is not what I mean. I expect (hope) that that domain grabber does not extend the registration, since it costs money and effort and he failed to sell the domain. Provided this is the case and the domain registration is not prolonged, is that date mentioned reliable? Or might it just be some 'default' date? I would like to try to register that domain name as soon as it is unregistered. Since that domain grabber registered that domain only two days before my own registration attempt I would like to prevent such annoying interference next time. So I ask myself: is it possible to register a domain name on a holyday? I mean not to send an email to my provider to do so on that day or before, but to actually have to process taking place as not to wait for 1-2 days after the unregistration? My own provider which I am very happy with does not offer such service on a holyday (which is perfectly understandable). They are 'still checking' if they can offer something automatic. I researched and did not find an answer to the question if that is possible at all. Is an autoomatic registration attempt on a holyday possible? Where can I do that? Is that reliable? Thanks for any reply!

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• Ubuntu 12.04.3 Graphics Issues: Broken Pipes, Reinstalled Xorg and Bumblebee

  - by user190488

  It seems I have a problem, and am only making it worse by following what I find online. I have a new Asus N550JV-D71 (not sure about the part after the dash, though I definitely know it includes 71). I decided to downgrade Windows 8 to 7, then dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 with it (there were issues with Windows 8, and I had a Windows 7 disk handy). It did work and, after installing Bumblebee in tty (because it wouldn't boot when it was first installed), it worked marvelously for a little less than a week. However, I restarted it last night and got the Could not write bytes: Broken pipes error. (I see it's a very common error, but I've looked at the majority of the suggested Similar Questions already.) I followed what I could find online, followed those instructions (making sure to not install any sort of graphics drivers other than what Bumblebee provides), and it just seems to go further and further downhill. I'm afraid I didn't write the exact steps to get to this point (it was late by the time I gave up the night before), but it involved reinstalling lightdm, xorg (and xserver?), and Bumblebee. I then changed the Bumblebee.conf file so that Device=nvidia. I'm pretty new to Linux in general (I've used it since 10.04, but I hadn't had issues up until this computer, so it let me stay a newbie), so I'm not exactly sure what log files to look at to find the errors to look up. However, I did look at lshw and noticed that displays was marked as unassigned. Also, if I try to start lightdm using the command line, it always stops at Stopping Mount network filesystems. I should note that there isn't an xorg.conf file, and no .Xauthority. I would really, really prefer not to reinstall 12.04 if possible. I managed to get grub to display only a short time ago, and I can't boot to the dvd drive unless I go into the BIOS settings and manually change the boot order (that was an issue from the beginning, before the Ubuntu install), and getting into those settings often means rebooting several times due to the fact that the window to get to it is extremely small. I have most of what I need backed up, however, in case it does get to that point. If I really have to, I can just use the latest Ubuntu version instead of the LTS, but the reason I chose 12.04 in the first place is because I need something stable-ish, and Windows isn't suitable to what I need to do. I should note that the reason I restarted last night in the first place was that it wasn't charging the battery, and the wifi kept on going out. Hardware: Nvidia GeForce GT 750M Intel HD graphics 4600

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• TouchDevelop: The Fast Path to Windows 8 and Phone Apps

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Are you looking for a little extra cash for the upcoming holidays? Then you might be interested in creating some cool apps to sell in the Windows Store. Or maybe you’re simply curious and want to try your hand at developing for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. In either case, the newly released TouchDevelop Web App is for you. TouchDevelop Web App is a development environment to create apps on your tablet or smartphone, without requiring a separate PC. Scripts written by using TouchDevelop can access data, media, and sensors on the phone, tablet, and PC. The script can interact with cloud services, including storage, computing, and social networks. TouchDevelop lets you quickly create fun games and useful tools, turning your scripts into true Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. A year ago, Microsoft Research released TouchDevelop for Windows Phone, which is being used by enthusiasts, students, and researchers to program their phones in fun, inventive, and interesting ways. These scripts are available at TouchDevelop for anyone to download and use. Ever since we released TouchDevelop, we’ve been eyeing the tablet form factor and working on a version for the browser. Now, with the release of TouchDevelop Web App, the wait is over: the tablet version is ready, so go play around with it. All TouchDevelop scripts that are developed on the smartphone can be downloaded to the tablet and run (if hardware allows). Any script that is developed on the tablet can also be accessed on the phone. And scripts can be converted to Windows Phone or Windows 8 apps and submitted to the Windows Phone Store or Windows Store, respectively. TouchDevelop Web App’s editor and programming language have been designed for tablet devices with touchscreens, but you can also use a keyboard and a mouse. So grab your web-enabled device and give the TouchDevelop Web App a try. It’s fun and easy, and could even put a little cash in your holiday-depleted wallet. Or at least give you bragging rights at family get-togethers. Are you interested in further tips on Windows 8 development?  Sign up for the 30 to launch program which will help you build a Windows Store application in 30 days.  You will receive a tip per day for 30 days, along with potential free design consultations and technical support from a Windows 8 expert. As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• Various issues linked to my CD drive, when it has a disc in it

  - by Voyagerfan5761

  When I go to the Desktop and click on a media icon (for my flash drive, a CD, whatever it is), the following problems occur, in this approximate sequence: Nautilus will close if it's open. the desktop icons disappear my Window List shows a button that says "Starting File Manager" the icons reappear the button in Window List disappears Because of this problem, I can no longer drag and drop media, nor can I right-click to perform actions such as "Eject" and "Safely Remove Drive". The same symptoms occur if I click a media icon (that is also present on the desktop) in Nautilus' Computer view, though notably not if I click in the places list on the left. I have confirmed that this problem happens only if there is a CD in the drive (Matshita UJDA360). Also, inserting a disc into the CD drive appears to kill all running programs and restart Nautilus (or X; I'm not sure). Applications like Brasero and Rhythmbox will not start while there is a disc in the drive. Removing the disc doesn't result in the list of media updating; it must be forced to update by clicking on one of the desktop icons and going through one of the above-described cycles. It doesn't seem to matter what type of disc is in the drive. This has happened with CD-RWs I burned years ago using Roxio on Windows XP, the Ubuntu disc I installed from (burned with InfraRecorder Portable under Windows XP), and the retail game disc for Star Trek Armada II. The first indication of a problem was Brasero dying when I tried to insert a disc for erasure and rewriting. Since then, I've drafted several different questions on various issues, finally combining them into this one when I realized that having a CD in the drive was the common link. Could this be a simple driver issue? If Ubuntu is dynamically detecting my hardware on boot, can I specify drivers for devices that I know will be a problem if the default files are used? I'm beginning to think that my laptop, an old Dell Inspiron 2650, is just too old or proprietary-driver-hungry (or something, maybe RAM-starved) for Ubuntu and Windows XP to play nicely alongside each other. Or maybe I just need to carefully take my wall-wart machine to a coffee shop for an afternoon so I can download updates and such from the Internet, as I lack a home connection.

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• Iterative and Incremental Principle Series 2: Finding Focus

  - by llowitz

  Welcome back to the second blog in a five part series where I recount my personal experience with applying the Iterative and Incremental principle to my daily life.  As you recall from part one of the series, a conversation with my son prompted me to think about practical applications of the Iterative and Incremental approach and I realized I had incorporated this principle in my exercise regime.    I have been a runner since college but about a year ago, I sustained an injury that prevented me from exercising.  When I was sufficiently healed, I decided to pick it up again.  Knowing it was unrealistic to pick up where I left off, I set a goal of running 3 miles or approximately for 30 minutes.    I was excited to get back into running and determined to meet my goal.  Unfortunately, after what felt like a lifetime, I looked at my watch and realized that I had 27 agonizing minutes to go!  My determination waned and my positive “I can do it” attitude was overridden by thoughts of “This is impossible”.   My initial focus and excitement was not sustained so I never met my goal.   Understanding that the 30 minute run was simply too much for me mentally, I changed my approach.   I decided to try interval training.  For each interval, I planned to walk for 3 minutes, then jog for 2 minutes, and finally sprint for 1 minute, and I planned to repeat this pattern 5 times.  I found that each interval set was challenging, yet achievable, leaving me excited and invigorated for my next interval.  I easily completed five intervals – or 30 minutes!!  My sense of accomplishment soared. What does this have to do with OUM?  Have you heard the saying -- “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time!”?  This adage certainly applies in my example and in an OUM systems implementation.  It is easier to manage, track progress and maintain team focus for weeks at a time, rather than for months at a time.   With shorter milestones, the project team focuses on the iteration goal.  Once the iteration goal is met, a sense of accomplishment is experience and the team can be re-focused on a fresh, yet achievable new challenge.  Join me tomorrow as I expand the concept of Iterative and incremental by taking a step back to explore the recommended approach for planning your iterations.

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• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

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• Java EE 8 update

  - by delabassee

  Planning for Java EE 8 is now well underway. As you know, a few weeks ago, we conducted a three part Java EE 8 Community Survey (you can find the final summary here). The data gathered have been very influential for the next steps. You can now expect over the coming weeks and months to see updates on the various specifications that compose the Java EE platform. Some Specification Leads are busy gathering additional feedback regarding what they should focus their efforts on (e.g. CDI 2 survey). Other Specification Leads have already publicly exposed what they think should be one of the focus for the evolution of the specification they lead.  For example, adding Server-Senet Events (SSE) support in JAX-RS is being discussed here and adding MVC support is being discussed here. Please remember that the fact we are now discussing any feature does not insure that it will be included in the proposal, nor in any particular update to Java EE. We can expect additional enhancements, changes and evolutions as we get closer to the finalisation of the different specifications... and there is still a long way to go with these specification proposals! Linda DeMichiel, Java EE Co-Specification Lead, has recently posted a draft proposal for the Java EE 8 Platform specification. Linda's goal is to recruit people and companies supporting this proposal before submitting it to the JCP.  This draft proposal is very interesting reading as it contains relevant information on the plans for Java EE 8 such as : The themes: Support for the latest web standards (eg. HTTP 2.0)  Continue to work on ease of development Improve the infrastructure for cloud support Alignment with Java SE 8 New JSRs to be added to the platform: J-Cache Java API for JSON Binding Java Configuration Plans for the Web Profile Plans on technologies to prune in Java EE 8, ... So if you haven't done it yet, I really encourage you to read the Java EE 8 draft proposal! Our goal for the Java EE 8 specification is for it to be finalized in the second half of 2016. It is important to note that we are in the early days of Java EE 8 and at this stage everything (themes, content, timing, etc.) is preliminary. Everything still needs to be discussed, challenged and agreed within the different Java Community Process (JCP) Experts Groups (EGs). Some EGs that still need to be formed! It could also means that the roadmap will have to be adjusted to follow the progress being made in the different EGs. This is also a good occasion to remind you that participation within those upcoming JCP Experts Groups is encouraged. Contributing in an EG is an effective lever to influence what Java EE 8 will become! Finally, as things get more concrete, we will share details on how to engage in the different Java EE 8 related Adopt-a-JSR initiatives, another way to contribute. You can also read other posts related to Java EE 8, here at The Aquarium blog. Just look for articles with the 'javaee8' tag.

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• Deferred Shading - Toolkit

  - by AliveDevil

  I recently managed to get some lights rendered in a scene by using a buffer and a for-loop. The problem with this method is the performance drop if more lights are used. I tried to convert Deferred Rendering in XNA4.0 | ROY-T.NL but it is not working, because I am not using any models. I know I have to render color, normals and lights seperate but I don't know how I could get it working. For understanding my structure better I'm using a world-class which holds some chunks. These chunks are loading all vertices from their items. These items have a property which returns the vertices. The item is returning VertexPositionNormalTexture[]. The chunk loads these Vertices and combines them to one large array of VertexPositionNormalTexture via someList.AsParallel().SelectMany(m => m).ToArray()). m is a VertexPositionNormalTexture. someList is List<VertexPositionNormalTexture>. I got my own shader to draw these vertices how I want them to be drawn. The first thing I would try is setting up two RenderTarget2D for rendering the color and normal part. With two different shaders. Than I would have to render the lights and there's the problem: I don't know how. I set up a structure to simplify working with lights but it didn't really help. public struct Light { public Vector3 Position; public Color4 Color; public float Range; public float Intensity; public Light( Vector3 position, Color color, float range, float intensity ) : this() { this.Position = position; this.Color = color; this.Range = range; this.Intensity = intensity; } public float[] Definition { get { return new[] { Position.X, Position.Y, Position.Z, Color.Red, Color.Green, Color.Blue, Intensity, Range }; } } } The next part is equally different because I don't know how to combine the colorMap, normalMap and textureMap to one finalMap. Some information to the system: I'm using SharpDX (Nightly from some months ago) and the SharpDX.Toolkit (I don't want to mess up with Direct3DDevice and similar things). Can someone help me with this problem? If things are missing or I provided insufficient information tell me, I need to get deferred shading working. Things I'm not able to do: create a rendertarget which holds all lights, merge colorMap, normalMap and lightMap to one finalMap and presenting this to the user.

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• Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

  - by JoshReuben

  About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial   Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx   2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand.   Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity.     support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3  skinnable hooks,  remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities  – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees,  Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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• I owe you an explanation

  - by Blueberry Coder

  Welcome to my blog! I am Frédéric Desbiens, a new member of the ADF Product Management team.  I joined Oracle only a few weeks ago. My boss is Grant Ronald, and I have the privilege to work in the same team as Susan Duncan, Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger and Chris Muir. I share with them a passion for all things Java and ADF. With this blog, I hope to help you be more successful with our products – whether you are a customer or a partner. You may have heard of me before. Maybe you have my book in your bookshelf; or maybe we met at a conference. I went to JavaOne, ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle OpenWorld in the past, when I worked for a major consulting firm. I will spare you all the details of my career; you can have a look at my LinkedIn profile if you are curious about my past.  Usually, my posts will be of a technical nature, and will focus on Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper. SOA and portals have always been two topics of interest for me, however, and I will write about them. Over time, you will probably get acquainted with my « strategic » side as well. I devour history books, and always had a tendency to look at the big picture. I will probably not resist to the temptation of mixing IT and history, but this will be occasional, I promise!  At this point, I owe you an explanation about the title of the blog. I am French-Canadian, and wanted to evoke my roots in an obvious yet unobtrusive way. I was born in Chicoutimi, which is one of the main cities found in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. Traditionally, a large part of the wild blueberry production of the province of Québec come from there. A common nickname for the inhabitants is thus Les Bleuets, « The Blueberries » in English. I hope to see you around. You can also follow me on Twitter under  @BlueberryCoder.

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• Should I go back to college and graduate with a poor GPA or try to jump into an entry-level development position? [closed]

  - by jshin47

  I once attended a top-10 American university but I am currently not in school for several different reasons. Chief among them is that I did very poorly two semesters and even failed one of them (got two F's) which put me in automatic suspension. My major is not CS but math. I am in a pickle at the moment. After I was suspended I got a job at a niche IT company in the area. I am employed as something of an IT generalist; my primary responsibilities are Windows systems administration/networking but I also do some Android, iOS, and .NET development. I have released a few apps to the app store under my name and my company's name, and we have done work for a few big clients. I started working at my job about 1.5 years ago and I am somewhat happily employed but I do not see it as a long-term fit because it is a small company with little opportunity to advance. I would like to move out to California and particularly to the Bay Area to get a job at a more reputable or exciting company, even at a lower rate of pay, but I am not sure if I should do that or try to go back to school. If I went back to school, it would take 1-1.5 years to graduate and some $. Best case scenario I would graduate with a 2.9 or 3.0 GPA. It is a top-10 school, but that's a crappy GPA. If I do not go back to school, I will be a field where most people have degrees, without a degree. If anything goes wrong I could be really screwed as I feel I will get no respect without a degree. On the other hand I really would like to get started in the field and get more serious about developing good development practices, learning new languages/frameworks, and working with people who know a lot more than I so I can learn and grow as a developer and eventually do my own thing. Basically, I am wondering: Should I just go back to school? How much does the bad GPA / good school reputation weigh in? What about the fact that I am a Math major and not a CS major (have never taken a CS course)? Does my skill set as something of a generalist bode well for me finding work at a start up in the Bay Area? If not (2), should I hunker down and focus on producing a really good (or a few medicore) iOS apps? Android apps? etc... How would you look at someone who did great in HS, kind of goofed off in college and eventually quit, and got into development? Thanks for any thoughts or input.

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• 4.8M wasn't enough so we went for 5.055M tpmc with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel r2 :-)

  - by wcoekaer

  We released a new set of benchmarks today. One is an updated tpc-c from a few months ago where we had just over 4.8M tpmc at $0.98 and we just updated it to go to 5.05M and $0.89. The other one is related to Java Middleware performance. You can find the press release here. Now, I don't want to talk about the actual relevance of the benchmark numbers, as I am not in the benchmark team. I want to talk about why these numbers and these efforts, unrelated to what they mean to your workload, matter to customers. The actual benchmark effort is a very big, long, expensive undertaking where many groups work together as a big virtual team. Having the virtual team be within a single company of course helps tremendously... We already start with a very big server setup with tons of storage, many disks, lots of ram, lots of cpu's, cores, threads, large database setups. Getting the whole setup going to start tuning, by itself, is no easy task, but then the real fun starts with tuning the system for optimal performance -and- stability. A benchmark is not just revving an engine at high rpm, it's actually hitting the circuit. The tests require long runs, require surviving availability tests, such as surviving crashes -and- recovery under load. In the TPC-C example, the x4800 system had 4TB ram, 160 threads (8 sockets, hyperthreaded, 10 cores/socket), tons of storage attached, tons of luns visible to the OS. flash storage, non flash storage... many things at high scale that all have to be perfectly synchronized. During this process, we find bugs, we fix bugs, we find performance issues, we fix performance issues, we find interesting potential features to investigate for the future, we start new development projects for future releases and all this goes back into the products. As more and more customers, for Oracle Linux, are running larger and larger, faster and faster, more mission critical, higher available databases..., these things are just absolutely critical. Unrelated to what anyone's specific opinion is about tpc-c or tpc-h or specjenterprise etc, there is a ton of effort that the customer benefits from. All this work makes Oracle Linux and/or Oracle Solaris better platforms. Whether it's faster, more stable, more scalable, more resilient. It helps. Another point that I always like to re-iterate around UEK and UEK2 : we have our kernel source git repository online. Complete changelog of the mainline kernel, and our changes, easy to pull, easy to dissect, easy to know what went in when, why and where. No need to go log into a website and manually click through pages to hopefully discover changes or patches. No need to untar 2 tar balls and run a diff.

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• System freezes while not in use, how do I fix this?

  - by PHLAK

  Bare with me, the following is a bit winded. I have Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop 64-bit installed on my laptop and up until a few weeks ago it has been running great. Then one day, while I was not using the laptop it froze. I was logged in as my user but had locked the screen locked and closed the lid. I didn't notice that it had frozen until I opened the lid and wiggled the mouse to try and log in. The screen remained black and I got no response. I immediately tried Alt + F2, F3, F4, etc. but got no response. The only thing I could do was hold the power button to power off the machine. The freezing has happened as quickly as within 10-20 minutes of the system being logged off and lid closed and as long as 4-6 hours. My machine is NOT configured to go into standby when plugged in and this has happened both on AC power and battery. Troubleshooting I have performed: I uninstalled programs I knew that I had installed between when it was working fine and having problems. Those programs were CrashPlan, Shutter and Conky. After uninstalling ALL of these programs the freezing still occurs. Next, I decided to SSH into the machine from my desktop and leave an htop and tail of the syslog running. Here are screenshots of the last thing shown on both when the system froze: htop, syslog Here is a dump of my syslog after another freeze. The freeze happened at 9:14 and I didn't notice it until about 10 minutes later and rebooted, hence the 10 minute gap from 9:14 to 9:24. In the above syslog dump I noticed a lot of NVRM: os_raise_smp_barrier(), invalid context! and upon investigating that message learned it was from the proprietary Nvidia driver I had installed. Thinking this could be part of the problem I uninstalled the Nvidia driver and reverted to using the Nouveau driver. The computer still froze after a few hours. Lastly, thinking the problem could be caused by overheating I used compressed air to blow out any dust in the CPU vents and all other openings on the laptop. None of the above troubleshooting has helped and the freezing still occurs. What other steps can I take to troubleshoot and/or fix this problem? Note: Yesterday X started to eat up a lot of CPU power and eventually froze my system while I was forwarding an X session over SSH (from another PC to my laptop). I'm unsure if this is related or not as it doesn't match any of the symptoms of the problem above. Aside from this, the system has never frozen while in use, even under heavy load. EDIT: I just ran Memtest86+ and it made it through two passes without any errors. Just eliminating possible causes here.

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001.5 (a review of City Under The Sand)

  - by Chris Williams

  City Under The Sand - a review I'm moderately familiar with the Dark Sun setting. I've read the other Dark Sun novels, ages ago and I recently started running a D&D 4.0 campaign in the Dark Sun world, so I picked up this book to help re-familiarize myself with the setting. Overall, it did accomplish that, in a limited way. The book takes place in Nibenay and a neighboring expanse of desert that includes a formerly buried city, a small town and a bandit outpost. The book does a more interesting job of describing Nibenese politics and the court of the ruling Sorcerer King, his templars and the expected jockeying for position that occurs between the Templar Wives. There is a fair amount of combat, which was interesting and fairly well detailed. The ensemble cast is introduced and eventually brought together over the first few chapters. Not a lot of backstory on most of the characters, but you get a feel for them fairly quickly. The storyline was somewhat predictable after the first third of the book. Some of the reviews on Amazon complain about the 2-dimensional characterizations, and yes there were some... but it's easy to ignore because there is a lot going on in the book... several interwoven plotlines that all eventually converge. Where the book falls short... First, it appears to have been edited by a 4th grader who knows how to use spellcheck but lacks the attention to detail to notice the frequent occurence of incorrect words that often don't make sense or change the context of the entire sentence. It happened just enough to be distracting, and honestly I expect better from WOTC. Second, there is a lot of buildup to the end of the story... the big fight, the confrontation between good and evil, etc... which is handled in just a few pages and then the story basically just ends. Kind of a letdown, honestly. There wasn't a big finish, and it wasn't a cliffhanger, it just wraps up neatly and ends. It felt pretty rushed. Overall, aside from the very end, I enjoyed it. I really liked the insight into that region of Athas and it gave me some good ideas for fleshing out my own campaign. In that sense, the book served its purpose for me. If you're looking for a light read (got a 5-6 hour flight somewhere?) or you want to learn more about the Dark Sun setting, then I'd recommend this book.

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• One Year Oracle SocialChat - The Movie

  - by mprove

  Tweet | Like | Watch on Vimeo You’ve just watched – hopefully – my first short movie. Thank you! Here is a bit of the back stage story. About 6 weeks ago colleagues from SNBC (Social Network and Business Collaboration) announced a Social Use Case Competition. It was expected to submit a video of 2 to 5 minutes duration on the Social Enterprise (our internal phrase for Enterprise 2.0). Hmm – I had a few vague ideas, but no script – no actors – no experience in film making. Really the best conditions to try something! I chose our weekly SocialChats as my main topic. But if you don’t do Danish Dogma cinema, you still need a script. Hence I played around with the SocialChat’s archive, and all of a sudden a script and even the actors appeared in front of me. The words that you have just seen are weekly topics. Slightly abridged and rearranged to form a story. Exciting, next phase. How to get it on digital celluloid? I have to confess I am still impressed by epic. (Keep in mind, epic was done in 2004.) And my actors – words – call for a typographic style already. The main part was done over a weekend with Apple Keynote. And I even found a wonderful matching soundtrack among my albums: Didge Goes World by Delago. I picked parts of Second Day and Seventh Day. Literally, the rhythm was set, and I "just" had to complete the movie. Tools used – apart from trial and error: Keynote, Pixelmator, GarageBand, iMovie. Finally I want to mention that I am extremely thankful to BSC Music for granting permissions to use the tracks for this short film! Without this sound it would have been just an ordinary slide show. – Internal note: The next SocialChat is on Death by PowerPoint vs. Presentation Zen. CU this Friday 3pm Greenwich / 7am Pacific.

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• Alfa AWUS036H USB wireless adapter not recognized

  - by GFiasco

  The Alfa AWUS036H USB wireless adapter will not be recognized by my netbook (Ubuntu 14.04, Asus X201E). As I understand it, the drivers should already be built in to this version of Linux, but I tried a make/make install of the latest Realtek drivers (as mentioned on How do I install drivers for the Alfa AWUS036H USB wireless adapter?) and it didn't work. I then followed the advice of this thread (ALFA AWUS036NH driver) and did a make/make install of the most up-to-date backport of the drivers, but that didn't work. At this point I tried a series of commands from this thread (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2187780) in an attempt to identify the problem, but at no point could I get the laptop to ever recognize the USB adapter. I have also troubleshot the USB cable itself, tried both the USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports on the laptop, have never received an error message regarding a need to update the firmware, and have seemingly successfully installed all manner of variation of Realtek drivers which were supposed to make the adapter work. (I also tried to delete/clean up after each install, in the hope I wasn't making things worse.) Not sure what I should do next. Please let me know if I need to post any more information. Thanks very much for your help. EDIT: Before inserting Alpha USB adapter: :~$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:570c Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Bus 001 Device 026: ID 13d3:3393 IMC Networks Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03f0:3112 Hewlett-Packard Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub After inserting Alpha USB adapter (USB 3.0 port, no change): :~$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:570c Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Bus 001 Device 026: ID 13d3:3393 IMC Networks Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03f0:3112 Hewlett-Packard Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Ran tail -f /var/log/syslog, inserted device, no recognition (last entry is dated 16:17:01, so an hour ago). Going to check on an Ubuntu 14.04 laptop and Windows XP desktop. I'll update after. Thanks for your help to this point.

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• My co-worker has not been doing such a good job for the past decade. What do I do? [closed]

  - by stijn

  Possible Duplicate: How do I approach a coworker about his or her code quality? I started working with him almost a decade ago and back then I had never really programmed before, being a young hardware engineer. Right now however I have made quite some progress in all areas being part of software design and i am much, much more skilled than my co-worker who is 15 years older and has been programming more than twice as long. He is super nice and definitely smart enough, but lately his lack of skill and performance are starting to drag me down because we're more and more working on the same codebase. And soon we are going to do a quite ambitious start from scratch creating a whole new hard/software system. I feel it is time to address all issues now, but i do not know how to start. Here are some of the things that I would like to see him improve on: no consistent usage of style, spaces nor tabs (eg if(something ) a =b ) adds newlines around pieces of code to make it easier to read, then commits those with messages like 'no changes made' overall commit messages are useless and so are most of the comments, if there are any (eg 'remove solves for bug Rik' if Rik reported a bug). There is no function/class documentation. lots of spelling errors, in both English and native language, which sometimes are mixed 6/7/8 level deep deep nesting is no exception, a lot of functions start with one level already like if(ptr!=Null){ even when ptr is the result of allocation via new in the constructor numerous source files have over 10k lines of those lines, a major part is simply a result of copy-pasting functionality instead of using a function. This includes copying comments so we end up with 50 occurrences of var=NULL; //TODO TEST this!!!!!!! another part is hundreds of lines of dead code knows what versioning does, yet comments out old code and places new code underneath it when making changes coding skills are below par, especially for the type of rather high precision applications we do. Yet somehow, after a lot of trying and testing, stuff starts to work. But then breaks again some time later because every change casues a waterfall effect. violates every single item in the C++ FAQ lite, practices every bad practice I can think of still doesn't know how to properly use the debugger, but spends hours inspecting messy logfiles in notepad on a tiny laptop screen. Does not make any adjustments to the settings of the software he uses. Never uses keyboard shortcuts. does not seem to progress or learn new things at all. Work rather slow, mostly due to the lack of planning and incorrect usage of tools. How does one deal with this? For starters, how do I make him aware of all these problems? Should I tell the staff about it? And the next step, how to get him to learn new things and adopt another way of working?

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• 5 ways to stop code thrashing&hellip;

  - by MarkPearl

  A few days ago I was programming on a personal project and hit a roadblock. I was applying the MVVM pattern and for some reason my view model was not updating the view when the state changed??? I had applied this pattern many times before and had never had this problem. It just didn’t make sense. So what did I do… I did what anyone would have done in my situation and looked to pass the blame to someone or something else. I tried to blame one of the inherited base classes, but it looked fine, then to Visual Studio, but it seemed to be fine and eventually to any random segment of code I came across. My elementary problem had now mushroomed into one that had lost any logical basis and I was in thrashing mode! So what to do when you begin to thrash? 1) Do a general code cleanup – Now there is a difference between cleaning code and changing code . When you thrash you change code and you want to avoid this. What you really want to do is things like rename variables to have better meaning and go over your comments. 2) Do a proof of concept – if cleaning code doesn’t help. The  you want to isolate the problem and identify the key concepts. When you isolate code you ideally want it to be in a totally separate project with as little complexity as possible. Make the building blocks and try and replicate the functionality that you are getting in your current application. 3) Phone a friend – I have found speaking to someone else about the problem generally helps me solve any thrashing issues I am having. Usually they don’t even have to say anything to solve the problem, just you talking them through the problem helps you get clarity of mind. 4) Let the dust settle – Sometimes time is the best solution. I have had a few problems that no matter who I discussed them with and no matter how much code cleaning I had done I just couldn’t seem to fix it. My brain just seemed to be going in circles. A good nights rest has always helped and often just the break away from the problem has helped me find a solution. 5) Stack overflow it – So similar to phone a friend. I am really surprised to see what a melting pot stack overflow has been and what a help it has been in solving technology specific problems. Just be considerate to those using the site and explain clearly exactly what problem you are having and the technologies you are using or else you will probably not get any useful help…

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• Should a server "be lenient" in what it accepts and "discard faulty input silently"?

  - by romkyns

  I was under the impression that by now everyone agrees this maxim was a mistake. But I recently saw this answer which has a "be lenient" comment upvoted 137 times (as of today). In my opinion, the leniency in what browsers accept was the direct cause of the utter mess that HTML and some other web standards were a few years ago, and have only recently begun to properly crystallize out of that mess. The way I see it, being lenient in what you accept will lead to this. The second part of the maxim is "discard faulty input silently, without returning an error message unless this is required by the specification", and this feels borderline offensive. Any programmer who has banged their head on the wall when something fails silently will know what I mean. So, am I completely wrong about this? Should my program be lenient in what it accepts and swallow errors silently? Or am I mis-interpreting what this is supposed to mean? The original question said "program", and I take everyone's point about that. It can make sense for programs to be lenient. What I really meant, however, is APIs: interfaces exposed to other programs, rather than people. HTTP is an example. The protocol is an interface that only other programs use. People never directly provide the dates that go into headers like "If-Modified-Since". So, the question is: should the server implementing a standard be lenient and allow dates in several other formats, in addition to the one that's actually required by the standard? I believe the "be lenient" is supposed to apply to this situation, rather than human interfaces. If the server is lenient, it might seem like an overall improvement, but I think in practice it only leads to client implementations that end up relying on the leniency and thus failing to work with another server that's lenient in slightly different ways. So, should a server exposing some API be lenient or is that a very bad idea? Now onto lenient handling of user input. Consider YouTrack (a bug tracking software). It uses a language for text entry that is reminiscent of Markdown. Except that it's "lenient". For example, writing - foo - bar - baz is not a documented way of creating a bulleted list, and yet it worked. Consequently, it ended up being used a lot throughout our internal bugtracker. Next version comes out, and this lenient feature starts working slightly differently, breaking a bunch of lists that (mis)used this (non)feature. The documented way to create bulleted lists still works, of course. So, should my software be lenient in what user inputs it accepts?

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• Failed to start up after upgrading software

  - by Landy

  I asked this question in SuperUser one hour ago, then I know this community so I moved the question here... I've been running Ubuntu 10.10 in a physical x86-64 machine. Today Update Manager reminded me that there are some updates to install and I confirmed the action. I should had read the update list but I didn't. I can only remember there is an update about cups. After the upgrading, Update Manager requires a restart and I confirmed too. But after the restart, the computer can't start up. There are errors in the console. Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ... done. Begin: Mounting root file system ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... done. [xxx]usb 1-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3 [xxx]usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2 [xxx]hub 2-1:1.0: USB hub found [xxx]hub 2-1:1.0: 4 ports detected [xxx]usb 2-1.1: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3 Gave up waiting for root device. Common probles: - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline) - Check rootdelay=(did the system wait long enough) - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?) - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev) FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-22-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-22-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory ALERT! /dev/sda1 does not exist. Dropping to a shell! BusyBox v1.15.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.15.3-1ubuntu5) built-in shell(ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands. (initramfs)[cursor is here] At the moment, I can't input anything in the console. The keyboard doesn't work at all. What's wrong? How can I check boot args or "root=" as suggested? How can I fix this issue? Thanks. =============== PS1: the /dev/sda1 is type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev) PS2: the /dev/sda1 can be mounted and accessed successfully under SUSE 11 SP1 x64. PS3: From this link, I think the keyboard doesn't work because the USB driver is not loaded at that time.

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• What kind of position matches my skills, experience and interests? [closed]

  - by Ryan

  I work in a large firm and my current job covers a variety of different duties. Due to several factors I am seriously considering finding a new job (hours, pay-cut, limited career growth). I have worked for the company nearly 4 years and almost 2 years ago I transitioned into more of a business analyst role (previously I was working in a client facing role for our audit group). In this role I have overseen all aspects of the development of a large scale re-platforming of our firm's key tool in analyzing investment portfolios. I gathered requirements, wrote specs, designed the UI and functionality, worked closely with developers (onshore and offshore) to see to it the implementation was correct, managed schedules and was the lead tester. This is a large scale system used by thousands of people around the world. I've also written Excel macros, reports in SQL, given trainings, written technical manuals, interfaced with senior managers and partners, etc. I've been on a couple interviews sporadically, most of which were for positions aimed at higher management consulting type positions, dealing with strategy, overall process management, project management, etc. What really interests me is the technical stuff and overseeing a project from beginning to end (although I would rather not have to do so many of the tasks on my own). I genuinely like a lot of what I do, but the company culture and attitude towards overworking people combined with my recent pay-cut (my overtime was cut due to a promotion to a higher level) has lead me to want to seek work elsewhere. The problem is - what type of work could I realistically do? I feel like traditional business analysis is too much business and not enough tech stuff, and I've really taken a shine lately to beefing up my programming abilities and creating small programs to automate things around work. I also feel that because my actual years of experience as a business analyst (figure 1.5 years realistically) puts me at a junior level doing a lot of grunt requirements gathering, when the work that I have been doing with my current company is more in line with what a Program Manager does (depending on your definition I guess). So in reality, when I'm job hunting I get a bit perplexed because I feel like the traditional BA stuff wouldn't really suit me, and even if it did it's usually something along the lines of 5-10 years experience for the type of work that is similar to what I've done (and I've also found most BA jobs to be contract only which at the moment I'm not too keen on). Program Manager is something that interests me, but again I feel like the experience is lacking because that's a much more senior position. Am I in some kind of career no-man's land? Any idea what would best suit me given my experience and abilities, as well as my interests? I plan to keep learning programming on the side, but don't expect to get a job being a straight programmer given my relative inexperience with programming.

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• Goodbye, Spreadsheets and Hello Modern ERP

  - by Christine Randle

  By: Steve Cox, Vice President, Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies     Signs of the resurging economy continue to sprout, with green shoots rising across different sectors and industries. With the economy on the rebound, businesses are increasing their investment in technology to keep up with growth and evolving demands; as proof, Gartner recently increased its worldwide IT spending forecast for 2012 to $3.6 trillion, anticipating a 3 percent increase from 2011 spending.   One of the segments most reliant on technology to catapult growth is midsize companies – established businesses leveraging every competitive efficiency and advantage to compete with much larger enterprises. We find that to compete against the big guys, they need to create an internal technology infrastructure to fuel that growth. Goodbye, spreadsheets and hello modern ERP.   While many businesses postponed upgrading or replacing financial and HR management systems during the recession, now some have started dusting off RFPs and revisiting technology options. Years ago, midsize organizations used spreadsheet-based systems and processes to manage employees, customers, partners, products and revenue. We’ve found that as companies scale up, they are apt to avoid heavily customizing their existing systems, and instead are more prone to standardize on a modern, enterprise-class ERP system.   Modern ERP platforms enable growing companies to immediately address the most pressing challenges – accounting, talent management, customer retention, et. al. Midsize companies implement these systems and processes to help them earn more, go public or expand globally.   And today, choice is a primary factor when selecting an ERP solution. Businesses have more deployment options now than ever before, depending on their unique structures and needs. Whether the preference is on demand, cloud, hosted or on premise, a modular, scalable deployment is available to meet the need.   With modern ERP systems, business that once struggled to do more with fewer resources have access to the same quality tools as larger competitors. By adopting top tier ERP systems tailored to individual business needs, midsize companies can support business operations while creating an enterprise system that seamlessly scales up to fuel future growth. Meaning that the ERP decision that your company makes today, will have legs to serve your business for years to come.

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• Loading another domain's content in a modal iframe - acceptable?

  - by user568458

  Is it okay to load another page in an iframe in a modal pop-up window - in terms of legal and ethical standards around displaying 3rd party content? I remember a few years ago there was controversy and a debate about whether it was okay to load another domain's page content on your domain in a full-width iframe, with your site providing a masthead with controls for favouriting, linking etc (e.g. like StumbleUpon). I seem to recall that the consensus was, that it was okay so long as you were clearly in no way claiming ownership of the 3rd party content or attempting to modify the content and so long as there was a 'go to site' button or equivalent; and that sites could ask you to exclude them, but generally speaking, it's an acceptable practice. How acceptable would it be considered to be to load another site's page within a modal (lightbox-like) popup box (following all the above principles: clear attribution and a prominent button that kills the iframe and gives them the 3rd party original)? My expectation would be that it would follow the same principles, and be acceptable so long as these conditions were met. Note that I'm asking about the likely legitimate responses of the 3rd party sites and possible legal position, not about usability or UX. I'm aware that this should never ever ever ever ever be the standard way external links are loaded, and that 99% of the time linking to external content like this would be terrible for usability. My specific use case is one of those 1% of cases where loading a separate page in this tab actually wouldn't be the expected behaviour of a link: an interactive data visualisation tool that also acts as a 'browser' of external content (science papers underlying the data it navigates). All other links within the interactive will change something while staying on the same page. If the user clicked one of these external links by mistake (as people often do, even when they are clearly, noisily labelled) and then had to back-button back, they would lose their fine-grained position in the interactive tool (jquery bbq hashchanges being not appropriate for all elements of the tool). New window/tab will simply open the target page on the 3rd party domain. Opening a new window/tab would also be an alternative option (and has its own disadvantages) - my question is, whether this is an alternative that could be considered (in terms of acceptable practice around intellectual property etc), irrespective of which option is best for UX: which is something we'll decide the proper way, based on actual UX testing.

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• Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon support

  - by Robottinosino

  I am considering selling my Mac to get money towards a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 because what I really want to do is to be running an Ubuntu system all the time. Is this machine completely supported in Ubuntu, with no tiny little feature missing just because I am "going Linux"? Optional user story section, skip to the question below if you don't have time: I have a friend who bought a "works on Ubuntu" system a year ago and has hated the fact ever since: battery lasts less than if he boots in Windows (which he despises) and he ascribes that to "no good OS/harware integration and support for advanced chipset power management features", odd behaviour on suspend/resume/hibernate (says: "when it works 90% of the time and the other 10% it makes you lose your work is as good as broken - 90% is the same as 0% he says), some occasional graphics card glitches he can perfectly well live with and has almost grown affectionate to, and finally, and that is what would make him undo his choice if he could, bad "input device drivers". He says: trackpoint and trackpad just "feel different", "so much better" on Windows and that was impossible to know from the website brochure. That story makes me very doubtful... but I want to abandon this "walled garden" of prison that is my Mac and go Ubuntu all the way, no doubt about that! My dilemma at this time is just: "I don't want to live with those eternal frustrations for sure"! Here's a directly answerable phrasing of my question: Is the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 supported on Ubuntu? Yes/no, which version? Which hardware features are not supported? Provide a list Optionally: sort the list in descending order of frustration from your experience Optionally: mention if there are acceptable workarounds to the "out-of-the-box" condition described in the earlier points and whether this ameliorates frustration at least to "tolerable" levels Comment: the Ubuntu hardware certification page is so not-for-end-users it's unreal. Whoa. What would make it end-user friendly is: Link to "buy here and you'll be just fine, this is the right configuration for you, it'll work as long as you press BUY on that page and don't browse further" Remove mentions of may and might not work. Just tell it straight: press buy here and you will get a working system with the exception of A, B, C (so that I can decide whether the philosophical "freedom pleasure" I get from escaping an Apple world is enough to off-balance the loss, for instance, of Bluetooth capabilities (something that I of course use on my Mac) but "could" lose to use free (as in freedom) software The certification page fails to dispel doubts in me as an end-user. I don't feel "eased into Ubuntu", I feel "partially informed".

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• The Softer Side of Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  It’s election season in the U.S., and you know what that means. It means I stop by the recycling bin in my garage before entering the house with the contents of my mailbox. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my usual direct mail purge when I came across a piece from The Container Store®. This piece would have gone straight to the recycling bin, but the title stopped me: Learn what WE STAND FOR! Under full disclaimer, I’m probably a “frequent flier” at The Container Store. One can never be too organized! Now, back to the direct mail piece. I opened it to discover that The Container Store has taken their customer experience beyond “a shopping experience that makes you smile” to giving customers more insight and transparency into how they feel about their employees, the vendors they partner with, and the communities they live in. The direct mail piece included several employees showcasing a skill, hobby or talent with their photo and a personal note that used one word to describe what these employees believe The Container Store stands for. I do not recall the last time I read through an entire piece of direct mail. But this time, I pored over all the comments and photos.  Summer, a salesperson, believes that one word is PASSION. Thomas in distribution center inventory systems chooses the word ACTION. The list goes on to include MATCHLESS, FUN, FAMILY, LOVE, and EMPOWERMENT. The Container Store is running a contest asking you to tell them what nonprofit organization you stand for. Anyone can submit their favorite nonprofit to win cash, products and services from The Container Store. Don’t forget about the softer side of customer experience. With many organizations working feverishly to transform their business into being more customer-centric, it’s easy to get caught up in processes and technology. Focusing on people and social responsibility often falls behind and becomes a lower priority. Keeping people and social responsibility at the forefront is crucial. Your customers will use your processes and technology, but they will see or hear your people and feel their passion. The latter is what they will remember most about your brand. I’m sure there are many other great examples of the softer side of customer experience. Please share your examples in the comments section.

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