Search Results

Search found 4072 results on 163 pages for 'social analytics'.

Page 153/163 | < Previous Page | 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 | Next Page >

CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, Please recommendation for further education of the former performing art manager seeking career in IT industries? [on hold]

- by Baek Seungjoo

IT specialists there J Thank you very much for your collective efforts here, and I got huge help reading your professional comments and advices on each questions I have searched so far! This time, I would like to ask for your practical advices or recommendation on what I am struggling on at this moment. I am currently seeking higher education for my career transition from performing art manager and director to “IT software and/or service development and management specialist”. However, as this field is quite new to me, and there are lots of different work positions, I have no idea which grad major I better pursue in order to get qualification. Of course I know this question could sounds wired as it is kind of personal choice. But my lack of understanding on how IT software companies work in general, your practical and experience-based advice will be great help to me, who spent more than two months of self-research on net. OK. Before my question, here is my plan and history, which are quite different from those currently in IT industry I think… 1) Target Firstly, get career transition into IT service or products companies and get experiences. Eventually, pursue IT entrepreneurship in combination with my arts and cultural production and business expertise. 2) Background Career: performing arts director and manager in theatre-based scale opera and musical Art education in youth BA in literature and Chinese studies (Art & Humanities) MA in Cultural & Creative Industries (Art & Humanities) – dissertation with focus on digital prosumption and the lived experience of the prosumer. (a qualitative research on the agents in the digital world) 2) Personally Huge interest in IT hardware and software, and their trend. Skills to build up, repair, tune PCs -of course this is no more than personal hobby, but shows my interests in this field. 4) Problem Encounter a question “So, what do you think you can contribute practically in this position”. This question turn me down everytime I go through job interviews, and I decided more education in the relevant area. Here are my questions. 1) In terms of work positions in IT software companies, I wonder if I can put the comparison of what “Artists” is to “Arts Manager or Director” is what “Developer” is to “Product Manager”. (Of course, this stereotypical division of Artist-Art Manager is out of sense because the domain overlaps to some extent, and is blurring at least in my field, and they are in different contexts, but just speaking easily.) Normally, artist comes with special arts educations, and they live in their own world of artistic inspiration and creation, and they feel alive in practice and on stages. Meanwhile, from the point of staging and managing productions, the role of art manager is critical as well. Our role cares how the production appeals to the audience in effective way, how to make profit and future sustainable management through that, how to set up future strategy in consideration of the external conditions such as political and social circumstances, audience trend and level, other production trends from on-going and historical perspectives, how and what the production make voice to the society from political, economic, humanitarian stances. So, we need keen eyes on economic, political, and societal environment, have to understand human-being and their desires, must know how to make presentation and attract investors, must have sense in managing and fighting over the limited financial resource, how to extend networking and so on. It is common that the two agents create productions in collaboration (normally not in that ideal way but in conflict and fight though J ). So, we need to know each other’s expertise to some extent, for better production. What are the work positions in IT software industries equivalent to the role of “art manager” in performing arts? From my view, considering developers come with special education in the world of computer science, software engineering, or others (self-education sometimes), and they express themselves with the arts of coding, computer languages on the black screen, and make sort of their artistic production online to the audience, I guess there might be someone who collaborate with developers in creating, managing, and launching IT services or products. 2) Which education among CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, is needed for those seeking such work position? Especially for person like me. (At this moment, Information Science has the highest possibility to get in, since I lack Calculus and Math in undergrad educaiton. But please let me know irrespective of this concern, I think there are ways to back it up if CS or SE education needed in my case) 3) Which field between Information Science and HCI can be more practical background regarding job hungting? And which of them have more demands in job market? AS I checked, HCI is more close to CS than IS in its focus of study area. Thank you very much for your patience reading such a long inquiry, and I appreciate to your efforts in advance. Have a nice day in this beautiful summer.

Read the article
PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

- by Bill Graziano

The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model. (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time. I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

Read the article
VNIC - New feature of AK8 - Working with VNICs

- by Steve Tunstall

One of the important new features of the AK8 code is the ability to use multiple IP addresses on the same physical network port. This feature is called VNICs, or Virtual NICs. This allows us to no longer "burn" a whole port in a cluster when one cluster peer owns a network port. Traditionally, we have had to leave Net0 empty on controller 2, because it was used for managing controller 1. Vise-versa for Net1 on Controller 1. Then, if you have data going over 10GigE ports, you probably only had half of your ports running at any given time, and the partner 10GigE port on the other controller just sat there, doing nothing, unless the first controller went down. What a waste. Those days are over. I want to thank and give a big shout-out to our good partner, OnX Enterprise Solutions, for allowing me to come into their lab and play around with their 7320 to do this demo. They let me make a big mess of their lab for the day as I played around with VNICs. If you're looking for a partner who knows Oracle well and can also piece together a solution from multiple vendors to get you what you need, OnX is a good choice. If you would like to talk to your local OnX rep, you can contact Scott Gill at [email protected] and he can point you in the right direction for your area. Here we go: Here is what your Datalinks window looks like BEFORE you upgrade to AK8. Here's what the same screen looks like after you upgrade. See the new box? So here is my current network setup. I have my 4 physical interfaces setup each with an IP address. If I ping them, no problems. So I can ping 180, 181, 251, and 252. However, if I try to ping 240, it does not work, as the 240 address is not being used by any of these interfaces, right?Let's change that. Here, I'm going to make a new Datalink by clicking the Datalink "Plus sign" button. I will check the VNIC box and tell it to use igb2, even though another interface is already using it. Now, I will create a new Interface, and choose "v_dl2" for it's datalink. My new network screen looks like this. A few things to take note of here. First, when I click the "igb2" device, it only highlights dl2 and int2. It does not highlight v_dl2 or v_int2.I think it should, but OK, it looks like VNICs don't highlight when you click the device. Second, note how the underscore character in v_dl2 and v_int2 do not seem to show on this screen. You can see it plainly if you go in and edit them, but from here it looks like a space instead of an underscore. Just a cosmetic bug, but something to be aware of. Now, if I click the VNIC datalink "v_dl2", on the other hand, it DOES highlight the device it belongs to, as it should. Seen here: Note that it did not, however, highlight int2 with it, even though int2 is connected to igb2. That's because we clicked v_dl2, which int2 has nothing to do with. So I'm OK with that. So let's try pinging 240 now. Of course, it works great. So I now make another VNIC, and call it v_dl3 using igb3, and v_int3 with an address of 241. I then setup three shares, using ports 251, 240, and 241.Remember that IP 251 and 240 both are using the same physical port of igb2, and IP 241 is using port igb3. Next, I copy a folder full of stuff over to all three shares at the same time. I have analytics going so I can see the traffic. My top chart is showing the logical interfaces, and the bottom chart is showing the physical ports.Sure enough, look at the igb2 and vnic1 interfaces. They equal the traffic going over the igb2 physical port on the second chart. VNIC2, on the other hand, gets igb3 all to itself. This would work the same way with 10Gig or Infiniband ports. You can now have multiple IP addresses and even completely different subnets sharing the same physical ports. You may need to make route table entries for that. This allows us to use all of the ports you paid for with no more waste. Very, very cool. One small "bug" I found when doing this. It's really not a bug, it was designed to do this when VNICs were not around. But now that we have NVIC capability, they should probably change this. I've alerted the engineering team about this and they're looking into it, so perhaps it will be fixed in a later code. Here it is. Remember when we made the new VNIC datalink, I specifically said to click on the "Plus Sign" button to create it? I don't always do that. I really like to use the drag-and-drop method to create my datalinks in the network screen.HOWEVER, if you were to do that for building a VNIC, it will mess you up a little. Watch this. Here, I'm dragging igb3 over to make a new datalink. igb3 is already being used by dl3, but I'm going to make this a VNIC, so who cares, right? Well, the ZFSSA does not KNOW you are going to make it a VNIC, now does it? So... it works as designed and REMOVES the igb3 device from the current dl3 datalink in the background. See how it's now missing? At the same time, the dl3 datalink choice is missing from my list of possible VNICs for me to choose from!!!! Hey!!! I wanted to pick dl3. Why isn't it on the list??? Well, it can't be on this list because dl3 no longer has a device associated with it. Bummer for you. When you click cancel, the device is still missing from dl3. The fix is easy. Just edit dl3 by clicking the pencil button, do absolutely nothing, and click "Apply". The device will magically come back. Now, make the VNIC datalink by clicking the "Plus Sign" button. Sure enough, once you check the VNIC box, dl3 is a valid choice. No problem. That's it for now. Have fun with VNICs.

Read the article
What do the participants say about the Open Day in South Africa?

- by Maria Sandu

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On the 26th of September, a group of students who were specifically selected to attend an Open day at Oracle South Africa, joined us at our offices in Woodmead, Johannesburg. The Conference room was filled with inquisitive minds. What we had in store for them was a detailed presentation about Oracle which was delivered by Zuko - Cluster Leader: Tech GB South Africa. The student’s many questions were all answered especially when we started addressing the opportunities we have and detailed information on our Graduate Programme. Our employees then came to talk about their experience. This allowed all the students to have an integrated learning experience. By inviting the students to walk around our Oracle Offices allowed them to see, talk, experience a bit of the culture and ask more questions. Here is some of the feedback from the attendees: Maxwell Moloi: “The open day truly served its purpose and exceeded expectations in the sense that I got to find out more about Oracle and all the different opportunities it has to offer. The fact that Oracle supplies a full solution to a customer and not just part of it and how the company manages to setup professional development for their employees is what entices me to want to join the rapidly growing team of Oracle.” Nqobile Mabaso: “I found the open day to be quite informative and enlightening because coming from a marketing background I could apply the knowledge I got from varsity to the Company I was able to point out what they do as part of their corporate social responsibility (Oracle recently partnered with the department of education to build a school), how Oracle emphasizes on relationship building because they know they sell to people and not companies and how they offer the full stack of solutions which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.” Nondumiso Mvelase: “The Open Day was a wonderful experience for me especially because I have never been part of an Open Day before, so it was absolutely amazing for me. It gave me a good idea of how it is to be part of Oracle. We were served with lovely breakfast and lunch which I enjoyed. I wish the Open Day went on for a whole week. Seeing and hearing from 2013 Graduates, telling us about their experience within Oracle was very inspiring to me. They were encouraging us to work hard if we ever got the opportunity they had. After hearing this from them I will definitely not take it for granted.” Itumeleng Moraka: “Before I walked into the Oracle offices all that was in my mind was databases and cloud storage. I was then surrounded by passionate, enthusiastic and welcoming employees. I came across a positive energy within the multinational company. I realized that Oracle is not a company that operates in survival mode. This may sound idealistic, but they operate in a non-traditional way investing more into innovation, they stay focused on what matters most about where technology is going and at the same time they are not losing sight of how their products make a difference in the world.” For more information on how to be part of the Oracle Graduate Programme please follow us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/CampusAtOracle /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Read the article
UK OUG Conference Highlights and Insights

- by Richard Bingham

As per my preemptive post, this was the first time the annual conference organized by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) was split into two events, one for Oracle Applications and another in December for Oracle Technology. Apps13, as it was branded, was hailed as a success, with over 1000 registered attendees and three days of sessions, exhibition, round-tables and many other types of content. As this poster on their stand illustrates, the UKOUG is a strong community with popular participants from both big and small Oracle partners and customers. The venue was a more intimate setting than previous years also, allowing everyone to casually bump into those they hoped to. It gave a real feeling of an Apps Community. The main themes over the days where CRM and Customer Experience, HCM, and FIN/SCM. This allowed people to attend just one focused day if they wanted. In addition the Apps Transformation stream ran across all three days, offering insights, advice, and details on the newer product solutions like Fusion Applications. Here are some of the key take-aways I got from the conference, specific to my role in Fusion Applications Developer Relations: User Experience continues to be a significant reason for adopting some of the newer application products available, with immediately obvious gains in user productivity and satisfaction reported by customers. Also this doesn't stop with the baked-in UX either, with their Design Patterns proving popular and indeed currently being extended to including things like extending on ADF mobile and customizing the Simplified UI. More on this to come from us soon. The executive sessions emphasized the "it's a journey" phrase, illustrating that modern business applications are powered by technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data and these can be harnessed to help propel your organization forward. Indeed the emphasis is away from the traditional vendor prescribed linear applications road map, and towards plotting a course based on business priorities supported by a broad range of integrated solutions. To help with this several conference sessions demoed the new "Applications Navigator" tool, developed in partnership with OUG members, which offers a visual framework to help organizations plan their Oracle Applications investments around business and technology imperatives. Initial reaction was positive, especially as customers do not need to decipher Oracle's huge product catalog and embeds the best blend of proven and integrated applications solutions. We'll share more on this when it is generally available. Several sessions focused around explanations and interpretation of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, helping highlight the key Oracle Applications messages and directions. With a relative small percentage of conference attendees also at OpenWorld (from a show of hands) this was a popular way to distill the information available down into specific items of interest for the community. Please note the original OpenWorld 2013 content is still available for download but will not remain available forever (via the Oracle website OpenWorld Content Catalog > pick a session > see the PDF download). With the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 the move to develop and deploy on the Fusion Middleware stack becomes a reality for many Oracle Applications customers. This coupled with recent E-Business Suite features such as the Integrated SOA Gateway and the E-Business Suite SDK for Java, illustrates how the gap between the technologies and techniques involved in extending E-Business Suite and Fusion Applications is quickly narrowing. We'll see this merging continue to evolve going forwards. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Applications is actually easier than many customers expected, with a broad selection of both large and medium sized organizations explaining how they added new features to their existing Oracle Applications portfolios. New functionality available from Fusion HCM and CX are popular extensions that do not have to disrupt those core business services. Coexistence is the buzzword here, and the available integration is also simpler than many expected, commonly involving an initial setup data load, then regularly incremental synchronizations, often without a need for real-time constant communication between systems. With much of this pre-built already the implementation process is also quite rapid. With most people dressed in suits, we wanted to get the conversations going without the traditional english reserve, so we decided to make ourselves a bit more obvious, as the photo below shows. This seemed to be quite successful and helped those interested identify and approach us. Keep a look out for similar again. In fact if you're in the UK there is an "Apps Transformation Day" planned by the UKOUG for the 19th March 2014, with more details to follow. Again something we'll be sure to participate in. I am hoping to attend the next half of the UKOUG annual conference, Tech13, that focuses more on Oracle technology and where there is more likely to be larger attendance of those interested in the lower-level aspects of applications customization and development. If you're going, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

Read the article
Right-Time Retail Part 1

- by David Dorf

This is the first in a three-part series. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Revolution Technology enables some amazing feats in retail. I can order flowers for my wife while flying 30,000 feet in the air. I can order my groceries in the subway and have them delivered later that day. I can even see how clothes look on me without setting foot in a store. Who knew that a TV, diamond necklace, or even a car would someday be as easy to purchase as a candy bar? Can technology make a mattress an impulse item? Wake-up and your back is hurting, so you rollover and grab your iPad, then a new mattress is delivered the next day. Behind the scenes the many processes are being choreographed to make the sale happen. This includes moving data between systems with the least amount for friction, which in some cases is near real-time. But real-time isn’t appropriate for all the integrations. Think about what a completely real-time retailer would look like. A consumer grabs toothpaste off the shelf, and all systems are immediately notified so that the backroom clerk comes running out and pushes the consumer aside so he can replace the toothpaste on the shelf. Such a system is not only cost prohibitive, but it’s also very inefficient and ineffectual. Retailers must balance the realities of people, processes, and systems to find the right speed of execution. That’ what “right-time retail” means. Retailers used to sell during the day and count the money and restock at night, but global expansion and the Web have complicated that simplistic viewpoint. Our 24hr society demands not only access but also speed, which constantly pushes the boundaries of our IT systems. In the last twenty years, there have been three major technology advancements that have moved us closer to real-time systems. Networking is the first technology that drove the real-time trend. As systems became connected, it became easier to move data between them. In retail we no longer had to mail the daily business report back to corporate each day as the dial-up modem could transfer the data. That was soon replaced with trickle-polling, when sale transactions were occasionally sent from stores to corporate throughout the day, often through VSAT. Then we got terrestrial networks like DSL and Ethernet that allowed the constant stream of data between stores and corporate. When corporate could see the sales transactions coming from stores, it could better plan for replenishment and promotions. That drove the need for speed into the supply chain and merchandising, but for many years those systems were stymied by the huge volumes of data. Nordstrom has 150 million SKU/Store combinations when planning (RPAS); The Gap generates 110 million price changes during end-of-season (RPM); Argos does 1.78 billion calculations executed each day for replenishment planning (AIP). These areas are now being alleviated by the second technology, storage. The typical laptop disk drive runs at 5,400rpm with PCs stepping up to 7,200rpm and servers hitting 15,000rpm. But the platters can only spin so fast, so to squeeze more performance we’ve had to rely on things like disk striping. Then solid state drives (SSDs) were introduced and prices continue to drop. (Augmenting your harddrive with a SSD is the single best PC upgrade these days.) RAM continues to be expensive, but compressing data in memory has allowed more efficient use. So a few years back, Oracle decided to build a box that incorporated all these advancements to move us closer to real-time. This family of products, often categorized as engineered systems, combines the hardware and software so that they work together to provide better performance. How much better? If Exadata powered a 747, you’d go from New York to Paris in 42 minutes, and it would carry 5,000 passengers. If Exadata powered baseball, games would last only 18 minutes and Boston’s Fenway would hold 370,000 fans. The Exa-family enables processing more data in less time. So with faster networks and storage, that brings us to the third and final ingredient. If we continue to process data in traditional ways, we won’t be able to take advantage of the faster networks and storage. Enter what Harvard calls “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” – the data scientist. New technologies like the Hadoop-powered Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery change the way in which we organize data. These technologies allow us to extract actionable information from raw data at incredible speeds, often ad-hoc. So the foundation to support the real-time enterprise exists, but how does a retailer begin to take advantage? The most visible way is through real-time marketing, but I’ll save that for part 3 and instead begin with improved integrations for the assets you already have in part 2.

Read the article
I'm a contract developer and I think I'm about to get screwed [closed]

- by kagaku

I do contract development on the side. You could say that I'm a contract developer? Considering I've only ever had one client I'd say that's not exactly the truth - more like I took a side job and needed some extra cash. It started out as a "rebuild our website and we'll pay you $10k" type project. Once that was complete (a bit over schedule, but certainly not over budget), the company hired me on as a "long term support" contractor. The contract is to go from March of this year, expiring on December 31st of this year - 10 months. Over which a payment is to be paid on the 30th of each month for a set amount. I've been fulfilling my end of the contract on all points - doing server maintenence, application and database changes, doing huge rush changes and pretty much just going above and beyond. Currently I'm in the middle of development of an iPhone mobile application (PhoneGap based) which is nearing completion (probably 3-4 weeks from submission). It has not been all peaches and flowers though. Each and every month when my paycheck comes due, there always seems to be an issue of sorts. These issues did not occur during the initial project, only during the support contract. The actual contract states that my check should be mailed out on the 30th of the month. I have received my check on time approximately once (on time being about 2-3 days within the 30th). I've received my paycheck as late as the 15th of the next month - over two weeks late. I've put up with it because I need the paycheck. There have been promises and promises of "we'll send it out on time next time! I promise" - only to receive it just as late the next month. When I ask about payment they give me a vibe like "why are you only worried about money?" - unfortunately I don't have the luxury of not worrying about money. The last straw was with my August payment, which should have been mailed on August 30th. I received it on September 12th. The reason for the delay? "USPS is delaying it man! we sent it out on the 1st!" is the reason I got. When I finally got the check in the mail, the postage on the envelope was marked September 10th - the date it was run through the postage machine. I've been outright lied to, at this point. I carry on working, because again - I need a paycheck. I orchestrated the move of our application to a new server, developed a bunch of new changes and continued work on the iPhone app. All told I probably went over my hourly allotment (I'm paid for 40 hours a month, I probably put in at least 50). On Saturday, the 1st, I gave the main contact at the company (a company of 3, by the way - this is not some big corporation) a ring and filled him in on the status of my work for the past two weeks. Unusually I hadn't heard from him since the middle of September. His response was "oh... well, that is nice and uh.. good job. well, we've been talking within the company about things and we've certainly got some decisions ahead of us..." - not verbatim but you get the idea (I hope?). I got out of this conversation that the site is not doing very well (which it's not) and they're considering pulling the plug. Crap, this contract is going to end early - there goes Christmas! Fine, that's alright, no problem. I'll get paid for the last months work and call it a day. Unfortunately I still haven't gotten last months check, and I'm getting dicked around now. "Oh.. we had problems transferring funds, we'll try and mail it out tomorrow" and "I left a VM with the finance guy, but I can't get ahold of him". So I'm getting the feeling I'm not getting paid for all the work I put in for September. This is obviously breach of contract, and I am pissed. Thinking irrationally, I considered changing all their passwords and holding their stuff hostage. Before I think it through (by the way, I am NOT going to do this, realized it would probably get me in trouble), I go and try some passwords for our various accounts. Google Apps? Oh, I'm no longer administrator here. Godaddy? Whoops, invalid password. Disqus? Nope, invalid password here too. Google Adsense / Analytics? Invalid password. Dedicated server account manager? Invalid password. Now, I have the servers root password - I just built the box last week and haven't had a chance to send the guy the root password. Wasn't in a rush, I manage the server and they never touch it. Now all of a sudden all the passwords except this one are changed; the writing is on the wall - I am out. Here's the conundrum. I have the root password, they do not. If I give them this password all the leverage I have is gone, out the door and out of my hands. During this argument of why am I not getting paid the guy sends me an email saying "oh by the way, what's the root username and password to the server?". Considering he knows absolutely nothing, I gave him an "admin" account which really has almost no rights. I still have exclusive access to the server, I just don't know where to go. I can hold their data hostage, but I'm almost positive this is the wrong thing to do. I'd consider it blackmail, regardless of whether or not I have gotten paid yet. I can "break" something on the server and give them the whole "well, if you were paying me I could fix it!" spiel. This works from a "well he's not holding their stuff hostage" point of view, but what stops them from hiring some one else to just fix the issue at hand? For all I know the guys nephew is a "l33t hax0r" and can figure it out for free. I can give in, document as much as I can and take him to small claims court. This is breach of contract, I'm not getting paid. I have a case, right? ???? Does anyone have any experience in this? What can I do? What are my options? I'm broke, I can't afford a lawyer and I can barely afford not getting this paycheck. My wife doesn't work (I work two jobs so she doesn't have to work - we have a 1 year old) and is already looking at getting a part time job to cover the bills. Long term we'll be fine, but this has pissed me off beyond belief! Help me out, I'm about to get screwed.

Read the article
How to Hashtag (Without Being #Annoying)

- by Mike Stiles

The right tool in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. Giving a chimpanzee a chain saw would not be a pretty picture. And putting Twitter hashtags in the hands of social marketers who were never really sure how to use them can be equally unattractive. Boiled down, hashtags are for search and organization of tweets. A notch up from that, they can also be used as part of a marketing strategy. In terms of search, if you’re in the organic apple business, you want anyone who searches “organic” on Twitter to see your posts about your apples. It’s keyword tactics not unlike web site keyword search tactics. So get a clear idea of what keywords are relevant for your tweet. It’s reasonable to include #organic in your tweet. Is it fatal if you don’t hashtag the word? It depends on the person searching. If they search “organic,” your tweet’s going to come up even if you didn’t put the hashtag in front of it. If the searcher enters “#organic,” your tweet needs the hashtag. Err on the side of caution and hashtag it so it comes up no matter how the searcher enters it. You’ll also want to hashtag it for the second big reason people hashtag, organization. You can follow a hashtag. So can the rest of the Twitterverse. If you’re that into organic munchies, you can set up a stream populated only with tweets hashtagged #organic. If you’ve established a hashtag for your brand, like #nobugsprayapples, you (and everyone else) can watch what people are tweeting about your company. So what kind of hashtags should you include? They should be directly related to the core message of your tweet. Ancillary or very loosely-related hashtags = annoying. Hashtagging your brand makes sense. Hashtagging your core area of interest makes sense. Creating a specific event or campaign hashtag you want others to include and spread makes sense (the burden is on you to promote it and get it going). Hashtagging nearly every word in the tweet is highly annoying. Far and away, the majority of hashtagged words in such tweets have no relevance, are not terms that would be searched, and are not terms needed for categorization. It looks desperate and spammy. Two is fine. One is better. And it is possible to tweet with --gasp-- no hashtags! Make your hashtags as short as you can. In fact, if your brand’s name really is #nobugsprayapples, you’re burning up valuable, limited characters and risking the inability of others to retweet with added comments. Also try to narrow your topic hashtag down. You’ll find a lot of relevant users with #organic, but a lot of totally uninterested users with #food. Just as you can join online forums and gain credibility and a reputation by contributing regularly to that forum, you can follow hashtagged topics and gain the same kind of credibility in your area of expertise. Don’t just parachute in for the occasional marketing message. And if you’re constantly retweeting one particular person, stop it. It’s kissing up and it’s obvious. Which brings us to the king of hashtag annoyances, “hashjacking.” This is when you see what terms are hot and include them in your marketing tweet as a hashtag, even though it’s unrelated to your content. Justify it all you want, but #justinbieber has nothing to do with your organic apples. Equally annoying, piggybacking on a popular event’s hashtag to tweet something not connected to the event. You’re only fostering ill will and mistrust toward your account from the people you’ve tricked into seeing your tweet. Lastly, don’t @ mention people just to make sure they see your tweet. If the tweet’s not for them or about them, it’s spammy. What I haven’t covered is use of the hashtag for comedy’s sake. You’ll see this a lot and is a matter of personal taste. No one will search these hashtagged terms or need to categorize then, they’re just there for self-expression and laughs. Twitter is, after all, supposed to be fun. What are some of your biggest Twitter pet peeves? #blogsovernow

Read the article
How do I dig myself out of this DEEP hole? [closed]

- by user74847

I may be a bit bias in the way i word this but any opinions and suggestions are welcome. I should start by saying i have a MSc in CS and a degree in new media +6 years expereince and im probably around a middleweight developer. I started a web development company with my friend from uni a year ago, there was a 4 month gap in the middle where i went miles away work on a big project. Ive since returned and picked up where we left off. A year on though i find im still staying up til 5am and getting up at 9 sometimes 2-3 days without sleep. While i was away i was working 9-5 and struggling to keep up with doing stuff for my clients 8 hours ahead, after work, so things stagnated. We currently have about 12 active projects, with one other part time developer and a full time freelancer who is dealing with one of our major projects. I am solely responsible for concurrently developing 2 big sites similar to gumtree in functionality, at the same time as about 5-6+ small WordPress based 5-10page sites. a lot of the content isnt in yet or the client is delaying so i chop and change project every other day which does my head in. Is it reasonable to expect myself to remember the intricate details of each project when i come back to it a week later? and remember the details of a task which hasnt been written down? my business partner seems to think so. or am i just forgetful? Im particularly bad at estimating timescales which doesnt help, added to that a lot of the technologies im am using are new to me (a magento site took weeks to theme rather than days and was full of bugs, even after 1000's of google searches and hours reading forums) im still trying to learn and find the best CMS for us to use and getting my head around the likes of Bootstrap and jquery, Cpanel / Linux (we just got a blank vps for me to set up with no experience) even installing an SSL certificate caused everyone's mail clients to go down which was more stress for me to sort out. I find the pressure of the workload and timescales and trying to learn this stuff so fast is beginning to turn me against my career path. The fact that i never seem to get anything done really winds up my business partner and iv come to associate him with the stress and pain of the whole situation especially when I get berated or a look that says "oh you retard" when I forget something. Even today i spent hours learning how a particular themeforest theme worked with wordpress and how i could twist it to work for our partiuclar needs, on the surface had done no work, that triggered a 30 minute tirade of anger and stress and questioning what i had done from my business partner. had i taken too long to work on that? shoudl i have done it in 2 hours instead of 6? i told him i would take 2 hours. i was wrong. I feel like im running myself into the ground. My sleeping pattern has got so bad that when im working im half asleep and making mistakes, my eyes are constantly purple underneath, i literally fall asleep at my desk, its affecting my social life too, ive not slept more than lightly for the last year and grind through impossible code puzzles in my half sleep wich keeps me awake, when im already exhausted. plus the work is rushed and buggy when it does get done so drags on into the next project. I also procrastinate quite badly, pacing the livingroom, looking out the window when Im alone for three days straight in the flat and start to get cabin fever which means i do even less work and the negative feedback loop continues. I get told im the only one with the problem when i say that i cant work from home any more, and examples of other freelancers get brought up. an office wouldnt bring any extra cash in to the company but im convinced having that moving more than 2 meters away from my bed to go to "work" would get me working, at the moment i feel guilty like i should be working 24-7. It is important that we do all this work to raise enough cash to get our business to the next level but every month still feels like a struggle to pay the rent (there is about £20K coming in by Jan) and i have to borrow money from friends often to buy food or get a taxi to a meeting, so it is vital the money keeps coming in. (im also 20 mins late for nearly all meetings but thats a different issue) have you experienced anything similar? how can i deal with the issues ive raised? is it realistic to develop 10 sites at once? how can i improve my relationship with my business partner? do you struggle to work at home? how do you deal with that? i think if i dont get my life on track by feb i will seriously consider giving it all up, but that seems like such a waste. any ideas!!? i need help! Thanks.

Read the article
WPF ToggleButton changing image depending on state

- by mack369

I would like to use ToggleButton in following way: There are 5 different images and each of them should be displayed depending on current state: button disabled button enabled, unchecked button enabled, unchecked, pointed by mouse cursor button enabled, checked button enabled, checked, pointed by mouse cursor I've found a simple example with two images on http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/28c36bd2-2ef7-4232-9976-2a0967140e32 , but how to change the image depending on "checked" property? The second question: how can I avoid creating different styles for each button in my application? I'm using about 20 different buttons and each of them has different set of icons. So far I'm using only one icon, below my code. Is it possible to have common code (style and template) and to define the source of images in section where I want to create button (like in section 3 of my code)? <ControlTemplate x:Key="ToggleButtonTemplate" TargetType="{x:Type ToggleButton}"> <Grid> <Border x:Name="ContentBorder" CornerRadius="4" BorderBrush="Transparent" BorderThickness="1" Background="{DynamicResource ButtonOff}"> <ContentPresenter SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" RecognizesAccessKey="True"/> </Border> </Grid> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsPressed" Value="true"> <Setter TargetName="ContentBorder" Property="Background" Value="{DynamicResource ButtonOn}"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="IsChecked" Value="true"> <Setter TargetName="ContentBorder" Property="Background" Value="{DynamicResource ButtonOn}"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="false"> <Setter TargetName="ContentBorder" Property="Background" Value="{DynamicResource ButtonDisabled}"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="{DynamicResource BorderDisabled}"/> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> <Style x:Key="ToggleButtonStyle" TargetType="{x:Type ToggleButton}"> <Setter Property="Width" Value="64" /> <Setter Property="Height" Value="64" /> <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Template" Value="{DynamicResource ToggleButtonTemplate}" /> </Style> <ToggleButton IsChecked="{Binding Path=IsLectorModeEnabled}" Command="{Binding CmdLector}" Style="{DynamicResource ToggleButtonStyle}"> <Image Source="{DynamicResource LectorImage}" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" Stretch="None" /> </ToggleButton>

Read the article
C# and WUAPI: BeginDownload function

- by Laurus Schluep

first things first: I have no experience in object-oriented programming, whatsoever. I created my share of VB scripts and a bit of Java in school, but that's it. So my problem most likely lies there. But nevertheless, for the past few days, I've been trying to get a little application together that allows me to scan for, select and install Windows updates. So far I've been able to understand most of the reference and with the help of a few posts around the internet and I'm now at the point where I can select and download updates. So far I've been able to download a collection of updates using the following code: UpdateCollection CurrentInstallCollection = (UpdateCollection)e.Argument; UpdateDownloader CurrentDownloader = CurrentSession.CreateUpdateDownloader(); CurrentDownloader.Updates = CurrentInstallCollection; This is run in a background worker and returns once the download is done. It works just fine, I can see the updates getting downloaded on the file system but there isn't really a way to display the progress within the application. To do such a thing, there is the IDownloadJob interface that allows me to use the .BeginDownload method of the downloader (UpdateSession.CreateUpdateDownloader)...i think, at least. :D And here comes the problem: I have now tried for about 6 hours to get the code working, but no matter what I tried nothing worked. Also, there isn't much information around on the internet about the .BeginDownload method (or at least it seems that way), but my call of the method doesn't work: IDownloadJob CurrentDownloadJob = CurrentDownloader.BeginDownload(); I have no clue what arguments to supply...I've tried methods, objects...to no avail. The complete block of code looks like this: UpdateCollection CurrentInstallCollection = (UpdateCollection)e.Argument; UpdateDownloader CurrentDownloader = CurrentSession.CreateUpdateDownloader(); CurrentDownloader.Updates = CurrentInstallCollection; IDownloadJob CurrentDownloadJob = CurrentDownloader.BeginDownload(); IDownloadProgress CurrentJobProgess = CurrentDownloadJob.GetProgress(); tbStatus.Text = Convert.ToString(CurrentJobProgess.PercentComplete); I've found one source on the internet that called the method with .BeginDownload(this,this,this), which does not report any error in the code editor but probably won't help with reporting as it is my understanding, that the arguments supplied are the methods that are called when the described event occurrs (progress has changed or the download has finished). I also tried this, but it didn't work either: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/csharpgeneral/thread/636a8399-2bc1-46ff-94df-a58cebfe688c A detailed description of the BeginDownload method: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa386132(v=VS.85).aspx WUAPI Reference: Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post the link, but the link to the BeginDownload method goes to the same place. :) I know, it's quite a bit to ask, but if someone could point me in the right direction (as in which arguments to pass and how), it'd be very much appreciated! :)

Read the article
Cannot pull correct data from a Javascript array into an HTML form

- by Isaac

I am trying to return the description value of the corresponding author name and book title(that are typed in the text boxes). The problem is that the first description displays in the text area no matter what. <h1>Bookland</h1> <div id="bookinfo"> Author name: <input type="text" id="authorname" name="authorname"></input><br /> Book Title: <input type="text" id="booktitle" name="booktitle"></input><br /> <input type="button" value="Find book" id="find"></input> <input type="button" value="Clear Info" id="clear"></input><br /> <textarea rows="15" cols="30" id="destin"></textarea> </div> JavaScript: var bookarray = [{Author: "Thomas Mann", Title: "Death in Venice", Description: "One of the most famous literary works of the twentieth century, this novella embodies" + "themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann in much of his work:" + "the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence," + "the connection between love and suffering and the conflict between the artist and his inner self." }, {Author: "James Joyce", Title: "A portrait of the artist as a young man", Description: "This work displays an unusually perceptive view of British society in the early 20th century." + "It is a social comedy set in Florence, Italy, and Surrey, England." + "Its heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, struggling against straitlaced Victorian attitudes of arrogance, narroe mindedness and sobbery, falls in love - while on holiday in Italy - with the socially unsuitable George Emerson." }, {Author: "E. M. Forster", Title: "A room with a view", Description: "This book is a fictional re-creation of the Irish writer'sown life and early environment." + "The experiences of the novel's young hero,unfold in astonishingly vivid scenes that seem freshly recalled from life" + "and provide a powerful portrait of the coming of age of a young man ofunusual intelligence, sensitivity and character. " }, {Author: "Isabel Allende", Title: "The house of spirits", Description: "Allende describes the life of three generations of a prominent family in Chile and skillfully combines with this all the main historical events of the time, up until Pinochet's dictatorship." }, {Author: "Isabel Allende", Title: "Of love and shadows", Description: "The whole world of Irene Beltran, a young reporter in Chile at the time of the dictatorship, is destroyed when" + "she discovers a series of killings carried out by government soldiers." + "With the help of a photographer, Francisco Leal, and risking her life, she tries to come up with evidence against the dictatorship." }] function searchbook(){ for(i=0; i < bookarray.length; i++){ if ((document.getElementById("authorname").value & document.getElementById("booktitle").value ) == (bookarray[i].Author & bookarray[i].Title)){ document.getElementById("destin").value =bookarray[i].Description return bookarray[i].Description } else { return "Not Found!" } } } document.getElementById("find").addEventListener("click", searchbook, false)

Read the article
Handling Errors from HttpWebRequest.GetResponse

- by Jason

Hey experts - I'm having a ridiculous time trying to get an SMS API working (ZeepMobile, if you're interested) with .NET... I've been around .NET for a few years, but with all this social networking and API stuff, I need to get into the HttpWebRequest a bit. I'm new at it, but not completely new; I was able to hook up my site to Twitter without too much fuss (ie, I was able to modify someone's code to work for me). Anyways, the way their API works is to send an SMS message, you send them a POST and they respond back to you. I can send it just fine, but every time I do, rather than echo back something helpful to figure out what the error is, I get the Yellow Error Page Of Death (YEPOD) saying something to the effect of "The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request." This occurs on my line: '...creation of httpwebrequest here...' Dim myWebResponse As WebResponse myWebResponse = request.GetResponse() '<--- error line Is there any way to simply receive the error from the server rather than have the webserver throw an exception and give me the YEPOD? Or better yet, can anyone post a working example of their Zeep code? :) Thanks! EDIT: Here's my whole code block: Public Shared Function SendTextMessage(ByVal username As String, _ ByVal txt As String) As String Dim content As String = "user_id=" + _ username + "&body=" + Current.Server.UrlEncode(txt) Dim httpDate As String = DateTime.Now.ToString("r") Dim canonicalString As String = API_KEY & httpDate & content Dim encoding As New System.Text.UTF8Encoding Dim hmacSha As New HMACSHA1(encoding.GetBytes(SECRET_ACCESS_KEY)) Dim hash() As Byte = hmacSha.ComputeHash(encoding.GetBytes(canonicalString)) Dim b64 As String = Convert.ToBase64String(hash) 'connect with zeep' Dim request As HttpWebRequest = CType(WebRequest.Create(_ "https://api.zeepmobile.com/messaging/2008-07-14/send_message"), HttpWebRequest) request.Method = "POST" request.ServicePoint.Expect100Continue = False ' set the authorization levels' request.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Zeep " & API_KEY & ":" & b64) request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" request.ContentLength = content.Length ' set up and write to stream' Dim reqStream As New StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream()) reqStream.Write(content) reqStream.Close() Dim msg As String = "" msg = reqStream.ToString Dim myWebResponse As WebResponse Dim myResponseStream As Stream Dim myStreamReader As StreamReader myWebResponse = request.GetResponse() myResponseStream = myWebResponse.GetResponseStream() myStreamReader = New StreamReader(myResponseStream) msg = myStreamReader.ReadToEnd() myStreamReader.Close() myResponseStream.Close() ' Close the WebResponse' myWebResponse.Close() Return msg End Function

Read the article
Lots of questions about file I/O (reading/writing message strings)

- by Nazgulled

Hi, For this university project I'm doing (for which I've made a couple of posts in the past), which is some sort of social network, it's required the ability for the users to exchange messages. At first, I designed my data structures to hold ALL messages in a linked list, limiting the message size to 256 chars. However, I think my instructors will prefer if I save the messages on disk and read them only when I need them. Of course, they won't say what they prefer, I need to make a choice and justify the best I can why I went that route. One thing to keep in mind is that I only need to save the latest 20 messages from each user, no more. Right now I have an Hash Table that will act as inbox, this will be inside the user profile. This Hash Table will be indexed by name (the user that sent the message). The value for each element will be a data structure holding an array of size_t with 20 elements (20 messages like I said above). The idea is to keep track of the disk file offsets and bytes written. Then, when I need to read a message, I just need to use fseek() and read the necessary bytes. I think this could work nicely... I could use just one single file to hold all messages from all users in the network. I'm saying one single file because a colleague asked an instructor about saving the messages from each user independently which he replied that it might not be the best approach cause the file system has it's limits. That's why I'm thinking of going the single file route. However, this presents a problem... Since I only need to save the latest 20 messages, I need to discard the older ones when I reach this limit. I have no idea how to do this... All I know is about fread() and fwrite() to read/write bytes from/to files. How can I go to a file offset and say "hey, delete the following X bytes"? Even if I could do that, there's another problem... All offsets below that one will be completely different and I would have to process all users mailboxes to fix the problem. Which would be a pain... So, any suggestions to solve my problems? What do you suggest?

Read the article
Importing a large dataset into a database

- by peaceful

I'm a beginning programmer in the relevant areas to this question, so if possible, it'd be helpful to avoid assuming I know a lot already. I'm trying to import the OpenLibrary dataset into a local Postgres database. After it's imported, I plan to use it as a starting seed for a Ruby on Rails application that will include information on books. The OpenLibrary datasets are available here, in a modified JSON format: http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/jsondump I only need very basic information for my application, much less than what is provided in the dumps. I'm only trying to get out book titles, author names, and relationships between books and authors. Below are two typical entries from their dataset, the first for an author, and the second for a book (they seem to have an entry for each edition of a book). The entries seem to lead off with a primary key, and then with a type, before including the actual JSON database dump. /a/OL2A /type/author {"name": "U. Venkatakrishna Rao", "personal_name": "U. Venkatakrishna Rao", "last_modified": {"type": "/type/datetime", "value": "2008-09-10 08:44:01.978456"}, "key": "/a/OL2A", "birth_date": "1904", "type": {"key": "/type/author"}, "id": 99, "revision": 3} /b/OL345M /type/edition {"publishers": ["Social Science Research Project, Dept. of Geography, University of Dacca"], "pagination": "ii, 54 p.", "title": "Land use in Fayadabad area", "lccn": ["sa 65000491"], "subject_place": ["East Pakistan", "Dacca region."], "number_of_pages": 54, "languages": [{"comment": "initial import", "code": "eng", "name": "English", "key": "/l/eng"}], "lc_classifications": ["S471.P162 E23"], "publish_date": "1963", "publish_country": "pk ", "key": "/b/OL345M", "authors": [{"birth_date": "1911", "name": "Nafis Ahmad", "key": "/a/OL302A", "personal_name": "Nafis Ahmad"}], "publish_places": ["Dacca, East Pakistan"], "by_statement": "[by] Nafis Ahmad and F. Karim Khan.", "oclc_numbers": ["4671066"], "contributions": ["Khan, Fazle Karim, joint author."], "subjects": ["Land use -- East Pakistan -- Dacca region."]} The size of the uncompressed dumps are enormous, about 2GB for the authors list, and 18GB for the book editions list. OpenLibrary does not provide any tools for this themselves, they provide a simple unoptimized Python script for reading in sample data (which unlike the actual dumps comes in pure JSON format), but they estimate if that was modified for use on their actual data it would take 2 months (!) to finish loading the data. How can I read this into the database? I assume I'll need to write a program to do this. What language and any guidance on how I should do it to finish in a reasonable amount of time? The only scripting language I have any experience with is Ruby.

Read the article
PHP: How to find connections between users so I can create a closed friend circle?

- by CuSS

Hi all, First of all, I'm not trying to create a social network, facebook is big enough! (comic) I've chosen this question as example because it fits exactly on what I'm trying to do. Imagine that I have in MySQL a users table and a user_connections table with 'friend requests'. If so, it would be something like this: Users Table: userid username 1 John 2 Amalia 3 Stewie 4 Stuart 5 Ron 6 Harry 7 Joseph 8 Tiago 9 Anselmo 10 Maria User Connections Table: userid_request userid_accepted 2 3 7 2 3 4 7 8 5 6 4 5 8 9 4 7 9 10 6 1 10 7 1 2 Now I want to find circles between friends and create a structure array and put that circle on the database (none of the arrays can include the same friends that another has already). Return Example: // First Circle of Friends Circleid => 1 CircleStructure => Array( 1 => 2, 2 => 3, 3 => 4, 4 => 5, 5 => 6, 6 => 1, ) // Second Circle of Friends Circleid => 2 CircleStructure => Array( 7 => 8, 8 => 9, 9 => 10, 10 => 7, ) I'm trying to think of an algorithm to do that, but I think it will take a lot of processing time because it would randomly search the database until it 'closes' a circle. PS: The minimum structure length of a circle is 3 connections and the limit is 100 (so the daemon doesn't search the entire database) EDIT: I've think on something like this: function browse_user($userget='random',$users_history=array()){ $user = user::get($userget); $users_history[] = $user['userid']; $connections = user::connection::getByUser($user['userid']); foreach($connections as $connection){ $userid = ($connection['userid_request']!=$user['userid']) ? $connection['userid_request'] : $connection['userid_accepted']; // Start the circle array if(in_array($userid,$users_history)) return array($user['userid'] => $userid); $res = browse_user($userid, $users_history); if($res!==false){ // Continue the circle array return $res + array($user['userid'] => $userid); } } return false; } while(true){ $res = browse_user(); // Yuppy, friend circle found! if($res!==false){ user::circle::create($res); } // Start from scratch again! } The problem with this function is that it could search the entire database without finding the biggest circle, or the best match.

Read the article
How do I avoid the loader lock?

- by Mark0978

We have a managed app, that uses an assembly. That assembly uses some unmanaged C++ code. The Managed C++ code is in a dll, that depends on several other dlls. All of those Dlls are loaded by this code. (We load all the dll's that ImageCore.dll depends on first, so we can tell which ones are missing, otherwise it would just show up as ImageCore.dll failed to load, and the log file would give no clues as to why). class Interop { private const int DONT_RESOLVE_DLL_REFERENCES = 1; private static log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger("Imagecore.NET"); [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr LoadLibraryEx(string fileName, IntPtr dummy, int flags); [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr FreeLibrary(IntPtr hModule); static private String[] libs = { "log4cplus.dll", "yaz.dll", "zlib1.dll", "libxml2.dll" }; public static void PreloadAssemblies() { for (int i=0; i < libs.Length; ++i) { String libname = libs[i]; IntPtr hModule = LoadLibraryEx(libname, IntPtr.Zero, DONT_RESOLVE_DLL_REFERENCES); if(hModule == IntPtr.Zero) { log.Error("Unable to pre-load '" + libname + "'"); throw new DllNotFoundException("Unable to pre-load '" + libname + "'"); } else { FreeLibrary(hModule); } } IntPtr h = LoadLibraryEx("ImageCore.dll", IntPtr.Zero, 0); if (h == IntPtr.Zero) { throw new DllNotFoundException("Unable to pre-load ImageCore.dll"); } } } And this code is called by public class ImageDoc : IDisposable { static ImageDoc() { ImageHawk.ImageCore.Utility.Interop.PreloadAssemblies(); } ... } Which is static constructor. As near as I can understand it, as soon as we attempt to use an ImageDoc object, the dll that contains that assembly is loaded and as part of that load, the static constructor is called which in turn causes several other DLLs to be loaded as well. What I'm trying to figure out, is how do we defer loading of those DLLs so that we don't run smack dab into this loader lock that is being kicked out because of the static constructor. I've pieced this much together by looking at: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/dd192d7e-ce92-49ce-beef-3816c88e5a86 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa290048%28VS.71%29.aspx http://forums.devx.com/showthread.php?t=53529 http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/beforefieldinit.html But I just can't seem to find a way to get these external DLLs to load without it happening at the point the class is loading. I think I need to get these LoadLibrary calls out of the static constructor, but don't know how to get them called before they are needed (except for how it is done here). I would prefer to not have to put this kind of knowledge of the dlls into every app that uses this assembly. (And I'm not sure that would even fix the problem.... The strange thing is that the exception only appears to be happening while running within the debugger, not while running outside the debugger.

Read the article
Extracting the source code of a facebook page with JavaScript

- by Hafizi Vilie

If I write code in the JavaScript console of Chrome, I can retrieve the whole HTML source code by entering: var a = document.body.InnerHTML; alert(a); For fb_dtsg on Facebook, I can easily extract it by writing: var fb_dtsg = document.getElementsByName('fb_dtsg')[0].value; Now, I am trying to extract the code "h=AfJSxEzzdTSrz-pS" from the Facebook Page. The h value is especially useful for Facebook reporting. How can I get the h value for reporting? I don't know what the h value is; the h value is totally different when you communicate with different users. Without that h correct value, you can not report. Actually, the h value is AfXXXXXXXXXXX (11 character values after 'Af'), that is what I know. Do you have any ideas for getting the value or any function to generate on Facebook page. The Facebook Source snippet is below, you can view source on facebook profile, and search h=Af, you will get the value: <code class="hidden_elem" id="ukftg4w44">  </code> Please guide me. How can extract the value exactly? I tried with following code, but the comment block prevent me to extract the code. How can extract the value which is inside comment block? var a = document.getElementsByClassName('hidden_elem')[3].innerHTML;alert(a);

Read the article
Alternatives to requiring users to register for an account?

- by jamieb

I'm working on a side project to build a new web app idea of mine. For the sake of discussion, let's say this app displays a random photograph of a famous work of art. On a scale of 1 to 5, users are asked to rate how well they like each piece of art, and then are shown the next photo. Eventually, the app is able to get an sense of the person's style and is able to recommend artwork that he/she may find pleasing. The whole concept is similar to Netflix. I understand how to do all the preference matching logic (although not as sophisticated as Netflix). But I'd like to find a way to do this without requiring that users create an account first. This is a novelty website that a typical user might use only a handful of times. Requiring registration is overkill and will likely drastically reduce it's utility. I'd like to allow people to begin rating artwork within five seconds of their initial pageview, yet maintain the integrity of the voting (since recommendations are predicated on how other people have rated the various pieces of artwork). Can it be done? Some ideas: OpenID. The perfect solution except for the fact that it's not wildly used and my target audience isn't the most technically adept demographic. Text message. User inputs phone number and is texted a four digit code to key into the web app. Quick, easy, and great way to limit abuse. However, privacy concerns abound... people are probably even less likely to give me their phone number than their email address. Facebook login. I personally don't have a Facebook account due to privacy concerns. And I'd really hate to support such a proprietary platform. Hash code/Bookmark. Vistor's initial pageview generates a 5 or 6 digit alphanumeric code that is embedded in each subsequent URL. They can bookmark any page to save their state. Good: Very simple system that doesn't require any user action. Bad: Very easy to stuff the ballot box, might be difficult to account for users sharing the link containing their ID code via email or social networking sites.

Read the article
Auto update the content in ASP.NET

- by Zerotoinfinite

I have to design a website where user can update their status, just like facebook and twitter and other social networking sites. Now my requirement is to refresh the feed with new user updates. Ex: when the new status comes facebook automatically add that on the top of the feed. on the other hand twitter shows the number of updates which is ready to be load. both ways are acceptable to me Now, I have to decide what is the best way to achieve this functionality. I am open to use ASP.NET. So I am confused that regular repeater control with timer and auto refresh or any other way? (I am wondering that if I set repeater for auto update and meanwhile if user is performing some action on any status it will lost). or do I need to change my framework from ASP.NET to ASP.NET MVC (I am little afraid with MVC as I have very less knowledge regarding it and I know it has a learning curve to master ajax/Jquery things) Any suggestion how I can I achieve it in a better and feasible way? EDIT1 I am not looking for a code but I want advice to achieve this. Supporting URL's would be appreciated. EDIT2 I am open to JQuery which can regularly check the database and fill the section. But my concern is this that if user is updating any comment and want to load/feed is automatically generated. his textbox text shouldn't be disappear (just like facebook, twitter or Linkedin) EDIT3 I have seen that on Stack overflow when any other user has modified the question/answer, I got notification like this question/answer is modified. and when I clicked on that notification only that section got reloaded. I am curious to know how to achieve this functionality. So that when user is commenting on a status/post and if meanwhile someone has updated the content then it would show the other user comment. Edit4 Could someone please recommend me an example of ASP.NET MVC 3+ which can do similar kind of activity (i.e. one input box and once user insert an text it will add the item in the list (with JQuery).

Read the article
Static Javascript files not loaded in Express app

- by Dave Long

I have an express app that has a bunch of static javascript files that aren't being loaded even though they are registered in my app.js file. Even public scripts (like jQuery: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.3/jquery.min.js) aren't processing. I can see the script tags in the generated html, but none of the functionality runs and I can't see the files loading in the web inspector. Here is the code that I have: app.js var express = require('express') var app = module.exports = express.createServer(); // Configuration var port = process.env.PORT || 3000; app.configure(function(){ app.set('views', __dirname + '/views'); app.set('view engine', 'jade'); app.use(express.bodyParser()); app.use(express.methodOverride()); app.use(app.router); app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public')); }); app.configure('development', function(){ app.use(express.errorHandler({ dumpExceptions: true, showStack: true })); }); app.configure('production', function(){ app.use(express.errorHandler()); }); // Routes app.get('/manage/new', function(req, res){ res.render('manage/new', { title: 'Create a new widget' }); }) app.listen(port); console.log("Express server listening on port %d in %s mode", app.address().port, app.settings.env); /views/manage/layout.jade !!! 5 html(lang="en") head title= title link(rel="stylesheet", href="/stylesheets/demo.css") link(rel="stylesheet", href="/stylesheets/jquery.qtip.css") script(type="text/javascript", href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.3/jquery.min.js") body!= body script(type="text/javascript", href="/javascripts/jquery.formalize.js") script(type="text/javascript", href="/javascripts/jquery.form.js") script(type="text/javascript", href="/javascripts/jquery.qtip.js") script(type="text/javascript", href="/javascripts/formToWizard.js") script(type="text/javascript", href="/javascripts/widget.js") /views/manage/new.jade h1= title div(style="float:left;") form(action="/manage/generate", method="post", enctype="multipart/form-data", name="create-widget") .errors fieldset legend Band / Album Information fieldset legend Social Networks fieldset legend Download All of my javascript files are stored in /public/javascripts and all of my static CSS files are being served up just fine. I'm not sure what I've done wrong.

Read the article
Account confirmation email sent as SPAM

- by praveen

I am using PHPMailer to send a confirmation email for newly registered users in my social network. But I found out most of them have ended up in user's spam list. (Hotmail and Yahoo). How to avoid this? This is my script $mail=new PHPMailer(); $mail->IsSMTP(); $mail->SMTPAuth = mSMTPAuth(); $mail->SMTPSecure = mSMTPSecure(); $mail->Host = mHost(); $mail->Port = mPort(); $mail->Username = mUsername(); $mail->Password = mPassword(); $mail->From = mFrom(); $mail->FromName = "SiteName"; $mail->Subject = "SiteName New Account Activation"; $mail->IsHTML(true); $mail->WordWrap = 50; $mail->Body = "<h2>Welcome to " .$sitename. " " .$username. "! </h2><br><br>"; $mail->Body .= "Please click on the link below to verify your email address:<br><br>"; $mail->Body .= "<a href='".$base. "verify.php?a=" .$gen_key."'>".$base. "verify.php?a=" .$gen_key."</a>"; $mail->Body .= "<br><br>Regards<br>"; $mail->AltBody = "Welcome to " .$sitename. " " .$username. "!\n\nTo verify your email address, please click on the link below:\n\n".$base. "verify.php?a=" .$gen_key; $mail->AddAddress($email); $mail->Send(); $mail->ClearAddresses();

Read the article
MySQL table organization and optimization (Rails)

- by aguynamedloren

I've been learning Ruby on Rails over the past few months with no prior programming experience. Lately, I've been thinking about database optimization and table organization. I know there are great books on the subject, but I typically learn by example / as I go. Here's a hypothetical situation: Let's say I am building a social network for a niche community with 250,000 members (users). The users have the ability to attend events. Let's say there are 50,000 past/present/future events. Much like Facebook events, a user can attend any number of events and an event can have any number of attendees. In the database, there would be a table for users and a table for events. Somehow I would have to create an association between the users and events. I could create an "events" column in the users table such that each user row would contain a hash of event IDs, or I could create an "attendees" column in the events table such that each event row would contain a hash of user IDs. Neither of these solutions seem ideal, however. On a users profile page, I want to display the list of events they are associated with, which would require scanning the 50,000 event rows for the user ID of said user if I include an "attendees" column in the events table. Likewise, on an event page, I want to display a list of attendees for the event, which would require scanning the 250,000 user rows for the event ID of said event if I include an "events" column in the users table. Option 3 would be to create a third table that contains the attendee information for each and every event - but I don't see how this would solve any problems. Are these non-issues? Rails makes accessing all of this information easy, but I guess I'm worried about scale. It is entirely possible that I am under-estimating the speed and processing power of modern databases / servers / etc. How long would it take to scan 250,000 user rows for specific event IDs - 10ms? 100ms? 1,000ms? I guess that's not that bad. Am I just over-thinking this?

Read the article
<li> titles and descriptions align across top

- by AMC

Not quite sure how to go about describing what it is I'm trying to achieve, so I have some screenshots.. Basically, I'd like the <h2>s all have their top edges align, as well as the <p>'s. What I currently have: What I would like to have: index.html <div id="services"> <p><span>Services</span></p> <ul> <li><h2>Identity and Logo Design</h2><p>Nulla et diam risus. Praesent vestibulum augue non purus tincidunt placerat. Sed in orci leo. Duis dignissim nibh vitae lacus placerat et posuere</p></li> <li><h2>Branding</h2><p>Nulla et diam risus. Praesent vestibulum augue non purus tincidunt placerat. Sed in orci leo. Duis dignissim nibh vitae lacus placerat et posuere</p></li> <li><h2>Web Design and Development</h2><p>Nulla et diam risus. Praesent vestibulum augue non purus tincidunt placerat. Sed in orci leo. Duis dignissim nibh vitae lacus placerat et posuere</p></li> <li><h2>Social Media</h2><p>Nulla et diam risus. Praesent vestibulum augue non purus tincidunt placerat. Sed in orci leo. Duis dignissim nibh vitae lacus placerat et posuere</p></li> </ul> <div class="next"> <a href="#"><img src="img/next.png" alt="Click for more information" /></a> </div> </div> style.css #services { border-top: 1px solid #202020; padding-bottom: 60px; padding-top: 40px; } #services p span { font-family: nevis-webfont; font-size: 112.5%; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: 1px; text-transform: uppercase; } #services ul li { display: inline-block; padding-left: 100px; width: 160px; } #services ul li:first-child { padding-left: 0px; } #services ul li h2 { padding-top: 20px; text-align: center; } #services .next { float: right }

Read the article
Android Facebook SDK : post message without showing facebook page

- by someone_ smiley

I am trying to integrate Facebook to my Android app for social post. I have downloaded latest Facebook sdk from here and apply all setup require to post to facebook. Now i can post to facebook. But problem is that, when i run sample program from facebook sdk, a browser like page is open and user have to enter message himself there. but i dont want this page to showed up. i want a fixed message to post directly without opening facebook dialog box. But if there is noway to avoid this, please tell me how can i fixed certain part of message so that user can't modified it. Thanks in Advance Edit: this is message i got after using this project 04-10 11:44:34.691: I/dalvikvm(719): Failed resolving Lnet/xeomax/TestRocket/TestRocket; interface 22 'Lnet/xeomax/FBRocket/LoginListener;' 04-10 11:44:34.691: W/dalvikvm(719): Link of class 'Lnet/xeomax/TestRocket/TestRocket;' failed 04-10 11:44:34.691: D/AndroidRuntime(719): Shutting down VM 04-10 11:44:34.701: W/dalvikvm(719): threadid=1: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x40015560) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to instantiate activity ComponentInfo{net.xeomax.TestRocket/net.xeomax.TestRocket.TestRocket}: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: net.xeomax.TestRocket.TestRocket in loader dalvik.system.PathClassLoader[/data/app/net.xeomax.TestRocket-1.apk] 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1569) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1663) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1500(ActivityThread.java:117) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:931) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:130) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3683) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: net.xeomax.TestRocket.TestRocket in loader dalvik.system.PathClassLoader[/data/app/net.xeomax.TestRocket-1.apk] 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at dalvik.system.PathClassLoader.findClass(PathClassLoader.java:240) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:551) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:511) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.Instrumentation.newActivity(Instrumentation.java:1021) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1561) 04-10 11:44:34.781: E/AndroidRuntime(719): ... 11 more

Read the article

Search Results

Search found 4072 results on 163 pages for 'social analytics'.

Page 153/163 | < Previous Page | 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 | Next Page >

- by Baek Seungjoo

- by Bill Graziano

- by Steve Tunstall

- by Maria Sandu

- by Richard Bingham

- by David Dorf

- by kagaku

- by Mike Stiles

- by user74847

- by mack369

- by Laurus Schluep

- by Isaac

- by Jason

- by Nazgulled

- by peaceful

- by CuSS

- by Mark0978

- by Hafizi Vilie

- by jamieb

- by Zerotoinfinite

- by Dave Long

- by praveen

- by aguynamedloren

- by AMC

- by someone_ smiley

< Previous Page | 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 | Next Page >