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• #OOW 2012 @PARIS...talking Oracle and Clouds, and Optimized Datacenter

  - by Eric Bezille

  For those of you who want to get most out of Oracle technologies to evolve your IT to the Next Wave, I encourage you to register to the up coming Oracle Optimized Datacenter event that will take place in Paris on November 28th. You will get the opportunity to exchange with Oracle experts and customers having successfully evolve their IT by leveraging Oracle technologies. You will also get the latest news on some of the Oracle systems announcements made during OOW 2012. During this event we will make an update about Oracle and Clouds, from private to public and hybrid models. So in preparing this session, I thought it was a good start to make a status of Cloud Computing in France, and CIO requirements in particular. Starting in 2009 with the first Cloud Camp in Paris, the market has evolved, but the basics are still the same : think hybrid. From Traditional IT to Clouds One size doesn't fit all, and for big companies having already an IT in place, there will be parts eligible to external (public) cloud, and parts that would be required to stay inside the firewalls, so ability to integrate both side is key.  None the less, one of the major impact of Cloud Computing trend on IT, reported by Forrester, is the pressure it makes on CIO to evolve towards the same model that end-users are now used to in their day to day life, where self-service and flexibility are paramount. This is what is driving IT to transform itself toward "a Global Service Provider", or for some as "IT "is" the Business" (see : Gartner Identifies Four Futures for IT and CIO), and for both models toward a Private Cloud Service Provider. In this journey, there is still a big difference between most of existing external Cloud and a firm IT : the number of applications that a CIO has to manage. Most cloud providers today are overly specialized, but at the end of the day, there are really few business processes that rely on only one application. So CIOs has to combine everything together external and internal. And for the internal parts that they will have to make them evolve to a Private Cloud, the scope can be very large. This will often require CIOs to evolve from their traditional approach to more disruptive ones, the time has come to introduce new standards and processes, if they want to succeed. So let's have a look at the different Cloud models, what type of users they are addressing, what value they bring and most importantly what needs to be done by the  Cloud Provider, and what is left over to the user. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS : what's provided and what needs to be done First of all the Cloud Provider will have to provide all the infrastructure needed to deliver the service. And the more value IT will want to provide, the more IT will have to deliver and integrate : from disks to applications. As we can see in the above picture, providing pure IaaS, left a lot to cover for the end-user, that’s why the end-user targeted by this Cloud Service is IT people. If you want to bring more value to developers, you need to provide to them a development platform ready to use, which is what PaaS is standing for, by providing not only the processors power, storage and OS, but also the Database and Middleware platform. SaaS being the last mile of the Cloud, providing an application ready to use by business users, the remaining part for the end-users being configuring and specifying the application for their specific usage. In addition to that, there are common challenges encompassing all type of Cloud Services : Security : covering all aspect, not only of users management but also data flows and data privacy Charge back : measuring what is used and by whom Application management : providing capabilities not only to deploy, but also to upgrade, from OS for IaaS, Database, and Middleware for PaaS, to a full Business Application for SaaS. Scalability : ability to evolve ALL the components of the Cloud Provider stack as needed Availability : ability to cover “always on” requirements Efficiency : providing a infrastructure that leverage shared resources in an efficient way and still comply to SLA (performances, availability, scalability, and ability to evolve) Automation : providing the orchestration of ALL the components in all service life-cycle (deployment, growth & shrink (elasticity), upgrades,...) Management : providing monitoring, configuring and self-service up to the end-users Oracle Strategy and Clouds For CIOs to succeed in their Private Cloud implementation, means that they encompass all those aspects for each component life-cycle that they selected to build their Cloud. That’s where a multi-vendors layered approach comes short in terms of efficiency. That’s the reason why Oracle focus on taking care of all those aspects directly at Engineering level, to truly provide efficient Cloud Services solutions for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. We are going as far as embedding software functions in hardware (storage, processor level,...) to ensure the best SLA with the highest efficiency. The beauty of it, as we rely on standards, is that the Oracle components that you are running today in-house, are exactly the same that we are using to build Clouds, bringing you flexibility, reversibility and fast path to adoption. With Oracle Engineered Systems (Exadata, Exalogic & SPARC SuperCluster, more specifically, when talking about Cloud), we are delivering all those components hardware and software already engineered together at Oracle factory, with a single pane of glace for the management of ALL the components through Oracle Enterprise Manager, and with high-availability, scalability and ability to evolve by design. To give you a feeling of what does that bring in terms just of implementation project timeline, for example with Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, we have a consistent track of record to have the system plug into existing Datacenter and ready in a week. This includes Oracle Database, OS, virtualization, Database Storage (Exadata Storage Cells in this case), Application Storage, and all network configuration. This strategy enable CIOs to very quickly build Cloud Services, taking out not only the complexity of integrating everything together but also taking out the automation and evolution complexity and cost. I invite you to discuss all those aspect in regards of your particular context face2face on November 28th.

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• Add Widget via Action in Toolbar

  - by Geertjan

  The question of the day comes from Vadim, who asks on the NetBeans Platform mailing list: "Looking for example showing how to add Widget to Scene, e.g. by toolbar button click." Well, the solution is very similar to this blog entry, where you see a solution provided by Jesse Glick for VisiTrend in Boston: https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/zoom_capability Other relevant articles to read are as follows: http://netbeans.dzone.com/news/which-netbeans-platform-action http://netbeans.dzone.com/how-to-make-context-sensitive-actions Let's go through it step by step, with this result in the end, a solution involving 4 classes split (optionally, since a central feature of the NetBeans Platform is modularity) across multiple modules: The Customer object has a "name" String and the Droppable capability has a method "doDrop" which takes a Customer object: public interface Droppable {    void doDrop(Customer c);} In the TopComponent, we use "TopComponent.associateLookup" to publish an instance of "Droppable", which creates a new LabelWidget and adds it to the Scene in the TopComponent. Here's the TopComponent constructor: public CustomerCanvasTopComponent() {    initComponents();    setName(Bundle.CTL_CustomerCanvasTopComponent());    setToolTipText(Bundle.HINT_CustomerCanvasTopComponent());    final Scene scene = new Scene();    final LayerWidget layerWidget = new LayerWidget(scene);    Droppable d = new Droppable(){        @Override        public void doDrop(Customer c) {            LabelWidget customerWidget = new LabelWidget(scene, c.getTitle());            customerWidget.getActions().addAction(ActionFactory.createMoveAction());            layerWidget.addChild(customerWidget);            scene.validate();        }    };    scene.addChild(layerWidget);    jScrollPane1.setViewportView(scene.createView());    associateLookup(Lookups.singleton(d));} The Action is displayed in the toolbar and is enabled only if a Droppable is currently in the Lookup: @ActionID(        category = "Tools",        id = "org.customer.controler.AddCustomerAction")@ActionRegistration(        iconBase = "org/customer/controler/icon.png",        displayName = "#AddCustomerAction")@ActionReferences({    @ActionReference(path = "Toolbars/File", position = 300)})@NbBundle.Messages("AddCustomerAction=Add Customer")public final class AddCustomerAction implements ActionListener {    private final Droppable context;    public AddCustomerAction(Droppable droppable) {        this.context = droppable;    }    @Override    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {        NotifyDescriptor.InputLine inputLine = new NotifyDescriptor.InputLine("Name:", "Data Entry");        Object result = DialogDisplayer.getDefault().notify(inputLine);        if (result == NotifyDescriptor.OK_OPTION) {            Customer customer = new Customer(inputLine.getInputText());            context.doDrop(customer);        }    }} Therefore, when the Properties window, for example, is selected, the Action will be disabled. (See the Zoomable example referred to in the link above for another example of this.) As you can see above, when the Action is invoked, a Droppable must be available (otherwise the Action would not have been enabled). The Droppable is obtained in the Action and a new Customer object is passed to its "doDrop" method. The above in pictures, take note of the enablement of the toolbar button with the red dot, on the extreme left of the toolbar in the screenshots below: The above shows the JButton is only enabled if the relevant TopComponent is active and, when the Action is invoked, the user can enter a name, after which a new LabelWidget is created in the Scene. The source code of the above is here: http://java.net/projects/nb-api-samples/sources/api-samples/show/versions/7.3/misc/WidgetCreationFromAction Note: Showing this as an MVC example is slightly misleading because, depending on which model object ("Customer" and "Droppable") you're looking at, the V and the C are different. From the point of view of "Customer", the TopComponent is the View, while the Action is the Controler, since it determines when the M is displayed. However, from the point of view of "Droppable", the TopComponent is the Controler, since it determines when the Action, i.e., which is in this case the View, displays the presence of the M.

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• Centered Content using panelGridLayout

  - by Duncan Mills

  A classic layout conundrum,  which I think pretty much every ADF developer may have faced at some time or other, is that of truly centered (centred) layout. Typically this requirement comes up in relation to say displaying a login type screen or similar. Superficially the  problem seems easy, but as my buddy Eduardo explained when discussing this subject a couple of years ago it's actually a little more complex than you might have thought. If fact, even the "solution" provided in that posting is not perfect and suffers from a several issues (not Eduardo's fault, just limitations of panelStretch!) The top, bottom, end and start facets all need something in them The percentages you apply to the topHeight, startWidth etc. are calculated as part of the whole width.  This means that you have to guestimate the correct percentage based on your typical screen size and the sizing of the centered content. So, at best, you will in fact only get approximate centering, and the more you tune that centering for a particular browser size the more it will fail if the user resizes. You can't attach styles to the panelStretchLayout facets so to provide things like background color or fixed sizing you need to embed another container that you can apply styles to, typically a panelgroupLayout   For reference here's the code to print a simple 100px x 100px red centered square  using the panelStretchLayout solution, approximately tuned to a 1980 x 1080 maximized browser (IDs omitted for brevity): <af:panelStretchLayout startWidth="45%" endWidth="45%"                        topHeight="45%"  bottomHeight="45%" >   <f:facet name="center">     <af:panelGroupLayout inlineStyle="height:100px;width:100px;background-color:red;"                          layout="vertical"/>   </f:facet>   <f:facet name="top">     <af:spacer height="1" width="1"/>   </f:facet>   <f:facet name="bottom">     <af:spacer height="1" width="1"/>   </f:facet>   <f:facet name="start">     <af:spacer height="1" width="1"/>   </f:facet>   <f:facet name="end">     <af:spacer height="1" width="1"/>    </f:facet> </af:panelStretchLayout>  And so to panelGridLayout  So here's the  good news, panelGridLayout makes this really easy and it works without the caveats above.  The key point is that percentages used in the grid definition are evaluated after the fixed sizes are taken into account, so rather than having to guestimate what percentage will "more, or less", center the content you can just say "allocate half of what's left" to the flexible content and you're done. Here's the same example using panelGridLayout: <af:panelGridLayout> <af:gridRow height="50%"/> <af:gridRow height="100px"> <af:gridCell width="50%" /> <af:gridCell width="100px" halign="stretch" valign="stretch"  inlineStyle="background-color:red;"> <af:spacer width="1" height="1"/> </af:gridCell> <af:gridCell width="50%" /> </af:gridRow> <af:gridRow height="50%"/> </af:panelGridLayout>  So you can see that the amount of markup is somewhat smaller (as is, I should mention, the generated DOM structure in the browser), mainly because we don't need to introduce artificial components to ensure that facets are actually observed in the final result.  But the key thing here is that the centering is no longer approximate and it will work as expected as the user resizes the browser screen.  By far this is a more satisfactory solution and although it's only a simple example, it will hopefully open your eyes to the potential of panelGridLayout as your number one, go-to layout container. Just a reminder though, right now, panelGridLayout is only available in 11.1.2.2 and above.

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• My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

  - by Valter Minute

  Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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• ASP.NET Multi-Select Radio Buttons

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  “HERESY!” you say, “Radio buttons are for single-select items!  If you want multi-select, use checkboxes!”  Well, I would agree, and that is why I consider this a significant bug that ASP.NET developers need to be aware of.  Here’s the situation. If you use ASP:RadioButton controls on your WebForm, then you know that in order to get them to behave properly, that is, to define a group in which only one of them can be selected by the user, you use the Group attribute and set the same value on each one.  For example: 1: <asp:RadioButton runat="server" ID="rdo1" Group="GroupName" checked="true" /> 2: <asp:RadioButton runat="server" ID="rdo2" Group="GroupName" /> With this configuration, the controls will render to the browser as HTML Input / Type=radio tags and when the user selects one, the browser will automatically deselect the other one so that only one can be selected (checked) at any time. BUT, if you user server-side code to manipulate the Checked attribute of these controls, it is possible to set them both to believe that they are checked. 1: rdo2.Checked = true; // Does NOT change the Checked attribute of rdo1 to be false. As long as you remain in server-side code, the system will believe that both radio buttons are checked (you can verify this in the debugger).  Therefore, if you later have code that looks like this 1: if (rdo1.Checked) 2: { 3: DoSomething1(); 4: } 5: else 6: { 7: DoSomethingElse(); 8: } then it will always evaluate the condition to be true and take the first action.  The good news is that if you return to the client with multiple radio buttons checked, the browser tries to clean that up for you and make only one of them really checked.  It turns out that the last one on the screen wins, so in this case, you will in fact end up with rdo2 as checked, and if you then make a trip to the server to run the code above, it will appear to be working properly.  However, if your page initializes with rdo2 checked and in code you set rdo1 to checked also, then when you go back to the client, rdo2 will remain checked, again because it is the last one and the last one checked “wins”. And this gets even uglier if you ever set these radio buttons to be disabled.  In that case, although the client browser renders the radio buttons as though only one of them is checked the system actually retains the value of both of them as checked, and your next trip to the server will really frustrate you because the browser showed rdo2 as checked, but your DoSomething1() routine keeps getting executed. The following is sample code you can put into any WebForm to test this yourself. 1: <body> 2: <form id="form1" runat="server"> 3: <h1>Radio Button Test</h1> 4: <hr /> 5: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdBlankPostback" Text="Blank Postback" /> 6: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 7: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdEnable" Text="Enable All" OnClick="cmdEnable_Click" /> 8: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 9: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdDisable" Text="Disable All" OnClick="cmdDisable_Click" /> 10: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 11: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdTest" Text="Test" OnClick="cmdTest_Click" /> 12: <br /><br /><br /> 13: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R1" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 1" Checked="true" /><br /> 14: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R2" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 2" /><br /> 15: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R3" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 3" /><br /> 16: <hr /> 17: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG2R1" GroupName="Group2" runat="server" Text="Group 2 Radio 1" /><br /> 18: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG2R2" GroupName="Group2" runat="server" Text="Group 2 Radio 2" Checked="true" /><br /> 19:  20: </form> 21: </body> 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3:  4: } 5:  6: protected void cmdEnable_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 7: { 8: rdoG1R1.Enabled = true; 9: rdoG1R2.Enabled = true; 10: rdoG1R3.Enabled = true; 11: rdoG2R1.Enabled = true; 12: rdoG2R2.Enabled = true; 13: } 14:  15: protected void cmdDisable_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 16: { 17: rdoG1R1.Enabled = false; 18: rdoG1R2.Enabled = false; 19: rdoG1R3.Enabled = false; 20: rdoG2R1.Enabled = false; 21: rdoG2R2.Enabled = false; 22: } 23:  24: protected void cmdTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 25: { 26: rdoG1R2.Checked = true; 27: rdoG2R1.Checked = true; 28: } 29: 30: protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e) 31: { 32:  33: } After you copy the markup and page-behind code into the appropriate files.  I recommend you set a breakpoint on Page_Load as well as cmdTest_Click, and add each of the radio button controls to the Watch list so that you can walk through the code and see exactly what is happening.  Use the Blank Postback button to cause a postback to the server so you can inspect things without making any changes. The moral of the story is: if you do server-side manipulation of the Checked status of RadioButton controls, then you need to set ALL of the controls in a group whenever you want to change one.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

  - by Jeff

  This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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• Social Engagement: One Size Doesn't Fit Anyone

  - by Mike Stiles

  The key to achieving meaningful social engagement is to know who you’re talking to, know what they like, and consistently deliver that kind of material to them. Every magazine for women knows this. When you read the article titles promoted on their covers, there’s no mistaking for whom that magazine is intended. And yet, confusion still reigns at many brands as to exactly whom they want to talk to, what those people want to hear, and what kind of content they should be creating for them. In most instances, the root problem is brands want to be all things to all people. Their target audience…the world! Good luck with that. It’s 2012, the age of aggregation and custom content delivery. To cope with the modern day barrage of information, people have constructed technological filters so that content they regard as being “for them” is mostly what gets through. Even if your brand is for men and women, young and old, you may want to consider social properties that divide men from women, and young from old. Yes, a man might find something in a women’s magazine that interests him. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to subscribe to it, or buy even one issue. In fact he’ll probably never see the article he’d otherwise be interested in, because in his mind, “This isn’t for me.” It wasn’t packaged for him. News Flash: men and women are different. So it’s a tall order to craft your Facebook Page or Twitter handle to simultaneously exude the motivators for both. The Harris Interactive study “2012 Connecting and Communicating Online: State of Social Media” sheds light on the differing social behaviors and drivers. -65% of women (vs. 59% of men) stay glued to social because they don’t want to miss anything. -25% of women check social when they wake up, before they check email. Only 18% of men check social before e-mail. -95% of women surveyed belong to Facebook vs. 86% of men. -67% of women log in to Facebook once a day or more vs. 54% of men. -Conventional wisdom is Pinterest is mostly a woman-thing, right? That may be true for viewing, but not true for sharing. Men are actually more likely to share on Pinterest than women, 23% to 10%. -The sharing divide extends to YouTube. 68% of women use it mainly for consumption, as opposed to 52% of men. -Women are as likely to have a Twitter account as men, but they’re much less likely to check it often. 54% of women check it once a week compared to 2/3 of men. Obviously, there are some takeaways from this depending on your target. Women don’t want to miss out on anything, so serialized content might be a good idea, right? Promotional posts that lead to a big payoff could keep them hooked. Posts for women might be better served first thing in the morning. If sharing is your goal, maybe male-targeted content is more likely to get those desired shares. And maybe Twitter is a better place to aim your male-targeted content than Facebook. Some grocery stores started experimenting with male-only aisles. The results have been impressive. Why? Because while it’s true men were finding those same items in the store just fine before, now something has been created just for them. They have a place in the store where they belong. Each brand’s strategy and targets are going to differ. The point is…know who you’re talking to, know how they behave, know what they like, and deliver content using any number of social relationship management targeting tools that meets their expectations. If, however, you’re committed to a one-size-fits-all, “our content is for everybody” strategy (or even worse, a “this is what we want to put out and we expect everybody to love it” strategy), your content will miss the mark for more often than it hits. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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• Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall.  That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions.  Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered.  A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8.  It will also run natively on multiple cores.  They mentioned that they have run it on up to 64 cores to this point.  The phones as you might expect will at least start as dual core.  If you remember there were metrics saying that Windows Phone 7 performed operations faster on a single core than other platforms did with dual cores.  The metrics they showed here indicate that Windows Phone 8 runs faster on comparable dual core hardware than other platforms. New Screen Resolutions Screen resolution has never been an issue for me, but it has been a criticism of Windows Phone 7 in the media.  Windows Phone 8 will supports three screen resolutions: WVGA 800 x 480, WXGA 1280 x 768, and 720 1280x720.  Hopefully this makes pixel counters a little happier. MicroSD Support This was one of my pet peeves when I got my Samsung Focus. With Windows Phone 8 the operating system will support adding MicroSD cards after initial setup.  Of course this is dependent on the hardware company on implementing it, but I think we have seen that even feature phone manufacturers have not had a problem supporting this in the past. NFC NFC has been an anticipated feature for some time.  What Microsoft showed today included the fact that they didn’t just want it to be for the phone.  There is cross platform NFC functionality between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.  The demos , while possibly a bit fanciful, showed would could be achieved even in a retail environment.  We are getting closer and closer to a Minority Report world with these technologies. Wallet Windows Phone 8 isn’t the first platform to have a wallet concept.  What they have done to differentiate themselves is to make it sot that it is not dependent on a SIM type chip like other platforms.  They have also expanded the concept beyond just banks to other types of credits such as airline miles. Nokia Mapping People have been envious of the Lumia phones having the Nokia mapping software.  Now all Windows Phone 8 devices will use NavTeq data and will have the capability to run in an offline fashion.  This is a major step forward from the Bing “touch for the next turn” maps. IT Administration The lack of features for enterprise administration and deployment was a complaint even before the Windows Phone 7 was released.  With the Windows Phone 8 release such features as Bitlocker and Secure boot will be baked into the OS. We will also have the ability to privately sign and distribute applications. Changing Start Screen Joe Belfiore made a big deal about this aspect of the new release.  Users will have more color themes available to them and the live tiles will be highly customizable. You will have the ability to resize and organize the tiles in a more dynamic way.  This allows for less important tiles or ones with less information to be made smaller.  And There Is More So what other tidbits came out of the presentation?  Later this summer the API for WP8 will be available.  There will be developer events coming to a city near you.  Another announcement of interest to developers is the ability to write applications at a native code level.  This is a boon for game developers and those who need highly efficient applications. As a topper on the cake there was mention of in app payment. On the consumer side we also found out that all updates will be available over the air.  Along with this came the fact that Microsoft will support all devices with updates for at least 18 month and you will be able to subscribe for early updates.  Update coming for Windows Phone 7.5 customers to WP7.8.  The main enhancement will be the new live tile features.  The big bonus is that the update will bypass the carriers.  I would assume though that you will be brought up to date with all previous patches that your carrier may not have released. There is so much more, but that is enough for one post.  Needless to say, EXCITING! del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 8,WP8,Windows Phone 7,WP7,Announcements,Microsoft

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• Are IE9 really good ?

  - by anirudha

  IE9 started a campaign for kill IE6 from the core because they know that IE6 is a big trouble or  problem for them for promote 9 version of IE. so they started a campaign for killing IE6. next time they kill IE 7 , 8,9 whenever they found this old version have a big problem for them to promote next version of IE.   Why they not make a update system who automatically update the browser and tell user to restart and update goes installed in the user system. well IE9 should learn from all other that they have very well design auto-update system who never give user in trouble that your browser goes old. Chrome and Firefox both update themselves and say user restart to enjoy another good version. in IE6 a big problem is that updates. no one sure that they installed new version of IE6 without any hassles and update goes install without any problem because they really know or care about “you need this to install this and this for this” so they thing “why I update IE whenever I am unsure that my browser goes update and I have no problem again” so they do nothing because their work done with no problem because common person used high profile application who work even in IE6. so they do nothing.    IE6 countdown website have designed a banner for warn or force user to upgrade to next version of IE. well there is no good reason for put the banner on website some of reason are:-   Windows 7 comes with pre-installed IE8 and Vista comes with upgrade version them IE6 so that is sure that you force a user who have Windows XP [luna] and if they want to upgrade IE then they can get IE8 not version 9 because IE9 is design for Windows 7 or Vista Service pack 2. so What is the use of update when user still have a outdate version too because IE8 is old version and not have any capability of HTML5 so forcing user by using the banner have no sense. I am not know why they all listed on website put the banner on their own website. it’s good that you offer user what they want instead of giving them a outdate version of IE again. My means to give a user list of browser they can try to enhance their browser experience instead of only IE.   IE9 build upon WPF and they spent more time on using WPF in IE instead of making user experience browser.  many thing is designed wrongly in IE first thing is tabs. the tabs in chrome are bigger and easily to move and same in Firefox even not have smooth tabbing. IE have same tabbing as chrome have but leak a point that it’s too small. if you really  want to move then sometime they create a problem that they going elsewhere from the current instance of IE.   Chrome have a big buttons, tabs and menu to enhance browser experience and Firefox have a good feature that you can make them bigger or small. you can put the icon for add-ons on the toolbar for easily use but IE have no relation with customization so we never can thinking about that.   When chrome provide lot’s of extensions and a  webstore for browser application and same feature in Firefox can be seen then there is no plugin in IE. really you can see their IE addons Website where no plugin listed for web development. even in the category or tag. as a response from many blog there is new for developer that new version of IE9 developer tool. well IE9 have three new tabs a blogger tell on their blog. when I trying them I found many thing but I still unable to edit the Css from the HTML tab and no plugin I found I can get to enhance IE9 web development. something more other provide never IE9 give me like personas , customization , browser extension or any other they used to tell a small thing customization  .   IE9 still have some problem with JavaScript that when I use Firefox and chrome and logout in both then my cookie is deleted but in IE it’s not done. it’s show me that IE9 still have different from other not for good thing even some bad thing too. When I trying to read a article that is written in Hindi using Unicode font I found that they show many thing misspelled. there is three Sha in Hindi but they all goes wrong in IE. the misprint thing is not that the writing  for the articles goes wrong. it’s problem or browser to rendering a font. the Firefox and chrome not give me this problem even opera render the font in italic style by decrease the font-size but all those work perfect.   in Pwn2Own the apple’s safari  and IE9 both are hacked. this is a awesome news for whose who thing that  open-source is lose in  Security and close-source is highly-secured software. well this is not a good parameter for talking about software. it’s should depend how much application tested and used. because more testing and more use of application make them better.   I  appreciate IE to making their new version 9 and good luck for them. there is a another matter that I personally found nothing on them.

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• Waiting for Windows 8: A Long, Hot Summer

  - by andrewbrust

  Microsoft has revealed some things about Windows 8, and revealed a part of the developer story for new Windows 8 “tailored,” “immersive” applications.  In retrospect, very little was shared.  The bit that was revealed to us is that those applications can be developed using a combination of HTML 5 and JavaScript.  Not much else was said, except that additional details would be revealed at Microsoft’s //Build/ conference in Anaheim, California in September. This has left a lot of people in suspense, and it seems that suspended state is going to last all summer.  The problem, of course, is that in the absence of hard information, people fill the void with Speculation, Rumor and Gloom.  That’s a bit like Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, except that it’s self-imposed by the Microsoft community and not planted by Microsoft’s competitors. This is a less-than-perfect situation.  Not only is it causing developers to worry about the value of their skill sets, but I am already hearing from consulting shops that customers are getting nervous too and, in extreme cases, opting for non-Microsoft tools for their projects as a result.  I’m also hearing from dev tool ISVs that sales have suffered as a result. It’s quite possible that the customers moving off .NET wanted to do so anyway and it’s also possible that dev tool ISVs are suffering slower sales this year due a slowed rate of economic recovery. Without hard information, tend to people interpret things negatively.  Actually, that’s the major point in all of this. While there is multitude of opinions about what the Windows 8 development platform will look like once fully revealed, there is an emerging consensus around one thing: it sure would help if Microsoft revealed more of its strategy…just enough to quash absurd rumors, stabilize the .NET ecosystem and get people to stay calm. We’ve had some reassurances thus far: there will be a Windows desktop mode; we’ll still have Windows Explorer, we’ll still run Office, we’ll still have a task bar, and all the skills and tools we use now will still work there.  But with reassurances like that…people still feel insecure.  Because telling us that Windows 8 will have what is essentially a “classic” mode sure makes it sound like today’s skill sets will soon be “classic” too…and then maybe they’ll just become obsolete. Humans find change scary; it’s natural.  And when left alone with their fears – because no one is saying anything to dispel them – people can go from frightened to paranoid, and can start to viewing things in a downright conspiratorial light.  It would be great if Microsoft stepped into the void now and told us what is coming – especially because whatever they tell us is bound to be at least a little better than what people think they are going to hear. I don’t know what the announcements will be, but I do have it on authority, from a number of sources, that Microsoft isn’t gong to talk until //Build/.  That means no news until September September 13th.  Nothing until after Labor Day.  You get zippo until after the Back-to-School sales are done. What to do?  Try not to let the dark voices of gloom and doom fill your head.  Even in the absence of answers, we still have some important facts: The .NET developer community is huge. Microsoft’s customers have major investments in .NET, and in .NET skills. Political infighting in Redmond might make for irrational decisions, but ultimately public companies can’t just alienate their advocates and piss off their customers.  Spite doesn’t trump fiduciary responsibility. The computing device markets are changing, software is changing, software business models are changing and developers are changing.  Microsoft has to keep up. The HTML + JavaScript community is huge too, and it includes many of the “changed” developers. Public companies can’t ignore new markets nor the popular standards that can help them enter those new markets.  Loyalty doesn’t trump fiduciary responsibility either. If Microsoft can appeal to new developers, then it should. If Microsoft can keep catering to its existing developers and customers -- not just through legacy support, but also through empowering futures -- then it probably will. You don’t have to shove your old friends out into the rain to make room for new ones; you can bring those new constituents in under a bigger tent.  I hope Microsoft will enlarge the tent, and I have trouble imagining why it would not.

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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• Tip #19 Module Private Visibility in OSGi

  - by ByronNevins

  I hate public and protected methods and classes.  It requires so much work to change them in a huge project like GlassFish.  Not to mention that you may well have to support those APIs forever.  They are highly overused in GlassFish.  In fact I'd bet that > 95% of classes are marked as public for no good reason.  It's just (bad) habit is my guess. private and default visibility (I call it package-private) is easier to maintain.  It is much much easier to change such classes and methods around.  If you have ANY public method or public class in GlassFish you'll need to grep through a tremendous amount of source code to find all callers.  But even that won't be theoretically reliable.  What if a caller is using reflection to access public methods?  You may never find such usages. If you have package private methods, it's easy.  Simply grep through all the code in that one package.  As long as that package compiles ok you're all set.  There can' be any compile errors anywhere else.  It's a waste of time to even look around or build the "outside" world.  So you may be thinking: "Aha!  I'll just make my module have one giant package with all the java files.  Then I can use the default visibility and maintenance will be much easier.  But there's a problem.  You are wasting a very nice feature of java -- organizing code into separate packages.  It also makes the code much more encapsulated.  Unfortunately to share code between the packages you have no choice but to declare public visibility. What happens in practice is that a module ends up having tons of public classes and methods that are used exclusively inside the module.  Which finally brings me to the point of this blog:  If Only There Was A Module-Private Visibility Available Well, surprise!  There is such a mechanism.  If your project is running under OSGi that is.  Like GlassFish does!  With this mechanism you can easily add another level of visibility by telling OSGi exactly which public you want to be exposed outside of the module.  You get the best of both worlds: Better encapsulation of your code so that maintenance is easier and productivity is increased. Usage of public visibility inside the module so that you can encapsulate intra-module better with packages. How I do this in GlassFish: Carefully plan out at least one package that will contain "true" publics.  This is the package that will be exported by OSGi.  I recommend just one package. Here is how to tell OSGi to use it in GlassFish -- edit osgi.bundle like so:-exportcontents:     org.glassfish.mymodule.truepublics;  version=${project.osgi.version} Now all publics declared in any other packages will be visible module-wide but not outside the module. There is one caveat: Accessing "module-private" items outside of the module is controlled at run-time, not compile-time.  The compiler has no clue that a public in a dependent module isn't really public.  it will happily compile it.  At runtime you will definitely see fireworks.  The good news is that you don't have to wait for the code path that tries to use the "module-private" items to fire.  OSGi will complain loudly when that module gets loaded.  OSGi will refuse to load it.  You will see an error like this: remote failure: Error while loading FOO: Exception while adding the new configuration : Error occurred during deployment: Exception while loading the app : org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle com.oracle.glassfish.miscreant.code [115]: Unable to resolve 115.0: missing requirement [115.0] osgi.wiring.package; (osgi.wiring.package=org.glassfish.mymodule.unexported). Please see server.log for more details. That is if you accidentally change code in module B to use a public that is really a "module-private" in module A, then you will see the error immediately when you try to test whatever you were changing in module B.

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• Windows 8/Surface Lunch Event Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Today was a big day for Microsoft with two separate launch event.  The first for Windows 8 and all of it’s hardware partners.  The second was specifically to introduce the Microsoft Windows 8 Surface tablet.  Below are some of the take-aways I got from the webcasts. Windows 8 Launch The three general area that Microsoft focused on were the release of the OS itself, the public unveiling of the Windows Store and the new devices available from its hardware partners. The release of the OS focused on the fact that it will be available at mid-night tonight for both new PCs and for upgrades.  I can’t say that this interested me that much since it was already known to most people.  I think what they did show well was how easy the OS really is to use. The Windows Store is also not a new feature to those of us who have been running the pre-release versions of Windows 8 or have owned Windows Phone 7 for the past 2 years.  What was interesting is that the Windows Store launches with more apps available than any other platforms store at their respective launch.  I think this says a lot about how Microsoft focuses on the ability of developers to create software and make it available.  The of course were sure to emphasize that the Windows Store has better monetary terms for developers than its competitors. The also showed off the fact that XBox Music streaming is available for to all Windows 8 user for free.  Couple this with the Bing suite of apps that give you news, weather, sports and finance right out of the box and I think most people will find the environment a joy to use. I think the hardware demo, while quick and furious, really show where Windows shine: CHOICE!  They made a statement that over 1000 devices have been certified for Windows 8.  They showed tablets, laptops, desktops, all-in-ones and convertibles.  Since these devices have industry standard connectors they give a much wider variety of accessories and devices that you can use with them. Steve Balmer then came on stage and tried to see how many times he could use the “magical”.  He focused on how the Windows 8 OS is designed to integrate with SkyDrive, Skype and Outlook.com.  He also enforced that they think Windows 8 is the best choice for the Enterprise when it comes to protecting data and integrating across devices including Windows Phone 8. With that we were left to wait for the second event of the day. Surface Launch The second event of the day started with kids with magnets.  Ok, they were adults, but who doesn’t like playing with magnets.  Steven Sinofsky detached and reattached the Surface keyboard repeatedly, clearly enjoying himself.  It turns out that there are 4 magnets in the cover, 2 for alignment and 2 as connectors. They then went to giving us the details on the display.  The 10.6” display is optically bonded to the case and is optimized to reduce glare.  I think this came through very well in the demonstrations. The properties of the case were also a great selling point.  The VaporMg allowed them to drop the device on stage, on purpose, and continue working.  Of course they had to bring out the skate boards made from Surface devices. “It just has to feel right” was the reason they gave for many of their design decisions from the weight and size of the device to the way the kickstand and camera work together.  While this gave you the feeling that the whole process was trial and error you could tell that a lot of science went into the specs.  This included making sure that the magnets were strong enough to hold the cover on and still have a 3 year old remove the cover without effort. I am glad that they also decided the a USB port would be part of the spec since it give so many options.  They made the point that this allows Surface to leverage over 420 million existing devices.  That works for me. The last feature that I really thought was important was the microSD port.  Begin stuck with the onboard memory has been an aggravation of mine with many of the devices in the market today. I think they did job of really getting the audience to understand why you want this platform and this particular device.  Using personal examples like creating a video of a birthday party and being in it or the fact that the device was being used to live blog the event and control the lights and presentation.  They showed very well that it was not only fun but very capable of getting real work done.  Handing out tablets to the crowd didn’t hurt either.  In the end I really wanted a Surface even though I really have no need for one on a daily basis.  Great job Microsoft! del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Win8,Windows 8 Luanch

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• State of the (Commerce) Union: What the healthcare.gov hiccups teach us about the commerce customer experience

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Guest Post by Brenna Johnson, Oracle Commerce Product A lot has been said about the healthcare.gov debacle in the last week. Regardless of your feelings about the Affordable Care Act, there’s a hidden issue in this story that most of the American people don’t understand: delivering a great commerce customer experience (CX) is hard. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The reality of the government’s issues getting the healthcare site up and running smooth is something we in the online commerce community know too well.  If there’s one thing the botched launch of the site has taught us, it’s that regardless of the size of your budget or the power of an executive with a high-profile project, some of the biggest initiatives with the most attention (and the most at stake) don’t go as planned. It may even give you a moment of solace – we have the same issues! But why?  Organizations engage too many separate vendors with different technologies, running sections or pieces of a site to get live. When things go wrong, it takes time to identify the problem – and who or what is at the center of it. Unfortunately, this is a brittle way of setting up a site, making it susceptible to breaks, bugs, and scaling issues. But, it’s the reality of running a site with legacy technology constraints in today’s demanding, customer-centric market. This approach also means there’s also a lot of cooks in lots of different kitchens. You’ve got development and IT, the business and the marketing team, an external Systems Integrator to bring it all together, a digital agency or consultant, QA, product experts, 3rd party suppliers, and the list goes on. To complicate things, different business units are held responsible for different pieces of the site and managing different technologies. And again – due to legacy organizational structure and processes, this is all accepted as the normal State of the Union. Digital commerce has been commonplace for 15 years. Yet, getting a site live, maintained and performing requires orchestrating a cast of thousands (or at least, dozens), big dollars, and some finger-crossing. But it shouldn’t. The great thing about the advent of mobile commerce and the continued maturity of online commerce is that it’s forced organizations to think from the outside, in. Consumers – whether they’re shopping for shoes or a new healthcare plan – don’t care about what technology issues or processes you have behind the scenes. They just want it to work.  They want their experience to be easy, fast, and tailored to them and their needs – whatever they are. This doesn’t sound like a tall order to the American consumer – especially since they interact with sites that do work smoothly.  But the reality is that it takes scores of people, teams, check-ins, late nights, testing, and some good luck to get sites to run, and even more so at Black Friday (or October 1st) traffic levels.  The last thing on a customer’s mind is making excuses for why they can’t buy a product – just get it to work. So what is the government doing? My guess is working day and night to get the site performing  - and having to throw big money at the problem. In the meantime they’re sending frustrated online users to the call center, or even a location where a trained “navigator” can help them in-person to complete their selection. Sounds a lot like multichannel commerce (where broken communication between siloed touchpoints will only frustrate the consumer more). One thing we’ve learned is that consumers spend their time and money with brands they know and trust. When sites are easy to use and adapt to their needs, they tend to spend more, come back, and even become long-time loyalists. Achieving this may require moving internal mountains, but there’s too much at stake to ignore the sea change in how organizations are thinking about their customer. If the thought of re-thinking your internal teams, technologies, and processes sounds like a headache, think about the pain associated with losing valuable customers – and dollars. Regardless if you’re in B2B or B2C, it’s guaranteed that your competitors are making CX a priority. Those early to the game who have made CX a priority have already begun to outpace their competition. So as you’re planning for 2014, look to the news this week. Make sure the customer experience is a focus at your organization. Expectations are at record highs. Map your customer’s journey, and think from the outside, in. How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? If they interact with many touchpoints across your organization, are the call center, website, mobile environment, or brick and mortar location in sync? Do you have the technology in place to achieve this? It’s time to give the people what they want!

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• IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

  - by andrewbrust

  Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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• ????????????????? Oracle Solaris ??? - Solaris 11 ????(??)

  - by kazun

  ???????????????? OS ????????????????????? 20 ??????????????????? Solaris?????????????????????? OS????????????????????????Solaris ???????????????????? ??????Oracle Solaris ??????????????6??????????????????Oracle Solaris ?????????????????????? [????????????] ?????(????????????? ???)?????(??????????????)?????(??????????????)?????(????????)???? ?(?????????????????)?????(???????????)(50??) Solaris????? ??: Solaris ??????????????????????????????????????Solaris ??Solaris ???????????????????????????? 10 ??? Solaris ?????????????????????? OS ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? OS ???? Solaris ?????? ??: Solaris ????????????????????????????OS?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???: ??????????????????????? 15 ??????????????????????????????????????????? Solaris ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????5 ???10 ??????????????????????????? Solaris ???????????? ??: ??? Solaris ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? OS ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ??????? OS ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????DTrace ????????????????????????????? Solaris ???????? ???: 1980 ?????Sun ???????OS???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?Solaris ????1988?????Sun ? AT&T ? System V Release 4.0 ?????????????Sun ????????? System V Release 4.0 ?????????? Unix OS ??? SunOS 5.0(?? 1992 ????????? Solaris 2.0)???????????????????? SMP ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????Solaris 2.0 ?????????????? OS ????????(?)???????????????????????????????? 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 ??????????? 2.0 ????????????????? ??: Solaris ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????OS?????????? ??: ????????????????????????? ???: ????????????????? OS ??????????? x86 ? SPARC ? 2 ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? CPU ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Solaris ??? ????? ?? Solaris 2.0 - 2.1 AT&T ? UNIX System V Release 4 ??????????????SMP/?????????????????API ????? SunOS 5.0 ????????Solaris 2.0 ????x86 ?? SPARC ?? Solaris 2.1 ?????????????????????????????? Solaris 2.2 - 2.4 - ???????? (SVR4 ??) - ???????????(2.5.1 ?? PowerPC ?????????) - 2.4 ?? x86 ?????????????????? Solaris 2.6?Solaris 7(2.7 ??????) 64 bit ??(Itanium ?????) Solaris 8 - 9 ?????????? Solaris 10 - 11 ??????????????????(OS ????????????????) Solaris??????? ??: ?????????????????????????????????????????Solaris ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ?????????????????? OS ???????????Solaris 2.3 ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???: ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? OS ????????????? Solaris ??????? ??: ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????DTrace ?????????????????????????????????? ??: ????Solaris ? UNIX ????????????????????????????????????? OS ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Solaris ????????????????????????????????????????????????? OS ??????????????????? Solaris ???????? ??: ??????????????????????????1?? OS ?????????????? OS ??????????????????????????????????????Solaris ????? 1 ?? Solaris ??????????????????OS????????????????? ???: Legacy Container ????????????? Solaris(Solaris 8?Solaris 9) ???????????? ??: Solaris 10 ?????? SMF(Service Management Facility) ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: SMF?FMA (Fault Management Architecture)?????????????????????????????? Solaris ?????????????????????????? ???: ????????????????????????? ??: ?????????????????????1???????????????????????????????????????? Sun ??????????The Network Is The Computer???? ??: ??????Solaris 10 ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Solaris?????? ??: Solaris ?????????????????????Sun ?????????????(? 20 ??)??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Sun ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Sun ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???: Solaris ????? SunOS ????????????????????????? OS ??????? ??: ??????????????????????????????Sun ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: 1990 ??????????????????? Solaris ???????? ???: ?????X Windows ???? Sun ??????????NeWS??????????????????????????????X Windows ??????????????????????????????????????? Sun ? Solaris ???????????????????????? ??: ???????Solaris ??????????????? OS ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ????????????????????? Solaris ????????????ZFS ???????????????????????????????? ??: ????? OS ??????? Solaris ??????(???)??????????????? ???: Solaris ???????????????????? Solaris??????Solaris 2.0 ???? 2 ??? 1 ??????????????(?????????)??????Solaris ? 2 ??????????????????????????????????????? 2 ????????????????????????????2 ??? 1 ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????OS???????????? ???: Solaris ?????? Solaris ????????????OS ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ??????????????????????????????????????????????(?)?????????????????????????????????????????????15 ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: Solaris ??????? Solaris ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ????????????????????????????????????????????????Solaris ??????????????????????????? ???: ??????????????Solaris ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Solaris ?????????? ??: Solaris ???????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??: ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???: 1994 ?????????????????????????????????????? ??: ??????????????????????????Solaris ????????????????????????????????????? ???: ???????????????? ??: ???Solaris ?????? 2 ?????????????????????????????????????? Solaris ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????OS?????????????????????????????????????????????????????Solaris ???????????? ??????Oracle Solaris ????????????6??????????????????Oracle Solaris ??????????????????????

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• WPF RowDetailsTemplate width issue

  - by Ed Courtenay

  Apologies if this is a dupe, but I can't seem to find a rational solution for what must be a fairly simple issue. <Window x:Class="FeedTest.MainWindow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525"> <Window.Resources> <XmlNamespaceMappingCollection x:Key="map"> <XmlNamespaceMapping Prefix="media" Uri="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" /> </XmlNamespaceMappingCollection> <XmlDataProvider x:Key="newsFeed" XPath="//item[string-length(title)>0]" Source="http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/uk/rss.xml" /> <DataTemplate x:Key="rowDetailTemplate"> <Border BorderThickness="2"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Image Source="{Binding XPath=media:thumbnail/@url}" Width="66" Height="49" /> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" Margin="5"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding XPath=description}" TextWrapping="Wrap" /> </StackPanel> </StackPanel> </Border> </DataTemplate> <Style TargetType="{x:Type DataGrid}"> <Setter Property="GridLinesVisibility" Value="None" /> </Style> </Window.Resources> <Grid Binding.XmlNamespaceManager="{StaticResource map}"> <DataGrid AutoGenerateColumns="False" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource newsFeed}}" RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" RowDetailsTemplate="{StaticResource rowDetailTemplate}"> <DataGrid.Columns> <DataGridTextColumn Header="Title" Binding="{Binding XPath=title}" MinWidth="150" Width="*" /> </DataGrid.Columns> </DataGrid> </Grid> The attached XAML gets a news feed, and displays the title of each item in a DataGrid. Selecting an item shows the RowDetailsTemplate which is where my problem lies - why does the RowDetailsTemplate expand beyond the width of the containing DataGrid (thus forcing a horizontal scrollbar), and more importantly, how do I stop it doing this? Many thanks.

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• Need help with wp_rewrite in a WordPress Plugin

  - by Brad

  Ok, I've got this code that I've been using to spit out news to an application of mine. It was working until today. I've cutout all the logic in the following code to make it simpiler. But it should "WORK" Can someone help me fix this code to where it works, and is done right? I know it's hacked together ,but it didn't seem to have any problems until today. I have not updated anything, don't know what the deal is. Plugin Name: MyPlugin Example Version: 1.0.1 if ( ! class_exists("MyPlugin") ) { class MyPlugin { var $db_version = "1.0"; //not used yet function init() { //Nothing as of now. } function activate() { global $wp_rewrite; $this-flush_rewrite_rules(); } function pushoutput( $id ) { $output-out =' The output worked!'; $this-output( $output ); } function output( $output ) { ob_start(); ob_end_clean(); header( 'Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate' ); header( 'Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT' ); header( 'Content-type: application/json' ); echo json_encode( $output ); //Must encode this... } function flush_rewrite_rules() { global $wp_rewrite; $wp_rewrite-flush_rules(); } function createRewriteRules( $rewrite ) { global $wp_rewrite; $new_rules = array( 'MyPlugin/(.+)' = 'index.php?MyPlugin=' . $wp_rewrite-preg_index(1) ); if ( ! is_array($wp_rewrite-rules) ) { $wp_rewrite-rules = array(); } $wp_rewrite-rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite-rules; return $wp_rewrite; } function add_query_vars( $qvars ) { $qvars[] = 'MyPlugin'; return $qvars; } function template_redirect_intercept() { global $wp_query; if ( $wp_query-get('MyPlugin') ) { $id = $wp_query-query_vars['MyPlugin']; $this-pushoutput( $id ); exit; } } } } if ( class_exists("MyPlugin") ) { $MyPluginCode = new MyPlugin(); } if ( isset($MyPluginCode) ) { register_activation_hook( __file__, array($MyPluginCode, 'activate') ); add_action( 'admin-init', array(&$MyPluginCode, 'flush_rewrite_rules') ); //add_action( 'init', array(&$MyPluginCode, 'init') ); add_action( 'generate_rewrite_rules', array(&$MyPluginCode, 'createRewriteRules') ); add_action( 'template_redirect', array(&$MyPluginCode, 'template_redirect_intercept') ); // add_filter( 'query_vars', array(&$MyPluginCode, 'add_query_vars') ); }

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• Shawn Wildermuth violating MVVM in MSDN article?

  - by rasx

  This may be old news but back in March 2009, Shawn Wildermuth, his article, “Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps,” has a code sample that includes DataServiceEntityBase: // COPIED FROM SILVERLIGHTCONTRIB Project for simplicity /// <summary> /// Base class for DataService Data Contract classes to implement /// base functionality that is needed like INotifyPropertyChanged. /// Add the base class in the partial class to add the implementation. /// </summary> public abstract class DataServiceEntityBase : INotifyPropertyChanged { /// <summary> /// The handler for the registrants of the interface's event /// </summary> PropertyChangedEventHandler _propertyChangedHandler; /// <summary> /// Allow inheritors to fire the event more simply. /// </summary> /// <param name="propertyName"></param> protected void FirePropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (_propertyChangedHandler != null) { _propertyChangedHandler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members /// <summary> /// The interface used to notify changes on the entity. /// </summary> event PropertyChangedEventHandler INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged { add { _propertyChangedHandler += value; } remove { _propertyChangedHandler -= value; } } #endregion What this class implies is that the developer intends to bind visuals directly to data (yes, a ViewModel is used but it defines an ObservableCollection of data objects). Is this design diverging too far from the guidance of MVVM? Now I can see some of the reasons why Shawn would go this way: what Shawn can do with DataServiceEntityBase is this sort of thing (which is intimate with the Entity Framework): // Partial Method to support the INotifyPropertyChanged interface public partial class Game : DataServiceEntityBase { #region Partial Method INotifyPropertyChanged Implementation // Override the Changed partial methods to implement the // INotifyPropertyChanged interface // This helps with the Model implementation to be a mostly // DataBound implementation partial void OnDeveloperChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("Developer"); } partial void OnGenreChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("Genre"); } partial void OnListPriceChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ListPrice"); } partial void OnListPriceCurrencyChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ListPriceCurrency"); } partial void OnPlayerInfoChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("PlayerInfo"); } partial void OnProductDescriptionChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ProductDescription"); } partial void OnProductIDChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ProductID"); } partial void OnProductImageUrlChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ProductImageUrl"); } partial void OnProductNameChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ProductName"); } partial void OnProductTypeIDChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ProductTypeID"); } partial void OnPublisherChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("Publisher"); } partial void OnRatingChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("Rating"); } partial void OnRatingUrlChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("RatingUrl"); } partial void OnReleaseDateChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("ReleaseDate"); } partial void OnSystemNameChanged() { base.FirePropertyChanged("SystemName"); } #endregion } Of course MSDN code can seen as “toy code” for educational purposes but is anyone doing anything like this in the real world of Silverlight development?

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• Using MongoDB with Ruby On Rails and the Mongomapper plugin

  - by Micke

  Hello, i am currently trying to learn Ruby On Rails as i am a long-time PHP developer so i am building my own community like page. I have came pritty far and have made the user models and suchs using MySQL. But then i heard of MongoDB and looked in to it a little bit more and i find it kinda nice. So i have set it up and i am using mongomapper for the connection between rails and MongoDB. And i am now using it for the News page on the site. I also have a profile page for every User which includes their own guestbook so other users can come to their profile and write a little message to them. My thought now is to change the User models from using MySQL to start using MongoDB. I can start by showing how the models for each User is set up. The user model: class User < ActiveRecord::Base has_one :guestbook, :class_name => "User::Guestbook" The Guestbook model model: class User::Guestbook < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user has_many :posts, :class_name => "User::Guestbook::Posts", :foreign_key => "user_id" And then the Guestbook posts model: class User::Guestbook::Posts < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :guestbook, :class_name => "User::Guestbook" I have divided it like this for my own convenience but now when i am going to try to migrate to MongoDB i dont know how to make the tables. I would like to have one table for each user and in that table a "column" for all the guestbook entries since MongoDB can have a EmbeddedDocument. I would like to do this so i just have one Table for each user and not like now when i have three tables just to be able to have a guestbook. So my thought is to have it like this: The user model: class User include MongoMapper::Document one :guestbook, :class_name => "User::Guestbook" The Guestbook model model: class User::Guestbook include MongoMapper::EmbeddedDocument belongs_to :user many :posts, :class_name => "User::Guestbook::Posts", :foreign_key => "user_id" And then the Guestbook posts model: class User::Guestbook::Posts include MongoMapper::EmbeddedDocument belongs_to :guestbook, :class_name => "User::Guestbook" But then i can think of one problem.. That when i just want to fetch the user information like a nickname and a birthdate then it will have to fetch all the users guestbook posts. And if each user has like a thousand posts in the guestbook it will get really much to fetch for the system. Or am i wrong? Do you think i should do it any other way? Thanks in advance and sorry if i am hard to understand but i am not so educated in the english language :)

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• Good Email Notification Sending Service

  - by Philibert Perusse

  I need to send a few but important email notifications to individual users. For instance, when they register their software I send them a confirmation email. Right now, I am using 'sendmail' from my Perl CGI script to do the job. Most of my automated email are lost or marked as junk. Unfortunately, I am using shared hosting services and not a very good control over the SPF and SenderID DNS records. Even more bad, some other user of that shared server has been infected with some kind of SPAM-BOT and the IP is now blacklisted until further notice! Anyway I just don't want to deal with this kind of headache. I am looking for an online service that I will be able to subscribe to and pay something like 0.10$ per email I send with no monthly fees. I just need and API to be able to send the email from PHP or Perl code I will have to write. I have been looking around at all those "Email Sending Services" and they are all wrapped around creating campains and managing lists for bulk email marketing distribution and newsletters. But remember, I want to send an email notification to a "single" recipient. So far, I have look at MailChimp, SocketLabs, iContact, ConstantContact, StreamSend and so many others to no avail. I have seen one comment at Hackers News saying that MailChimp have an API for transactional e-mails (i.e. ad-hoc ones to welcome a user for example). So you're not just restricted to using them for bulk emails But I cannot find this in the API documentation supplied, maybe this was removed. Any suggestions out there. Here is a summary of my requirements: Allows ad hoc sending of email to a single recipient. Throughput may well be throttle I don't care, i am sending like 2-5 emails a day. API available in PHP or Perl to connect to that web service. Ideally I can send HTML formatted emails, otherwise I will live with text only. Solution not too expensive, between 0.01$ and 0.25$ per email would be acceptable. No recurring monthly fees.

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• Encoding::UndefinedConversionError from email body

  - by raam86

  using mail for ruby I am getting this message: mail.rb:22:in `encode': "\xC7" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError) from mail.rb:22:in `<main>' If I remove encode I get a message ruby /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/bson-1.7.0/lib/bson/bson_ruby.rb:63:in `rescue in to_utf8_binary': String not valid utf-8: "<div dir=\"ltr\"><div class=\"gmail_quote\">l<br><br><br><div dir=\"ltr\"><div class=\"gmail_quote\"><br><br><br><div dir=\"ltr\"><div class=\"gmail_quote\"><br><br><br><div dir=\"ltr\"><div dir=\"rtl\">\xC7\xE1\xE4\xD5 \xC8\xC7\xE1\xE1\xDB\xC9 \xC7\xE1\xDA\xD1\xC8\xED\xC9</div></div>\r\n</div><br></div>\r\n</div><br></div>\r\n</div><br></div>" (BSON::InvalidStringEncoding) This is my code: require 'mail' require 'mongo' connection = Mongo::Connection.new db = connection.db("DB") db = Mongo::Connection.new.db("DB") newsCollection = db["news"] Mail.defaults do retriever_method :pop3, :address => "pop.gmail.com", :port => 995, :user_name => 'my_username', :password => '*****', :enable_ssl => true end emails = Mail.last #Checks if email is multipart and decods accordingly. Put to extract UTF8 from body plain_part = emails.multipart? ? (emails.text_part ? emails.text_part.body.decoded : nil) : emails.body.decoded html_part = emails.html_part ? emails.html_part.body.decoded : nil mongoMessage = {"date" => emails.date.to_s , "subject" => emails.subject , "body" => plain_part.encode('UTF-8') } msgID = newsCollection.insert(mongoMessage) #add the document to the database and returns it's ID puts msgID For English and Hebrew it works perfectly but it seems gmail is sending arabic with different encoding. Replacing UTF-8 with ASCII-8BIT gives a similar error. I get the same result when using plain_part for plain email messages. I am handling emails from one specific source so I can put html_part with confidence it's not causing the error. To make it extra weird Subject in Arabic is rendered perfectly. What encoding should I use?

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• jquery plus minus sign on collaps and expand

  - by user295189

  hi I am using the code below. What I wanted is to have a + or - sign on expanded or collapsed view. How can I do that. Here is the code Thanks in advance! XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <!--//---------------------------------+ // Developed by Roshan Bhattarai | // http://roshanbh.com.np | // Fell Free to use this script | //---------------------------------+--> <title>Collapsible Message Panels</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ //hide the all of the element with class msg_body $(".msg_body").show(); //toggle the componenet with class msg_body $(".msg_head").click(function(){ $(this).next(".msg_body").slideToggle(100); }); }); </script> <style type="text/css"> body { margin: 10px auto; width: 570px; font: 75%/120% Verdana,Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } p { padding: 0 0 1em; } .msg_list { margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 383px; } .msg_head { padding: 5px 10px; cursor: pointer; position: relative; background-color:#FFCCCC; margin:1px; } .msg_body { padding: 5px 10px 15px; background-color:#F4F4F8; } </style> </head> <body> <div align="center"> <p>Click on the each news head to toggle </p> </div> <div class="msg_list"> <p class="msg_head">Header-1 </p> <div class="msg_body"> orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit </div> <p class="msg_head">Header-2</p> <div class="msg_body"> orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit </div> </div> </body> </html>

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• How do I work around this problem creating a virtualenv environment with a custom-build Python?

  - by Daryl Spitzer

  I need to run some code on a Linux machine with Python 2.3.4 pre-installed. I'm not on the sudoers list for that machine, so I built Python 2.6.4 into (a subdirectory in) my home directory. Then I attempted to use virtualenv (for the first time), but got: $ Python-2.6.4/python virtualenv/virtualenv.py ENV New python executable in ENV/bin/python Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix> Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>] Installing setuptools......... Complete output from command /apps/users/dspitzer/ENV/bin/python -c "#!python \"\"\"Bootstrap setuptoo... " /apps/users/dspitzer/virtualen...6.egg: Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix> Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>] 'import site' failed; use -v for traceback Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 67, in <module> ImportError: No module named md5 ---------------------------------------- ...Installing setuptools...done. Traceback (most recent call last): File "virtualenv/virtualenv.py", line 1488, in <module> main() File "virtualenv/virtualenv.py", line 529, in main use_distribute=options.use_distribute) File "virtualenv/virtualenv.py", line 619, in create_environment install_setuptools(py_executable, unzip=unzip_setuptools) File "virtualenv/virtualenv.py", line 361, in install_setuptools _install_req(py_executable, unzip) File "virtualenv/virtualenv.py", line 337, in _install_req cwd=cwd) File "virtualenv/virtualenv.py", line 590, in call_subprocess % (cmd_desc, proc.returncode)) OSError: Command /apps/users/dspitzer/ENV/bin/python -c "#!python \"\"\"Bootstrap setuptoo... " /apps/users/dspitzer/virtualen...6.egg failed with error code 1 Should I be setting PYTHONHOME to some value? (I intentionally named my ENV "ENV" for lack of a better name.) Not knowing if I can ignore those errors, I tried installing nose (0.11.1) into my ENV: $ cd nose-0.11.1/ $ ls AUTHORS doc/ lgpl.txt nose.egg-info/ selftest.py* bin/ examples/ MANIFEST.in nosetests.1 setup.cfg build/ functional_tests/ NEWS PKG-INFO setup.py CHANGELOG install-rpm.sh* nose/ README.txt unit_tests/ $ ~/ENV/bin/python setup.py install Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix> Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>] Traceback (most recent call last): File "setup.py", line 1, in <module> from nose import __version__ as VERSION File "/apps/users/dspitzer/nose-0.11.1/nose/__init__.py", line 1, in <module> from nose.core import collector, main, run, run_exit, runmodule File "/apps/users/dspitzer/nose-0.11.1/nose/core.py", line 3, in <module> from __future__ import generators ImportError: No module named __future__ Any advice?

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• Unexpected behavior of IntentService

  - by kknight

  I used IntentService in my code instead of Service because IntentService creates a thread for me in onHandleIntent(Intent intent), so I don't have to create a Thead myself in the code of my service. I expected that two intents to the same IntentSerivce will execute in parallel because a thread is generated in IntentService for each invent. But my code turned out that the two intents executed in sequential way. This is my IntentService code: public class UpdateService extends IntentService { public static final String TAG = "HelloTestIntentService"; public UpdateService() { super("News UpdateService"); } protected void onHandleIntent(Intent intent) { String userAction = intent .getStringExtra("userAction"); Log.v(TAG, "" + new Date() + ", In onHandleIntent for userAction = " + userAction + ", thread id = " + Thread.currentThread().getId()); if ("1".equals(userAction)) { try { Thread.sleep(20 * 1000); } catch (InterruptedException e) { Log.e(TAG, "error", e); } Log.v(TAG, "" + new Date() + ", This thread is waked up."); } } } And the code call the service is below: public class HelloTest extends Activity { //@Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); Intent selectIntent = new Intent(this, UpdateService.class); selectIntent.putExtra("userAction", "1"); this.startService(selectIntent); selectIntent = new Intent(this, UpdateService.class); selectIntent.putExtra("userAction", "2"); this.startService(selectIntent); } } I saw this log message in the log: V/HelloTestIntentService( 848): Wed May 05 14:59:37 PDT 2010, In onHandleIntent for userAction = 1, thread id = 8 D/dalvikvm( 609): GC freed 941 objects / 55672 bytes in 99ms V/HelloTestIntentService( 848): Wed May 05 15:00:00 PDT 2010, This thread is waked up. V/HelloTestIntentService( 848): Wed May 05 15:00:00 PDT 2010, In onHandleIntent for userAction = 2, thread id = 8 I/ActivityManager( 568): Stopping service: com.example.android/.UpdateService The log shows that the second intent waited the first intent to finish and they are in the same thread. It there anything I misunderstood of IntentService. To make two service intents execute in parallel, do I have to replace IntentService with service and start a thread myself in the service code? Thanks.

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