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• TGIF: Engagement Wrap-up

  - by Michael Snow

  We've had a very busy week here at Oracle and as we build up to Oracle OpenWorld starting in less than 10 days - it doesn't look like things will be slowing down. Engagement is definitely in the air this week. Our friend, John Mancini published a great article entitled: "The World of Engagement" on his Digital Landfill blog yesterday and we hosted a great webcast with R "Ray" Wang from Constellation Research yesterday on the "9 C's of Engagement". 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} I wanted to wrap-up the week with some key takeaways from our webcast yesterday with Ray Wang. If you missed the webcast yesterday, fear not - it is now available  On-Demand. We'll leave you this week with lots of questions about how to navigate these churning waters of engagement. Stay tuned to the Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series as we fuel this dialogue. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Company Culture Does company support a culture of putting customer satisfaction ahead of profits? Does culture promote creativity and cross functional employee collaboration? Does culture accept different views of multi-generational workforce? Does culture promote employee training and skills development Does culture support upward mobility and long term retention? Does culture support work-life balance? Does the culture provide rewards for employee for outstanding customer support? Channels What are the current primary channels for customer communications? What do you think will be the primary channels in two years? Is company developing support model for emerging channels? Do all channels consistently deliver the same level of customer support? Do you know the cost per transaction across all channels? Do you engage customers proactively across multiple channels? Do all channels have access to the same customer information? Community Does company extend customer support into virtual communities of interest? Does company facilitate educating users through its virtual communities? Does company mine its customer’s experience into useful data? Does company increase the value for customers through using data to deliver new products and services? Does company support two way interactions with its customers through communities of interest? Does company actively support social CRM, online communities and social media markets? Credibility Does company market its trustworthiness through external certificates such as business licenses, BBB certificates or other validations? Does company promote trust through customer testimonials and case studies on ethical business practices? Does company promote truthful market campaigns Does company make it easy for customers to complain? Does company build its reputation for standing behind its products with guarantees for satisfaction? Does company protect its customer data with high security measures> Content What sources do you use to create customer content? Does company mine social media and blogs for customer content? How does your company sort, store and retain its customer content? How frequently does content get updated? What external sources do you use for customer content? How many responses are typically received from a knowledge management system inquiry? Does your company use customer content to design and develop new product and services? Context Does your company market to customers in clusters or individually? Does your company customize its messages and personalize them to specific needs of each individual customer? Does your company store customer data based on their past behaviors, purchases, sentiment analysis and current activities? Does your company manage customer context according to channels used? For example identify personal use channels versus business channels? What is your frequency of collecting customer activities across various touch points? How is your customer data stored and analyzed? Is contextual data used for future customer outreach? Cadence Which channels does your company measure-web site visits, phone calls, IVR, store visits, face to face, social media? Does company make effective use of cross channel marketing to promote more frequent customer engagement? Does your company rate the patterns relevant for your product or service and monitor usage against this pattern? Does your company measure the frequency of both online and offline channels? Does your company apply metrics to the frequency of customer engagements with product or services revenues? Does your company consolidate data for customer engagement across various channels for a complete view of its customer? Catalyst Does company offer coupon discounts? Does company have a customer loyalty program or a VIP membership program? Does company mine customer data to target specific groups of buyers? Do internal employees serve as ambassadors for customer programs? Does company drive loyalty through social media loyalty programs? Does company build rewards based on using loyalty data? Does company offer an employee incentive program to drive customer loyalty?

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• AccelerometerInput XNA GameComponent

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Bad accelerometer controls kill otherwise good games. I decided to try to do something about it. So I create an XNA GameComponent called AccelerometerInput. It’s still a beta project but you are welcome to try it, use it, modify it, etc. I’m releasing under the terms of the Microsoft Public License. Important info: First, it only supports tilt-style controls currently. I have not implemented motion-style controls yet (and make no promises as to when I might find time to do so). Second, I commented it heavily so that you can (hopefully) understand what it is doing. Please read the comments and examine the sample game for a usage overview. There are configurable parameters which I encourage you to make use of (both by modifying the default values where your testing shows it to be appropriate and also by implementing a calibration mechanism in your game that lets the user adjust those configurable values based on his or her own circumstances). Third, even with this code, accelerometer controls are still a fairly advanced topic area; you will likely find nothing but disappointment if you simply plunk this into some project without testing it on a device (or preferably on several devices). Fourth, if you do try this code and find that something doesn’t work as expected on your phone, please let me know as I want to improve it and can only do so with your help. Let me know what phone model it is, what you tried doing, what you expected, and what result you had instead. I may or may not be able to incorporate it into the code, but I can let others know at the very least so that they can make appropriate modifications to their games (I’m hopeful that all phones are reasonably similar in their workings and require, at most, a slight calibration change, but I simply don’t know). Fifth, although I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have about it, I’m very busy with a number of things currently so it might take a little while. Please look through the code and examine the comments and sample game first before asking any questions. It’s likely that the answer is in there. If not, or if you just aren’t really sure, ask away. Sixth, there are differences between a portrait-mode game and a landscape mode game (specifically in the appropriate default tilt adjustment for toward the user/away from the user calculations). This is documented and the default is set for landscape. If you use this for a portrait game, make the appropriate change (look for the TODO: comment in AccelerometerInput.cs). Seventh, no provision whatsoever is made for disabling screen locking. It is up to you to implement that and to take appropriate measures to detect when the user has been idle for too long and timeout the game. That code is very game-specific. If you have questions about such matters, consult the relevant MSDN documentation and, if you still have questions, visit the App Hub forums and ask there. I answer questions there a lot and so I may even stumble across your question and answer it. But that’s a much better forum than the comments section here for questions of that sort so I would appreciate it if you asked idle detection-related questions there (or on some other suitable site that you may be more familiar and comfortable with). Eighth, this is an XNA GameComponent intended for XNA-based games on WP7. A sufficiently knowledgeable Silverlight developer should have no problem adapting it for use in a Silverlight game or app. I may create a Silverlight version at some point myself. Right now I do not have the time, unfortunately. Ok. Without further ado: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/AccelerometerInput.zip Have a great St. Patrick’s Day!

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• Oracle ATG Ranked "Leader" Once Again In This Year's Gartner Magic Quadrant For E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Oracle ATG Web Commerce is in the top portion of the Leaders quadrant once again in this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce, and gained in “ability to execute” over the 2010 version. Leaders are defined in this Magic Quadrant as technology providers that demonstrate the optimal blend of insight, innovation, execution and the ability to "see around the corner." Oracle ATG Web Commerce is a Leader because it has broadened its e-commerce capabilities with multisite management, a broader range of mobile devices supported and other additions, and Gartner points out ATG’s steady growth in revenue, market share and market visibility. Gartner notes that Oracle made the announcement regarding its acquisition of ATG in November 2010 and this has helped ATG with additional sales, marketing, R&D and global partnerships.Oracle ATG's latest release, Oracle ATG Commerce 10, provides several important enhancements, including multisite management, cross-channel campaign management and support for a broader range of mobile devices, with the addition of merchandising (including updates to the user interface) and promotions applications. The Magic Quadrant focuses on e-commerce for B2B and B2C across industry verticals, including retail, manufacturing, distribution, telecommunications, publishing, media, and financial services. The product should be able to integrate with applications beyond traditional e-commerce channels to meet the emerging customer requirement to transact across channels with a seamless experience.

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• Oracle ATG Ranked "Leader" Once Again In This Year's Gartner Magic Quadrant For E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Oracle ATG Web Commerce is in the top portion of the Leaders quadrant once again in this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce, and gained in “ability to execute” over the 2010 version. Leaders are defined in this Magic Quadrant as technology providers that demonstrate the optimal blend of insight, innovation, execution and the ability to "see around the corner." Oracle ATG Web Commerce is a Leader because it has broadened its e-commerce capabilities with multisite management, a broader range of mobile devices supported and other additions, and Gartner points out ATG’s steady growth in revenue, market share and market visibility. Gartner notes that Oracle made the announcement regarding its acquisition of ATG in November 2010 and this has helped ATG with additional sales, marketing, R&D and global partnerships.Oracle ATG's latest release, Oracle ATG Commerce 10, provides several important enhancements, including multisite management, cross-channel campaign management and support for a broader range of mobile devices, with the addition of merchandising (including updates to the user interface) and promotions applications. The Magic Quadrant focuses on e-commerce for B2B and B2C across industry verticals, including retail, manufacturing, distribution, telecommunications, publishing, media, and financial services. The product should be able to integrate with applications beyond traditional e-commerce channels to meet the emerging customer requirement to transact across channels with a seamless experience.

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• Index independent character comparison within text blocks

  - by Michael IV

  I have the following task: developing a program where there is a block of sample text which should be typed by user. Any typos the user does during the test are registered. Basically, I can compare each typed char with the sample char based on caret index position of the input, but there is one significant flaw in such a "naive" approach. If the user typed mistakenly more letters than a whole string has, or inserted more white spaces between the string than should be, then the rest of the comparisons will be wrong because of the index offsets added by the additional wrong insertions. I have thought of designing some kind of parser where each string (or even a char ) is tokenized and the comparisons are made "char-wise" and not "index-wise," but that seems to me like an overkill for such a task. I would like to get a reference to possibly existing algorithms which can be helpful in solving this kind of problem.

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• How do I implement a score database in Android?

  - by Michael Seun Araromi

  I making a 2D game for Android using OpenGL-ES technology. It is a space shooting game where the player shoots enemy ships. I want to keep a track of score for the amount of enemy ships destroyed and a record of a local highscore. The score should be incremented whenever an enemy is destroyed. I also want a way of displaying both the current score and highscore on the game screen. I am not familiar with databases at all and I will appreciate a clear answer or a link to a good tutorial for my cause. Thanks.

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• XNA RenderTarget2D Sample

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I remember being scared of render targets when I first started with XNA. They seemed like weird magic and I didn’t understand them at all. There’s nothing to be frightened of, though, and they are pretty easy to learn how to use. The first thing you need to know is that when you’re drawing in XNA, you aren’t actually drawing to the screen. Instead you’re drawing to this thing called the “back buffer”. Internally, XNA maintains two sections of graphics memory. Each one is exactly the same size as the other and has all the same properties (such as surface format, whether there’s a depth buffer and/or a stencil buffer, and so on). XNA flips between these two sections of memory every update-draw cycle. So while you are drawing to one, it’s busy drawing the other one on the screen. Then the current update-draw cycle ends, it flips, and the section you were just drawing to gets drawn to the screen while the one that was being drawn to the screen before is now the one you’ll be drawing on. This is what’s meant by “double buffering”. If you drew directly to the screen, the player would see all of those draws taking place as they happened and that would look odd and not very good at all. Those two sections of graphics memory are render targets. All a render target is, is a section of graphics memory to which things can be drawn. In addition to the two that XNA maintains automatically, you can also create and set your own using RenderTarget2D and GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget. Using render targets lets you do all sorts of neat post-processing effects (like bloom) to make your game look cooler. It also just lets you do things like motion blur and lets you create mirrors in 3D games. There are quite a lot of things that render targets let you do. To go along with this post, I wrote up a simple sample for how to create and use a RenderTarget2D. It’s available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License and is available for download on my website here: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/RenderTarget2DSample.zip . Other than the ‘using’ statements, every line is commented in detail so that it should (hopefully) be easy to follow along with and understand. If you have any questions, leave a comment here or drop me a line on Twitter. One last note. While creating the sample I came across an interesting quirk. If you start by creating a Windows Game, and then make a copy for Windows Phone 7, the drop-down that lets you choose between drawing to a WP7 device and the WP7 emulator stays grayed-out. To resolve this, you need to right click on the Windows Phone 7 version in the Solution Explorer, and choose “Set as StartUp Project”. The bar will then become active, letting you change the target you which to deploy to. If you want another version to be the one that starts up when you press F5 to start debugging, just go and right-click on that version and choose “Set as StartUp Project” for it once you’ve set the WP7 target (device or emulator) that you want.

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• VS 2010 snippet manager and quickCode

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  During the last few years I've used QuickCode and it was very helpful. VS 2010 has  Code Snippets Manager that MS finally made quite convenient to use, so I will use it in a future.   I will need to convert my QuickCode commands to VS snippets. I am sure I will miss Alt-Q hotkey for some time.

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• How to "cast" from generic List<> to ArrayList

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  We are writing new code using generic List<> , e.g. List<MyClass>.   However we have legacy functions, that are expect ArrayList as a parameter. It is a second time, when I and my colleague asked, how to "cast" generic List<MyClass> to ArrayList. The answer is simple- just use ArrayList constructor with ICollection parameter. Note that it is not real cast, it  copies  references to ArrayList. var list=new List<MyClass>(); //Fill list items ArrayList al=new ArrayList(list);//"cast"-

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• Modern Shader Book?

  - by Michael Stum

  I'm interested in learning about Shaders: What are they, when/for what would I use them, and how to use them. (Specifically I'm interested in Water and Bloom effects, but I know close to 0 about Shaders, so I need a general introduction). I saw a lot of books that are a couple of years old, so I don't know if they still apply. I'm targeting XNA 4.0 at the moment (which I believe means HLSL Shaders for Shader Model 4.0), but anything that generally targets DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 is helpful I guess.

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• Oracle WebCenter Quiz

  - by Michael Snow

  Quiz: How many of the following business necessities can you accomplish with Oracle WebCenter? a) Employee On-boarding b) Policies & Procedures c) Regulatory Compliance d) Sales Enablement Dashboards e) Secure Deal Collaboration f) Document & IP Management g) Accounts Payable h) Records Management i) Claims Processing j) Marketing and Brand Management k) Call Center & HelpDesk l) Contract Management m) Collaborative Content Contribution and Sharing Environment n) Enterprise Application, Desktop and Office integration o) Share Content Across Intranet And Extranets p) Combine Content In Composite Applications q) Subject Matter Expert Location r) Personalize Recommendations of Spaces, Documents, Wikis, Blogs, and Topics s) Collaborative Community Websites t) Marketing Driven Websites u) Strategic Web Experience Management v) Online Engagement Optimization w) Create Targeted Online Experiences x) Manage Interactive Social Experiences y) Optimize Multi-Channel Customer Experiences z) End-User Personalization & Syndication aa) ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!  (HINT: CHOOSE THIS ONE!!) bb) NONE OF THE ABOVE Learn More - Join us for a Webcast   Do More with Oracle WebCenter – Expand Beyond Content Management

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• Communications: BNSL Unifies The Customer Experience

  - by Michael Seback

  Hear how BNSL achieved a unified customer experience across channels.  BNSL is India's number one telecommunications operator with 70M mobile customers and 20M wired customers. They consolidated 330 different districts and customer experiences into a single customer experience across the contact center, web, email and SMS.  Click here to listen to their journey.  Read more about Oracle Communications.  

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• Hamster Time Tracker Broken After Upgrade to 11.10

  - by Michael Robinson

  After upgrading 11.04 to 11.10 (which was rather bumpy because of a failure with the flash-installer), I can't seem to start hamster-time-tracker. Output: user@machine:~$ hamster-time-tracker Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker", line 478, in <module> from hamster import i18n ImportError: cannot import name i18n Does anyone have any tips on where to start with this issue?

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• Why do people crawl sites without downloading pictures?

  - by Michael

  Let me show you what I mean: IP Pages Hits Bandwidth 85.xx.xx.xxx 236 236 735.00 KB 195.xx.xxx.xx 164 164 533.74 KB 95.xxx.xxx.xxx 90 90 293.47 KB It's very clear that these person are crawling my site with bots. There's no way that you could visit my site and use <1MB bandwidth. You might say that there's the possibility that they could be browsing the site using some browser or plug-in that does not download images, js/css files, etc., but the simple fact of the matter is that there are not 90-236 pages that are linked from the home page (outside of WP files), even if you visited every page twice. I could understand if these people were crawling the site for pictures, but once again, the bandwidth indicates that this isn't what is happening. Why, then, would they crawl the site to simply view the HTML/txt/js/etc. files? The only thing that I can come up with is that they are scanning for outdated versions of WordPress, SQL injection vulnerabilities, etc., which makes me inclined to outright ban the IPs, but I'm curious, is it possible that this person is a legitimate user, or at the very least, not intending to be harmful?

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• n00b needs some PHP syntax guidance [closed]

  - by Michael

  If you look at http://www.cruc.es/?paged=12/ and go to the bottom of the page you'll see the bottom navigation with the next and previous options. I've been able to make the page numbers work by changing page to paged= in the code. I don't know enough about PHP to get the previous/next options to work. Any advice would be appreciated and I've pasted the code below. Thank you: n00b if ( $query->found_posts > $query->query_vars["posts_per_page"] ) { echo '<ul class="paging">'; // Previous link? if ( $page > 1 ) { echo '<li class="previous"><a href="'.$baseURL.'/page/'.($page-1).'/'.$qs.'">previous</a></li>'; } // Loop through pages for ( $i=1; $i <= $query->max_num_pages; $i++ ) { // Current page or linked page? if ( $i == $page ) { echo '<li class="active">'.$i.'</li>'; } else { echo '<li><a href="'.$baseURL.'/?paged='.$i.'/'.$qs.'">'.$i.'</a></li>'; } } // Next link? if ( $page < $query->max_num_pages ) { echo '<li><a href="'.$baseURL.'/page/'.($page+1).'/'.$qs.'">next</a></li>'; } echo '</ul>'; }

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• Oracle CRM For Public Sector, Commercial Business, Education

  - by michael.seback

  Chongqing Transport Commission Improves Management of Transport Projects The Chongqing Transport Commission is responsible for public passenger, road, and waterway transport in urban and rural areas of Chongqing. The commission administers the region's road and water industry; oversees the construction of transport infrastructure; and manages civil aviation, railroads, roads, waterways, ports, and wharves. "After studying the IT initiatives of other provincial transport commissions, we decided to use Siebel Public Sector to build our integrated transport service system. The Siebel software offers powerful functions that allow us to integrate information and improve the management of our road, rail, and waterway infrastructure projects." - Chen Xiaoming, Vice Director, Information Center, Chongqing Transport Commission. Read more here. Siemens Information Services Increases Productivity by 20% Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. provides back-office account processing services to Siemens' vendors. The company works with Siemens' healthcare, energy, and industry divisions in Europe, the United States, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. It approves financial services such as processing payroll, accounts data, purchase orders, invoices, and payments, and also creates service catalogs for customers and internal teams. "Oracle CRM ON Demand provides us with a complete view of each customer's data from the moment they log a request to the time we close it. This has eliminated manual requests, and improved the service we offer to our clients across the Asia-Pacific region." -Sunil Zutshi, General Manager, IT, Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. Read more here. China Distance Education Holdings Improves Call Center Productivity by 24% China Distance Education Holdings Limited is a leading provider of online education. The organization offers 174 courses through 16 Web sites, including accounting, healthcare, law, and engineering. In 2010, 215,000 students were enrolled. "Online education is a fast growing sector in China. To maintain our competitiveness, we implemented Oracle Contact Center Anywhere to make it easier and faster for our call center staff to respond to student enquiries. As a result, their productivity increased by 24%." - Qin Songjiang, Chief Technology Officer, China Distance Education Holdings Limited. Read more here.

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• How to describe the profession [closed]

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Possible Duplicates: How to explain programming to a non-programmer? Getting non-programmers to understand the development process I was asked a question today that made me think. Here's a middle age person who apparently knows nothing about computers besides this specific application they use (I actually suggested to use Calculator, rather than hunt around the whole office for a hand-held one which had mysteriously vanished, and the fact that the computer could be used for such tasks was apparently news), asking me to explain what programming is about. In general. I tried, but am not sure I managed very well. But it got me thinking. What would be a good way to describe programming, or more generally speaking systems development, to a person like that? How have you responded being put in a similar situation?

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures. There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication. And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations. Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users. Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible. Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along. Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals. What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.

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• Modularity through HTTP

  - by Michael Williamson

  As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

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• Microsoft Interview Attire

  - by Michael

  Hi all, I have an interview with Microsoft in a week and am wondering what to wear. The recruiter said Business Casual but that means very little to me. I'm sure some people here have already had interviews at MS. Anyone care to share what the interviewers were wearing? Would I be out of place with jeans and a polo shirt? Honestly, I feel more comfortable with casual clothes (some people are the opposite) but I don't want to look under dressed either. Thanks for the tips.

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• Standards Matter: The Battle For Interoperability Continues

  - by michael.rowell

  Great Article, although it is a little dated at this point. Information Week Article Standards Matter: The Battle for Interoperability goes on Summary If you're guilty of relegating standards support to a "nice to have" feature rather than a requirement, you're part of the problem. If you want products to interoperate, be prepared to walk away if a vendor can't prove compliance. Don't be brushed off with promises of standards support "on the road map." The alternative is vendor lock-in and higher costs, including the cost of maintaining systems that don't work together. Standards bodies are imperfect and must do better. The alternative: splintered networks and broken promises. The point: "The secret sauce to a successful 'working standard' isn't necessarily IETF or another longstanding body," says Jonathan Feldman, director of IT services for the city of Asheville, N.C., and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. "Rather, an earnest and honest effort by a group that has governance outside of a single corporation's control is what's important." In order to have true interoperability vendors as well as customers must be actively engaged in the standards process. Vendors must be willing to truly work together and not be protecting an existing product. Customers must also be willing to truly to work together and not be demanding a solution that only meets their needs but instead meets the needs of all participants. Ultimately, customers must be willing to reward vendor compliance by requiring compliance in products and services that they purchase and deploy. Managers that deploy systems without compliance to standards are only hurting themselves. Standards do matter. When developed openly and deployed compliantly standards deliver interoperability which provides solid business value.

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• BizTalk & NService Bus Whitepaper

  - by Michael Stephenson

  My whitepaper discussing BizTalk and NService Bus is not available on MSDN http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b57b7625-7316-4f56-b88e-1fb685efae5b Thanks to Steve Lemkau for his contribution and to Udi Dahan and the NServiceBus User Forums for help with a few questions I had.

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• How do you force Ubuntu to unmount a disk when you press the eject button on an optical drive?

  - by Michael Curran

  When upgrading my hardware, I also upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10. On my previous system (with 10.04 and earlier) when I ejected a disk from the optical drive, the subfolder in the /media directory was automatically removed. In my new 10.10 system, if I don't eject the disk using the "eject" command within the system, the disk remains mounted, even after a new disk is installed. The new drive is a Blu Ray drive, but I haven't noticed any other problems from it. Normally, this isn't a problem, but it makes installing applications that are spread over multiple CDs more difficult in many cases (i.e. Wine). Any advice?

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• Defaulting the HLSL Vertex and Pixel Shader Levels to Feature Level 9_1 in VS 2012

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I love Visual Studio 2012. But this is not a post about that. This is a post about tweaking one particular parameter that I’ve found a bit annoying. Disclaimer: You will be modifying important MSBuild files. If you screw up you will break your build tools. And maybe your computer will catch fire. I’m not responsible. No warranties or guaranties of any sort. This info is provided “as is”. By default, if you add a new vertex shader or pixel shader item to a project, it will be set to build with shader profile 4.0_level_9_3. If you need 9_3 functionality, this is all well and good. But (especially for Windows Store apps) you really want to target the lowest shader profile possible so that your game will run on as many computers as possible. So it’s a good idea to default to 9_1. To do this you could add in new HLSL files via “Add->New Item->Visual C++->HLSL->______ Shader File (.hlsl)” and then edit the shader files’ properties to set them manually to use 9_1 via “Properties->HLSL Compiler->General->Shader Model”. This is fine unless you forget to do this once and then submit your game with 9_3 shaders instead of 9_1 shaders to the Windows Store or to some other game store. Then you’d wind up with either rejection or angry “this doesn’t work on my computer! ripoff!” messages. There’s another option though. In “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VC\HLSL\1033\VertexShader” (note the path might vary slightly for you if you are using a 32-bit system or have a non-ENU version of Visual Studio 2012) you will find a “VertexShader.vstemplate” file. If you open this file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad++), then inside the CustomParameters tag within the TemplateContent tag you should see a CustomParameter tag for the ShaderType, i.e.: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> On a new line, we are going to add another CustomParameter tag to the CustomParameters tag. It will look like this: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> such that we now have:     <CustomParameters>       <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/>       <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/>     </CustomParameters> You can then save the file (you will need to be an Administrator or have Administrator access). Back in the 1033 directory (or whatever the number is for your language), go into the “PixelShader” directory. Edit the “PixelShader.vstemplate” file and make the same change (note that this time $ShaderType$ is “Pixel” not “Vertex”; you shouldn’t be changing that line anyway, but if you were to just copy and replace the above four lines then you will wind up creating pixel shaders that the HLSL compiler would try to compile as vertex shaders, with all sort of weird errors as a result). Once you’ve added the $ShaderModel$ line to “PixelShader.vstemplate” and have saved it, everything should be done. Since Feature Level 9_1 and 9_3 don’t support any of the other shader types, those are set to default to their appropriate minimums already (Compute and Geometry are set to “4.0” and Domain and Hull are set to “5.0”, which are their respective minimums (though not all 4.0 cards support Compute shaders; they were an optional feature added with DirectX 10.1 and only became required for DirectX 11 hardware). In case you are wondering where these magic values come from, you can find them all in the “fxc.xml” file in the “\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.CPP\v4.0\V110\1033” directory (or whatever your language number is; 1033 is ENU and various other product languages have their own respective numbers (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964664.aspx ) such that Japanese is 1041 (for example), though for all I know MSBuild tasks might be 1033 for everyone). If, like me, you installed VS 2012 to a drive other than the C:\ drive, you will find the vstemplate files in the drive to which you installed VS 2012 (D:\ in my case) but you will find the fxc.xml file on the C:\ drive. You should not edit fxc.xml. You will almost definitely break things by doing that; it’s just something you can look through to see all the other options that the FXC task takes such that you could, if needed, add further CustomParameter tags if you wanted to default to other supported options. I haven’t tried any others though so I don’t have any advice on how to set them.

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• Less Can Be More In E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Today’s consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the products and services that interest them.  In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult. In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs. The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile have purchased. Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective. Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.

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