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• Windows Azure: Announcing release of Windows Azure SDK 2.2 (with lots of goodies)

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier today I blogged about a big update we made today to Windows Azure, and some of the great new features it provides. Today I’m also excited to also announce the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.2. Today’s SDK release adds even more great features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter The below post has more details on what’s available in today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release.  Also head over to Channel 9 to see the new episode of the Visual Studio Toolbox show that will be available shortly, and which highlights these features in a video demonstration. Visual Studio 2013 Support Version 2.2 of the Window Azure SDK is the first official version of the SDK to support the final RTM release of Visual Studio 2013. If you installed the 2.1 SDK with the Preview of Visual Studio 2013 we recommend that you upgrade your projects to SDK 2.2.  SDK 2.2 also works side by side with the SDK 2.0 and SDK 2.1 releases on Visual Studio 2012: Integrated Windows Azure Sign In within Visual Studio Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio is one of the big improvements added with this Windows Azure SDK release.  Integrated sign-in support enables developers to develop/test/manage Windows Azure resources within Visual Studio without having to download or use management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer inside Visual Studio and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to connect to Windows Azure: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the account you wish to sign-in with: You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Organizational account (e.g. Active Directory) as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio Server Explorer (and you can start using them): With this new integrated sign in experience you are now able to publish web apps, deploy VMs and cloud services, use Windows Azure diagnostics, and fully interact with your Windows Azure services within Visual Studio without the need for a management certificate.  All of the authentication is handled using the Windows Azure Active Directory associated with your Windows Azure account (details on this can be found in my earlier blog post). Integrating authentication this way end-to-end across the Service Management APIs + Dev Tools + Management Portal + PowerShell automation scripts enables a much more secure and flexible security model within Windows Azure, and makes it much more convenient to securely manage multiple developers + administrators working on a project.  It also allows organizations and enterprises to use the same authentication model that they use for their developers on-premises in the cloud.  It also ensures that employees who leave an organization immediately lose access to their company’s cloud based resources once their Active Directory account is suspended. Filtering/Subscription Management Once you login within Visual Studio, you can filter which Windows Azure subscriptions/regions are visible within the Server Explorer by right-clicking the “Filter Services” context menu within the Server Explorer.  You can also use the “Manage Subscriptions” context menu to mange your Windows Azure Subscriptions: Bringing up the “Manage Subscriptions” dialog allows you to see which accounts you are currently using, as well as which subscriptions are within them: The “Certificates” tab allows you to continue to import and use management certificates to manage Windows Azure resources as well.  We have not removed any functionality with today’s update – all of the existing scenarios that previously supported management certificates within Visual Studio continue to work just fine.  The new integrated sign-in support provided with today’s release is purely additive. Note: the SQL Database node and the Mobile Service node in Server Explorer do not support integrated sign-in at this time. Therefore, you will only see databases and mobile services under those nodes if you have a management certificate to authorize access to them.  We will enable them with integrated sign-in in a future update. Remote Debugging Cloud Resources within Visual Studio Today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds support for remote debugging many types of Windows Azure resources. With live, remote debugging support from within Visual Studio, you are now able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure.  Let’s walkthrough how to enable remote debugging for a Cloud Service: Remote Debugging of Cloud Services To enable remote debugging for your cloud service, select Debug as the Build Configuration on the Common Settings tab of your Cloud Service’s publish dialog wizard: Then click the Advanced Settings tab and check the Enable Remote Debugging for all roles checkbox: Once your cloud service is published and running live in the cloud, simply set a breakpoint in your local source code: Then use Visual Studio’s Server Explorer to select the Cloud Service instance deployed in the cloud, and then use the Attach Debugger context menu on the role or to a specific VM instance of it: Once the debugger attaches to the Cloud Service, and a breakpoint is hit, you’ll be able to use the rich debugging capabilities of Visual Studio to debug the cloud instance remotely, in real-time, and see exactly how your app is running in the cloud. Today’s remote debugging support is super powerful, and makes it much easier to develop and test applications for the cloud.  Support for remote debugging Cloud Services is available as of today, and we’ll also enable support for remote debugging Web Sites shortly. Firewall Management Support with SQL Databases By default we enable a security firewall around SQL Databases hosted within Windows Azure.  This ensures that only your application (or IP addresses you approve) can connect to them and helps make your infrastructure secure by default.  This is great for protection at runtime, but can sometimes be a pain at development time (since by default you can’t connect/manage the database remotely within Visual Studio if the security firewall blocks your instance of VS from connecting to it). One of the cool features we’ve added with today’s release is support that makes it easy to enable and configure the security firewall directly within Visual Studio.  Now with the SDK 2.2 release, when you try and connect to a SQL Database using the Visual Studio Server Explorer, and a firewall rule prevents access to the database from your machine, you will be prompted to add a firewall rule to enable access from your local IP address: You can simply click Add Firewall Rule and a new rule will be automatically added for you. In some cases, the logic to detect your local IP may not be sufficient (for example: you are behind a corporate firewall that uses a range of IP addresses) and you may need to set up a firewall rule for a range of IP addresses in order to gain access. The new Add Firewall Rule dialog also makes this easy to do.  Once connected you’ll be able to manage your SQL Database directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer: This makes it much easier to work with databases in the cloud. Visual Studio 2013 RTM Virtual Machine Images Available for MSDN Subscribers Last week we released the General Availability Release of Visual Studio 2013 to the web.  This is an awesome release with a ton of new features. With today’s Windows Azure update we now have a set of pre-configured VM images of VS 2013 available within the Windows Azure Management Portal for use by MSDN customers.  This enables you to create a VM in the cloud with VS 2013 pre-installed on it in with only a few clicks: Windows Azure now provides the fastest and easiest way to get started doing development with Visual Studio 2013. Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Preview) Having the ability to automate the creation, deployment, and tear down of resources is a key requirement for applications running in the cloud.  It also helps immensely when running dev/test scenarios and coded UI tests against pre-production environments. Today we are releasing a preview of a new set of Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET.  These new libraries make it easy to automate tasks using any .NET language (e.g. C#, VB, F#, etc).  Previously this automation capability was only available through the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets or to developers who were willing to write their own wrappers for the Windows Azure Service Management REST API. Modern .NET Developer Experience We’ve worked to design easy-to-understand .NET APIs that still map well to the underlying REST endpoints, making sure to use and expose the modern .NET functionality that developers expect today: Portable Class Library (PCL) support targeting applications built for any .NET Platform (no platform restriction) Shipped as a set of focused NuGet packages with minimal dependencies to simplify versioning Support async/await task based asynchrony (with easy sync overloads) Shared infrastructure for common error handling, tracing, configuration, HTTP pipeline manipulation, etc. Factored for easy testability and mocking Built on top of popular libraries like HttpClient and Json.NET Below is a list of a few of the management client classes that are shipping with today’s initial preview release: .NET Class Name Supports Operations for these Assets (and potentially more) ManagementClient Locations Credentials Subscriptions Certificates ComputeManagementClient Hosted Services Deployments Virtual Machines Virtual Machine Images & Disks StorageManagementClient Storage Accounts WebSiteManagementClient Web Sites Web Site Publish Profiles Usage Metrics Repositories VirtualNetworkManagementClient Networks Gateways Automating Creating a Virtual Machine using .NET Let’s walkthrough an example of how we can use the new Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET to fully automate creating a Virtual Machine. I’m deliberately showing a scenario with a lot of custom options configured – including VHD image gallery enumeration, attaching data drives, network endpoints + firewall rules setup - to show off the full power and richness of what the new library provides. We’ll begin with some code that demonstrates how to enumerate through the built-in Windows images within the standard Windows Azure VM Gallery.  We’ll search for the first VM image that has the word “Windows” in it and use that as our base image to build the VM from.  We’ll then create a cloud service container in the West US region to host it within: We can then customize some options on it such as setting up a computer name, admin username/password, and hostname.  We’ll also open up a remote desktop (RDP) endpoint through its security firewall: We’ll then specify the VHD host and data drives that we want to mount on the Virtual Machine, and specify the size of the VM we want to run it in: Once everything has been set up the call to create the virtual machine is executed asynchronously In a few minutes we’ll then have a completely deployed VM running on Windows Azure with all of the settings (hard drives, VM size, machine name, username/password, network endpoints + firewall settings) fully configured and ready for us to use: Preview Availability via NuGet The Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET are now available via NuGet. Because they are still in preview form, you’ll need to add the –IncludePrerelease switch when you go to retrieve the packages. The Package Manager Console screen shot below demonstrates how to get the entire set of libraries to manage your Windows Azure assets: You can also install them within your .NET projects by right clicking on the VS Solution Explorer and using the Manage NuGet Packages context menu command.  Make sure to select the “Include Prerelease” drop-down for them to show up, and then you can install the specific management libraries you need for your particular scenarios: Open Source License The new Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET make it super easy to automate management operations within Windows Azure – whether they are for Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Storage Accounts, Web Sites, and more.  Like the rest of the Windows Azure SDK, we are releasing the source code under an open source (Apache 2) license and it is hosted at https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/master/libraries if you wish to contribute. PowerShell Enhancements and our New Script Center Today, we are also shipping Windows Azure PowerShell 0.7.0 (which is a separate download). You can find the full change log here. Here are some of the improvements provided with it: Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support Script Center providing many sample scripts to automate common tasks on Windows Azure New cmdlets for Media Services and SQL Database Script Center Windows Azure enables you to script and automate a lot of tasks using PowerShell.  People often ask for more pre-built samples of common scenarios so that they can use them to learn and tweak/customize. With this in mind, we are excited to introduce a new Script Center that we are launching for Windows Azure. You can learn about how to scripting with Windows Azure with a get started article. You can then find many sample scripts across different solutions, including infrastructure, data management, web, and more: All of the sample scripts are hosted on TechNet with links from the Windows Azure Script Center. Each script is complete with good code comments, detailed descriptions, and examples of usage. Summary Visual Studio 2013 and the Windows Azure SDK 2.2 make it easier than ever to get started developing rich cloud applications. Along with the Windows Azure Developer Center’s growing set of .NET developer resources to guide your development efforts, today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release should make your development experience more enjoyable and efficient. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• How to create art assets for a 3d avatar editor

  - by Andrew Garrison

  I am currently prototyping an idea for an iPhone game. I'd like to create an avatar editor inside the game so that the player can create a 3d avatar face and modify certain features (using slider controls), such as nose shape, eye color, mouth size, etc. This has been done in several games, but what I'm looking to do would be fairly cartoon-ish/caricature-ish, similar to the Mii editor on the Nintendo Wii (http://www.myavatareditor.com/). I'd also like the final result to have the ability to use some canned animations, such as simple speech animations, smiling, frowning, etc. I am not an artist, so I would be unable to create these assets, but what kind of effort is required for an artist to create the 3d models necessary for this type of game? Also what mechanism would be required to tweak the face's characteristics? Would you use bones or morph targets? How would the final result be animated? Would facial animation use bones or morph targets? I've seen several tools that do this sort of thing too, such as FacialStudio. Are there any facial generation tools out there you'd recommend for generating some base content for this game, or should I just hire an artist to do this type of work. Thanks!

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• How to Fix "Read-only file system" error when I run something as sudo and try to make a folder/file?

  - by Andrew

  When I try to save something or rename a file/folder it say this error " Read-only file system" or run something as root in the terminal it say this error sudo: unable to open /var/lib/sudo/"My User Name"/0: Read-only file system W: Not using locking for read only lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock E: Unable to write to /var/cache/apt/ E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. When I make a Folder the error dialog in the details with Nautilus is this: Error creating directory: Read-only file system I would show you I picture of it but it isn't even letting my save onto my flash drive. Please help me.

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• What is the best aproach for coding in a slow compilation environment

  - by Andrew

  I used to coding in C# in a TDD style - write/or change a small chunk of code, re-compile in 10 seconds the whole solution, re-run the tests and again. Easy... That development methodology worked very well for me for a few years, until a last year when I had to go back to C++ coding and it really feels that my productivity has dramatically decreased since. The C++ as a language is not a problem - I had quite a lot fo C++ dev experience... but in the past. My productivity is still OK for a small projects, but it gets worse when with the increase of the project size and once compilation time hits 10+ minutes it gets really bad. And if I find the error I have to start compilation again, etc. That is just purely frustrating. Thus I concluded that in a small chunks (as before) is not acceptable - any recommendations how can I get myself into the old gone habit of coding for an hour or so, when reviewing the code manually (without relying on a fast C# compiler), and only recompiling/re-running unit tests once in a couple of hours. With a C# and TDD it was very easy to write a code in a evolutionary way - after a dozen of iterations whatever crap I started with was ending up in a good code, but it just does not work for me anymore (in a slow compilation environment). Would really appreciate your inputs and recos. p.s. not sure how to tag the question - anyone is welcome to re-tag the question appropriately. Cheers.

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• First steps into css - aligning data insite one DIV [on hold]

  - by Andrew

  I am trying to move away from tables, and start doing CSS. Here is my HTML code that I currently trying to place into a nice looking container. <div> <div> <h2>ID: 4000 | SSN#: 4545</h2> </div> <div> <img src="./images/tenant/unknown.png"> </div> <div> <h3>Names Used</h3> Will Smith<br> Bill Smmith<br> John Smith<br> Will Smith<br> Bill Smmith<br> John Smith<br> Will Smith<br> Bill Smmith<br> John Smith<br> </div> <div> <h3>Phones Used</h3> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> 123456789<br> </div> <div> <h3>Addresses Used</h3> 125 Main Evanston IL 60202<br> 465 Greenwood St. Schaumburg null 60108<br> 125 Main Evanston IL 60202<br> 465 Greenwood St. Schaumburg null 60108<br> 125 Main Evanston IL 60202<br> 465 Greenwood St. Schaumburg null 60108<br> 125 Main Evanston IL 60202<br> 465 Greenwood St. Schaumburg null 60108<br> 125 Main Evanston IL 60202<br> 465 Greenwood St. Schaumburg null 60108<br> </div> </div> I now understand now I create classes and assign classes to elements. I have no issues doing colors. But I am very confused with elements alignments. Could you suggest a nice way to pack it together with some CSS which I can analyze and take as a CSS starting learning point?

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• How can I automatically change the system keyboard layout when plugging in an external keyboard?

  - by Andrew Bolster

  I have a US-Style laptop, which is fine, but I also have a UK-style Ergonomic USB keyboard. As such I usually have the US key layout set, but when I settle in at my desk and use the UK USB keyboard I find myself making stupid mistakes on symbols (normally a pretty good touch typist on either ergo or standard kbd). Can anyone think of a clean way of setting the keyboard layout based on the inferred layout/USBID of any plugged in Keyboard? Even having a custom setting such as adding a specific USB ID to a runtime script that checks if its plugged in or not. Can this be done without the user having to logout/in? I remember doing something similar with xorg.conf, but that required logout.

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• Do professional software developers still dream of creating industry/world-changing apps?

  - by Andrew Heath

  I'm a hobby programmer. The absence of real world deadlines, customer feedback, or performance reviews leaves me free to daydream about having and implementing The Next Great Idea That Changes the World. Of course I'm aware I probably have a better chance of winning the lottery, but it's fun to imagine knocking out some fully-homebrewed app that destroys the status quo. I know many professional programmers have side projects, some for profit others not. I was wondering on the way to work this morning (non-IT boring work) if having to code for your food tended to dampen the dreaming? Does greater experience leave you jaded and more focused on the projects at hand? Not trying to be a downer, just interested in the mindset of the real software professional :-)

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• Subversion 1.7 on 12.04 precise: libsasl error, compiling from source?

  - by Andrew Mao

  Background: I am a longtime Gentoo user, and this is my first time using Ubuntu (installed on a VM to avoid compiling everything from scratch). I am familiar with a Linux environment but somewhat unfamiliar with Ubuntu. I am trying to install Subversion 1.7 on Ubuntu and saw this post: Where can I find a Subversion 1.7 binary? The above post recommends using the PPA ppa:dominik-stadler/subversion-1.7. I also found the PPA ppa:svn/ppa from another link. They both cause problems for me. The issue is that any svn operation using the remote server causes the following error: svn: E170001: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'svn+ssh://my_repo' svn: E170001: Could not create SASL context: generic failure: No such file or directory This seems to arise from a recent bug involving SVN dependency on the libsasl library, as documented by Debian users here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683555 and also Mac users here: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/34861 Resolution seems to involve either updating the cyrus-sasl or libsasl library to a newer version (neither of which is in the latest apt packages), or compiling subversion without SASL support. As a Gentoo user I started looking into how to compile svn from source, but it looks way more complicated on Ubuntu than I'm used to and I'm not sure what the canonical way is. My questions: Is there an obvious fix for this problem that I am overlooking? Is there a way to update the dependencies for SVN to something that works through using synaptic or apt-get? If I want to compile from scratch, how do I use the sources in the PPA instead of downloading my own source copy (i.e. the PPA has both binary and sources?)

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• Coding in large chunks ... Code verification skills

  - by Andrew

  As a follow up to my prev question: What is the best aproach for coding in a slow compilation environment To recap: I am stuck with a large software system with which a TDD ideology of "test often" does not work. And to make it even worse the features like pre-compiled headers/multi-threaded compilation/incremental linking, etc is not available to me - hence I think that the best way out would be to add the extensive logging into the system and to start "coding in large chunks", which I understand as code for a two-three hours first (as opposed to 15-20 mins in TDD) - thoroughly eyeball the code for a 15 minutes and only after all that do the compilation and run the tests. As I have been doing TDD for a quite a while, my code eyeballing / code verification skills got rusty (you don't really need this that much if you can quickly verify what you've done in 5 seconds by running a test or two) - so I am after a recommendations on how to learn these source code verification/error spotting skills again. I know I was able to do that easily some 5-10 years ago when I din't have much support from the compiler/unit testing tools I had until recently, thus there should be a way to get back to the basics.

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• Examples of continuous integration workflow using git

  - by Andrew Barinov

  Can anyone provide a rough outline of their git workflow that complies with continuous integration. E.g. How do you branch? Do you fast forward commits to the master branch? I am primarily working with Rails as well as client and server side Javascript. If anyone can recommend a solid CI technology that's compatible with those, that'd be great. I've looked into Jenkins but would like to check out other good alternatives. To put some context into this, I am planning on transitioning from working as a single developer into working as part of the team. I'd like to start standardizing my own personal workflow so that I can onboard new devs quickly.

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• Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Remix on Asus Eee PC 701 4G - boot process hangs up

  - by Andrew

  I've got an old Eee PC 701 4G with the following specifications: 512 MB RAM 4GB SSD drive SM223AC 8GB SD card extension Screen resolution: 800 x 480 BIOS Revision 1101 (05/16/2008) EC Firmware version: EPC-079 Windows XP SP3 works fine on it, but I decided to switch my OS to Ubuntu. I have downloaded an Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Remix ISO and wrote it to my FAT32 SD card using Universal-USB-Installer-1.8.3.3, as described on ubuntu.com During standard load from the SD card the boot process hangs up with black screen. If I'll press F6 while preloading Ubuntu, it sucessfully displays the boot menu, selecting language and showing 2 main commands: "Run ubuntu from USB drive" and "Insall Ubuntu". Selecting either of these commands leading to the same result - after some background work the main loading indicator is displayed ("Ubuntu" text with dotted progress bar under it), and it's progressing forever without any effect. Is Ubuntu 10.10 compatible with my Eee PC at all? How to boot it correctly?

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• Right-Time Retail Part 3

  - by David Dorf

  This is part three of the three-part series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Marketing Real-time isn’t just about executing faster; it extends to interactions with customers as well. As an industry, we’ve spent many years analyzing all the data that’s been collected. Yes, that data has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions like where to open new stores, how to assort those stores, and how to price our products. But the recent advances in technology are now making it possible to analyze and deliver that data very quickly… fast enough to impact a potential sale in near real-time. Let me give you two examples. Salesmen in car dealerships get pretty good at sizing people up. When a potential customer walks in the door, it doesn’t take long for the salesman to figure out the revenue at stake. Is this person a real buyer, or just looking for a fun test drive? Will this person buy today or three months from now? Will this person opt for the expensive packages, or go bare bones? While the salesman certainly asks some leading questions, much of information is discerned through body language. But body language doesn’t translate very well over the web. Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year, reads internet body language. By tracking the behavior of the people visiting your web site, Eloqua categorizes visitors based on their propensity to buy. While Eloqua’s roots have been in B2B, we’ve been looking at leveraging the technology with ATG to target B2C. Knowing what sites were previously visited, how often the customer has been to your site recently, and how long they’ve spent searching can help understand where the customer is in their purchase journey. And knowing that bit of information may be enough to help close the deal with a real-time offer, follow-up email, or online customer service pop-up. This isn’t so different from the days gone by when the clerk behind the counter of the corner store noticed you were lingering in a particular aisle, so he walked over to help you compare two products and close the sale. You appreciated the personalized service, and he knew the value of the long-term relationship. Move that same concept into the digital world and you have Oracle’s CX Suite, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end customer experience tools, assembled primarily from acquisitions. Those tools are Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire). We are providing the glue that binds the CIO and CMO together to unleash synergies that drive the top-line higher, and by virtue of the cloud-approach, keep costs at bay. My second example of real-time marketing takes place in the store but leverages the concepts of Web marketing. In 1962 the decline of personalized service in retail began. Anyone know the significance of that year? That’s when Target, K-Mart, and Walmart each opened their first stores, and over the succeeding years the industry chose scale over personal service. No longer were you known as “Jane with the snotty kid so make sure we check her out fast,” but you suddenly became “time-starved female age 20-30 with kids.” I’m not saying that was a bad thing – it was the right thing for our industry at the time, and it enabled a huge amount of growth, cheaper prices, and more variety of products. But scale alone is no longer good enough. Today’s sophisticated consumer demands scale, experience, and personal attention. To some extent we’ve delivered that on websites via the magic of cookies, your willingness to log in, and sophisticated data analytics. What store manager wouldn’t love a report detailing all the visitors to his store, where they came from, and which products that examined? People trackers are getting more sophisticated, incorporating infrared, video analytics, and even face recognition. (Next time you walk in front on a mannequin, don’t be surprised if it’s looking back.) But the ultimate marketing conduit is the mobile phone. Since each mobile phone emits a unique number on WiFi networks, it becomes the cookie of the physical world. Assuming congress keeps privacy safeguards reasonable, we’ll have a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers. Retailers get to know more about the consumer’s purchase journey, and consumers get higher levels of service with the retailer. When I call my bank, a couple things happen before the call is connected. A reverse look-up on my phone number identifies me so my accounts can be retrieved from Siebel CRM. Then the system anticipates why I’m calling based on recent transactions. In this example, it sees that I was just charged a foreign currency fee, so it assumes that’s the reason I’m calling. It puts all the relevant information on the customer service rep’s screen as it connects the call. When I complain about the fee, the rep immediately sees I’m a great customer and I travel lots, so she suggests switching me to their traveler’s card that doesn’t have foreign transaction fees. That technology is powered by a product called Oracle Real-Time Decisions, a rules engine built to execute very quickly, basically in the time it takes the phone to ring once. So let’s combine the power of that product with our new-found mobile cookie and provide contextual customer interactions in real-time. Our first opportunity comes when a customer crosses a pre-defined geo-fence, typically a boundary around the store. Context is the key to our interaction: that’s the customer (known or anonymous), the time of day and day of week, and location. Thomas near the downtown store on a Wednesday at noon means he’s heading to lunch. If he were near the mall location on a Saturday morning, that’s a completely different context. But on his way to lunch, we’ll let Thomas know that we’ve got a new shipment of ASICS running shoes on display with a simple text message. We used the context to look-up Thomas’ past purchases and understood he was an avid runner. We used the fact that this was lunchtime to select the type of message, in this case an informational message instead of an offer. Thomas enters the store, phone in hand, and walks to the shoe department. He scans one of the new ASICS shoes using the convenient QR Codes we provided on the shelf-tags, but then he starts scanning low-end Nikes. Each scan is another opportunity to both learn from Thomas and potentially interact via another message. Since he historically buys low-end Nikes and keeps scanning them, he’s likely falling back into his old ways. Our marketing rules are currently set to move loyal customer to higher margin products. We could have set the dials to increase visit frequency, move overstocked items, increase basket size, or many other settings, but today we are trying to move Thomas to higher-margin products. We send Thomas another text message, this time it’s a personalized offer for 10% off ASICS good for 24 hours. Offering him a discount on Nikes would be throwing margin away since he buys those anyway. We are using our marketing dollars to change behavior that increases the long-term value of Thomas. He decides to buy the ASICS and scans the discount code on his phone at checkout. Checkout is yet another opportunity to interact with Thomas, so the transaction is sent back to Oracle RTD for evaluation. Since Thomas didn’t buy anything with the shoes, we’ll print a bounce-back coupon on the receipt offering 30% off ASICS socks if he returns within seven days. We have successfully started moving Thomas from low-margin to high-margin products. In both of these marketing scenarios, we are able to leverage data in near real-time to decide how best to interact with the customer and lead to an increase in the lifetime value of the customer. The key here is acting at the moment the customer shows interest using the context of the situation. We aren’t pushing random products at haphazard times. We are tailoring the marketing to be very specific to this customer, and it’s the technology that allows this to happen in near real-time. Conclusion As we enable more right-time integrations and interactions, retailers will begin to offer increased service to their customers. Localized and personalized service at scale will drive loyalty and lead to meaningful revenue growth for the retailers that execute well. Our industry needs to support Commerce Anywhere…and commerce anytime as well.

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• Speaking in Raleigh NC June 15th

  - by Andrew Kelly

  Just a heads up to those in the area that I will be speaking at the (TriPASS) Raleigh SQL Server user group on the 15th of June 2010. The topic is Storage & I/O Best Practices. The abstract is listed below: SQL Server relies heavily on a well configured storage sub-system to perform at its peak but unfortunately this is one of the most neglected or mis-configured areas of a SQL Server instance. Here we will focus on the best practices related to how SQL Server works with the underlying storage...(read more)

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• help animating player in corona sdk

  - by andrew McCutchan

  working on a game in the corona sdk with lua and I need help so the player animates on the line drawn. Right now he animates at the beggining and the end but not on the line. here is the player code function spawnPlayerObject(xPlayerSpawn,yPlayerSpawn,richTurn) --spawns Rich where we need him. -- riches sprite sheet and all his inital spirites. We need to adjust this so that animations 3-6 are the only ones that animate when moving horizontally local richPlayer = sprite.newSpriteSet(richSheet1,1,6) sprite.add(richPlayer, "rich", 1,6,500,1) rich = sprite.newSprite(richPlayer) rich.x = xPlayerSpawn rich.y = yPlayerSpawn rich:scale(_W*0.0009, _W*0.0009) -- scale is used to adjust the size of the object. richDir = richTurn rich.rotation = richDir rich:prepare("rich") rich:play() physics.addBody( rich, "static", { friction=1, radius = 15 } ) -- needs a better physics body for collision detection. end and here is the code for the line function movePlayerOnLine(event) --for the original image replace all rich with player. if posCount ~= linePart then richDir = math.atan2(ractgangle_hit[posCount].y-rich.y,ractgangle_hit[posCount].x-rich.x)*180/math.pi playerSpeed = 5 rich.x = rich.x + math.cos(richDir*math.pi/180)*playerSpeed rich.y = rich.y + math.sin(richDir*math.pi/180)*playerSpeed if rich.x < ractgangle_hit[posCount].x+playerSpeed*10 and rich.x > ractgangle_hit[posCount].x-playerSpeed*10 then if rich.y < ractgangle_hit[posCount].y+playerSpeed*10 and rich.y > ractgangle_hit[posCount].y-playerSpeed*10 then posCount = posCount + 1 end end I don't think anything has changed recently but I have been getting an error when testing of " attempt to upvalue "rich" a nil value" on the second line, richDir = etc.

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• Setting up Google Analytics for multiple subdomains

  - by Andrew G. Johnson

  so first here's a snippet of my current Analytics javascript: var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-30490730-1']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.apartmentjunkie.com']); _gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 100]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); So if you wanna have a quick peak at the site the url is ApartmentJunkie.com, keep in mind the site is pretty bare bones but you'll get the idea -- basically it's very similar to craigslist in the sense that it's in the local space so people pick a city then get sent to a subdomain that is specific for that city, e.g. winnipeg.mb.apartmentjunkie.com. I put that up late last night then had a look at the analytics and found that I am seeing only the request uri portion of the URLs in analytics as I would with any other site only with this one it's a problem as winnipeg.mb.apartmentjunkie.com/map/ and brandon.mb.apartmentjunkie.com/map/ are two different pages and shouldn't be lumped together as /map/ I know the kneejerk response is likely going to be "hey just setup a different google analytics profile for each subdomain" but there will eventually be a lot of subdomains so google's cap of 50 is going to be too limited and even more important I want to see the data in aggregate for the most part. I am thinking of making a change to the javascript, to something like: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview',String(document.domain) + String(document.location)]); But am unsure if this is the best way and figured someone else on wm.se would have had a similar situation that they could talk a bit about.

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• Latest SolidQ Journal Plus Giveaways

  - by Andrew Kelly

    You can find the latest edition of the SolidQ Journal here that is always good reading but if you register over the next 3 weeks you may be eligible for a prize including:  One $500 Amazon gift card and 5 $150 gift cards; books from Itzik Ben-Gan, Greg Low, and Erik Veerman/Jay Hackney/Dejan Sarka; and chats with MarkTab and Kevin Boles.   The deadline for the giveaway is January 7th and you can register for it HERE .  So be a good little boy or girl and maybe Santa will bring...(read more)

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• help animating a player in Corona SDK

  - by andrew McCutchan

  Working on a game in the Corona SDK with Lua and I need help so the player animates on the line drawn. Right now he animates at the beggining and the end but not on the line. Here is the player code: function spawnPlayerObject(xPlayerSpawn,yPlayerSpawn,richTurn) --spawns Rich where we need him. -- riches sprite sheet and all his inital spirites. We need to adjust this so that animations 3-6 are the only ones that animate when moving horizontally local richPlayer = sprite.newSpriteSet(richSheet1,1,6) sprite.add(richPlayer, "rich", 1,6,500,1) rich = sprite.newSprite(richPlayer) rich.x = xPlayerSpawn rich.y = yPlayerSpawn rich:scale(_W*0.0009, _W*0.0009) -- scale is used to adjust the size of the object. richDir = richTurn rich.rotation = richDir rich:prepare("rich") rich:play() physics.addBody( rich, "static", { friction=1, radius = 15 } ) -- needs a better physics body for collision detection. end And here is the code for the line: function movePlayerOnLine(event) --for the original image replace all rich with player. if posCount ~= linePart then richDir = math.atan2(ractgangle_hit[posCount].y-rich.y,ractgangle_hit[posCount].x-rich.x)*180/math.pi playerSpeed = 5 rich.x = rich.x + math.cos(richDir*math.pi/180)*playerSpeed rich.y = rich.y + math.sin(richDir*math.pi/180)*playerSpeed if rich.x < ractgangle_hit[posCount].x+playerSpeed*10 and rich.x > ractgangle_hit[posCount].x-playerSpeed*10 then if rich.y < ractgangle_hit[posCount].y+playerSpeed*10 and rich.y > ractgangle_hit[posCount].y-playerSpeed*10 then posCount = posCount + 1 end end I don't think anything has changed recently but I have been getting an error when testing of "attempt to upvalue "rich" a nil value" on the second line, richDir = etc.

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• Closer Aero-snap in ubuntu

  - by Andrew Redd

  Before I get screamed at for duplicating a question. Ive read windows 7-like snap window maximize and vertical feature and http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/11/get-aero-snap-in-ubuntu/ There are two problems with this solution that I am trying to get around. It's not sensitive to dragging a window It's not intelligent for Twin-view monitors. The first problem is the more pressing. I have the compiz settings with wmctrl, but this is not sensitive to dragging windows if I have a window with the focus and place my mouse in the panel I get the window maximized, even though I'm not dragging the window. A good solution would be sensitive to the state of the mouse, clicked, right clicked, middle clicked. An ideal solution would be sensitive to dragging a window or not. Second is a minor annoyance to me at least. With the commands as they are listed are equivalent to maximizing the windows since I have a Twinview monitors setup. Is there any way to add these sensitivities to the commands?

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• wubi dual-boot installation of ubuntu 12.04 on Windows 7 fails to boot

  - by Andrew

  I am trying to use the wubi installation process to create a Ubuntu 12.04 / Windows 7 dual boot setup on my Windows 7 machine (Dell Inspiron 17R). The installation initially works fine, and I am able to load Ubuntu several times after selecting it from the boot menu. However, when I boot into Windows 7 it seems to corrupt the Ubuntu boot process, because after running Windows 7, Ubuntu won't boot on the machine. It is still listed as an option in the boot menu, but when it is selected, the machine does one of the following: -hangs at the load-screen and says that Ubuntu is preparing to run for the first time (although it isn't the first time the OS has been loaded) -hangs with a black screen and does nothing I have uninstalled Ubuntu and then reinstalled it (using wubi) three times. Each time Ubuntu initially boots okay (including rebooting the laptop into Ubuntu several times.) However, whenever I switch over and boot into Windows 7 it breaks the Ubuntu installation. Windows 7 continues to boot and work fine without issues. I have successfully installed Ubuntu using wubi onto a different Windows 7 machine before without problems...it seems that there is something different about this laptop configuration. I am not sure how to debug the issue. I see no error messages during the Ubuntu boot process when it hangs and am not sure how to debug this.

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• Why does Farseer 2.x store temporaries as members and not on the stack? (.NET)

  - by Andrew Russell

  UPDATE: This question refers to Farseer 2.x. The newer 3.x doesn't seem to do this. I'm using Farseer Physics Engine quite extensively at the moment, and I've noticed that it seems to store a lot of temporary value types as members of the class, and not on the stack as one might expect. Here is an example from the Body class: private Vector2 _worldPositionTemp = Vector2.Zero; private Matrix _bodyMatrixTemp = Matrix.Identity; private Matrix _rotationMatrixTemp = Matrix.Identity; private Matrix _translationMatrixTemp = Matrix.Identity; public void GetBodyMatrix(out Matrix bodyMatrix) { Matrix.CreateTranslation(position.X, position.Y, 0, out _translationMatrixTemp); Matrix.CreateRotationZ(rotation, out _rotationMatrixTemp); Matrix.Multiply(ref _rotationMatrixTemp, ref _translationMatrixTemp, out bodyMatrix); } public Vector2 GetWorldPosition(Vector2 localPosition) { GetBodyMatrix(out _bodyMatrixTemp); Vector2.Transform(ref localPosition, ref _bodyMatrixTemp, out _worldPositionTemp); return _worldPositionTemp; } It looks like its a by-hand performance optimisation. But I don't see how this could possibly help performance? (If anything I think it would hurt by making objects much larger).

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• What's the best Open Source code you've ever seen?

  - by Andrew Theken

  Part of the value of Open Source is to provide great example code to people getting started with a new platform or language. What's the best Open Source code you've encountered, and why do you like your choice? Any language will do, but I'm particularly interested in the best examples of Objective-C you can point out. Obviously this is an open-ended question, so I'll leave the question open for a while and see what kinds of answers we get. Thanks!

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• What is the current "standard" for setting up a development environment that supports remote collaboration as well as secure version control?

  - by Andrew

  What is the current "standard" for setting up a development environment that supports remote collaboration as well as secure version control? Considering a virtual dedicated solution with vm for a web layer and a data layer, using VPN for each programmer. We're a small start-up that do both Microsoft and open-source development. Is there a set software tools or packages that are appropriate for a small shop and yet scalable? Thanks.

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• Adding a forum to an existing site

  - by Andrew Heath

  I've got a site with ~500 registered members, 300 of which are what you'd call "active". Site data is kept in a MySQL dbase. I'd like to add a myBB forum to the site, but this question applies to any forum really. What I very much want to avoid is requiring my users to register both on the site and on the forum because my userbase is not technically literate and this would confuse a lot of them. However the forum software has its own registration, login, cookie, and password management system which naturally are different from the site's mechanics. I envision the following possibilities: install myBB into the existing database and customize the login code to unify the two systems. This would probably mean changing the site's code to use the myBB system as that would likely be less painful to refactor and wouldn't hurt future myBB upgrade ability. install myBB into separate database and write a bridging script of some sort that auto-registers existing site users with the forum if they elect to participate. Also check new forum registrations against the site's username list to prevent newcomers from taking existing names. run them fully separate and force users to re-register (easiest for ME, but least desirable for them) I would like a suggested course of action from those who have trod this path before... Thank you.

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• The Hot-Add Memory Hogs

  - by Andrew Clarke

  One of the more difficult tasks, when virtualizing a server, is to determine the amount of memory that Hypervisor should assign to the virtual machine. This requires accurate monitoring and, because of the consequences of setting the value too low, there is a great temptation to err on the side of over-provisioning. This results in fewer guest VMs and, in fact, with more accurate memory provisioning, many virtual environments could support 30% more VMs. In order to achieve a better consolidation (aka VM density) ratio, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 has introduced what Microsoft calls ‘Dynamic Memory’. This means that the start-up RAM VM memory assigned to guest virtual machines can be allowed to vary according to demand, changing dynamically while the VM is running, based on the workload of applications running inside. If demand outstrips supply, then memory can be rationed according to the ‘memory weight’ assigned to the guest VM. By this mechanism, memory becomes a shared resource that can be reallocated automatically as demand patterns vary. Unlike VMWare’s Memory Overcommit technology, the sum of all the memory allocations to each virtual machine will not exceed the total memory of the host computer. This is fine for applications that are self-regulating in their demands for memory, releasing memory back into the 'pool' when not under peak load. Other applications however, such as SQL Server Standard and Enterprise, are by nature, memory hogs under high workload; they can grab hot-add memory whilst running under load and then never release it. This requires more careful setting-up and the SQLOS team have provided some guidelines from for configuring SQL Server in virtual environments. Whereas VMWare’s Memory Overcommit is well-proven in a number of different configurations, Hyper-V’s ‘Dynamic Memory’ is new. So far, the indications are that it will improve the business case for virtualizing and it is probably a far more intuitive technology for the average IT professional to grasp. It is certainly worth testing to see whether it works for you.

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• Blank space on right side of screen with XMonad/Gnome

  - by Andrew

  Fresh install of 11.10 x64. I set up XMonad with gnome-session as I did before on 11.04, following the guide on the Arch wiki. Everything works, but there's this weird vertical space about the size of a scrollbar on the side of the screen. The space is also above xmobar (the battery system tray icon is hidden behind it and I can't click it). XMonad weird space (since I can't post images) Is there some weird XMonad or Gnome option I'm missing? I don't even know where to begin to look.

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