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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• Reviewing Retail Predictions for 2011

  - by David Dorf

  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: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;} I've been busy thinking about what 2012 and beyond will look like for retail, and I have some interesting predictions to share.  But before I go there, let’s first review this year’s predictions before making new ones for 2012. 1. Alternate Payments We've seen several alternate payment schemes emerge over the last two years, and 2011 may be the year one of them takes hold. Any competition that can drive down fees will be good for everyone. I'm betting that Apple will add NFC chips to their next version of the iPhone, then enable payments in stores using iTunes accounts on the backend. Paypal will continue to make inroads, and Isis will announce a pilot. The iPhone 4S did not contain an NFC chip, so we’ll have to continuing waiting for the iPhone 5. PayPal announced its moving into in-store payments, and Google launched its wallet in selected cities.  Overall I think the payment scene is heating up and that trend will continue. 2. Engineered Systems The industry is moving toward purpose-built appliances that are optimized across the entire stack. Oracle calls these "engineered systems" and the first two examples are Exadata and Exalogic, but there are other examples from other vendors. These are particularly important to the retail industry because of the volume of data that must be processed. There should be continued adoption in 2011. Oracle reports that Exadata is its fasting growing product, and at the recent OpenWorld it announced the SuperCluster and Exalytics products, both continuing the engineered systems trend. SAP’s HANA continues to receive attention, and IBM also seems to be moving in this direction. 3. Social Analytics There are lots of tools that provide insight into how a brand is perceived across popular internet sites, but as far as I know, these tools are not industry specific. The next step needs to mine the data and determine how it should influence retail operations. The data needs to help retailers determine how they create promotions, which products to stock, and how to keep consumers engaged. Social data alone does not provide the answers, but its one more data point that will help retailers make better decisions. Look for some vendor consolidation to help make this happen. In March, Salesforce.com acquired leading social monitoring vendor Radian6 and followed up with acquisitions of Heroku and Model Metrics. The notion of Social CRM seems to be going more mainstream now. 4. 2-D Barcodes Look for more QRCodes on shelf-tags, in newspaper circulars, and on billboards. It's a great portal from the physical world into the digital one that buys us time until augmented reality matures further. Nobody wants to type "www", backslash, and ".com" on their phones. QRCodes are everywhere. ‘Nuff said. 5. In the words of Microsoft, "To the Cloud!" My favorite "cloud application" is Evernote. If you take notes on your work laptop, you will inevitably need those notes on your home PC. And if you manage to solve that problem, you'll need to access them from your mobile phone. Evernote stores your notes in the cloud and provides easy ways to access them. Being able to access a service from anywhere and not having to worry about backups, upgrades, etc. is great. Retailers will start to rely on cloud services, both public and private, in the coming year. There were no shortage of announcements in this area: Amazon’s cloud-based Kindle Fire, Apple’s iCloud, Oracle’s Public Cloud, etc. I saw an interesting presentation showing how BevMo moved their systems to the cloud.  Seems like retailers are starting to consider the cloud for specific uses. 6. F-CommerceTop of Form Move over "E" and "M" so we can introduce "F-Commerce," which should go mainstream in 2011. Already several retailers have created small stores on Facebook, and it won't be long before Facebook becomes a full-fledged channel in the omni-channel world of retail. The battle between Facebook and Google will heat up over retail, where both stand to make lots of money. JCPenney and ASOS both put their entire catalogs on Facebook, and lots of other retailers have connected Facebook to their e-commerce site. I still think selling from the newsfeed is the best approach, and several retailers are trying that approach as well. I just don’t see Google+ as a threat to Facebook, so I think that battle is over.  I called 2011 The Year of F-Commerce, and that was probably accurate. Its good to look back at predictions, but we also have to think about what was missed.  I didn't see Amazon entering the tablet business with such a splash, although in hindsight it was obvious. Nor did I think HP would fall so far so fast.  Look for my 2012 predictions coming soon.

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• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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• Free Document/Content Management System Using SharePoint 2010

  - by KunaalKapoor

  That’s right, it’s true. You can use the free version of SharePoint 2010 to meet your document and content management needs and even run your public facing website or an internal knowledge bank.  SharePoint Foundation 2010 is free. It may not have all the features that you get in the enterprise license but it still has enough to cater to your needs to build a document management system and replace age old file shares or folders. I’ve built a dozen content management sites for internal and public use exploiting SharePoint. There are hundreds of web content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix).  On one hand we have commercial platforms like SharePoint, SiteCore, and Ektron etc. which are the most frequently used and on the other hand there are free options like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone etc. which are pretty common popular as well. But I would be very surprised if anyone was able to find a single CMS platform that is all things to all people. Infact not a lot of people consider SharePoint’s free version under the free CMS side but its high time organizations benefit from this. Through this blog post I wanted to present SharePoint Foundation as an option for running a FREE CMS platform. Even if you knew that there is a free version of SharePoint, what most people don’t realize is that SharePoint Foundation is a great option for running web sites of all kinds – not just team sites. It is a great option for many reasons, but in reality it is supported by Microsoft, and above all it is FREE (yay!), and it is extremely easy to get started.  From a functionality perspective – it’s hard to beat SharePoint. Even the free version, SharePoint Foundation, offers simple data connectivity (through BCS), cross browser support, accessibility, support for Office Web Apps, blogs, wikis, templates, document support, health analyzer, support for presence, and MUCH more.I often get asked: “Can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?” The answer really depends on ·          What are your specific requirements? ·          What systems you currently have in place for managing documents. ·          And of course how much money you have J Benefits? Not many large organizations have benefited from SharePoint yet. For some it has been an IT project to see what they can achieve with it, for others it has been used as a collaborative platform or in many cases an extended intranet. SharePoint 2010 has changed the game slightly as the improvements that Microsoft have made have been noted by organizations, and we are seeing a lot of companies starting to build specific business applications using SharePoint as the basis, and nearly every business process will require documents at some stage. If you require a document management system and have SharePoint in place then it can be a relatively straight forward decision to use SharePoint, as long as you have reviewed the considerations just discussed. The collaborative nature of SharePoint 2010 is also a massive advantage, as specific departmental or project sites can be created quickly and easily that allow workers to interact in a variety of different ways using one source of information.  This also benefits an organization with regards to how they manage the knowledge that they have, as if all of their information is in one source then it is naturally easier to search and manage. Is SharePoint right for your organization? As just discussed, this can only be determined after defining your requirements and also planning a longer term strategy for how you will manage your documents and information. A key factor to look at is how the users would interact with the system and how much value would it get for your organization. The amount of data and documents that organizations are creating is increasing rapidly each year. Therefore the ability to archive this information, whilst keeping the ability to know what you have and where it is, is vital to any organizations management of their information life cycle. SharePoint is best used for the initial life of business documents where they need to be referenced and accessed after time. It is often beneficial to archive these to overcome for storage and performance issues. FREE CMS – SharePoint, Really? In order to show some of the completely of what comes with this free version of SharePoint 2010, I thought it would make sense to use Wikipedia (since every one trusts it as a credible source). Wikipedia shows that a web content management system typically has the following components: Document Management:   -       CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction. SharePoint is king when it comes to document management.  Version history, exclusive check-out, security, publication, workflow, and so much more.  Content Virtualization:   -       CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission. Through the use of versioning, each content manager can preview, publish, and roll-back content of pages, wiki entries, blog posts, documents, or any other type of content stored in SharePoint.  The idea of each user having an entire copy of the website virtualized is a bit odd to me – not sure why anyone would need that for anything but the simplest of websites. Automated Templates:   -       Create standard output templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place. Through the use of Master Pages and Themes, SharePoint provides the ability to change the entire look and feel of site.  Of course, the older brother version of SharePoint – SharePoint Server 2010 – also introduces the concept of Page Layouts which allows page template level customization and even switching the layout of an individual page using different page templates.  I think many organizations really think they want this but rarely end up using this bit of functionality.  Easy Edits:   -       Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content. This is probably easier described with a screen cap of a vanilla SharePoint Foundation page in edit mode.  Notice the page editing toolbar, the multiple layout options…  It’s actually easier to use than Microsoft Word. Workflow management: -       Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it. Workflow, it’s in there. In fact, the same workflow engine is running under SharePoint Foundation that is running under the other versions of SharePoint.  The primary difference is that with SharePoint Foundation – you need to configure the workflows yourself.   Web Standards: -       Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards. SharePoint is in the fourth major iteration under Microsoft with the 2010 release.  In addition to the innovation that Microsoft continuously adds, you have the entire global ecosystem available. Scalable Expansion:   -       Available in most modern WCMSs is the ability to expand a single implementation (one installation on one server) across multiple domains. SharePoint Foundation can run multiple sites using multiple URLs on a single server install.  Even more powerful, SharePoint Foundation is scalable and can be part of a multi-server farm to ensure that it will handle any amount of traffic that can be thrown at it. Delegation & Security:  -       Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management. SharePoint Foundation provides very granular security capabilities. Read @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537811.aspx Content Syndication:  -       CMS software often assists in content distribution by generating RSS and Atom data feeds to other systems. They may also e-mail users when updates are available as part of the workflow process. SharePoint Foundation nails it.  With RSS syndication and email alerts available out of the box, content syndication is already in the platform. Multilingual Support: -       Ability to display content in multiple languages. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports more than 40 languages. Read More Read more @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256(v=office.12).aspxYou can download the free version from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5970

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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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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3&ndash;Clrizr)

  - by ToString(theory);

  Welcome back!  In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions.  I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color.  Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that.  However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality!  So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it.  I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors.  However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics.  Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload.  The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t.  Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users.  So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades.  Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1.  Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file.  After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables…  Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;...   In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent.  Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things…  On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness.  This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name.  So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel.  You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces.  For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part.  These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input.  However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it.  Black or white depending on light or dark color.  Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story.  You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red.  So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it!  I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works.  Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

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• Need personal advice on how to get out of a company..

  - by SOfan

  Hi, I am an SO user since past 6 months and this is the first time I am turning to SO for personal help. I have asked technical questions before with my real ID. I am stuck inside a service based IT company for the past one year and haven't been able to decide if to leave it, when to leave it and how to leave it. I had taken 2 weeks LWP on medical reason roughly at end of 1 year and then soon after reporting, I applied for 2 months more LWP (on medical/personal ground) with the intention of working on my health,take up a hobby class to ward off depression,pessimism, to have some fun in life, and to look for a job which I really would be excited about - that interests me and which matches with my strength. My leave starts from this Monday. So in any case, I had hard set in mind that I will leave the company after I join them back hopefully with some job offer already in hand (after figuring out what I want do). Neither I can stand the past project,past colleagues,company, HR, pathetically low salary. But if I really listen to my heart, I don't want to have to go back to that office after my sabbatical and again have to see those people. I will have to resign it after my sabbatical ends. Then HR people perhaps wont like it, may even accuse me on face or behind back that primary purpose of my leave must have been to hunt for a better job and I lied about medical and person reasons. Also, if they get nasty and force me to serve 2 months notice period. There is no way I see myself after sabbatical resuming in old project or starting new work. It will be a pain. Since they have already approved 2 months leave and stuff, ideally if they want, they should be just able to relieve me right on the next day after I join back. But, I don't know if they want to get nasty, will they mention about my 2 months sabbatical leave in my experience letter or more scary, the term medical/personal reason. I have hard earned my experience here, have worked against my will, mostly it has been painful and slogged like anything, because I realize the importance of work experience in IT industry. I don't have greed to have those 2 months included extra in my experience letter, but I don't want to mess up with my experience letter in a way which makes my next employer ask question, get suspicious, or be wary if I have any medical reason going on. Being an emotional,moody person or somebody who can't be in an environment, once my mind and heart starts hating it. I think it perhaps is best, if I resign on Monday itself telling them (in polite manner) something that look I took sabbatical for some reason but I don't want to resume working in the company after my sabbatical ends. So please accept my resignation. Now tell me what you want to do about my leave request, my notice period and when you are willing to relieve me. What should I write and how? Some background: I am working in an IT company in India.I am overqualified in the company. It is grossly underpaying me. My education qualifications far exceed anyone's in the whole company being a CS undergrad as well as a CS grad. I joined this company after finishing the grad. I had self-doubts about my skills and interest as a programmer. I like doing research oriented work, though didn't have any particular success during grad. My life here has been very hectic. The project containing many many sub-projects has kept me on my toes and I have never really liked the work. I have been playing against my strength. Also the company strict internet usage policy (you can't read gmails, can't browse any non-work related sites not even news). When working for a client, from the machine we can't even check company related emails.For this one has to go to kiosk like 5 machines in a small room etc. Most of the times those machines are not available, so it was not unusual to keep making rounds to these kiosk machines to check company emails, browse company related emails etc.So it was not so easy to keep in touch with company related basic affairs for a not particular careful person. Things like this which are new to me, make me feel restricted. I am an undecisive person with a sense of failure, self-doubt, not meeting up unrealistic expectation. Somewhere at back of mind, I envy my classmates who make a smooth transition from company to company without causing any gap in their resume. I on other hand have gaps in resume. I get tired after working in a place for sometime. problem with colleagues in general. I am not particular great with people, have few friends, not known for a fun nature, rather serious, scholar. I am not a typical conventional female. I think females are usually more disciplined. But I am not so. I reach office late (though after informing manager). I don't want to blame them entirely, because from my past, it is not unusual for me to get undecisive on things. Also I had doubts about my ability as researched and to succeed there. of building a relationship in a group, to have something to talk about, newspaper. I get cut-off from people. peer pressure. I make blunders in coding, lose patience. Consciously or unconsciously I feel contempt for people here, work here, environment here. I have doubts that either I go to a place which does innovation, does research oriented work, product biggies, have great motivated people, have competent people passionate about products they are building. But then I also doubt my ability to survive there. I have identified that an idea job for me would be 4 days a week, a high salary job. When among people in company/team, I can't think much. I need some time at home to read good authentic books written in good style on what work I am doing.So that I am comfortable with my understanding of work. I get into pressure easily under deadline and need 5th day to cool myself off. I took for 2 weeks leave, because each day was hell for me. May be the depression phase of bipolar is on and also partially it could be that being a work centered person, who derives happiness,self-esteem from work, haven't been enjoying work and have been working for the sole person of proving stability, and ability to stick, against all odds, and facing what challenges I see, bonding with people, identifying opportunities to learn in given task etc.have been averaging one day LWP in 1 week or 10 days. or may be because of my nature,ADD,not being able to switch context,out of touch with news, don't have a circle of friends with who I enjoy. less knowledge in general to talk about, just some technical stuff.anyway, so due to emotional reason, some practical reason etc, I wanted to be very sure before leaving. So my leave starts from Monday and I should feel happy about it. I have taken the leave to for a few purposes - to take care of my health by regular yoga/exercise (with project on, I just can't do anything regular), reassess myself to see what I want to try next which work I might like, look for next job, take up a hobby which I like say singing. I am not clear on my career,job aspiration. I have tried my hands on research. During this year appraisal yesterday, I even had some conflict with my last manager. In meeting with me one on one, he would say all nice things about me, but in feedback to new manager, he hasn't given any excellent feedback. It is all only good. I am angry at this old Manager. Also new manager also scolded me as I didn't agree to his appraisal and waited to hear myself from old Manager. He kind of scolded me for wasting his time. Am I being unethical somewhere? I am always very conscious of if I am cheating anywhere. What advice I am seeking? How to resign and what to write in resignation letter

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• A Bite With No Teeth&ndash;Demystifying Non-Compete Clauses

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  *DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this post in no way should be considered legal advice. I’m also in Canada, so references made are to Canadian court cases. I received a signed letter the other day, a reminder from my previous employer about some clauses associated with my employment and entry into an employee stock purchase program. So since this is in effect for the next 12 months, I guess I’m not starting that new job tomorrow. I’m kidding of course. How outrageous, how presumptuous, pompous, and arrogant that a company – any company – would actually place these conditions upon an employee. And yet, this is not uncommon. Especially in the IT industry, we see time and again similar wording in our employment agreements. But…are these legal? Is there any teeth behind the threat of the bite? Luckily, the answer seems to be ‘No’. I want to highlight two cases that support this. The first is Lyons v. Multari. In a nutshell, Dentist hires younger Dentist to be an associate. In their short, handwritten agreement, a non-compete clause was written stating “Protective Covenant. 3 yrs. – 5mi” (meaning you can’t set up shop within 5 miles for 3 years). Well, the young dentist left and did start an oral surgery office within 5 miles and within 3 years. Off to court they go! The initial judge sided with the older dentist, but on appeal it was overturned. Feel free to read the transcript of the decision here, but let me highlight one portion from section [19]: The general rule in most common law jurisdictions is that non-competition clauses in employment contracts are void. The sections following [19] explain further, and discuss Elsley v. J.G. Collins Insurance Agency Ltd. and its impact on Canadian law in this regard. The second case is Winnipeg Livestock Sales Ltd. v. Plewman. Desmond Plewman is an auctioneer, and worked at Winnipeg Livestock Sales. Part of his employment agreement was that he could not work for a competitor for 18 months if he left the company. Well, he left, and took up an important role in a competing company. The case went to court and as with Lyons v. Multari, the initial judge found in favour of the plaintiffs. Also as in the first case, that was overturned on appeal. Again, read through the transcript of the decision, but consider section [28]: In other words, even though Plewman has a great deal of skill as an auctioneer, Winnipeg Livestock has no proprietary interest in his professional skill and experience, even if they were acquired during his time working for Winnipeg Livestock.  Thus, Winnipeg Livestock has the burden of establishing that it has a legitimate proprietary interest requiring protection.  On this key question there is little evidence before the Court.  The record discloses that part of Plewman’s job was to “mingle with the … crowd” and to telephone customers and prospective customers about future prospects for the sale of livestock.  It may seem reasonable to assume that Winnipeg Livestock has a legitimate proprietary interest in its customer connections; but there is no evidence to indicate that there is any significant degree of “customer loyalty” in the business, as opposed to customers making choices based on other considerations such as cost, availability and the like. So are there any incidents where a non-compete can actually be valid? Yes, and these are considered “exceptional” cases, meaning that the situation meets certain circumstances. Michael Carabash has a great blog series discussing the above mentioned cases as well as the difference between a non-compete and non-solicit agreement. He talks about the exceptional criteria: In summary, the authorities reveal that the following circumstances will generally be relevant in determining whether a case is an “exceptional” one so that a general non-competition clause will be found to be reasonable: - The length of service with the employer. - The amount of personal service to clients. - Whether the employee dealt with clients exclusively, or on a sustained or     recurring basis. - Whether the knowledge about the client which the employee gained was of a   confidential nature, or involved an intimate knowledge of the client’s   particular needs, preferences or idiosyncrasies. - Whether the nature of the employee’s work meant that the employee had   influence over clients in the sense that the clients relied upon the employee’s   advice, or trusted the employee. - If competition by the employee has already occurred, whether there is   evidence that clients have switched their custom to him, especially without   direct solicitation. - The nature of the business with respect to whether personal knowledge of   the clients’ confidential matters is required. - The nature of the business with respect to the strength of customer loyalty,   how clients are “won” and kept, and whether the clientele is a recurring one. - The community involved and whether there were clientele yet to be exploited   by anyone. I close this blog post with a final quote, one from Zvulony & Co’s blog post on this subject. Again, all of this is not official legal advice, but I think we can see what all these sources are pointing towards. To answer my earlier question, there’s no teeth behind the threat of the bite. In light of this list, and the decisions in Lyons and Orlan, it is reasonably certain that in most employment situations a non-competition clause will be ineffective in protecting an employer from a departing employee who wishes to compete in the same business. The Courts have been relatively consistent in their position that if a non-solicitation clause can protect an employer’s interests, then a non-competition clause is probably unreasonable. Employers (or their solicitors) should avoid the inclination to draft restrictive covenants in broad, catch-all language. Or in other words, when drafting a restrictive covenant – take only what you need! D

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• How to begin? Windows 8 Development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I convinced you in my last post to do some Win8 development. You want a piece of that cake, or whatever your reasons may be. Good! Welcome to the club! Now let me ask you a question: what are you going to write? Ah. That’s the big one, isn’t it? What indeed? If you have been creating applications for computers before you’re in for quite a shock. The way people perceive apps on a tablet is quite different from what we know as applications. There’s a reason we call them apps instead of applications! Yes, technically they are applications but we don’t call them apps only because it sounds cool. The abbreviated form of the word applications itself is a pointer. Apps are small. Apps are focused. Apps are more lightweight. Apps do one thing but they do that one thing extremely good. In the ‘old’ days we wrote huge systems. We build ecosystems of services, screens, databases and more to create a system that provides value for the user. Think about it: what application do you use most at work? Can you in one sentence describe what it is, or what it does and yet still distinctively describe its purpose? I doubt you can. Let’s have a look at Outlouk. We all know it and we all love or hate it. But what is it? A mail program? No, there’s so much more there: calendar, contacts, RSS feeds and so on. Some call it a ‘collaboration’  application but that’s not really true as well. After all, why should a collaboration application give me my schedule for the day? I think the best way to describe Outlook is “client for Exchange”  although that isn’t accurate either. Anyway: Outlook is a great application but it’s not an ‘app’ and therefor not very suitable for WinRT. Ok. Disclaimer here: yes, you can write big applications for WinRT. Some will. But that’s not what 99.9% of the developers will do. So I am stating here that big applications are not meant for WinRT. If 0.01% of the developers think that this is nonsense then they are welcome to go ahead but for the majority here this is not what we’re talking about. So: Apps are small, lightweight and good at what they do but only at that. If you’re a Phone developer you already know that: Phone apps on any platform fit the description I have above. If you’ve ever worked in a large cooperation before you might have seen one of these before: the Mission Statement. It’s supposed to be a oneliner that sums up what the company is supposed to do. Funny enough: although this doesn’t work for large companies it does work for defining your app. A mission statement for an app describes what it does. If it doesn’t fit in the mission statement then your app is going to get to big and will fail. A statement like this should be in the following style “<your app name> is the best app to <describe single task>” Fill in the blanks, write it and go! Mmm.. not really. There are some things there we need to think about. But the statement is a very, very important one. If you cannot fit your app in that line you’re preparing to fail. Your app will become to big, its purpose will be unclear and it will be hard to use. People won’t download it and those who do will give it a bad rating therefor preventing that huge success you’ve been dreaming about. Stick to the statement! Ok, let’s give it a try: “PlanesAreCool” is the best app to do planespotting in the field. You might have seen these people along runways of airports: taking photographs of airplanes and noting down their numbers and arrival- and departure times. We are going to help them out with our great app! If you look at the statement, can you guess what it does? I bet you can. If you find out it isn’t clear enough of if it’s too broad, refine it. This is probably the most important step in the development of your app so give it enough time! So. We’ve got the statement. Print it out, stick it to the wall and look at it. What does it tell you? If you see this, what do you think the app does? Write that down. Sit down with some friends and talk about it. What do they expect from an app like this? Write that down as well. Brainstorm. Make a list of features. This is mine: Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. Now, I must make it clear that I am not a planespotter nor do I know what one does. So if the above list makes no sense, I apologize. There is a lesson: write apps for stuff you know about…. First of all, let’s look at our statement and then go through the list of features. Remove everything that has nothing to do with that statement! If you end up with an empty list, try again with both steps. Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. That's better. The things I removed could be pretty useful to a plane spotter and could be fun to write. But do they match the statement? I said that the app is for spotting in the field, so “look up airfields” doesn’t belong there: I know where I am so why look it up? And the same goes for inviting friends or looking up the weather conditions for tomorrow. I am at the airfield right now, looking through my binoculars at the planes. I know the weather now and I don’t care about tomorrow. If you feel the items you’ve crossed out are valuable, then why not write another app? One that says “SpotNoter” is the best app for preparing a day of spotting with my friends. That’s a different app! Remember: Win8 apps are small and very good at doing ONE thing, and one thing only! If you have made that list, it’s time to prepare the navigation of your app. The navigation is how users see your app and how they use it. We’ll do that next time!

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• PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

  - by Bill Graziano

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

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• Nokia Windows Phone 8 App Collection

  - by Tim Murphy

  I recently upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 920.  Along with it came the availability of a number of Nokia developed apps or apps that Nokia has made available from other developers.  Below is a summary of some of the ones that I have used to this point.  There are quite a few of them so I won’t be covering everything that is available. Nokia Maps I am quite pleased with the accuracy of Nokia Maps and not having to tap the screen for each turn any more.  The information on the screen is quite good as well.  The couple of improvements I would like to see are for the voice directions to include which street or exit you need to use and improve the search accuracy.  Bing maps had much better search results in my opinion. Nokia Drive This one really had me confused when I first setup the phone.  I was driving down the road and suddenly I am getting notification tones, but there were no visual notifications on the phone.  It seems that in their infinite wisdom Nokia thinks I don’t know when I am going over the speed limit and need to be told. ESPN I really liked my ESPN app on Windows Phone 7.5, but I am not getting the type of experience I was looking for out of this app.  While it allows me to pick my favorite teams, but there isn’t a pivot page or panorama page that shows a summary of my favorite teams.  I have also found that the live tile don’t update very often.  Over all I am rather disappointed compared app produced by ESPN. Smart Shoot I really need to get the kids to let me use this on.  I like the concept, but I need to spend more time with it.  The idea how running the camera through a continuous shooting mode and then picking the best is something that I have done with my DSLR and am glad to see it available here. Cinemagraph Here is a fun filter.  It doesn’t have the most accurate editing features, but it is fun to stop certain parts of a scene and let other parts move.  As a test I stopped the traffic on the highway and let the traffic on the frontage road flow.  It makes for a fun effect.  If nothing else it could be great for sending prank animations to your friends. YouSendIt I have only briefly touched this application.  What I don’t understand is why it is needed.  Most of the functionality seems to be similar to SkyDrive and it gives you less storage.  They only feature that seems to differentiate the app is the signature capability. Creative Studio This app has some nice quick edits, but it is not very comprehensive.  I am also not to thrilled with the user experience.  It puts you though an initial color cast series that I’m not sure why it is there.  Discovery of the remaining adjustments isn’t that great.  In the end I found myself wanting Thumbia back. Panorama This is one of the apps that I like.  I found it easy to use as it guides you with a target circle that you center for it to take the next pictures.  It also stitches the images with amazing speed.  The one thing I wish it had was the capability to turn the phone into portrait orientation and do a taller panorama.  Perhaps we will see this in the future. Nokia Music After getting over the missing album art I found that there were a number of missing features with this app as well.  I have a Zune HD and I am used to being able to go through my collection and adding songs, albums or artists to my now playing.  There also doesn’t seem to be a way to manage playlists that I have seen yet.  Other than that the UI is familiar and it give Nokia City Lens Augmented reality is a cool concept, but I still haven’t seen it implemented in a compelling fashion beyond a demo at TED a couple of years ago.  The app still leaves me wanting as well.  It does give an interesting toy.  It gives you the ability to look for general categories and see general direction and clusters of locations.  I think as this concept is better thought out it will become more compelling. Nokia Trailers I don’t know how often I will use this app, but I do like being able to see what movies are being promoted.  I can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out and the trailer was just what the doctor ordered.  I can see coming back to this app from time to time. PhotoBeamer PhotoBeamer is a strange beast that needs a better instruction manual.  It seems a lot like magic but very confusing.  I need some more testing, but I don’t think this is something that most people are going to understand quickly and may give up before getting it to work.  I may put an update here after playing with it further. Ringtone Maker The app was just published and it didn’t work very well for me. It couldn’t find 95% of the songs that Nokia Music was playing for me and crashed several times.  It also had songs named wrong that when I checked them in Nokia Music they were fine.  This app looks like it has a long way to go. Summary In all I think that Nokia is offering a well rounded set of initial applications that can get any new owner started.  There is definitely room for improvement in all of these apps.  The main need is usability upgrades.  I would guess that with feedback from users they will come up to acceptable levels.  Try them out and see if you agree. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Nokia,Lumia,Nokia Apps,ESPN,PhotoBeamer,City Lens,YouSendIt,Drive,Maps

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• not able to remove nested lists in a jQuery variable

  - by Pradyut Bhattacharya

  Hi I have a nested oredered list which i m animating using this code... var $li = $("ol#update li"); function animate_li(){ $li.filter(':first') .animate({ height: 'show', opacity: 'show' }, 500, function(){ animate_li(); }); $li = $li.not(':first'); } animate_li(); now i want not to show or animate the nested lists(ol s) or the li s in the ols take a look at the example here The structure of my ols are <ol> <li class="bar248"> <div class="nli"> <div class="pic"> <img src="dir/anonymous-thumb.png"alt="image" /> </div> <div align="left" class="text"> <span> <span class="delete_button"><a href="#" id="test" class="delete_update">R</a></span> test shouted <span class="timestamp"> 2010/02/24 18:34:26 </span> <br /> this </span> </div> <div class="clear"></div> </div> <div class="padd"> </div> <ol class="comment"> <li> <div>Testing </div> </li> <li> <div>Another Test </div> </li> </ol> </li> </ol> I m able to hide the nested ols using this code... $("ol#update li ol").hide(); But still time is being consumed in animating them although they are hidden I m not able to remove the nested li s using this code var $li = $("ol#update li").not("ol#update li ol"); $li = $li.not("ol#update li ol"); Take a look at this here Any help thanks < br Pradyut

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• Json Jackson deserialization without inner classes

  - by Eto Demerzel

  Hi everyone, I have a question concerning Json deserialization using Jackson. I would like to deserialize a Json file using a class like this one: (taken from http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonInFiveMinutes) public class User { public enum Gender { MALE, FEMALE }; public static class Name { private String _first, _last; public String getFirst() { return _first; } public String getLast() { return _last; } public void setFirst(String s) { _first = s; } public void setLast(String s) { _last = s; } } private Gender _gender; private Name _name; private boolean _isVerified; private byte[] _userImage; public Name getName() { return _name; } public boolean isVerified() { return _isVerified; } public Gender getGender() { return _gender; } public byte[] getUserImage() { return _userImage; } public void setName(Name n) { _name = n; } public void setVerified(boolean b) { _isVerified = b; } public void setGender(Gender g) { _gender = g; } public void setUserImage(byte[] b) { _userImage = b; } } A Json file can be deserialized using the so called "Full Data Binding" in this way: ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); User user = mapper.readValue(new File("user.json"), User.class); My problem is the usage of the inner class "Name". I would like to do the same thing without using inner classes. The "User" class would became like that: import Name; import Gender; public class User { private Gender _gender; private Name _name; private boolean _isVerified; private byte[] _userImage; public Name getName() { return _name; } public boolean isVerified() { return _isVerified; } public Gender getGender() { return _gender; } public byte[] getUserImage() { return _userImage; } public void setName(Name n) { _name = n; } public void setVerified(boolean b) { _isVerified = b; } public void setGender(Gender g) { _gender = g; } public void setUserImage(byte[] b) { _userImage = b; } } This means to find a way to specify to the mapper all the required classes in order to perform the deserialization. Is this possible? I looked at the documentation but I cannot find any solution. My need comes from the fact that I use the Javassist library to create such classes, and it does not support inner or anonymous classes. Thank you in advance

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• Segmentation fault when creating a Phonon MediaObject

  - by Luke Hansford

  I have music playing program made using PySide which uses Phonon to playback audio. I updated to MacOS X Mavericks a few days ago, which meant I needed to reinstall PySide. I'm not sure which of these actions has caused this, but now whenever I try to create a Phonon MediaObject I get a Segmentation Fault: 11 from Python. It's not just in my program, it happens when trying to create a MediaObject in Python without any other actions. I'm getting the following error message from my Mac whenever it crashes: Process: Python [13711] Path: /usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.5/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python Identifier: org.python.python Version: 2.7.5 (2.7.5) Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: bash [13707] Responsible: Terminal [13704] User ID: 501 Date/Time: 2013-11-01 19:47:53.164 +1000 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.9 (13A603) Report Version: 11 Anonymous UUID: C2686854-18CA-9D37-26E9-60050E3C4DA6 Sleep/Wake UUID: BB983BF6-CCE2-44D1-82A0-1C73382DFFE4 Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000008 VM Regions Near 0x8: --> __TEXT 00000001082e8000-00000001082e9000 [ 4K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.5/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread 0 QtCore 0x000000010a1b34cb QObject::moveToThread(QThread*) + 17 1 QtDBus 0x000000010d55f98b QDBusDefaultConnection::QDBusDefaultConnection(QDBusConnection::BusType, char const*) + 171 2 QtDBus 0x000000010d55ebdf QDBusConnection::sessionBus() + 71 3 phonon 0x000000010d50228d Phonon::FactoryPrivate::FactoryPrivate() + 189 4 phonon 0x000000010d5024d5 Phonon::$_249::operator->() + 99 5 phonon 0x000000010d502991 Phonon::Factory::registerFrontendObject(Phonon::MediaNodePrivate*) + 17 6 phonon 0x000000010d50b27e Phonon::MediaNodePrivate::MediaNodePrivate(Phonon::MediaNodePrivate::CastId) + 80 7 phonon 0x000000010d50f570 Phonon::MediaObjectPrivate::MediaObjectPrivate() + 24 8 phonon 0x000000010d50be9d Phonon::MediaObject::MediaObject(QObject*) + 45 9 phonon.so 0x000000010d42f24a Sbk_Phonon_MediaObject_Init + 458 10 org.python.python 0x0000000108338707 type_call + 189 11 org.python.python 0x00000001082f74fd PyObject_Call + 101 12 org.python.python 0x00000001083714f0 PyEval_EvalFrameEx + 15525 13 org.python.python 0x0000000108373aaf fast_function + 182 14 org.python.python 0x0000000108370919 PyEval_EvalFrameEx + 12494 15 org.python.python 0x000000010836d721 PyEval_EvalCodeEx + 1638 16 org.python.python 0x000000010836d0b5 PyEval_EvalCode + 54 17 org.python.python 0x000000010838beb8 run_mod + 53 18 org.python.python 0x000000010838bf5f PyRun_FileExFlags + 137 19 org.python.python 0x000000010838baad PyRun_SimpleFileExFlags + 718 20 org.python.python 0x000000010839c58b Py_Main + 3039 21 libdyld.dylib 0x00007fff8e4fb5fd start + 1 Thread 1:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.libdispatch-manager 0 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff8c938662 kevent64 + 10 1 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff923e743d _dispatch_mgr_invoke + 239 2 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff923e7152 _dispatch_mgr_thread + 52 Thread 2: 0 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff8c937e6a __workq_kernreturn + 10 1 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff90bd8f08 _pthread_wqthread + 330 2 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff90bdbfb9 start_wqthread + 13 Thread 3: 0 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff8c937e6a __workq_kernreturn + 10 1 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff90bd8f08 _pthread_wqthread + 330 2 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff90bdbfb9 start_wqthread + 13 Thread 4: 0 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff8c937e6a __workq_kernreturn + 10 1 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff90bd8f08 _pthread_wqthread + 330 2 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff90bdbfb9 start_wqthread + 13 Thread 0 crashed with X86 Thread State (64-bit): rax: 0x00007feba0d19700 rbx: 0x000000010d5b7098 rcx: 0x00000000002f4180 rdx: 0x000000000012c040 rdi: 0x0000000000000000 rsi: 0x00007feba0d19700 rbp: 0x00007fff57917210 rsp: 0x00007fff579171d0 r8: 0x00007feba0fd5d10 r9: 0x00007feba0ff5310 r10: 0x0000000019c04cbe r11: 0x0000000070769b38 r12: 0x00007fff57917220 r13: 0x00007feba0c07190 r14: 0x0000000000000000 r15: 0x00007feba0fe1430 rip: 0x000000010a1b34cb rfl: 0x0000000000010202 cr2: 0x0000000000000008 Logical CPU: 0 Error Code: 0x00000004 Trap Number: 14 Anyone have any ideas about what is happening?

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• Linq query challenge

  - by vdh_ant

  My table structure is as follows: Person 1-M PesonAddress Person 1-M PesonPhone Person 1-M PesonEmail Person 1-M Contract Contract M-M Program Contract M-1 Organization At the end of this query I need a populated object graph where each person has their: PesonAddress's PesonPhone's PesonEmail's PesonPhone's Contract's - and this has its respective Program's Now I had the following query and I thought that it was working great, but it has a couple of problems: from people in ctx.People.Include("PersonAddress") .Include("PersonLandline") .Include("PersonMobile") .Include("PersonEmail") .Include("Contract") .Include("Contract.Program") where people.Contract.Any( contract => (param.OrganizationId == contract.OrganizationId) && contract.Program.Any( contractProgram => (param.ProgramId == contractProgram.ProgramId))) select people; The problem is that it filters the person to the criteria but not the Contracts or the Contract's Programs. It brings back all Contracts that each person has not just the ones that have an OrganizationId of x and the same goes for each of those Contract's Programs respectively. What I want is only the people that have at least one contract with an OrgId of x with and where that contract has a Program with the Id of y... and for the object graph that is returned to have only the contracts that match and programs within that contract that match. I kinda understand why its not working, but I don't know how to change it so it is working... This is my attempt thus far: from people in ctx.People.Include("PersonAddress") .Include("PersonLandline") .Include("PersonMobile") .Include("PersonEmail") .Include("Contract") .Include("Contract.Program") let currentContracts = from contract in people.Contract where (param.OrganizationId == contract.OrganizationId) select contract let currentContractPrograms = from contractProgram in currentContracts let temp = from x in contractProgram.Program where (param.ProgramId == contractProgram.ProgramId) select x where temp.Any() select temp where currentContracts.Any() && currentContractPrograms.Any() select new Person { PersonId = people.PersonId, FirstName = people.FirstName, ..., ...., MiddleName = people.MiddleName, Surname = people.Surname, ..., ...., Gender = people.Gender, DateOfBirth = people.DateOfBirth, ..., ...., Contract = currentContracts, ... }; //This doesn't work But this has several problems (where the Person type is an EF object): I am left to do the mapping by myself, which in this case there is quite a lot to map When ever I try to map a list to a property (i.e. Scholarship = currentScholarships) it says I can't because IEnumerable is trying to be cast to EntityCollection Include doesn't work Hence how do I get this to work. Keeping in mind that I am trying to do this as a compiled query so I think that means anonymous types are out.

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• Linq guru - filtering related entities...

  - by vdh_ant

  My table structure is as follows: Person 1-M PesonAddress Person 1-M PesonPhone Person 1-M PesonEmail Person 1-M Contract Contract M-M Program Contract M-1 Organization At the end of this query I need a populated object graph where each person has their: PesonAddress's PesonPhone's PesonEmail's PesonPhone's Contract's - and this has its respective Program's Now I had the following query and I thought that it was working great, but it has a couple of problems: from people in ctx.People.Include("PersonAddress") .Include("PersonLandline") .Include("PersonMobile") .Include("PersonEmail") .Include("Contract") .Include("Contract.Program") where people.Contract.Any( contract => (param.OrganizationId == contract.OrganizationId) && contract.Program.Any( contractProgram => (param.ProgramId == contractProgram.ProgramId))) select people; The problem is that it filters the person to the criteria but not the Contracts or the Contract's Programs. It brings back all Contracts that each person has not just the ones that have an OrganizationId of x and the same goes for each of those Contract's Programs respectively. What I want is only the people that have at least one contract with an OrgId of x with and where that contract has a Program with the Id of y... and for the object graph that is returned to have only the contracts that match and programs within that contract that match. I kinda understand why its not working, but I don't know how to change it so it is working... This is my attempt thus far: from people in ctx.People.Include("PersonAddress") .Include("PersonLandline") .Include("PersonMobile") .Include("PersonEmail") .Include("Contract") .Include("Contract.Program") let currentContracts = from contract in people.Contract where (param.OrganizationId == contract.OrganizationId) select contract let currentContractPrograms = from contractProgram in currentContracts let temp = from x in contractProgram.Program where (param.ProgramId == contractProgram.ProgramId) select x where temp.Any() select temp where currentContracts.Any() && currentContractPrograms.Any() select new Person { PersonId = people.PersonId, FirstName = people.FirstName, ..., ...., MiddleName = people.MiddleName, Surname = people.Surname, ..., ...., Gender = people.Gender, DateOfBirth = people.DateOfBirth, ..., ...., Contract = currentContracts, ... }; //This doesn't work But this has several problems (where the Person type is an EF object): I am left to do the mapping by myself, which in this case there is quite a lot to map When ever I try to map a list to a property (i.e. Scholarship = currentScholarships) it says I can't because IEnumerable is trying to be cast to EntityCollection Include doesn't work Hence how do I get this to work. Keeping in mind that I am trying to do this as a compiled query so I think that means anonymous types are out.

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• How to eager load sibling data using LINQ to SQL?

  - by Scott

  The goal is to issue the fewest queries to SQL Server using LINQ to SQL without using anonymous types. The return type for the method will need to be IList<Child1>. The relationships are as follows: Parent Child1 Child2 Grandchild1 Parent Child1 is a one-to-many relationship Child1 Grandchild1 is a one-to-n relationship (where n is zero to infinity) Parent Child2 is a one-to-n relationship (where n is zero to infinity) I am able to eager load the Parent, Child1 and Grandchild1 data resulting in one query to SQL Server. This query with load options eager loads all of the data, except the sibling data (Child2): DataLoadOptions loadOptions = new DataLoadOptions(); loadOptions.LoadWith<Child1>(o => o.GrandChild1List); loadOptions.LoadWith<Child1>(o => o.Parent); dataContext.LoadOptions = loadOptions; IQueryable<Child1> children = from child in dataContext.Child1 select child; I need to load the sibling data as well. One approach I have tried is splitting the query into two LINQ to SQL queries and merging the result sets together (not pretty), however upon accessing the sibling data it is lazy loaded anyway. Adding the sibling load option will issue a query to SQL Server for each Grandchild1 and Child2 record (which is exactly what I am trying to avoid): DataLoadOptions loadOptions = new DataLoadOptions(); loadOptions.LoadWith<Child1>(o => o.GrandChild1List); loadOptions.LoadWith<Child1>(o => o.Parent); loadOptions.LoadWith<Parent>(o => o.Child2List); dataContext.LoadOptions = loadOptions; IQueryable<Child1> children = from child in dataContext.Child1 select child; exec sp_executesql N'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[Child2] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ForeignKeyToParent] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=1 exec sp_executesql N'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[Child2] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ForeignKeyToParent] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=2 exec sp_executesql N'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[Child2] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ForeignKeyToParent] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=3 exec sp_executesql N'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[Child2] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ForeignKeyToParent] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=4 I've also written LINQ to SQL queries to join in all of the data in hopes that it would eager load the data, however when the LINQ to SQL EntitySet of Child2 or Grandchild1 are accessed it lazy loads the data. The reason for returning the IList<Child1> is to hydrate business objects. My thoughts are I am either: Approaching this problem the wrong way. Have the option of calling a stored procedure? My organization should not be using LINQ to SQL as an ORM? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, -Scott

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• Data denormalization and C# objects DB serialization

  - by Robert Koritnik

  I'm using a DB table with various different entities. This means that I can't have an arbitrary number of fields in it to save all kinds of different entities. I want instead save just the most important fields (dates, reference IDs - kind of foreign key to various other tables, most important text fields etc.) and an additional text field where I'd like to store more complete object data. the most obvious solution would be to use XML strings and store those. The second most obvious choice would be JSON, that usually shorter and probably also faster to serialize/deserialize... And is probably also faster. But is it really? My objects also wouldn't need to be strictly serializable, because JsonSerializer is usually able to serialize anything. Even anonymous objects, that may as well be used here. What would be the most optimal solution to solve this problem? Additional info My DB is highly normalised and I'm using Entity Framework, but for the purpose of having external super-fast fulltext search functionality I'm sacrificing a bit DB denormalisation. Just for the info I'm using SphinxSE on top of MySql. Sphinx would return row IDs that I would use to fast query my index optimised conglomerate table to get most important data from it much much faster than querying multiple tables all over my DB. My table would have columns like: RowID (auto increment) EntityID (of the actual entity - but not directly related because this would have to point to different tables) EntityType (so I would be able to get the actual entity if needed) DateAdded (record timestamp when it's been added into this table) Title Metadata (serialized data related to particular entity type) This table would be indexed with SPHINX indexer. When I would search for data using this indexer I would provide a series of EntityIDs and a limit date. Indexer would have to return a very limited paged amount of RowIDs ordered by DateAdded (descending). I would then just join these RowIDs to my table and get relevant results. So this won't actually be full text search but a filtering search. Getting RowIDs would be very fast this way and getting results back from the table would be much faster than comparing EntityIDs and DateAdded comparisons even though they would be properly indexed.

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• App starts in 1.5 emulator but doesn't in 1.6

  - by DixieFlatline

  My app works on 1.5 emulator and 1.5 device. When i try to start it on 1.6 emulator, it produces strange exceptions (doesn't even start). I don't have any 1.6 device to try this app if it works on a real device. I get some warnings in Eclipse ( warning: Ignoring InnerClasses attribute for an anonymous inner class that doesn't come with an associated EnclosingMethod attribute. This class was probably produced by a broken compiler.) and get cant rid of them (i think they come from some apache jars that i need to make http multipart posts). Is it possible that this jars are cause for my exceptions in 1.6 or is it something else? My logacat: 04-29 16:14:55.874: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): Uncaught handler: thread main exiting due to uncaught exception 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{com.poslji.gor/com.poslji.gor.FormFiller}: java.lang.NumberFormatException: unable to parse 'null' as integer 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2401) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2417) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$2100(ActivityThread.java:116) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1794) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4203) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:791) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:549) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): Caused by: java.lang.NumberFormatException: unable to parse 'null' as integer 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:358) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:333) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at com.poslji.gor.FormFiller.nastavi(FormFiller.java:322) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at com.poslji.gor.FormFiller.onCreate(FormFiller.java:188) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1123) 04-29 16:14:55.894: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(392): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2364)

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• Asynchronous subprocess on Windows

  - by Stigma

  First of all, the overall problem I am solving is a bit more complicated than I am showing here, so please do not tell me 'use threads with blocking' as it would not solve my actual situation without a fair, FAIR bit of rewriting and refactoring. I have several applications which are not mine to modify, which take data from stdin and poop it out on stdout after doing their magic. My task is to chain several of these programs. Problem is, sometimes they choke, and as such I need to track their progress which is outputted on STDERR. pA = subprocess.Popen(CommandA, shell=False, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) # ... some more processes make up the chain, but that is irrelevant to the problem pB = subprocess.Popen(CommandB, shell=False, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=pA.stdout ) Now, reading directly through pA.stdout.readline() and pB.stdout.readline(), or the plain read() functions, is a blocking matter. Since different applications output in different paces and different formats, blocking is not an option. (And as I wrote above, threading is not an option unless at a last, last resort.) pA.communicate() is deadlock safe, but since I need the information live, that is not an option either. Thus google brought me to this asynchronous subprocess snippet on ActiveState. All good at first, until I implement it. Comparing the cmd.exe output of pA.exe | pB.exe, ignoring the fact both output to the same window making for a mess, I see very instantaneous updates. However, I implement the same thing using the above snippet and the read_some() function declared there, and it takes over 10 seconds to notify updates of a single pipe. But when it does, it has updates leading all the way upto 40% progress, for example. Thus I do some more research, and see numerous subjects concerning PeekNamedPipe, anonymous handles, and returning 0 bytes available even though there is information available in the pipe. As the subject has proven quite a bit beyond my expertise to fix or code around, I come to Stack Overflow to look for guidance. :) My platform is W7 64-bit with Python 2.6, the applications are 32-bit in case it matters, and compatibility with Unix is not a concern. I can even deal with a full ctypes or pywin32 solution that subverts subprocess entirely if it is the only solution, as long as I can read from every stderr pipe asynchronously with immediate performance and no deadlocks. :)

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• make an http post from server using user credentials - integrated security

  - by opensas

  I'm trying to make a post, from an asp classic server side page, using the user credentials... I'm using msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP to programatically make the post I've tried with several configurations in the IIS 5.1 site, but there's no way I can make IIS run with a specified account... I made a little asp page that runs whoami to verify what account the iis process i using... with IIS 5.1, using integrated security the process uses: my_machine\IWAM_my_machine I disable integrated security, and leave a domain account as anonymous access, and I get the same (¿?) to test the user I do the following private function whoami() dim shell, cmd set shell = createObject("wscript.shell") set cmd = shell.exec( server.mapPath( "whoami.exe" ) ) whoami = cmd.stdOut.readAll() set shell = nothing: set cmd = nothing end function is it because I'm issuing a shell command? I'd like to make http post calls, to another site that works with integrated security... So I need some way to pass the credentials, or at least to run with a specified account, and then configure the remote site to thrust that account... I thought that just setting the site to work with integrated security would be enough... How can I achieve such a thing? ps: with IIS6,happens the same but if I change the pool canfiguration I get the following info from whoami NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM if I set a domain account, I get a "service unavailable" message... edit: found this http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/275269ee-1b9f-4869-8d72-c9006b5bd659.mspx?mfr=true it says what I supossed, "If an authenticated user makes a request, the thread token is based on the authenticated account of the user", but somehow I doesn't seem to work like that... what could I possibly be missing? edit: well the whoami thing is obviously fooling me, I tried with the following function private function whoami_db( serverName, dbName ) dim conn, data set conn = server.createObject("adodb.connection") conn.open "Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Integrated Security=SSPI;" & _ "Initial Catalog=" & dbName & ";Data Source=" & serverName set data = conn.execute( "select suser_sname() as user_name" ) whoami_db = data("user_name") data.close: conn.close set data = nothing: set conn = nothing end function and everything seemed to be working fine... but how can I make msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP work with the user credentials???

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• Getting results in a result set from dynamic SQL in Oracle

  - by msorens

  This question is similar to a couple others I have found on StackOverflow, but the differences are signficant enough to me to warrant a new question, so here it is: I want to obtain a result set from dynamic SQL in Oracle and then display it as a result set in a SqlDeveloper-like tool, just as if I had executed the dynamic SQL statement directly. This is straightforward in SQL Server, so to be concrete, here is an example from SQL Server that returns a result set in SQL Server Management Studio or Query Explorer: EXEC sp_executesql N'select * from countries' Or more properly: DECLARE @stmt nvarchar(100) SET @stmt = N'select * from countries' EXEC sp_executesql @stmt The question "How to return a resultset / cursor from a Oracle PL/SQL anonymous block that executes Dynamic SQL?" addresses the first half of the problem--executing dynamic SQL into a cursor. The question "How to make Oracle procedure return result sets" provides a similar answer. Web search has revealed many variations of the same theme, all addressing just the first half of my question. I found this post explaining how to do it in SqlDeveloper, but that uses a bit of functionality of SqlDeveloper. I am actually using a custom query tool so I need the solution to be self-contained in the SQL code. This custom query tool similarly does not have the capability to show output of print (dbms_output.put_line) statements; it only displays result sets. Here is yet one more possible avenue using 'execute immediate...bulk collect', but this example again renders the results with a loop of dbms_output.put_line statements. This link attempts to address the topic but the question never quite got answered there either. Assuming this is possible, I will add one more condition: I would like to do this without having to define a function or procedure (due to limited DB permissions). That is, I would like to execute a self-contained PL/SQL block containing dynamic SQL and return a result set in SqlDeveloper or a similar tool. So to summarize: I want to execute an arbitrary SQL statement (hence dynamic SQL). The platform is Oracle. The solution must be a PL/SQL block with no procedures or functions. The output must be generated as a canonical result set; no print statements. The output must render as a result set in SqlDeveloper without using any SqlDeveloper special functionality. Any suggestions?

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• node.js / socket.io, cookies only working locally

  - by Ben Griffiths

  I'm trying to use cookie based sessions, however it'll only work on the local machine, not over the network. If I remove the session related stuff, it will however work just great over the network... You'll have to forgive the lack of quality code here, I'm just starting out with node/socket etc etc, and finding any clear guides is tough going, so I'm in n00b territory right now. Basically this is so far hacked together from various snippets with about 10% understanding of what I'm actually doing... The error I see in Chrome is: socket.io.js:1632GET http://192.168.0.6:8080/socket.io/1/?t=1334431940273 500 (Internal Server Error) Socket.handshake ------- socket.io.js:1632 Socket.connect ------- socket.io.js:1671 Socket ------- socket.io.js:1530 io.connect ------- socket.io.js:91 (anonymous function) ------- /socket-test/:9 jQuery.extend.ready ------- jquery.js:438 And in the console for the server I see: debug - served static content /socket.io.js debug - authorized warn - handshake error No cookie My server is: var express = require('express') , app = express.createServer() , io = require('socket.io').listen(app) , connect = require('express/node_modules/connect') , parseCookie = connect.utils.parseCookie , RedisStore = require('connect-redis')(express) , sessionStore = new RedisStore(); app.listen(8080, '192.168.0.6'); app.configure(function() { app.use(express.cookieParser()); app.use(express.session( { secret: 'YOURSOOPERSEKRITKEY', store: sessionStore })); }); io.configure(function() { io.set('authorization', function(data, callback) { if(data.headers.cookie) { var cookie = parseCookie(data.headers.cookie); sessionStore.get(cookie['connect.sid'], function(err, session) { if(err || !session) { callback('Error', false); } else { data.session = session; callback(null, true); } }); } else { callback('No cookie', false); } }); }); var users_count = 0; io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) { console.log('New Connection'); var session = socket.handshake.session; ++users_count; io.sockets.emit('users_count', users_count); socket.on('something', function(data) { io.sockets.emit('doing_something', data['data']); }); socket.on('disconnect', function() { --users_count; io.sockets.emit('users_count', users_count); }); }); My page JS is: jQuery(function($){ var socket = io.connect('http://192.168.0.6', { port: 8080 } ); socket.on('users_count', function(data) { $('#client_count').text(data); }); socket.on('doing_something', function(data) { if(data == '') { window.setTimeout(function() { $('#target').text(data); }, 3000); } else { $('#target').text(data); } }); $('#textbox').keydown(function() { socket.emit('something', { data: 'typing' }); }); $('#textbox').keyup(function() { socket.emit('something', { data: '' }); }); });

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• Text to Speech in ASP.NET - Access is denied... what to do?

  - by Magnetic_dud

  On my personal website, i would like to make it "pronounce" something I solved the "concept" problem, as in here, and on my desktop it works smoothly when launched from visual web developer. Creates a file, and then an embedded player in the page will play it. Perfect. So, I uploaded it on the server... I get this error 500: Server Error in '/sapi' Application. Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) ASP.NET is not authorized to access the requested resource. Consider granting access rights to the resource to the ASP.NET request identity. ASP.NET has a base process identity (typically {MACHINE}\ASPNET on IIS 5 or Network Service on IIS 6) that is used if the application is not impersonating. If the application is impersonating via , the identity will be the anonymous user (typically IUSR_MACHINENAME) or the authenticated request user. (...) Source Error: See it below Source File: c:\mypath\sapi\myfile.aspx.cs Line: 21 Stack Trace: [UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))] SpeechLib.SpVoiceClass.Speak(String Text, SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags Flags) +0 prova.Button1_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) in c:\mypath\sapi\prova.aspx.cs:21 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) +111 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +110 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +10 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +13 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +36 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1565 Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3053; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3053 This is the source Source Error: Line 19: myfile.Open(@"C:\mypath\sapi\gen\hi.wav",SpeechStreamFileMode.SSFMCreateForWrite,false); Line 20: voice.AudioOutputStream = myfile; Line 21: voice.Speak("Hi",SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault); I get error on line 21, Voice.speak That probably means that the aspnet worker user has not some right permission The generation folder has all the right permissions: an empty file is created. So, i have to give permission of execute to some system dll? Do you know which dll? It is not bin\Interop.SpeechLib.dll, on this one the aspnet user has full control Ps: i have full control on the (windows) server (i mean, access by RDC, is not a shared hosting)

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