Search Results

Search found 784 results on 32 pages for 'collaborate profit oaug f'.

Page 27/32 | < Previous Page | 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32  | Next Page >

  • How to skip certain tests with Test::Unit

    - by Daniel Abrahamsson
    In one of my projects I need to collaborate with several backend systems. Some of them somewhat lacks in documentation, and partly therefore I have some test code that interact with some test servers just to see everything works as expected. However, accessing these servers is quite slow, and therefore I do not want to run these tests every time I run my test suite. My question is how to deal with a situation where you want to skip certain tests. Currently I use an environment variable 'BACKEND_TEST' and a conditional statement which checks if the variable is set for each test I would like to skip. But sometimes I would like to skip all tests in a test file without having to add an extra row to the beginning of each test. The tests which have to interact with the test servers are not many, as I use flexmock in other situations. However, you can't mock yourself away from reality. As you can see from this question's title, I'm using Test::Unit. Additionally, if it makes any difference, the project is a Rails project.

    Read the article

  • Quantis Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) - any reviews?

    - by Tim Post
    I am thinking about getting one of these (PCI) to set up an internal entropy pool similar to this service who incidentally brought us fun captcha challenges. Prior to lightening my wallet, I'm hoping to gather feedback from people who may be using this device. As there is no possible 'correct' answer, I am making this CW and tagging it as subjective. I'm undertaking a project to help write Monte Carlo simulations for a non profit that distributes mosquito nets in Malaria stricken areas. The idea is to model areas to determine the best place to distribute mosquito nets. During development, I expect to consume gigs if not more of the RNG output. We really need our own source. Is this device reliable? Does it have to be re-started often? Is its bandwidth really as advertised? It passes all tests, as far as randomness goes (i.e. NIST/DIEHARD). What I don't want is something in deadlock due to some ioctl in disk sleep that does nothing but radiate heat. This is not a spamvertisement, I'm helping out of pocket and I really, really want to know if such a large purchase will bear fruit. I can't afford to build a HRNG based on radioactive decay, this looks like the next best thing. Any comments are appreciated. I will earn zero rep for this, please do not vote to close. This is no different than questions regarding the utilization of some branded GPU for some odd purpose. Answers pointing to other solutions will be gladly accepted, I'm not married to this idea.

    Read the article

  • UISplitView show different views in the detail pane

    - by Mark
    How can I change the view in the Details pane of the UISplitView so that its a completely different view? Im having a fair amount of trouble understanding how its all wired up and where things should go at the moment, could someone please enlighten me? What I would love to be able to do is to show a specific view based on what the user has selected in the UITableView on the left pane (this view could be an image, or a more complex view of a news article, etc... many different options) then when the user turns the iPad into portrait view, that view that was in the details pane changes to be its equivalent portrait view version. Does this make sense? How on earth would I do that? Just to brainstorm, here is what I was thinking: Create a Split View project Create 2 NIBs for each view: (with accompanying view controllers???) * PortraitNewsStory * LandscapeNewsStory * PortraitImageBrowser * LandscapeImageBrowser * etc... Create a UISplitView control using XCode Capture when a user rotates the iPad (should this be done in the RootViewController.m ?) Change the view of the DetailViewController how should I do this? profit??? Thanks Mark

    Read the article

  • What are the best open-source software non-profits for making financial contributions and/or facilitating useful work?

    - by Jason S
    I'm not a great programmer myself (my main job is more electrical engineering) and have never really helped out with any open source projects, but I've benefited greatly from free and/or open-source software (MySQL, OpenOffice, Firefox, Apache, PHP, Java, etc.) and at some point would like to make some modest financial contributions to help keep this stuff going. I'm wondering, what are the best non-profits to make financial contributions? I'm aware of: Open Source Initiative (founded 10 years ago by several prominent figures including programmer and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" author Eric S. Raymond) Free Software Foundation Mozilla Foundation Apache Foundation Anyone have a particular favorite? Ideally I'd like to give money to a non-profit that would foster some of the smaller but promising open-source and/or free software projects. The big projects like Firefox and Apache are already well-established. There are a few small individual shareware programs I've already paid for directly. But it's those middle-ground projects that I would really like my contributions to support. (one that comes to mind is a good GUI for Subversion or Mercurial.) It's one thing for a single person to donate a little $$ to a small project. It's another for a foundation or something to give larger grants to projects that give a good bang for the buck. Conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy, or the Trust for Public Lands, have really honed this approach, but I'm not really sure if there's an equivalent model in software-land.

    Read the article

  • Differences between iPhone/iPod Simulator and Devices

    - by Allisone
    Hi, since I started iPhone/iPod Development I have come across some differences between how the simulator and how real device react. Maybe I will come across some other differences I will have to figure out as well, maybe other people haven't met these problems here (YET) and can profit from the knowledge, and maybe you know some problems/differences that you would have been happy to know about earlier before you spent several hours or days figuring out what the heck is going on. So here is what I came across. Simulator is not case sensitive, Devices are case sensitive. This means a default.png or Icon.png will work in simulator, but not on a device where they must be named Default.png and icon.png (if it's still not working read this answer) Simulator has different codecs to play audio and video If you use f.e. MPMoviePlayerController you might play certain video on the simulator while on the device it won't work (use Handbrake-presets-iPhone & iPod Touch to create playable videos for Simulator and Device). If you play audio with AudioServicesPlaySystemSound(&soundID) you might here the sound on simulator but not an a device. (use Audacity to open your soundfile, export as wav and run afconvert -f caff -d LEI16@44100 -c 1 audacity.wav output.caf in terminal) Also there is this flickering on second run problem which can be resolved with an playerViewCtrl.initialPlaybackTime = -1.0; either on the end of playing or before each beginning. Simulator is mostly much faster cause it doesn't simulate the hardware but uses Mac resources, therefore f.e. sio2 Apps (OpenGL,OpenAL,etc. framework) run much better on simulator, well everything that uses more resources will run visibly better in simulator than on device. I hope we can add some more to this.

    Read the article

  • Handling conflicting priorities and expectations in project development

    - by jasonk
    There are any number of situations in the standard day where priority conflicts exist for projects. Management wants maximum productivity from employees. Marketing wants maximum salability and fast turnaround. Ownership wants maximum profit. Customers want usability and low cost. Regardless of the origin of the demands, time and money are always the limiting factor in business. Sometimes project elements have intrinsic or goodwill benefits for which there is not a hard, fast way to measure with monetary means (e.g. arguments for an attractive UI appeal vs. functional but plain). Other elements of software may have a method of providing “mental breaks” or motivating “cool factor” for developers that can get them back on track on other bigger, complex issues. While they may sidetrack the project short term they may have greater results long term through improved job satisfaction, etc. Continued training is a must, but working it in can setup back progress. What are your suggestions for setting priorities? How do you evaluate requests/demands on your projects? What are your suggestions for communicating and passing those on to your team in a way that they stay focused?

    Read the article

  • Does anyone knows any Train-table-api service?

    - by DaNieL
    Hi guys, im wondering if there is any online service who provide API about the train timetables (arrivals, departure, etch..), at least for the european stations. I know www.bahn.de, who provide the accurated timetables for many european countries, but i didin't find any similar to a api service. My goal (well, just a future-project) is to develope an application like gmaps, but instead of giving the car-trip i would like to give the train-trip.. you know, the user set the departure day, time and station, then the first arrival, maybe then add another one, and so on. So, there is something like, that can be queryed by php/python/javascript? Edit: if can help, im wondering to build a service to plan an inter-rail trip! (and any help will be really appreciate) Im stuck. Google's public-service api rely on the information that every local company makes avaiable, much branches are missing (for example, is almost impossible to use it to build an itinerary that touches two or more regions of Europe. As i said before, the only service that i know doing it good is the bahn.de, they really have all the data.. but no api. I tryed to parse theyre result page (in order to use them as API), but seem like the markup is been build exactly to avoid that.. maybe they have business plans behind that or whatever, but i dont think they will ever release some API.. so, my project is going on without this function (p.s: my project is about non-profit cultural organizations, we wont make war to anyone ;P) @El Goorf: if you find a way, and consider the idea of sharing it, count on my hand if need help!

    Read the article

  • Libraries for developing NCPDP SCRIPT based systems (a standard for e-prescribing)

    - by Kaveh Shahbazian
    What are (based on experiences) best (commercial or open source) libraries for developing NCPDP-based systems? Background: NCPDP (National Council for Prescription Drug Programs) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited, standards development organization. One of it's standards is the SCRIPT Standard for Electronic Prescribing, which allows PHARMACY, PRESCRIBER (i.e. Physician) and PAYERS (patient or more often insurer) communicate. So the SCRIPT standard is about data transmission. Problem: One step in implementing such systems is to develop models for data based on SCRIPT standard. These models should have utilities for serializing/deserializing to/from SCRIPT binary format and SCRIPT XML format (there are two distinct formats here; both must be supported). Here rises the problem (for me at least). To develop this subsystem for handling the model, implementing serializing and deserializing facilities and keep it uptodate with the SCRIPT standard specifications is a lot of work; it needs it's own team and team management issues (to support a standard implementation). So I am looking for a solution to this problem; to keep standard implementation out of the way and focusing on main problems. Thanks to all (Thankyou Freiheit for your hints!) Edit 2: Thanks to all for help! NCPDP (National Council for Prescription Drug Programs) is an standard for e-prescribing. It defines two formats for message transmission: binary and XML. Implementing XML is somehow easier because it is a standard format which in turn gives us more tooling options. The binary format has a very big specification and time-consuming to implement. I did not find an open source solution to work with. So I am looking for commercial alternatives. Edit 1: Please guide me; what's wrong with this question?

    Read the article

  • Using ARIMA to model and forecast stock prices using user-friendly stats program

    - by Brian
    Hi people, Can anyone please offer some insight into this for me? I'm coming from a functional magnetic resonance imaging research background where I analyzed a lot of time series data, and I'd like to analyze the time series of stock prices (or returns) by: 1) modeling a successful stock in a particular market sector and then cross-correlating the time series of this historically successful stock with that of other newer stocks to look for significant relationships; 2) model a stock's price time series and use forecasting (e.g., exponential smoothing) to predict future values of it. I'd like to use non-linear modeling methods (ARIMA and ARCH) to do this. Several questions: How often do ARIMA and ARCH modeling methods (given that the individual who implements them does so accurately) actually fit the stock time series data they target, and what is the optimal fit I can expect? Is the extent to which this model fits the data commensurate with the extent to which it predicts this stock time series' future values? Rather than randomly selecting stocks to compare or model, if profit is my goal, what is an efficient approach, if any, to selecting the stocks I'm going to analyze? Which stats program is the most user-friendly for this? Any thoughts on this would be great and would go a long way for me. Thanks, Brian

    Read the article

  • i386 assembly question: why do I need to meddle with the stack pointer?

    - by zneak
    Hello everyone, I decided it would be fun to learn x86 assembly during the summer break. So I started with a very simple hello world program, borrowing on free examples gcc -S could give me. I ended up with this: HELLO: .ascii "Hello, world!\12\0" .text .globl _main _main: pushl %ebp # 1. puts the base stack address on the stack movl %esp, %ebp # 2. puts the base stack address in the stack address register subl $20, %esp # 3. ??? pushl $HELLO # 4. push HELLO's address on the stack call _puts # 5. call puts xorl %eax, %eax # 6. zero %eax, probably not necessary since we didn't do anything with it leave # 7. clean up ret # 8. return # PROFIT! It compiles and even works! And I think I understand most of it. Though, magic happens at step 3. Would I remove this line, my program would die between the call to puts and the xor from a misaligned stack error. And would I change $20 to another value, it'd crash too. So I came to the conclusion that this value is very important. Problem is, I don't know what it does and why it's needed. Can anyone explain me? (I'm on Mac OS, would it ever matter.)

    Read the article

  • Why should I use Entity Framework over Linq2SQL ...

    - by Refracted Paladin
    To be clear, I am not asking for a side by side comparision which has already been asked Ad Nauseum here on SO. I am also Not asking if Linq2Sql is dead as I don't care. What I am asking is this.... I am building internal apps only for a non-profit organization. I am the only developer on staff. We ALWAYS use SQL Server as our Database backend. I design and build the Databases as well. I have used L2S successfully a couple of times already. Taking all this into consideration can someone offer me a compelling reason to use EF instead of L2S? I was at Code Camp this weekend and after an hour long demonstration on EF, all of which I could have done in L2S, I asked this same question. The speakers answer was, "L2S is dead..." Very well then! NOT! (see here) I understand EF is what MS WANTS us to use in the future(see here) and that it offers many more customization options. What I can't figure out is if any of that should, or does, matter for me in this environment. One particular issue we have here is that I inherited the Core App which was built on 4 different SQL Data bases. L2S has great difficulty with this but when I asked the aforementioned speaker if EF would help me in this regard he said "No!"

    Read the article

  • Generating Random Records Date Wise

    - by Julian
    I work for a non-profit organization where we send volunteers to aided schools everyday. I am creating a site to display this info and am using SQL server express. I want some help regarding a query so here's my first post We have 15 volunteers currently who will go to 4 different schools to teach. Here are some conditions: We have to create a 'new' group comprising of 1 Leader and 4 TeamSupporters 'every day' except Sunday who will go to teach everyday If a person becomes a Leader in a week, he cannot become a leader again for the same week. A leader can become a TeamSupporter in the same week. Moving ahead, we can have more number of school to target, so 4 is not a constant Here's how the output should look like School1 School2 School3 School4 Jun14 Leader V6 V6 V6 V6 Support1 V3 V3 V3 V3 Support2 V9 V9 V9 V9 Support3 V12 V12 V12 V12 Support4 V1 V1 V1 V1 Jun15 Leader V2 V2 V2 V2 Support1 V7 V7 V7 V7 Support2 V9 V9 V9 V9 Support3 V8 V8 V8 V8 Support4 V11 V11 V11 V11 Jun16 Leader V9 V9 V9 V9 Support1 V6 V6 V6 V6 Support2 V4 V4 V4 V4 Support3 V3 V3 V3 V3 Support4 V14 V14 V14 V14 and so on..

    Read the article

  • Creating a smart text generator

    - by royrules22
    I'm doing this for fun (or as 4chan says "for teh lolz") and if I learn something on the way all the better. I took an AI course almost 2 years ago now and I really enjoyed it but I managed to forget everything so this is a way to refresh that. Anyway I want to be able to generate text given a set of inputs. Basically this will read forum inputs (or maybe Twitter tweets) and then generate a comment based on the learning. Now the simplest way would be to use a Markov Chain Text Generator but I want something a little bit more complex than that as the MKC basically only learns by word order (which word is more likely to appear after word x given the input text). I'm trying to see if there's something I can do to make it a little bit more smarter. For example I want it to do something like this: Learn from a large selection of posts in a message board but don't weight it too much For each post: Learn from the other comments in that post and weigh these inputs higher Generate comment and post See what other users' reaction to your post was. If good weigh it positively so you make more posts that are similar to the one made, and vice versa if negative. It's the weighing and learning from mistakes part that I'm not sure how to implement. I thought about Artificial Neural Networks (mainly because I remember enjoying that chapter) but as far as I can tell that's mainly used to classify things (i.e. given a finite set of choices [x1...xn] which x is this given input) not really generate anything. I'm not even sure if this is possible or if it is what should I go about learning/figuring out. What algorithm is best suited for this? To those worried that I will use this as a bot to spam or provide bad answers to SO, I promise that I will not use this to provide (bad) advice or to spam for profit. I definitely will not post it's nonsensical thoughts on SO. I plan to use it for my own amusement. Thanks!

    Read the article

  • Why use Entity Framework over Linq2SQL ...

    - by Refracted Paladin
    To be clear, I am not asking for a side by side comparision which has already been asked Ad Nauseum here on SO. I am also Not asking if Linq2Sql is dead as I don't care. What I am asking is this.... I am building internal apps only for a non-profit organization. I am the only developer on staff. We ALWAYS use SQL Server as our Database backend. I design and build the Databases as well. I have used L2S successfully a couple of times already. Taking all this into consideration can someone offer me a compelling reason to use EF instead of L2S? I was at Code Camp this weekend and after an hour long demonstration on EF, all of which I could have done in L2S, I asked this same question. The speakers answer was, "L2S is dead..." Very well then! NOT! (see here) I understand EF is what MS WANTS us to use in the future(see here) and that it offers many more customization options. What I can't figure out is if any of that should, or does, matter for me in this environment. One particular issue we have here is that I inherited the Core App which was built on 4 different SQL Data bases. L2S has great difficulty with this but when I asked the aforementioned speaker if EF would help me in this regard he said "No!"

    Read the article

  • Licensing iPhone apps per user in existing system

    - by Alxandr
    I've been asked by my job to write a iPhone app for an existing system for managing worktasks. This system is proprietary and costs money, so in order to login you need to be a customer. Now, I've got two questions about the legality of licensing iPhone apps with this system: My company would like to be able to sell the app for profit, but not as a one-time payment, but as a added subscription-fee to the already existing one. Is it legal for us (according with the terms of distributing an iPhone app on the Apple App Store) to do this? That way we'll just add another field to the users-database saying weather or not iPhone is enabled for them, and distribute the app as a free app on App Store. If the previous question is not legal, we'd like to just create a free app and distribute it as part of the existing system. In other words, no extra fee for using the iPhone app for the users, but still free distribution trough App Store. Due to our company not being american or having an office in the U.S. at all enterprice account is not an option. Please let me know if there is anything wrong with any of the above approaches.

    Read the article

  • A commercial software but open and free for personal/edu. How to license?

    - by Ivan
    I am developing a software to sell for business use but am willing to make it free and open-source for personal and educational use. Actually I can see the flowing requirements I would like the license to set: Personal and educational usage of the program and its source codes is to be free. In case of publishing of derivative works the original work and author (me) must be mentioned (incl. textual link to my website in a not-very-far-hidden place) and the derivative work must have different name. A derivative work can be closed-source. In every case of commercial (when the end-user is a commercial body (as a company (expect of non-profit organizations), an individual entrepreneur or government office)) usage of my work or any of derivative works made by anyone, the end-user, service provider or the derivative author must buy a commercial license from me. I mean no guarantees or responsibilities, whether expressed or implied... (except the case when one explicitly purchases a support service contract from me and the particular contract specifies a responsibility). Is there a known common license for this case? As far as I can see now it can not be OSI-approved as it does not comply to the §6. of OSI definition of open source. But there still can be an a common known reusable license for this case as it looks quite natural, I think.

    Read the article

  • Bulletin board - Database optimisation

    - by andrew
    This question is a follow on from this Question The project and problem The project I am currently working on is a bulletin board for a large non-profit organisation. The bulletin board will be used to allow inter-office communication within the organisation. I am building the application and have been having trouble extracting the results that I need from my database because I don't think it is properly normalized and because of limitations in my knowledge of relational database theory and mysql. I would appreciate input into the design of the board in general and in particular, ways that the database structure can be improved to facilitate efficient queries and help me develop this application and future application faster Business Logic The bulletin board will be used in the following way Posting bulletins and responses to bulletins Employees or 'users' in offices around the country will be able to post messages to the bulletin board.Bulletins must be posted to a location and categorised- i'll call these "bulletins". Users will be able to post any number of replies to any one bulletin and users will be able to reply to their own bulletin - i'll call these 'replies'. Rating bulletins and replies Users will be able to either 'like' or 'dislike' a bulletin or a reply and the total number of likes or dislikes will be shown for each bulletin or reply. Viewing the bulletin board and responses Bulletins can be displayed chronologically. Users can sort bulletins chronologically or chronologically by the latest reply to that bulletin(let me know if you need more explanation) When a particular bulletin is selected, replies to that bulletin will be displayed chronologically @PerformanceDBA - edited 10:34 est 28/12/10I have begun implementing the data model. I assume that the 6th data model is the physical model because it contains the associative tables. I am going to post any questions that I have below. I will put up a database dump once I am done. I will then put up a list of all the queries that I need to run on the database and begin writing them. I hope you had a good Christmas. I'm in Canada and there's snow! Implementation of Physical model

    Read the article

  • WPF or Silverlight Learning Resources for Business Applications

    - by Refracted Paladin
    I am the only developer at a non-profit organization(~200 employees) where we are a M$ shop and 90% of the things I develop are specific to our company and are internal only. I am given a lot of latitude on how I accomplish my goals so using new technologies is in my best interest. So far I have developed all winform & asp.net applications. I would now like to focus on XAML driven development(WPF & Silverlight) and would like your help. I am subscribed to numerous Silverlight blogs and I have went through a few good tutorials however, I would really appreciate a GOOD SOLID book in my hands going forward. I prefer learning books versus reference books and I REALLY would like one from a Business standpoint as well. Shameless, self-promoting is welcomed if you happen to be an author or reviewer for one that meets my criteria. I would, however, prefer that recomendations were based on first-hand experience(no, 'my friend as this awesome book he told me about', please). Though, I don't mind un-released books if say they are an updated version of an existing. disclaimer -- I know there are an insane amount of Book posts here(SO) but none I believe for my specific need. If there is and I missed it I apologize.

    Read the article

  • Specific Shopping Cart Recommendations

    - by Dean J
    I'm trying to suggest a solution for a friend who owns an existing web shop. The current solution isn't cutting it. The new solution needs to have a few things that look like they're enterprise-only if I go with Magento, and $12k a year for a store with maybe $20k in stock just doesn't work. The site should have items, which have one or more categories. Each category may have a parent category. Items have MSRP, and a discount rate by supplier, brand, and sometimes additional discount by product. When a user buys something, it should automatically setup a shipping label with UPS or USPS, depending on user's choice, and build two invoices; one to go in the box, one to go into records. This is crucial; it's low profit per item, so it needs to minimize labor here. Need to be able to have sales (limited by time), discount codes/coupon codes. Ideally would have private sales and/or members-only rates as well. It needs a payment gateway; Paypal/GCheckout-only isn't going to fly. Must be able to accept Visa/MC. Suggestions? I'm debating just building this myself in Java or PHP, but wanted to point my friend to a reasonable-cost solution that already exists if I can. This all seems pretty straightforward to code, save working with the UPS/USPS/Visa/MC APIs, and doing CSS for it.

    Read the article

  • WPF/Silverlight Resources for Businesses

    - by Refracted Paladin
    I am the only developer at a non-profit organization(~200 employees) where we are a M$ shop and 90% of the things I develop are specific to our company and are internal only. I am given a lot of latitude on how I accomplish my goals so using new technologies is in my best interest. So far I have developed all winform & asp.net applications. I would now like to focus on XAML driven development(WPF & Silverlight) and would like your help. I am subscribed to numerous Silverlight blogs and I have went through a few good tutorials however, I would really appreciate a GOOD SOLID book in my hands going forward. I prefer learning books versus reference books and I REALLY would like one from a Business standpoint as well. Shameless, self-promoting is welcomed if you happen to be an author or reviewer for one that meets my criteria. I would, however, prefer that recomendations were based on first-hand experience(no, 'my friend as this awesome book he told me about', please). Though, I don't mind un-released books if say they are an updated version of an existing. If more info is needed to provide accurate recomendations please let me know. Thanks disclaimer -- I know there are an insane amount of Book posts here(SO) but none I believe for my specific need. If there is and I missed it I apologize.

    Read the article

  • Why use Entity Framework over Linq2SQL if...

    - by Refracted Paladin
    To be clear, I am not asking for a side by side comparision which has already been asked Ad Nauseum here on SO. I am also Not asking if Linq2Sql is dead as I don't care. What I am asking is this.... I am building internal apps only for a non-profit organization. I am the only developer on staff. We ALWAYS use SQL Server as our Database backend. I design and build the Databases as well. I have used L2S successfully a couple of times already. Taking all this into consideration can someone offer me a compelling reason that I should use EF instead of L2S? I was at Code Camp this weekend and after an hour long demonstration on EF, all of which I could have done in L2S, I asked this same question. The speakers answer was, "L2S is dead..." Very well then! NOT! (see here) I understand EF is what MS WANTS us to use in the future(see here) and that it offers many more customization options. What I can't figure out is if any of that should, or does, matter for me in this environment. One particular issue we have here is that I inherited the Core App which was built on 4 different SQL Data bases. L2S has great difficulty with this but when I asked the aforementioned speaker if EF would help me in this regard he said "No!"

    Read the article

  • Book Recomendations: WPF/Silverlight for Business(smallish, internal) Environment

    - by Refracted Paladin
    Yes, I know there are an insane amount of Book posts here(SO) but none I believe for my specific need. If there is and I missed it I apologize. I am the only developer at a non-profit organization(~200 employees) where we are a M$ shop and 90% of the things I develop are specific to our company and are internal only. I am given a lot of latitude on how I accomplish my goals so using new technologies is in my best interest. So far I have developed all winform & asp.net applications but I am an expert by NO MEANS. I would now like to focus on XAML driven development(WPF & Silverlight) but I have no idea where to start. I am subscribed to numerous Silverlight blogs and I have went through a few good tutorials however, I would really appreciate a GOOD SOLID book in my hands going forward. I prefer learning books versus reference books and I REALLY would like one from a Business standpoint as well. Shameless, self-promoting is welcomed if you happen to be an author or reviewer for one that meets my criteria. I would, however, prefer that recomendations were based on first-hand experience(no, 'my friend as this awesome book he told me about', please). If more info is needed to provide accurate recomendations please let me know. Thanks

    Read the article

  • “Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

    - by jesschadwick
    Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants.  Some may even mention the word “iterations”.  But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation.  After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile?  Of course it does!  But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.)  It’s essentially a list of values.  More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values:  “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor.  This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan.  This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning).  I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word.  It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad.  It’s a list of priorities.  In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important.  This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans.  Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible.  This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile.  There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!”  In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised.  Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project.  This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!”  Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow.  If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback.  If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright.  If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system!  Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective.  Learn from your mistakes.  Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it.  Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!”  After all, Agile is a Zen journey.  It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

    Read the article

  • Form, function and complexity in rule processing

    - by Charles Young
    Tim Bass posted on ‘Orwellian Event Processing’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments. For me, the ‘red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “...rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (‘IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function.   It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions.   Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ‘robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken.   In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken. There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a rule?’ We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English. Likewise, the term ‘rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically. The best way to envisage the term is as a ‘centre of gravity’ within a wider domain. That domain contains many other ‘centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more. Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres. The term 'rule processing' is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc. There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products. Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences. It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently.  As a centre of gravity, ‘rule processing’ is no island. It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous.   Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing.   On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms.   Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP.   On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ‘Power of Events’ by David Luckham).   Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics. On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic.   Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks. For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets. What about simplicity of form?   Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (‘If...Then’, ‘When...Do’, etc.)   However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function.   It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity.   There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion.   Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity. Does rule processing offer a ‘one size fits all’. No, of course not.   No serious commentator suggests it does.   Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult?   Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed.   The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form.  It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ‘problem space’ (‘search space’) which is something quite different.   Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem. This is basic computer science and common practice. Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good.   Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.

    Read the article

  • Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Real World Perspectives from Oracle WebCenter Customers

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} If you frequent the Oracle WebCenter blog you’ve probably read a lot about the customer experience revolution over the last few months.  An important aspect of the customer experience revolution is the increasing role that peers play in influencing how others perceive a product, brand or solution, simply by sharing their own, real-world experiences.  Think about it, who do you trust more -- marketers and sales people pitching polished messages or peers with similar roles and similar challenges to the ones you face in your business every day? With this spirit in mind, this polished marketer personally invites you to hear directly from Oracle WebCenter customers about their real-life experiences during our customer panel sessions at Oracle OpenWorld next week.  If you’re currently using WebCenter, thinking about it, or just want to find out more about best practices in social business, next-generation portals, enterprise content management or web experience management, be sure to attend these sessions: CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West - 3000Priscilla Hancock - Vice President/CIO, University of Louisville Kellie Christensen - Director of Information Technology, Banner EngineeringWhat does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change your organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. This session will take a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel DiscussionWednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West - 3000Roberts Wayne - Director, IT, Canadian Partnership Against CancerMike Beattie - VP Application Development, Aramark Uniform ServicesJohn Chen - Utilities Services Manager 6, Los Angeles Department of Water & PowerJörg Modlmayr - Head of Product Managment, Siemens AGSocial and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM NirvanaThursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001Stephen Madsen - Senior Management Consultant, Alberta Agriculture and Rural DevelopmentHimanshu Parikh - Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Middleware, Ross Stores, Inc.Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we're not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing SuccessThursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001Blane Nelson - Chief Architect, Ancestry.comMike Remedios - CIO, ArbonneCaitlin Scanlon - Product Manager, Monster WorldwideEvery year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from customers on how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. Your Handy Guide to WebCenter at Oracle OpenWorld Want a quick and easy guide to all the keynotes, demos, hands-on labs and WebCenter sessions you definitely don't want to miss at Oracle OpenWorld? Download this handy guide, Focus on WebCenter. More helpful links: * Oracle OpenWorld* Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld* Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook * Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter* Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn* Oracle OpenWorld Blog

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32  | Next Page >