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  • Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

    - by Roger Hart
    In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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  • Can't seem to get C TCP Server-Client Communications Right

    - by Zeesponge
    Ok i need some serious help here. I have to make a TCP Server Client. When the Client connects to server using a three stage handshake. AFterwards... while the Client is running in the terminal, the user enters linux shell commands like xinput list, ls -1, ect... something that uses standard output. The server accepts the commands and uses system() (in a fork() in an infinite loop) to run the commands and the standard output is redirected to the client, where the client prints out each line. Afterward the server sends a completion signal of "\377\n". In which the client goes back to the command prompt asking for a new command and closes its connection and exit()'s when inputting "quit". I know that you have to dup2() both the STDOUT_FILENO and STDERR_FILENO to the clients file descriptor {dup2(client_FD, STDOUT_FILENO). Everything works accept when it comes for the client to retrieve system()'s stdout and printing it out... all i get is a blank line with a blinking cursor (client waiting on stdin). I tried all kinds of different routes with no avail... If anyone can help out i would greatly appreciate it TCP SERVER CODE include #include <sys/socket.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <netinet/in.h> #include <signal.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <errno.h> //Prototype void handle_client(int connect_fd); int main() { int server_sockfd, client_sockfd; socklen_t server_len, client_len; struct sockaddr_in server_address; struct sockaddr_in client_address; server_sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); server_address.sin_family = AF_INET; server_address.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY); server_address.sin_port = htons(9734); server_len = sizeof(server_address); bind(server_sockfd, (struct sockaddr *)&server_address, server_len); /* Create a connection queue, ignore child exit details and wait for clients. */ listen(server_sockfd, 10); signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN); while(1) { printf("server waiting\n"); client_len = sizeof(client_address); client_sockfd = accept(server_sockfd, (struct sockaddr *)&client_address, &client_len); if(fork() == 0) handle_client(client_sockfd); else close(client_sockfd); } } void handle_client(int connect_fd) { const char* remsh = "<remsh>\n"; const char* ready = "<ready>\n"; const char* ok = "<ok>\n"; const char* command = "<command>\n"; const char* complete = "<\377\n"; const char* shared_secret = "<shapoopi>\n"; static char server_msg[201]; static char client_msg[201]; static char commands[201]; int sys_return; //memset client_msg, server_msg, commands memset(&client_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); memset(&server_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); memset(&commands, 0, sizeof(commands)); //read remsh from client read(connect_fd, &client_msg, 200); //check remsh validity from client if(strcmp(client_msg, remsh) != 0) { errno++; perror("Error Establishing Handshake"); close(connect_fd); exit(1); } //memset client_msg memset(&client_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); //write remsh to client write(connect_fd, remsh, strlen(remsh)); //read shared_secret from client read(connect_fd, &client_msg, 200); //check shared_secret validity from client if(strcmp(client_msg, shared_secret) != 0) { errno++; perror("Invalid Security Passphrase"); write(connect_fd, "no", 2); close(connect_fd); exit(1); } //memset client_msg memset(&client_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); //write ok to client write(connect_fd, ok, strlen(ok)); // dup2 STDOUT_FILENO <= client fd, STDERR_FILENO <= client fd dup2(connect_fd, STDOUT_FILENO); dup2(connect_fd, STDERR_FILENO); //begin while... while read (client_msg) from server and >0 while(read(connect_fd, &client_msg, 200) > 0) { //check command validity from client if(strcmp(client_msg, command) != 0) { errno++; perror("Error, unable to retrieve data"); close(connect_fd); exit(1); } //memset client_msg memset(&client_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); //write ready to client write(connect_fd, ready, strlen(ready)); //read commands from client read(connect_fd, &commands, 200); //run commands using system( ) sys_return = system(commands); //check success of system( ) if(sys_return < 0) { perror("Invalid Commands"); errno++; } //memset commands memset(commands, 0, sizeof(commands)); //write complete to client write(connect_fd, complete, sizeof(complete)); } } TCP CLIENT CODE #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/socket.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <netinet/in.h> #include <arpa/inet.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <errno.h> #include "readline.c" int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int sockfd; int len; struct sockaddr_in address; int result; const char* remsh = "<remsh>\n"; const char* ready = "<ready>\n"; const char* ok = "<ok>\n"; const char* command = "<command>\n"; const char* complete = "<\377\n"; const char* shared_secret = "<shapoopi>\n"; static char server_msg[201]; static char client_msg[201]; memset(&client_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); memset(&server_msg, 0, sizeof(server_msg)); /* Create a socket for the client. */ sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); /* Name the socket, as agreed with the server. */ memset(&address, 0, sizeof(address)); address.sin_family = AF_INET; address.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(argv[1]); address.sin_port = htons(9734); len = sizeof(address); /* Now connect our socket to the server's socket. */ result = connect(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *)&address, len); if(result == -1) { perror("ACCESS DENIED"); exit(1); } //write remsh to server write(sockfd, remsh, strlen(remsh)); //read remsh from server read(sockfd, &server_msg, 200); //check remsh validity from server if(strcmp(server_msg, remsh) != 0) { errno++; perror("Error Establishing Initial Handshake"); close(sockfd); exit(1); } //memset server_msg memset(&server_msg, 0, sizeof(server_msg)); //write shared secret text to server write(sockfd, shared_secret, strlen(shared_secret)); //read ok from server read(sockfd, &server_msg, 200); //check ok velidity from server if(strcmp(server_msg, ok) != 0 ) { errno++; perror("Incorrect security phrase"); close(sockfd); exit(1); } //? dup2 STDIN_FILENO = server socket fd? //dup2(sockfd, STDIN_FILENO); //begin while(1)/////////////////////////////////////// while(1){ //memset both msg arrays memset(&client_msg, 0, sizeof(client_msg)); memset(&server_msg, 0, sizeof(server_msg)); //print Enter Command, scan input, fflush to stdout printf("<<Enter Command>> "); scanf("%s", client_msg); fflush(stdout); //check quit input, if true close and exit successfully if(strcmp(client_msg, "quit") == 0) { printf("Exiting\n"); close(sockfd); exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } //write command to server write(sockfd, command, strlen(command)); //read ready from server read(sockfd, &server_msg, 200); //check ready validity from server if(strcmp(server_msg, ready) != 0) { errno++; perror("Failed Server Communications"); close(sockfd); exit(1); } //memset server_msg memset(&server_msg, 0, sizeof(server_msg)); //begin looping and retrieving from stdin, //break loop at EOF or complete while((read(sockfd, server_msg, 200) != 0) && (strcmp(server_msg, complete) != 0)) { //while((fgets(server_msg, 4096, stdin) != EOF) || (strcmp(server_msg, complete) == 0)) { printf("%s", server_msg); memset(&server_msg, 0, sizeof(server_msg)); } } }

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  • Can't connect to Office Communication Server through Unified Communications API

    - by Robin Clowers
    I am trying to connect to Office Communication Server using the Unified Communications Managed API. I have tried my user and a fresh user enabled for OCS. Both account can successfully log into the Office Communicator client, but fail using the API. When creating the network credential, if I pass in the username in the form domain\username, I get this error: SupportedAuthenticationProtocols=Ntlm, Kerberos Realm=SIP Communications Service FailureReason=InvalidCredentials ErrorCode=-2146893044 Microsoft.Rtc.Signaling.AuthenticationException: The log on was denied. Check that the proper credentials are being used and the account is active. ---> Microsoft.Rtc.Internal.Sip.AuthException: NegotiateSecurityAssociation failed, error: - 2146893044 If I leave off the domain in the username I this error: ResponseCode=404 ResponseText=Not Found DiagnosticInformation=ErrorCode=4005,Source=OCS.mydomain.com,Reason=Destination URI either not enabled for SIP or does not exist

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  • UCS Documentation: Home1 or Home2? You Decide.

    - by joesciallo
    How you go about finding information can be a very personal affair. We each have our own style of locating content, we each have our particular bent. But when it comes to getting started finding technical information, sometimes the simplest ways are best, especially if you are relatively new to a product or technology, and you just need to get going quickly with that Installation Guide or those Release Notes. With that in mind, I recently created an alternative home page for the Unified Communications Suite documentation. You can now have your Home2, in addition to the original, more wiki-fied Home1. I would recommend Home2 for those who are used to, and are more comfortable with, the spreadsheet-like view of manuals: here you'll find those familiar titles and the option to either view on the wiki or download the equivalent PDF file. Once you get familiar with what guides are available for the UCS component products, then move on to the Home1 layout, and start using some of the more advanced techniques for finding content in a wiki. Either way, you should be able to locate the "thing" you are looking for.

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  • Cisco Unifies Communications Manager 7.0 - Installing Extension Mobility

    - by Lance
    I've setup extension mobility to the best of my ability, however, it its perplexing me... From the materials I've been reading I have established I need to have the following URL in place: http://IP/emapp/EmAppServlet?device=#DEVICENAME# If I try and browse to this in a web browser I can a blankHTML page. When my registered phone (CIPC) presses Services - Extension Mobility, it just sits there / delivers a blank page. I figure this isn't coincidence... Any ideas?

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  • Low Latency Serial Communications In .Net

    - by bvillersjr
    I have been researching various third party libraries and approaches to low latency serial communications in .Net. I've read enough that I have now come full circle and know as little as I did when I started due to the variety of conflicting opinions. For example, the functionality in the Framework was ruled out due to some convincing articles stating: "that the Microsoft provided solution has not been stable across framework versions and is lacking in functionality." I have found articles bashing many of the older COM based libraries. I have found articles bashing the idea of a low latency .Net app as a whole due to garbage collection. I have also read articles demonstrating how P/Invoking Windows API functionality for the purpose of low latency communication is unacceptable. THIS RULES OUT JUST ABOUT ANY APPROACH I CAN THINK OF! I would really appreciate some words from those with been there / done that experience. Ideally, I could locate a solid library / partner and not have to build the communications library myself. I have the following simple objectives: Sustained low latency serial communication in C# / VB.Net 32/64 bit Well documented (if the solution is 3rd party) Relatively unimpacted (communication and latency wise) by garbage collection . Flexible (I have no idea what I will have to interface with in the future!) The only requirement that I have for certain is that I need to be able to interface with many different industrial devices such as RS485 based linear actuators, serial / microcontroller based gauges, and ModBus (also RS485) devices. Any comments, ideas, thoughts or links to articles that may iron out my confusion are much appreciated!

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  • Must-see sessions at TCUK11

    - by Roger Hart
    Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

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  • Free SQL Server training? Now you’re talking.

    - by Fatherjack
    SQL Server user groups are everywhere, literally all over the globe there are SQL Server professionals meeting on a regular basis, sharing ideas, solving problems, learning about how to do new stuff and new ways to do old stuff and it’s all for free. I don’t have detailed figures but of all the SQL Server professionals there are only a small number of them attend these user groups. Those people are the people that are taking the time and making then effort to make themselves better at their chosen trade, more employable and having a good time. For free. I don’t know why but there are many people that don’t seem to want to be the best they can be. Some of you enlightened people that do already attend could be doing more though. Have you ever spoken at  your group? Not just in the break while you have a mouthful of pizza and a drink in your hand but had the attention of the whole group listen to you speak. It doesn’t need to be a full hour, it doesn’t need to be some obscure deeply technical demonstration of SQL Server internals, just a few minutes on something that you do that might help other people with their daily work. A neat process that helps you get from Problem A to Solution B. There is no need to get concerned that becoming a speaker means that you suddenly have to know more than anyone else in the room. This is you talking about something that you experienced. What you did, what you would repeat, what you might do differently next time. No one in the audience can pick you up on a technicality. If someone comes out with a great idea that you hadn’t thought of, say “That’s a great idea, I didn’t think of that while we had the problem on our hands. I’ll try to remember that for next time”. If someone is looking to show you up for picking the wrong decision (and this, in my experience, is very uncommon indeed) then you simply give a reply like “Well, at the time we chose that option. Perhaps another time then we would tackle things differently but we were happy with how our solution worked”. It’s sharing things like this that makes user groups have a real value, talking about how you coped with or averted a disaster, a handy little section of code or using a tool in a particular way that you take for granted that might, just might, be something that other people haven’t thought of that solves a problem or saves some time for them. At the next meeting you might get the same benefit from a different person and so it goes on. As individuals benefits so the community benefits. For free. Things I encourage you to do; If you are a chapter or user group leader; encourage someone from your group who has never spoken before to start speaking. If you are a chapter or user group attendee that hasn’t spoken before; speak for at least 5 minutes on something related to SQL Server at any group meeting. If you don’t currently attend a user group; please go along to you nearest one when they are meeting next and invest in yourself and your future. UK user group details are here: http://sqlsouthwest.co.uk/national_ug.htm , PASS chapters outside the UK are found via http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters/LocalChapters.aspx. If you are unsure of how you might achieve any of these things then get in touch with me*, I’ll give you specific advice on getting started on any of the above points and help you prove to yourself what you are capable of. SQL Community – be part of it and make it better. Let me know how you get on in the comments.

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  • Tron: Legacy, 3D goggles, and embedded UA

    - by Roger Hart
    The 3D edition of Tron: Legacy opens with embedded user assistance. The film starts with an iconic white-on-black command-prompt message exhorting viewers to keep their 3D glasses on throughout. I can't quote it verbatim, and at the time of writing nor could anybody findable with 5 minutes of googling. But it was something like: "Although parts of the movie are 2D, it was shot in 3D, and glasses should be worn at all times. This is how it was intended to be viewed" Yeah - "intended". That part is verbatim. Wow. Now, I appreciate that even out of the small sub-set of readers who care a rat's ass for critical theory, few will be quite so gung-ho for the whole "death of the author" shtick as I tend to be. And yes, this is ergonomic rather than interpretive, but really - telling an audience how you expect them to watch a movie? That's up there with Big Steve's "you're holding it wrong" Even if it solves the problem, it's pretty arrogant. If anything, it's worse than RTFM. And if enough people are doing it wrong that you have to include the announcement, then maybe - just maybe - you've got a UX and/or design problem. Plus, current 3D glasses are like sitting in a darkened room, cosplaying the lovechild of Spider Jerusalem and Jarvis Cocker. Ok, so that observation was weirder than it was helpful; but seriously, nobody wants to wear the glasses if they don't have to. They ruin the visual experience of the non-3D sections, and personally, I find them pretty disruptive to the suspension of disbelief. This is an old, old, problem, and I'm carping on about it because Tron is enjoyable mass-market slush. It's easier for me to say "no, I can't just put some text on it. It's fundamentally broken, redesign it." in the middle of a small-ish, agile, software project than it would be for some beleaguered production assistant at the end of editing a $200 million movie. But lots of folks in software don't even get to do that. Way more people are going to see Tron, and be annoyed by this, than will ever read a technical communication blog. So hopefully, after two hours of being mildly annoyed, wanting to turn the brightness up, and slowly getting a headache, they'll realise something very, very important: you just can't document your way out of a shoddy UI.

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  • Google, typography, and cognitive fluency for persuasion

    - by Roger Hart
    Cognitive fluency is - roughly - how easy it is to think about something. Mere Exposure (or familiarity) effects are basically about reacting more favourably to things you see a lot. Which is part of why marketers in generic spaces like insipid mass-market lager will spend quite so much money on getting their logo daubed about the place; or that guy at the bus stop starts to look like a dating prospect after a month or two. Recent thinking suggests that exposure effects likely spin off cognitive fluency. We react favourably to things that are easier to think about. I had to give tech support to an older relative recently, and suggested they Google the problem. They were confused. They could not, apparently, Google the problem, because part of it was that their Google toolbar had mysteriously vanished. Once I'd finished trying not to laugh, I started thinking about typography. This is going somewhere, I promise. Google is a ubiquitous brand. Heck, it's a verb, and their recent, jaw-droppingly well constructed Paris advert is more or less about that ubiquity. It trades on Google's integration into any information-seeking behaviour. But, as my tech support encounter suggests, people settle into comfortable patterns of thinking about things. They build schemas, and altering them can take work. Maybe the ubiquity even works to cement that. Alongside their online effort, Google is running billboard campaigns to advertise Chrome, a free product in a crowded space. They are running these ads in some kind of kooky Calibri / Comic Sans hybrid. Now, at first it seems odd that one of the world's more ubiquitous brands needs to run a big print campaign in public places - surely they have all the fluency they need? Well, not so much. Chrome, after all, is not the same as their core product, so there's some basic awareness work to do, and maybe a whole new batch of exposure effect to try and grab. But why the typeface? It's heavily foregrounded, and the ads are extremely textual. Plus, don't we all know that jovial, off-beat fonts look unprofessional, or something? There's a whole bunch of people who want (often rightly) to ban Comic Sans I wonder, though. Are Google trying to subtly disrupt cognitive fluency? There's an interesting paper (pdf) about - among other things - the effects of typography on they way people answer survey questions. Participants given the slightly harder to read question gave more abstract answers. The paper references other work suggesting that generally speaking, less-fluent question framing elicits more considered answers. The Chrome ad typeface is less fluent for print. Reactions may therefore be more considered, abstract, and disruptive. Is that, in fact, what Google need? They have brand ubiquity, but they want here to change accustomed behaviour, to get people to think about changing their browser. Is this actually a very elegant piece of persuasive information design? If you think about their "what is a browser?" vox pop research video, there's certainly a perceptual barrier they're going to have to tackle somehow.

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  • Pub banter - content strategy at the ballot box?

    - by Roger Hart
    Last night, I was challenged to explain (and defend) content strategy. Three sheets to the wind after a pub quiz, this is no simple task, but I hope I acquitted myself passably. I say "hope" because there was a really interesting question I couldn't answer to my own satisfaction. I wonder if any of you folks out there in the ethereal internet hive-mind can help me out? A friend - a rather concrete thinker who mathematically models complex biological systems for a living - pointed out that my examples were largely routed in business-to-business web sales and support. He challenged me with: Say you've got a political website, so your goal is to have somebody read it and vote for you - how do you measure the effectiveness of that content? Well, you would. umm. Oh dear. I guess what we're talking about here, to yank it back to my present comfort zone, is a sales process where your point of conversion is off the site. The political example is perhaps a little below the belt, since what you can and can't do, and what data you can and can't collect is so restricted. You can't throw up a "How did you hear about this election?" questionnaire in the polling booth. Exit polls don't pull in your browsing history and site session information. Not everyone fatuously tweets and geo-tags each moment of their lives. Oh, and folks lie. The business example might be easier to attack. You could have, say, a site for a farm shop that only did over the counter sales. Either way, it's tricky. I fell back on some of the work I've done usability testing and benchmarking documentation, and suggested similar, quick and dirty, small sample qualitative UX trials. I'm not wholly sure that was right. Any thoughts? How might we measure and curate for this kind of discontinuous conversion?

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  • Who writes the words? A rant with graphs.

    - by Roger Hart
    If you read my rant, you'll know that I'm getting a bit of a bee in my bonnet about user interface text. But rather than just yelling about the way the world should be (short version: no UI text would suck), it seemed prudent to actually gather some data. Rachel Potts has made an excellent first foray, by conducting a series of interviews across organizations about how they write user interface text. You can read Rachel's write up here. She presents the facts as she found them, and doesn't editorialise. The result is insightful, but impartial isn't really my style. So here's a rant with graphs. My method, and how it sucked I sent out a short survey. Survey design is one of my hobby-horses, and since some smartarse in the comments will mention it if I don't, I'll step up and confess: I did not design this one well. It was potentially ambiguous, implicitly excluded people, and since I only really advertised it on Twitter and a couple of mailing lists the sample will be chock full of biases. Regardless, these were the questions: What do you do? Select the option that best describes your role What kind of software does your organization make? (optional) In your organization, who writes the text on your software user interfaces? (for example: button names, static text, tooltips, and so on) Tick all that apply. In your organization who is responsible for user interface text? Who "owns" it? The most glaring issue (apart from question 3 being a bit broken) was that I didn't make it clear that I was asking about applications. Desktop, mobile, or web, I wouldn't have minded. In fact, it might have been interesting to categorize and compare. But a few respondents commented on the seeming lack of relevance, since they didn't really make software. There were some other issues too. It wasn't the best survey. So, you know, pinch of salt time with what follows. Despite this, there were 100 or so respondents. This post covers the overview, and you can look at the raw data in this spreadsheet What did people do? Boring graph number one: I wasn't expecting that. Given I pimped the survey on twitter and a couple of Tech Comms discussion lists, I was more banking on and even Content Strategy/Tech Comms split. What the "Others" specified: Three people chipped in with Technical Writer. Author, apparently, doesn't cut it. There's a "nobody reads the instructions" joke in there somewhere, I'm sure. There were a couple of hybrid roles, including Tech Comms and Testing, which sounds gruelling and thankless. There was also, an Intranet Manager, a Creative Director, a Consultant, a CTO, an Information Architect, and a Translator. That's a pretty healthy slice through the industry. Who wrote UI text? Boring graph number two: Annoyingly, I made this a "tick all that apply" question, so I can't make crude and inflammatory generalizations about percentages. This is more about who gets involved in user interface wording. So don't panic about the number of developers writing UI text. First off, it just means they're involved. Second, they might be good at it. What? It could happen. Ours are involved - they write a placeholder and flag it to me for changes. Sometimes I don't make any. It's also not surprising that there's so much UX in the mix. Some of that will be people taking care, and crafting an understandable interface. Some of it will be whatever text goes on the wireframe making it into production. I'm going to assume that's what happened at eBay, when their iPhone app purportedly shipped with the placeholder text "Some crappy content goes here". Ahem. Listing all 17 "other" responses would make this post lengthy indeed, but you can read them in the raw data spreadsheet. The award for the approach that sounds the most like a good idea yet carries the highest risk of ending badly goes to whoever offered up "External agencies using focus groups". If you're reading this, and that actually works, leave a comment. I'm fascinated. Who owned UI text Stop. Bar chart time: Wow. Let's cut to the chase, and by "chase", I mean those inflammatory generalizations I was talking about: In around 60% of cases the person responsible for user interface text probably lacks the relevant expertise. Even in the categories I count as being likely to have relevant skills (Marketing Copywriters, Content Strategists, Technical Authors, and User Experience Designers) there's a case for each role being unsuited, as you'll see in Rachel's blog post So it's not as simple as my headline. Does that mean that you personally, Mr Developer reading this, write bad button names? Of course not. I know nothing about you. It rather implies that as a category, the majority of people looking after UI text have neither communication nor user experience as their primary skill set, and as such will probably only be good at this by happy accident. I don't have a way of measuring those frequency of those accidents. What the Others specified: I don't know who owns it. I assume the project manager is responsible. "copywriters" when they wish to annoy me. the client's web maintenance person, often PR or MarComm That last one chills me to the bone. Still, at least nobody said "the work experience kid". You can see the rest in the spreadsheet. My overwhelming impression here is of user interface text as an unloved afterthought. There were fewer "nobody" responses than I expected, and a much broader split. But the relative predominance of developers owning and writing UI text suggests to me that organizations don't see it as something worth dedicating attention to. If true, that's bothersome. Because the words on the screen, particularly the names of things, are fundamental to the ability to understand an use software. It's also fascinating that Technical Authors and Content Strategists are neck and neck. For such a nascent discipline, Content Strategy appears to have made a mark on software development. Or my sample is skewed. But it feels like a bit of validation for my rant: Content Strategy is eating Tech Comms' lunch. That's not a bad thing. Well, not if the UI text is getting done well. And that's the caveat to this whole post. I couldn't care less who writes UI text, provided they consider the user and don't suck at it. I care that it may be falling by default to people poorly disposed to doing it right. And I care about that because so much user interface text sucks. The most interesting question Was one I forgot to ask. It's this: Does your organization have technical authors/writers? Like a lot of survey data, that doesn't tell you much on its own. But once we get a bit dimensional, it become more interesting. So taken with the other questions, this would have let me find out what I really want to know: What proportion of organizations have Tech Comms professionals but don't use them for UI text? Who writes UI text in their place? Why this happens? It's possible (feasible is another matter) that hundreds of companies have tech authors who don't work on user interfaces because they've empirically discovered that someone else, say the Marketing Copywriter, is better at it. And once we've all finished laughing, I'll point out that I've met plenty of tech authors who just aren't used to thinking about users at the point of need in the way UI text and embedded user assistance require. If you've got what I regard, perhaps unfairly, as the bad kind of tech author - the old-school kind with the thousand-page pdf and the grammar obsession - if you've got one of those then you probably are better off getting the UX folk or the copywriters to do your UI text. At the very least, they'll derive terminology from user research.

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  • The spork/platypus average: shameless self promotion

    - by Roger Hart
    This is the video of presentation I gave at UA Europe and TCUK this year. The actual sub-title was "Content strategy at Red Gate Software", but this heading feels more honest. For anybody who missed it, or is just vaguely interested, here's a link to me talking about de-suckifying the web. You can find the slideshare deck here, too* Watching it back is more than a little embarrassing, and makes me really, really want to do a follow up, so I can do three things: explain the rest of the big web project, now we've done it give some data on the outcome of the content review make a grovelling apology to our marketing guys, who I've been unfairly mean to in a childish effort to look cool There are a whole bunch of other TCUK presentations online, too. You can find them all here: http://tiny.cc/tcuk10_videos I'd particularly recommend Chris Atherton's: "Everything you always wanted to know about psychology and technical communication" - it's full of cool stuff. You should probably also watch David Black's opening keynote, which managed to make my hour of precocious grandstanding look measured, meek, and helpful. He actually makes some interesting points, but you'd basically have to ship Richard Dawkins off to Utah, if you wanted to go further out of your way to aggravate your audience. It does give an engaging account of running a large tech comms project, and raise some questions about how we propose to understand a world where increasing amounts of our stuff gets done by increasingly many increasingly complicated tissues of APIs. Well, sort of. That's what all the notes I made were about, anyway.   *Slideshare ate my fonts. Just so we're clear on this: I'd never use badly-kerned Arial in a presentation. Don't worry.

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  • Hibernate JDBCConnectionException: Communications link failure and java.io.EOFException: Can not read response from server

    - by Marc
    I get a quite well-known using MySql jdbc driver : JDBCConnectionException: Communications link failure, java.io.EOFException: Can not read response from server. This is caused by the wait_timeout parameter in my.cnf. So I decided to use c3p0 pool connection along with Hibernate. Here is what I added to hibernate.cfg.xml : <property name="hibernate.connection.provider_class">org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider</property> <property name="c3p0.min_size">10</property> <property name="c3p0.max_size">100</property> <property name="c3p0.timeout">1000</property> <property name="c3p0.preferredTestQuery">SELECT 1</property> <property name="c3p0.acquire_increment">1</property> <property name="c3p0.idle_test_period">2</property> <property name="c3p0.max_statements">50</property> idle_test_period is volontarily low for test purposes. Looking at the mysql logs I can see the "SELECT 1" request which is regularly sent to the mysql server so it works. Unfortunately I still get this EOF exception within my app if I wait longer than 'wait_timout' seconds (set to 10 for test purposes). I'm using Hibernate 4.1.1 and mysql-jdbc-connector 5.1.18. So what am I doing wrong? Thanks, Marc.

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  • Java interface to Windows communications? (OLE, OPC, DDE)

    - by Jared
    I need to integrate an off-the-shelf Windows application with a Java application. At a few key points, I need the Windows application to send an "event" and some data to the Java application. The Windows application anticipated this need, and can be configured to "Poke a DDE Item", "Set an OLE Auto-Property" or "Write an OPC Item". I'm already using JACOB to call COM methods and set COM properties on a COM object. However, I'm guessing that's pretty unrelated to these "event" notification capabilities. Anyone have any experience calling FROM a Windows application to a "DDE Item", "OLE Auto-Property" or "OPC Item" that's actually in a JVM? Any pointers, advice, etc, would be appreciated.

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  • Advice on logic circuits and serial communications

    - by Spencer Ruport
    As far as I understand the serial port so far, transferring data is done over pin 3. As shown here: There are two things that make me uncomfortable about this. The first is that it seems to imply that the two connected devices agree on a signal speed and the second is that even if they are configured to run at the same speed you run into possible synchronization issues... right? Such things can be handled I suppose but it seems like there must be a simpler method. What seems like a better approach to me would be to have one of the serial port pins send a pulse that indicates that the next bit is ready to be stored. So if we're hooking these pins up to a shift register we basically have: (some pulse pin)-clk, tx-d Is this a common practice? Is there some reason not to do this? EDIT Mike shouldn't have deleted his answer. This I2C (2 pin serial) approach seems fairly close to what I did. The serial port doesn't have a clock you're right nobugz but that's basically what I've done. See here: private void SendBytes(byte[] data) { int baudRate = 0; int byteToSend = 0; int bitToSend = 0; byte bitmask = 0; byte[] trigger = new byte[1]; trigger[0] = 0; SerialPort p; try { p = new SerialPort(cmbPorts.Text); } catch { return; } if (!int.TryParse(txtBaudRate.Text, out baudRate)) return; if (baudRate < 100) return; p.BaudRate = baudRate; for (int index = 0; index < data.Length * 8; index++) { byteToSend = (int)(index / 8); bitToSend = index - (byteToSend * 8); bitmask = (byte)System.Math.Pow(2, bitToSend); p.Open(); p.Parity = Parity.Space; p.RtsEnable = (byte)(data[byteToSend] & bitmask) > 0; s = p.BaseStream; s.WriteByte(trigger[0]); p.Close(); } } Before anyone tells me how ugly this is or how I'm destroying my transfer speeds my quick answer is I don't care about that. My point is this seems much much simpler than the method you described in your answer nobugz. And it wouldn't be as ugly if the .Net SerialPort class gave me more control over the pin signals. Are there other serial port APIs that do?

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  • Recommendation for serial communications in Access 2007

    - by bglenn
    I need to communicate with a bar code scanner connected over a serial port in Microsoft Access. In older versions of Access I was able to use a wrapper around MSCOMM32.ocx that no longer seems to work. I can't use wedge communication because I need to use ACK/NACK which is only supported through the RS232 interface and I need to send messages to the scanner, which is also only supported through the RS232 interface. Are there any controls in widespread use that support serial communication in Access 2007? EDIT: In case anyone comes across this, the newest version of MSCOMM32.ocx (I believe dated 3/09) still works fine as of this writing. It is older versions of MSCOMM32.ocx that do not work.

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  • MVVM- View Model-View Model Communications

    - by user275561
    How do I go about having two view models communicate with one another using MVVM Light. I know how to use the messenger class and register etc.. Here is my Scenario A Settings View ---> a Settings View Model . . . A MainPage View ---> A MainPage ViewModel If something changes in the Settings View it will Message back to the Settings View Model. So then I want the Settings View Model to communicate to the MainPage View Model about what changed. THe MainPage ViewModel will then tell the View.

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  • Bluetooth communications with C#

    - by Abdulaziz
    hello, I want to write 2 programs with C# one work on PC, the other work on a windows mobile phone. So I want the PC program to send a signal via Bluetooth ( 1 byte maybe) to the windows mobile phone. and the mobile program (which work on background) handles and accepts this byte without the need of pairing. how to code this? please I need any kind of help.

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  • C# Serial Communications - Received Data Lost

    - by Jim Fell
    Hello. Received data in my C# application is getting lost due to the collector array being over-written, rather than appended. private void serialPort1_DataReceived(object sender, SerialDataReceivedEventArgs e) { try { pUartData_c = serialPort1.ReadExisting().ToCharArray(); bUartDataReady_c = true; } catch ( System.Exception ex ) { MessageBox.Show(ex.Message, "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } } In this example pUartData_c is over-written every time new data is received. On some systems this is not a problem because the data comes in quickly enough. However, on other systems data in the receive buffer is not complete. How can I append received data to pUartData_c, rather than over-write it. I am using Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. Thanks.

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  • Designing server communications like DNS

    - by fryme
    I'm just need some help about server design. I need help in the design of the structure of the server application. Need to develop a network of servers that interact with each other. If a server receives a request and the server can not comply it, then the request is sent to another server and the result will be refunded to the sender. Information on all servers is different, and sender did not know where the result is placed in. The first thing that comes to mind is to use the model(scheme) of the DNS. But any interesting detailed articles on this subject I have not found. Any ideas?

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  • How to make Connect Communications VPN connection in 10.10?

    - by Bilal Mohammad Qazi
    these steps were send by my iSP admin for ver10.10 and i'm using 11.10... step 1 sucessfully implemented till point 7 after that the problems are marked after '//' Step 2 i cannot completely do the step 2 How to make Connect Communications VPN connection in Ubuntu 10.10. 1st Step:- 1- Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manage 2- Search for “PPTP”, check “network-manager-PPTP” and click “Apply” 3- Click on the Network Manager tray icon with your right mouse button and choose “Edit Connections…”. 4- Go to the “VPN” tab and click “Add”. 5- Choose “Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP)” as the VPN Connection Type 6- Check the VPN Connection Type and click “Create”. 7- Give your VPN connection a name and assign all the necessary information • Gateway = blue.connect.net.pk if you got Blue Package or • Gateway = green.connect.net.pk if you got Green Package or • Gateway = blueplus.connect.net.pk if you got BluePlus Package or • Gateway = red.connect.net.pk if you got Red Package • User name = Connect Communications Userid • Password = Connect Communications Password 8- Now Click on “Advanced” Authentication • Unchecked “PAP" // cannot uncheck • Unchecked “MSCHAP" // cannot uncheck • Unchecked “CHAP" • Checked only “MSCHAPv2" EAP shown in ver11.10 and cannot be unchecked Security And Compression. • Unchecked “Use Point-to-Point encryption (MPPE)”. • Unchecked “Allow statefull encryption”. • Unchecked “Allow BSD data Compression”. • Unchecked “Allow Deflate data Compression”. • Unchecked “Use TCP Header Compression”. • Unchecked “Send PPP echo Packets” Then Press “OK” then “Apply”. 9-Now you are able to connect to the specified VPN connection via the Networking Manager Then you can connect to VPN in the menu bar and your Internet icon will have a lock when the connection is successful. 2nd Step:- Open Terminal window. First, you open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal): Run command “sudo” Now gave root Password. Then run command “netstat -r -n” It will show some lines and for example from the last line pick the IP from 2nd column like 10.111.0.1 0.0.0.0 10.111.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 Now run the fallowing command. echo “route add -net 10.101.8.0 netmask 255.255.252.0 gw 10.152.24.1” > /etc/rc.local note :- 10.111.0.1 is an example IP now run “ sh /etc/rc.local “

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  • Exposing the ipPhone attribute to Communicator and the OCS address book service

    - by Doug Luxem
    I am in the process of integrating OCS with our Cisco phone system using CUCIMOC. After some fiddling with the phone normalization rules, it appears that I can get PSTN numbers to be dialed though the CUCIMOC interface (yay!). However, during this process I came to realize that the ipPhone attribute in Active Directory does not appear to be exposed to Communicator (and CUCIMOC). What is strange though, is that I can see from the OCS address book service "Invalid_AD_Phone_Numbers.txt" that the attribute is processed by the address book service. My question is, how do I expose the ipPhone field in Office Communicator? Currently, Communicator maps like this - Work = telephoneNumber Mobile = mobile Home = homePhone Attributes such as otherHomePhone, ipPhone, otherMobile, otherTelephone, otherIpPhone are ignored.

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