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• Include weather information in ASP.Net site from weather.com services

  - by sreejukg

  In this article, I am going to demonstrate how you can use the XMLOAP services (referred as XOAP from here onwards) provided by weather.com to display the weather information in your website. The XOAP services are available to be used for free of charge, provided you are comply with requirements from weather.com. I am writing this article from a technical point of view. If you are planning to use weather.com XOAP services in your application, please refer to the terms and conditions from weather.com website. In order to start using the XOAP services, you need to sign up the XOAP datafeed. The signing process is simple, you simply browse the url http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html. The URL looks similar to the following. Click on the sign up button, you will reach the registration page. Here you need to specify the site name you need to use this feed for. The form looks similar to the following. Once you fill all the mandatory information, click on save and continue button. That’s it. The registration is over. You will receive an email that contains your partner id, license key and SDK. The SDK available in a zipped format, contains the terms of use and documentation about the services available. Other than this the SDK includes the logos and icons required to display the weather information. As per the SDK, currently there are 2 types of information available through XOAP. These services are Current Conditions for over 30,000 U.S. and over 7,900 international Location IDs Updated at least Hourly Five-Day Forecast (today + 4 additional forecast days in consecutive order beginning with tomorrow) for over 30,000 U.S. and over 7,900 international Location IDs Updated at least Three Times Daily The SDK provides detailed information about the fields included in response of each service. Additionally there is a refresh rate that you need to comply with. As per the SDK, the refresh rate means the following “Refresh Rate” shall mean the maximum frequency with which you may call the XML Feed for a given LocID requesting a data set for that LocID. During the time period in between refresh periods the data must be cached by you either in the memory on your servers or in Your Desktop Application. About the Services Weather.com will provide you with access to the XML Feed over the Internet through the hostname xoap.weather.com. The weather data from the XML feed must be requested for a specific location. So you need a location ID (LOC ID). The XML feed work with 2 types of location IDs. First one is with City Identifiers and second one is using 5 Digit US postal codes. If you do not know your location ID, don’t worry, there is a location id search service available for you to retrieve the location id from city name. Since I am a resident in the Kingdom of Bahrain, I am going to retrieve the weather information for Manama(the capital of Bahrain) . In order to get the location ID for Manama, type the following URL in your address bar. http://xoap.weather.com/search/search?where=manama I got the following XML output. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- This document is intended only for use by authorized licensees of The –> <!-- Weather Channel. Unauthorized use is prohibited. Copyright 1995-2011, –> <!-- The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved. –> <search ver="3.0">       <loc id="BAXX0001" type="1">Al Manama, Bahrain</loc> </search> You can try this with any city name, if the city is available, it will return the location id, and otherwise, it will return nothing. In order to get the weather information, from XOAP,  you need to pass certain parameters to the XOAP service. A brief about the parameters are as follows. Please refer SDK for more details. Parameter name Possible Value cc Optional, if you include this, the current condition will be returned. Value can be anything, as it will be ignored e.g. cc=* dayf If you want the forecast for 5 days, specify dayf=5 This is optional iink Value should be XOAP par Your partner id. You can find this in your registration email from weather.com prod Value should be XOAP key The license key assigned to you. This will be available in the registration email unit s or m (standard or matric or you can think of Celsius/Fahrenheit) this is optional field, if not specified the unit will be standard(s) The URL host for the XOAP service is http://xoap.weather.com. So for my purpose, I need the following request to be made to access the XOAP services. http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/BAXX0001?cc=*&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=*********&key=************** (The ***** to be replaced with the corresponding alternatives) The response XML have a root element “weather”. Under the root element, it has the following sections <head> - the meta data information about the weather results returned. <loc> - the location data block that provides, the information about the location for which the wheather data is retrieved. <lnks> - the 4 promotional links you need to place along with the weather display. Additional to these 4 links, there should be another link with weather channel logo to the home page of weather.com. <cc> - the current condition data. This element will be there only if you specify the cc element in the request. <dayf> - the forcast data as you specified. This element will be there only if you specify the dayf in the request. In this walkthrough, I am going to capture the weather information for Manama (Location ID: BAXX0001). You need 2 applications to display weather information in your website. A Console application that retrieves data from the XMLOAP and store in the SQL Server database (or any data store as you prefer).This application will be scheduled to execute in every 25 minutes using windows task scheduler, so that we can comply with the refresh rate. A web application that display data from the SQL Server database Retrieve the Weather from XOAP I have created a console application named, Weather Service. I created a SQL server database, with the following columns. I named the table as tblweather. You are free to choose any name. Column name Description lastUpdated Datetime, this is the last time when the weather data is updated. This is the time of the service running TemparatureDateTime The date and time returned by XML feed Temparature The temperature returned by the XML feed. TemparatureUnit The unit of the temperature returned by the XML feed iconId The id of the icon to be used. Currently 48 icons from 0 to 47 are available. WeatherDescription The Weather Description Phrase returned by the feed. Link1url The url to the first promo link Link1Text The text for the first promo link Link2url The url to the second promo link Link2Text The text for the second promo link Link3url The url to the third promo link Link3Text The text for the third promo link Link4url The url to the fourth promo link Link4Text The text for the fourth promo link Every time when the service runs, the application will update the database columns from the XOAP data feed. When the application starts, It is going to get the data as XML from the url. This demonstration uses LINQ to extract the necessary data from the fetched XML. The following are the code segment for extracting data from the weather XML using LINQ. // first, create an instance of the XDocument class with the XOAP URL. replace **** with the corresponding values. XDocument weather = XDocument.Load("http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/BAXX0001?cc=*&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=***********&key=c*********"); // construct a query using LINQ var feedResult = from item in weather.Descendants() select new { unit = item.Element("head").Element("ut").Value, temp = item.Element("cc").Element("tmp").Value, tempDate = item.Element("cc").Element("lsup").Value, iconId = item.Element("cc").Element("icon").Value, description = item.Element("cc").Element("t").Value, links = from link in item.Elements("lnks").Elements("link") select new { url = link.Element("l").Value, text = link.Element("t").Value } }; // Load the root node to a variable, you may use foreach construct instead. var item1 = feedResult.First(); *If you want to learn more about LINQ and XML, read this nice blog from Scott GU. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/08/07/using-linq-to-xml-and-how-to-build-a-custom-rss-feed-reader-with-it.aspx Now you have all the required values in item1. For e.g. if you want to get the temperature, use item1.temp; Now I just need to execute an SQL query against the database. See the connection part. using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=sreeju\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=Sample;Integrated Security=True")) { string strSql = @"update tblweather set lastupdated=getdate(), temparatureDateTime = @temparatureDateTime, temparature=@temparature, temparatureUnit=@temparatureUnit, iconId = @iconId, description=@description, link1url=@link1url, link1text=@link1text, link2url=@link2url, link2text=@link2text,link3url=@link3url, link3text=@link3text,link4url=@link4url, link4text=@link4text"; SqlCommand comm = new SqlCommand(strSql, conn); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparatureDateTime", item1.tempDate); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparature", item1.temp); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparatureUnit", item1.unit); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("description", item1.description); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("iconId", item1.iconId); var lstLinks = item1.links; comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link1url", lstLinks.ElementAt(0).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link1text", lstLinks.ElementAt(0).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link2url", lstLinks.ElementAt(1).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link2text", lstLinks.ElementAt(1).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link3url", lstLinks.ElementAt(2).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link3text", lstLinks.ElementAt(2).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link4url", lstLinks.ElementAt(3).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link4text", lstLinks.ElementAt(3).text); conn.Open(); comm.ExecuteNonQuery(); conn.Close(); Console.WriteLine("database updated"); } Now click ctrl + f5 to run the service. I got the following output Check your database and make sure, the data is updated with the latest information from the service. (Make sure you inserted one row in the database by entering some values before executing the service. Otherwise you need to modify your application code to count the rows and conditionally perform insert/update query) Display the Weather information in ASP.Net page Now you got all the data in the database. You just need to create a web application and display the data from the database. I created a new ASP.Net web application with a default.aspx page. In order to comply with the terms of weather.com, You need to use Weather.com logo along with the weather display. You can find the necessary logos to use under the folder “logos” in the SDK. Additionally copy any of the icon set from the folder “icons” to your web application. I used the 93x93 icon set. You are free to use any other sizes available. The design view of the page in VS2010 looks similar to the following. The page contains a heading, an image control (for displaying the weather icon), 2 label controls (for displaying temperature and weather description), 4 hyperlinks (for displaying the 4 promo links returned by the XOAP service) and weather.com logo with hyperlink to the weather.com home page. I am going to write code that will update the values of these controls from the values stored in the database by the service application as mentioned in the previous step. Go to the code behind file for the webpage, enter the following code under Page_Load event handler. using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=sreeju\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=Sample;Integrated Security=True")) { SqlCommand comm = new SqlCommand("select top 1 * from tblweather", conn); conn.Open(); SqlDataReader reader = comm.ExecuteReader(); if (reader.Read()) { lblTemparature.Text = reader["temparature"].ToString() + "&deg;" + reader["temparatureUnit"].ToString(); lblWeatherDescription.Text = reader["description"].ToString(); imgWeather.ImageUrl = "icons/" + reader["iconId"].ToString() + ".png"; lnk1.Text = reader["link1text"].ToString(); lnk1.NavigateUrl = reader["link1url"].ToString(); lnk2.Text = reader["link2text"].ToString(); lnk2.NavigateUrl = reader["link2url"].ToString(); lnk3.Text = reader["link3text"].ToString(); lnk3.NavigateUrl = reader["link3url"].ToString(); lnk4.Text = reader["link4text"].ToString(); lnk4.NavigateUrl = reader["link4url"].ToString(); } conn.Close(); } Press ctrl + f5 to run the page. You will see the following output. That’s it. You need to configure the console application to run every 25 minutes so that the database is updated. Also you can fetch the forecast information and store those in the database, and then retrieve it later in your web page. Since the data resides in your database, you have the full control over your display. You need to make sure your website comply with weather.com license requirements. If you want to get the source code of this walkthrough through the application, post your email address below. Hope you enjoy the reading.

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• Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

  - by raul.goycoolea

  Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

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• Tips for XNA WP7 Developers

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  There are several things any XNA developer should know/consider when coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This post assumes you are familiar with the XNA Framework and with the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0. It’s not exhaustive; it’s simply a list of things I’ve gathered over time. I may come back and add to it over time, and I’m happy to add anything anyone else has experienced or learned as well. Display · The screen is either 800x480 or 480x800. · But you aren’t required to use only those resolutions. · The hardware scaler on the phone will scale up from 240x240. · One dimension will be capped at 800 and the other at 480; which depends on your code, but you cannot have, e.g., an 800x600 back buffer – that will be created as 800x480. · The hardware scaler will not normally change aspect ratio, though, so no unintended stretching. · Any dimension (width, height, or both) below 240 will be adjusted to 240 (without any aspect ratio adjustment such that, e.g. 200x240 will be treated as 240x240). · Dimensions below 240 will be honored in terms of calculating whether to use portrait or landscape. · If dimensions are exactly equal or if height is greater than width then game will be in portrait. · If width is greater than height, the game will be in landscape. · Landscape games will automatically flip if the user turns the phone 180°; no code required. · Default landscape is top = left. In other words a user holding a phone who starts a landscape game will see the first image presented so that the “top” of the screen is along the right edge of his/her phone, such that the natural behavior would be to turn the phone 90° so that the top of the phone will be held in the user’s left hand and the bottom would be held in the user’s right hand. · The status bar (where the clock, battery power, etc., are found) is hidden when the Game-derived class sets GraphicsDeviceManager.IsFullScreen = true. It is shown when IsFullScreen = false. The default value is false (i.e. the status bar is shown). · You should have a good reason for hiding the status bar. Users find it helpful to know what time it is, how much charge their battery has left, and whether or not their phone is in service range. This is especially true for casual games that you expect someone to play for a few minutes at a time, e.g. while waiting for some event to start, for a phone call to come in, or for a train, bus, or subway to arrive. · In portrait mode, the status bar occupies 32 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 480x800 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 461x768 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 480x768 (or some resolution with the same 0.625 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. · In landscape mode, the status bar occupies 72 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 800x480 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 728x437 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 728x480 (or some resolution with the same 1.51666667 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. Input · Touch input is scaled with screen size. · So if your back buffer is 600x360, a tap in the bottom right corner will come in as (599,359). You don’t need to do anything special to get this automatic scaling of touch behavior. · If you do not use full area of the screen, any touch input outside the area you use will still register as a touch input. For example, if you set a portrait resolution of 240x240, it would be scaled up to occupy a 480x480 area, centered in the screen. If you touch anywhere above this area, you will get a touch input of (X,0) where X is a number from 0 to 239 (in accordance with your 240 pixel wide back buffer). Any touch below this area will give a touch input of (X,239). · If you keep the status bar visible, touches within its area will not be passed to your game. · In general, a screen measurement is the diagonal. So a 3.5” screen is 3.5” long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6 (480/800 = 0.6), this means that a phone with a 3.5” screen is only approximately 1.8” wide by 3” tall. So there are approximately 267 pixels in an inch on a 3.5” screen. · Again, this time in metric! 3.5 inches is approximately 8.89 cm. So an 8.89 cm screen is 8.89 cm long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6, this means that a phone with an 8.89 cm screen is only approximately 4.57 cm wide by 7.62 cm tall. So there are approximately 105 pixels in a centimeter on an 8.89 cm screen. · Think about the size of your finger tip. If you do not have large hands, think about the size of the fingertip of someone with large hands. Consider that when you are sizing your touch input. Especially consider that when you are spacing two touch targets near one another. You need to judge it for yourself, but items that are next to each other and are each 100x100 should be fine when it comes to selecting items individually. Smaller targets than that are ok provided that you leave space between them. · You want your users to have a pleasant experience. Making touch controls too small or too close to one another will make them nervous about whether they will touch the right target. Take this into account when you plan out your game initially. If possible, do some quick size mockups on an actual phone using colored rectangles that you position and size where you plan to have your game controls. Adjust as necessary. · People do not have transparent hands! Nor are their hands the size of a mouse pointer icon. Consider leaving a dedicated space for input rather than forcing the user to cover up to one-third of the screen with a finger just to play the game. · Another benefit of designing your controls to use a dedicated area is that you’re less likely to have players moving their finger(s) so frantically that they accidentally hit the back button, start button, or search button (many phones have one or more of these on the screen itself – it’s easy to hit one by accident and really annoying if you hit, e.g., the search button and then quickly tap back only to find out that the game didn’t save your progress such that you just wasted all the time you spent playing). · People do not like doing somersaults in order to move something forward with accelerometer-based controls. Test your accelerometer-based controls extensively and get a lot of feedback. Very well-known games from noted publishers have created really bad accelerometer controls and been virtually unplayable as a result. Also be wary of exceptions and other possible failures that the documentation warns about. · When done properly, the accelerometer can add a nice touch to your game (see, e.g. ilomilo where the accelerometer was used to move the background; it added a nice touch without frustrating the user; I also think CarniVale does direct accelerometer controls very well). However, if done poorly, it will make your game an abomination unto the Marketplace. Days, weeks, perhaps even months of development time that you will never get back. I won’t name names; you can search the marketplace for games with terrible reviews and you’ll find them. Graphics · The maximum frame rate is 30 frames per second. This was set as a compromise between battery life and quality. · At least one model of phone is known to have a screen refresh rate that is between 59 and 60 hertz. Because of this, using a fixed time step with a target frame rate of 30 will cause a slight internal delay to build up as the framework is forced to wait slightly for the next refresh. Eventually the delay will get to the point where a draw is skipped in order to recover from the delay. (See Nick's comment below for clarification.) · To deal with that delay, you can either stay with a fixed time step and set the frame rate slightly lower or else you can go to a variable time step and make sure to adjust all of your update data (e.g. player movement distance) to take into account the elapsed time from the last update. A variable time step makes your update logic slightly more complicated but will avoid frame skips entirely. · Currently there are no custom shaders. This might change in the future (there is no hardware limitation preventing it; it simply wasn’t a feature that could be implemented in the time available before launch). · There are five built-in shaders. You can create a lot of nice effects with the built-in shaders. · There is more power on the CPU than there is on the GPU so things you might typically off-load to the GPU will instead make sense to do on the CPU side. · This is a phone. It is not a PC. It is not an Xbox 360. The emulator runs on a PC and uses the full power of your PC. It is very good for testing your code for bugs and doing early prototyping and layout. You should not use it to measure performance. Use actual phone hardware instead. · There are many phone models, each of which has slightly different performance levels for I/O, screen blitting, CPU performance, etc. Do not take your game right to the performance limit on your phone since for some other phones you might be crossing their limits and leaving players with a bad experience. Leave a cushion to account for hardware differences. · Smaller screened phones will have slightly more dots per inch (dpi). Larger screened phones will have slightly less. Either way, the dpi will be much higher than the typical 96 found on most computer screens. Make sure that whoever is doing art for your game takes this into account. · Screens are only required to have 16 bit color (65,536 colors). This is common among smart phones. Using gradients on a 16 bit display can produce an ugly artifact known as banding. Banding is when, rather than a smooth transition from one color to another, you instead see distinct lines. Be careful to avoid this when possible. Banding can be avoided through careful art creation. Its effects can be minimized and even unnoticeable when the texture in question is always moving. You should be careful not to rely on “looks good on my phone” since some phones do have 32-bit displays and thus you’ll find yourself wondering why you’re getting bad reviews that complain about the graphics. Avoid gradients; if you can’t, make sure they are 16-bit safe. Audio · Never rely on sounds as your sole signal to the player that something is happening in the game. They might have the sound off. They might be playing somewhere loud. Etc. · You have to provide controls to disable sound & music. These should be separate. · On at least one model of phone, the volume control API currently has no effect. Players can adjust sound with their hardware volume buttons, but in game selectors simply won’t work. As such, it may not be worth the effort of providing anything beyond on/off switches for sound and music. · MediaPlayer.GameHasControl will return true when a game is hooked up to a PC running Zune. When Zune is running, any attempts to do anything (beyond check GameHasControl) with MediaPlayer will cause an exception to be thrown. If this exception is thrown, catch it and disable music. Exceptions take time to propagate; you don’t want one popping up in every single run of your game’s Update method. · Remember that players can already be listening to music or using the FM radio. In this case GameHasControl will be false and you should handle this appropriately. You can, alternately, ask the player for permission to stop their current music and play your music instead, but the (current) requirement that you restore their music when done is very hard (if not impossible) to deal with. · You can still play sound effects even when the game doesn’t have control of the music, but don’t think this is a backdoor to playing music. Your game will fail certification if your “sound effect” seems to be more like music in scope and length.

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• TFS 2010 RC does not run Visual Studio 2008 MSTest unit tests

  - by Bernard Vander Beken

  Steps: Run the build including unit tests. Expected result: the unit tests are executed and succeed. Actual result: the unit tests are built by the build, but this is the result: 1 test run(s) completed - 0% average pass rate (0% total pass rate) 0/4 test(s) passed, 0 failed, 4 inconclusive, View Test Results Other Errors and Warnings 1 error(s), 0 warning(s) TF270015: 'MSTest.exe' returned an unexpected exit code. Expected '0'; actual '1'. All the tests are enumerated (four), but the result for each test is "Not Executed". Context: Team Foundation Server 2010 release candidate A build definition that runs projects using the Visual Studio 2008 project format and .NET 3.5 SP1. The unit tests run on a development machine, within Visual Studio. The unit tests project references C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework.dll Typical test class [TestClass] public class DemoTest { [TestMethod] public void DemoTestName() { } // etc }

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• Problem in linking an nasm code

  - by Stefano

  I'm using a computer with an Intel Core 2 CPU and 2GB of RAM. The SO is Ubuntu 9.04. When I try to compile this code: ;programma per la simulazione di un terminale su PC, ottenuto utilizzando l'8250 ;in condizione di loopback , cioè Tx=Rx section .code64 section .data TXDATA EQU 03F8H ;TRASMETTITORE RXDATA EQU 03F8H ;RICEVITORE BAUDLSB EQU 03F8H ;DIVISORE DI BAUD RATE IN LSB BAUDMSB EQU 03F9H ;DIVISORE DI BAUD RATE IN MSB INTENABLE EQU 03F9H ;REGISTRO DI ABILITAZIONE DELL'INTERRUZIONE INTIDENTIF EQU 03FAH ;REGISTRO DI IDENTIFICAZIONE DELL'INTERRUZIONE LINECTRL EQU 03FBH ;REGISTRO DI CONTROLLO DELLA LINEA MODEMCTRL EQU 03FCH ;REGISTRO DI CONTROLLO DEL MODEM LINESTATUS EQU 03FDH ;REGISTRO DI STATO DELLA LINEA MODEMSTATUS EQU 03FEH ;REGISTRO DI STATO DEL MODEM BAUDRATEDIV DW 0060H ;DIVISOR: LOW=60, HIGH=00 -BAUD =9600 COUNTERCHAR DB 0 ;CHARACTER COUNTER ;DW 256 DUP (?) section .text global _start _start: ;PROGRAMMAZIONE 8250 MOV DX,LINECTRL MOV AL,80H ;BIT 7=1 PER INDIRIZZARE IL BAUD RATE OUT DX,AL MOV DX,BAUDLSB MOV AX,BAUDRATEDIV ;DEFINISCO FATTORE DI DIVISIONE OUT DX,AL MOV DX,BAUDMSB MOV AL,AH OUT DX,AL ;MSB MOV DX,LINECTRL MOV AL,00000011B ;8 BIT DATO, 1 STOP, PARITA' NO OUT DX,AL MOV DX,MODEMCTRL MOV AL,00010011B ;BIT 4=0 PER NO LOOPBACK OUT DX,AL MOV DX,INTENABLE XOR AL,AL ;DISABILITO TUTTI GLI INTERRUPTS OUT DX,AL CICLO: MOV DX,LINESTATUS IN AL,DX ;LEGGO IL REGISTRO DI STATO DELLA LINEA TEST AL,00011110B ;VERIFICO GLI ERRORI (4 TIPI) JNE ERRORI TEST AL,01H ;VERIFICO Rx PRONTO JNE LEGGOCHAR TEST AL,20H ;VERIFICO Tx VUOTO JE CICLO ;SE SI ARRIVA A QUESTO PUNTO ALLORA L'8250 è PRONTO PER TRASMETTERE UN NUOVO CARATTERE MOV AH,1 INT 80H JE CICLO ;SE SI ARRIVA A QUESTO PUNTO SIGNIFICA CHE ESISTE UN CARATTERE DA TASTIERA MOV AH,0 INT 80H ;Al CONTIENE IL CARATTERE DELLA TASTIERA MOV DX,3F8H OUT DX,AL JMP CICLO LEGGOCHAR: MOV AL,[COUNTERCHAR] INC AL CMP AL,15 JE FINE MOV [COUNTERCHAR],AL MOV DX,TXDATA IN AL,DX ;AL CONTIENE IL CARATTERE RICEVUTO AND AL,7FH ;POICHè VI SONO 7 BIT DI DATO ;VISUALIZZAZIONE DEL CARATTERE MOV BX,0 MOV AH,14 INT 80H POP AX CMP AL,0DH ;CONTROLLO SE RETURN JNE CICLO ;CAMBIO RIGA DI VISUALIZZAZIONE MOV AL,0AH MOV BX,0 MOV AH,14 ;INT 10H INT 80H JMP CICLO ;GESTIONE ERRORI ERRORI: MOV DX,3F8H IN AL,DX MOV AL,'?' MOV BX,0 MOV AH,14 INT 80H JMP CICLO FINE: XOR AH,AH MOV AL,03 INT 80H When I compile this code "NASM -f bin UARTLOOP.asm", the compiler can create the UARTLOOP.o file without any error. When I try to link the .o file with "ld UARTLOOP.o" it tells: UARTLOOP.o: In function `_start': UARTLOOP.asm:(.text+0xd): relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_16 against `.data' Have u got some ideas to solve this problem? Thx =)

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• Boost asio async vs blocking reads, udp speed/quality

  - by Dolphin

  I have a quick and dirty proof of concept app that I wrote in C# that reads high data rate multicast UDP packets from the network. For various reasons the full implementation will be written in C++ and I am considering using boost asio. The C# version used a thread to receive the data using blocking reads. I had some problems with dropped packets if the computer was heavily loaded (generally with processing those packets in another thread). What I would like to know is if the async read operations in boost (which use overlapped io in windows) will help ensure that I receive the packets and/or reduce the cpu time needed to receive the packets. The single thread doing blocking reads is pretty straightforward, using the async reads seems like a step up in complexity, but I think it would be worth it if it provided higher performance or dropped fewer packets on a heavily loaded system. Currently the data rate should be no higher than 60Mb/s.

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• PHP simpleXML parsing

  - by FFish

  I need currency conversion, euro to dollar. The European Central bank provides the rates here: http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml I can get the USD rate by using the first node, but what if they change the order? Do I need something more reliable? I have no idea how.. $xml = @simplexml_load_file('http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml'); echo "dollar: " . $xml->Cube->Cube->Cube[0]->attributes()->rate;

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• Programmatically convert WAV

  - by kaykun

  Hi, I'm writing a file compressor utility in C++ that I want support for PCM WAV files, however I want to keep it in PCM encoding and just convert it to a lower sample rate and change it from stereo to mono if applicable to yield a lower file size. I understand the WAV file header, however I have no experience or knowledge of the actual sound data works. So my question is, would it be relatively easy to programmatically manipulate the "data" sub-chunk in a WAV file to convert it to another sample rate and change the channel number, or would I be much better off using an existing library for it? If it is, then how would it be done? Thanks in advance.

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• Creating an independent draw thread using pthreads (C++)

  - by sagekilla

  Hi all, I'm working on a graphical application which looks something like this: while (Simulator.simulating) { Simulator.update(); InputManager.processInput(); VideoManager.draw(); } I do this several times a second, and in the vast majority of cases my computation will be taking up 90 - 99% of my processing time. What I would like to do is take out the processInput and draw functions and have each one run independently. That way, I can have the input thread always checking for input (at a reasonable rate), and the draw thread attempting to redraw at a given frame rate. My issue is I'm not sure how I can properly do this. How would I properly initialize my pthread_t and associated pthread_attr_t so that the thread runs without blocking what I'm doing? Any help or even a link is appreciated, thanks!

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• Tuning OS X Virtual Memory

  - by dcolish

  I've noticed some really odd results form vm_stat on OSX 10.6. According to this, its barely hitting the cache. Searches of pretty much everywhere I could think of turn up little to explain why the rate is so low. I asked a few friends and they're seeing the same thing. What gives and how can I make it better? Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes) Pages free: 78609. Pages active: 553411. Pages inactive: 191116. Pages speculative: 6198. Pages wired down: 153998. "Translation faults": 116031508. Pages copy-on-write: 2274338. Pages zero filled: 33360804. Pages reactivated: 264378. Pageins: 1197683. Pageouts: 43756. Object cache: 20 hits of 1550639 lookups (0% hit rate)

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• Specifying --host1 as localhost with port 8983 in autobench

  - by mamatha

  I am using autobench for benchmarking in ubuntu 8.10 autobench --single_host --host1 localhost --uri1 /solr/admin --low_rate 20 --high_rate 200 --rate_step 20 --num_call 10 --num_conn 5000 --timeout 5 --file bench1.tsv This is the command which I gave. It is taking the default port as 80 and the number of replies and requests are as shown below **Errors: total 5000 client-timo 0 socket-timo 0 connrefused 5000 connreset 0 Errors: fd-unavail 0 addrunavail 0 ftab-full 0 other 0 Zero replies received, test invalid: rate 20 httperf --timeout=5 --client=0/1 --server=localhost --port=80 --uri=/solr/admin --rate=40 --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=5000 --num-calls=10 Maximum connect burst length: 4 Total: connections 5000 requests 0 replies 0 test-duration 124.976 s** But, I want the port to be 8983. In all the examples that I have seen in the autobench tutorial, --host1 is a website (such as, www.test.com). Can anyone suggest how to use localhost taking the port as 8983? Thanks, in advance.

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• Slow insert speed in Postgresql memory tablespace

  - by Prashant

  Hi, I have a requirement where I need to store the records at rate of 10,000 records/sec into a database (with indexing on a few fields). Number of columns in one record is 25. I am doing a batch insert of 100,000 records in one transaction block. To improve the insertion rate, I changed the tablespace from disk to RAM.With that I am able to achieve only 5,000 inserts per second. I have also done the following tuning in the postgres config: Indexes : no fsync : false logging : disabled Other information: - Tablespace : RAM - Number of columns in one row : 25 (mostly integers) - CPU : 4 core, 2.5 GHz - RAM : 48 GB I am wondering why a single insert query is taking around 0.2 msec on average when database is not writing anything on disk (as I am using RAM based tablespace). Is there something I am doing wrong? Help appreciated. Prashant

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• Named Blueprints with factory_girl

  - by Jason Nerer

  I am using Factory Girl but like the machinist syntax. So I wonder, if there is any way creating a named blueprint for class, so that I can have something like that: User.blueprint(:no_discount_user) do admin false hashed_password "226bc1eca359a09f5f1b96e26efeb4bb1aeae383" is_trader false name "foolish" salt "21746899800.223524289203464" end User.blueprint(:discount_user) do admin false hashed_password "226bc1eca359a09f5f1b96e26efeb4bb1aeae383" is_trader true name "deadbeef" salt "21746899800.223524289203464" discount_rate { DiscountRate.make(:rate => 20.00) } end DiscountRate.blueprint do rate {10} not_before ... not_after ... end Is there a way making factory_girl with machinist syntax acting like that? I did not find one. Help appreciated. Thx in advance Jason

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• problem drawing gRaphaeljs pie chart

  - by Aswad

  Hi, I was trying to draw the raphaeljs piechart. I used the same example as shown on "http://g.raphaeljs.com/piechart2.html". It renders me the text but the pie charts goes missing.Can someone please help? please find the code below. g·Raphaël Dynamic Pie Chart Demo window.onload = function () { var r = Raphael("holder"); r.g.txtattr.font = "12px 'Fontin Sans', Fontin-Sans, sans-serif"; r.g.text(320, 100, "Interactive Pie Chart Demo").attr({"font-size": 20}); var pie = r.g.piechart(320, 240, 100, [55, 20, 13, 32, 5, 1, 2, 10], {legend: ["%%.%% – Enterprise Users", "IE Users"], legendpos: "west", href: ["http://raphaeljs.com", "http://g.raphaeljs.com"]}); pie.hover(function () { this.sector.stop(); this.sector.scale(1.1, 1.1, this.cx, this.cy); if (this.label) { this.label[0].stop(); this.label[0].scale(1.5); this.label[1].attr({"font-weight": 800}); } }, function () { this.sector.animate({scale: [1, 1, this.cx, this.cy]}, 500, "bounce"); if (this.label) { this.label[0].animate({scale: 1}, 500, "bounce"); this.label[1].attr({"font-weight": 400}); } }); }; </script> </head> <body class="raphael" id="g.raphael.dmitry.baranovskiy.com"> <div id="holder"></div> <p> Pie chart with legend, hyperlinks on two first sectors and hover effect. </p> <p> Demo of <a href="http://g.raphaeljs.com/">g·Raphaël</a> JavaScript library. </p> </body>

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• What is the most you've charged for a single programming job?

  - by David Murdoch

  This question/wiki is more aimed at my fellow freelancers rather than companies or groups...but any and all feedback definitely is welcome. When quoting jobs for anything over $10,000 I always feel uneasy and unsure about the estimate I'm providing (though, I'm not sure why, I know what I'm worth [ I think :-) ] and I charge appropriately. I'm sure there are more (noob) freelancers here on S.O. that feel the same way. In danger of being voted closed because of its subjective (but factual) nature - the question(s): What is the largest amount you have charged for a single programming job (not including maintenance, support, or residual income). What are some of the details of the specific job? (research, q&a, challenges, etc) What languages did you use to get the job done? Assuming you bill your work at an hourly rate, what was the rate? How long did the job actually take you to complete? (from start to deployment, how many weeks, months, years?)

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• Key stroke time in Openmoko or any smart phones

  - by Adi

  Dear all, I am doing a project in which I am working on security issues related to smart phones. I want to develop an authentication scheme which is based on biometrics, Every human being have a unique key-hold time,digraph time error rate. Key-Hold Time : Time difference between pressing and releasing a key . Digraph Time : Time difference between releasing one and pressing next one. Error Rate : No of times backspace is pressed. I got these metrics from a paper "Keystroke-based User Identification on Smart Phones" by Saira Zahid1, Muhammad Shahzad1, Syed Ali Khayam1,2, Muddassar Farooq1. I was planning to get the datasets to test my algorithm from openmoko phone, but the phone is mis-behaving and I am finding trouble in generating these time data-sets. If anyone can help me or tell me a good source of data sets for the 3 metrics I defined, it will be a great help. Thanks Aditya

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• mySQL one-to-many query

  - by Stomped

  I've got 3 tables that are something like this (simplified here ofc): users user_id user_name info info_id user_id rate contacts contact_id user_id contact_data users has a one-to-one relationship with info, although info doesn't always have a related entry. users has a one-to-many relationship with contacts, although contacts doesn't always have related entries. I know I can grab the proper 'users' + 'info' with a left join, is there a way to get all the data I want at once? For example, one returned record might be: user_id: 5 user_name: tom info_id: 1 rate: 25.00 contact_id: 7 contact_data: 555-1212 contact_id: 8 contact_data: 555-1315 contact_id: 9 contact_data: 555-5511 Is this possible with a single query? Or must I use multiple?

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• How to convert a 32bpp image to an indexed format?

  - by Ed Swangren

  So here are the details (I am using C# BTW): I receive a 32bpp image (JPEG compressed) from a server. At some point, I would like to use the Palette property of a bitmap to color over-saturated pixels (brightness 240) red. To do so, I need to get the image into an indexed format. I have tried converting the image to a GIF, but I get quality loss. I have tried creating a new bitmap in an index format by these methods: // causes a "Parameter not valid" error Bitmap indexed = new Bitmap(orig.Width, orig.Height, PixelFormat.Indexed) // no error, but the resulting image is black due to information loss I assume Bitmap indexed = new Bitmap(orig.Width, orig.Height, PixelFormat.Format8bppIndexed) I am at a loss now. The data in this image is changed constantly by the user, so I don't want to manually set pixels that have a brightness 240 if I can avoid it. If I can set the palette once when the image is created, my work is done. If I am going about this the wrong way to begin with please let me know. EDIT: Thanks guys, here is some more detail on what I am attempting to accomplish. We are scanning a tissue slide at high resolution (pathology application). I write the interface to the actual scanner. We use a line-scan camera. To test the line rate of the camera, the user scans a very small portion and looks at the image. The image is displayed next to a track bar. When the user moves the track bar (adjusting line rate), I change the overall intensity of the image in an attempt to model what it would look like at the new line rate. I do this using an ImageAttributes and ColorMatrix object currently. When the user adjusts the track bar, I adjust the matrix. This does not give me per pixel information, but the performance is very nice. I could use LockBits and some unsafe code here, but I would rather not rewrite it if possible. When the new image is created, I would like for all pixels with a brightness value of 240 to be colored red. I was thinking that defining a palette for the bitmap up front would be a clean way of doing this.

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• mp3 downsampling / compression in java

  - by veenit33

  Well, i was looking forward to modify the bit rate of a mp3 file in java. I want to downsample(change its bit rate) the mp3 file from 256/384 kbps to say 64/128 kbps.. (I guess this is the only way one can achieve mp3 compression..or is there any other way.?) I searched for LameOnJ but that website is temperoraly down and so im not able to get the license file which we need to download in every 2 days. Is this possible using JMF..? What are the other option i have..? Regards, Veenit Shah

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• quantity of measurable units design pattern

  - by Berryl

  Hello I am thinking through a nice pattern to be useful across domains of measurable units (ie, Length, Time) and came up with the following use case and initial classes, and of course, questions! 1) Does a Composite pattern help or complicate? 2) Should the Convert method(s) in the ComposityNode be a separate converter class? All comments appreciated. Cheers, Berryl Example Use Case: var inch = new ConvertableUnit("inch", 1) var foot = new ConvertableUnit("foot", 12) var imperialUnits = new CompositeConvertableUnit("imperial units", .024) imperialUnits.AddChild(inch) imperialUnits.AddChild(foot) var meter = new ConvertableUnit("meter", 1) var millimeter = new ConvertableUnit("millimeter ", .001) var imperialUnits = new CompositeConvertableUnit("metric units", 1) imperialUnits.AddChild(meter) imperialUnits.AddChild(millimeter) var oneInch = new Quantity(1, inch); var oneFoot = new Quantity(1, foot); oneFoot.ToBase() // "12 inches" var oneMeter = new Quantity(1, meter); oneInch.ToBase() // .024 meters Possible Solution ConvertableUnit : Node double Rate string Name Quantity ConvertableUnit Unit double Amount CompositeConvertableUnit : Node ISet<ConvertableUnit> _children ConvertableUnit BaseUnit {get{ return _children.Where(c=>c.Rate == 1).First() } } Quantity ConvertTo(Quantity from, Quantity to) Quantity ToBase(Quantity from);

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• Determine Click-thru Percentage With PHP

  - by Lea

  Hi all, I am currently working on a small sponsorship application(PHP/MySql) for my personal blog, and am almost finish, but I am stuck on how to calculate the click-thru rate of my sponsors campaigns. I was always terrible with working out percentages, so any practical help would be appreciated. The data is stored in the DB as simple numbers.. So as expected, when a page refreshes, or a sponsors ad is clicked, the data updates with an incrementation of 1. So using these values...say $clicks and $impressions, how would I determine the click-thru rate? What would be the sum I would use to calculate? An example function would really be appreciated. Kind Regards, Lea

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• Run time error '3075' in Access 2007

  - by Thys

  I am getting the following error when I try to open a report in Access 2007. The code works fine in Access 2003. run time error '3075' Syntax error (missing operator) in query expression '[COUNTRY_ID]=' here is the code giving the error... How could I fix this? Private Sub List25_Click() Combo20.SetFocus 'DoCmd.FindRecord List25.ItemData(List25.ListIndex) Forms![Country Rate Administration].Filter = "[COUNTRY_ID]=" & List25.ItemData(List25.ListIndex) Forms![Country Rate Administration].FilterOn = True End Sub Thansk in advance for your help!

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• Using DateDiff in Entity Framwork on a SQL CE database

  - by deverop

  I have a method which should return a list of anonymous objects with a calculated column like this: var tomorrow = DateTime.Today.AddDays(1); return from t in this.Events where (t.StartTime >= DateTime.Today && t.StartTime < tomorrow && t.EndTime.HasValue) select new { Client = t.Activity.Project.Customer.Name, Project = t.Activity.Project.Name, Task = t.Activity.Task.Name, Rate = t.Activity.Rate.Name, StartTime = t.StartTime, EndTime = t.EndTime.Value, Hours = (System.Data.Objects.SqlClient.SqlFunctions.DateDiff("m", t.StartTime, t.EndTime.Value) / 60), Description = t.Activity.Description }; Unfortunately I get the following error from the DateDiff function: The specified method 'System.Nullable1[System.Int32] DateDiff(System.String, System.Nullable1[System.DateTime], System.Nullable`1[System.DateTime])' on the type 'System.Data.Objects.SqlClient.SqlFunctions' cannot be translated into a LINQ to Entities store expression. Any ideas what I could have done wrong here? EDIT: I also tried the EntityFunctions class mentioned here, but that did not work as well. Minutes = EntityFunctions.DiffMinutes(t.EndTime, t.StartTime),

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• Question SpeechSynthesizer.SetOutputToAudioStream audio format problem

  - by Chris Kugler

  Hi, I'm currently working on an application which requires transmission of speech encoded to a specific audio format. System.Speech.AudioFormat.SpeechAudioFormatInfo synthFormat = new System.Speech.AudioFormat.SpeechAudioFormatInfo(System.Speech.AudioFormat.EncodingFormat.Pcm, 8000, 16, 1, 16000, 2, null); This states that the audio is in PCM format, 8000 samples per second, 16 bits per sample, mono, 16000 average bytes per second, block alignment of 2. When I attempt to execute the following code there is nothing written to my MemoryStream instance; however when I change from 8000 samples per second up to 11025 the audio data is written successfully. SpeechSynthesizer synthesizer = new SpeechSynthesizer(); waveStream = new MemoryStream(); PromptBuilder pbuilder = new PromptBuilder(); PromptStyle pStyle = new PromptStyle(); pStyle.Emphasis = PromptEmphasis.None; pStyle.Rate = PromptRate.Fast; pStyle.Volume = PromptVolume.ExtraLoud; pbuilder.StartStyle(pStyle); pbuilder.StartParagraph(); pbuilder.StartVoice(VoiceGender.Male, VoiceAge.Teen, 2); pbuilder.StartSentence(); pbuilder.AppendText("This is some text."); pbuilder.EndSentence(); pbuilder.EndVoice(); pbuilder.EndParagraph(); pbuilder.EndStyle(); synthesizer.SetOutputToAudioStream(waveStream, synthFormat); synthesizer.Speak(pbuilder); synthesizer.SetOutputToNull(); There are no exceptions or errors recorded when using a sample rate of 8000 and I couldn't find anything useful in the documentation regarding SetOutputToAudioStream and why it succeeds at 11025 samples per second and not 8000. I have a workaround involving a wav file that I generated and converted to the correct sample rate using some sound editing tools, but I would like to generate the audio from within the application if I can. One particular point of interest was that the SpeechRecognitionEngine accepts that audio format and successfully recognized the speech in my synthesized wave file... Update: Recently discovered that this audio format succeeds for certain installed voices, but fails for others. It fails specifically for LH Michael and LH Michelle, and failure varies for certain voice settings defined in the PromptBuilder.

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• Parameter Tuning for Perceptron Learning Algorithm

  - by Albert Diego

  Hi, I'm having sort of an issue trying to figure out how to tune the parameters for my perceptron algorithm so that it performs relatively well on unseen data. I've implemented a verified working perceptron algorithm and I'd like to figure out a method by which I can tune the numbers of iterations and the learning rate of the perceptron. These are the two parameters I'm interested in. I know that the learning rate of the perceptron doesn't affect whether or not the algorithm converges and completes. I'm trying to grasp how to change n. Too fast and it'll swing around a lot, and too low and it'll take longer. As for the number of iterations, I'm not entirely sure how to determine an ideal number. In any case, any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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