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  • Most Rails-y way to give different views of the same resource?

    - by Nathan Long
    In Rails, is there a canonical way of giving different views of the same resource? For example, a directory of people, where each person can have multiple photos, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. The people, photos and phone numbers are actually different resources with their own RESTful actions. But when viewing people, one page might shows everyone's name and associated photos; another page is names and associated contact information, formatted for printing. Would it be more "Rails-y" to: Create additional actions on the People controller besides the RESTful ones, like "index_with_contact_info"? Create a different controller and a different group of views? Neither seems quite right to me, but the first seems more likely. Any thoughts?

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  • What is So Unique About Node.js?

    - by Adrian Shum
    Recently there has been a lot of praise for Node.js. I am not a developer that has had much exposure to network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: we have only one thread handling multiple connections, providing an event-based architecture. However, for example in Java, I can create only one thread using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ? Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it to run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems to be something not difficult to create, I am not sure why Node.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?

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  • How would you explain your job to a 5-year old?

    - by Canavar
    Sometimes it's difficult to define programming to people. Especially too old or too young people can not understand what I do to earn money. They think that I repair computers, or they want to think that I (as an engineer) build computers at work. :) It's really hard to tell people that you produce something they can't touch. Here is a funny question, how would you explain your job to a 5-year-old?

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  • Run SQL Queries on DataTables, or similar, in .Net, without an RDBMS

    - by FastAl
    I'd like to have a dataset or datatables, and be able to run SQL statements on them, without using any external RDBMS. For Example, to take take 2 datatables in a dataset and just join them outright with a SQL statement and Where clause, the result being a new datatable? For example if I have 2 datatables, named People and Addresses in a dataset (that I built using code, not getting from a database .. pardon the old fashioned Join syntax): dim dtJoined as DataTable = MyDataSet.RunSQLQuery ("Select * from People, Orders Where People.PersonID=Orders.OrdereID") Thanks

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  • Why Nodes.js being that "unique"?

    - by Adrian Shum
    Recently years there are lots of praise to Nodes.js. I am not a developer that have much exposure on network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: We are having only on thread handling multiple connections, providing a event-based architecture. However, for example in Java, what if I am having only one thread, using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ? Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems not something difficult to create. I am not sure why Nodes.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?

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  • Does approaching SICP in clojure have a high chance of success? [on hold]

    - by ironicaldiction
    I am a third year bachelor student in a software engineering program, and I brought up the idea of reading SICP to an adviser to gain a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the principles behind all this software we engineer. He suggested not to learn scheme to complete the book (because it's not as common as modern dialects of lisp) but to do the exercises in clojure instead. My worry is that completing exercises in clojure instead of scheme will make an already difficult book tortuous. If I do attempt the book's exercises in the more modern clojure, will it be difficult to succeed (for example, because I can't find any real solutions, the syntax they teach for scheme is different, etc.), or do you think approaching the book in clojure could be just as successful as approaching it in scheme? I'm really not knowledgeable enough about either clojure or scheme to make an argument about this, so I wanted to know if I should bring it up or not.

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  • What do you think about gems and eggs? Alternatives?

    - by Juanlu001
    I've read recently some criticism (see 1, 2, 3) about the packaging distribution system of two popular programming languages: Ruby gems and Python eggs. The most important argument stated against them is that they replace the system package manager (in case there is one, as in every Linux distribution), which makes eggs and gems difficult to track, code difficult to patch, and so on. Are actually eggs and gems right? In case not, are there any alternatives to distributing Python or Ruby modules? Should developers focus on taking advantage of package manager (apt-get, pacman, ...) capabilities?

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  • Do You Really Know Your Programming Languages?

    - by Kristopher Johnson
    I am often amazed at how little some of my colleagues know or care about their craft. Something that constantly frustrates me is that people don't want to learn any more than they need to about the programming languages they use every day. Many programmers seem content to learn some pidgin sub-dialect, and stick with that. If they see a keyword or construct that they aren't familiar with, they'll complain that the code is "tricky." What would you think of a civil engineer who shied away from calculus because it had "all those tricky math symbols?" I'm not suggesting that we all need to become "language lawyers." But if you make your living as a programmer, and claim to be a competent user of language X, then I think at a minimum you should know the following: Do you know the keywords of the language and what they do? What are the valid syntactic forms? How are memory, files, and other operating system resources managed? Where is the official language specification and library reference for the language? The last one is the one that really gets me. Many programmers seem to have no idea that there is a "specification" or "standard" for any particular language. I still talk to people who think that Microsoft invented C++, and that if a program doesn't compile under VC6, it's not a valid C++ program. Programmers these days have it easy when it comes to obtaining specs. Newer languages like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. all have their documentation available for free from the vendors' web sites. Older languages and platforms often have standards controlled by standards bodies that demand payment for specs, but even that shouldn't be a deterrent: the C++ standard is available from ISO for $30 (and why am I the only person I know who has a copy?). Programming is hard enough even when you do know the language. If you don't, I don't see how you have a chance. What do the rest of you think? Am I right, or should we all be content with the typical level of programming language expertise? Update: Several great comments here. Thanks. A couple of people hit on something that I didn't think about: What really irks me is not the lack of knowledge, but the lack of curiosity and willingness to learn. It seems some people don't have any time to hone their craft, but they have plenty of time to write lots of bad code. And I don't expect people to be able to recite a list of keywords or EBNF expressions, but I do expect that when they see some code, they should have some inkling of what it does. Few people have complete knowledge of every dark corner of their language or platform, but everyone should at least know enough that when they see something unfamiliar, they will know how to get whatever additional information they need to understand it.

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  • Add organization details in contact list

    - by Nemat
    Hi Friends..... I have to add organization details in contacts.Here is my code: Uri newPersonUri = null; ContentValues personValues = new ContentValues(); // Add name and get its Uri personValues.put(People.NAME, arrValues[0] + " " + arrValues[1]); personValues.put(People.STARRED, 0); // STARRED 0 = Contacts, 1 = Favorites personValues.put(People.NOTES, arrValues[9]); //add notes newPersonUri = context.getContentResolver().insert(android.provider.Contacts.People.CONTENT_URI, personValues); ContentValues organisationValues = new ContentValues(); Uri orgUri = Uri.withAppendedPath(newPersonUri, android.provider.Contacts.Organizations.CONTENT_DIRECTORY); //Uri orgUri =Uri.withAppendedPath(newPersonUri, "organizations"); organisationValues.clear(); organisationValues.put(Organizations.COMPANY, arrValues[10]); organisationValues.put(Organizations.TITLE, arrValues[11]); organisationValues.put(Organizations.TYPE, Organizations.TYPE_WORK); objContext.getContentResolver().insert(orgUri, organisationValues); It works fine in some phones but in some phones it gives "java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Unknown uri: content://contacts/people/201/organizations" What can be the reason..... Any help will be appreciated!!!! Thanks in Advance Nemat

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  • JSF2.0: variable list of custom component

    - by rattaman
    Hello Is there any way of using JSF2.0 in connection with variable lists of components? For example, lets say I have list o people that I would like to edit. They are presented on the page as list of components PersonEditor, which allow changing person data. Each editor is associated with single Person element. In order for this to work I need to perform following steps: On initial request: Get list of people For each person create PersonEditor and associate it with Person object. Fill editor's data. On user action: When user changes values and presses Save, data is processed by backing bean. I can either fill editor with data from list of people or bind it to the backing bean, but not at the same time, so I am stuck. I tried people.xhtml <ui:render value="#{bean.people}" var="person"> <example:personEditor person="#{person}"/> </ui:render> where personEditor.xhtml: a) proper association with person object, but no connection to backing bean <h:form> <h:outputText value="#{cc.attr.person.name}"/> <h:commandButton name="Save" actionListener="editorBean.save"> <f:ajax execute="@form" render="@form"/> </h:commandButton> </h:form> b) no association with person object, but there is connection to backing bean - there is no way to pass that person to the backing bean <h:form> <h:outputText value="#{editorBean.name}"/> <h:commandButton name="Save" actionListener="editorBean.save"> <f:ajax execute="@form" render="@form"/> </h:commandButton> </h:form> If I had each editor on separate page, I could pass the person id as url parameter (either using f:param or f:attribute) and initialize it accordingly. Is there any solution to this problem?

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  • Effective way of keeping past projects with their working development environment?

    - by Korey Hinton
    I find that whenever I want to go run a past project, it will take a long time before I can find it and before I have everything set-up again for it to be able to run. For example, I have python projects I created in Linux, and it depends on software packages that are easily installed in Linux, yet I no longer have the Linux VM I was using. And some of my other projects depend on other variables like web server configuration, PATH variables, sdk, IDE, OS version, device, etc. Does someone have an effective way of handling this issue? As of now I have only concerned myself with keeping the source code backed up yet it is difficult re-establish the working development environment and it is also difficult to keep the working development environment around as well.

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  • Help needed to construct a SQL query

    - by song202y
    Need your help to get the list of suggested friends (who aren't friends of the current user but are friends of 2 or more of the current user's friends). The primary ordering should put people at the same school at the top, and the secondary ordering should put people with more common friends (that is, the number of people who are friends of that person and the current user) near the top. Users: user_id PK, user_name Profiles: user_id PK, school_name, ... Friendships: id PK, user_id FK, friend_id FK Thank you in advance. Joe

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  • Code reviews for larger ASP.NET MVC team using TFS

    - by Parrots
    I'm trying to find a good code review workflow for my team. Most questions similar to this on SO revolve around using shelved changes for the review, however I'm curious about how this works for people with larger teams. We usually have 2-3 people working a story (UI person, Domain/Repository person, sometimes DB person). I've recommended the shelf idea but we're all concerned about how to manage that with multiple people working the same feature. How could you share a shelf between multiple programmers at that point? We worry it would be clunky and we might easily have unintended consequences moving to this workflow. Of course moving to shelfs for each feature avoids having 10 or so checkins per feature (as developers need to share code) making seeing the diffs at code review time painful. Has anyone else been able to successfully deal with this? Are there any tools out there people have found useful aside from shelfs in TFS (preferably open-source)?

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  • What will help you get an entry-level position?

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} “Finishing your studies and getting a great job.” Isn’t this the biggest dream of most of the young people? At the beginning you think it’s easy, but when it’s your turn, you realize that actually it’s not as easy as you thought it would be. Especially nowadays, when we’re living difficult times and finding a job is a challenge. This is why I felt lucky when I joined Oracle. Do you want to know how did I do it? My name is Markéta Kocová and I am working as a Customer Intelligence Support Intern within Oracle Prague. Before this job I have, I was focused on my studies, going also abroad for one semester in Rostock University in Germany. I decided though to gain some working experience. In November 2011, I joined Oracle, this one being my first job. I never thought I would be part of such a big company, but here I am! I have to say that I think it’s quite difficult to find a job and thus job search might be exhausting. What did help me? I think it was the networking. The more people you know, the more chances you have to find a job. This is how I’ve heard about this internship. I think internship programs are a great opportunity for young people to gain experience and also to start building a career. As companies are looking for the candidates with the best skills and some experience, it’s difficult to get a job. It’s a paradox isn’t it? You are applying for a entry-level position, but you won’t get it because they’ll be searching for someone who has experience. This is why internship is a good solution to improve your skills. You will learn many things, you might get a mentor and also perform given tasks. What else could you do? In my opinion you should invest in yourself. Try to focus on both education and skills. In order to get a good job in an international and successful company, it’s not enough a university diploma. You could learn a foreign language because it’s usually required. Employers are also looking for good computer skills, so this could be something you could take into consideration before applying to a job. There are also some personal characteristics like communication abilities, self-reliance, self-confidence or ability to solve the crisis situations that companies look at when hiring a person. You could consider attending some training in order to improve these soft skills. Getting a job is difficult, but also when you make it and get one you’ll still finding challenging to stay there. You might realize it is not the dream job, but being patient and trying to learn as much as possible will help you to achieve more. I think every experience is valuable. I’ve been through this type of situation, but the environment, my colleagues and the atmosphere in office have always been great and made me love my job! Thanks guys! If you’re searching for a job and you want to join Oracle, I recommend you to check http://campus.oracle.com

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  • Lumia 920 or iPhone5, which is it gonna be?

    - by Sahil Malik
    SharePoint 2010 Training: more information Deciding on a new phone is so difficult. I currently use an iPhone4, and I am itching to upgrade to either iPhone5 or Lumia 920. The decision is difficult because a lot of my work depends on my communication device, and whatever I pick, I will be stuck with for 2 years. Here is how I see the two stacking up. iPhone 5 of course based on rumors so far. I didn’t even consider Android here because I don’t like Android as an OS. It’s too insecure, privacy intrusive, and frankly unreliable. I cannot bet my work on Android, sorry not gonna happen. Read full article ....

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  • Is there a good web-based project management app with scheduling?

    - by Andykiteman
    Ideally something as intuitive as basecamp, with good usability and accessibility. The best I've seen is huddle.net but it's still weak in several areas. Must have: Projects - ability to add people & tasks and schedule tasks to people Calendar - showing when people are busy or available Role based access - Admins and non-admins History - ability to look back at all history Anyone seen a product that's worth a look? Clarification: Must be hosted i.e. not require my own hardware or IT staff I'm looking for an app to schedule people with specific tasks at specific times and monitor the outcomes. I'm already using Mingle (for stories), Basecamp (to run the business) and Exceptional (to track bugs). I'm not looking for a bug-tracking system or a story management application (I already looked at VersionOne, but chose Mingle due to it's nicer UI) My response to the answer being auto-selected: I still don't feel the answer (chosen for me) is the correct one. It's a useful list but little more, and doesn't provide the solution I was seeking.

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  • Is there a place where I see the popular opinion of developers?

    - by User1
    I really want to know popular opinion on controversial programming topics. Questions like: Why do some people prefer vi over emacs (or vice versa)? Is Java faster than C++? Is Intel faster than AMD? It seems SO discourages such conversions because of potential flamewars. So where do people go to discuss such matters? I'm especially interested in venues where people can "up vote" good comments and good questions.

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  • Specifying Entire Path As Optional Rails 3.0.0

    - by Kevin Sylvestre
    I want to create a Rails 3 route with entirely optional parameters. The example route is: match '(/name/:name)(/height/:height)(/weight/:weight)' => 'people#index' The route works if I specify it as: match '/people(/name/:name)(/height/:height)(/weight/:weight)' => 'people#index' But I want to have this as the root URL. Thanks.

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  • How do I do a table join on two fields in my second table?

    - by Cannonade
    I have two tables: Messages - Amongst other things, has a to_id and a from_id field. People - Has a corresponding person_id I am trying to figure out how to do the following in a single linq query: Give me all messages that have been sent to and from person x (idself). I had a couple of cracks at this. Not quite right MsgPeople = (from p in db.people join m in db.messages on p.person_id equals m.from_id where (m.from_id == idself || m.to_id == idself) orderby p.name descending select p).Distinct(); This almost works, except I think it misses one case: "people who have never received a message, just sent one to me" How this works in my head So what I really need is something like: join m in db.messages on (p.people_id equals m.from_id or p.people_id equals m.to_id) Gets me a subset of the people I am after It seems you can't do that. I have tried a few other options, like doing two joins: MsgPeople = (from p in db.people join m in AllMessages on p.person_id equals m.from_id join m2 in AllMessages on p.person_id equals m2.to_id where (m2.from_id == idself || m.to_id == idself) orderby p.name descending select p).Distinct(); but this gives me a subset of the results I need, I guess something to do with the order the joins are resolved. My understanding of LINQ (and perhaps even database theory) is embarrassingly superficial and I look forward to having some light shed on my problem.

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  • WPF Databinding With A Collection Object

    - by Randster
    Argh, although I've been googling, I really would appreciate it if someone could break my problem down as all the code examples online are confusing me more than assisting (perhaps it's just late)... I have a simple class as defined below: public class Person { int _id; string _name; public Person() { } public int ID { get { return _id; } set { _id = value; } } public string Name { get { return _name; } set { _name = value; } } } that is stored in a database, and thru a bit more code I put it into an ObservableCollection object to attempt to databind in WPF later on: public class People : ObservableCollection<Person> { public People() : base() { } public void Add(List<Person> pListOfPeople) { foreach (Person p in pListOfPeople) this.Add(p); } } In XAML, I have myself a ListView that I would like to populate a ListViewItem (consisting of a textblock) for each item in the "People" object as it gets updated from the database. I would also like that textblock to bind to the "Name" property of the Person object. I thought at first that I could do this: lstPeople.DataContext = objPeople; where lstPeople is my ListView control in my XAML, but that of course does nothing. I've found TONS of examples online where people through XAML create an object and then bind to it through their XAML; but not one where we bind to an instantiated object and re-draw accordingly. Could someone please give me a few pointers on: A) How to bind a ListView control to my instantiated "People" collection object? B) How might I apply a template to my ListView to format it for the objects in the collection? Even links to a decent example (not one operating on an object declared in XAML please) would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

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  • Django. Invalid keyword argument for this function. ManyToMany

    - by sagem_tetra
    I have this error: 'people' is an invalid keyword argument for this function class Passage(models.Model): name= models.CharField(max_length = 255) who = models.ForeignKey(UserProfil) class UserPassage(models.Model): passage = models.ForeignKey(Passage) people = models.ManyToManyField(UserProfil, null=True) class UserProfil(models.Model): user = models.OneToOneField(User) name = models.CharField(max_length=50) I try: def join(request): user = request.user user_profil = UserProfil.objects.get(user=user) passage = Passage.objects.get(id=2) #line with error up = UserPassage.objects.create(people= user_profil, passage=passage) return render_to_response('thanks.html') How to do correctly? Thanks!

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  • Network update solutions for a company of ~20 (5 local, 15 remote)?

    - by Margaret
    Hi all This is probably going to be a bit up in the air, because we're still in the "reaching towards solutions" phase, but I figured I'd see what you guys had to say. Plus I honestly know very little about systems and what is good and bad pratice. My organisation has always more or less worked on the concept of local machines; since it primarily employed contractors who were working from home, each of those people was largely responsible for their own machine and backup procedures and the like. We're now expanding, though we're still reasonably small (we're up to about 20 staff members). Most people still work remotely, but we have a central office where about five people are working. But we're getting large enough that we're starting to think it would be a good idea to have a central file server, and things like that - if someone gets hit by a bus, we want someone else to know where to look for the files to continue their work. A lot of the people who work for us remotely work on projects for other companies as well, so I don't want to force them to log in to our server whenever they're on a network. But I do want to make connection to be as painless as possible to do so, to improve utilisation. The other thing is that we're getting more people who would like to remote into the office server and do their work there. Our current remote connection application is an SSH install that allows people access to the network; the problem is, it's a black box to me, and I've never understood how to even connect to it (despite supposedly being de facto sysadmin). Thus far I've been able to bounce questions about how to get it working to the guy who does know it well, but he's leaving the company soon. So we probably need a solution for this that I actually understand. We were knocking around the idea of implementing a VPN with some form of remote desktop, and someone mentioned that this was largely a matter of purchasing a router capable of it; I'm not sure of the truth of that statement. This is what we have in the office: Two shiny new i7 servers, each running Windows Server 2008. Precise eventual layout is still being debated, a little, but the current suggestion is that one is primary database crunching, while the other is a warm backup of the databases, along with running Reporting Services. They currently have SQL Server 2008 installed on them, which is being connected to via the 'sa' account. We're hoping to make each person use their own account (preferably one tied to the 'central' password we set up, so we can use Windows Authentication). An older server, running XP Pro, that we are currently using as a test bed for a project that requires access to older versions of software. This machine is also being used to take backups, but I'm thinking of moving that functionality elsewhere. A spare desktop from a guy who left the company (XP Pro). We're thinking of bumping up the hard disk space and using it as the magical file server that's going to solve one particular everything. Assorted desktops, laptops, etc, at least one for each person in the office (mix of Win XP and Win 7; occasionally a person who normally works remotely might drop in to the office and bring a laptop bearing Vista, but it's pretty rare). All are set up as local user accounts at the moment; I don't know if it's the best arrangement. Purchasing more hardware is not a big problem, but we figure we might as well make use of what we've got first. Is Active Directory a big magic wand that's going to solve all the world's problems? Is there some other arrangement we should be looking to instead?

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  • Dividing web.config into multiple files in asp.net

    - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama
    When you are having different people working on one project remotely you will get some problem with web.config, as everybody was having different version of web.config. So at that time once you check in your web.config with your latest changes the other people have to get latest that web.config and made some specific changes as per their local environment. Most of people who have worked things from remotely has faced that problem. I think most common example would be connection string and app settings changes. For this kind of situation this will be a best solution. We can divide particular section of web.config into the multiple files. For example we could have separate ConnectionStrings.config file for connection strings and AppSettings.config file for app settings file. Most of people does not know that there is attribute called ‘configSource’ where we can  define the path of external config file and it will load that section from that external file. Just like below. <configuration> <appSettings configSource="AppSettings.config"/> <connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStrings.config"/> </configuration> And you could have your ConnectionStrings.config file like following. <connectionStrings> <add name="DefaultConnection" connectionString="Data Source=(LocalDb)\v11.0;Initial Catalog=aspnet-WebApplication1-20120523114732;Integrated Security=True" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> Same way you have another AppSettings.Config file like following. <appSettings> <add key="aspnet:UseTaskFriendlySynchronizationContext" value="true" /> <add key="ValidationSettings:UnobtrusiveValidationMode" value="WebForms" /> </appSettings> That's it. Hope you like this post. Stay tuned for more..

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  • Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server

    - by jamiet
    I overheard/read a couple of things today that really made me, data junkie that I am, take a step back and think, “Hmmm, yeah, that could be really interesting” and I wanted to make a note of them here so that (a) I could bring them to the attention of anyone that happens to read this and (b) I can maybe come back here in a few years and see if either of these have come to fruition. Your phone as a web server While listening to Jon Udell’s (twitter) “Interviews with Innovators Podcast” today in which he interviewed Herbert Van de Sompel (twitter) about his Momento project. During the interview Jon and Herbert made the following remarks: Jon: [some people] really had this vision of a web of servers, the notion that every node on the internet, every connected entity, is potentially a server and a client…we can see where we’re getting to a point where these endpoint devices we have in our pockets are going to be massively capable and it may be in the not too distant future that significant chunks of the web archive will be cached all over the place including on your own machine… Herbert: wasn’t it Opera who at one point turned your browser into a server? That really got my brain ticking. We all carry a mobile phone with us and therefore we all potentially carry a mobile web server with us as well and to my mind the only thing really stopping that from happening is the capabilities of the phone hardware, the capabilities of the network infrastructure and the will to just bloody do it. Certainly all the standards required for addressing a web server on a phone already exist (to this uninitiated observer DNS and IPv6 seem to solve that problem) so why not? I tweeted about the idea and Rory Street answered back with “why would you want a phone to be a web server?”: Its a fair question and one that I would like to try and answer. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming our window onto the world as we use them to upload messages to Twitter, record our location on FourSquare or interact with our friends on Facebook but in each of these cases some other service is acting as our intermediary; to see what I’m thinking you have to go via Twitter, to see where I am you have to go to FourSquare (I’m using ‘I’ liberally, I don’t actually use FourSquare before you ask). Why should this have to be the case? Why can’t that data be decentralised? Why can’t we be masters of our own data universe? If my phone acted as a web server then I could expose all of that information without needing those intermediary services. I see a time when we can pass around URLs such as the following: http://jamiesphone.net/location/current - Where is Jamie right now? http://jamiesphone.net/location/2010-04-21 – Where was Jamie on 21st April 2010? http://jamiesphone.net/thoughts/current – What’s on Jamie’s mind right now? http://jamiesphone.net/blog – What documents is Jamie sharing with me? http://jamiesphone.net/calendar/next7days – Where is Jamie planning to be over the next 7 days? and those URLs get served off of the phone in our pockets. If we govern that data then we can control who has access to it and (crucially) how long its available for. Want to wipe yourself off the face of the web? its pretty easy if you’re in control of all the data – just turn your phone off. None of this exists today but I look forward to a time when it does. Opera really were onto something last June when they announced Opera Unite (admittedly Unite only works because Opera provide an intermediary DNS-alike system – it isn’t totally decentralised). Opening up Twitter annotations Last week Twitter held their first developer conference called Chirp where they announced an upcoming new feature called ‘Twitter Annotations’; in short this will allow us to attach metadata to a Tweet thus enhancing the tweet itself. Think of it as a richer version of hashtags. To think of it another way Twitter are turning their data into a humongous Entity-Attribute-Value or triple-tuple store. That alone has huge implications both for the web and Twitter as a whole – the ability to enrich that 140 characters data and thus make it more useful is indeed compelling however today I stumbled upon a blog post from Eugene Mandel entitled Tweet Annotations – a Way to a Metadata Marketplace? where he proposed the idea of allowing tweets to have metadata added by people other than the person who tweeted the original tweet. This idea really fascinated me especially when I read some of the potential uses that Eugene and his commenters suggested. They included: Amazon could attach an ISBN to a tweet that mentions a book. Specialist clients apps for book lovers could be built up around this metadata. Advertisers could pay to place adverts in metadata. The revenue generated from those adverts could be shared with the tweeter or people who add the metadata. Granted, allowing anyone to add metadata to a tweet has the potential to create a spam problem the like of which we haven’t even envisaged but spam hasn’t halted the growth of the web and neither should it halt the growth of data annotations either. The original tweeter should of course be able to determine who can add metadata and whether it should be moderated. As Eugene says himself: Opening publishing tweet annotations to anyone will open the way to a marketplace of metadata where client developers, data mining companies and advertisers can add new meaning to Twitter and build innovative businesses. What Eugene and his followers did not mention is what I think is potentially the most fascinating use of opening up annotations. Google’s success today is built on their page rank algorithm that measures the validity of a web page by the number of incoming links to it and the page rank of the sites containing those links – its a system built on reputation. Twitter annotations could open up a new paradigm however – let’s call it People rank- where reputation can be measured by the metadata that people choose to apply to links and the websites containing those links. Its not hard to see why Google and Microsoft have paid big bucks to get access to the Twitter firehose! Neither of these features, phones as a web server or the ability to add annotations to other people’s tweets, exist today but I strongly believe that they could dramatically enhance the web as we know it today. I hope to look back on this blog post in a few years in the knowledge that these ideas have been put into place. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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