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• Windows Phone 7 UserExtenedProperties opinion...

  - by webdad3

  I was thinking of a way to some how connect my phone user base to my site user base. Right now if an item gets added to the site via the phone the userId is generic and the site displays it as SmartPhoneUser. I was thinking it might be cool to display the unique phone id by using the UserExtenedProperties, however, after reading Nick Harris's blog about it I'm thinking it may not be a good idea as I don't want users to think I'm up to anything nefarious. So I'm wondering if there are any suggestions out there on how to accomplish this task. Right now my site uses the JanRain module that allows multiple logins from other sites (Facebook, Yahoo, Google etc.). Any thoughts on how I can accomplish what I want to do without using the ExtendedProperties?

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• links for 2010-05-11

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Fat Bloke: Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released! "Supporting new platforms such as Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and delivering a host of bugfixes, VirtualBox 3.1.8 is available now from the usual places, " says the Fat Bloke. (tags: oracle otn virtualization linux) Anthony Shorten: What is the Oracle Utilities Application Framework? "The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is a reusable, scalable and flexible java based framework which allows other products to be built, configured and implemented in a standard way," according to Anthony Shorten (tags: oracle otn framework java standards) Audio podcast: Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option (Application Grid) "Steve Harris, Senior Vice President of application server and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition development, talks about running Oracle WebLogic Server on Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition. Listen here to learn how you can run faster and more efficiently without a guest operating system on Oracle VM." (tags: oracle otn grid wweblogic podcast virtualization) MySQL Community Blog: MySQL track with free event at Kaleidoscope 2010 "The even greater news," writes Giuseppe Maxia, "is that, in addition to the general schedule, there are SUNDOWN SESSIONS!" (tags: java sun oracle mysql) @SOAtoday: Will Cloudsourcing Change the Face of Consulting? "Will we all be working remotely to deliver our client projects going forward? Maybe someday, but not anytime soon." -- Oracle ACE Director Jordan Braunstein (tags: oracle otn oracleace cloudcomputing entarch) @SOAtoday: Are we Paid to Say No? "Software architects take their governance initiatives seriously, and I can say with a high level of confidence that most of these denials are highly justified. But, have we architects lost our entrepreneurial spirit, with governance as our defense? Are we over-scrutinizing new ideas and slowing down pilots of innovation because they don’t align with our governance policies and enterprise frameworks?" -- Oracle ACE Director Jordan Braunstein (tags: architect entarch oracle otn soa)

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• Is there an existing solution to the multithreaded data structure problem?

  - by thr

  I've had the need for a multi-threaded data structure that supports these claims: Allows multiple concurrent readers and writers Is sorted Is easy to reason about Fulfilling multiple readers and one writer is a lot easier, but I really would wan't to allow multiple writers. I've been doing research into this area, and I'm aware of ConcurrentSkipList (by Lea based on work by Fraser and Harris) as it's implemented in Java SE 6. I've also implemented my own version of a concurrent Skip List based on A Provably Correct Scalable Concurrent Skip List by Herlihy, Lev, Luchangco and Shavit. These two implementations are developed by people that are light years smarter then me, but I still (somewhat ashamed, because it is amazing work) have to ask the question if these are the two only viable implementations of a concurrent multi reader/writer data structures available today?

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• Twitter @Anywhere oauth_bridge_code

  - by AngelCabo

  I'm having trouble with Twitter's implementation of an oauth_bridge_code for the @anywhere api. I've seen a few walkthrough's on how to use this functionality but I can't seem to get the request to work for me. I'm using Ruby on Rails with the oauth gem. My code is as follows: def callback consumer = OAuth::Consumer.new(APP_CONFIG['twitter_key'], APP_CONFIG['twitter_secret'], :site => "http://api.twitter.com", :request_token_path => "/oauth/request_token", :authorize_path => "/oauth/authorize", :access_token_path => "/oauth/access_token", :http_method => :post) request = OAuth::AccessToken.new consumer json = request.post("https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token?oauth_bridge_code=#{params[:oauth_bridge_code]}") end I keep getting 401 unauthorized responses from the signed post request even though this is supposed to be working according to this walkthrough: http://blog.abrah.am/2010/09/using-twitter-anywhere-bridge-codes.html and a presentation from Matt Harris on slideshare. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong (besides possibly trying to hit functionality that may not be in place)? Greatly appreciated!

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-22

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Guide to integration architecture | Stephanie Mann "The landscape of integration architecture is shifting as service-oriented and cloud-based architecture take the fore," says Stephanie Mann. "To ensure success, enterprise architects and developers are turning to lighter-weight infrastructure to support more complex integration projects." FY13 Oracle PartnerNetwork Kickoff - Tues June 26, 2012 Join us for a one-hour live online event hosted by the Oracle PartnerNetwork team as we kickoff FY13. Other dates/times for EMEA/LAD/JAPAN/APAC. Click the link for details. Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6? | Ricardo Ferreira Okay, you would expect an Oracle guy to make this argument. But Ferreira takes a very deep, very detailed technical dive into the issue. So hear the man out, will ya? Hibernate4 and Coherence | Rene van Wijk According to Oracle ACE Rene van Wijk, "there are two ways to integrate Hibernate and Coherence." In this post he illustrates one of them. Simple Made Easy | Rich Hickey Rich Hickey discusses simplicity, why it is important, how to achieve it in design and how to recognize its absence in the tools, language constructs and libraries in this presentation from QCon London 2012. Starting a cluster | Mark Nelson Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Mark Nelson looks at Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BPM, and Oracle Coherence, three products that are " commonly clustered, and which have somewhat different requirements." Why building SaaS well means giving up your servers | GigaOM The biggest benefit to PaaS, reports GigaOM's Derrick Harris, "might be a better product because the company is able to focus on building the app rather than managing servers." Personas - what, why & how | Mascha van Oosterhout "To be able to create a successful, user-friendly website or application," says Mascha van Oosterhout, "every decision you take, whether you are part of the marketing team, the design team or the development team, should be based on what you know about the user." Thought for the Day "Machines take me by surprise with great frequency." — Alan Turing(June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) Source: Brainy Quote

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• Understanding Data Science: Recent Studies

  - by Joe Lamantia

  If you need such a deeper understanding of data science than Drew Conway's popular venn diagram model, or Josh Wills' tongue in cheek characterization, "Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician." two relatively recent studies are worth reading.   'Analyzing the Analyzers,' an O'Reilly e-book by Harlan Harris, Sean Patrick Murphy, and Marck Vaisman, suggests four distinct types of data scientists -- effectively personas, in a design sense -- based on analysis of self-identified skills among practitioners.  The scenario format dramatizes the different personas, making what could be a dry statistical readout of survey data more engaging.  The survey-only nature of the data,  the restriction of scope to just skills, and the suggested models of skill-profiles makes this feel like the sort of exercise that data scientists undertake as an every day task; collecting data, analyzing it using a mix of statistical techniques, and sharing the model that emerges from the data mining exercise.  That's not an indictment, simply an observation about the consistent feel of the effort as a product of data scientists, about data science.  And the paper 'Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study' by researchers Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, Joseph Hellerstein, and Jeffery Heer considers data science within the larger context of industrial data analysis, examining analytical workflows, skills, and the challenges common to enterprise analysis efforts, and identifying three archetypes of data scientist.  As an interview-based study, the data the researchers collected is richer, and there's correspondingly greater depth in the synthesis.  The scope of the study included a broader set of roles than data scientist (enterprise analysts) and involved questions of workflow and organizational context for analytical efforts in general.  I'd suggest this is useful as a primer on analytical work and workers in enterprise settings for those who need a baseline understanding; it also offers some genuinely interesting nuggets for those already familiar with discovery work. We've undertaken a considerable amount of research into discovery, analytical work/ers, and data science over the past three years -- part of our programmatic approach to laying a foundation for product strategy and highlighting innovation opportunities -- and both studies complement and confirm much of the direct research into data science that we conducted. There were a few important differences in our findings, which I'll share and discuss in upcoming posts.

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• The Numbers of Customer Experience

  - by Christie Flanagan

  This week, we’ll be continuing our conversations about Customer Experience (CX) on the Oracle WebCenter blog.  While we all know that customer experience is critically important for acquiring new customers and engendering long term brand loyalty, I thought we could kick this week off by taking a look at the numbers of customer experience.   I’m sure you’ll agree that nothing quite puts things into perspective like numbers and figures. A whopping 86% of consumers say that they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.  But many companies are failing to step up to the challenge.  And when companies fail deliver on customer experience expectations, they leave money on the table. A huge percentage of customers, 89%, begin doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. Breaking up isn’t hard to do and today’s empowered customers have no qualms about taking their business elsewhere when their expectations for customer experience are not met. Over a quarter of consumers, 26%, posted a negative comment on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter following a poor customer experience. Today, individual customer service failures have the ability to easily snowball.  An unsatisfied customer has the ability to easily share their rancor with their entire social network and chip away at your brand’s reputation. A large number of consumers, 79%,  who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored.  Companies ignore customer complaints at their own peril.  And unsatisfied customers, when handled effectively, have the potential to become advocates for your brand.  Of the 21% of consumers who did get responses to complaints, more than half had positive reactions to the same company about which they were previously complaining. Half of consumers will give a brand only a week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them.  The clock is ticking when customers have questions about your brand and a week is an eternity in the realm of customer experience.  The source for these stats is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, which explores the relationship between consumers and brands.  The report is based on a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive. If you’re interested in seeing more facts and figures about customer experience, download the full report.

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• BI and EPM Landscape

  - by frank.buytendijk

  Most of my blog entries are not about Oracle products, and most of the latest entries are about topics such as IT strategy and enterprise architecture. However, given my background at Gartner, and at Hyperion, I still keep a close eye on what's happening in BI and EPM. One important reason is that I believe there is significant competitive value for organizations getting BI and EPM right. Davenport and Harris wrote a great book called "Competing on Analytics", in which they explain this in a very engaging and convincing way. At Oracle we have defined the concept of "management excellence" that outlines what organizations have to do to keep or create a competitive edge. It's not only in the business processes, but also in the management processes. Recently, Gartner published its 2009 market shares report for BI, Analytics, and Performance Management. Gartner identifies the same three segments that Oracle does: (1) CPM Suites (Oracle refers not to Corporate Performance Management, but Enterprise Performance Management), (2) BI Platform, and (3) Analytic Applications & Performance Management. According to Gartner, Oracle's share is increasing with revenue growing by more than 5%. Oracle currently holds the #2 market share position in the overall BI Software space based on total BI software revenue. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 Gartner has ranked Oracle as #1 in the CPM Suites worldwide sub-segment based on total BI software revenue, and Oracle is gaining share with revenue growing by more than 6% in 2009. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 The Analytic Applications & Performance Management subsegment is more fragmented. It has for instance a very large "Other Vendors" category. The largest player traditionally is SAS. Analytic Applications are often meant for very specific analytic needs in very specific industry sectors. According to Gartner, from the large vendors, again Oracle is the one who is gaining the most share - with total BI software revenue growth close to 15% in 2009. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 I believe this shows Oracle's integration strategy is working. In fact, integration actually is the innovation. BI and EPM have been silo technology platforms and application suites way too long. Management and measuring performance should be very closely linked to strategy execution, which is the domain of other business application areas such as CRM, ERP, and Supply Chain. BI and EPM are not about "making better decisions" anymore, but are part of a tangible action framework. Furthermore, organizations are getting more serious about ecosystem thinking. They do not evaluate single tools anymore for different application areas, but buy into a complete ecosystem of hardware, software and services. The best ecosystem is the one that offers the most options, in environments where the uncertainty is high and investments are hard to reverse. The key to successfully managing such an environment is middleware, and BI and EPM become increasingly middleware intensive. In fact, given the horizontal nature of BI and EPM, sitting on top of all business functions and applications, you could call them "upperware". Many are active in the BI and EPM space. Big players can offer a lot, but there are always many areas that are covered by specialty vendors. Oracle openly embraces those technologies within the ecosystem as well. Complete, open and integrated still accurately describes the Oracle product strategy. frank

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• Silverlight Cream for April 16, 2010 -- #838

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Alan Beasley(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Brian, Rishi, Pete Brown, Yavor Georgiev, and David Anson. Shoutouts: As usual, Tim Heuer has all the scoop on all the hot-off-the-presses releases: Silverlight 4 released. Availability of tools announcement. He covers all the main parts of interest. Tim Heuer also discusses Backward Compatibility with Silverlight 4 applications And before you ask, Tim Heuer announced the Silverlight Client for Facebook updated for Silverlight 4 release If you're having trouble with the install, Peter Bromberg has a post up to help bail you out: Get Silverlight 4 Installed: Tips and Tricks Christian Schormann has a link to probably the fastest intro to SketchFlow I've seen: Video: SketchFlow in 90 seconds, with Jon Harris Chris Rouw has a Summary of Silverlight at DevConnections on his site. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Chris and we had some good discussions. Rene Schulte describes how to get started with the new final Silverlight 4 RTW build and announces that he updated his samples and open source projects. He also shares what he wishes for the next Silverlight version: Silverlight 4 Up and Running From SilverlightCream.com: Building Better Buttons in Expression Blend and Silverlight I generally end up missing articles embedded at CodeProject, so Alan Beasley emailed me a link to these, they were new to me. In this first one, he's got a very nice tutorial up on making some awesome buttons in Expression Blend Arcade Button in Expression Blend and Silverlight Alan Beasley's second Expression Blend Button tutorial is the classic 'arcade button' ... this is great stuff.. check it out. Picture Frame Control in Expression Blend and Silverlight I wasn't going to do the full list Alan Beasley had sent me in one post, but they're all so good! This third takes an excursion away from buttons to do a Picture Frame control. Styled to the max, and another great Blend tutorial! The last building buttons article (Part1), in Expression Blend and Silverlight Alan Beasley finishes what may be a definitive work on buttons in Blend... even if you don't want to follow the tutorials (and why wouldn't you??) ... he's got 10 buttons you can download! ListBox Styling (Part1-ScrollBars) in Expression Blend & Silverlight In Alan Beasley's 5th post at Code Project, He has a great long tutorial on Styling Listbox Scrollbars in Expression Blend ... the ScrollBars are Part 1 of a series. Some Notes on DRM in Silverlight 4 Brian at Silverlight SDK has a post up on DRM ... WMDRM and PlayReady. If you're planning on utilizing this, Brian's post looks like a good starting point. nRoute: Now, More Wholesome Rishi has a detailed post up explaining the latest nRoute release now supporting Silverlight 4, WP7, and WPF. What a piece of work! Scanning an Image from Silverlight 4 using WIA Automation Pete Brown demonstrates using VS2010 and SL4 to lash up to his scanner. Lots of code and external links... all good stuff, Pete! Dealing with those pesky WCF CommunicationException “NotFound” errors in Silverlight Yavor Georgiev has a quick post up discussing WCF CommunicationException errors in Silverlight with a couple external links to explain the solution. New Silverlight 4 Toolkit released with today's Silverlight 4 RTW! David Anson blogged about the new Toolkit release that is live right now along with the Silverlight 4 Release, and has some release notes up on the Toolkit. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• MIXing it Up a Bit

  - by andrewbrust

  Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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• Exposed: Fake Social Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Brands and marketers who want to build their social popularity on a foundation of lies are starting to face more of an uphill climb. Fake social is starting to get exposed, and there are a lot of emperors getting caught without any clothes. Facebook is getting ready to do a purge of “Likes” on Pages that were a result of bots, fake accounts, and even real users who were duped or accidentally Liked a Page. Most of those accidental Likes occur on mobile, where it’s easy for large fingers to hit the wrong space. Depending on the degree to which your Page has been the subject of such activity, you may see your number of Likes go down. But don’t sweat it, that’s a good thing. The social world has turned the corner and assessed the value of a Like. And the verdict is that a Like is valuable as an opportunity to build a real relationship with a real customer. Its value pales immensely compared to a user who’s actually engaged with the brand. Those fake Likes aren’t doing you any good. Huge numbers may once have impressed, but it’s not fooling anybody anymore. Facebook’s selling point to marketers is the ability to use a brand’s fans to reach friends of those fans. Consequently, there has to be validity and legitimacy to a fan count. Speaking of mobile, Trademob recently reported 40% of clicks are essentially worthless, because 22% of them are accidental (again with the fat fingers), while 18% are trickery. Publishers will but huge banner ads next to tiny app buttons to increase the odds of an accident. Others even hide a banner behind another to score 2 clicks instead of 1. Pontiflex and Harris Interactive last year found 47% of users were more likely to click a mobile ad accidentally than deliberately. Beyond that, hijacked devices are out there manipulating click data. But to what end for a marketer? What’s the value of a click on something a user never even saw? What’s the value of a seen but accidentally clicked ad if there’s no resulting transaction? Back to fake Likes, followers and views; they’re definitely for sale on numerous sites, none of which I’ll promote. $5 can get you 1,000 Twitter followers. You can even get followers targeted by interests. One site was set up by an unemployed accountant out of his house in England. He gets them from a wholesaler in Brooklyn, who gets them from a 19-year-old supplier in India. The unemployed accountant is making $10,000 a day. That means a lot of brands, celebrities and organizations are playing the fake social game, apparently not coming to grips with the slim value of the numbers they’re buying. But now, in addition to having paid good money for non-ROI numbers, there’s the embarrassment factor. At least a couple of sites have popped up allowing anyone to see just how many fake and inactive followers you have. Britain’s Fake Follower Check and StatusPeople are the two getting the most attention. Enter any Twitter handle and the results are there for all to see. Fake isn’t good, period. “Inactive” could be real followers, but if they’re real, they’re just watching, not engaging. If someone runs a check on your Twitter handle and turns up fake followers, does that mean you’re suspect or have purchased followers? No. Anyone can follow anyone, so most accounts will have some fakes. Even account results like Barack Obama’s (70% fake according to StatusPeople) and Lady Gaga’s (71% fake) don’t mean these people knew about all those fakes or initiated them. Regardless, brands should realize they’re now being watched, and users are judging the legitimacy of their social channels. Use one of any number of tools available to assess and clean out fake Likes and followers so that your numbers are as genuine as possible. And obviously, skip the “buying popularity” route of social marketing strategy. It doesn’t work and it gets you busted…a losing combination.

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• Java in Flux: Utopia or Deuteranopia?

  - by Tori Wieldt

  What a difference a year makes, indeed. Steve Harris, Senior VP, App Server Dev, Oracle and Adam Messinger, VP, Fusion Middleware Group, Oracle presented an informative keynote at the TheServerSide Java Symposium today. With a title "Java in Flux: Utopia or Deuteranopia?" you know things are going to be interesting (see Aeon Flux if you don't get the title reference).What a YearThey started with a little background, explaining that the reactions to Oracle's acquisition of Sun (and therefore Java) one year ago varied greatly, from "Freak Out!" to "Don't Panic." From the Oracle perspective, being the steward of and key contributor to Java requires a lot of sausage making.  They admitted to Oracle's fair share of Homer Simpson-esque "D'oh" moments in the past year, which was complicated by Oracle's communication style.   "Oracle has a tradition has a saying a few things and sticking by then, in contrast to Sun who was much more open," Adam explained. "We laid out the Java roadmap and are executing on it, and we hope that speaks to our commitment."Java SEAdam talked about having a long term perspective on the Java language (20+ years), letting ideas mature in more experimental languages, then bringing them into Java. Current priorities include: JVM convergence (getting the best features of JRockit into Hotspot); support of parallel/multi-core programming, and of course, all the improvements in JDK7. The JDK7 Developer Preview is underway (please download now and report bugs!). The Oracle development team is also working on Lambda and modularity (Jigsaw) for SE 8. Less certain, but also under discussion are improvements for Java SE 9. Adam is thinking of it as a "back to basics" release. He mentioned reworking JNI, improving data integration and improved device support.Java EE To provide context about Java EE, Steve said Java EE was great at getting businesses on the internet. The success of Java EE resulted in an incredible expansion of the middleware marketplace for developers and vendors.  But with success, came more. Java EE kept piling on capabilities, but that created excess baggage.  Doing simple things was no longer so simple. That's where Java community is so valuable: "When Java EE was too complex and heavyweight, many people were happy to tell us what we were doing wrong and popularize solutions," Steve explained. Because of that feedback, the Java EE teams focused on making things simple again: POJOs and annotations, and leveraging changes in Java SE.  Steve said that "innovation doesn't happen in expert groups, it happens on the ground where developers are solving problems," and platform stewards need to pay attention and take advantage of changes that are taking place.Enter the Cloud "Developers are restless, they want cloud functionality from their own IT dept" Steve explained. With the cloud, the scope of problem has expanded to include the data center itself, with multiple tenants. To move forward, existing APIs in Java EE need to be updated to be tenant-aware, service-enabled, and EE needs to support various styles of deployment. The goal is to get all that done in Java EE 8.Adam questioned Steve about timing and schedule. "Yes, the schedule is aggressive, but it'll work" Steve said. Then Adam asked about modularization. If Java SE 8 comes out at the end of 2012, when can Java EE deliver modularization? Steve suggested that key stakeholders can come with up some pre-SE 8 agreement on how to expose the metadata about modules. He then alluded to Mark Reinhold and John Duimovich's keynote at EclipseCON next week. Stay tuned.Evil Master PlanIn conclusion, Adam finally admitted to Oracle's Evil Master Plan: 1) Invest in and improve Java SE and EE 2) Collaborate with the community 3) Broaden the marketplace for Java development. Bwaaaaaaaaahahaha! <rubs hands together>Key LinksJDK7 Developer Preview  http://jdk7.java.net/preview/Oracle Technology Network http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.htmlTheServerSide Java Symposium  http://javasymposium.techtarget.com/"Utopia or Deuteranopia?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_Flux

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• Where can you find the Oracle Applications User Experience team in the next several months?

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Applications User ExperienceNovember is one of my favorite times of year at Oracle. The blast of OpenWorld work is over, and it’s time to get down to business and start taking our messages and our work on the road out to the user groups. We’re in the middle of planning all of that right now, so we decided to provide a snapshot of where you can see us and hear about the Oracle Applications User Experience – whether it’s Fusion Applications, PeopleSoft, or what we’re planning for the next-generation of Oracle Applications.On the road with Apps UX...In December, you can find us at UKOUG 2012 in Birmingham, UK: UKOUG, UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012?December 3 – 5, 2012?ICC, Birmingham, UKIn March, we will be at Alliance 2013 in Indianapolis, and our fingers are crossed for OBUG Connect 2013 in Antwerp:? Alliance 2013March 17 - 20, 2013 ?Indianapolis, IndianaOBUG Benelux Connect 2013?March 26, 2013?Antwerp, Belgium?? In April, you will see us at COLLABORATE13 in Denver:? Collaborate13April 7 - April 11, 2013 ?Denver, Colorado?? And in June, we round out the kick-off to summer at OHUG 2013 in Dallas and Kscope13 in New Orleans:? OHUG 2013June 9 -13, 2013?Dallas, Texas ODTUG Kscope13?June 23-27, 2013 ?New Orleans, LA? The Labs & DemosAs always, a hallmark of our team is our mobile usability labs. If you haven’t seen them, they are a great way for customers and partners to get a peek at what Oracle is working on next, and a chance for you to provide your candid perspective. Based on the interest and enthusiasm from customers last year at Collaborate, we are adding more demo-stations to our user group presence in the year ahead. If you want to see some of the work we are doing first-hand but don’t have a lot of time, the demo stations are a great way to get a quick update on the latest wow-factor we are researching. I can promise that you will see whatever we think is new and interesting at the demo stations first. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Apps UX DemostationFor Applications DevelopersMore and more, I get asked the question, “How do I build an application that looks like a Fusion?” My answer is Fusion Applications Design Patterns. You can find out more about how Fusion Applications developers can leverage ADF and the user experience best practices we developed for Fusion at sessions lead by Ultan O’Broin, Director of Global User Experience, in the year ahead. Ultan O'Broin, On Fusion Design Patterns Building mobile applications are also top of mind these days. If you want to understand how Oracle is approaching this strategy, check out our session on Mobile user experience design patterns with Mobile ADF.  In many cases, this will be presented by Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager of Mobile User Experiences, and in a few cases our ever-ready traveler Ultan O’Broin will be on deck. Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, on Mobile User Experience Design PatternsApplications User ExperiencesFusion Applications continues to evolve, and you will see the new face of Fusion Applications at our executive sessions in the year ahead, which are led by vice president Jeremy Ashley or a hand-picked presenter, such as one of our Fusion User Experience Advocates.  Edward Roske, CEO InterRel Consulting & Fusion User Experience AdvocateAs always, our strategy is to take our lessons learned and spread them across the Applications product lines. A great example is the enhancements coming in the PeopleSoft user experience, which you can hear about from Harris Kravatz, Senior Manager, PeopleSoft User Experience. Fusion Applications ExtensibilityWe can’t talk about Fusion Applications without talking about how to make it look like your business. If tailoring Fusion applications is a question in your mind, and it should be, you should hit one of these sessions. These sessions will be lead by our own Killian Evers, Senior Director, Tim Dubois, User Experience Architect, and some well-trained Fusion User Experience Advocates.Find out moreIf you want to stay on top of where and when we will be, you can always sign up for our newsletter or check out the events page of usableapps.

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• Rails paginate array items one-by-one instead of page-by-page

  - by hnovick

  Hi Guys, I have a group of assets, let's call them "practitioners". I'm displaying these practitioners in the header of a calendar interface. There are 7 columns to the calendar. 7 columns = 7 practitioners per view/page. Right now: if the first page shows you practitioners 1-7, when you go the next page you will see practitioners 8-15, next page 16-23, etc. etc. i am wondering how to page the practitioners so that if the first page shows you practitioners 1-7, the next page will show you practitioners 2-8, then 3-9, etc. etc. i would greatly appreciate any help you can offer. here is the rails code i am working with. best regards, harris novick # get the default sort order sort_order = RESOURCE_SORT_ORDER # if we've been given asset ids, start our list with them unless params[:asset_ids].blank? params[:asset_ids] = params[:asset_ids].values unless params[:asset_ids].is_a?(Array) sort_order = "#{params[:asset_ids].collect{|id| "service_provider_resources.id = #{id} DESC"}.join(",")}, #{sort_order}" end @asset_set = @provider.active_resources(:include => {:active_services => :latest_approved_version}).paginate( :per_page => RESOURCES_IN_DAY_VIEW, :page => params[:page], :order => sort_order )

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• How can I change how OS X's 'say' command pronounces a word?

  - by jwhitlock

  OS X's say command is useful for some tasks (such as Skype's 'notify me when a contact comes online), but it is pronouncing some names incorrectly. Is there a way to teach say to pronounce a word differently? For example, try: say "Hi, Joel Spolsky" The 'ol' sounds like 'ball' rather than 'old'. I'd like to add an exception that say "Pronounce Spolsky like this", rather than try to teach new linguistic rules. I bet there is a way since it can pronounce "iphone" as Apple wants. Update - After some research, here's what I've learned: Text-to-speech is split between turning the text to phonemes, and then the phonemes are turned into audio using a voice. Changing the voice doesn't effect the phonemes. The Speech Synthesis Manager has some functions for turning text to phonemes, and a method for registering a speech dictionary that will add new text-phoneme maps. However, Apple's speech dictionary must be in a binary form - I didn't find any plist XML. Using dtrace while running say, I found some interesting files opened in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SpeechDictionary.framework/Resources. This is probably the speech dictionary, but they are all binary, except for Homophones, which is XML. Adding entries to Homophones does nothing - it is probably used in speech-to-text. They are also code signed by Apple - changing them may prevent some programs from working. PrefixDictionary CartNames CartLite SymbolDictionary Homophones There are ways to add text versions of application interface elements so VoiceOver works, a lot of which a developer gets for free, but there are tricky bits. The standard here appears to be to use a phonetic spelling as needed. My guesses are: say is a light layer of code on top of the Speech Synthesis Manager. It would be easy for the Apple devs to add a command line option to take the path to a speech dictionary plist for alternate phoneme mapping, but they didn't. It may be a useful open-source project to write a better say. Skype probably uses Speech Synthesis Manager directly, leaving no hooks to change the way my friend's names are pronounced, other than spelling them phonetically, which is silly. The easiest way to make a command line version of say is how JRobert suggested. Here's my quick implementation, using Doug Harris's spelling suggestion: #!/bin/sh echo $@ | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sed "s/spolsky/spowlsky/g" | /usr/bin/say Finally, some fun command line stuff: # Apple is weird sqlite3 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SpeechDictionary.framework/Resources/Tuples .dump # Get too much information about what files are being opened sudo dtrace -n 'syscall::open*:entry { printf("%s %s",execname,copyinstr(arg0)); }' # Just fun say -v bad "Joel Spolsky Spolsky Spolsky Spolsky Spolsky, Joel Spolsky Spolsky Spolsky Spolsky Spolsky" echo "scale=1000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l | say

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• The Oracle Retail Week Awards - in review

  - by user801960

  The Oracle Retail Week Awards 2012 were another great success, building on the legacy of previous award ceremonies. Over 1,600 of the UK's top retailers gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel and many of Europe's top retail leaders attended the prestigious Oracle Retail VIP Reception in the Grosvenor House Hotel's Red Bar. Over the years the Oracle Retail Week Awards have become a rallying point for the morale of the retail industry, and each nominated retailer served as a demonstration that the industry is fighting fit. It was an honour to speak to so many figureheads of UK - and global - retail. All of us at Oracle Retail would like to congratulate both the winners and the nominees for the awards. Retail is a cornerstone of the economy and it was inspiring to see so many outstanding demonstrations of innovation and dedication in the entries. Winners 2012   The Market Force Customer Service Initiative of the Year Winner: Dixons Retail: Knowhow Highly Commended: Hughes Electrical: Digital Switchover     The Deloitte Employer of the Year Winner: Morrisons     Growing Retailer of the Year Winner: Hallett Retail - The Concessions People Highly Commended: Blue Inc     The TCC Marketing/Advertising Campaign of the Year Winner: Sainsbury's: Feed your Family for £50     The Brandbank Multichannel Retailer of the Year Winner: Debenhams Highly Commended: Halfords     The Ashton Partnership Product Innovation of the Year Winner: Argos: Chad Valley Highly Commended: Halfords: Private label bikes     The RR Donnelley Pure-play Online Retailer of the Year Winner: Wiggle     The Hitachi Consulting Responsible Retailer of the Year Winner: B&Q: One Planet Home     The CA Technologies Retail Technology Initiative of the Year Winner: Oasis: Argyll Street flagship launch with iPad PoS     The Premier Tax Free Speciality Retailer of the Year Winner: Holland & Barrett     Store Design of the Year Winner: Next Home and Garden, Shoreham, Sussex Highly Commended: Dixons Retail, Black concept store, Birmingham Bullring     Store Manager of the Year Winner: Ian Allcock, Homebase, Aylesford Highly Commended: Darren Parfitt, Boots UK, Melton Mowbray Health Centre     The Wates Retail Destination of the Year Winner: Westfield, Stratford     The AlixPartners Emerging Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Catriona Marshall, HobbyCraft, Chief Executive     The Wipro Retail International Retailer of the Year Winner: Apple     The Clarity Search Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher     The Oracle Retailer of the Year Winner: Burberry     Outstanding Contribution to Retail Winner: Lord Harris of Peckham     Oracle Retail and "Your Experience Platform" Technology is the key to providing that differentiated retail experience. More specifically, it is what we at Oracle call ‘the experience platform’ - a set of integrated, cross-channel business technology solutions, selected and operated by a retail business and IT team, and deployed in accordance with that organisation’s individual strategy and processes. This business systems architecture simultaneously: Connects customer interactions across all channels and touchpoints, and every customer lifecycle phase to provide a differentiated customer experience that meets consumers’ needs and expectations. Delivers actionable insight that enables smarter decisions in planning, forecasting, merchandising, supply chain management, marketing, etc; Optimises operations to align every aspect of the retail business to gain efficiencies and economies, to align KPIs to eliminate strategic conflicts, and at the same time be working in support of customer priorities.   Working in unison, these three goals not only help retailers to successfully navigate the challenges of today but also to focus on delivering that personalised customer experience based on differentiated products, pricing, services and interactions that will help you to gain market share and grow sales.  

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• Oracle RightNow CX for Good Customer Experiences

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Oracle RightNow CX is all about the customer experience, it’s about understanding what drives a good interaction and it’s about delivering a solution which works for our customers and by extension, their customers. One of the early guiding principles of Oracle RightNow was an 8-point strategy to providing good customer experiences. Establish a knowledge foundation Empowering the customer Empower employees Offer multi-channel choice Listen to the customer Design seamless experiences Engage proactively Measure and improve continuously The application suite provides all of the tools necessary to deliver a rewarding, repeatable and measurable relationship between business and customer. The Knowledge Authoring tool provides gap analysis, WYSIWIG editing (and includes HTML rich content for non-developers), multi-level categorisation, permission based publishing and Web self-service publishing. Oracle RightNow Customer Portal, is a complete web application framework that enables businesses to control their own end-user page branding experience, which in turn will allow customers to self-serve. The Contact Centre Experience Designer builds a combination of workspaces, agent scripting and guided assistances into a Desktop Workflow. These present an agent with the tools they need, at the time they need them, providing even the newest and least experienced advisors with consistently accurate and efficient information, whilst guiding them through the complexities of internal business processes. Oracle RightNow provides access points for customers to feedback about specific knowledge articles or about the support site in general. The system will generate ‘incidents’ based on the scoring of the comments submitted. This makes it easy to view and respond to customer feedback. It is vital, more now than ever, not to under-estimate the power of the social web – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – they have the ability to cause untold amounts of damage to businesses with a single post – witness musician Dave Carroll and his protest song on YouTube, posted in response to poor customer services from an American airline. The first day saw 150,000 views and is currently at 12,011,375. The Times reported that within 4 days of the post, the airline’s stock price fell by 10 percent, which represented a cost to shareholders of $180 million dollars. It is a universally acknowledged fact, that when customers are unhappy, they will not come back, and, generally speaking, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. The idea that customer loyalty can be regained by using social media channels was the subject of a 2011 Survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey discovered that 68% of customers who posted a negative review about a holiday on a social networking site received a response from the business. It further found that 33% subsequently posted a positive review and 34% removed the original negative review. Cloud Monitor provides the perfect mechanism for seeing what is being said about a business on public Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube posts; it allows agents to respond proactively – either by creating an Oracle RightNow incident or by using the same channel as the original post. This leaves step 8 – Measuring and Improving: How does a business know whether it’s doing the right thing? How does it know if its customers are happy? How does it know if its staff are being productive? How does it know if its staff are being effective? Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease. Oracle RightNow believes strongly in the customer owning their solution, and to provide the best foundation for success, Oracle University can give you the RightNow knowledge and skills you need. This is a selection of the courses offered: RightNow Customer Service Administration Rel 12.02 (3 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course familiarises users with the tasks and concepts needed to configure and maintain their system. RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course introduces basic CP structure and how to make changes to the look, feel and behaviour of their self-service pages RightNow Analytics Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand (Release 11.11 is available as In Class and Live Virtual Class) This course equips users with the skills necessary to understand data supplied by standard reports and to create custom reports RightNow Integration and Customization For Developers Rel 12.02 (5-days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course is for experienced web developers and offers an introduction to Add-In development using the Desktop Add-In Framework and introduces the core knowledge that developers need to begin integrating Oracle RightNow CX with other systems A full list of courses offered can be found on the Oracle University website. For more information and course dates please get in contact with your local Oracle University team. On top of the Service components, the suite also provides marketing tools, complex survey creation and tracking and sales functionality. I’m a fan of the application, and I think I’ve made that clear: It’s completely geared up to providing customers with support at point of need. It can be configured to meet even the most stringent of business requirements. Oracle RightNow is passionate about, and committed to, providing the best customer experience possible. Oracle RightNow CX is the application that makes it possible. About the Author: Sarah Anderson worked for RightNow for 4 years in both in both a consulting and training delivery capacity. She is now a Senior Instructor with Oracle University, delivering the following Oracle RightNow courses: RightNow Customer Service Administration RightNow Analytics RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration RightNow Marketing and Feedback

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• Mark Hurd on the Customer Revolution: Oracle's Top 10 Insights

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Reprint of an article from Forbes Businesses that fail to focus on customer experience will hear a giant sucking sound from their vanishing profitability. Because in today’s dynamic global marketplace, consumers now hold the power in the buyer-seller equation, and sellers need to revamp their strategy for this new world order. The ability to relentlessly deliver connected, personalized and rewarding customer experiences is rapidly becoming one of the primary sources of competitive advantage in today’s dynamic global marketplace. And the inability or unwillingness to realize that the customer is a company’s most important asset will lead, inevitably, to decline and failure. Welcome to the lifecycle of customer experience, in which consumers explore, engage, shop, buy, ask, compare, complain, socialize, exchange, and more across multiple channels with the unconditional expectation that each of those interactions will be completed in an efficient and personalized manner however, wherever, and whenever the customer wants. While many niche companies are offering point solutions within that sprawling and complex spectrum of needs and requirements, businesses looking to deliver superb customer experiences are still left having to do multiple product evaluations, multiple contract negotiations, multiple test projects, multiple deployments, and–perhaps most annoying of all–multiple and never-ending integration projects to string together all those niche products from all those niche vendors. With its new suite of customer-experience solutions, Oracle believes it can help companies unravel these challenges and move at the speed of their customers, anticipating their needs and desires and creating enduring and profitable relationships. Those solutions span the full range of marketing, selling, commerce, service, listening/insights, and social and collaboration tools for employees. When Oracle launched its suite of Customer Experience solutions at a recent event in New York City, president Mark Hurd analyzed the customer experience revolution taking place and presented Oracle’s strategy for empowering companies to capitalize on this important market shift. From Hurd’s presentation and related materials, I’ve extracted a list of Hurd’s Top 10 Insights into the Customer Revolution. 1. Please Don’t Feed the Competitor’s Pipeline!After enduring a poor experience, 89% of consumers say they would immediately take their business to your competitor. (Except where noted, the source for these findings is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report including a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive.) 2. The Addressable Market Is Massive. Only 1% of consumers say their expectations were always met by their actual experiences. 3. They’re Willing to Pay More! In return for a great experience, 86% of consumers say they’ll pay up to 25% more. 4. The Social Media Microphone Is Always Live. After suffering through a poor experience, more than 25% of consumers said they posted a negative comment on Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites. Conversely, of those consumers who got a response after complaining, 22% posted positive comments about the company. 5.  The New Deal Is Never Done: Embrace the Entire Customer Lifecycle. An appropriately active and engaged relationship, says Hurd, extends across every step of the entire processs: need, research, select, purchase, receive, use, maintain, and recommend. 6. The 360-Degree Commitment. Customers want to do business with companies that actively and openly demonstrate the desire to establish strong and seamless connections across employees, the company, and the customer, says research firm Temkin Group in its report called “The CX Competencies.” 7. Understand the Emotional Drivers Behind Brand Love. What makes consumers fall in love with a brand? Among the top factors are friendly employees and customer reps (73%), easy access to information and support (55%), and personalized experiences, such as when companies know precisely what products or services customers have purchased in the past and what issues those customers have raised (36%). 8.  The Importance of Immediate Action. You’ve got one week to respond–and then the opportunity’s lost. If your company needs more than a week to answer a prospect’s question or request, most of those prospects will terminate the relationship. 9.  Want More Revenue, Less Churn, and More Referrals? Then improve the overall customer experience: Forrester’s research says that approach put an extra $900 million in the pockets of wireless service providers, $800 million for hotels, and $400 million for airlines. 10. The Formula for CX Success.  Hurd says it includes three elegantly interlaced factors: Connected Engagement, to personalize the experience; Actionable Insight, to maximize the engagement; and Optimized Execution, to deliver on the promise of value. RECOMMENDED READING: The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 Wal-Mart, Amazon, eBay: Who’s the Speed King of Retail? Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats Memo to Marc Benioff: Social Is a Tool, Not an App

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• Social Engagement: One Size Doesn't Fit Anyone

  - by Mike Stiles

  The key to achieving meaningful social engagement is to know who you’re talking to, know what they like, and consistently deliver that kind of material to them. Every magazine for women knows this. When you read the article titles promoted on their covers, there’s no mistaking for whom that magazine is intended. And yet, confusion still reigns at many brands as to exactly whom they want to talk to, what those people want to hear, and what kind of content they should be creating for them. In most instances, the root problem is brands want to be all things to all people. Their target audience…the world! Good luck with that. It’s 2012, the age of aggregation and custom content delivery. To cope with the modern day barrage of information, people have constructed technological filters so that content they regard as being “for them” is mostly what gets through. Even if your brand is for men and women, young and old, you may want to consider social properties that divide men from women, and young from old. Yes, a man might find something in a women’s magazine that interests him. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to subscribe to it, or buy even one issue. In fact he’ll probably never see the article he’d otherwise be interested in, because in his mind, “This isn’t for me.” It wasn’t packaged for him. News Flash: men and women are different. So it’s a tall order to craft your Facebook Page or Twitter handle to simultaneously exude the motivators for both. The Harris Interactive study “2012 Connecting and Communicating Online: State of Social Media” sheds light on the differing social behaviors and drivers. -65% of women (vs. 59% of men) stay glued to social because they don’t want to miss anything. -25% of women check social when they wake up, before they check email. Only 18% of men check social before e-mail. -95% of women surveyed belong to Facebook vs. 86% of men. -67% of women log in to Facebook once a day or more vs. 54% of men. -Conventional wisdom is Pinterest is mostly a woman-thing, right? That may be true for viewing, but not true for sharing. Men are actually more likely to share on Pinterest than women, 23% to 10%. -The sharing divide extends to YouTube. 68% of women use it mainly for consumption, as opposed to 52% of men. -Women are as likely to have a Twitter account as men, but they’re much less likely to check it often. 54% of women check it once a week compared to 2/3 of men. Obviously, there are some takeaways from this depending on your target. Women don’t want to miss out on anything, so serialized content might be a good idea, right? Promotional posts that lead to a big payoff could keep them hooked. Posts for women might be better served first thing in the morning. If sharing is your goal, maybe male-targeted content is more likely to get those desired shares. And maybe Twitter is a better place to aim your male-targeted content than Facebook. Some grocery stores started experimenting with male-only aisles. The results have been impressive. Why? Because while it’s true men were finding those same items in the store just fine before, now something has been created just for them. They have a place in the store where they belong. Each brand’s strategy and targets are going to differ. The point is…know who you’re talking to, know how they behave, know what they like, and deliver content using any number of social relationship management targeting tools that meets their expectations. If, however, you’re committed to a one-size-fits-all, “our content is for everybody” strategy (or even worse, a “this is what we want to put out and we expect everybody to love it” strategy), your content will miss the mark for more often than it hits. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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• World Backup Day

  - by red(at)work

  Here at Red Gate Towers, the SQL Backup development team have been hunkered down in their shed for the last few months, with the toolbox, blowtorch and chamois leather out, upgrading SQL Backup. When we started, autumn leaves were falling. Now we're about to finish, spring flowers are budding. If not quite a gleaming new machine, at the very least a familiar, reliable engine with some shiny new bits on it will trundle magnificently out of the workshop. One of the interesting things I've noticed about working on software development teams is that the team is together for so long 'implementing' stuff - designing, coding, testing, fixing bugs and so on - that you occasionally forget why you're doing what you're doing. Doubt creeps in. It feels like a long time since we launched this project in a fanfare of optimism and enthusiasm, and all that clarity of purpose and mission "yee-haw" has dissipated with the daily pressures of development. Every now and again, we look up from our bunker and notice all those thousands of users out there, with their different configurations and working practices and each with their own set of problems and requirements, and we ask ourselves "does anyone care about what we're doing?" Has the world moved on while we've been busy? Could we have been doing something more useful with the time and talent of all these excellent people we've assembled? In truth, you can research and test and validate all you like, but you never really know if you've done the right thing (or at least, something valuable for some users) until you release. All projects suffer this insecurity. If they don't, maybe you're not worrying enough about what you're building. The two enemies of software development are certainty and complacency. Oh, and of course, rival teams with Nerf guns. The goal of SQL Backup 7 is to make it so easy to schedule regular restores of your backups that you have no excuse not to. Why schedule a restore? Because your data is not as good as your last backup. It's only as good as your last successful restore. If you're not checking your backups by restoring them and running an integrity check on the database, you're only doing half the job. It seems that most DBAs know that this is best practice, but it can be tricky and time-consuming to set up, so it's one of those tasks that can get forgotten in the midst all the other demands on their time. Sometimes, they're just too busy firefighting. But if it was simple to do? That was our inspiration for SQL Backup 7. So it was heartening to read Brent Ozar's blog post the other day about World Backup Day. To be honest, I'd never heard of World Backup Day (Talk Like a Pirate Day, yes, but not this one); however, its emphasis on not just backing up your data but checking the validity of those backups was exactly the same message we had in mind when building SQL Backup 7. It's printed on a piece of A3 above our planning board - "Make backup verification so easy to do that no DBA has an excuse for not doing it" It's the missing piece that completes the puzzle. Simple idea, great concept, useful feature, but, as it turned out, far from straightforward to implement. The problem is the future. As Marty McFly discovered over the course of three movies, the future is uncertain and hard to predict - so when you are scheduling a restore to take place an hour, day, week or month after the backup, there are all kinds of questions that you wouldn't normally have to consider. Where will this backup live? Will it even exist at the time? Will it be split into multiple files? What will the file names be? Will it be encrypted? What files should it be restored to? SQL Backup needs to know what to expect at the time the restore job is actually run. Of course, a DBA will know the answer to all these questions, but to deliver the whole point of version 7, we wanted to make it easy for them to input that information into SQL Backup. We think we've done that. When you create your scheduled backup job, there is now an option to create a "reminder" to follow it up with a scheduled restore to verify the resulting backups. Actually, it's much more than a reminder, as it stores all the relevant data so you can click it and pre-populate the wizard with all the right settings to set up your verification restores. Simple. But, what do you think? We'd love you to try it. Post by Brian Harris

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• Deduping your redundancies

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  Robin Harris of Storagemojo pointed to an interesting article about about deduplication and it's impact to the resiliency of your data against data corruption on ACM Queue. The problem in short: A considerable number of filesystems store important metadata at multiple locations. For example the ZFS rootblock is copied to three locations. Other filesystems have similar provisions to protect their metadata. However you can easily proof, that the rootblock pointer in the uberblock of ZFS for example is pointing to blocks with absolutely equal content in all three locatition (with zdb -uu and zdb -r). It has to be that way, because they are protected by the same checksum. A number of devices offer block level dedup, either as an option or as part of their inner workings. However when you store three identical blocks on them and the devices does block level dedup internally, the device may just deduplicated your redundant metadata to a block stored just once that is stored on the non-voilatile storage. When this block is corrupted, you have essentially three corrupted copies. Three hit with one bullet. This is indeed an interesting problem: A device doing deduplication doesn't know if a block is important or just a datablock. This is the reason why I like deduplication like it's done in ZFS. It's an integrated part and so important parts don't get deduplicated away. A disk accessed by a block level interface doesn't know anything about the importance of a block. A metadata block is nothing different to it's inner mechanism than a normal data block because there is no way to tell that this is important and that those redundancies aren't allowed to fall prey to some clever deduplication mechanism. Robin talks about this in regard of the Sandforce disk controllers who use a kind of dedup to reduce some of the nasty effects of writing data to flash, but the problem is much broader. However this is relevant whenever you are using a device with block level deduplication. It's just the point that you have to activate it for most implementation by command, whereas certain devices do this by default or by design and you don't know about it. However I'm not perfectly sure about that ? given that storage administration and server administration are often different groups with different business objectives I would ask your storage guys if they have activated dedup without telling somebody elase on their boxes in order to speak less often with the storage sales rep. The problem is even more interesting with ZFS. You may use ditto blocks to protect important data to store multiple copies of data in the pool to increase redundancy, even when your pool just consists out of one disk or just a striped set of disk. However when your device is doing dedup internally it may remove your redundancy before it hits the nonvolatile storage. You've won nothing. Just spend your disk quota on the the LUNs in the SAN and you make your disk admin happy because of the good dedup ratio However you can just fall in this specific "deduped ditto block"trap when your pool just consists out of a single device, because ZFS writes ditto blocks on different disks, when there is more than just one disk. Yet another reason why you should spend some extra-thought when putting your zpool on a single LUN, especially when the LUN is sliced and dices out of a large heap of storage devices by a storage controller. However I have one problem with the articles and their specific mention of ZFS: You can just hit by this problem when you are using the deduplicating device for the pool. However in the specifically mentioned case of SSD this isn't the usecase. Most implementations of SSD in conjunction with ZFS are hybrid storage pools and so rotating rust disk is used as pool and SSD are used as L2ARC/sZIL. And there it simply doesn't matter: When you really have to resort to the sZIL (your system went down, it doesn't matter of one block or several blocks are corrupt, you have to fail back to the last known good transaction group the device. On the other side, when a block in L2ARC is corrupt, you simply read it from the pool and in HSP implementations this is the already mentioned rust. In conjunction with ZFS this is more interesting when using a storage array, that is capable to do dedup and where you use LUNs for your pool. However as mentioned before, on those devices it's a user made decision to do so, and so it's less probable that you deduplicating your redundancies. Other filesystems lacking acapability similar to hybrid storage pools are more "haunted" by this problem of SSD using dedup-like mechanisms internally, because those filesystem really store the data on the the SSD instead of using it just as accelerating devices. However at the end Robin is correct: It's jet another point why protecting your data by creating redundancies by dispersing it several disks (by mirror or parity RAIDs) is really important. No dedup mechanism inside a device can dedup away your redundancy when you write it to a totally different and indepenent device.

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• WPF DataGrid, Help with Binding to a List<X> where each X has a Dictionary<Y,object> property.

  - by panamack

  I'm building an application which helps someone manage an event and works with data originating from Excel. I want to use the WPF Toolkit DataGrid to display the incoming data but can't guarantee how many Columns there are going to be or what information they will contain. I'd like to have an Info class that stores column information and have each Visitor at my Event own a Dictionary that uses shared references to Info objects for the keys. Here's the general gist: public class Info{ public string Name{get;set;} public int InfoType{get;set;} } public class Visitor{ public Dictionary<Info,object> VisitorInfo {get;set;} } public class Event{ public List<Visitor> Visitors{get;set;} public Event(){ Info i1 = new Info(){ Name = "ID", InfoType = 0};// type 0 for an id Info i2 = new Info(){ Name = "Name", InfoType = 1};// type 1 for a string Info i3 = new Info(){ Name = "City", InfoType = 1}; Visitor v1 = new Visitor(); v1.VisitorInfo.Add(i1, 0); v1.VisitorInfo.Add(i2, "Foo Harris"); v1.VisitorInfo.Add(i3, "Barsville"); Visitor v2 = new Visitor(); ... this.Visitors.Add(v1); this.Visitors.Add(v2); ... } } XAML: <!-- Window1.xaml --> ... <local:Event x:Key="MyEvent"/> ... <wpftk:DataGrid DataContext="{StaticResource MyEvent}" ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Visitors}" /> Disappointingly, DataGrid just sees a collection of Visitors each having a VisitorInfo property and displays one column called VisitorInfo with the string "(Collection)" once for each Visitor. As a workaround I've created a ListTVisitorToDataTableConverter that maps Infos to DataColumns and Visitors to DataRows and used it like this: <wpftk:DataGrid DataContext="{StaticResource Event}" ItemsSource{Binding Path=Visitors, Converter={StaticResource MySmellyListTVisitorToDataTableConverter}}" /> I don't think this is good though, I haven't started trying to convert back yet which I guess I'll need to do if I want to be able to edit any data! How can I do better? Thanks.

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• How to group using XSLT

  - by AdRock

  I'm having trouble grouping a set of nodes. I've found an article that does work with grouping and i have tested it and it works on a small test stylesheet i have I now need to use it in my stylesheet where I only want to select node sets that have a specific value. What I want to do in my stylesheet is select all users who have a userlevel of 2 then to group them by the volunteer region. What happens at the minute is that it gets the right amount of users with userlevel 2 but doesn't print them. It just repeats the first user in the xml file. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:key name="volunteers-by-region" match="volunteer" use="region" /> <xsl:template name="hoo" match="/"> <html> <head> <title>Registered Volunteers</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="volunteer.css" /> </head> <body> <h1>Registered Volunteers</h1> <h3>Ordered by the username ascending</h3> <xsl:for-each select="folktask/member[user/account/userlevel='2']"> <xsl:for-each select="volunteer[count(. | key('volunteers-by-region', region)[1]) = 1]"> <xsl:sort select="region" /> <xsl:for-each select="key('volunteers-by-region', region)"> <xsl:sort select="folktask/member/user/personal/name" /> <div class="userdiv"> <xsl:call-template name="member_userid"> <xsl:with-param name="myid" select="/folktask/member/user/@id" /> </xsl:call-template> <xsl:call-template name="volunteer_volid"> <xsl:with-param name="volid" select="/folktask/member/volunteer/@id" /> </xsl:call-template> <xsl:call-template name="volunteer_role"> <xsl:with-param name="volrole" select="/folktask/member/volunteer/roles" /> </xsl:call-template> <xsl:call-template name="volunteer_region"> <xsl:with-param name="volloc" select="/folktask/member/volunteer/region" /> </xsl:call-template> </div> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:for-each> <xsl:if test="position()=last()"> <div class="count"><h2>Total number of volunteers: <xsl:value-of select="count(/folktask/member/user/account/userlevel[text()=2])"/></h2></div> </xsl:if> </body> </html> </xsl:template> <xsl:template name="member_userid"> <xsl:param name="myid" select="'Not Available'" /> <div class="heading bold"><h2>USER ID: <xsl:value-of select="$myid" /></h2></div> </xsl:template> <xsl:template name="volunteer_volid"> <xsl:param name="volid" select="'Not Available'" /> <div class="heading2 bold"><h2>VOLUNTEER ID: <xsl:value-of select="$volid" /></h2></div> </xsl:template> <xsl:template name="volunteer_role"> <xsl:param name="volrole" select="'Not Available'" /> <div class="small bold">ROLES:</div> <div class="large"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="string-length($volrole)!=0"> <xsl:value-of select="$volrole" /> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:text> </xsl:text> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </div> </xsl:template> <xsl:template name="volunteer_region"> <xsl:param name="volloc" select="'Not Available'" /> <div class="small bold">REGION:</div> <div class="large"><xsl:value-of select="$volloc" /></div> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> here is my full xml file <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="volunteers.xsl"?> <folktask xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xs:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="folktask.xsd"> <member> <user id="1"> <personal> <name>Abbie Hunt</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>108 Access Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Wells</city> <county>Somerset</county> <postcode>BA5 8GH</postcode> <telephone>01528927616</telephone> <mobile>07085252492</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>AdRock</username> <password>269eb625e2f0cf6fae9a29434c12a89f</password> <userlevel>4</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="1"> <roles></roles> <region>South West</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="2"> <personal> <name>Aidan Harris</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>103 Aiken Street</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Chichester</city> <county>Sussex</county> <postcode>PO19 4DS</postcode> <telephone>01905149894</telephone> <mobile>07784467941</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>AmbientExpert</username> <password>8e64214160e9dd14ae2a6d9f700004a6</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="2"> <roles>Van Driver,gas Fitter</roles> <region>South Central</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="3"> <personal> <name>Skye Saunders</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>31 Anns Court</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Cirencester</city> <county>Gloucestershire</county> <postcode>GL7 1JG</postcode> <telephone>01958303514</telephone> <mobile>07260491667</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>BigUndecided</username> <password>ea297847f80e046ca24a8621f4068594</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="3"> <roles>Scaffold Erector</roles> <region>South West</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="4"> <personal> <name>Connor Lawson</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>12 Ash Way</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Swindon</city> <county>Wiltshire</county> <postcode>SN3 6GS</postcode> <telephone>01791928119</telephone> <mobile>07338695664</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>iTuneStinker</username> <password>3a1f5fda21a07bfff20c41272bae7192</password> <userlevel>3</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <festival id="1"> <event> <eventname>Oxford Folk Festival</eventname> <url>http://www.oxfordfolkfestival.com/</url> <datefrom>2010-04-07</datefrom> <dateto>2010-04-09</dateto> <location>Oxford</location> <eventpostcode>OX1 9BE</eventpostcode> <additional>Oxford Folk Festival is going into it's third year in 2006. As well as needing volunteers to steward for the event on the weekend itself, we would be delighted to hear from people willing to help in year round festival work such as stuffing envelopes for mailings, poster and leaflet distribution, and stewarding duties at festival pre-events.</additional> <coords> <lat>51.735640</lat> <lng>-1.276136</lng> </coords> </event> <contact> <conname>Stuart Vincent</conname> <conaddress1>P.O. Box 642</conaddress1> <conaddress2></conaddress2> <concity>Oxford</concity> <concounty>Bedfordshire</concounty> <conpostcode>OX1 3BY</conpostcode> <contelephone>01865 79073</contelephone> <conmobile></conmobile> <fax></fax> <conemail>[email protected]</conemail> </contact> </festival> </member> <member> <user id="5"> <personal> <name>Lewis King</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>67 Arbors Way</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Sherborne</city> <county>Dorset</county> <postcode>DT9 0GS</postcode> <telephone>01446139701</telephone> <mobile>07292614033</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>Runninglife</username> <password>98fab0a27c34ddb2b0618bc184d4331d</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="4"> <roles>Van Driver</roles> <region>South West</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="6"> <personal> <name>Cameron Lee</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>77 Arrington Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Solihull</city> <county>Warwickshire</county> <postcode>B90 6FG</postcode> <telephone>01435158624</telephone> <mobile>07789503179</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>love2Mixer</username> <password>1df752d54876928639cea07ce036a9c0</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="5"> <roles>Fire Warden</roles> <region>Midlands</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="7"> <personal> <name>Lexie Dean</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>38 Bloomfield Court</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Windermere</city> <county>Westmorland</county> <postcode>LA23 8BM</postcode> <telephone>01781207188</telephone> <mobile>07127461231</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>MailNetworker</username> <password>0e070701839e612bf46af4421db4f44b</password> <userlevel>3</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <festival id="2"> <event> <eventname>Middlewich Folk And Boat Festival</eventname> <url>http://midfest.org.uk/mfab/</url> <datefrom>2010-06-16</datefrom> <dateto>2010-06-18</dateto> <location>Middlewich</location> <eventpostcode>CW10 9BX</eventpostcode> <additional>We welcome stewards staying on campsite or boats.</additional> <coords> <lat>53.190562</lat> <lng>-2.444926</lng> </coords> </event> <contact> <conname>Festival Committee</conname> <conaddress1>PO Box 141</conaddress1> <conaddress2></conaddress2> <concity>Winsford</concity> <concounty>Cheshire</concounty> <conpostcode>CW10 9WB</conpostcode> <contelephone>07092 39050</contelephone> <conmobile>07092 39050</conmobile> <fax></fax> <conemail>[email protected]</conemail> </contact> </festival> </member> <member> <user id="8"> <personal> <name>Liam Chapman</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>99 Black Water Drive</address1> <address2></address2> <city>St.Austell</city> <county>Cornwall</county> <postcode>PL25 3GF</postcode> <telephone>01835629418</telephone> <mobile>07695179069</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>GreenWimp</username> <password>1fe3df99a841dc4f723d21af89e0990f</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="9"> <personal> <name>Brandon Harrison</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>41 Arlington Way</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Dorchester</city> <county>Dorset</county> <postcode>DT1 3JS</postcode> <telephone>01293626735</telephone> <mobile>07277145760</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>LovelyStar</username> <password>8b53b66f323aa5e6a083edb4fd44456b</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="10"> <personal> <name>Samuel Young</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>102 Bailey Hill Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Wolverhampton</city> <county>Staffordshire</county> <postcode>WV7 8HS</postcode> <telephone>01594531382</telephone> <mobile>07544663654</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>GuruSassy</username> <password>00da02da6c143c3d136bf60b8bfcf43e</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="6"> <roles>Fire Warden</roles> <region>Midlands</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="11"> <personal> <name>Alexander Harris</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>93 Beguine Drive</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Winchester</city> <county>Hampshire</county> <postcode>S23 2FD</postcode> <telephone>01452496582</telephone> <mobile>07353867291</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>GuitarExpert</username> <password>0102ad3740028e155925e9918ead3bde</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="7"> <roles>Scaffold Erector</roles> <region>North East</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="12"> <personal> <name>Tyler Mcdonald</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>44 Baker Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Bromley</city> <county>Kent</county> <postcode>BR1 2GD</postcode> <telephone>01918704546</telephone> <mobile>07314062451</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>WildWish</username> <password>073220bb5e9a12ad202bb7d94dcc86f7</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="13"> <personal> <name>Skye Mason</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>56 Cedar Creek Church Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Bracknell</city> <county>Berkshire</county> <postcode>RG12 1AQ</postcode> <telephone>01787607618</telephone> <mobile>07540218868</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>PizzaDork</username> <password>74c54937ee7051ee7f4ebc11296ed531</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="14"> <personal> <name>Maryam Rose</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>98 Baptist Circle</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Newbury</city> <county>Berkshire</county> <postcode>RG14 8DF</postcode> <telephone>01691317999</telephone> <mobile>07212477154</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>SexTech</username> <password>f1c21f9f1e999da97d7dc460bb876fcf</password> <userlevel>3</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <festival id="3"> <event> <eventname>Birdsedge Village Festival</eventname> <url>http://www.birdsedge.co.uk/</url> <datefrom>2010-07-08</datefrom> <dateto>2010-07-09</dateto> <location>Birdsedge</location> <eventpostcode>HD8 8XT</eventpostcode> <additional></additional> <coords> <lat>53.565644</lat> <lng>-1.696196</lng> </coords> </event> <contact> <conname>Jacey Bedford</conname> <conaddress1>Penistone Road</conaddress1> <conaddress2>Birdsedge</conaddress2> <concity>Huddersfield</concity> <concounty>West Yorkshire</concounty> <conpostcode>HD8 8XT</conpostcode> <contelephone>01484 60623</contelephone> <conmobile></conmobile> <fax></fax> <conemail>[email protected]</conemail> </contact> </festival> </member> <member> <user id="15"> <personal> <name>Lexie Rogers</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>38 Bishop Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Matlock</city> <county>Derbyshire</county> <postcode>DE4 1BX</postcode> <telephone>01961168823</telephone> <mobile>07170855351</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>ShipBurglar</username> <password>cc190488a95667cb117e20bc6c7c330e</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="8"> <roles>Gas Fitter</roles> <region>Midlands</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="16"> <personal> <name>Noah Parker</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>112 Canty Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Keswick</city> <county>Cumberland</county> <postcode>CA12 4TR</postcode> <telephone>01931272522</telephone> <mobile>07610026576</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>AwsomeMoon</username> <password>50b770539bdf08543f15778fc7a6f188</password> <userlevel>2</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <volunteer id="9"> <roles>Van Driver</roles> <region>North West</region> </volunteer> </member> <member> <user id="17"> <personal> <name>Elliot Mitchell</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>102 Brown Loop</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Grimsby</city> <county>Lincolnshire</county> <postcode>OX16 4QP</postcode> <telephone>01212971319</telephone> <mobile>07544663654</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>msBasher</username> <password>c38fad85badcdff6e3559ef38656305d</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="18"> <personal> <name>Scarlett Rose</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>93 Cedar Lane</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Stourbridge</city> <county>Warminster</county> <postcode>DY8 4NX</postcode> <telephone>01537477435</telephone> <mobile>07353867291</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>MakeupWimp</username> <password>16a9b7910fc34304c1d1a6a1b0c31502</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="19"> <personal> <name>Katie Butler</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>44 Boulder Crest Road</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Bungay</city> <county>Suffolk</county> <postcode>NR35 1LT</postcode> <telephone>01419124094</telephone> <mobile>07314062451</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>TomatoCrunch</username> <password>d7eba53443ec4ddcee69ed71b2023fc0</password> <userlevel>1</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> </member> <member> <user id="20"> <personal> <name>Jayden Richards</name> <sex>Male</sex> <address1>56 Corson Trail</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Sandy</city> <county>Bedfordshire</county> <postcode>SG19 6DF</postcode> <telephone>01882134438</telephone> <mobile>07540218868</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>nightmareTwig</username> <password>8a9c08c7b6473493e8a5da15dd541025</password> <userlevel>3</userlevel> <signupdate>2010-03-26T09:23:50</signupdate> </account> </user> <festival id="4"> <event> <eventname>East Barnet Festival</eventname> <url>http://www.eastbarnetfestival.org.uk</url> <datefrom>2010-07-01</datefrom> <dateto>2010-07-03</dateto> <location>East Barnet</location> <eventpostcode>EN4 8TB</eventpostcode> <additional></additional> <coords> <lat>51.641556</lat> <lng>-0.163018</lng> </coords> </event> <contact> <conname>East Barnet Festival Commitee</conname> <conaddress1>Oak Hill Park</conaddress1> <conaddress2>Church Hill Road</conaddress2> <concity>East Barnet</concity> <concounty>Hertfordshire</concounty> <conpostcode>EN4 8TB</conpostcode> <contelephone>07071781745</contelephone> <conmobile>07071781745</conmobile> <fax></fax> <conemail>[email protected]</conemail> </contact> </festival> </member> <member> <user id="21"> <personal> <name>Abbie Jackson</name> <sex>Female</sex> <address1>98 Briarwood Lane</address1> <address2></address2> <city>Weymouth</city> <county>Dorset</county> <postcode>DT3 6TS</postcode> <telephone>01575629969</telephone> <mobile>07212477154</mobile> <email>[email protected]</email> </personal> <account> <username>CrazyBlockhead</username> <password>4ce56fb13d043be605037ace4fbd9fa5</password> <userlevel>2</u

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• Expanding Rows for Unique Checkboxes

  - by Marc Morgan

  I was just recently given a project for my job to write a script that compares two mysql databases and print out information into an html table. Currently, I am trying to insert a checkbox by each individual's name and when selected, rows pertaining to that individual will expand underneath the person's name. I am combining javascript into my script to do this, although I really have no experience is it. The problem I am having is that when any checkbox is selected, all the rows for each individual is expanding instead of the rows pertaining only to the one individual selected. Here is the coding so far: <?php $link = mysql_connect ($server = "harris.lib.fit.edu", $username = "", $password = "") or die(mysql_error()); $db = mysql_select_db ("library-test") or die(mysql_error()); $ids = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `ifc_studylog`") or die(mysql_error()); //not single quotes (tilda apostrophy) $x=0; $n=0; while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $ids )) { $tracksid1[$x] = $row['fitID']; $checkin[$x] = $row['checkin']; $checkout[$x] = $row['checkout']; $n++; $x++; } $names = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `ifc_users`") or die(mysql_error()); //not single quotes (tilda apostrophy) $x=0; while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $names )) { $tracksnamefirst[$x] = $row['firstName']; $tracksnamesecond[$x] = $row['lastname']; $tracksid2[$x] = $row['fitID']; $tracksuser[$x] = $row['tracks']; $x++; } $x=0; foreach($tracksid2 as $comparename) { $chk = strval($x); ?> <script type='text/javascript' src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.js'></script> <script type='text/javascript'> $(window).load(function () { $('.varx').click(function () { $('.text').toggle(this.checked); });}); </script> <?php echo '<td><input id = "<?=$chk?>" type="checkbox" class="varx" /></td>'; echo '<td align="center">'.$comparename.'</td>'; echo'<td align="center">'.$tracksnamefirst[$x].'</td>'; echo'<td align="center">'.$tracksnamesecond[$x].'</td>'; $z=0; foreach($tracksid1 as $compareid) { $HH=0; $MM =0; $SS =0; if($compareid == $comparename)// && $tracks==$tracksuser[$x]) { $SS = sprintf("%02s",(($checkout[$z]-$checkin[$z])%60)); $MM = sprintf("%02s",(($checkout[$z]-$checkin[$z])/60 %60)); $HH = sprintf("%02s",(($checkout[$z]-$checkin[$z])/3600 %24)); // echo'<td align="center">'.$HH.':'.$MM.':'.$SS.'</td>'; echo '</tr>'; echo '<tr>'; echo "<td id='txt' class='text' align='center' colspan='2' style='display:none'></td>"; echo "<td id='txt' class='text' align='center' style='display:none'>".$checkin[$z]."</td>"; echo '</tr>'; } echo '<tr>'; $z++; echo '</tr>'; } $x++; } } ?> Any Help is appreciated and sorry if I am too vague on the subject. The username and password is left off for security purposes.

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• Fast multi-window rendering with C#

  - by seb

  I've been searching and testing different kind of rendering libraries for C# days for many weeks now. So far I haven't found a single library that works well on multi-windowed rendering setups. The requirement is to be able to run the program on 12+ monitor setups (financial charting) without latencies on a fast computer. Each window needs to update multiple times every second. While doing this CPU needs to do lots of intensive and time critical tasks so some of the burden has to be shifted to GPUs. That's where hardware rendering steps in, in another words DirectX or OpenGL. I have tried GDI+ with windows forms and figured it's way too slow for my needs. I have tried OpenGL via OpenTK (on windows forms control) which seemed decently quick (I still have some tests to run on it) but painfully difficult to get working properly (hard to find/program good text rendering libraries). Recently I tried DirectX9, DirectX10 and Direct2D with Windows forms via SharpDX. I tried a separate device for each window and a single device/multiple swap chains approaches. All of these resulted in very poor performance on multiple windows. For example if I set target FPS to 20 and open 4 full screen windows on different monitors the whole operating system starts lagging very badly. Rendering is simply clearing the screen to black, no primitives rendered. CPU usage on this test was about 0% and GPU usage about 10%, I don't understand what is the bottleneck here? My development computer is very fast, i7 2700k, AMD HD7900, 16GB ram so the tests should definitely run on this one. In comparison I did some DirectX9 tests on C++/Win32 API one device/multiple swap chains and I could open 100 windows spread all over the 4-monitor workspace (with 3d teapot rotating on them) and still had perfectly responsible operating system (fps was dropping of course on the rendering windows quite badly to around 5 which is what I would expect running 100 simultaneous renderings). Does anyone know any good ways to do multi-windowed rendering on C# or am I forced to re-write my program in C++ to get that performance (major pain)? I guess I'm giving OpenGL another shot before I go the C++ route... I'll report any findings here. Test methods for reference: For C# DirectX one-device multiple swapchain test I used the method from this excellent answer: Display Different images per monitor directX 10 Direct3D10 version: I created the d3d10device and DXGIFactory like this: D3DDev = new SharpDX.Direct3D10.Device(SharpDX.Direct3D10.DriverType.Hardware, SharpDX.Direct3D10.DeviceCreationFlags.None); DXGIFac = new SharpDX.DXGI.Factory(); Then initialized the rendering windows like this: var scd = new SwapChainDescription(); scd.BufferCount = 1; scd.ModeDescription = new ModeDescription(control.Width, control.Height, new Rational(60, 1), Format.R8G8B8A8_UNorm); scd.IsWindowed = true; scd.OutputHandle = control.Handle; scd.SampleDescription = new SampleDescription(1, 0); scd.SwapEffect = SwapEffect.Discard; scd.Usage = Usage.RenderTargetOutput; SC = new SwapChain(Parent.DXGIFac, Parent.D3DDev, scd); var backBuffer = Texture2D.FromSwapChain<Texture2D>(SC, 0); _rt = new RenderTargetView(Parent.D3DDev, backBuffer); Drawing command executed on each rendering iteration is simply: Parent.D3DDev.ClearRenderTargetView(_rt, new Color4(0, 0, 0, 0)); SC.Present(0, SharpDX.DXGI.PresentFlags.None); DirectX9 version is very similar: Device initialization: PresentParameters par = new PresentParameters(); par.PresentationInterval = PresentInterval.Immediate; par.Windowed = true; par.SwapEffect = SharpDX.Direct3D9.SwapEffect.Discard; par.PresentationInterval = PresentInterval.Immediate; par.AutoDepthStencilFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.D16; par.EnableAutoDepthStencil = true; par.BackBufferFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.X8R8G8B8; // firsthandle is the handle of first rendering window D3DDev = new SharpDX.Direct3D9.Device(new Direct3D(), 0, DeviceType.Hardware, firsthandle, CreateFlags.SoftwareVertexProcessing, par); Rendering window initialization: if (parent.D3DDev.SwapChainCount == 0) { SC = parent.D3DDev.GetSwapChain(0); } else { PresentParameters pp = new PresentParameters(); pp.Windowed = true; pp.SwapEffect = SharpDX.Direct3D9.SwapEffect.Discard; pp.BackBufferFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.X8R8G8B8; pp.EnableAutoDepthStencil = true; pp.AutoDepthStencilFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.D16; pp.PresentationInterval = PresentInterval.Immediate; SC = new SharpDX.Direct3D9.SwapChain(parent.D3DDev, pp); } Code for drawing loop: SharpDX.Direct3D9.Surface bb = SC.GetBackBuffer(0); Parent.D3DDev.SetRenderTarget(0, bb); Parent.D3DDev.Clear(ClearFlags.Target, Color.Black, 1f, 0); SC.Present(Present.None, new SharpDX.Rectangle(), new SharpDX.Rectangle(), HWND); bb.Dispose(); C++ DirectX9/Win32 API test with multiple swapchains and one device code is here: http://pastebin.com/tjnRvATJ It's a modified version from Kevin Harris's nice example code.

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