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• Extreme Makeover, Phone Edition: Comcasts xfinity

  Mobile Makeover For many companies the first foray into Windows Phone 7 (WP7) may be in porting their existing mobile apps. It is tempting to simply transfer existing functionality, avoiding the additional design costs. Readdressing business needs and taking advantage of the WP7 platform can reduce cost and is essential to a successful re-launch. To better understand the advantage of new development lets examine a conceptual upgrade of Comcasts existing mobile app. Before Comcast has a great mobile app that provides several key features. The ability to browse the lineup using a guide, a client for Comcast email accounts, On Demand gallery, and much more. We will leverage these and build on them using some of the incredible WP7 features.   After With the proliferation of DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) and a variety of media devices (TV, PC, Mobile) content providers are challenged to find creative ways to build their brands. Every client touch point must provide both value added services as well as opportunities for marketing and up-sale; WP7 makes it easy to focus on those opportunities. The new app is an excellent vehicle for presenting Comcasts newly rebranded TV, Voice, and Internet services. These services now fly under the banner of xfinity and have been expanded to provide the best experience for Comcast customers. The Windows Phone 7 app will increase the surface area of this service revolution.   The home menu is simplified and highlights Comcasts Triple Play: Voice, TV, and Internet. The inbox has been replaced with a messages view, and message management is handled by a WP7 hub. The hub presents emails, tweets, and IMs from Comcast and other viewers the user follows on Twitter.  The popular view orders shows based on the users viewing history and current cable package. The first show Glee is both popular and participating in a conceptual co-marketing effort, so it receives prime positioning. The second spot goes to a hit show on a premium channel, in this example HBOs The Pacific, encouraging viewers to upgrade for this premium content. The remaining spots are ordered based on viewing history and popularity. Tapping the play button moves the user to the theatre where they can watch previews or full episodes streaming from Fancast. Tapping an extra presents the user with show details as well as interactive content that may be included as part of co-marketing efforts. Co-Marketing with Dynamic Content The success of Comcasts services are tied to the success of the networks and shows it purveys, making co-marketing efforts essential. In this concept FOX is co-marketing its popular show Glee. A customized panorama is updated with the latest gleeks tweets, streaming HD episodes, and extras featuring photos and video of the cast. If WP7 apps can be dynamically extended with web hosted .xap files, including sandboxed partner experiences would enable interactive features such as the Gleek Peek, in which a viewer can select a character from a panorama to view the actors profile. This dynamic inline experience has a tailored appeal to aspiring creatives and is technically possible with Windows Phone 7.   Summary The conceptual Comcast mobile app for Windows Phone 7 highlights just a few of the incredible experiences and business opportunities that can be unlocked with this latest mobile solution. It is critical that organizations recognize and take full advantage of these new capabilities. Simply porting existing mobile applications does not leverage these powerful tools; re-examining existing applications and upgrading them to Windows Phone 7 will prove essential to the continued growth and success of your brand.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Approach for packing 2D shapes while minimizing total enclosing area

  - by Dennis

  Not sure on my tags for this question, but in short .... I need to solve a problem of packing industrial parts into crates while minimizing total containing area. These parts are motors, or pumps, or custom-made components, and they have quite unusual shapes. For some, it may be possible to assume that a part === rectangular cuboid, but some are not so simple, i.e. they assume a shape more of that of a hammer or letter T. With those, (assuming 2D shape), by alternating direction of top & bottom, one can pack more objects into the same space, than if all tops were in the same direction. Crude example below with letter "T"-shaped parts: ***** xxxxx ***** x ***** *** ooo * x vs * x vs * x vs * x o * x * xxxxx * x * x o xxxxx xxx Right now we are solving the problem by something like this: using CAD software, make actual models of how things fit in crate boxes make estimates of actual crate dimensions & write them into Excel file (1) is crazy amount of work and as the result we have just a limited amount of possible entries in (2), the Excel file. The good things is that programming this is relatively easy. Given a combination of products to go into crates, we do a lookup, and if entry exists in the Excel (or Database), we bring it out. If it doesn't, we say "sorry, no data!". I don't necessarily want to go full force on making up some crazy algorithm that given geometrical part description can align, rotate, and figure out best part packing into a crate, given its shape, but maybe I do.. Question Well, here is my question: assuming that I can represent my parts as 2D (to be determined how), and that some parts look like letter T, and some parts look like rectangles, which algorithm can I use to give me a good estimate on the dimensions of the encompassing area, while ensuring that the parts are packed in a minimal possible area, to minimize crating/shipping costs? Are there approximation algorithms? Seeing how this can get complex, is there an existing library I could use? My thought / Approach My naive approach would be to define a way to describe position of parts, and place the first part, compute total enclosing area & dimensions. Then place 2nd part in 0 degree orientation, repeat, place it at 180 degree orientation, repeat (for my case I don't think 90 degree rotations will be meaningful due to long lengths of parts). Proceed using brute force "tacking on" other parts to the enclosing area until all parts are processed. I may have to shift some parts a tad (see 3rd pictorial example above with letters T). This adds a layer of 2D complexity rather than 1D. I am not sure how to approach this. One idea I have is genetic algorithms, but I think those will take up too much processing power and time. I will need to look out for shape collisions, as well as adding extra padding space, since we are talking about real parts with irregularities rather than perfect imaginary blocks. I'm afraid this can get geometrically messy fairly fast, and I'd rather keep things simple, if I can. But what if the best (practical) solution is to pack things into different crate boxes rather than just one? This can get a bit more tricky. There is human element involved as well, i.e. like parts can go into same box and are thus a constraint to be considered. Some parts that are not the same are sometimes grouped together for shipping and can be considered as a common grouped item. Sometimes customers want things shipped their way, which adds human element to constraints. so there will have to be some customization.

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• The best computer ever

  - by Jeff

  (This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!) About three years and three months ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro, and it turned out to be the best computer I've ever owned. You might think that every computer with better specs is automatically better than the last, but that hasn't been my experience. My first one was a Sony, back in the Pentium III days, and it cost an astonishing $2,500. That was even more ridiculous in 1999 dollars. It had a dial-up modem, and a CD-ROM, built-in! It may have even played DVD's. A few years later I bought an HP, and it ended up being a pile of shit. The power connector inside came loose from the board, and on occasion would even short. In 2005, I bought a Dell, and it wasn't bad. It had a really high resolution screen (complete with dead pixels, a problem in those days), and it was the first laptop I felt I could do real work on. When 2006 rolled around, Apple started making computers with Intel CPU's, and I bought the very first one the week it came out. I used Boot Camp to run Windows. I still have it in its box somewhere, and I used it for three years. The current 17" was new in 2009. The goodness was largely rooted in having a big screen with lots of dots. This computer has been the source of hundreds of blog posts, tens of thousands of lines of code, video and photo editing, and of course, a whole lot of Web surfing. It connected to corpnet at Microsoft, WiFi in Hawaii and has presented many a deck. It has traveled with me tens of thousands of miles. Last year, I put a solid state drive in it, and it was like getting a new computer. I can boot up a Windows 7 VM in about 19 seconds. Having 8 gigs of RAM has always been fantastic. Everything about it has been fast and fun. When new, the battery (when not using VM's) could get as much as 10 hours. I can still do 7 without much trouble. After 460 charge cycles, the battery health is still between 85 and 90%. The only real negative has been the size and weight. It's only an inch thick, but naturally it's pretty big with a 17" screen. You don't get battery life like that without a huge battery, either, so it's heavy. It was never a deal breaker, but sometimes a long haul across a large airport, you know you're carrying it. Today, Apple announced a new, thinner and lighter 15" laptop, with twice the RAM and CPU cores, and four times the screen resolution. It basically handles my size and weight issues while retaining the resolution, and it still costs less than my 17" did. So I ordered one. Three years is an excellent run, but I kind of budgeted for a new workhorse this year anyway. So if you're interested in a 17" MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz CPU, 8 gigs of RAM and a 320 gig hard drive (sorry, I'm keeping the SSD), I have one to sell. They've apparently discontinued the 17", which is going to piss off the video community. It's in excellent condition, with a few minor scratches, but I take care of my stuff.

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• Migrating VB6 to HTML5 is not a fiction - Customer success story

  - by Webgui

  All of you VB developers in the present or past would probably find it hard to believe that the old VB code can be migrated and modernized into the latest .NET based HTML5 without having to rewrite the application. But we have been working on such tools for the past couple of years and already have several real world applications that were fully 'transposed' from VB6. The solution is called Instant CloudMove and its main tool is called the TranspositionStudio. It is a unique solution that relies on the concept of transposition. Transposition comes from mathematics and music and refers to exchanging elements while everything else remains the same or moving an element as is from one environment to another. This means that we are taking the source code and put it in a modern technological environment with relatively few adjustments.The concept is based on a set of Mapping Expressions which are basically links between an element in the source environment and one in the target environment that has the same functionality. About 95% of the code is usually mapped out-of-the-box and the rest is handled with easy-to-use mapping tools designed for Visual Studio developers providing them with a familiar environment and concepts for completing the mapping and allowing them to extend and customize existing mapping expressions. The solution is also based on a circular workflow that enables developers to make any changes as required until the result is satisfying.As opposed to existing migration solutions that offer automation are usually a “black box” to the user, the transposition concept enables full visibility, flexibility and control over the code and process at all times allowing to also add/change functionalities or upgrade the UI within the process and tools.This is exactly the case with our customer’s aging VB6 PMS (Property Management System) which needed a technological update as well as a design refresh. The decision was to move the VB6 application which had about 1 million lines of code into the latest web technology. Since the application was initially written 13 years ago and had many upgrades since the code must be very patchy and includes unused sections. As a result, the company Mihshuv Group considered rewriting the entire application in Java since it already had the knowledge. Rewrite would allow starting with a clean slate and designing functionality, database architecture, UI without any constraints. On the other hand, rewrite entitles a long and detailed specification work as well as a thorough QA and this translates into a long project with high risk and costs.So the company looked for a migration solution as an alternative; the research lead to Gizmox and after examining the technology it was decided to perform a hybrid project which would include an automatic transposition of the core of the VB6 application (200,000 lines of code) while they redesigning the UI, adding new functionality, deleting unused code and rewriting about 140 reports with Crystal Reports will be done manually using Visual WebGui development tools.The migration part of the project was completed in 65 days by 3 developers from Mihshuv Group guided by Gizmox migration experts while the rewrite and UI upgrade tasks took about the same. So in only a few months period Mihshuv Group generated an up-to-date product, written in the latest Web technology with modern, friendly UI and improved functionality. Guest selection screen of the original VB6 PMS Guest selection screen on the new web–based PMS Compared to the initial plan to rewrite the entire application in Java, the hybrid migration/rewrite approach taken by Mihshuv Group using Gizmox technology proved as a great decision. In terms of time and cost there were substantial savings; from a project that was priced for at least a year (without taking into account the huge risk and uncertainty) it became a few months project only. More about this and other customer stories can be found here

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• No Customer Left Behind

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development What does customer experience mean to you? Is it a strategy for your executives? A new buzz word and marketing term? A bunch of CRM technology with social software added on? For me, customer experience is a customer-centric worldview that produces a deeper understanding of your business and what it takes to achieve sustainable, differentiated success. It requires you to prioritize and examine the journey your customers are on with your brand, so you can answer the question, "How can we drive greater value for our business by delivering a better customer experience?" Businesses that embrace a customer-centric worldview understand their business at a much deeper level than most. They know who their customers are, what their value is, what they do, what they say, what they want, and ultimately what that means to their business. "Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?" We're all consumers who have our own experiences with many brands. Good or bad, some of those experiences stay with us. So viscerally we understand the concept of customer experience from the stories we share. One that stands out in my mind happened as I was preparing to leave for a 12-month job assignment in Europe. I wanted to put my cable television subscription on hold. I wasn't leaving for another vendor. I wasn't upset. I just had a situation where it made sense to put my $180 per month account on pause until I returned. Unfortunately, there was no way for this cable company to acknowledge that I was a loyal customer with a logical request - and to respond accordingly. So, ultimately, they lost my business. Research shows us that it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Heavily funding the efforts of getting new customers and underfunding the efforts of serving the needs of your existing (who are your greatest advocates) is a vicious and costly cycle. "Hey, These Guys Suck!" I love my Apple iPad because it's so easy to use. The explosion of these types of technologies, combined with new media channels, has raised our expectations and made us hyperaware of what's going on and what's available. In addition, social media has given us a megaphone to share experiences both positive and negative with greater impact. We are now an always-on culture that thrives on our ability to access, connect, and share anywhere anytime. If we don't get the service, product, or value we expect, it is easy to tell many people about it. We also can quickly learn where else to get what we want. Consumers have the power of influence and choice at a global scale. The businesses that understand this principle are able to leverage that power to their advantage. The ones that don't, suffer from it. Which camp are you in?Note: This is Part 1 in a three-part series. Stop back for Part 2 on November 19.

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• EPPM Is a Must-Have Capability as Global Energy and Power Industries Eye US$38 Trillion in New Investments

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} “The process manufacturing industry is facing an unprecedented challenge: from now until 2035, cumulative worldwide investments of US$38 trillion will be required for drilling, power generation, and other energy projects,” Iain Graham, director of energy and process manufacturing for Oracle’s Primavera, said in a recent webcast. He adds that process manufacturing organizations such as oil and gas, utilities, and chemicals must manage this level of investment in an environment of constrained capital markets, erratic supply and demand, aging infrastructure, heightened regulations, and declining global skills. In the following interview, Graham explains how the right enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) technology can help the industry meet these imperatives. Q: Why is EPPM so important for today’s process manufacturers? A: If the industry invests US$38 trillion without proper cost controls in place, a huge amount of resources will be put at risk, especially when it comes to cost overruns that may occur in large capital projects. Process manufacturing companies must not only control costs, but also monitor all the various contractors that will be involved in each project. If you’re not managing your own workers and all the interdependencies among the different contractors, then you’ve got problems. Q: What else should process manufacturers look for? A: It’s also important that an EPPM solution has the ability to manage more than just capital projects. For example, it’s best to manage maintenance and capital projects in the same system. Say you’re due to install a new transformer in a power station as part of a capital project, but routine maintenance in that area of the facility is scheduled for that morning. The lack of coordination could lead to unforeseen delays. There are also IT considerations that impact capital projects, such as adding servers and network cable for a control system in a power station. What organizations need is a true EPPM system that’s not just for capital projects, maintenance, or IT activities, but instead an enterprisewide solution that provides visibility into all types of projects. Read the complete Q&A here and discover the practical framework for successfully managing this massive capital spending.

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• Why were namespaces removed from ECMAScript consideration?

  - by Bob

  Namespaces were once a consideration for ECMAScript (the old ECMAScript 4) but were taken out. As Brendan Eich says in this message: One of the use-cases for namespaces in ES4 was early binding (use namespace intrinsic), both for performance and for programmer comprehension -- no chance of runtime name binding disagreeing with any earlier binding. But early binding in any dynamic code loading scenario like the web requires a prioritization or reservation mechanism to avoid early versus late binding conflicts. Plus, as some JS implementors have noted with concern, multiple open namespaces impose runtime cost unless an implementation works significantly harder. For these reasons, namespaces and early binding (like packages before them, this past April) must go. But I'm not sure I understand all of that. What exactly is a prioritization or reservation mechanism and why would either of those be needed? Also, must early binding and namespaces go hand-in-hand? For some reason I can't wrap my head around the issues involved. Can anyone attempt a more fleshed out explanation? Also, why would namespaces impose runtime costs? In my mind I can't help but see little difference in concept between a namespace and a function using closures. For instance, Yahoo and Google both have YAHOO and google objects that "act like" namespaces in that they contain all of their public and private variables, functions, and objects within a single access point. So why, then, would a namespace be so significantly different in implementation? Maybe I just have a misconception as to what a namespace is exactly.

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• Parsing with BeautifulSoup, error message TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, NoneType found

  - by Samsun Knight

  so I'm trying to scrape an Amazon page for data, and I'm getting an error when I try to parse for where the seller is located. Here's my code: #getting the html request = urllib2.Request('http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0393934241/') opener = urllib2.build_opener() #hiding that I'm a webscraper request.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5 (Solaris 10) Gecko') #opening it up, putting into soup form html = opener.open(request).read() soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html5lib") #parsing for the seller info sellers = soup.findAll('div', {'class' : 'a-row a-spacing-medium olpOffer'}) for eachseller in sellers: #parsing for price price = eachseller.find('span', {'class' : 'a-size-large a-color-price olpOfferPrice a-text-bold'}) #parsing for shipping costs shippingprice = eachseller.find('span' , {'class' : 'olpShippingPrice'}) #parsing for condition condition = eachseller.find('span', {'class' : 'a-size-medium'}) #parsing for seller name sellername = eachseller.find('b') #parsing for seller location location = eachseller.find('div', {'class' : 'olpAvailability'}) #printing it all out print "price, " + price.string + ", shipping price, " + shippingprice.string + ", condition," + condition.string + ", seller name, " + sellername.string + ", location, " + location.string I get the error message, pertaining to the 'print' command at the end, "TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, NoneType found" I know that it's coming from this line - location = eachseller.find('div', {'class' : 'olpAvailability'}) - because the code works fine without that line, and I know that I'm getting NoneType because the line isn't finding anything. Here's the html from the section I'm looking to parse: <*div class="olpAvailability"> In Stock. Ships from WI, United States. <*br/><*a href="/gp/aag/details/ref=olp_merch_ship_9/175-0430757-3801038?ie=UTF8&amp;asin=0393934241&amp;seller=A1W2IX7T37FAMZ&amp;sshmPath=shipping-rates#aag_shipping">Domestic shipping rates</a> and <*a href="/gp/aag/details/ref=olp_merch_return_9/175-0430757-3801038?ie=UTF8&amp;asin=0393934241&amp;seller=A1W2IX7T37FAMZ&amp;sshmPath=returns#aag_returns">return policy</a>. <*/div> (but without the stars - just making sure the HTML doesn't compile out of code form) I don't see what's the problem with the 'location' line of code, or why it's not pulling the data I want. Help?

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• R and version control for the solo data analyst

  - by Jeromy Anglim

  Many data analysts that I respect use version control. For example: http://github.com/hadley/ See comments on http://permut.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/revision-control-statistics-bleg/ However, I'm evaluating whether adopting a version control system such as git would be worthwhile. A brief overview: I'm a social scientist who uses R to analyse data for research publications. I don't currently produce R packages. My R code for a project typically includes a few thousand lines of code for data input, cleaning, manipulation, analyses, and output generation. Publications are typically written using LaTeX. With regards to version control there are many benefits which I have read about, yet they seem to be less relevant to the solo data analyst. Backup: I have a backup system already in place. Forking and rewinding: I've never felt the need to do this, but I can see how it could be useful (e.g., you are preparing multiple journal articles based on the same dataset; you are preparing a report that is updated monthly, etc) Collaboration: Most of the time I am analysing data myself, thus, I woudln't get the collaboration benefits of version control. There are also several potential costs involved with adopting version control: Time to evaluate and learn a version control system A possible increase in complexity over my current file management system However, I still have the feeling that I'm missing something. General guides on version control seem to be addressed more towards computer scientists than data analysts. Thus, specifically in relation to data analysts in circumstances similar to those listed above: Is version control worth the effort? What are the main pros and cons of adopting version control? What is a good strategy for getting started with version control for data analysis with R (e.g., examples, workflow ideas, software, links to guides)?

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• solve a classic map-reduce problem with opencl?

  - by liuliu

  I am trying to parallel a classic map-reduce problem (which can parallel well with MPI) with OpenCL, namely, the AMD implementation. But the result bothers me. Let me brief about the problem first. There are two type of data that flow into the system: the feature set (30 parameters for each) and the sample set (9000+ dimensions for each). It is a classic map-reduce problem in the sense that I need to calculate the score of every feature on every sample (Map). And then, sum up the overall score for every feature (Reduce). There are around 10k features and 30k samples. I tried different ways to solve the problem. First, I tried to decompose the problem by features. The problem is that the score calculation consists of random memory access (pick some of the 9000+ dimensions and do plus/subtraction calculations). Since I cannot coalesce memory access, it costs. Then, I tried to decompose the problem by samples. The problem is that to sum up overall score, all threads are competing for few score variables. It keeps overwriting the score which turns out to be incorrect. (I cannot carry out individual score first and sum up later because it requires 10k * 30k * 4 bytes). The first method I tried gives me the same performance on i7 860 CPU with 8 threads. However, I don't think the problem is unsolvable: it is remarkably similar to ray tracing problem (for which you carry out calculation that millions of rays against millions of triangles). Any ideas?

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• Subscription Management with Merchant Account via API

  - by Josh

  I'm researching gateways/vendors that provide the ability to create subscription based transitions for merchant accounts. In other words, I want to allow customers to signup for a subscription for a website service that charges once a month. Authorize.Net has an ARB (Automated Recurring Billing) Module. The cost is cheap, $10 a month for the service, with unlimited subscriptions, and they have an API that allows XML or SOAP access to create, update and cancel. The LARGE negative of the service is that it doesn't have elegant way to obtain the current status of a subscription. They can send a daily email with an attached CSV file, or someone can login into the site and review statuses – neither is an enterprise solution. The parent company "CyberSource" has a "Recurring Billing Service" which implies a more robust solution, including API access to subscription information. I’m currently waiting for a sales call back on costs related to the service. I also looked at PayPal's Recurring Billing Service, but that appears to require that users are redirected to the PayPal site to signup for the subscription -- again, not an an elegant solution. Does anyone know of any other vendors/gateways that offer subscription service, that meet the following criteria: Vendor/Gateway must host the credit card number and be PCI compliant Have an API that accessible via a Web Service, Post over HTTPS or SOAP Have an API that allows querying the status of subscriptions and/or the ability to query for activity since a certain date. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

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• Java EE suitablity for a social network using Cassandra datastore ??

  - by Marcos

  We are in the process of making some important technology decisions for a social networking application. We're planning to have Cassandra(a NoSQL database to support efficient data storage). We would be using Hector(a Java client) to interact with Cassandra. 1.) Would Java EE be a good choice over PHP for a social networking application in terms of performance, scalabilty & complexities? 2.) Another possible implementation strategy, Is it suitable to have backend alone in Java and rest in PHP? 3.) What differences(as compared to PHP) it makes in terms of costs at various stages of application development, deployment and maintenance ? 4.) What are the things to keep in mind as we move along with Java development& deployment(as we are relatively new to the Java background) ? 5.) If you could list some major production deployments of similar type(social network) applications in Java. Thank you!

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• Looking for Antlr Grammar syntaxt highlight in VS2010

  - by David Mårtensson

  I am looking for some way to edit antlr grammar files directly within VS2010 with syntax highlight. I have used antlrworks a lot but it has the drawback that I have to start antlrworks separately and then browse to the file I want to edit, do the changed and save. For minor fixes I do not need all the tools in Antlrworks but I still would like the syntax highlight. But I have not been able to get VS2010 to open antlrworks with the right file and I have found no other way to get syntax highlight directly within VS2010 editor, it just opens as plain text. I can get visual studio to open antlrworks but it will open with only the last set of files it had open, not the one I clicked on. So my question(s) are: Is there a way to get antlrworks to open with the right file when I double click in it in visual studio project explorer? Is there any other way to get correct syntax highlight for antlr grammar files within visual studio (or with another editor, preferably not one that costs money, but if there are no free ones a commercial one might be an option).

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• Majordomo/Mailman - Yahoo/Google Groups

  - by tom smith

  Hi. Not an app question, but thought that I might ask here anyway! The responses might help someone. I've got an app where we're going to be dealing with 5000-10000 people in a group/pool. Periodically, different subsets of people will break off in their own group. I'm looking for thoughts on how to manage/approach this situation. (For now, all of this is being managed on a few servers in the garage, with dynamic IP) I've looked into the Yahoo/google groups, and they seem to be reasonable. The primary issue that I see with this approach, is that I don't have a good way of quickly/easily alowing a subset of the group to form their own group for a given project. This kind of function is critical. The upside to this though, I wouldn't have to really set anything up. And the hosted groups could send emails to the user all day along, without running into cap/bandwidth limits The other approach is a managed list, like mailman/majordomo. This approach appears to be more flexible, and looks like ti could be modified to handle the quick creation of lists, allowing users to quickly be assigned to different lists on the fly.. The downside, I'd have to run my own Mailman/Majordomo instance, as well as the associated mail server. Or I could look at possibly using one of the hosted service.. But this is for a project on the cheap, so we're really trying to keep costs down. Thoughts/Comments/Pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance -tom

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• Applications on the Web/Cloud the way to go? over Desktop apps?

  - by jiewmeng

  i am currently a mainly web developer, but is quite attracted to the performance and great integration with the OS (eg. Windows 7, Jump Lists, Taskbar Thumbnails, etc) something like WPF/C# can provide to the user, improving workflow and productivity. privacy and performance seems like a major downside of web/cloud apps compared to desktop apps. applications on the cloud/web work on the go, increased popularity of smartphones/netbooks majority of users may not benefit as much from increased performance of desktop apps, eg. internet surfing, word processing, probably benefit more from decreased startup times, lower costs and data on the cloud desktop applications increased performance benefits power users like 3D rendering, HD video/photo editing, gamers (i wonder if such processing maybe offset to cloud processing) integration with OS increases productivity (maybe such features can be adapted to a web version? maybe with a local desktop app to work with Web App API) more control over privacy (maybe fixed by encryption?) local data access (esp. large files) guaranteed and fast (YouTube HD fast enough most of the time) work not affected by intermittent/slow/availability internet connections (i know this is changing tho) what do you think?

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• Can a GeneralPath be modified?

  - by Dov

  java2d is fairly expressive, but requires constructing lots of objects. In contrast, the older API would let you call methods to draw various shapes, but lacks all the new features like transparency, stroke, etc. Java has fairly high costs associated with object creation. For speed, I would like to create a GeneralPath whose structure does not change, but go in and change the x,y points inside. path = new GeneralPath(GeneralPath.WIND_EVEN_ODD, 10); path.moveTo(x,y); path.lineTo(x2, y2); double len = Math.sqrt((x2-x)*(x2-x) + (y2-y)*(y2-y)); double dx = (x-x2) * headLen / len; double dy = (y-y2) * headLen / len; double dx2 = -dy * (headWidth/headLen); double dy2 = dx * (headWidth/headLen); path.lineTo(x2 + dx + dx2, y2 + dy + dy2); path.moveTo(x2 + dx - dx2, y2 + dy - dy2); path.lineTo(x2,y2); This one isn't even that long. Imagine a much longer sequence of commands, and only the ones on the end are changing. I just want to be able to overwrite commands, to have an iterator effectively. Does that exist?

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• Secure Webservice (WCF) without storing credentials on consumer application

  - by Pai Gaudêncio

  Howdy folks, I have a customer that sells a lottery analysis application. In this application, he consumes a webservice (my service, I mean, belongs to the company I work for now) to get statistical data about lottery results, bets made, amounts, etc., from all across the globe. The access to this webservice is paid, and each consult costs X credits. Some people have disassembled this lottery application and found the api key/auth key used to access the paid webservice, and started to use it. I would like to prevent this from happening again, but I can't find a way to authenticate on the webservice without storing the auth. keys on the application. Does anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish such task? ps1.Can't ask for the users to input any kind of credentials. Has to be transparent for them (they shouldn't know what is happening). ps2. Can't use digital certificates for the same reason above, not to mention it's easy to retrieve them and we would fall into the original problem. Thanks in advance.

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• Resizing video best practices (frame size)

  - by undefined

  I have read the following which is from Best Practices for Encoding Video with the VP6 Codec on the Adobe website here - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/encoding_video_print.html. It is talking about common video ratios (320x240, 640x480) Although these ratios are standard, and should be used to avoid distorting the video, the size of the encoded video is not set in stone. The original web video sizes used heights and widths that were evenly divisible by 16. This was mandatory for many early codecs. Although this is not necessary for modern codecs, you should stick to even heights and widths. What do they mean by 'even heights and widths'. I am thinking about encoding my video at 400x300 to make it slightly bigger, this is still 4x3 format but should I just stick at 320x240 and resize it on the screen? Clearly there are benefits to this in terms of storage size and delivery costs. In some places on my site I want to show the video at 400x300 but in others I want it to play full screen so this is why I am wondering if a larger original size (400x300) will give better results when blown up. Any thoughts?

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• Online voice chat: Why client-server model vs. peer-to-peer model?

  - by sstallings

  I am adding online voice chat to a Silverlight app. I've been reviewing current apps, services and SDKs found thru online searches and forums. I'm finding that the majority of these implement a client-server (C/S) model and I'm trying to understand why that model versus a peer-to-peer (PTP) model. To me PTP would be preferable because going direct between peers would be more efficient (fewer IP hops and no processing along the way by a server computer) and no need for a server and its costs and dependencies. I found some products offer the ability to switch from PTP to C/S if the PTP proves insufficient. As I thought more about it, I could see that C/S could be better if there are more than two peers involved in a conversation, then the server (supposedly with more bandwidth) could do a better job of relaying each peers outgoing traffic to the multiple other peers. In C/S many-to-many voice chatting, each peer's upstream broadband (which is where the bottleneck inherently is) would only have to carry each item of voice traffic once, then the server would use its superior bandwidth to relay the message to the multiple other peers. But, in a situation with one-on-one voice chatting it seems that PTP would be best. A server would not reduce each of the two peer's bandwidth requirements and would only add unnecessary overhead, dependency and cost. In one-on-one voice chatting: Am I mistaken on anything above? Would peer-to-peer be best? Would a server provide anything of value that could not be provided by a client-only program? Is there anything else that I should be taking into consideration? And lastly, can you recommend any Silverlight PTP or C/S voice chat products? Thanks in advance for any info.

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• How can I edit an exe's resources (File Description, Icon, etc.) using a command line utility?

  - by Coder7862396

  The whole story: I have created a fancy .NET program which has an installer created by the Visual Studio Installer (VSI). The VSI creates 2 files (setup.exe and MyProgramSetup.msi). I understand the reasons for both files being needed, however, I only want to distribute a SINGLE executable installer to users. I do not want them to see 2 files and have to choose between them. In order to do this I have merged the 2 files into a self-extracting archive using IExpress (as seen in this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/535966/merge-msi-and-exe). This works well, however, the self-extracting archive that gets created has an ugly icon and confusing file info (the File Description is "Win32 Cabinet Self-Extractor" with 43 black spaces after it). I need to replace the icon with my custom one and change some of the file properties like "Description", "Company", etc. I would like to have this automatically done as a build step so having a program which is a command line/console utility would be great. I've searched for a while now and can only find one program which does exactly what I want (ResourceTuner Console: http://www.heaventools.com/command-line_resource_editor.htm) but it costs an arm and a leg and my budget is $0. Does anyone know a better way to achieve what I want, or know of a program which can replace an executable's resources without having to use a GUI? By the way, I have also tried "SiComponents Resource Builder 3" which can't even open the executable, and "Julien Audo's ResEdit" which just crashes when I execute the command: "resedit.exe -convert "Modified Resources.rc" "MyProgramSetup.exe"

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• Updating a Minimum spanning tree when a new edge is inserted

  - by Lynette

  Hello, I've been presented the following problem in University: Let G = (V, E) be an (undirected) graph with costs ce = 0 on the edges e € E. Assume you are given a minimum-cost spanning tree T in G. Now assume that a new edge is added to G, connecting two nodes v, tv € V with cost c. a) Give an efficient algorithm to test if T remains the minimum-cost spanning tree with the new edge added to G (but not to the tree T). Make your algorithm run in time O(|E|). Can you do it in O(|V|) time? Please note any assumptions you make about what data structure is used to represent the tree T and the graph G. b)Suppose T is no longer the minimum-cost spanning tree. Give a linear-time algorithm (time O(|E|)) to update the tree T to the new minimum-cost spanning tree. This is the solution I found: Let e1=(a,b) the new edge added Find in T the shortest path from a to b (BFS) if e1 is the most expensive edge in the cycle then T remains the MST else T is not the MST It seems to work but i can easily make this run in O(|V|) time, while the problem asks O(|E|) time. Am i missing something? By the way we are authorized to ask for help from anyone so I'm not cheating :D Thanks in advance

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• find(:all) and then add data from another table to the object

  - by Koning Baard XIV

  I have two tables: create_table "friendships", :force => true do |t| t.integer "user1_id" t.integer "user2_id" t.boolean "hasaccepted" t.datetime "created_at" t.datetime "updated_at" end and create_table "users", :force => true do |t| t.string "email" t.string "password" t.string "phone" t.boolean "gender" t.datetime "created_at" t.datetime "updated_at" t.string "firstname" t.string "lastname" t.date "birthday" end I need to show the user a list of Friendrequests, so I use this method in my controller: def getfriendrequests respond_to do |format| case params[:id] when "to_me" @friendrequests = Friendship.find(:all, :conditions => { :user2_id => session[:user], :hasaccepted => false }) when "from_me" @friendrequests = Friendship.find(:all, :conditions => { :user1_id => session[:user], :hasaccepted => false }) end format.xml { render :xml => @friendrequests } format.json { render :json => @friendrequests } end end I do nearly everything using AJAX, so to fetch the First and Last name of the user with UID user2_id (the to_me param comes later, don't worry right now), I need a for loop which make multiple AJAX calls. This sucks and costs much bandwidth. So I'd rather like that getfriendrequests also returns the First and Last name of the corresponding users, so, e.g. the JSON response would not be: [ { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 11, "user2_id": 3 } }, { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 12, "user2_id": 4 } } ] but rather: [ { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 11, "user2_id": 3, "firstname": "Jon", "lastname": "Skeet" } }, { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 12, "user2_id": 4, "firstname": "Mark", "lastname": "Gravell" } } ] I thought of a for loop in the getfriendrequests method, but I don't know how to implement this, and maybe there is an easier way. It must also work for XML. Can anyone help me? Thanks

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• Moving a ASP.NET application to the cloud

  - by user102533

  I am new to cloud computing, so please bear with me here. I have an existing ASP.NET application with SQL Server 2008 hosted on a Virtual Private Server. Here's what it briefly does: The front end accepts user's requests and adds them to a DB table A Windows Service running in the background picks up the request, processes it and sets a flag. The Windows Services also creates a file for the user to download. User downloads file I'd like to move this web application with the service to the cloud. The architecture I envision is that I'll have 1 Web server in which I will install the front end and the windows service. I'll also have a cloud files server for file storage. The windows service should somehow create a file and transfer it to the cloud file server (I assume this is possible?) My questions: Does the architecture look like I am going in the right direction? I know Amazon has been providing cloud services for a long time. If I want to do minimal changes to my application, should I go with Amazon, Rackspace, Azure or some other provider? I understand that I would not only pay for file storage and web server but also for the bandwidth of users downloading the file and the windows servic uploading the file to the cloud server. Can I assume these costs are negligible? Should I go with VPS + Cloud Files combination to begin with? Any other thoughts/suggestions?

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• Approximate string matching with a letter confusion matrix?

  - by zigglenaut

  I'm trying to model a phonetic recognizer that has to isolate instances of words (strings of phones) out of a long stream of phones that doesn't have gaps between each word. The stream of phones may have been poorly recognized, with letter substitutions/insertions/deletions, so I will have to do approximate string matching. However, I want the matching to be phonetically-motivated, e.g. "m" and "n" are phonetically similar, so the substitution cost of "m" for "n" should be small, compared to say, "m" and "k". So, if I'm searching for [mein] "main", it would match the letter sequence [meim] "maim" with, say, cost 0.1, whereas it would match the letter sequence [meik] "make" with, say, cost 0.7. Similarly, there are differing costs for inserting or deleting each letter. I can supply a confusion matrix that, for each letter pair (x,y), gives the cost of substituting x with y, where x and y are any letter or the empty string. I know that there are tools available that do approximate matching such as agrep, but as far as I can tell, they do not take a confusion matrix as input. That is, the cost of any insertion/substitution/deletion = 1. My question is, are there any open-source tools already available that can do approximate matching with confusion matrices, and if not, what is a good algorithm that I can implement to accomplish this?

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• Where do you take mocking - immediate dependencies, or do you grow the boundaries...?

  - by Peter Mounce

  So, I'm reasonably new to both unit testing and mocking in C# and .NET; I'm using xUnit.net and Rhino Mocks respectively. I'm a convert, and I'm focussing on writing behaviour specifications, I guess, instead of being purely TDD. Bah, semantics; I want an automated safety net to work above, essentially. A thought struck me though. I get programming against interfaces, and the benefits as far as breaking apart dependencies goes there. Sold. However, in my behaviour verification suite (aka unit tests ;-) ), I'm asserting behaviour one interface at a time. As in, one implementation of an interface at a time, with all of its dependencies mocked out and expectations set up. The approach seems to be that if we verify that a class behaves as it should against its collaborating dependencies, and in turn relies on each of those collaborating dependencies to have signed that same quality contract, we're golden. Seems reasonable enough. Back to the thought, though. Is there any value in semi-integration tests, where a test-fixture is asserting against a unit of concrete implementations that are wired together, and we're testing its internal behaviour against mocked dependencies? I just re-read that and I think I could probably have worded it better. Obviously, there's going to be a certain amount of "well, if it adds value for you, keep doing it", I suppose - but has anyone else thought about doing that, and reaped benefits from it outweighing the costs?

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