Search Results

Search found 26313 results on 1053 pages for 'job control'.

Page 439/1053 | < Previous Page | 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446  | Next Page >

  • ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

    - by Andreea Vaduva
    Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful.   Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience.   Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide   About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management.  She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

    Read the article

  • Designing for mobile (aka designing for everything)

    - by ihaynes
    Last Saturday I went to 'Developer Developer Developer 10' on the Microsoft campus at Reading (UK). This is one of a series of regular events put on by the developer community for the developer community. The guys who organise these events put in a huge amount of time and effort into them and they are well worth getting to if you can.I enjoy these events because there's always something currently relevant but also I can get an insight into things I don't normally come across or work with.Having said that, it's web related things that always grab my attention and this year one of my favourite speakers, George Adamson, gave a session on 'Designing for mobile (aka designing for everything)'. This is a subject close to my heart and I've tried to put the argument forward myself on http://www.ew-resource.co.uk/mobile/ but George makes a far better job of it that I can.His slideshow from the session is available on http://www.slideshare.net/george.adamson and although you won't get his unique presentation style in the static slideshow, this is well worth watching if you have the time.

    Read the article

  • Ubuntu, OpenSuse, the world of linux for a web-developer

    - by SonofWatson
    I'm learning web development. My main OS is windows 7 but I've used Linux and currently dual-booting with Ubuntu. My Linux knowledge however, is pretty limited. I can work with the command line on simple tasks but that's pretty much it. I don't do any shell scripting, don't know very well the most important commands, nor the system in general. I am interested in web development. Should I get myself familiarized more with Linux ? Is it a must for future job positions considering my field of interest?

    Read the article

  • Task ownership with Wordpress - CSS - Designer or Developer?

    - by Syed Absar
    We have a dispute regarding who owns which tasks when it comes to the CSS on our live site. Our designer argues that he is not responsible to log-in to word press and modify the css or use ftp for any changes because that's not his job description while developer argues that since it is css, it belongs to designer and that he is to update the changes to the server and then compare and correct the output. I'd like experienced people working in professional development environment to put a light on this scenario. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, or is there a separate forum for business development or project management specific questions?

    Read the article

  • My Right-to-Left Foot (T-SQL Tuesday #13)

    - by smisner
    As a business intelligence consultant, I often encounter the situation described in this month's T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Steve Jones ( Blog | Twitter) – “What the Business Says Is Not What the  Business Wants.” Steve posed the question, “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done?” My profession requires me to have one foot firmly planted in the technology world and the other foot planted in the business world. I learned long ago that the business never says exactly what the business wants because the business doesn't have the words to describe what the business wants accurately enough for IT. Not only do technological-savvy barriers exist, but there are also linguistic barriers between the two worlds. So how do I cope? The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" is particularly helpful when I'm called in to help design a new business intelligence solution. Many of my students in BI classes have heard me explain ("rant") about left-to-right versus right-to-left design. To understand what I mean about these two design options, let's start with a picture: When we design a business intelligence solution that includes some sort of traditional data warehouse or data mart design, we typically place the data sources on the left, the new solution in the middle, and the users on the right. When I've been called in to help course-correct a failing BI project, I often find that IT has taken a left-to-right approach. They look at the data sources, decide how to model the BI solution as a _______ (fill in the blank with data warehouse, data mart, cube, etc.), and then build the new data structures and supporting infrastructure. (Sometimes, they actually do this without ever having talked to the business first.) Then, when they show what they've built to the business, the business says that is not what we want. Uh-oh. I prefer to take a right-to-left approach. Preferably at the beginning of a project. But even if the project starts left-to-right, I'll do my best to swing it around so that we’re back to a right-to-left approach. (When circumstances are beyond my control, I carry on, but it’s a painful project for everyone – not because of me, but because the approach just doesn’t get to what the business wants in the most effective way.) By using a right to left approach, I try to understand what it is the business is trying to accomplish. I do this by having them explain reports to me, and explaining the decision-making process that relates to these reports. Sometimes I have them explain to me their business processes, or better yet show me their business processes in action because I need pictures, too. I (unofficially) call this part of the project "getting inside the business's head." This is starting at the right side of the diagram above. My next step is to start moving leftward. I do this by preparing some type of prototype. Depending on the nature of the project, this might mean that I simply mock up some data in a relational database and build a prototype report in Reporting Services. If I'm lucky, I might be able to use real data in a relational database. I'll either use a subset of the data in the prototype report by creating a prototype database to hold the sample data, or select data directly from the source. It all depends on how much data there is, how complex the queries are, and how fast I need to get the prototype completed. If the solution will include Analysis Services, then I'll build a prototype cube. Analysis Services makes it incredibly easy to prototype. You can sit down with the business, show them the prototype, and have a meaningful conversation about what the BI solution should look like. I know I've done a good job on the prototype when I get knocked out of my chair so that the business user can explore the solution further independently. (That's really happened to me!) We can talk about dimensions, hierarchies, levels, members, measures, and so on with something tangible to look at and without using those terms. It's not helpful to use sample data like Adventure Works or to use BI terms that they don't really understand. But when I show them their data using the BI technology and talk to them in their language, then they truly have a picture worth a thousand words. From that, we can fine tune the prototype to move it closer to what they want. They have a better idea of what they're getting, and I have a better idea of what to build. So right to left design is not truly moving from the right to the left. But it starts from the right and moves towards the middle, and once I know what the middle needs to look like, I can then build from the left to meet in the middle. And that’s how I get past what the business says to what the business wants.

    Read the article

  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 01, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 01, 2014Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 3.20: Added a 'Directory Services Query' collector agent. This collector allows for querying Active Directory using simple DirectorySearcher queries.Grunndatakvalitet: Initial working: Show Altinn metadata in Excel. To get a live list you need to run the sql script on a server and update the connection string in ExcelMultiple Threads TCP Server: Project: this Project is based on VS 2013, .net freamwork 4.0, you can open it by vs 2010 or laterEssence#: Philemon-2 (Alpha Build 18): The Philemon-2 release fixes bugs, most of which have to do with the binding of .Net assemblies. Configuration profiles have been added in order to help solve some of the .Net assembly binding issues. A configuration profile is persistently stored as a folder in the filesystem. It must be located in the folder %EssenceSharpPath%\Config. The folder name must use ".profile" as its file extension. A configuration profile folder may (optionally) contain one or more files--each with its own form...DataBind: DataBind 1.0: - Efficiency ImprovedConsole Progress Bar: ConsoleProgressBar-0.3: - Validate ProgressInPercentageSpace Engineers Server Manager: SESM V1.10: V1.10 - New auto update system ! You won't miss any SE Update now ^^ To learn more : https://sesm.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Activating%20the%20auto%20update%20system - Moved the serve-wide configuration options to an other file than web.config. It should solve the "my parametters are errased by each SESM update" ! Warning ! If you upgrade from any previous version, you will need to copy-pase your parameters from your old web.config into the new SESM.config (this file is generated by acc...Accesorios de sitios Torrent en Español para Synology Download Station: Pack de Torrents en Español 6.0.0: Agregado los módulos de DivXTotal, el módulo de búsqueda depende del de alojamiento para bajar las series Utiliza el rss: http://www.divxtotal.com/rss.php DbEntry.Net (Leafing Framework): DbEntry.Net 4.2: DbEntry.Net is a lightweight Object Relational Mapping (ORM) database access compnent for .Net 4.0+. It has clearly and easily programing interface for ORM and sql directly, and supoorted Access, Sql Server, MySql, SQLite, Firebird, PostgreSQL and Oracle. It also provide a Ruby On Rails style MVC framework. Asp.Net DataSource and a simple IoC. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Setup.zip include the setup package. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Src.zip include source files and unit tests. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Samples.zip ...Recaptcha for .NET: Recaptcha for .NET v1.5: What's NewMinor bug fixes Support for legacy .NET framework 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 4. Support for .NET Framework 4.5.1.Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1: Welcome to Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1 This is the first release of the latest Azure Storage Explorer, code-named Phoenix. What's New?Here are some important things to know about version 6: Open Source Now being run as a full open source project. Full source code on CodePlex. Collaboration encouraged! Updated Code Base Brand-new code base (WPF/C#/.NET 4.5) Visual Studio 2013 solution (previously VS2010) Uses the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for asynchronous background operat...Wsus Package Publisher: release v1.3.1407.29: Updated WPP to recognize the very latest console version. Some files was missing into the latest release of WPP which lead to crash when trying to make a custom update. Add a workaround to avoid clipboard modification when double-clicking on a label when creating a custom update. Add the ability to publish detectoids. (This feature is still in a BETA phase. Packages relying on these detectoids to determine which computers need to be updated, may apply to all computers).SSIS Connector for Sharepoint Online: Sharepoint_Online_ConnectorsV2.3.5: V2.3.5 Removed validation for user name where it was accepting user name with only ".com" V2.3.1 Added support for column with string array type. (For source only) V2.3 Added support for delete operation. just map ID columns and choose operation type as "Delete" Any other Operation Type will be taken as Insert\Update MultiUser type will be taken as User field and single user will be added, still figuring out how to add multi user field (whatever available on internet not helping :( ) V2.2 ...Artezio SharePoint 2013 Workflow Activities for VS & Actions for Designer: SharePoint Designer 2013 custom workflow actions 1.0: SharePoint Designer 2013 custom workflow actions that work with permissions. Add Role Assignment Add Role Assignments Delete Role Assignments Get Role Definition Id Get Role Definition Id By Role Type Id Reset Role Inheritance Artezio SharePoint Consulting & DevelopmentVG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.32: changes NEW: Added Support for 'ImgMega.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgCandy.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgPit.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Img.yt' links FIXED: 'Radikal.ru' links FIXED: 'ImageTeam.org' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.com' links FIXED: 'Img.yt' linksAsp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with Todo List WebApplication: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with simple Todo List WebApplication, Overview TodoList is a simple web application to create, store and modify Todo tasks to be maintained by the users, which comprises of following fields to the user (Task Name, Task Description, Severity, Target Date, Task Status). TodoList web application is created using MVC - 4 architecture, code-first Entity Framework (ORM) and Jqgrid for displaying the data.Waterfox: Waterfox 31.0 Portable: New features in Waterfox 31.0: Added support for Unicode 7.0 Experimental support for WebCL New features in Firefox 31.0:New Add the search field to the new tab page Support of Prefer:Safe http header for parental control mozilla::pkix as default certificate verifier Block malware from downloaded files Block malware from downloaded files audio/video .ogg and .pdf files handled by Firefox if no application specified Changed Removal of the CAPS infrastructure for specifying site-sp...SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6.3: The changes below are included in this release: fixed an exception when collect a server's status but it has been stopped fixed a bug that can cause an exception in case of sending data when the connection dropped already fixed the log4net missing issue for a QuickStart project fixed a warning in a QuickStart projectYnote Classic: Ynote Classic 2.8.5 Beta: Several Changes - Multiple Carets and Multiple Selections - Improved Startup Time - Improved Syntax Highlighting - Search Improvements - Shell Command - Improved StabilityTEBookConverter: 1.2: Fixed: Could not start convertion in some cases Fixed: Progress show during convertion was truncated Fixed: Stopping convertion didn't reset program titleNew Projects.NET to C/C++ Interop Sample: Reference projects that demonstrate how to invoke C/C++ code from .NET using C#.Aircraft Guidance Systems: Software for RC model control and navigationDNN Upgrade Wizard: Provides a simple method for upgrading a DNN siteDrop and Create indexes SSIS Task: This is a simple SSIS Control Flow Task which can be used to drop and re-create all non-primary key indexes associated with specified table.Dynamics CRM 2013 Global Advanced Find: Dynamics CRM 2013 Global Advanced Find adds a button to the global navigation allowing users to launch an advanced find window from anywhere in the system.itsanewproject: sdlfjsldjfJNMSJW: hahaOmni Kits: A library tend to help in projects for any purpose while keeping small.Phase1Week1: Learning how to post, publish, and patch my commits to CodePlex with homework using bootsrap and font awesome.PL_Last1: Pll1Tabletoparmy: Tabletoparmy ist ein Tool um Tabletop Miniaturen zu Verwalten. Aktuell gibt es nur die Möglichkeit ein X-Wing Turnier zu verwalten.TalesAndTiles: Tile based game developed with Microsoft XNA Framework 4.0??????: ?????????

    Read the article

  • Justifiable Perks.

    - by Phil Factor
        I was once the director of a start-up IT Company, and had the task of recruiting a proportion of the management team. As my background was in IT management, I was rather more familiar with recruiting Geeks for technology jobs, but here, one of my early tasks was interviewing a Marketing Director.  The small group of financiers had suggested a rather strange Irishman called  Halleran.  From my background in City of London dealing-rooms, I was slightly unprepared for the experience of interviewing anyone wearing a pink suit. Many of my older City colleagues would have required resuscitation after seeing his white leather shoes. However, nobody will accuse me of prejudging an interviewee. After all, many Linux experts who I’ve come to rely on have appeared for interview dressed as hobbits. In fact, the interview went well, and we had even settled his salary.  I was somewhat unprepared for the coda.    ‘And I will need to be provided with a Ferrari  by the company.’    ‘Hmm. That seems reasonable.’    Initially, he looked startled, and then a slow smile of victory spread across his face.    ‘What colour would you like?’ I asked genially.    ‘It has to be red.’ He looked very earnest on this point.    ‘Fine. I have to go past Hamleys on the way home this evening, so I’ll pick one up then for you.’    ‘Er.. Hamley’s is a toyshop, not a Ferrari Dealership.’    I stared at him in bafflement for a few seconds. ‘You’re not seriously asking for a real Ferrari are you?’     ‘Well, yes. Not for my own sake, you understand. I’d much prefer a simple run-about, but my position demands it. How could I maintain the necessary status in the office without one? How could I do my job in marketing when my grey Datsun was all too visible in the car Park? It is a tool of the job.’    ‘Excuse me a moment, but I must confer with the MD’    I popped out to see Chris, the MD. ‘Chris, I’m interviewing a lunatic in a pink suit who is trying to demand that a Ferrari is a precondition of his employment. I tried the ‘misunderstanding trick’ but it didn’t faze him.’     ‘Sorry, Phil, but we’ve got to hire him. The VCs insist on it. You’ve got to think of something that doesn’t involve committing to the purchase of a Ferrari. Current funding barely covers the rent for the building.’    ‘OK boss. Leave it to me.’    On return, I slapped O’Halleran’s file on the table with a genial, paternalistic smile. ‘Of course you should have a Ferrari. The only trouble is that it will require a justification document that can be presented to the board. I’m sure you’ll have no problem in preparing this document in the required format.’ The initial look of despair was quickly followed by a bland look of acquiescence. He had, earlier in the interview, argued with great eloquence his skill in preparing the tiresome documents that underpin the essential corporate and government deals that were vital to the success of this new enterprise. The justification of a Ferrari should be a doddle.     After the interview, Chris nervously asked how I’d fared.     ‘I think it is all solved.’    ‘… without promising a Ferrari, I hope.’    ‘Well, I did actually; on condition he justified it in writing.’    Chris issued a stream of invective. The strain of juggling the resources in an underfunded startup was beginning to show.    ‘Don’t worry. In the unlikely event of him coming back with the required document, I’ll give him mine.’    ‘Yours?’ He strode over to the window to stare down at the car park.    He needn’t have worried: I knew that his breed of marketing man could more easily lay an ostrich egg than to prepare a decent justification document. My Ferrari is still there at the back of my garage. Few know of the Ferrari cultivator, a simple inexpensive motorized device designed for the subsistence farmers of southern Italy. It is the very devil to start, but it creates a perfect tilth for the seedbed.

    Read the article

  • Top Reasons You Need A User Engagement Platform

    - by Michael Snow
    Guest post by: Amit Sircar, Senior Sales Consultant, Oracle Deliver complex enterprise functionality through a simple intuitive and unified User Interface (UI) The modern enterprise contains a wide range of applications that are used to manage the business and drive competitive advantages. Organizations respond by creating a complex structure that results in a functional and management grouping of users. Each of these groups of users requires access to multiple applications and information sources in order to perform their job functions. This leads to the lack of a unified view of enterprise information, inconsistent user interfaces and disjointed security. To be effective, portals must be designed from the end-user perspective, enabling the user to accomplish as many tasks as possible while visiting the fewest number of portals. This requires rethinking the way that portals are built, moving from a functional business unit perspective to a user-focused, process-oriented point of view. Oracle WebCenter provides the Common User Experience Architecture that allows organizations to seamlessly present a unified view of enterprise information tailored to a particular user’s role and preferences. This architecture provides the best practices, design patterns and delivery mechanism for myriad services, applications, and data sources.  In order to serve as a primary system of access, Oracle WebCenter also provides access to unstructured content and to other users via integrated search, service-oriented artifacts, content management, and collaboration tools. Provide a modern and engaging experience without modifying the core business application Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums or social media sites are having a profound impact in the public internet.  These technologies can be leveraged by enterprises to add significant value to the business. Organizations need to integrate these technologies directly into their business applications while continuing to meet their security and governance needs. To deliver richer connections and become a more agile and intelligent business, WebCenter provides an enterprise portal platform that contains pre-integrated, standards-based Enterprise 2.0 services. These Enterprise 2.0 services can be easily accessed, integrated and utilized by users. By giving users the ability to use and integrate Enterprise 2.0 services such as tags, links, wikis, activities, blogs or social networking directly with their portals and applications, they are empowered to make richer connections, optimize their productivity, and ultimately increase the value of their applications. Foster a collaborative experience The organizational workplace has undergone a major change in the last decade. With increasing globalization and a distributed workforce, project teams may be physically separated by large distances. Online collaboration technologies are becoming a critical resource to enable virtual teams to share information and work together effectively. Oracle WebCenter delivers dynamic business communities with rich Services to empower teams to quickly and efficiently manage their information, applications, projects, and people without requiring IT assistance. It brings together the latest technology around Enterprise 2.0 and social computing, communities, personal productivity, and ad-hoc team interactions without any development effort. It enables the sharing and collaboration on team content, focusing an organization’s valuable resources on solving business problems, tapping into new ideas, and reducing time-to-market. Mobile Support The traditional workplace dynamics that required employees to access their work applications from their desktops have undergone a fundamental shift. Employees were used to primarily working from company offices and utilized an IT-issued computer for performing their job functions. With the introduction of flexible work hours and the growth of remote workers, more and more employees need the ability to remain productive even when they do not have access to a computer via the use of tablets and smartphones.  In addition, customers and citizens have come to expect 24x7 access to resources and websites from wherever they are located. Tablets and smartphones have empowered everyone to quickly access services they need anytime and from any place.  WebCenter provides out of the box capabilities to deliver the mobile experience in a seamless manner. Seeded device profiles and toolkits within WebCenter can be used to render the same web pages into multiple target devices such iPads, iPhones and android devices. Web designers can preview the portal using the built in simulator, make necessary updates and then deploy their UI design for the targeted device. Conclusion The competitive economy and resource constraints facing organizations today require them to find ways to make their applications, portals and Web sites more agile and intelligent and their knowledge workers more productive no matter where they are located. Organizations need to provide faster access to relevant information and resources, enhance existing applications and business processes with rich Enterprise 2.0 services, and seamlessly deliver content to mobile platforms. Oracle WebCenter successfully meets these challenges by providing the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web.

    Read the article

  • Mixed Emotions: Humans React to Natural Language Computer

    - by Applications User Experience
    There was a big event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, November 15. Watson, the natural language computer developed at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and its inventor and principal research investigator, David Ferrucci, were guests at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for another round of the television game Jeopardy. You may have read about or watched on YouTube how Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two top Jeopardy competitors, last February. This time, Watson swept the floor with two Silicon Valley high-achievers, one a venture capitalist with a background  in math, computer engineering, and physics, and the other a technology and finance writer well-versed in all aspects of culture and humanities. Watson is the product of the DeepQA research project, which attempts to create an artificially intelligent computing system through advances in natural language processing (NLP), among other technologies. NLP is a computing strategy that seeks to provide answers by processing large amounts of unstructured data contained in multiple large domains of human knowledge. There are several ways to perform NLP, but one way to start is by recognizing key words, then processing  contextual  cues associated with the keyword concepts so that you get many more “smart” (that is, human-like) deductions,  rather than a series of “dumb” matches.  Jeopardy questions often require more than key word matching to get the correct answer; typically several pieces of information put together, often from vastly different categories, to come up with a satisfactory word string solution that can be rephrased as a question.  Smarter than your average search engine, but is it as smart as a human? Watson was especially fast at descrambling mixed-up state capital names, and recalling and pairing movie titles where one started and the other ended in the same word (e.g., Billion Dollar Baby Boom, where both titles used the word Baby). David said they had basically removed the variable of how fast Watson hit the buzzer compared to human contestants, but frustration frequently appeared on the faces of the contestants beaten to the punch by Watson. David explained that top Jeopardy winners like Jennings achieved their success with a similar strategy, timing their buzz to the end of the reading of the clue,  and “running the board”, being first to respond on about 60% of the clues.  Similar results for Watson. It made sense that Watson would be good at the technical and scientific stuff, so I figured the venture capitalist was toast. But I thought for sure Watson would lose to the writer in categories such as pop culture, wines and foods, and other humanities. Surprisingly, it held its own. I was amazed it could recognize a word definition of a syllogism in the category of philosophy. So what was the audience reaction to all of this? We started out expecting our formidable human contestants to easily run some of their categories; however, they started off on the wrong foot with the state capitals which Watson could unscramble so efficiently. By the end of the first round, contestants and the audience were feeling a little bit, well, …. deflated. Watson was winning by about $13,000, and the humans had gone into negative dollars. The IBM host said he was going to “slow Watson down a bit,” and the humans came back with respectable scores in Double Jeopardy. This was partially thanks to a very sympathetic audience (and host, also a human) providing “group-think” on many questions, especially baseball ‘s most valuable players, which by the way, couldn’t have been hard because even I knew them.  Yes, that’s right, the humans cheated. Since Watson could speak but not hear us (it didn’t have speech recognition capability), it was probably unaware of this. In Final Jeopardy, the single question had to do with law. I was sure Watson would blow this one, but all contestants were able to answer correctly about a copyright law. In a career devoted to making computers more helpful to people, I think I may have seen how a computer can do too much. I’m not sure I’d want to work side-by-side with a Watson doing my job. Certainly listening and empathy are important traits we humans still have over Watson.  While there was great enthusiasm in the packed room of computer scientists and their friends for this standing-room-only show, I think it made several of us uneasy (especially the poor human contestants whose egos were soundly bashed in the first round). This computer system, by the way , only took 4 years to program. David Ferrucci mentioned several practical uses for Watson, including medical diagnoses and legal strategies. Are you “the expert” in your job? Imagine NLP computing on an Oracle database.   This may be the user interface of the future to enable users to better process big data. How do you think you’d like it? Postscript: There were three little boys sitting in front of me in the very first row. They looked, how shall I say it, … unimpressed!

    Read the article

  • Should a programmer know Linux ?

    - by Maxtor
    I'm a PHP/Python programmer learning Java and C#(.NET). My main OS is windows 7 but I've used Linux and currently dual-booting with Ubuntu. My Linux knowledge however, is pretty limited. I can work with the command line on simple tasks but that's pretty much it. I don't do any shell scripting, don't know very well the most important commands, nor the system in general. My interests are web development, mobile apps and maybe some embedded stuff in the future. Should I get myself familiarized more with Linux ? Even if at the moment I'm not that interested in it? Is it a must for future job positions considering my field of interest? Thank you.

    Read the article

  • Optical Illusion Freezes Water In Place [Video]

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    This clever optical illusion uses sound frequency and a digital camera to “freeze” water in time and space. YouTube user MrBibio explains the hack: Creating the illusion of a static flow of water using sound. Of course this isn’t my idea and plenty more refined examples already exist. I tried this same experiment years ago but using a strobe light, but it’s harsh on the eyes after a while and hard to video successfully. It only dawned on me shortly before making this that for video purposes, no strobe light is required. This is because the frame rate and shutter of the camera is doing a similar job to the strobe. The speaker-as-frequency-generator model is definitely easier on the eyes than similar experiments that rely on high-speed strobes. How to Stress Test the Hard Drives in Your PC or Server How To Customize Your Android Lock Screen with WidgetLocker The Best Free Portable Apps for Your Flash Drive Toolkit

    Read the article

  • How to interview my future team leader?

    - by Stormenet
    Our current team leader is quitting his job (starting his own company) and thus we are searching for a new team leader. It's a small team of 4 people (Team leader included). Since it's a small team we expect the team leader not to only manage us but also do some coding. Because of this I convinced the R&D manager to let me have a say in this so that I can evaluate his technical skills and managing skills. I have little experience interviewing people let alone my future Team leader. What I search in a team leader is someone who isn't running a dictatorship but someone that when there are issues there is a discussion about it and we take everyone on the same line. What are the things I should not forget to ask and what are the skills I should find in that person?

    Read the article

  • Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors

    - by mark.rosenberg(at)oracle.com
    Many of our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications customers operate in service-based industries, and all of our customers have at least some internal service units, such as IT, marketing, and facilities. Employing the services of contractors, often referred to as "contingent labor," to deliver either or both internal and external services is common practice. As we've transitioned from an industrial age to a knowledge age, talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services. Talent comes from many sources and the rise in the contingent worker (contractor, consultant, temporary, part time) has increased significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach 40 percent in the next decade. Managing the total pool of talent in a seamless integrated fashion not only saves organizations money and increases efficiency, but creates a better place for workers of all kinds to work. Although the term "contingent labor" is frequently used to describe both contractors and employees who have flexible schedules and relationships with an organization, the remainder of this discussion focuses on contractors. The term "contingent labor" is used interchangeably with "contractor." Recognizing the importance of contingent labor, our PeopleSoft customers often ask our team, "What Oracle vendor management system (VMS) applications should I evaluate for managing contractors?" In response, I thought it would be useful to describe and compare the three most common Oracle-based options available to our customers. They are:   The enterprise licensed software model in which you implement and utilize the PeopleSoft Services Procurement (sPro) application and potentially other PeopleSoft applications;  The software-as-a-service model in which you gain access to a derivative of PeopleSoft sPro from an Oracle Business Process Outsourcing Partner; and  The managed service provider (MSP) model in which staffing industry professionals utilize either your enterprise licensed software or the software-as-a-service application to administer your contingent labor program. At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Why three options?" The answer is that since there is no "one size fits all" in terms of talent, there is also no "one size fits all" for effectively sourcing and managing contingent workers. Various factors influence how an organization thinks about and relates to its contractors, and each of the three Oracle-based options addresses an organization's needs and preferences differently. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe the options with respect to (A) pricing and software provisioning models; (B) control and flexibility; (C) level of engagement with contractors; and (D) approach to sourcing, employment law, and financial settlement. Option 1:  Enterprise Licensed Software In this model, you purchase from Oracle the license and support for the applications you need. Typically, you license PeopleSoft sPro as your VMS tool for sourcing, monitoring, and paying your contract labor. In conjunction with sPro, you can also utilize PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) applications (if you do not already) to configure more advanced business processes for recruiting, training, and tracking your contractors. Many customers choose this enterprise license software model because of the functionality and natural integration of the PeopleSoft applications and because the cost for the PeopleSoft software is explicit. There is no fee per transaction to source each contractor under this model. Our customers that employ contractors to augment their permanent staff on billable client engagements often find this model appealing because there are no fees to affect their profit margins. With this model, you decide whether to have your own IT organization run the software or have the software hosted and managed by either Oracle or another application services provider. Your organization, perhaps with the assistance of consultants, configures, deploys, and operates the software for managing your contingent workforce. This model offers you the highest level of control and flexibility since your organization can configure the contractor process flow exactly to your business and security requirements and can extend the functionality with PeopleTools. This option has proven very valuable and applicable to our customers engaged in government contracting because their contingent labor management practices are subject to complex standards and regulations. Customers find a great deal of value in the application functionality and configurability the enterprise licensed software offers for managing contingent labor. Some examples of that functionality are... The ability to create a tiered network of preferred suppliers including competencies, pricing agreements, and elaborate candidate management capabilities. Configurable alerts and online collaboration for bid, resource requisition, timesheet, and deliverable entry, routing, and approval for both resource and deliverable-based services. The ability to manage contractors with the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects applications that are used to manage the permanent workforce. Because it allows you to utilize much of the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects application functionality for contractors that you use for permanent employees, the enterprise licensed software model supports the deepest level of engagement with the contingent workforce. For example, you can: fill job openings with contingent labor; guide contingent workers through essential safety and compliance training with PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; and source contingent workers directly to project-based assignments in PeopleSoft Resource Management and PeopleSoft Program Management. This option enables contingent workers to collaborate closely with your permanent staff on complex, knowledge-based efforts - R&D projects, billable client contracts, architecture and engineering projects spanning multiple years, and so on. With the enterprise licensed software model, your organization maintains responsibility for the sourcing, onboarding (including adherence to employment laws), and financial settlement processes. This means your organization maintains on staff or hires the expertise in these domains to utilize the software and interact with suppliers and contractors. Option 2:  Software as a Service (SaaS) The effort involved in setting up and operating VMS software to handle a contingent workforce leads many organizations to seek a system that can be activated and configured within a few days and for which they can pay based on usage. Oracle's Business Process Outsourcing partner, Provade, Inc., provides exactly this option to our customers. Provade offers its vendor management software as a service over the Internet and usually charges your organization a fee that is a percentage of your total contingent labor spending processed through the Provade software. (Percentage of spend is the predominant fee model, although not the only one.) In addition to lower implementation costs, the effort of configuring and maintaining the software is largely upon Provade, not your organization. This can be very appealing to IT organizations that are thinly stretched supporting other important information technology initiatives. Built upon PeopleSoft sPro, the Provade solution is tailored for simple and quick deployment and administration. Provade has added capabilities to clone users rapidly and has simplified business documents, like work orders and change orders, to facilitate enterprise-wide, self-service adoption with little to no training. Provade also leverages Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to provide integrated spend analytics and dashboards. Although pure customization is more limited than with the enterprise licensed software model, Provade offers a very effective option for organizations that are regularly on-boarding and off-boarding high volumes of contingent staff hired to perform discrete support tasks (for example, order fulfillment during the holiday season, hourly clerical work, desktop technology repairs, and so on) or project tasks. The software is very configurable and at the same time very intuitive to even the most computer-phobic users. The level of contingent worker engagement your organization can achieve with the Provade option is generally the same as with the enterprise licensed software model since Provade can automatically establish contingent labor resources in your PeopleSoft applications. Provade has pre-built integrations to Oracle's PeopleSoft and the Oracle E-Business Suite procurement, projects, payables, and HCM applications, so that you can evaluate, train, assign, and track contingent workers like your permanent employees. Similar to the enterprise licensed software model, your organization is responsible for the contingent worker sourcing, administration, and financial settlement processes. This means your organization needs to maintain the staff expertise in these domains. Option 3:  Managed Services Provider (MSP) Whether you are using the enterprise licensed model or the SaaS model, you may want to engage the services of sourcing, employment, payroll, and financial settlement professionals to administer your contingent workforce program. Firms that offer this expertise are often referred to as "MSPs," and they are typically staffing companies that also offer permanent and temporary hiring services. (In fact, many of the major MSPs are Oracle applications customers themselves, and they utilize the PeopleSoft Solution for the Staffing Industry to run their own business operations.) Usually, MSPs place their staff on-site at your facilities, and they can utilize either your enterprise licensed PeopleSoft sPro application or the Provade VMS SaaS software to administer the network of suppliers providing contingent workers. When you utilize an MSP, there is a separate fee for the MSP's service that is typically funded by the participating suppliers of the contingent labor. Also in this model, the suppliers of the contingent labor (not the MSP) usually pay the contingent labor force. With an MSP, you are intentionally turning over business process control for the advantages associated with having someone else manage the processes. The software option you choose will to a certain extent affect your process flexibility; however, the MSPs are often able to adapt their processes to the unique demands of your business. When you engage an MSP, you will want to give some thought to the level of engagement and "partnering" you need with your contingent workforce. Because the MSP acts as an intermediary, it can be very valuable in handling high volume, routine contracting for which there is a relatively low need for "partnering" with the contingent workforce. However, if your organization (or part of your organization) engages contingent workers for high-profile client projects that require diplomacy, intensive amounts of interaction, and personal trust, introducing an MSP into the process may prove less effective than handling the process with your own staff. In fact, in many organizations, it is common to enlist an MSP to handle contractors working on internal projects and to have permanent employees handle the contractor relationships that affect the portion of the services portfolio focused on customer-facing, billable projects. One of the key advantages of enlisting an MSP is that you do not have to maintain the expertise required for orchestrating the sourcing, hiring, and paying of contingent workers.  These are the domain of the MSPs. If your own staff members are not prepared to manage the essential "overhead" processes associated with contingent labor, working with an MSP can make solid business sense. Proper administration of a contingent workforce can make the difference between project success and failure, operating profit and loss, and legal compliance and fines. Concluding Thoughts There is little doubt that thoughtfully and purposefully constructing a service delivery strategy that leverages the strengths of contingent workers can lead to better projects, deliverables, and business results. What requires a bit more thinking is determining the platform (or platforms) that will enable each part of your organization to best deliver on its mission.

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Beginning New Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #001

    - by pinaldave
    I am introducing a new series today.  This series is called “Memory Lane.”  From the last six years and 2,300 articles, there are fantastic articles I keep revisiting.  Sometimes when I read old blog posts I think I should have included something or added a bit more to the topic.  But for many articles, I still feel they are fantastic (even after six years) and could be read again and again. I have also found that after six years of blogging, readers will write to me and say “Pinal, why don’t you write about X, Y or Z.”  The answer is: I already did!  It is here on the blog, or in the comments, or possibly in one of my books.  The solution has always been there, it is simply a matter of finding it and presenting it again.  That is why I have created Memory Lane.  I will be listing the best articles from the same week of the past six years.  You will find plenty of reading material every Saturday from articles of SQLAuthority past. Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Query to Display Foreign Key Relationships and Name of the Constraint for Each Table in Database My blogging journey began with this blog post. As many of you know my journey began with creating a repository of my scripts. This was very first script which I had written to find out foreign key relationship and constraints. The same query was updated later on using the new SYS schema modification in SQL Server. Version 1: Using sys.schema Version 2: Using sys.schema and additional columns 2007 Milestone Posts – 1 Year (365 blogs) and 1 Million Views When I reached 1st week of Nov in 2007 SQLAuthority.com blog had around 365 blog posts and 1 Million Views. I was not obsessed with the statistics before but this was indeed an interesting moment for me as I was blogging for myself and did not realize that so many people are reading my blog. In year 2006 there were not many bloggers so blogging was new to me as well. I was learning it as I go. 2008 Stored Procedure WITH ENCRYPTION and Execution Plan If you have stored procedure and its code is encrypted when you execute it what will be displayed in the execution plan. There are two kinds of execution plans 1) Estimated and 2) Actual. It will be indeed interesting to know what is displayed in both the cases when Stored Procedure is encrypted. What is your guess? Now go ahead and click on here and figure out your answer. If the user is not able to login into SQL Server due to any error or issues there were two different blog post addresses the same issue here and here. 2009 It seems like Nov is the month of SQLPASS month. In 2009 on the same week I was in USA attending SQLPASS event. I had a fantastic experience attending the event. Here are the blog posts covering the subject Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 2010 Finding the last backup time for all the databases This little script is very powerful and instantly gives details when was the last time your database backup performed. If you are reading this blog post – I say just go ahead and check if everything is alright on your server and you have all the necessary latest backup. It is better to be safe than sorrow. Version 1: Above script was improved to get more details about the database Version 2: This version of the script will include pretty much have all the backup related information in a single script. Do not miss to save it for future use. Are you a Database Administrator or a Database Developer? Three years ago I created a very small survey and the results which I have received are very interesting. The question was asking what is the profile of the visitor of that blog post and I noticed that DBA and Developers have balanced with little inclination towards Developers. Have you voted so far? If not, go ahead! 2011 New Book Released – SQL Server Interview Questions And Answers One year ago, on November 3, 2011 I published my book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers.  The book has a lot of great reviews, and we have even received emails telling us this book was a life changer because it helped get them a great new job.  I don’t think anyone can get a job just from my book.  It was the individual who studied hard and took it seriously, and was determined to learn something new.  The book might have helped guide them and show them the topics to study, but they spent their own energy on it.  It was their own skills that helped them pass the exam. So, in this very first installment, I would like to thank the readers for accepting our book, for giving it great reviews and for using it and sharing it.  Our goal in writing this book was to help others, and it seems like we succeeded. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • How could this diagram of the current most lucrative technologies be improved?

    - by Edward Tanguay
    I'm giving a talk in April 2011 on the "Developer English" and showing my non-developer audience, mostly English teachers, various diagrams to explain how developers see their industry etc. One of these diagrams is "Hot Technologies", basically, if you want to become a developer, what technologies should you learn to have the highest chance of (1) getting a job (2) making a good salary, and (3) work with the most exciting technology. This is a draft I made just to get some ideas out, basically C#, PHP, Java are where the bulk of the jobs are. Mobile development has a big future. JavaScript is becoming more and more important, and I want to list "minor technologies" such a Python, Ruby on Rails to the side, I assume e.g. that in general, there are a much smaller percentage of jobs in these technologies as in C#, PHP, Java. How could this diagram be improved?

    Read the article

  • JQGrdi PDF Export

    - by thanigai
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/thanigai/archive/2013/06/17/jqgrdi-pdf-export.aspxJQGrid PDF Export The aim of this article is to address the PDF export from client side grid frameworks. The solution is done using the ASP.Net MVC 4 and VisualStudio 2012. The article assumes the developer to have a fair amount of knowledge on ASP.Net MVC and C#. Tools Used Visual Studio 2012 ASP.Net MVC 4 Nuget Package Manager JQGrid  is one of the client grid framework built on top of the JQuery framework. It helps in building a beautiful grid with paging, sorting and exiting options. There are also other features available as extension plugins and developers can write their own if needed. You can download the JQgrid from the  JQGrid  homepage or as NUget package. I have given below the command to download the JQGrid through the package manager console. From the tools menu select “Library Package Manager” and then select “Package Manager Console”. I have given the screenshot below. This command will pull down the latest JQGrid package and adds them in the script folder. Once the script is downloaded and referenced in the project update the bundleconfig file to add the script reference in the pages. Bundleconfig can be found in the  App_Start  folder in the project structure. bundles .Add (newStyleBundle(“~/Content/jqgrid”).Include (“~/Content/ui.jqgrid.css”)); bundles.Add( newScriptBundle( “~/bundles/jquerygrid”) .Include( “~/Scripts/jqGrid/jquery.jqGrid*”)); Once added the config’s refer the bundles to the Views/Shared/LayoutPage.cshtml. Add the following lines to the head section of the page. @Styles.Render(“~/Content/jqgrid”) Add the following lines to the end of the page before html close tags. @Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jquery”) @Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jqueryui”) @Scripts.Render(“ ~/bundles/jquerygrid”)              That’s all to be done from the view perspective. Once these steps are done the developer can start coding for the JQGrid. In this example we will modify the HomeController for the demo. The index action will be the default action. We will add an argument for this index action. Let it be nullable bool. It’s just to mark the pdf request. In the Index.cshtml we will add a table tag with an id “ gridTable “. We will use this table for making the grid. Since JQGrid is an extension for the JQUery we will initialize the grid setting at the  script  section of the page. This script section is marked at the end of the page to improve performance. The script section is placed just below the bundle reference for JQuery and JQueryUI. This is the one of improvement factors from “ why slow” provided by yahoo. < tableid=“gridTable”class=“scroll”></ table> < inputtype=“button”value=“Export PDF”onclick=“exportPDF();“/>  @section scripts { <scripttype=“text/javascript”> $(document).ready(function(){$(“#gridTable”).jqGrid({datatype:“json”,url:‘@Url.Action(“GetCustomerDetails”)‘,mtype:‘GET’,colNames:["CustomerID","CustomerName","Location","PrimaryBusiness"],colModel:[{name:"CustomerID",width:40,index:"CustomerID",align:"center"},{name:"CustomerName",width:40,index:"CustomerName",align:"center"},{name:"Location",width:40,index:"Location",align:"center"},{name:"PrimaryBusiness",width:40,index:"PrimaryBusiness",align:"center"},],height:250,autowidth:true,sortorder:“asc”,rowNum:10,rowList:[5,10,15,20],sortname:“CustomerID”,viewrecords:true});});  function exportPDF (){ document . location = ‘ @ Url . Action ( “Index” ) ?pdf=true’ ; } </ script >  } The exportPDF methos just sets the document location to the Index action method with PDF Boolean as true just to mark for download PDF. An inmemory list collection is used for demo purpose. The  GetCustomerDetailsmethod is the server side action method that will provide the data as JSON list. We will see the method explanation below. [ HttpGet] publicJsonResultGetCustomerDetails(){ varresult=new { total=1, page=1, records=customerList.Count(), rows=( customerList.Select( e=>new { id=e.CustomerID, cell=newstring[]{ e.CustomerID.ToString(), e.CustomerName, e.Location, e.PrimaryBusiness}})) .ToArray()}; returnJson( result,  JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); }   JQGrid can understand the response data from server in certain format. The server method shown above is taking care of formatting the response so that JQGrid understand the data properly. The response data should contain totalpages, current page, full record count, rows of data with id and remaining columns as string array. The response is built using an anonymous object and will be sent as a MVC JsonResult. Since we are using HttpGet it’s better to mark the attribute as HttpGet and also the JSON requestbehavious as AllowGet. The inmemory list is initialized in the homecontroller constructor for reference. Public class HomeController : Controller{ private readonly Ilist < CustomerViewModel > customerList ; public HomeController (){ customerList=newList<CustomerViewModel>() { newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=100, CustomerName=“Sundar”, Location=“Chennai”, PrimaryBusiness=“Teacing”}, newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=101, CustomerName=“Sudhagar”, Location=“Chennai”, PrimaryBusiness=“Software”}, newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=102, CustomerName=“Thivagar”, Location=“China”, PrimaryBusiness=“SAP”}, }; }  publicActionResultIndex( bool?pdf){ if ( !pdf.HasValue){ returnView( customerList);} else{ stringfilePath=Server.MapPath( “Content”)  +“Sample.pdf”; ExportPDF( customerList,  new string[]{  “CustomerID”,  “CustomerName”,  “Location”,  “PrimaryBusiness” },  filePath); return File ( filePath ,  “application/pdf” , “list.pdf” ); }}   The index actionmethod has a Boolean argument named “pdf”. It’s used to indicate for PDF download. When the application starts this method is first hit for initial page request. For PDF operation a filename is generated and then sent to the  ExportPDF  method which will take care of generating the PDF from the datasource. The  ExportPDF method is listed below.  Private static void ExportPDF<TSource>(IList<TSource>customerList,string [] columns, string filePath){ FontheaderFont=FontFactory.GetFont( “Verdana”,  10,  Color.WHITE); Fontrowfont=FontFactory.GetFont( “Verdana”,  10,  Color.BLUE); Documentdocument=newDocument( PageSize.A4);  PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter . GetInstance ( document ,  new FileStream ( filePath ,  FileMode . OpenOrCreate )); document.Open(); PdfPTabletable=newPdfPTable( columns.Length); foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){ PdfPCellcell=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( column,  headerFont)); cell.BackgroundColor=Color.BLACK; table.AddCell( cell); }  foreach  ( var item in customerList ) { foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){ stringvalue=item.GetType() .GetProperty( column) .GetValue( item) .ToString(); PdfPCellcell5=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( value,  rowfont)); table.AddCell( cell5); } }  document.Add( table); document.Close(); }   iTextSharp is one of the pioneer in PDF export. It’s an opensource library readily available as NUget library. This command will pulldown latest available library. I am using the version 4.1.2.0. The latest version may have changed. There are three main things in this library. Document This is the document class which takes care of creating the document sheet with particular size. We have used A4 size. There is also an option to define the rectangle size. This document instance will be further used in next methods for reference. PdfWriter PdfWriter takes the filename and the document as the reference. This class enables the document class to generate the PDF content and save them in a file. Font Using the FONT class the developer can control the font features. Since I need a nice looking font I am giving the Verdana font. Following this PdfPTable and PdfPCell are used for generating the normal table layout. We have created two set of fonts for header and footer. Font headerFont=FontFactory .GetFont(“Verdana”, 10, Color .WHITE); Font rowfont=FontFactory .GetFont(“Verdana”, 10, Color .BLUE);   We are getting the header columns as string array. Columns argument array is looped and header is generated. We are using the headerfont for this purpose. PdfWriter writer=PdfWriter .GetInstance(document, newFileStream (filePath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate)); document.Open(); PdfPTabletable=newPdfPTable( columns.Length); foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){ PdfPCellcell=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( column,  headerFont)); cell.BackgroundColor=Color.BLACK; table.AddCell( cell); }   Then reflection is used to generate the row wise details and form the grid. foreach  (var item in customerList){ foreach ( varcolumnincolumns) { stringvalue=item.GetType() .GetProperty( column) .GetValue( item) .ToString(); PdfPCellcell5=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( value,  rowfont)); table.AddCell( cell5); } } document . Add ( table ); document . Close ();   Once the process id done the pdf table is added to the document and document is closed to write all the changes to the filepath given. Then the control moves to the controller which will take care of sending the response as a JSON result with a filename. If the file name is not given then the PDF will open in the same page otherwise a popup will open up asking whether to save the file or open file. Return File(filePath, “application/pdf”,“list.pdf”);   The final result screen is shown below. PDF file opened below to show the output. Conclusion: This is how the export pdf is done for JQGrid. The problem area that is addressed here is the clientside grid frameworks won’t support PDF’s export. In that time it’s better to have a fine grained control over the data and generated PDF. iTextSharp has helped us to achieve our goal.

    Read the article

  • SolidQ Journal for January (free and available now)

    - by Greg Low
    I've been travelling in Tasmania for a week or so and didn't get to post about the SolidQ Journal for January. It's our free monthly journal at: http://www.solidq.com/sqj . I promised to write a part two on controlling the security context of stored procedures but didn't get time to write this month. I'll rectify that very soon. However, in the meantime, the rest of the team have done a great job again. Guillermo Bas has described how to access SharePoint 2010 data through Windows Phone 7. Marino...(read more)

    Read the article

  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 08, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 08, 2011Popular ReleasesExtended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.3.0: What's in the 1.3.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner ChildWindow ColorPicker - Updated (Breaking Changes) DateTimeUpDown - New Control Magnifier - New Control MaskedTextBox - New Control MessageBox NumericUpDown RichTextBox RichTextBoxFormatBar - Updated .NET 3.5 binaries and SourcePlease note: The Extended WPF Toolkit 3.5 is dependent on .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit. You must install .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit in order to use any features in the To...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9d: added elementclient coordinate catcher to catch coordinates select a target (ingame) i.e. your char, npc or monster than click the button and coordinates+direction will be transfered to the selected row in the table corrected labels from Rot to Direction (because it is a vector)AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.2: Implemented the Auto Updater Fix: Your settings will no longer be cleared with new releases of AutoLoL The mastery Editor and Browser now have their own tabs instead of nested tabs The Browser tab will only show the masteries matching ALL filters instead of just one Added a 'Browse' button in the Mastery Editor tab to open the Masteries Directory The Browser tab now shows a message when there are no mastery files in the Masteries Directory Fix: Fixed the Save As dialog again, for ...Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter: 2.1 latest stable: V2.1 is stable, and is in maintenance mode. This is v2.1.1.25. It is a bug-fix release. There are no new features. 28629 29172 28722 27626 28074 29164 27659 27900 many documentation updates and fixes proper x64 build environment. This release includes x64 binaries in zip form, but no x64 MSI file. You'll have to manually install x64 servers, following the instructions in the documentation.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...VidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...DbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.10: IMPORTANT CHANGESThis release changes the way some WURFL capabilities and attributes are exposed to .NET developers. If you cast MobileCapabilities to return some values then please read the Release Note before implementing this release. The following code snippet can be used to access any WURFL capability. For instance, if the device is a tablet: string capability = Request.Browser["is_tablet"]; SummaryNew attributes have been added to the redirect section: originalUrlAsQueryString If se...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...New Projects2011 Scripting Games: Track Changes for the 2011 Scripting Games to be hosted on PoshCode by the Microsoft Scripting Guys and the PowerShell community. ADO.NET Unit Testable Repository Generator: Generates a strongly-typed Object Context and POCO Entities from your EDMX file. Additionally a Repository and an abstract Unit Test for the Repository is created (with a mock for the ObjectContext and mock for the ObjectSets). Bases on the "ADO.NET C# POCO Entity Generator".AshpazKhone: ???AVAilable Rooms: AVAilable Rooms Can be used to show and book rooms on an exchange serverContentManager: Content Manger for SAP Kpro exports the data pool of a content-server by PHIOS-Lists (txt-files) into local binary files. Afterwards this files can be imported in a SAP content-repository . The whole List of the PHIOS Keys can also be downloaded an splitted in practical units.CSLauncher: CSLauncher is a small application providing a launching interface similar to Counter Strike's weapons selection menu. You can organize your favorite applications in CSLauncher in the order you wish, then launch them by remembering their numbers.DbMetadata: A simple lightweight library used to retrieve database metadata.DotNetSiemensPLCToolBoxLibrary: DotNetSiemensPLCToolBoxLibrary A Library for working with Siemens Step5 and Step7 Projects, connecting to S5 or S7 PLC's.EmptyX: EmptyX is a game developped with c# and xna for the XNA CHALLENGE in AlgeriaERASMUS: Erasmus šitFaceDeBouc: Simplebook, le nouveau Facebook CPE! Technlogies .NET Serveur: - BDD SQLServer - Logique métier - Web services Clients: - client lourd WPF - client léger ASP.NETFunction resolver: Application using .NET Expression trees to resolve a function for a set of numbersMLRobotic: Programme de gestion MLRobotic 2011 Sissa ProjectMS CRM Multiple Attachment Download Application: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 currently does not have a built in way for CRM Administrators to Export multiple attachments from the database and store it on a local directory on the Server or the local PC. This application allows you to do so.Open Data Publisher: Open Data Publisher is a C# MVC application that allows you to quickly and easily publish data from SQL Server tables and views using the OData protocol, and present data from OData and static sources to the public for download and exploration.OttawaZagreb1: Test projectPrague: ????? ?? ???? ??????PSSplunk: PSSplunk is a set of Powershell cmdlets that use the RESTFUL API provided by www.splunk.com The goal is provide access to all of Splunks configuration and search features from the CLI without having to have Splunk installed locally.Reactive C#: Reactive language extensions for C#SemanaWebcasts: Projeto para semana de webcasts.Steward: Personal StewardSVNUG.Tracker: SVNUG.Tracker is an example task tracking application used as a presentation project for the Sangamon Valley .NET User Group (svnug.com). The purpose of SVNUG.Tracker is to be a common problem domain for exercising new .NET technology. SVNUG.Tracker is written in C# 4.The Silverlight Cookbook - A Reference Application for Silverlight 4 LOB Apps: The Silverlight Cookbook is a .NET example application that demonstrates how to build a full-blown line-of-business app using the reference architecture explained at: http://www.dennisdoomen.net/search/label/Silverlight Vkontakte Wpf Client: This is a simple client for social network Vkontakte. It can send message to your friends, download audio files or play it,list user video. Also you can view user status and change yours.Windows Phone Multilingual Keyboard: Multilingual keyboard for Windows Phone 7WPF Controls & MVVM Practices: WPF Controls contains various controls that can be used in applications. Currently Featured * FilteredListBox (filter and selected items notification) * IsDirty functionality for a ViewModel model

    Read the article

  • Convert ddply {plyr} to Oracle R Enterprise, or use with Embedded R Execution

    - by Mark Hornick
    The plyr package contains a set of tools for partitioning a problem into smaller sub-problems that can be more easily processed. One function within {plyr} is ddply, which allows you to specify subsets of a data.frame and then apply a function to each subset. The result is gathered into a single data.frame. Such a capability is very convenient. The function ddply also has a parallel option that if TRUE, will apply the function in parallel, using the backend provided by foreach. This type of functionality is available through Oracle R Enterprise using the ore.groupApply function. In this blog post, we show a few examples from Sean Anderson's "A quick introduction to plyr" to illustrate the correpsonding functionality using ore.groupApply. To get started, we'll create a demo data set and load the plyr package. set.seed(1) d <- data.frame(year = rep(2000:2014, each = 3),         count = round(runif(45, 0, 20))) dim(d) library(plyr) This first example takes the data frame, partitions it by year, and calculates the coefficient of variation of the count, returning a data frame. # Example 1 res <- ddply(d, "year", function(x) {   mean.count <- mean(x$count)   sd.count <- sd(x$count)   cv <- sd.count/mean.count   data.frame(cv.count = cv)   }) To illustrate the equivalent functionality in Oracle R Enterprise, using embedded R execution, we use the ore.groupApply function on the same data, but pushed to the database, creating an ore.frame. The function ore.push creates a temporary table in the database, returning a proxy object, the ore.frame. D <- ore.push(d) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   mean.count <- mean(x$count)   sd.count <- sd(x$count)   cv <- sd.count/mean.count   data.frame(year=x$year[1], cv.count = cv)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, cv.count=1)) You'll notice the similarities in the first three arguments. With ore.groupApply, we augment the function to return the specific data.frame we want. We also specify the argument FUN.VALUE, which describes the resulting data.frame. From our previous blog posts, you may recall that by default, ore.groupApply returns an ore.list containing the results of each function invocation. To get a data.frame, we specify the structure of the result. The results in both cases are the same, however the ore.groupApply result is an ore.frame. In this case the data stays in the database until it's actually required. This can result in significant memory and time savings whe data is large. R> class(res) [1] "ore.frame" attr(,"package") [1] "OREbase" R> head(res)    year cv.count 1 2000 0.3984848 2 2001 0.6062178 3 2002 0.2309401 4 2003 0.5773503 5 2004 0.3069680 6 2005 0.3431743 To make the ore.groupApply execute in parallel, you can specify the argument parallel with either TRUE, to use default database parallelism, or to a specific number, which serves as a hint to the database as to how many parallel R engines should be used. The next ddply example uses the summarise function, which creates a new data.frame. In ore.groupApply, the year column is passed in with the data. Since no automatic creation of columns takes place, we explicitly set the year column in the data.frame result to the value of the first row, since all rows received by the function have the same year. # Example 2 ddply(d, "year", summarise, mean.count = mean(count)) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   mean.count <- mean(x$count)   data.frame(year=x$year[1], mean.count = mean.count)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, mean.count=1)) R> head(res)    year mean.count 1 2000 7.666667 2 2001 13.333333 3 2002 15.000000 4 2003 3.000000 5 2004 12.333333 6 2005 14.666667 Example 3 uses the transform function with ddply, which modifies the existing data.frame. With ore.groupApply, we again construct the data.frame explicilty, which is returned as an ore.frame. # Example 3 ddply(d, "year", transform, total.count = sum(count)) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   total.count <- sum(x$count)   data.frame(year=x$year[1], count=x$count, total.count = total.count)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, count=1, total.count=1)) > head(res)    year count total.count 1 2000 5 23 2 2000 7 23 3 2000 11 23 4 2001 18 40 5 2001 4 40 6 2001 18 40 In Example 4, the mutate function with ddply enables you to define new columns that build on columns just defined. Since the construction of the data.frame using ore.groupApply is explicit, you always have complete control over when and how to use columns. # Example 4 ddply(d, "year", mutate, mu = mean(count), sigma = sd(count),       cv = sigma/mu) res <- ore.groupApply (D, D$year, function(x) {   mu <- mean(x$count)   sigma <- sd(x$count)   cv <- sigma/mu   data.frame(year=x$year[1], count=x$count, mu=mu, sigma=sigma, cv=cv)   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, count=1, mu=1,sigma=1,cv=1)) R> head(res)    year count mu sigma cv 1 2000 5 7.666667 3.055050 0.3984848 2 2000 7 7.666667 3.055050 0.3984848 3 2000 11 7.666667 3.055050 0.3984848 4 2001 18 13.333333 8.082904 0.6062178 5 2001 4 13.333333 8.082904 0.6062178 6 2001 18 13.333333 8.082904 0.6062178 In Example 5, ddply is used to partition data on multiple columns before constructing the result. Realizing this with ore.groupApply involves creating an index column out of the concatenation of the columns used for partitioning. This example also allows us to illustrate using the ORE transparency layer to subset the data. # Example 5 baseball.dat <- subset(baseball, year > 2000) # data from the plyr package x <- ddply(baseball.dat, c("year", "team"), summarize,            homeruns = sum(hr)) We first push the data set to the database to get an ore.frame. We then add the composite column and perform the subset, using the transparency layer. Since the results from database execution are unordered, we will explicitly sort these results and view the first 6 rows. BB.DAT <- ore.push(baseball) BB.DAT$index <- with(BB.DAT, paste(year, team, sep="+")) BB.DAT2 <- subset(BB.DAT, year > 2000) X <- ore.groupApply (BB.DAT2, BB.DAT2$index, function(x) {   data.frame(year=x$year[1], team=x$team[1], homeruns=sum(x$hr))   }, FUN.VALUE=data.frame(year=1, team="A", homeruns=1), parallel=FALSE) res <- ore.sort(X, by=c("year","team")) R> head(res)    year team homeruns 1 2001 ANA 4 2 2001 ARI 155 3 2001 ATL 63 4 2001 BAL 58 5 2001 BOS 77 6 2001 CHA 63 Our next example is derived from the ggplot function documentation. This illustrates the use of ddply within using the ggplot2 package. We first create a data.frame with demo data and use ddply to create some statistics for each group (gp). We then use ggplot to produce the graph. We can take this same code, push the data.frame df to the database and invoke this on the database server. The graph will be returned to the client window, as depicted below. # Example 6 with ggplot2 library(ggplot2) df <- data.frame(gp = factor(rep(letters[1:3], each = 10)),                  y = rnorm(30)) # Compute sample mean and standard deviation in each group library(plyr) ds <- ddply(df, .(gp), summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y)) # Set up a skeleton ggplot object and add layers: ggplot() +   geom_point(data = df, aes(x = gp, y = y)) +   geom_point(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean),              colour = 'red', size = 3) +   geom_errorbar(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean,                                ymin = mean - sd, ymax = mean + sd),              colour = 'red', width = 0.4) DF <- ore.push(df) ore.tableApply(DF, function(df) {   library(ggplot2)   library(plyr)   ds <- ddply(df, .(gp), summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y))   ggplot() +     geom_point(data = df, aes(x = gp, y = y)) +     geom_point(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean),                colour = 'red', size = 3) +     geom_errorbar(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean,                                  ymin = mean - sd, ymax = mean + sd),                   colour = 'red', width = 0.4) }) But let's take this one step further. Suppose we wanted to produce multiple graphs, partitioned on some index column. We replicate the data three times and add some noise to the y values, just to make the graphs a little different. We also create an index column to form our three partitions. Note that we've also specified that this should be executed in parallel, allowing Oracle Database to control and manage the server-side R engines. The result of ore.groupApply is an ore.list that contains the three graphs. Each graph can be viewed by printing the list element. df2 <- rbind(df,df,df) df2$y <- df2$y + rnorm(nrow(df2)) df2$index <- c(rep(1,300), rep(2,300), rep(3,300)) DF2 <- ore.push(df2) res <- ore.groupApply(DF2, DF2$index, function(df) {   df <- df[,1:2]   library(ggplot2)   library(plyr)   ds <- ddply(df, .(gp), summarise, mean = mean(y), sd = sd(y))   ggplot() +     geom_point(data = df, aes(x = gp, y = y)) +     geom_point(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean),                colour = 'red', size = 3) +     geom_errorbar(data = ds, aes(x = gp, y = mean,                                  ymin = mean - sd, ymax = mean + sd),                   colour = 'red', width = 0.4)   }, parallel=TRUE) res[[1]] res[[2]] res[[3]] To recap, we've illustrated how various uses of ddply from the plyr package can be realized in ore.groupApply, which affords the user explicit control over the contents of the data.frame result in a straightforward manner. We've also highlighted how ddply can be used within an ore.groupApply call.

    Read the article

  • Level Design V.S. Modeler

    - by Ecurbed
    From what I understand being a level designer and a character/environment/object/etc Modeler are two different jobs, yet sometimes it feels like a Modeler can also do the job of the level designer. I know this also depends on the scale of the game. For small games maybe they are one and the same, but for bigger games they become two different jobs. I understand a background in some modeling could not hurt when it comes to level design, but the question I have is: Do jobs prefer people who can model for level designing? This way they can kill two birds with one stone and have someone to create the assets and design the level. What is your opinion of the training? Does level design contain skill sets that make them completely different from what a modeler can do, or is this an easy transition for a modeler to become a level designer? Can you be a bad level designer but a good modeler and vice versa?

    Read the article

  • Ask for Budget vs. Give Proposal

    - by Miro
    Should I ask a prospect what his budget is or just give out a price? He need: "a new web site, with nice effects but at same time very simple & funtional for my costumers & guests" It's a 5 page website for mp3 guided tour with 2-3 paragraphs of text on each page and 5-8 images on total + logo that needs redesign. It's my first 'over distance' job. (I don't know the guy personally and have never met him) Please let me know what is a good practice and how to proceed. P.S. Also what is an average price for Simple 5 page Flash website with some custom graphics. Thanks

    Read the article

  • How to code a 4x shader/filter which emulates arcade crt display behavior?

    - by Arthur Wulf White
    I want to write a shader/filer probably in adobe Pixel Bender that will do the best job possible in emulating the fill of an oldskul monochromatic arcade CRT screen. Much like this here: http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2012/07/customizing-cgwgs-crt-pixel-shader.html Here are some attributes I know will exist in this filter: It will take in a low res image 160 x 120 and return a medium res image 640 x 480. It will add scanlines It will blur the color channels to create that color bleeding effect It will distort the shape of the image from a perfect rectangle into a rounder shape. The question is, could you please provide any other attributes that are beneficial to emulating an arcade CRT feel and links and resources on coding these effects. Thanks

    Read the article

  • Windows Phone 8 development on Windows 7 - is it or will be possible?

    - by Tiby
    I was trying to install Windows Phone 8 SDK on my Windows 7 machine and it hit me with the 'supported only on Windows 8' message. I actually wanted to develop Phone 7.5 apps on Visual Studio 2012, impossible thing with the 7.1 SDK, so I thought 8 SDK will do the job. As if it was not enough that the 8 SDK was controversial upon release, now that it's generally available, to me it seems like a horrible decision to make it available only for Windows 8, because in my humble opinion, no serious and sane developer will install Windows 8 ever, or at least in the near future, just because of the Metro UI. So, anyone knows any workarounds for developing Windows Phone 8 on Windows 7, or at least develop for 7.5 but using Visual Studio 2012?

    Read the article

  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, August 14, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, August 14, 2014Popular ReleasesWordMat: WordMat for Mac: WordMat for Mac has a few limitations compared to the Windows version - Graph is not supported (Gnuplot, GeoGebra and Excel works) - Units are not supported yet (Coming up) The Mac version is yet as tested as the windows version.Awake: Awake v1.4.0 (Stand-Alone-Exe): Awake is a tool, that resides in system tray and prevents the computer from entering the idle state, thus successfully preventing it from entering sleep/hibernation/the lock screen. It does not change any system settings, therefore it does not require administrative privileges. This tool is designed for those who cannot change the timings in their power settings, because of some corporate policy.Node.js Tools for Visual Studio: Latest dev build: An intermediate release with the latest changes and bug fixes.HP OneView PowerShell Library: HP OneView PowerShell Library 1.10.1193: Branch to HP OneView 1.10 Release. NOTE: This library version does not support older appliance versions. Fixed New-HPOVProfile to check for Firmware and BIOS management for supported platforms. Would erroneously error when neither -firmware or -bios were passed. Fixed Remove-HPOV* cmdlets which did not handle -force switch parameter correctly Fixed New-HPOVUplinkSet and New-HPOVNetwork Fixed Download-File where HTTP stream compression was not handled, resulting in incorrectly writt...Linq 4 Javascript: Version 2.3: Minor Changes Made In Queryable - don't check for collection length with >=. Use === (In The Next Method) TypeScript Change Only - Remove collection source and other inherit properties from all the chainables. Also in typescript add private - public to all properties. This should cleanup the typescript namespace a bit TypeScript Change Only - Change return type of ToDictionary to TKey, T instead of T, TKey Changed the unit test to Typescript so I can test how the caller experience is in...NeoLua (Lua for .net dynamic language runtime): NeoLua-0.8.17: Fix: table.insert Fix: table auto convert Fix: Runtime-functions were defined as private it should be internal. Fix: min,max MichaelSenko release.Azure Maching Learning Excel Add-In: Beta: Download the zip file and extract into your local directory. Then watch the video tutorials for installation steps.MFCMAPI: August 2014 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1042 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010/2013 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeOooPlayer: 1.1: Added: Support for speex, TAK and OptimFrog files Added: An option to not to load cover art Added: Smaller package size Fixed: Unable to drag&drop audio files to playlist Updated: FLAC, WacPack and Opus playback libraries Updated: ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag librariesEWSEditor: EwsEditor 1.10 Release: • Export and import of items as a full fidelity steam works - without proxy classes! - I used raw EWS POSTs. • Turned off word wrap for EWS request field in EWS POST windows. • Several windows with scrolling texts boxes were limiting content to 32k - I removed this restriction. • Split server timezone info off to separate menu item from the timezone info windows so that the timezone info window could be used without logging into a mailbox. • Lots of updates to the TimeZone window. • UserAgen...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.1 RC: Release notes for PTVS 2.1 RC We’re pleased to announce the release candidate for Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, editing, IntelliSense, interactive debugging, profiling, Microsoft Azure, IPython, and cross-platform debugging support. PTVS 2.1 RC is available for: Visual Studio Expre...Sense/Net ECM - Enterprise CMS: SenseNet 6.3.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.3.1 Community EditionSense/Net 6.3.1 is an important step toward a more modular infrastructure, robustness and maintainability. With this release we finally introduce a packaging and a task management framework, and the Image Editor that will surely make the job of content editors more fun. Please review the changes and new features since Sense/Net 6.3 and give a feedback on our forum! Main new featuresSnAdmin (packaging framework) Task Management Image Editor OData REST A...Aspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI SS - v 1.2: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI SS SDK in comparison with Aspose.Cells What's New ? Following Examples: Create Pivot Charts Detect Merged Cells Sort Data Printing Workbooks Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are available at Aspose Docs. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.MFCBDAINF: MFCBDAINF: Added recognition of TBS, Hauppauge, DVBWorld and FireDTV proprietary GUID'sFluffy: Fluffy 0.3.35.4: Change log: Text editorSKGL - Serial Key Generating Library: SKGL Extension Methods 4 (1.0.5.1): This library contains methods for: Time change check (make sure the time has not been changed on the client computer) Key Validation (this will use http://serialkeymanager.com/ to validate keys against the database) Key Activation (this will, depending on the settings, activate a key with a specific machine code) Key Activation Trial (allows you to update a key if it is a trial key) Get Machine Code (calculates a machine code given any hash function) Get Eight Byte Hash (returns an...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.019 Release 1: Added RadioAntenna broadcast name to ship name detail. Added two additional columns for Asteroid material generation for Asteroid Fields. Added Mass and Block number columns to main display. Added Ellipsis to some columns on main display to reduce name confusion. Added correct SE version number in file when saving. Re-added in reattaching Motor when drag/dropping or importing ships (KeenSH have added RotorEntityId back in after removing it months ago). Added option to export and r...New ProjectsAndroid PCM Audio Recording: Android PCM Audio Recording The source code records the PCM audio in android device.Azure Maching Learning Excel Add-In: The Azure ML Excel Add-In enables you to interact with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning WebServices through excel by adding the scoring endpoint as a function.bitboxx bbcontact: The bitboxx bbcontact module is a DNN module for providing a simple configurable contact form with easy setup and email notificationJD eSurvey Java Open Source Online Survey Application: JD eSurvey is an open source enterprise survey web application written in Java and based on the Spring Framework and Hibernate ORM developed by JD Software.Kobayashi Royale: A tactical space combat turn based game.OneApp Framework: Framework for building true cross platform application.Raspberry Pi Control Center: A GTK+ based Raspberry Pi Control Center. Made to be simple and fastSharePoint Farm's Logs Collector: Get Farm Logs from a centralized place. Sonar Snitch: Ferramenta para filtrar e monitorar aplicações no Sonar. Indica o quanto cada aplicação foi alterada em uma série de indicadores conhecidos.

    Read the article

  • How to document/verify consistent layering?

    - by Morten
    I have recently moved to the dark side: I am now a CUSTOMER of software development -- mainly websites. With this new role comes new concerns. As a programmer i know how solid an application becomes when it is properly layered, and I want to use this knowledge in my new job. I don't want business logic in my presentation layer, and certainly not presentation stuff in my data layer. Thus, I want to be able to demand from my supllier that they document the level of layering, and how neat and consistent the layering is. The big question is: How is the level of layering documented to me as a customer, and is that a reasonable demmand for me to have, so I don't have to look in the code (I'm not supposed to do that anymore)?

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446  | Next Page >