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  • How do I prevent mail from my Exchange server from being blocked?

    - by Mike C
    Recently one of our client machines was infected with a virus and I believe was spamming addresses in the user's contact list. Since then our server has been appearing on blacklists and it has been causing our e-mail to be blocked and returned by many clients. The virus has since been cleared, what can I do to get our server off these blacklists so that we will have more reliable e-mail service? Will I have to change my IP address? Thanks, Mike

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  • I can't get the Samsung PC Studio to work on Vista or Windows 7

    - by Mike Farrington
    Has anyone got a solution to this problem have asked Samsung but no reply yet! The software installs OK and the drivers, it sees the Tocco Lite when connected but will not actually connect! error message can't change mode or can't connect as "no response from the device because it is in the initializing stage. Try again after the initialization has completed" but it never does. Please Help!!! Mike

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  • How to connect lines in Flash CS4 to fill?

    - by Mike
    Hi, I drew a shape with the pen tool in Flash CS4. When I double click on the line it highlights the entire shape, but I can't fill for some reason. If I single click, only part of the line is highlighted (before it changes angle). How can I get this line to connect as a shape to invoke fill on it? Thanks, Mike

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  • Table Formatting in Excel 2007: How do I remove it?

    - by Mike
    I've used the new Table Formatting option in Excel 2007. Now I can't remove it. I've dragged the little blue square up to the last cell on the top left, but it just won't go any further. In fact it just won't go at all. Clear all doesn't remove it. What does? I want my table back! Thanks Mike

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  • iPhone: how to test that a 3Gs is what it says it is?

    - by Mike
    I'm about to buy a second hand iPhone. It's supposedly a 3Gs; hardly used and de-blocked. Is there any way of checking this through the handset before I give over my money? I recently sold my Nokia W72 and the guy I sold it too put in a code and it showed him my usage details? Any advice given is greatly appreciated. Thanks Mike.

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  • Grounded in Dublin

    - by Mike Dietrich
    Friday's hands-on workshop in the Oracle office in Dublin was quite good fun for everybody - except for Mick who has just recognized that his Ryanair flight back to Cork has been canceled (So I hope you've returned home well!) and me as my flights back to Munich via London City had been canceled as well. It's always good to have somebody in the workshop from Air Lingus so I've got hourly information what's going in in the Irish airspace (and now I know that the system dealing with such situations is an well prepared Oracle database which runs just like a switch watch - Thanks again for all your support!!! Was great to talk to you!!!). But to be honest, there are worse places to be grounded for a few days than Dublin. At least it gave me the chance to do something which I never had time enough before when visiting Oracle Ireland: a bit of sightseeing. When I've realized that nothing seems to move over the weekend I started organizing my travel back yesterday. It was no fun at all because there's no single system to book such a travel. Figuring out all possibilities and options going back to Munich was the first challange. Irish Ferries webpage was moaning with all the unexpected load (currently it's fully down). Hotel booking websites showed vacancies in Holyhead but didn't let me book. And calling them just reveiled that there are no rooms left. Haven't stayed overnight in a train station for quite a while ;-) The website of VirginTrains puzzled me with offering a seat at an enormous price for a train ride from Holyhead to London Euston (Thanks, Sir Richard Branson!) just to tell me after I booked a ticket that there are no seats left (but I traveled German railsways a few weeks ago from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt sitting on the floor as well). Eurostar's website let me choose tickets through the tunnel to tell me in the final step that the ticket cannot be confirmed as there are no seats left - but the next check again showed bookable seats - must be a database from some other vendor which has no proper row level locking ... hm ...?! Finally the TGV page for the speed train to Stuttgart and then the ICE to Munich was not allowing searches for quite a while - but ultimately ... after 4.5 hours of searching, waiting, sending credit card information again and again ... So if you have a few spare fingers please keep them crossed :-) And good luck to all my colleagues traveling back from the Exadata training in Berlin. As Mike Appleyard, my colleague from the UK presales team wrote: "Dublin and Berlin aren't too bad a place to get stuck... ;-)"

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  • The best Bar on the globe is ... in Seoul/Korea

    - by Mike Dietrich
    As you know already sometimes I write about things which really don't have to do anything with a database upgrade. So if you are looking for tips and tricks and articles about that topic please stop reading now Actually I'm not a lets-go-to-a-bar person. I enjoy good food and a fine dessert wine afterwards. But last week in Seoul/Korea Ryan, our local host, did ask us after a wonderful dinner at a Korean Barbecue place if we'd like to visit a bar. I was really tired as I flew into Seoul overnight from Sunday to Monday arriving Monday early morning, getting shower, breakfast - and then a full day of very good and productive customer meetings. But one thing Ryan mentioned catched my immediate attention: The owner of the bar collects records and has a huge tube amp stereo system - and you can ask him to play your favorite songs. The bar is called "Peter, Paul and Mary" - honestly not my favorite style of music. And I even coulnd't find a webpage or an address - only that little piece of information on Facebook. But after stepping down the stairs to the cellar my eyes almost poped out of my head. This is the audio system: Enourmus huge corner horn loudspeakers from Western Electric. Pretty old I'd suppose but delivering an incredible present dynamics into the room. And plenty of tube equipment from Jadis, NSA Labs and Shindo Laboratories Western Electric 300B Limited amps from Tokyo. And the owner (I was so amazed I had simply forgotten to ask for his name) collects records since 40 years. And we had many wishes that night. Actually when we did enter Peter, Paul and Mary he played an old Helloween song. That must have been destiny. A German entering a bar in Korea and the owner is playing an old song by one of Germany's best heavy metal bands ever. And it went on with the Doors, Rainbow's Stargazer, Scorpions, later Deep Purple's Perfect Strangers, a bit of Santana, Carly Simon, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie ...Ronnie James Dio's Holy Diver, Gary Moore, Peter Gabriel's San Jacinto ... and many many more great songs ... Of course we were the last guests leaving the place at 2am in the morning - and I've never ever had a better night in a bar before ... I could have stayed days listening to so many records  ... Thanks Ryan, that was a phantastic night! -Mike

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  • New Slides - and a discussion about Dictionary Statistics

    - by Mike Dietrich
    First of all we have just upoaded a new version of the Upgrade and Migration Workshop slides with some added information. So please feel free to download them from here.The slides have one new interesting information which lead to a discussion I've had in the past days with a very large customer regarding their upgrades - and internally on the mailing list targeting an EBS database upgrade from Oracle 10.2 to Oracle 11.2. Why are we creating dictionary statistics during upgrade? I'd believe this forced dictionary statistics creation got introduced with the desupport of the Rule Based Optimizer in Oracle 10g. The goal: as RBO is not supported anymore we have to make sure that the data dictionary has fresh and non-stale statistics. Actually that would have led in Oracle 9i to strange behaviour in some databases - so in Oracle 9i this was strongly disrecommended. The upgrade scripts got hardcoded to create these stats. But during tests we had the following findings: It's important to create dictionary statistics the night before the upgrade. Not two weeks before, not 60 minutes before your downtime begins. But very close to the upgrade. From Oracle 10g onwards you'd just say: $ execute DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS; This is important to make sure you have fresh dictionary statistics during upgrade for performance reasons. Tests have shown that running an upgrade without valid dictionary statistics might slow down the whole upgrade by factors of 2x-3x. And it would be also a great idea post upgrade to create again fresh dictionary statistics when you've did suppress the stats creation during the upgrade process. Suppress? Yes, you could set this underscore parameter in the init.ora: _optim_dict_stats_at_db_cr_upg=FALSE to suppress the forced dictionary statistics collection during an upgrade. We believe strongly that (a) people using the default statistics creation process which will create dictionary statistics by default and (b) create fresh stats before upgrade on the dictionary. Therefore we find it save once you have followed our advice to use the underscore during upgrade. And we've taken out that forced statistics collection during upgrade in the next release of the database. Please note: If you are using the DBUA for the upgrade it will remove underscore parameters for the upgrade run to improve performance - which is generally a good idea. So you'll have to start the DBUA with that call: $ dbua -initParam "_optim_dict_stats_at_cb_cr_upg"=FALSE -Mike

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  • Content from Oracle Business Analytics Partner Forum 2013

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This year’s EMEA Partner Forum (11th June - 14th June, 2013 in Milan, Italy) was well attended with 120 partners from countries around Europe and the Middle East. The presentation content for the main Plenary day and for the OBI, and Hyperion 11.1.2.3 breakout sessions is available to partners who attended. If you could not make it, and would like access to this material, please email to Mike[email protected]. You can also get additional Hyperion content from the EPM Solution Factory page: for logon details please contact [email protected]. The keynote by Oracle VP Rich Clayton set the agenda, plus many partners presented their experiences, including Accenture, Deloitte, Tech Edge, iConsulting, RealDecoy, Rittman-Mead, and Aorta, covering a variety of topics such as: · 21st Century Business Analytics · The 21st Century CFO · Driving Profitability through Customer Experience · Exalytics Case Studies For details on the agenda and multi-day breakout sessions download here the Agenda.pdf. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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  • A starting point for Use Cases and User Stories

    - by Mike Benkovich
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/benko/archive/2013/07/23/a-starting-point-for-use-cases-and-user-stories.aspxSoftware is a challenging business and is rife with opportunities to go wrong. Over the years a number of methodologies have evolved to help make sure that things go right. In an effort to contribute to this I’ve created a list of user stories that I think should be included and sometimes are just assumed. Note this is a work in progress, so I’m looking for your feedback. I’m curious what you would add or change in my list. · As a DBA I am working with a Normalized data model that reflects an agreed upon logical model for the system · As a DBA I am using consistent names for my fields which match the naming standards of my organization · As a DBA my model supports simple CRUD operations against all the entities · As an Application Architect the UI has been validated against the Business requirements and a complete set of user story’s have been created · As an Application Architect the database model has been validated against the UI · As an Application Architect we have a logical business model that describes all the known and/or expected usage of the system during the software’s expected lifecycle · As an Application Architect we have a Deployment diagram that describes how the application components will be deployed · As an Application Architect we have a navigation diagram that describes the typical application flow · As an Application Architect we have identified points of interaction which describes how the UI interacts with the services and the data storage · As an Application Architect we have identified external systems which may now or in the future use the data of this application and have adapted the logical model to include these interactions · As an Application Architect we have identified existing systems and tools that can be extended and/or reused to help this application achieve it’s business goals · As a Project Manager all team members understand the goals of each release and iteration as they are planned · As a Project Manager all team members understand their role and the roles of others · As a Project Manager we have support of the business to do the right thing even if it is not the expedient thing · As a Test/QA Analyst we have created a simulation environment for testing the system which does not use sensitive data and accurately reflects the scenarios of all the data that will be supported by the system · As a Test/QA Analyst we have identified the matrix of supported clients used to access the system including the likely browsers, mobile devices and other interfaces to work with the application · As a Test/QA Analyst we have created exit criteria for each user story that match the requirements of the business story that was used to create them · As a Test/QA Analyst we have access to a Test environment that is isolated from production and staging environments · As a Test/QA Analyst there we have a way to reset the environment so we can rerun tests when a new version of the software becomes available · As a Test/QA Analyst I am able to automate portions of the test process Thoughts? -mike

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  • Owner of uploads directory is `www-data` but this prevents FTP access via PHP scripts

    - by letseatfood
    To allow write access to Apache, I needed to chown www-data:www-data /var/www/mysite/uploads to my site's upload folder. This allows me to delete files from the folder via unlink() in a PHP script. Unfortunately, this prevents another PHP script, which uses FTP functions, from working. I think it is because the FTP user is mike and now that the uploads directory is owned by www-data, mike cannot access it. I added mike to the group www-data, but this does not fix the issue. Can somebody advise me on how to allow PHP FTP functions to work in addition to file deletion using PHP's unlink() function?

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 19, 2010 -- #865

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Mike Snow(-2-), Justin Angel(-2-), Jeremy Likness, and David Kelley. Shoutout: Erik Mork and crew have their latest up: Silverlight Week – Silverlight Android? From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Silverlight 4 Example Using oData and RX Extensions Michael Washington has a follow-on tutorial up on ViewModel, Rx, and lashed up to OData... good detailed tutorial with external links for more information. Silverlight Tip of the Day #21 – Animation Easing Mike Snow has a couple new tips up -- this first one is about easing... great diagrams to help visualize and a cool demo application to boot. Silverlight Tip of the Day #22 – Data Validation Mike Snow's second tip (#22) is about validation and again he has a great demo app on the post. Windows Phone 7 - Emulator Automation Justin Angel has a WP7 post up about Automating the emulator... and in the process, loading the emulator from something other than VS2010... lots of good information. TFS2010 WP7 Continuous Integration Justin Angel hinted at continuous integration for WP7 in the last post, and he pays off with this one... even without all the bits installed on the build server. Making the ScrollViewer Talk in Silverlight 4 Jeremy Likness tried to respond to a user query about knowing when a user scrolled to the bottom of a ScrollViewer... Jeremy resolved it by listening to the right property. MEF (Microsoft Extensibility Framework) made simple (ish) David Kelley is discussing MEF and using a real-world example while doing so. Good discussion and code available in his code browser app... check thecomments. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Silverlight Cream for June 22, 2011 -- #1111

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Kunal Chowdhury, Beth Massi, Mike Taulty, Xpert360, and Erno de Weerd. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight, HTML and the WebBrowser Control for Offline Apps" Mike Taulty WP7: "Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 18 - Know about various Phone Tasks" Kunal Chowdhury LightSwitch: "How to Create a Simple Audit Trail (Change Log) in LightSwitch" Beth Massi From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 18 - Know about various Phone Tasks Kunal Chowdhury has number 18 in his Mango series up and is discussing WP7.1 Microsoft.Phone.Tasks namespace classes How to Create a Simple Audit Trail (Change Log) in LightSwitch Beth Massi's latest is a demo of building an audit trail to track changes to records in LightSwitch Silverlight, HTML and the WebBrowser Control for Offline Apps Mike Taulty takes a good hard look at the WebBrowser control ... and all the permutations and gyrations. If you're using or going to use this control, you definitely want to read this article. PivotViewer Shorts Part 5: Invert Facet Category Selections Xpert360 has his 5th tutorial up on PivotViewer, covering the topic of inverting the facet category's selections... per reader request. Windows Phone 7: Drawing graphics for your application with Inkscape – Part III: Backgrounds Erno de Weerd has his 3rd tutorial in his series using Inkscape to draw graphics for your WP7 app... this one is on Background images, and staying within in the Marketplace guidelines of course Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Objective-C SSL Synchronous Connection

    - by Mike
    Hello, I'm a little new to objective-C but have run across a problem that I can't solve, mostly because I'm not sure I am implementing the solution correctly. I am trying to connect using a Synchronous Connection to a https site with a self-signed certificate. I am getting the Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1202 "untrusted server certificate" Error that I have seen some solutions to on this forum. The solution i found was to add: - (BOOL)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection canAuthenticateAgainstProtectionSpace:(NSURLProtectionSpace *)protectionSpace { return [protectionSpace.authenticationMethod isEqualToString:NSURLAuthenticationMethodServerTrust]; } (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveAuthenticationChallenge:(NSURLAuthenticationChallenge *)challenge { [challenge.sender useCredential:[NSURLCredential credentialForTrust:challenge.protectionSpace.serverTrust] forAuthenticationChallenge:challenge]; } to the NSURLDelegate to accept all certificates. When I connect to the site using just a: NSURLRequest *theRequest=[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"https://examplesite.com/"] cachePolicy:NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy timeoutInterval:60.0]; NSURLConnection *theConnection=[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:theRequest delegate:self]; It works fine and I see the challenge being accepted. However when I try to connect using the synchronous connection I still get the error and I don't see the challenge functions being called when I put in logging. How can I get the synchronous connection to use the challenge methods? Is it something to do with the delegate:self part of the URLConnection? I also have logging for sending/receiving data within the NSURLDelegate that is called by my connection function but not by the synchronous function. What I am using for the synchronous part: NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL: [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://examplesite.com/"]]; [request setHTTPMethod: @"POST"]; [request setHTTPBody: [[NSString stringWithString:@"username=mike"] dataUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; dataReply = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error]; NSLog(@"%@", error); stringReply = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:dataReply encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; NSLog(@"%@", stringReply); [stringReply release]; NSLog(@"Done"); Like I mentioned I'm a little new to objective C so be kind :) Thanks for any help. Mike

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  • How to build an android test app with a dependency on another app using ant?

    - by Mike
    I have a module called MyApp, and another module called MyAppTests which has a dependency on MyApp. Both modules produce APKs, one named MyApp.apk and the other MyAppTests.apk. I normally build these in IntelliJ or Eclipse, but I'd like to create an ant buildfile for them for the purpose of continuous integration. I used "android update" to create a buildfile for MyApp, and thanks to commonsware's answer to my previous question I've been able to build it successfully using ant. I'd now like to build MyAppTests.apk using ant. I constructed the buildfile as before using "android update", but when I run it I get an error indicating that it's not finding any of the classes in MyApp. Taking a que from my previous question, I tried putting MyApp.apk into my MyAppTests/libs, but unfortunately that didn't miraculously solve the problem. What's the best way to build a test app APK using ant when it depends on classes in another APK? $ ant debug Buildfile: build.xml [setup] Project Target: Google APIs [setup] Vendor: Google Inc. [setup] Platform Version: 1.5 [setup] API level: 3 [setup] WARNING: No minSdkVersion value set. Application will install on all Android versions. dirs: [echo] Creating output directories if needed... resource-src: [echo] Generating R.java / Manifest.java from the resources... aidl: [echo] Compiling aidl files into Java classes... compile: [javac] Compiling 5 source files to /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/classes [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:3: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class MyApplication [javac] location: package com.myapp [javac] import com.myapp.MyApplication; [javac] ^

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  • R: Why does read.table stop reading a file?

    - by Mike Dewar
    I have a file, called genes.txt, which I'd like to become a data.frame. It's got a lot of lines, each line has three, tab delimited fields: mike$ wc -l genes.txt 42476 genes.txt I'd like to read this file into a data.frame in R. I use the command read.table, like this: genes = read.table( genes_file, sep="\t", na.strings="-", fill=TRUE, col.names=c("GeneSymbol","synonyms","description") ) Which seems to work fine, where genes_file points at genes.txt. However, the number of lines in my data.frame is significantly less than the number of lines in my text file: > nrow(genes) [1] 27896 and things I can find in the text file: mike$ grep "SELL" genes.txt SELL CD62L|LAM1|LECAM1|LEU8|LNHR|LSEL|LYAM1|PLNHR|TQ1 selectin L don't seem to be in the data.frame > grep("SELL",genes$GeneSymbol) integer(0) it turns out that genes = read.delim( genes_file, header=FALSE, na.strings="-", fill=TRUE, col.names=c("GeneSymbol","synonyms","description"), ) works just fine. Why does read.delim work when read.table not? If it's of use, you can recreate genes.txt using the following commands which you should run from a command line curl -O ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/DATA/gene_info.gz gzip -cd gene_info.gz | awk -Ft '$1==9606{print $3 "\t" $5 "\t" $9}' > genes.txt be warned, though, that gene_info.gz is 101MBish.

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  • UIScrollView image/photo viewer with paging enabled and zooming

    - by Mike Weller
    OK, I think it's time to make an official place on the internet for this problem: How to make a UIScrollView photoviewer with paging and zooming. Welcome my fellow UIScrollView hackers. I have a UIScrollView with paging enabled, and I'm displaying UIImageViews like the built-in photos app. (Does this sound familiar yet?) I found the following project on github: http://wiki.github.com/andreyvit/ScrollingMadness Which shows how to implement zooming in a scroll view while paging is enabled. If anyone else tries this out, I actually had to remove the UIScrollView subclass and use the native class otherwise it doesn't work. I think it's because of changes in the 3.0 SDK relating to how the scroll view intercepts touch events. So the the idea is to remove all the other views when you start zooming, and move the current view to (0, 0) in the scrollview, updating the contentsize etc. Then when you zoom back to 1.0f it adds the other views back and puts things all back in order. Anyway, that project works perfectly in the simulator, but on the device there is some nasty movement of the view you are resizing, which looks like it's caused by the fact we are changing the contentsize/offset etc. for the view being resized. You have to do this view moving otherwise you can pan left through the whitespace left by the other views. I found one interesting note in the "Known Issues" of the 3.0 SDK release notes: UIScrollView: After zooming, content inset is ignored and content is left in the wrong position. This kind of sounds like what is happening here. After zooming in, the view will shift offscreen because you have changed the offset etc. I've spent hours on this already and I'm slowing coming to the sad realization that this just isn't going to work. Three20's photo viewer is out of the question: it's too heavy weight and there is too much unnecessary UI and other behaviour. The built in Photo app seems to do some magic. If you zoom in on an image and pan to the far edges, the current photo moves independently of the photo next to it which isn't what you get when trying this with a standard UIScrollView. I've seen discussion about nesting the UIScrollView's but I really don't want to go there. Has anybody managed this with the standard UIScrollView (and works in the 2.2 and 3.0 SDK)? I don't fancy rolling my own zoom + bounce + pan + paging code.

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  • How to automatically insert code for an XCode video demo

    - by Mike Weller
    I've been watching some of the WWDC 2009 videos which include some video demos in XCode. The presenters are using some sort of macro or script bound to a keyboard shortcut to automatically insert some pre-prepared code at the current caret location. Each time they press the key, the next prepared snippet is inserted. Does anybody know how this is done?

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  • Content Challenge: You Can Only Get it Here

    - by Mike Stiles
    Part of the content conundrum for brands is figuring out what kind of content customers would find cool, desirable, and relevant. The mere fact many brands have no idea what this content might be is, in itself, pretty alarming. You’d have to have a pretty thorough lack of involvement with and understanding of your customers to not know what they might like. But despite what should be a great awakening in which consumers are using every technology and trick in the book to shield themselves from ads and commercials, brand self-obsession continues as marketers concentrate on their message, their campaign, what they want to say, and what they want social users to do. When individuals conduct themselves in that same fashion on Facebook and Twitter, it gets tiresome and starts losing value pretty quickly. Their posts eventually get hidden. Conversely, friends who post things that consistently entertain or inform, with little self-marketing desperation involved, win the coveted “show all updates” setting. Of course brands are going to use social to market. It’s pretty much the point of having social in the marketing mix. And yes, people who follow a brand’s Twitter account or “Like” a brand’s Facebook Page implicitly state they want to know what’s going on with that brand’s products and services. But if you have a Facebook friend that assumes you want every one of her posts to be about what wine she likes (Mitsubishi’s current campaign is even based around weeding out pretentious Facebook friends, then running them over), then you know how it must feel for your fans and followers to get a sales pitch for your crackers or whatever you’re selling every single time. Is there such a thing as content that doesn’t sell but that still advances the brand and makes the consumer more involved and valuable? Of course. And perhaps there are no better companies than enterprise brands to do it. Enterprise organizations are large enough to go beyond a product and engage readers/viewers at higher, broader levels…communicating expertise across entire sectors, subjects and industries. You’re going from pitchman to news source, and getting full credit for it as the presenter. A recent GigaOM article pointed out the success a San Francisco-based startup called Crunchyroll is having. Their niche (and they proudly admit it’s a niche) is providing Japanese anime, Korean drama and Asian live action content to countries that can’t get it any other way via licensing deals. Shows are available in HD and on the same day they air in the host country. Crunchyroll not only gets 8 million viewers a month, they have 100,000 paying subscribers at $7-12/month. Got a point, Mike? I do happen to have one. Crunchyroll illustrates the content opportunity enterprise companies have…which is to determine your “area,” the interest graph of your customers, then provide content that speaks to and satisfies those interests that can’t be found anywhere else. At least not in the same style, or of the same quality, or with the same authority. Do what no one else is doing. Provide what no one else is providing in your sector. If underserved users are willing to pay monthly for access to awkwardly moving cartoon dragons, imagine the audience you could attract with free, useful, non-sales content in your customers’ area of interest. It’s an audience you’ll want in place when the time does come to put out that marketing message. A content challenge is better than a content conundrum any day.

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  • Core Data ANY BETWEEN predicate

    - by Mike Weller
    I'm trying to create an NSPredicate to find 'projects' that contain 'sessions' within a certain date range. I tried this at first: [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"ANY sessions.date BETWEEN {$STARTDATE, $ENDDATE}"]; But I get an exception: *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: 'to-many key not allowed here' It seems BETWEEN does not work with ANY in this way. I'm also limited in use of () and AND clauses meaning I can't use something like: [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"ANY (sessions.date > $STARTDATE && sessions.date < $ENDDATE)"]; If I try that I get a parse error. How can I do this? Thanks UPDATE: Note that this: [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"ANY sessions.date > $STARTDATE && ANY sessions.date < $ENDDATE"]; Is incorrect because it returns a project where there is a session greater than the start date and another session less than the end date but no session in between.

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