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  • Gamification = -10#/3mo

    - by erikanollwebb
    One of the purposes of gamification of anything is to see if you can modify the behavior of the user. In the enterprise, that might mean getting sales people to enter more information into a CRM system, encouraging employees to update their HR records, motivating people to participate in forums and discussions, or process invoices more quickly.  Wikipedia defines behavior modification as "the traditional term for the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior through its extinction, punishment and/or satiation."  Gamification is just a way to modify someone's behavior using game mechanics. And the magic question is always whether it works. So I thought I would present my own little experiment from the last few months.  This spring, I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy 4.  It's a pretty sweet phone in many ways, but one of the little extras I discovered was a built in app called S Health. S Health is an app that you can use to track calories, weight, exercise and it has a built in pedometer. I looked at it when I got the phone, but assumed you had to turn it on to use it so I didn't look at it much.  But sometime in July, I realized that in fact, it just ran in the background and was quietly tracking my steps, with a goal of 10,000 per day.  10,000 steps per day is this magic number recommended by the Surgeon General and the American Heart Association.  Dr. Oz pushes it as the goal for daily exercise.  It's about 5 miles of walking. I'm generally not the kind of person who always has my phone with me.  I leave it in my purse and pull it out when I need it.  But then I realized that meant I wasn't getting a good measure of my steps.  I decided to do a little experiment, and carry it with me as much as possible for a week.  That's when I discovered the gamification that changed my life over the last 3 months.  When I hit 10,000 steps, the app jingled out a little "success!" tune and I got a badge.  I was hooked.  I started carrying my phone.  I started making sure I had shoes I could walk in with me.  I started walking at lunch time, because I realized how often I sat at my desk for 8-10 hours every day without moving.  I started pestering my husband to walk with me after work because I hadn't hit my 10,000 yet, leading him at one point to say "I'm not as much a slave to that badge as you are!"  I started looking at parking lots differently.  Can't get a space up close?  No worries, just that many steps toward my 10,000.  I even tried to see if there was a second power user level at 15,000 or 20,000 (*sadly, no).  If I was close at the end of the day, I have done laps around my house until I got my badge.  I have walked around the block one more time to get my badge.  I have mentally chastised myself when I forgot to put my phone in my pocket because I don't know how many steps I got.  The badge below I got when my boss and I were in New York City and we walked around the block of our hotel just to watch the badge pop up. There are a bunch of tools out on the market now that have similar ideas for helping you to track your exercise, make it social.  There are apps (my favorite is still Zombies, Run!).  You could buy a FitBit or UP by Jawbone.   Interactive fitness makes the Expresso stationary bike with built in video games.  All designed to help you be more aware of your activity and keep you engaged and motivated.  And the idea is to help you change your behavior. I know someone who would spend extra time and work hard on the Expresso because he had built up strategies for how to kill the most dragons while he was riding to get more points.  When the machine broke down, he didn't ride a different bike because it just wasn't that interesting. But for me, just the simple jingle and badge have been all I needed.  I admit, I still giggle gleefully when I hear the tune sing out from my pocket. After a few weeks, I noticed I had dropped a few pounds.  Not a lot, just 2-3.  But then I was really hooked.  I started making a point both to eat a little less and hit 10,000 steps as much as I could.  I bemoaned that during the floods in Boulder, I wasn't hitting my 10,000 steps.  And now, a few months later, I'm almost 10 lbs lighter. All for 1 badge a day. So yes, simple gamification can increase motivation and engagement.  And that can lead to changes in behavior.  Now the job is to apply that to the enterprise space in a meaningful and engaging way. 

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  • My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

    - by Valter Minute
    Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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  • Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

    - by Rajesh Raheja
    Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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  • Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

    - by Rajesh Raheja
    Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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  • The Best BPM Journey: More Exciting Destinations with Process Accelerators

    - by Cesare Rotundo
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Open World (OOW) earlier this month has been a great occasion to discuss with our BPM customers. It was interesting to hear definite patterns emerging from those conversations: “BPM is a journey”, “experiences to share”, “our organization now understands what BPM is”, and my favorite (with some caveats): “BPM is like wine tasting, once you start, you want to try more”. These customers have started their journey, climbed up the learning curve, and reached a vantage point that allows them to see their next BPM destination. They see the next few processes they are going to tackle and improve with BPM. These processes/destinations target both horizontal processes where BPM replaces or coordinates manual activities, and critical industry processes that the company needs to improve to compete and deliver increasing value. Each new destination generates value, allowing the organization to reduce the cost of manual processes that were not supported by apps/custom development, and increase efficiency of end-to-end processes partially covered by apps/custom dev. The question we wanted to answer is how to help organizations experience deeper success with BPM, by increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and equipping them with the right tools. We decided that we needed to identify destinations, and plot routes to show the fastest path to those destinations. In the end we want to enable customers to reach “Process Excellence”: continuously set new targets and consistently and efficiently reach them. The result is Oracle Process Accelerators (PA), solutions built using the rich functionality in Oracle BPM Suite. PAs offers a rapidly expanding list of exciting destinations. Our launch of the latest installment of Process Accelerators at Oracle Open World includes new Industry-focused solutions such as Public Sector Incident Reporting and Financial Services Loan Origination, and improved other horizontal PAs, including Travel Request Management, Document Routing and Approval, and Internal Service Requests. Just before OOW we had extended the Oracle deployment of Travel Request Management, riding the enthusiastic response from early adopters among travelers (employees), management and support (approvers). “Getting there first” means being among the first to extract value from the PA approach, while acquiring deeper insights into the customers’ perspective. This is especially noteworthy when it comes to PAs, a set of solutions designed to be quickly deployed and iteratively improved by customers. The OOW launch has generated immediate feedback from customers, non-customers, analysts, and partners. They all confirmed that both Business and IT at organizations benefit from PAs when it comes to exploring the potential for BPM to improve their business processes. PAs help customers visualize what can be done with BPM, and PAs are made to be extended: you can see your destination, change the path to fit your needs, and deploy. We're discovering new destinations/processes that the market wants us to support, generic enough across industries and within industries. We'll keep on building sets of requirements, deliver functional design, construct solutions using Oracle BPM, and test them not only functionally but for performance, scalability, clustering, making them robust, product-quality. Delivering BPM solutions with product-grade quality is the equivalent of following a tried-and-tested path on a map. Do you know of existing destinations in your industry? If yes, we can draw a path to innovative processes together.

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  • BIP 11g Dynamic SQL

    - by Tim Dexter
    Back in the 10g release, if you wanted something beyond the standard query for your report extract; you needed to break out your favorite text editor. You gotta love 'vi' and hate emacs, am I right? And get to building a data template, they were/are lovely to write, such fun ... not! Its not fun writing them by hand but, you do get to do some cool stuff around the data extract including dynamic SQL. By that I mean the ability to add content dynamically to your your query at runtime. With 11g, we spoiled you with a visual builder, no more vi or notepad sessions, a friendly drag and drop interface allowing you to build hierarchical data sets, calculated columns, summary columns, etc. You can still create the dynamic SQL statements, its not so well documented right now, in lieu of doc updates here's the skinny. If you check out the 10g process to create dynamic sql in the docs. You need to create a data trigger function where you assign the dynamic sql to a global variable that's matched in your report SQL. In 11g, the process is really the same, BI Publisher just provides a bit more help to define what trigger code needs to be called. You still need to create the function and place it inside a package in the db. Here's a simple plsql package with the 'beforedata' function trigger. Spec create or replace PACKAGE BIREPORTS AS whereCols varchar2(2000); FUNCTION beforeReportTrig return boolean; end BIREPORTS; Body create or replace PACKAGE BODY BIREPORTS AS   FUNCTION beforeReportTrig return boolean AS   BEGIN       whereCols := ' and d.department_id = 100';     RETURN true;   END beforeReportTrig; END BIREPORTS; you'll notice the additional where clause (whereCols - declared as a public variable) is hard coded. I'll cover parameterizing that in my next post. If you can not wait, check the 10g docs for an example. I have my package compiling successfully in the db. Now, onto the BIP data model definition. 1. Create a new data model and go ahead and create your query(s) as you would normally. 2. In the query dialog box, add in the variables you want replaced at runtime using an ampersand rather than a colon e.g. &whereCols.   select     d.DEPARTMENT_NAME, ...  from    "OE"."EMPLOYEES" e,     "OE"."DEPARTMENTS" d  where   d."DEPARTMENT_ID"= e."DEPARTMENT_ID" &whereCols   Note that 'whereCols' matches the global variable name in our package. When you click OK to clear the dialog, you'll be asked for a default value for the variable, just use ' and 1=1' That leading space is important to keep the SQL valid ie required whitespace. This value will be used for the where clause if case its not set by the function code. 3. Now click on the Event Triggers tree node and create a new trigger of the type Before Data. Type in the default package name, in my example, 'BIREPORTS'. Then hit the update button to get BIP to fetch the valid functions.In my case I get to see the following: Select the BEFOREREPORTTRIG function (or your name) and shuttle it across. 4. Save your data model and now test it. For now, you can update the where clause via the plsql package. Next time ... parametrizing the dynamic clause.

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  • Facebook connect displaying invite friends dialog and closing on completion

    - by Dougnukem
    I'm trying to create a Facebook Connect application that displays a friend invite dialog within the page using Facebook's Javascript API (through a FBMLPopupDialog). The trouble is to display a friend invite dialog you use a multi-friend form which requires an action="url" attribute that represents the URL to redirect your page to when the user completes or skips the form. The problem is that I want to just close the FBMLPopupDialog (the same behavior as if the user just hit the 'X' button on the popup dialog). The best I can do is redirect the user back to the page they were on basically a reload but they lose all AJAX/Flash application state. I'm wondering if any Facebook Connect developers have run into this issue and have a good way to simply display a friend invite "lightbox" dialog within their website where they don't want to "refresh" or "redirect" when the user finishes. The facebook connect JS API provides a FB.Connect.inviteConnectUsers, which provides a nice dialog but only connects existing users of your application who also have a Facebook account and haven't connected. http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show%5Fbug.cgi?id=4916 function fb_inviteFriends() { //Invite users log("Inviting users..."); FB.Connect.requireSession( function() { //Connect succes var uid = FB.Facebook.apiClient.get_session().uid; log('FB CONNECT SUCCESS: ' + uid); //Invite users log("Inviting users..."); //Update server with connected account updateAccountFacebookUID(); var fbml = fb_getInviteFBML() ; var dialog = new FB.UI. FBMLPopupDialog("Weblings Invite", fbml) ; //dialog.setFBMLContent(fbml); dialog.setContentWidth(650); dialog.setContentHeight(450); dialog.show(); }, //Connect cancelled function() { //User cancelled the connect log("FB Connect cancelled:"); } ); } function fb_getInviteFBML() { var uid = FB.Facebook.apiClient.get_session().uid; var fbml = ""; fbml = '<fb:fbml>\n' + '<fb:request-form\n'+ //Redirect back to this page ' action="'+ document.location +'"\n'+ ' method="POST"\n'+ ' invite="true"\n'+ ' type="Weblings Invite"\n' + ' content="I need your help to discover all the Weblings and save the Internet! WebWars: Weblings is a cool new game where we can collect fantastic creatures while surfing our favorite websites. Come find the missing Weblings with me!'+ //Callback the server with the appropriate Webwars Account URL ' <fb:req-choice url=\''+ WebwarsFB.WebwarsAccountServer +'/SplashPage.aspx?action=ref&reftype=Facebook' label=\'Check out WebWars: Weblings\' />"\n'+ '>\n'+ ' <fb:multi-friend-selector\n'+ ' rows="2"\n'+ ' cols="4"\n'+ ' bypass="Cancel"\n'+ ' showborder="false"\n'+ ' actiontext="Use this form to invite your friends to connect with WebWars: Weblings."/>\n'+ ' </fb:request-form>'+ ' </fb:fbml>'; return fbml; }

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  • Databinding to ObservableCollection in a different UserControl?

    - by Dave
    Question re-written on 2010-03-24 I have two UserControls, where one is a dialog that has a TabControl, and the other is one that appears within said TabControl. I'll just call them CandyDialog and CandyNameViewer for simplicity's sake. There's also a data management class called Tracker that manages information storage, which for all intents and purposes just exposes a public property that is an ObservableCollection. I display the CandyNameViewer in CandyDialog via code behind, like this: private void CandyDialog_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { _candyviewer = new CandyViewer(); _candyviewer.DataContext = _tracker; candy_tab.Content = _candyviewer; } The CandyViewer's XAML looks like this (edited for kaxaml): <Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <Page.Resources> <DataTemplate x:Key="CandyItemTemplate"> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="120"></ColumnDefinition> <ColumnDefinition Width="150"></ColumnDefinition> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox Grid.Column="0" Text="{Binding CandyName}" Margin="3"></TextBox> <!-- just binding to DataContext ends up using InventoryItem as parent, so we need to get to the UserControl --> <ComboBox Grid.Column="1" SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedCandy, Mode=TwoWay}" ItemsSource="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource FindAncestor, AncestorType={x:Type UserControl}}, Path=DataContext.CandyNames}" Margin="3"></ComboBox> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </Page.Resources> <Grid> <ListBox DockPanel.Dock="Top" ItemsSource="{Binding CandyBoxContents, Mode=TwoWay}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource CandyItemTemplate}" /> </Grid> </Page> Now everything works fine when the controls are loaded. As long as CandyNames is populated first, and then the consumer UserControl is displayed, all of the names are there. I obviously don't get any errors in the Output Window or anything like that. The issue I have is that when the ObservableCollection is modified from the model, those changes are not reflected in the consumer UserControl! I've never had this problem before; all of my previous uses of ObservableCollection updated fine, although in those cases I wasn't databinding across assemblies. Although I am currently only adding and removing candy names to/from the ObservableCollection, at a later date I will likely also allow renaming from the model side. Is there something I did wrong? Is there a good way to actually debug this? Reed Copsey indicates here that inter-UserControl databinding is possible. Unfortunately, my favorite Bea Stollnitz article on WPF databinding debugging doesn't suggest anything that I could use for this particular problem.

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  • JavaCC: Please help me understand token ambiguity.

    - by java.is.for.desktop
    Hello, everyone! I had already many problems with understanding, how ambiguous tokens can be handled elegantly (or somehow at all) in JavaCC. Let's take this example: I want to parse XML processing instruction. The format is: "<?" <target> <data> "?>": target is an XML name, data can be anything except ?>, because it's the closing tag. So, lets define this in JavaCC: (I use lexical states, in this case DEFAULT and PROC_INST) TOKEN : <#NAME : (very-long-definition-from-xml-1.1-goes-here) > TOKEN : <WSS : (" " | "\t")+ > // WSS = whitespaces <DEFAULT> TOKEN : {<PI_START : "<?" > : PROC_INST} <PROC_INST> TOKEN : {<PI_TARGET : <NAME> >} <PROC_INST> TOKEN : {<PI_DATA : ~[] >} // accept everything <PROC_INST> TOKEN : {<PI_END : "?>" > : DEFAULT} Now the part which recognizes processing instructions: void PROC_INSTR() : {} { ( <PI_START> (t=<PI_TARGET>){System.out.println("target: " + t.image);} <WSS> (t=<PI_DATA>){System.out.println("data: " + t.image);} <PI_END> ) {} } The problem is (i guess): hence <PI_DATA> recognizes "everything", my definition is wrong. Let's test it with <?mytarget here-goes-some-data?>: The target is recognized: "target: mytarget". But now I get my favorite JavaCC parsing error: !! procinstparser.ParseException: Encountered "" at line 1, column 15. !! Was expecting one of: !! Encountered nothing? Was expecting nothing? Or what? Thank you, JavaCC! I know, that I could use the MORE keyword of JavaCC, but this would give me the whole processing instruction as one token, so I'd had to parse/tokenize it further by myself. Why should I do that? Am I writing a parser that does not parse? What I would need is telling JavaCC to recognize "everything until ?>" as processing instruction data. How can it be done? Thank you.

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  • Faster Matrix Multiplication in C#

    - by Kyle Lahnakoski
    I have as small c# project that involves matrices. I am processing large amounts of data by splitting it into n-length chunks, treating the chucks as vectors, and multiplying by a Vandermonde** matrix. The problem is, depending on the conditions, the size of the chucks and corresponding Vandermonde** matrix can vary. I have a general solution which is easy to read, but way too slow: public byte[] addBlockRedundancy(byte[] data) { if (data.Length!=numGood) D.error("Expecting data to be just "+numGood+" bytes long"); aMatrix d=aMatrix.newColumnMatrix(this.mod, data); var r=vandermonde.multiplyBy(d); return r.ToByteArray(); }//method This can process about 1/4 megabytes per second on my i5 U470 @ 1.33GHz. I can make this faster by manually inlining the matrix multiplication: int o=0; int d=0; for (d=0; d<data.Length-numGood; d+=numGood) { for (int r=0; r<numGood+numRedundant; r++) { Byte value=0; for (int c=0; c<numGood; c++) { value=mod.Add(value, mod.Multiply(vandermonde.get(r, c), data[d+c])); }//for output[r][o]=value; }//for o++; }//for This can process about 1 meg a second. (Please note the "mod" is performing operations over GF(2^8) modulo my favorite irreducible polynomial.) I know this can get a lot faster: After all, the Vandermonde** matrix is mostly zeros. I should be able to make a routine, or find a routine, that can take my matrix and return a optimized method which will effectively multiply vectors by the given matrix, but faster. Then, when I give this routine a 5x5 Vandermonde matrix (the identity matrix), there is simply no arithmetic to perform, and the original data is just copied. ** Please note: What I use the term "Vandermonde", I actually mean an Identity matrix with some number of rows from the Vandermonde matrix appended (see comments). This matrix is wonderful because of all the zeros, and because if you remove enough rows (of your choosing) to make it square, it is an invertible matrix. And, of course, I would like to use this same routine to convert any one of those inverted matrices into an optimized series of instructions. How can I make this matrix multiplication faster? Thanks! (edited to correct my mistake with Vandermonde matrix)

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  • Hidden Features of PHP?

    - by George Mauer
    EDIT: This didn't really start as a hidden features of PHP topic, but thats what it ended up as, so go nuts. I know this sounds like a point-whoring question but let me explain where I'm coming from. Out of college I got a job at a PHP shop. I worked there for a year and a half and thought that I had learned all there was to learn about programming. Then I got a job as a one-man internal development shop at a sizable corporation where all the work was in C#. In my commitment to the position I started reading a ton of blogs and books and quickly realized how wrong I was to think I knew everything. I learned about unit testing, dependency injection and decorator patterns, the design principle of loose coupling, the composition over inheritance debate, and so on and on and on - I am still very much absorbing it all. Needless to say my programming style has changed entirely in the last year. Now I find myself picking up a php project doing some coding for a friend's start-up and I feel completely constrained as opposed to programming in C#. It really bothers me that all variables at a class scope have to be referred to by appending '$this-' . It annoys me that none of the IDEs that I've tried have very good intellisense and that my SimpleTest unit tests methods have to start with the word 'test'. It drives me crazy that dynamic typing keeps me from specifying implicitly which parameter type a method expects, and that you have to write a switch statement to do method overloads. I can't stand that you can't have nested namespaces and have to use the :: operator to call the base class's constructor. Now I have no intention of starting a PHP vs C# debate, rather what I mean to say is that I'm sure there are some PHP features that I either don't know about or know about yet fail to use properly. I am set in my C# universe and having trouble seeing outside the glass bowl. So I'm asking, what are your favorite features of PHP? What are things you can do in it that you can't or are more difficult in the .Net languages?

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  • iPhone reachability checking

    - by Sneakyness
    I've found several examples of code to do what I want (check for reachability), but none of it seems to be exact enough to be of use to me. I can't figure out why this doesn't want to play nice. I have the reachability.h/m in my project, I'm doing #import <SystemConfiguration/SystemConfiguration.h> And I have the framework added. I also have: #import "Reachability.h" at the top of the .m in which I'm trying to use the reachability. Reachability* reachability = [Reachability sharedReachability]; [reachability setHostName:@"http://www.google.com"]; // set your host name here NetworkStatus remoteHostStatus = [reachability remoteHostStatus]; if(remoteHostStatus == NotReachable) {NSLog(@"no");} else if (remoteHostStatus == ReachableViaWiFiNetwork) {NSLog(@"wifi"); } else if (remoteHostStatus == ReachableViaCarrierDataNetwork) {NSLog(@"cell"); } This is giving me all sorts of problems. What am I doing wrong? I'm an alright coder, I just have a hard time when it comes time to figure out what needs to be put where to enable what I want to do, regardless if I want to know what I want to do or not. (So frustrating) Update: This is what's going on. This is in my viewcontroller, which I have the #import <SystemConfiguration/SystemConfiguration.h> and #import "Reachability.h" set up with. This is my least favorite part of programming by far. FWIW, we never ended up implementing this in our code. The two features that required internet access (entering the sweepstakes, and buying the dvd), were not main features. Nothing else required internet access. Instead of adding more code, we just set the background of both internet views to a notice telling the users they must be connected to the internet to use this feature. It was in theme with the rest of the application's interface, and was done well/tastefully. They said nothing about it during the approval process, however we did get a personal phone call to verify that we were giving away items that actually pertained to the movie. According to their usually vague agreement, you aren't allowed to have sweepstakes otherwise. I would also think this adheres more strictly to their "only use things if you absolutely need them" ideaology as well. Here's the iTunes link to the application, EvoScanner.

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  • JavaCC: How can one exclude a string from a token? (A.k.a. understanding token ambiguity.)

    - by java.is.for.desktop
    Hello, everyone! I had already many problems with understanding, how ambiguous tokens can be handled elegantly (or somehow at all) in JavaCC. Let's take this example: I want to parse XML processing instruction. The format is: "<?" <target> <data> "?>": target is an XML name, data can be anything except ?>, because it's the closing tag. So, lets define this in JavaCC: (I use lexical states, in this case DEFAULT and PROC_INST) TOKEN : <#NAME : (very-long-definition-from-xml-1.1-goes-here) > TOKEN : <WSS : (" " | "\t")+ > // WSS = whitespaces <DEFAULT> TOKEN : {<PI_START : "<?" > : PROC_INST} <PROC_INST> TOKEN : {<PI_TARGET : <NAME> >} <PROC_INST> TOKEN : {<PI_DATA : ~[] >} // accept everything <PROC_INST> TOKEN : {<PI_END : "?>" > : DEFAULT} Now the part which recognizes processing instructions: void PROC_INSTR() : {} { ( <PI_START> (t=<PI_TARGET>){System.out.println("target: " + t.image);} <WSS> (t=<PI_DATA>){System.out.println("data: " + t.image);} <PI_END> ) {} } Let's test it with <?mytarget here-goes-some-data?>: The target is recognized: "target: mytarget". But now I get my favorite JavaCC parsing error: !! procinstparser.ParseException: Encountered "" at line 1, column 15. !! Was expecting one of: !! Encountered nothing? Was expecting nothing? Or what? Thank you, JavaCC! I know, that I could use the MORE keyword of JavaCC, but this would give me the whole processing instruction as one token, so I'd had to parse/tokenize it further by myself. Why should I do that? Am I writing a parser that does not parse? The problem is (i guess): hence <PI_DATA> recognizes "everything", my definition is wrong. I should tell JavaCC to recognize "everything except ?>" as processing instruction data. But how can it be done? NOTE: I can only exclude single characters using ~["a"|"b"|"c"], I can't exclude strings such as ~["abc"] or ~["?>"]. Another great anti-feature of JavaCC. Thank you.

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  • jQuery Validation plugin, IE7 "SCRIPT3: Member not found"

    - by jkinz
    I have the following: <html> <head> </head> <body> <div> <form method="post"> <div id="questions"> <label for="question-6">Name of Course:</label> <input type="text" name="name_of_course[response]" value="" id="question-6" class="required"> <label class="control-label" for="reporting-year">Reporting Year: </label> <select name="reporting_year" id="reporting-year"> <option value="-1" selected="selected">Select option...</option> <option value="4">2013-2014</option> <option value="1">2012-2013</option> <option value="2">2011-2012</option> <option value="3">2010-2011</option> </select> </div> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Save Entry" class="btn"> </form> </div> <script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery.js"></script> <script src="//ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.validate/1.10.0/jquery.validate.min.js"></script> <script> $(function(){ jQuery.validator.addMethod("notEqual", function(value, element, param) { return this.optional(element) || value !== param; }, "Please select an option"); $('form').validate({ rules:{ 'reporting_year': { notEqual: "-1" } } }); }); </script> </body> </html> Everyone's favorite browser, IE7 (IE10 w/compatibility really) is reporting the following error in the console: SCRIPT3: Member not found. jquery.js, line 2525 character 4 Of course IE8 and above work fine, but my client is using IE7.

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  • How can I implement a site with ASP.NET MVC without using Visual Studio?

    - by Cheeso
    I have seen ASP.NET MVC Without Visual Studio, which asks, Is it possible to produce a website based on ASP.NET MVC, without using Visual Studio? And the accepted answer is, yes. Ok, next question: how? Here's an analogy. If I want to create an ASP.NET Webforms page, I load up my favorite text editor, create a file named Something.aspx. Then I insert into that file, some boilerplate: <%@ Page Language="C#" Debug="true" Trace="false" Src="Sourcefile.cs" Inherits="My.Namespace.ContentsPage" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title>Title goes here </title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css"></link> <style type="text/css"> #elementid { font-size: 9pt; color: Navy; ... more css ... } </style> <script type="text/javascript" language='javascript'> // insert javascript here. </script> </head> <body> <asp:Literal Id='Holder' runat='server'/> <br/> <div id='msgs'></div> </body> </html> Then I also create the Sourcefile.cs file: namespace My.Namespace { using System; using System.Web; using System.Xml; // etc... public class ContentsPage : System.Web.UI.Page { protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal Holder; void Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) { // page load logic here } } } And that is a working ASPNET page, created in a text editor. Drop it into an IIS virtual directory, and it's working. What do I have to do, to make a basic, hello, World ASPNET MVC app, in a text editor? (without Visual Studio) Suppose I want a basic MVC app with a controller, one view, and a simple model. What files would I need to create, and what would go into them?

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  • How can I implement ASP.NET MVC without using Visual Studio?

    - by Cheeso
    I have seen ASP.NET MVC Without Visual Studio, which asks, Is it possible to produce a website based on ASP.NET MVC, without using Visual Studio? And the accepted answer is, yes. Ok, next question: how? Here's an analogy. If I want to create an ASP.NET Webforms page, I load up my favorite text editor, create a file named Something.aspx. Then I insert into that file, some boilerplate: <%@ Page Language="C#" Debug="true" Trace="false" Src="Sourcefile.cs" Inherits="My.Namespace.ContentsPage" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title>Title goes here </title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css"></link> <style type="text/css"> #elementid { font-size: 9pt; color: Navy; ... more css ... } </style> <script type="text/javascript" language='javascript'> // insert javascript here. </script> </head> <body> <asp:Literal Id='Holder' runat='server'/> <br/> <div id='msgs'></div> </body> </html> Then I also create the Sourcefile.cs file: namespace My.Namespace { using System; using System.Web; using System.Xml; // etc... public class ContentsPage : System.Web.UI.Page { protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal Holder; void Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) { // page load logic here } } } And that is a working ASPNET page, created in a text editor. Drop it into an IIS virtual directory, and it's working. What do I have to do, to make a basic, hello, World ASPNET MVC app, in a text editor? (without Visual Studio)

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  • Where do you put your unit test?

    - by soulmerge
    I have found several conventions to housekeeping unit tests in a project and I'm not sure which approach would be suitable for our next PHP project. I am trying to find the best convention to encourage easy development and accessibility of the tests when reviewing the source code. I would be very interested in your experience/opinion regarding each: One folder for productive code, another for unit tests: This separates unit tests from the logic files of the project. This separation of concerns is as much a nuisance as it is an advantage: Someone looking into the source code of the project will - so I suppose - either browse the implementation or the unit tests (or more commonly: the implementation only). The advantage of unit tests being another viewpoint to your classes is lost - those two viewpoints are just too far apart IMO. Annotated test methods: Any modern unit testing framework I know allows developers to create dedicated test methods, annotating them (@test) and embedding them in the project code. The big drawback I see here is that the project files get cluttered. Even if these methods are separated using a comment header (like UNIT TESTS below this line) it just bloats the class unnecessarily. Test files within the same folders as the implementation files: Our file naming convention dictates that PHP files containing classes (one class per file) should end with .class.php. I could imagine that putting unit tests regarding a class file into another one ending on .test.php would render the tests much more present to other developers without tainting the class. Although it bloats the project folders, instead of the implementation files, this is my favorite so far, but I have my doubts: I would think others have come up with this already, and discarded this option for some reason (i.e. I have not seen a java project with the files Foo.java and FooTest.java within the same folder.) Maybe it's because java developers make heavier use of IDEs that allow them easier access to the tests, whereas in PHP no big editors have emerged (like eclipse for java) - many devs I know use vim/emacs or similar editors with little support for PHP development per se. What is your experience with any of these unit test placements? Do you have another convention I haven't listed here? Or am I just overrating unit test accessibility to reviewers?

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  • how to fetch & store any column from coredata to array

    - by user440485
    Hi All, I am working on page(Lesson) has button called "AddToFavorite". when i click on this button lessonID,lessonHeading is added in the Coredata. - (NSFetchedResultsController *)fetchedResultsController { // Set up the fetched results controller if needed. if (fetchedResultsController != nil) { return fetchedResultsController; } // Create the fetch request for the entity. NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init]; // Edit the entity name as appropriate. NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Favorites" inManagedObjectContext:managedObjectContext]; [fetchRequest setEntity:entity]; // Edit the sort key as appropriate. NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"lessonHeading" ascending:YES]; NSArray *sortDescriptors = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:sortDescriptor, nil]; [fetchRequest setSortDescriptors:sortDescriptors]; NSFetchedResultsController *aFetchedResultsController = [[NSFetchedResultsController alloc] initWithFetchRequest:fetchRequest managedObjectContext:managedObjectContext sectionNameKeyPath:@"lessonHeading" cacheName:@"Root"]; self.fetchedResultsController = aFetchedResultsController; self.fetchedResultsController.delegate = self; [aFetchedResultsController release]; [fetchRequest release]; [sortDescriptor release]; [sortDescriptors release]; return fetchedResultsController; } -(void)addToFavorites { UIAlertView *alert=[[UIAlertView alloc]initWithTitle:nil message:@"Lesson has been added successfully to your Favorite List" delegate:nil cancelButtonTitle:@"OK" otherButtonTitles:nil]; [alert show]; [alert release]; //Create a new managed object context for the new book -- set its persistent store coordinator to the same as that from the fetched results controller's context. NSManagedObjectContext *addingContext = [[NSManagedObjectContext alloc] init]; self.addingManagedObjectContext = addingContext; [addingManagedObjectContext setPersistentStoreCoordinator:[[fetchedResultsController managedObjectContext] persistentStoreCoordinator]]; Favorites *fav = [NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"Favorites" inManagedObjectContext:addingContext]; fav.lessonID=[[data objectAtIndex:count]objectForKey:@"LessonID"]; fav.lessonTitle=[[data objectAtIndex:count]objectForKey:@"LessonTitle"]; [self didFinishWithSave:YES]; [addingContext release]; } My problem is that i want to show an alert if this lessonID is already existing in the coreData. show guide me how i can match the current page lessonID with the existing lessonID's in the CoreData. I am using CoreData 1st time.so sory for any mistake ...& thanks for ypur help frnds.

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  • organizing unit test

    - by soulmerge
    I have found several conventions to housekeeping unit tests in a project and I'm not sure which approach would be suitable for our next PHP project. I am trying to find the best convention to encourage easy development and accessibility of the tests when reviewing the source code. I would be very interested in your experience/opinion regarding each: One folder for productive code, another for unit tests: This separates unit tests from the logic files of the project. This separation of concerns is as much a nuisance as it is an advantage: Someone looking into the source code of the project will - so I suppose - either browse the implementation or the unit tests (or more commonly: the implementation only). The advantage of unit tests being another viewpoint to your classes is lost - those two viewpoints are just too far apart IMO. Annotated test methods: Any modern unit testing framework I know allows developers to create dedicated test methods, annotating them (@test) and embedding them in the project code. The big drawback I see here is that the project files get cluttered. Even if these methods are separated using a comment header (like UNIT TESTS below this line) it just bloats the class unnecessarily. Test files within the same folders as the implementation files: Our file naming convention dictates that PHP files containing classes (one class per file) should end with .class.php. I could imagine that putting unit tests regarding a class file into another one ending on .test.php would render the tests much more present to other developers without tainting the class. Although it bloats the project folders, instead of the implementation files, this is my favorite so far, but I have my doubts: I would think others have come up with this already, and discarded this option for some reason (i.e. I have not seen a java project with the files Foo.java and FooTest.java within the same folder.) Maybe it's because java developers make heavier use of IDEs that allow them easier access to the tests, whereas in PHP no big editors have emerged (like eclipse for java) - many devs I know use vim/emacs or similar editors with little support for PHP development per se. What is your experience with any of these unit test placements? Do you have another convention I haven't listed here? Or am I just overrating unit test accessibility to reviewing developers?

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  • Communicate progress from local Service

    - by kpdvx
    An application I'm building uses a local Service for downloading files from the web to the phone's SD card. In this app users can browse lists of books, and read them while online. A user can also download a pdf copy of a book for offline viewing. To handle downloads I'm using a locally bound Service. I do not want this Service to run all the time, only when downloading files. So that the Service can shut itself down when its tasks are complete, I am not binding to the service, rather I'm sending an "enqueue for download" command through the Intent passed to Context.startService. Books available for download are shown in a list. A user can choose to download a book by clicking on its row in the list. On download, I need to show download progress using a ProgressBar on the actual book list row. I need to also show, on the rows, if a book is enqueued for download, or if its download has completed or failed. The books can be shown in different activities throughout the application--in search, or in the user's list of favorite books, for example. When the books are shown in different places, these are not the same objects, but they are uniquely identified by their bookId. Because I do not want to bind to the service from every Activity, my tentative plan was to use a public static final HashMap on the Service class itself to contain a mapping of bookId to download status, an enum of enqueued, downloading, cancelled, etc. Each book view, when displayed, would check this static HashMap, and if the bookId is in the map, retrieve and display its status. I don't particularly like this idea, but at the moment it's the only way I can think of to retrieve status from the Service without having to bind to it and start it. Additionally I need to retrieve download progress percent from the Service, for a given bookId, if it is the active download. Again I'd rather not bind to the service from every activity, so I'm not sure how to go about retrieving current progress from the Service. My current plan is to use some sort of singleton mediator, that the Service will push updates to, and the views can read from. But I'm not terribly happy with this idea. The reason I'd like to avoid binding to the Service from each Activity is 1.) I'm already running another Service and 2.) binding is verbose and I'd like to avoid needing to pass around a reference to the Service (but admittedly this isn't too much of a problem). Perhaps binding to the local Service isn't expensive enough to warrant this other setup? Should I not be concerned about binding to it from each Activity? Maybe this is a non-issue?

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  • OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010

    - by Matthew Guay
    Quality OCR software can often be very expensive, but you may have one already installed on your computer that you didn’t know about.  Here’s how you can use OneNote to OCR anything on your computer. OneNote is one of the overlooked gems in recent versions of Microsoft Office.  OneNote makes it simple to take notes and keep track of everything with integrated search, and offers more features than its popular competitor Evernote.  One way it is better is its high quality optical character recognition (OCR) engine.  One of Evernote’s most popular features is that you can search for anything, including text in an image, and you can easily find it.  OneNote takes this further, and instantly OCRs any text in images you add.  Then, you can use this text easily and copy it from the image.  Let’s see how this works and how you can use OneNote as the ultimate OCR. Please Note: This feature is available in OneNote 2007 and 2010.  OneNote 2007 is included with Office 2007 Home and Student, Enterprise, and Ultimate, while OneNote 2010 is included with all edition of Office 2010 except for Starter edition. OCR anything First, let’s add something to OCR into OneNote.  There are many different ways you can add items to OCR into OneNote.  Open a blank page or one you want to insert something into, and then follow these steps to add what you want into OneNote. Picture Simply drag-and-drop a picture with text into a notebook… You can insert a picture directly from OneNote as well.  In OneNote 2010, select the Insert tab, and then choose Picture. In OneNote 2007, select the Insert menu, select Picture, and then choose From File.   Screen Clipping There are many times we’d like to copy text from something we see onscreen, but there is no direct way to copy text from that thing.  For instance, you cannot copy text from the title-bar of a window, or from a flash-based online presentation.  For these cases, the Screen Clipping option is very useful.  To add a clip of anything onscreen in OneNote 2010, select the Insert tab in the ribbon and click Screen Clipping. In OneNote 2007, either click the Clip button on the toolbar or select the Insert menu and choose Screen Clipping.   Alternately, you can take a screen clipping by pressing the windows key + S. When you click Screen Clipping, OneNote will minimize, your desktop will fade lighter, and your mouse pointer will change to a plus sign.  Now, click and drag over anything you want to add to OneNote.  Here we’re selecting the title of this article. The section you selected will now show up in your OneNote notebook, complete with the date and time the clip was made. Insert a file You’re not limited to pictures; OneNote can even OCR anything in most files on your computer.  You can add files directly in OneNote 2010 by selecting File Printout in the Insert tab. In OneNote 2007, select the Insert menu and choose Files as Printout. Choose the file you want to add to OneNote in the dialog. Select Insert, and OneNote will pause momentarily as it processes the file. Now your file will show up in OneNote as a printout with a link to the original file above it. You can also send any file directly to OneNote via the OneNote virtual printer.  If you have a file open, such as a PDF, that you’d like to OCR, simply open the print dialog in that program and select the “Send to OneNote” printer. Or, if you have a scanner, you can scan documents directly into OneNote by clicking Scanner Printout in the Insert tab in OneNote 2010. In OneNote 2003, to add a scanned document select the Insert menu, select Picture, and then choose From Scanner or Camera. OCR the image, file, or screenshot you put in OneNote Now that you’ve got your stuff into OneNote, let’s put it to work.  OneNote automatically did an OCR scan on anything you inserted into OneNote.  You can check to make sure by right-clicking on any picture, screenshot, or file you inserted.  Select “Make Text in Image Searchable” and then make sure the correct language is selected. Now, you can copy text from the Picture.  Simply right-click on the picture, and select “Copy Text from Picture”. And here’s the text that OneNote found in this picture: OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010 - Windows Live Writer Not bad, huh?  Now you can paste the text from the picture into a document or anywhere you need to use the text. If you are instead copying text from a printout, it may give you the option to copy text from this page or all pages of the printout.   This works the exact same in OneNote 2007. In OneNote 2010, you can also edit the text OneNote has saved in the image from the OCR.  This way, if OneNote read something incorrectly you can change it so you can still find it when you use search in OneNote.  Additionally, you can copy only a specific portion of the text from the edit box, so it can be useful just for general copying as well.  To do this, right-click on the item and select “Edit Alt Text”. Here is the window to edit alternate text.  If you want to copy only a portion of the text, simply select it and press Ctrl+C to copy that portion. Searching OneNote’s OCR engine is very useful for finding specific pictures you have saved in OneNote.  Simply enter your search query in the search box on top right, and OneNote will automatically find all instances of that term in all of your notebooks.  Notice how it highlights the search term even in the image! This works the same in OneNote 2007.  Notice how it highlighted “How-to” in a shot of the header image in our favorite website. In Windows Vista and 7, you can even search for things OneNote OCRed from the Start Menu search.  Here the start menu search found the words “Windows Live Writer” in our OCR Test notebook in OneNote where we inserted the screen clip above. Conclusion OneNote is a very useful OCR tool, and can help you capture text from just about anything.  Plus, since you can easily search everything you have stored in OneNote, you can quickly find anything you insert anytime.  OneNote is one of the least-used Office tools, but we have found it very useful and hope you do too. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteRemove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007How To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007How To Copy Worksheets in Excel 2007 & 2010Add Page Numbers to Documents in Word 2007 & 2010 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Data Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers

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  • Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Introduction

    - by zowens
    I’ve read a few different blogs that talk about multi-tenancy and how to resolve some of the issues surrounding multi-tenancy. What I’ve come to realize is that these implementations overcomplicate the issues and give only a muddy implementation! I’ve seen some really illogical code out there. I have recently been building a multi-tenancy framework for internal use at eagleenvision.net. Through this process, I’ve realized a few different techniques to make building multi-tenant applications actually quite easy. I will be posting a few different entries over the issue and my personal implementation. In this first post, I will discuss what multi-tenancy means and how my implementation will be structured.   So what’s the problem? Here’s the deal. Multi-tenancy is basically a technique of code-reuse of web application code. A multi-tenant application is an application that runs a single instance for multiple clients. Here the “client” is different URL bindings on IIS using ASP.NET MVC. The problem with different instances of the, essentially, same application is that you have to spin up different instances of ASP.NET. As the number of running instances of ASP.NET grows, so does the memory footprint of IIS. Stack Exchange shifted its architecture to multi-tenancy March. As the blog post explains, multi-tenancy saves cost in terms of memory utilization and physical disc storage. If you use the same code base for many applications, multi-tenancy just makes sense. You’ll reduce the amount of work it takes to synchronize the site implementations and you’ll thank your lucky stars later for choosing to use one application for multiple sites. Multi-tenancy allows the freedom of extensibility while relying on some pre-built code.   You’d think this would be simple. I have actually seen a real lack of reference material on the subject in terms of ASP.NET MVC. This is somewhat surprising given the number of users of ASP.NET MVC. However, I will certainly fill the void ;). Implementing a multi-tenant application takes a little thinking. It’s not straight-forward because the possibilities of implementation are endless. I have yet to see a great implementation of a multi-tenant MVC application. The only one that comes close to what I have in mind is Rob Ashton’s implementation (all the entries are listed on this page). There’s some really nasty code in there… something I’d really like to avoid. He has also written a library (MvcEx) that attempts to aid multi-tenant development. This code is even worse, in my honest opinion. Once I start seeing Reflection.Emit, I have to assume the worst :) In all seriousness, if his implementation makes sense to you, use it! It’s a fine implementation that should be given a look. At least look at the code. I will reference MvcEx going forward as a comparison to my implementation. I will explain why my approach differs from MvcEx and how it is better or worse (hopefully better).   Core Goals of my Multi-Tenant Implementation The first, and foremost, goal is to use Inversion of Control containers to my advantage. As you will see throughout this series, I pass around containers quite frequently and rely on their use heavily. I will be using StructureMap in my implementation. However, you could probably use your favorite IoC tool instead. <RANT> However, please don’t be stupid and abstract your IoC tool. Each IoC is powerful and by abstracting the capabilities, you’re doing yourself a real disservice. Who in the world swaps out IoC tools…? No one!</RANT> (It had to be said.) I will outline some of the goodness of StructureMap as we go along. This is really an invaluable tool in my tool belt and simple to use in my multi-tenant implementation. The second core goal is to represent a tenant as easily as possible. Just as a dependency container will be a first-class citizen, so will a tenant. This allows us to easily extend and use tenants. This will also allow different ways of “plugging in” tenants into your application. In my implementation, there will be a single dependency container for a single tenant. This will enable isolation of the dependencies of the tenant. The third goal is to use composition as a means to delegate “core” functions out to the tenant. More on this later.   Features In MvcExt, “Modules” are a code element of the infrastructure. I have simplified this concept and have named this “Features”. A feature is a simple element of an application. Controllers can be specified to have a feature and actions can have “sub features”. Each tenant can select features it needs and the other features will be hidden to the tenant’s users. My implementation doesn’t require something to be a feature. A controller can be common to all tenants. For example, (as you will see) I have a “Content” controller that will return the CSS, Javascript and Images for a tenant. This is common logic to all tenants and shouldn’t be hidden or considered a “feature”; Content is a core component.   Up next My next post will be all about the code. I will reveal some of the foundation to the way I do multi-tenancy. I will have posts dedicated to Foundation, Controllers, Views, Caching, Content and how to setup the tenants. Each post will be in-depth about the issues and implementation details, while adhering to my core goals outlined in this post. As always, comment with questions of DM me on twitter or send me an email.

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  • Error on 64 Bit Install of IIS &ndash; LoadLibraryEx failed on aspnet_filter.dll

    - by Rick Strahl
    I’ve been having a few problems with my Windows 7 install and trying to get IIS applications to run properly in 64 bit. After installing IIS and creating virtual directories for several of my applications and firing them up I was left with the following error message from IIS: Calling LoadLibraryEx on ISAPI filter “c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll” failed This is on Windows 7 64 bit and running on an ASP.NET 4.0 Application configured for running 64 bit (32 bit disabled). It’s also on what is essentially a brand new installation of IIS and Windows 7. So it failed right out of the box. The problem here is that IIS is trying to loading this ISAPI filter from the 32 bit folder – it should be loading from Framework64 folder note the Framework folder. The aspnet_filter.dll component is a small Win32 ISAPI filter used to back up the cookieless session state for ASP.NET on IIS 7 applications. It’s not terribly important because of this focus, but it’s a default loaded component. After a lot of fiddling I ended up with two solutions (with the help and support of some Twitter folks): Switch IIS to run in 32 bit mode Fix the filter listing in ApplicationHost.config Switching IIS to allow 32 Bit Code This is a quick fix for the problem above which enables 32 bit code in the Application Pool. The problem above is that IIS is trying to load a 32 bit ISAPI filter and enabling 32 bit code gets you around this problem. To configure your Application Pool, open the Application Pool in IIS Manager bring up Advanced Options and Enable 32 Bit Applications: And voila the error message above goes away. Fix Filters Enabling 32 bit code is a quick fix solution to this problem, but not an ideal one. If you’re running a pure .NET application that doesn’t need to do COM or pInvoke Interop with 32 bit apps there’s usually no need for enabling 32 bit code in an Application Pool as you can run in native 64 bit code. So trying to get 64 bit working natively is a pretty key feature in my opinion :-) So what’s the problem – why is IIS trying to load a 32 bit DLL in a 64 bit install, especially if the application pool is configured to not allow 32 bit code at all? The problem lies in the server configuration and the fact that 32 bit and 64 bit configuration settings exist side by side in IIS. If I open my Default Web Site (or any other root Web Site) and go to the ISAPI filter list here’s what I see: Notice that there are 3 entries for ASP.NET 4.0 in this list. Only two of them however are specifically scoped to the specifically to 32 bit or 64 bit. As you can see the 64 bit filter correctly points at the Framework64 folder to load the dll, while both the 32 bit and the ‘generic’ entry point at the plain Framework 32 bit folder. Aha! Hence lies our problem. You can edit ApplicationHost.config manually, but I ran into the nasty issue of not being able to easily edit that file with the 32 bit editor (who ever thought that was a good idea???? WTF). You have to open ApplicationHost.Config in a 64 bit native text editor – which Visual Studio is not. Or my favorite editor: EditPad Pro. Since I don’t have a native 64 bit editor handy Notepad was my only choice. Or as an alternative you can use the IIS 7.5 Configuration Editor which lets you interactively browse and edit most ApplicationHost settings. You can drill into the configuration hierarchy visually to find your keys and edit attributes and sub values in property editor type interface. I had no idea this tool existed prior to today and it’s pretty cool as it gives you some visual clues to options available – especially in absence of an Intellisense scheme you’d get in Visual Studio (which doesn’t work). To use the Configuration Editor go the Web Site root and use the Configuration Editor option in the Management Group. Drill into System.webServer/isapiFilters and then click on the Collection’s … button on the right. You should now see a display like this: which shows all the same attributes you’d see in ApplicationHost.config (cool!). These entries correspond to these raw ApplicationHost.config entries: <filter name="ASP.Net_4.0" path="C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll" enableCache="true" preCondition="runtimeVersionv4.0" /> <filter name="ASP.Net_4.0_64bit" path="C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll" enableCache="true" preCondition="runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" /> <filter name="ASP.Net_4.0_32bit" path="C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll" enableCache="true" preCondition="runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" /> The key attribute we’re concerned with here is the preCondition and the bitness subvalue. Notice that the ‘generic’ version – which comes first in the filter list – has no bitness assigned to it, so it defaults to 32 bit and the 32 bit dll path. And this is where our problem comes from. The simple solution to fix the startup problem is to remove the generic entry from this list here or in the filters list shown earlier and leave only the bitness specific versions active. The preCondition attribute acts as a filter and as you can see here it filters the list by runtime version and bitness value. This is something to keep an eye out in general – if a bitness values are missing it’s easy to run into conflicts like this with any settings that are global and especially those that load modules and handlers and other executable code. On 64 bit systems it’s a good idea to explicitly set the bitness of all entries or remove the non-specific versions and add bit specific entries. So how did this get misconfigured? I installed IIS before everything else was installed on this machine and then went ahead and installed Visual Studio. I suspect the Visual Studio install munged this up as I never saw a similar problem on my live server where everything just worked right out of the box. In searching about this problem a lot of solutions pointed at using aspnet_regiis –r from the Framework64 directory, but that did not fix this extra entry in the filters list – it adds the required 32 bit and 64 bit entries, but it doesn’t remove the errand un-bitness set entry. Hopefully this post will help out anybody who runs into a similar situation without having to trouble shoot all the way down into the configuration settings and noticing the bitness settings. It’s a good lesson learned for me – this is my first desktop install of a 64 bit OS and things like this are what I was reluctant to find. Now that I ran into this I have a good idea what to look for with 32/64 bit misconfigurations in IIS at least.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET  

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  • Week in Geek: USDA Chooses Microsoft for Cloud Services Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    This week we learned how to create geeky LED holiday lights with old bottles, dig deeper in Windows Defrag via the command prompt, use Google Chrome’s drag/drop feature to upload files easier, find great gift recommendations by looking through the How-To Geek holiday gift guide, and have fun adding Merry Christmas fonts to our computers. Photo by ntr23. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week, so we have extra news link goodness with information that is good for you to know. USDA making the move to Microsoft The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that it has chosen Microsoft to host things like e-mail, instant messaging, and collaboration through the software giant’s Business Productivity Online Suite. Google says it was cut off from USDA project bid Google is claiming that it was not given a chance to bid on a cloud-computing project for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for which the contract was awarded to rival Microsoft. Apache is being forced into a Java Fork When Oracle rolled over Apache and Google’s objections to its Java plans in December, the scene was set for Apache to leave and, eventually, force a Java code fork. Tumblr explains daylong outage After experiencing an outage that started on Sunday afternoon and stretched through most of the day yesterday, Tumblr has explained what happened. Google demos Chrome OS, launches pilot program During a press briefing this week in San Francisco, Google launched the Chrome application store and demonstrated Chrome OS, its browser-centric netbook operating system. Don’t expect Spotify in U.S. this holiday season As of last week, Spotify had yet to sign a single licensing deal with a major label, after spending more than a year negotiating, multiple music sources told CNET. December 2010 Patch Tuesday will come with most bulletins ever According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue 17 Security Bulletins addressing 40 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, December 14. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day. Hacker plants back door in Symbian firmware Indian hacker Atul Alex has had a look at the firmware for Symbian S60 smartphones and come up with a back door for it. PC quarantines raise tough complexities The concept of quarantining PCs to prevent widespread infection is “interesting, but difficult to implement, with far too many problems”, said security experts. Symantec: DDoS attacks hard to defend It has surfaced that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Visa and MasterCard Web sites on Wednesday were carried out by a toolkit known as low orbit ion cannon (LOIC). Web Sockets and the risks of unfinished standards Enthusiasm for a promising new standard called Web Sockets has quickly cooled in some quarters as a potential security problem led some browser makers to hastily postpone support. Internet Explorer 9 to get tracking protection Microsoft is making changes to Internet Explorer 9’s security features that will better enable users to keep sites from tracking their activity across browsing sessions. NASA sold PCs with sensitive data NASA failed to remove sensitive data from computers that it sold, according to an audit report released this week. Cybercrooks create fake Amazon receipts The bad guys have created yet another online scam, this one involving fake Amazon receipts. World of Warcraft character move fees waived Until December 22, Blizzard will allow free realm transfers from 25 highly populated servers to alleviate log-in queues or performance issues. (The free transfers are one-way and one-time only.) SpaceX Dragon reaches orbit atop a Falcon with a fiery tail The Space Exploration Technologies corporation has become the first nongovernmental entity to put a vehicle into low Earth orbit. Geek Video of the Week If birds have wings, then why are the Angry Birds using slingshots? Photo by Dorkly Bits. Wait… Birds have Wings, Why are the Angry Ones Using Slingshots? Sysadmin Geek Tips How To Setup Email Alerts on Linux Using Gmail or SMTP Linux machines may require administrative intervention in countless ways, but without manually logging into them how would you know about it? Here’s how to setup emails to get notified when your machines want some tender love and attention. Random TinyHacker Links Red Panda Webcam Support Firefox and the Knoxville Zoo’s Red Panda program. Christmas Icons (Icons we like) Superb set of holiday icons by lgp85 at deviantArt. Download the .zip and use as .png or convert to .ico at Convertico.com or with tiny app Imagicon. Super User Questions Enjoy reading the great answers to this week’s popular questions from Super User Useful USB boot disks? DVD/CD burning .zip: is it more reliable, faster, longer lasting to burn a zip of files rather than the files as a folder? What are other ways to backup my files if I do not have an external drive? Anti virus what is the difference between these all? How can I block all Facebook elements/content? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a busy week between work and preparing for the holidays? Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles of the week. 20 Windows Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? How to Use and Customize Google Chrome Web Apps One Year Ago on How-To Geek This week’s batch of retro geeky goodness is all about customizing Windows 7. ClassicShell Adds Classic Start Menu and Explorer Features to Windows 7 Get an Aero-Styled Classic Start Menu in Windows 7 Customize the Windows 7 Logon Screen Get the Classic Style Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7 How To Enable Check Boxes for Items In Windows 7 The Geek Note We would like you to join us in welcoming Jason Fitzpatrick to the writing staff here at How-To Geek. He started with us this past week, so take some time to read through his articles about the Wii, Kindle, & PlayStation 2 Peripherals and leave a friendly comment to say “Hi”! Got a great tip to share? Make sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by real00. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

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  • Week in Geek: New Security Flaw Confirmed for Internet Explorer Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    This week we learned how to use a PC to stay entertained while traveling for the holidays, create quality photo prints with free software, share links between any browser and any smartphone, create perfect Christmas photos using How-To Geek’s 10 best how-to photo guides, and had fun decorating Firefox with a collection of Holiday 2010 Personas themes. Photo by Repoort. Random Geek Links Photo by Asian Angel. Critical 0-Day Flaw Affects All Internet Explorer Versions, Microsoft Warns Microsoft has confirmed a zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE7 and IE6. Note: Article contains link to Microsoft Security Advisory detailing two work-arounds until a security update is released. Hackers targeting human rights, indie media groups Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. OpenBSD: audits give no indication of back doors So far, the analyses of OpenBSD’s crypto and IPSec code have not provided any indication that the system contains back doors for listening to encrypted VPN connections. But the developers have already found two bugs during their current audits. Sophos: Beware Facebook’s new facial-recognition feature Facebook’s new facial recognition software might result in undesirable photos of users being circulated online, warned a security expert, who urged users to keep abreast with the social network’s privacy settings to prevent the abovementioned scenario from becoming a reality. Microsoft withdraws flawed Outlook update Microsoft has withdrawn update KB2412171 for Outlook 2007, released last Patch Tuesday, after a number of user complaints. Skype: Millions still without service Skype was still working to right itself going into the holiday weekend from a major outage that began this past Wednesday. Mozilla improves sync setup and WebGL in Firefox 4 beta 8 Firefox 4.0 beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices. Chrome OS the litmus test for cloud The success or failure of Google’s browser-oriented Chrome OS will be the litmus test to decide if the cloud is capable of addressing user needs for content and services, according to a new Ovum report released Monday. FCC Net neutrality rules reach mobile apps The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally released its long-expected regulations on Thursday and the related explanations total a whopping 194 pages. One new item that was not previously disclosed: mobile wireless providers can’t block “applications that compete with the provider’s” own voice or video telephony services. KDE and the Document Foundation join Open Invention Network The KDE e.V. and the Document Foundation (TDF) have both joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as licensees, expanding the organization’s roster of supporters. Report: SEC looks into Hurd’s ousting from HP The scandal surrounding Mark Hurd’s departure from the world’s largest technology company in August has officially drawn attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Report: Google requests delay of new Google TVs Google TV is apparently encountering a bit of static that has resulted in a programming change. Geek Video of the Week This week we have a double dose of geeky video goodness for you with the original Mac vs PC video and the trailer for the sequel. Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC 2 Trailer Random TinyHacker Links Awesome Tools To Extract Audio From Video Here’s a list of really useful, and free tools to rip audio from videos. Getting Your iPhone Out of Recovery Mode Is your iPhone stuck in recovery mode? This tutorial will help you get it out of that state. Google Shared Spaces Quickly create a shared space and collaborate with friends online. McAfee Internet Security 2011 – Upgrade not worthy of a version change McAfee has released their 2011 version of security products. And as this review details, the upgrades are minimal when compared to their 2010 products. For more information, check out the review. 200 Countries Plotted Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. Super User Questions Enjoy looking through this week’s batch of popular questions and answers from Super User. How to restore windows 7 to a known working state every time it boots? Is there an easy way to mass-transfer all files between two computers? Coffee spilled inside computer, damaged hard drive Computer does not boot after ram upgrade Keyboard not detected when trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a super busy week while preparing for the holiday weekend? Then here is your chance to get caught up on your reading with our five hottest articles for the week. Ask How-To Geek: Rescuing an Infected PC, Installing Bloat-free iTunes, and Taming a Crazy Trackpad How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Eight Geektacular Christmas Projects for Your Day Off VirtualBox 4.0 Rocks Extensions and a Simplified GUI Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer? One Year Ago on How-To Geek Here are more great articles from one year ago for you to read and enjoy during the holiday break. Enjoy Distraction-Free Writing with WriteMonkey Shutter is a State of Art Screenshot Tool for Ubuntu Get Hex & RGB Color Codes the Easy Way Find User Scripts for Your Favorite Websites the Easy Way Access Your Unsorted Bookmarks the Easy Way (Firefox) The Geek Note That “wraps” things up for this week and we hope that everyone enjoys the rest of their holiday break! Found a great tip during the break? Then be sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by ArSiSa7. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Simon’s Cat Explores the Christmas Tree! [Video] The Outdoor Lights Scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [Video] The Famous Home Alone Pizza Delivery Scene [Classic Video] Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Theme for Windows 7 Cardinal and Rabbit Sharing a Tree on a Cold Winter Morning Wallpaper An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video]

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