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  • Efficient method of getting all plist arrays into one array?

    - by cannyboy
    If I have a plist which is structured like this: Root Array Item 0 Dictionary City String New York People Array Item 0 String Steve Item 1 String Paul Item 2 String Fabio Item 3 String David Item 4 String Penny Item 1 Dictionary City String London People Array Item 0 String Linda Item 1 String Rachel Item 2 String Jessica Item 3 String Lou Item 2 Dictionary City String Barcelona People Array Item 0 String Edward Item 1 String Juan Item 2 String Maria Then what is the most efficient way of getting all the names of the people into one big NSArray?

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  • Are any of these SQL Queries open to SQL injection attacks?

    - by Phil
    I have re-written my code after great help from some friendly stack overflow members (big thanks to Martin B and Kev Chadders especially). I would now like to check if my code is still open to SQL Injections after this work. I believe the code is now working as it should, but any blinding errors that you see i'd love to hear about too. My code is now looking like: -code removed-

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  • c# - How do you get a variable's name as it was physically typed in its declaration?

    - by Petras
    The class below contains the field city. I need to dynamically determine the field's name as it is typed in the class declaration i.e. I need to get the string "city" from an instance of the object city. I have tried to do this by examining its Type in DoSomething() but can't find it when examining the contents of the Type in the debugger. Is it possible? public class Person { public string city = "New York"; public Person() { } public void DoSomething() { Type t = city.GetType(); string field_name = t.SomeUnkownFunction(); //would return the string "city" if it existed! } } Some people in their answers below have asked me why I want to do this. Here's why. In my real world situation, there is a custom attribute above city. [MyCustomAttribute("param1", "param2", etc)] public string city = "New York"; I need this attribute in other code. To get the attribute, I use reflection. And in the reflection code I need to type the string "city" MyCustomAttribute attr; Type t = typeof(Person); foreach (FieldInfo field in t.GetFields()) { if (field.Name == "city") { //do stuff when we find the field that has the attribute we need } } Now this isn't type safe. If I changed the variable "city" to "workCity" in my field declaration in Person this line would fail unless I knew to update the string if (field.Name == "workCity") //I have to make this change in another file for this to still work, yuk! { } So I am trying to find some way to pass the string to this code without physically typing it. Yes, I could declare it as a string constant in Person (or something like that) but that would still be typing it twice. Phew! That was tough to explain!! Thanks Thanks to all who answered this * a lot*. It sent me on a new path to better understand lambda expressions. And it created a new question.

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  • Software Architecture: Unit of Work design pattern discussion

    - by santiagobasulto
    Hey everybody. According Martin Fowler's Unit of Work description: "Maintains a list of objects that are affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and resolution of concurrency problems." Avoiding very small calls to the database, which ends up being very slow I'm wondering. If we just delimit it to database transaction management, won't prepare statements help with this?

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  • Is it possible to implement Separated Interface in PHP?

    - by sunwukung
    I recently asked a question regarding the resolution of dependencies between Unit of Work and Data Mapper classes: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3012657/dependency-injection-and-unit-of-work-pattern - (which was answered by Gabor de Mooij - thx) In PoEAA, Martin Fowler suggests using Separated Interface to manage these dependencies. My question is simple - is it actually possible to implement this pattern in PHP, or is it specific to Java interfaces? I've searched high and low and it's hard to find references to this pattern anywhere outside of PoEAA.

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  • What's the best software development conventions document you have seen?

    - by Pavel Radzivilovsky
    Google C++ development conventions outlaw exceptions, RAII, RTTI and bans the default parameter in parseInt(number, radix=10). Qt API style guide is brilliant, but only covers interfaces. The Robert C. Martin series Clean Code has M104 galaxy on the cover, but it is 462 pages long and based on Java, with no simple "do this" digest. Assuming that it is important to synchronize style and best practices across the organization, what is the smartest, most pleasant and useful conventions document you have worked with?

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  • How to hide certain elements on a page using jQuery

    - by Ankur
    I am trying to implement something that is similar to a faceted search. My data is a series of objects and relationships. The idea is that you click an object (in this case "95 Theses" and then the possibly relationships are displayed, in this case "author" and clicking the relationship shows the object that matches the relationship, in this case "Martin Luther". My clicking of objects and relationsips (predicates) works fine. What I need to do is allow users to click an object or relationship and have all those that extend from it removed. This is what I thought of adding when a object or relationship 'tag' is clicked (every time I add another object or relationship I increment the global attribute called 'level'): if($(".objHolder,. preHolder").filter("[level>'"+level+"']").filter("[holderId='"+holderId+"']").length) { $(".objHolder,. preHolder").filter("[level>'"+level+"']").filter("[holderId='"+holderId+"']").remove(); } <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="2"> <tbody><tr> <td class="objHolder" objid="1" holderid="1" level="1"> <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="2"> <tbody><tr class="objItemRow" objid="1" holderid="1" level="1"> <td class="objItem" objid="1" holderid="1" level="2" bgcolor="#eeeeee" nowrap="nowrap">95 Theses</td> </tr></tbody> </table></td> <td><img src="images/right.jpg" alt="" height="10" width="16"></td> <td class="preHolder" level="2" holderid="1"> <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="2"><tbody> <tr><td class="preItem" level="3" subid="1" preid="1" holderid="1" bgcolor="#eeeeee" nowrap="nowrap">author</td></tr> </tbody></table></td> <td><img src="images/right.jpg" alt="" height="10" width="16"></td> <td class="objHolder" level="3" holderid="1"> <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="2"><tbody><tr><td class="objItem" level="4" objid="3" holderid="1" bgcolor="#eeeeee" nowrap="nowrap">Martin Luther</td></tr></tbody></table> </td> </tr></tbody> </table>

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  • many "META-INF/ already added, skipping" warnings when building assembly

    - by Tchick
    Hi, when building a jar-with-dependencies with the assembly plugin, I get many, many messages like this: META-INF/ already added, skipping It seems to mee, that maven is warning me, that I already have a META-INF in my to-be-created jar, and therefore the META-INF of the to-be-included dependant jar file is not included in my to-be-created jar. Well, this is exactly what I want, and I want to ged rid of those messages. Is there a way to achieve this? Regards, Martin.

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  • SRP & "axis of change"?

    - by lance
    I'm reading Bob Martin's principles of OOD, specifically the SRP text, and I understand the spirit of what it's saying pretty well, but I don't quite understand a particular phrasing, from page 2 of the link (page 150 of the book): I paraphrase: It is important to separate these two responsibilities into separate classes because each responsibility is an axis of change. What exactly is meant here by "axis of change"?

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  • mysql insert multiple rows, return rows that failed

    - by Glenn
    When I try to insert (lets say) 30 rows in my table. For example INSERT INTO customers(cust_name, cust_address, cust_city, cust_state, cust_zip, cust_country) VALUES( 'Pep E. LaPew', '100 Main Street', 'Los Angeles', 'CA', '90046', 'USA' ), ( 'M. Martian', '42 Galaxy Way', 'New York', 'NY', '11213', 'USA' ), ... ; And cust_name has to be unique. How can I then identify the records that failed to insert because their cust_name already exists? Is it possible to return them?

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  • LINQ Query with 3 levels

    - by BahaiResearch.com
    I have a business object structured like this: Country has States, State has Cities So Country[2].States[7].Cities[5].Name would be New York Ok, I need to get a list of all the Country objects which have at least 1 City.IsNice == true How do I get that?

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  • Can't create/write to file (Errcode: 22)

    - by magdmartin
    Quite new with SQL I'm looking to export some data from a MySQL database into a csv file. I'm working locally (localhost). Here is my SQL statement: SELECT DISTINCT * INTO OUTFILE 'C:\Users\Martin\Downloads\result.csv' FROM provider, location, provider_has_location WHERE provider.idprovider = provider_has_location.provider_idprovider AND location.idLocation = provider_has_location.location_idLocation LIMIT 20 MySQL return the following error: Can't create/write to file 'C:UsersMartinDownloads esult.csv' (Errcode: 22) Thanks for your help.

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  • Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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  • Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

    - by terje
    Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

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  • You Say You Want a (Customer Experience) Revolution

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} rev-o-lu-tion [rev-uh-loo-shuhn] noun 1. a sudden, radical or complete change 2. fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something; a change of paradigm 3. a changeover in use or preference especially in technology <the computer revolution> Lately, I've been hearing an awful lot about the customer experience revolution.  Tonight Oracle will be hosting The Experience Revolution, an evening of exploration and networking with customer experience executives in New York City where Oracle President Mark Hurd will introduce Oracle Customer Experience, a cross-stack suite of customer experience products that includes Oracle WebCenter and a number of other Oracle technologies. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East also kicks off in New York City where they'll examine how businesses can "reap the full business benefits of the customer experience revolution." So, are we in the midst of a customer experience revolution? As a consumer, I can answer that question with a definitive “yes.” When I bought my very first car, I had a lot of questions. How do I know if I’m paying a fair price? How do I know if this dealer is honest? Why do I have to sit through these good cop, bad cop shenanigans between sales and sales management at the dealership? Why do I feel like I’m doing these people a favor by giving them my business? In the end the whole experience left me feeling deeply unsatisfied. I didn’t feel that I held all that much power over the experience and the only real negotiating trick I had was to walk out, which I did, many times before actually making a purchase. Fast forward to a year ago and I found myself back in the market for a new car. The very first car that I bought had finally kicked the bucket after many years, many repair bills, and much wear and tear. Man, I had loved that car. It was time to move on, but I had a knot in my stomach when I reflected back on my last car purchase experience and dreaded the thought of going through that again. Could that have been the reason why I drove my old car for so long? But as I started the process of researching new cars, I started to feel really confident. I had a wealth of online information that helped me in my search. I went to Edmunds and plugged in some information on my preferences and left with a short list of vehicles. After an afternoon spent test driving the cars my short list, I had determined my favorite – it was a model I didn’t even know about until my research on Edmunds! But I didn’t want to go back to the dealership where I test drove it. They were clearly old school and wanted me to buy the way that they wanted to sell. No thanks! After that I went back online. I figured out exactly what people had paid for this car in my area. I found out what kind of discount others were able to negotiate from an online community forum dedicated to the make and model. I found out how the sales people were being incentivized by the manufacturer that month. I learned which dealers had the best ratings and reviews. This was actually getting exciting. I was feeling really empowered. My next step was to request online quotes from the some of the highest rated dealers but I already knew exactly how much I was going to pay. This was really a test for the dealers. My new mantra was “let he who delivers the best customer experience win.” An inside sales rep from one dealer responded to my quote request within a couple of hours. I told him I had already decided on the make and model and it was just a matter of figuring out who I would buy it from. I also told them that I was really busy and wouldn’t set foot in the dealership unless we had come to terms beforehand. Lastly, I let him know that I’d prefer to work out the details via email. He promised to get back to me shortly with a detailed quote. Over the next few days I received calls from other dealers. One asked me a host of questions that I had already answered in their lengthy online form. Another blamed their website performance issues for their delay in responding to my request. But by then it didn’t really matter because I’d already bought the car days before from the dealer who responded to me first and who was willing to adjust their sales process to accommodate my buying one. So, yes, I really do believe we are in the midst of a customer experience revolution. And every revolution leaves some victorious and other vanquished. Which side do you want to be on when it comes to the customer experience revolution?

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  • The Faces in the Crowdsourcing

    - by Applications User Experience
    By Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer, Oracle Imagine having access to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of people who can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately. Distributing simple tasks not easily done by computers to the masses is called "crowdsourcing" and until recently was an interesting concept, but due to practical constraints wasn't used often. Enter Amazon.com. For five years, Amazon has hosted a service called Mechanical Turk, which provides an easy interface to the crowds. The service has almost half a million registered, global users performing a quarter of a million human intelligence tasks (HITs). HITs are submitted by individuals and companies in the U.S. and pay from $.01 for simple tasks (such as determining if a picture is offensive) to several dollars (for tasks like transcribing audio). What do we know about the people who toil away in this digital crowd? Can we rely on the work done in this anonymous marketplace? A rendering of the actual Mechanical Turk (from Wikipedia) Knowing who is behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is fitting, considering the history of the actual Mechanical Turk. In the late 1800's, a mechanical chess-playing machine awed crowds as it beat master chess players in what was thought to be a mechanical miracle. It turned out that the creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, had a small person (also a chess master) hiding inside the machine operating the arms to provide the illusion of automation. The field of human computer interaction (HCI) is quite familiar with gathering user input and incorporating it into all stages of the design process. It makes sense then that Mechanical Turk was a popular discussion topic at the recent Computer Human Interaction usability conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta. It is already being used as a source for input on Web sites (for example, Feedbackarmy.com) and behavioral research studies. Two papers shed some light on the faces in this crowd. One paper tells us about the shifting demographics from mostly stay-at-home moms to young men in India. The second paper discusses the reliability and quality of work from the workers. Just who exactly would spend time doing tasks for pennies? In "Who are the crowdworkers?" University of California researchers Ross, Silberman, Zaldivar and Tomlinson conducted a survey of Mechanical Turk worker demographics and compared it to a similar survey done two years before. The initial survey reported workers consisting largely of young, well-educated women living in the U.S. with annual household incomes above $40,000. The more recent survey reveals a shift in demographics largely driven by an influx of workers from India. Indian workers went from 5% to over 30% of the crowd, and this block is largely male (two-thirds) with a higher average education than U.S. workers, and 64% report an annual income of less than $10,000 (keeping in mind $1 has a lot more purchasing power in India). This shifting demographic certainly has implications as language and culture can play critical roles in the outcome of HITs. Of course, the demographic data came from paying Turkers $.10 to fill out a survey, so there is some question about both a self-selection bias (characteristics which cause Turks to take this survey may be unrepresentative of the larger population), not to mention whether we can really trust the data we get from the crowd. Crowds can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately for usability testing. (Photo attributed to victoriapeckham Flikr While having immediate access to a global workforce is nice, one major problem with Mechanical Turk is the incentive structure. Individuals and companies that deploy HITs want quality responses for a low price. Workers, on the other hand, want to complete the task and get paid as quickly as possible, so that they can get on to the next task. Since many HITs on Mechanical Turk are surveys, how valid and reliable are these results? How do we know whether workers are just rushing through the multiple-choice responses haphazardly answering? In "Are your participants gaming the system?" researchers at Carnegie Mellon (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng and Cranor) set up an experiment to find out what percentage of their workers were just in it for the money. The authors set up a 30-minute HIT (one of the more lengthy ones for Mechanical Turk) and offered a very high $4 to those who qualified and $.20 to those who did not. As part of the HIT, workers were asked to read an email and respond to two questions that determined whether workers were likely rushing through the HIT and not answering conscientiously. One question was simple and took little effort, while the second question required a bit more work to find the answer. Workers were led to believe other factors than these two questions were the qualifying aspect of the HIT. Of the 2000 participants, roughly 1200 (or 61%) answered both questions correctly. Eighty-eight percent answered the easy question correctly, and 64% answered the difficult question correctly. In other words, about 12% of the crowd were gaming the system, not paying enough attention to the question or making careless errors. Up to about 40% won't put in more than a modest effort to get paid for a HIT. Young men and those that considered themselves in the financial industry tended to be the most likely to try to game the system. There wasn't a breakdown by country, but given the demographic information from the first article, we could infer that many of these young men come from India, which makes language and other cultural differences a factor. These articles raise questions about the role of crowdsourcing as a means for getting quick user input at low cost. While compensating users for their time is nothing new, the incentive structure and anonymity of Mechanical Turk raises some interesting questions. How complex of a task can we ask of the crowd, and how much should these workers be paid? Can we rely on the information we get from these professional users, and if so, how can we best incorporate it into designing more usable products? Traditional usability testing will still play a central role in enterprise software. Crowdsourcing doesn't replace testing; instead, it makes certain parts of gathering user feedback easier. One can turn to the crowd for simple tasks that don't require specialized skills and get a lot of data fast. As more studies are conducted on Mechanical Turk, I suspect we will see crowdsourcing playing an increasing role in human computer interaction and enterprise computing. References: Downs, J. S., Holbrook, M. B., Sheng, S., and Cranor, L. F. 2010. Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2399-2402. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753688 Ross, J., Irani, L., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., and Tomlinson, B. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2863-2872. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753873

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  • How To Watch Live Streaming of Oscars 2010 (Academy Awards)

    - by Gopinath
    The Academy Awards or more popularly known as Oscars for this year will go live on 7th March 2010 (8PM ET) at the Kodak Theater (Hollywood), Los Angeles, California. It’s a star studded event every movie lover wish to follow and watch live. We at Tech Dreams always love to write about live streaming of popular events happening across the globe. Here is our guide to follow Oscars 2010 Oscars 2010 Live Streams Last year we did not have many choices to view the Oscars online. But this year there are plenty of them available from the best of the media power houses APLive Oscars coverage on livestream.com (embedded below) Oscars.com – The Official Web Site of Academy Awards Oscars.org Live Streaming Academy Awards – Official Live Steaming Channel on livestream.com(embedded below) APLive Oscars coverage on Facebook AP Live Oscars Red Carpet Coverage Academy Awards – Live Coverage Websites To View Highlights & Exclusive Clips Of Oscars 2010 If you miss to catch the live streaming of Oscars 2010, here are few sites you can check to view video highlights of the entire event.  Few websites like Hulu have access to exclusive moments. Oscar’s Official YouTube Channel Hulu Award Season 2010 coverage Oscars 2010  Date and Time Oscars 2010 will begin at on 7th March  Sunday 8PM EST in California. The local time in India will be around 9:30 AM on Monday. Here is list of major cities and the local time at which Oscars 2010 are going to start Date & Time California March 7th, Sunday 20:00 Adelaide March 8th, Monday 14:30 Bangkok March 8th, Monday 11:00 Beijing March 8th, Monday 12:00 Brisbane March 8th, Monday 14:00 Cape Town March 8th, Monday 06:00 Dubai March 8th, Monday 08:00 Frankfurt March 8th, Monday 05:00 Hong Kong March 8th, Monday 12:00 Delhi/Chennai/Mumbai/Kolkata March 8th, Monday 09:30 New York March 7th, Sunday 23:00 Paris March 8th, Monday 05:00 Washington March 7th, Sunday 23:00 London March 8th, Monday 04:00 For more cities visit this link If you know any other source that provide live streaming of Oscar’s, let us hear through the comments. Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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  • List of resources for database continuous integration

    - by David Atkinson
    Because there is so little information on database continuous integration out in the wild, I've taken it upon myself to aggregate as much as possible and post the links to this blog. Because it's my area of expertise, this will focus on SQL Server and Red Gate tooling, although I am keen to include any quality articles that discuss the topic in general terms. Please let me know if you find a resource that I haven't listed! General database Continuous Integration · What is Database Continuous Integration? (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration for SQL Server Databases (Troy Hunt) · Installing NAnt to drive database continuous integration (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration Tip #3 - Version your Databases as part of your automated build (Doug Rathbone) · How the "migrations" approach makes database continuous integration possible (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration for the Database (Keith Bloom) Setting up Continuous Integration with Red Gate tools · Continuous integration for databases using Red Gate tools - A technical overview (White Paper, Roger Hart and David Atkinson) · Continuous integration for databases using Red Gate SQL tools (Product pages) · Database continuous integration step by step (David Atkinson) · Database Continuous Integration with Red Gate Tools (video, David Atkinson) · Database schema synchronisation with RedGate (Vincent Brouillet) · Database continuous integration and deployment with Red Gate tools (David Duffett) · Automated database releases with TeamCity and Red Gate (Troy Hunt) · How to build a database from source control (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration Automated Database Update Process (Lance Lyons) Other · Evolutionary Database Design (Martin Fowler) · Recipes for Continuous Database Integration: Evolutionary Database Development (book, Pramod J Sadalage) · Recipes for Continuous Database Integration (book, Pramod Sadalage) · The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based Development (book, Phil Factor, Grant Fritchey, Alex Kuznetsov, Mladen Prajdic) · Using SQL Test Database Unit Testing with TeamCity Continuous Integration (Dave Green) · Continuous Database Integration (covers MySQL, Perason Education) Technorati Tags: SQL Server,Continous Integration

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  • Google Earth 6–It’s All About Trees & Better Street View

    - by Gopinath
    The latest version of Google Earth is all about viewing 3D models of trees that we can see as we walk through the streets in Google Earth and integrated street views. Tech Crunch says ..trees are obviously a hugely important part of the Earth. To get them into Google Earth, the search giant has made 3D models of over 50 different species of trees. And they’ve included over 80 million of them in various places around the world including Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The other big addition to this latest version of Google Earth is Integrated Street View. To be clear, Google has had a form of Street View in Google Earth since 2008, but now it’s fully a part of the experience. This means that you can go all the way from space, right down to Street View seamlessly. Check the embedded video to know more about Google Earth 6 features This article titled,Google Earth 6–It’s All About Trees & Better Street View, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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  • The “Customer” Experience Revolution is Here

    - by Jeri Kelley
    A guest post by Anthony Lye, SVP, CRM, Oracle The Experience Revolution is here, and we are going to explore and celebrate our new customer experience (CX) ventures and strategy in an extraordinary way. In true Oracle fashion, we are hosting an exceptional event, bringing together customer experience advocates, visionaries and practitioners to discover and define Oracle’s Customer Experience vision. At The Experience Revolution, Oracle President Mark Hurd will detail the vision of where customer experience is going and how Oracle will help you get there. He will introduce for the first time Oracle Customer Experience, a cross stack suite of customer experience products that enable organizations to: Engage customers with a consistent, connected and personalized brand experience across all channels and devices Deliver exceptional cross-channel order fulfillment and customer service through web, call centers and social networks Connect and analyze data from all interactions to better personalize experiences and identify hidden opportunities The Experience Revolution will also include an interactive gallery of customer experience interactions, featuring videos, touch screens and near field communication technology that will guide each attendee through an individualized event experience. We hope you will join us for an incredible evening on June 25, from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at Gotham Hall in New York City.  You can register for The Experience Revolution here. And if you haven’t already joined the conversation on Twitter, please do:  #OracleCX, #ExperienceRevolution

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