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• The battle between Java vs. C#

  The battle between Java vs. C# has been a big debate amongst the development community over the last few years. Both languages have specific pros and cons based on the needs of a particular project. In general both languages utilize a similar coding syntax that is based on C++, and offer developers similar functionality. This being said, the communities supporting each of these languages are very different. The divide amongst the communities is much like the political divide in America, where the Java community would represent the Democrats and the .Net community would represent the Republicans. The Democratic Party is a proponent of the working class and the general population. Currently, Java is deeply entrenched in the open source community that is distributed freely to anyone who has an interest in using it. Open source communities rely on developers to keep it alive by constantly contributing code to make applications better; essentially they develop code by the community. This is in stark contrast to the C# community that is typically a pay to play community meaning that you must pay for code that you want to use because it is developed as products to be marketed and sold for a profit. This ties back into my reference to the Republicans because they typically represent the needs of business and personal responsibility. This is emphasized by the belief that code is a commodity and that it can be sold for a profit which is in direct conflict to the laissez-faire beliefs of the open source community. Beyond the general differences between Java and C#, they also target two different environments. Java is developed to be environment independent and only requires that users have a Java virtual machine running in order for the java code to execute. C# on the other hand typically targets any system running a windows operating system and has the appropriate version of the .Net Framework installed. However, recently there has been push by a segment of the Open source community based around the Mono project that lets C# code run on other non-windows operating systems. In addition, another feature of C# is that it compiles into an intermediate language, and this is what is executed when the program runs. Because C# is reduced down to an intermediate language called Common Language Runtime (CLR) it can be combined with other languages that are also compiled in to the CLR like Visual Basic (VB) .Net, and F#. The allowance and interaction between multiple languages in the .Net Framework enables projects to utilize existing code bases regardless of the actual syntax because they can be compiled in to CLR and executed as one codebase. As a software engineer I personally feel that it is really important to learn as many languages as you can or at least be open to learn as many languages as you can because no one language will work in every situation.  In some cases Java may be a better choice for a project and others may be C#. It really depends on the requirements of a project and the time constraints. In addition, I feel that is really important to concentrate on understanding the logic of programming and be able to translate business requirements into technical requirements. If you can understand both programming logic and business requirements then deciding which language to use is just basically choosing what syntax to write for a given business problem or need. In regards to code refactoring and dynamic languages it really does not matter. Eventually all projects will be refactored or decommissioned to allow for progress. This is the way of life in the software development industry. The language of a project should not be chosen based on the fact that a project will eventually be refactored because they all will get refactored.

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• T-SQL (SCD) Slowly Changing Dimension Type 2 using a merge statement

  - by AtulThakor

  Working on stored procedure recently which loads records into a data warehouse I found that the existing record was being expired using an update statement followed by an insert to add the new active record. Playing around with the merge statement you can actually expire the current record and insert a new record within one clean statement. This is how the statement works, we do the normal merge statement to insert a record when there is no match, if we match the record we update the existing record by expiring it and deactivating. At the end of the merge statement we use the output statement to output the staging values for the update,  we wrap the whole merge statement within an insert statement and add new rows for the records which we inserted. I’ve added the full script at the bottom so you can paste it and play around.   1: INSERT INTO ExampleFactUpdate 2: (PolicyID, 3: Status) 4: SELECT -- these columns are returned from the output statement 5: PolicyID, 6: Status 7: FROM 8: ( 9: -- merge statement on unique id in this case Policy_ID 10: MERGE dbo.ExampleFactUpdate dp 11: USING dbo.ExampleStag s 12: ON dp.PolicyID = s.PolicyID 13: WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN -- when we cant match the record we insert a new record record and this is all that happens 14: INSERT (PolicyID,Status) 15: VALUES (s.PolicyID, s.Status) 16: WHEN MATCHED --if it already exists 17: AND ExpiryDate IS NULL -- and the Expiry Date is null 18: THEN 19: UPDATE 20: SET 21: dp.ExpiryDate = getdate(), --we set the expiry on the existing record 22: dp.Active = 0 -- and deactivate the existing record 23: OUTPUT $Action MergeAction, s.PolicyID, s.Status -- the output statement returns a merge action which can 24: ) MergeOutput -- be insert/update/delete, on our example where a record has been updated (or expired in our case 25: WHERE -- we'll filter using a where clause 26: MergeAction = 'Update'; -- here   Complete source for example 1: if OBJECT_ID('ExampleFactUpdate') > 0 2: drop table ExampleFactUpdate 3:  4: Create Table ExampleFactUpdate( 5: ID int identity(1,1), 3: go 6: PolicyID varchar(100), 7: Status varchar(100), 8: EffectiveDate datetime default getdate(), 9: ExpiryDate datetime, 10: Active bit default 1 11: ) 12:  13:  14: insert into ExampleFactUpdate( 15: PolicyID, 16: Status) 17: select 18: 1, 19: 'Live' 20:  21: /*Create Staging Table*/ 22: if OBJECT_ID('ExampleStag') > 0 23: drop table ExampleStag 24: go 25:  26: /*Create example fact table */ 27: Create Table ExampleStag( 28: PolicyID varchar(100), 29: Status varchar(100)) 30:  31: --add some data 32: insert into ExampleStag( 33: PolicyID, 34: Status) 35: select 36: 1, 37: 'Lapsed' 38: union all 39: select 40: 2, 41: 'Quote' 42:  43: select * 44: from ExampleFactUpdate 45:  46: select * 47: from ExampleStag 48:  49:  50: INSERT INTO ExampleFactUpdate 51: (PolicyID, 52: Status) 53: SELECT -- these columns are returned from the output statement 54: PolicyID, 55: Status 56: FROM 57: ( 58: -- merge statement on unique id in this case Policy_ID 59: MERGE dbo.ExampleFactUpdate dp 60: USING dbo.ExampleStag s 61: ON dp.PolicyID = s.PolicyID 62: WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN -- when we cant match the record we insert a new record record and this is all that happens 63: INSERT (PolicyID,Status) 64: VALUES (s.PolicyID, s.Status) 65: WHEN MATCHED --if it already exists 66: AND ExpiryDate IS NULL -- and the Expiry Date is null 67: THEN 68: UPDATE 69: SET 70: dp.ExpiryDate = getdate(), --we set the expiry on the existing record 71: dp.Active = 0 -- and deactivate the existing record 72: OUTPUT $Action MergeAction, s.PolicyID, s.Status -- the output statement returns a merge action which can 73: ) MergeOutput -- be insert/update/delete, on our example where a record has been updated (or expired in our case 74: WHERE -- we'll filter using a where clause 75: MergeAction = 'Update'; -- here 76:  77:  78: select * 79: from ExampleFactUpdate 80: 

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• Minimum team development sizes

  - by MarkPearl

  Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario. Two is a partnership, three starts a team For a while I thought that a team was anything more than one and that scrum could be effective methodology with even two people. I have recently adjusted my thinking to a scrum team being a minimum of three, so what happened to two and what do you call it? For me I consider a group of two people working together a partnership - there is value in having a partnership, but some of the dynamics and value that you get from having a team is lost with a partnership. Avoidance of a one on one confrontation The first dynamic I see missing in a partnership is the team motivation to do better and how this is delivered to individuals that are not performing. Take two highly motivated individuals and put them together and you will typically see them continue to perform. Now take a situation where you have two individuals, one performing and one not and the behaviour is totally different compared to a team of three or more individuals. With two people, if one feels the other is not performing it becomes a one on one confrontation. Most people avoid confrontations and so nothing changes. Compare this to a situation where you have three people in a team, 2 performing and 1 not the dynamic is totally different, it is no longer a personal one on one confrontation but a team concern and people seem more willing to encourage the individual not performing and express their dissatisfaction as a team if they do not improve. Avoiding the effects of Tuckman’s Group Development Theory If you are not familiar with Tuckman’s group development theory give it a read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development) In a nutshell with Tuckman’s theory teams go through these stages of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. You want your team to reach and remain in the Performing stage for as long as possible - this is where you get the most value. When you have a partnership of two and you change the individuals in the partnership you basically do a hard reset on the partnership and go back to the beginning of Tuckman’s model each time. This has a major effect on the performance of a team and what they can deliver. What I have seen is that you reduce the effects of Tuckman's theory the more individuals you have in the team (until you hit the maximum team size in which other problems kick in). While you will still experience Tuckman's theory with a team of three, the impact will be greatly reduced compared to two where it is guaranteed every time a change occurs. It's not just in the numbers, it's in the people One final comment - while the actual numbers of a team do play a role, the individuals in the team are even more important - ideally you want to keep individuals working together for an extended period. That doesn't mean that you never change the individuals in a team, or that once someone joins a team they are stuck there - there is value in an individual moving from team to team and getting cross pollination, but the period of time that an individual moves should be in month's or years, not days or weeks. Why? So why is it important to know this? Why is it important to know how a team works and what motivates them? I have been asking myself this question for a while and where I am at right now is this… the aim is to achieve the stage where the sum of the total (team) is greater than the sum of the parts (team members). This is why we form teams and why understanding how they work is a challenge and also extremely stimulating.

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• How much is a subscriber worth?

  - by Tom Lewin

  This year at Red Gate, we’ve started providing a way to back up SQL Azure databases and Azure storage. We decided to sell this as a service, instead of a product, which means customers only pay for what they use. Unfortunately for us, it makes figuring out revenue much trickier. With a product like SQL Compare, a customer pays for it, and it’s theirs for good. Sure, we offer support and upgrades, but, fundamentally, the sale is a simple, upfront transaction: we’ve made this product, you need this product, we swap product for money and everyone is happy. With software as a service, it isn’t that easy. The money and product don’t change hands up front. Instead, we provide a service in exchange for a recurring fee. We know someone buying SQL Compare will pay us $X, but we don’t know how long service customers will stay with us, or how much they will spend. How do we find this out? We use lifetime value analysis. What is lifetime value? Lifetime value, or LTV, is how much a customer is worth to the business. For Entrepreneurs has a brilliant write up that we followed to conduct our analysis. Basically, it all boils down to this equation: LTV = ARPU x ALC To make it a bit less of an alphabet-soup and a bit more understandable, we can write it out in full: The lifetime value of a customer equals the average revenue per customer per month, times the average time a customer spends with the service Simple, right? A customer is worth the average spend times the average stay. If customers pay on average $50/month, and stay on average for ten months, then a new customer will, on average, bring in $500 over the time they are a customer! Average spend is easy to work out; it’s revenue divided by customers. The problem comes when we realise that we don’t know exactly how long a customer will stay with us. How can we figure out the average lifetime of a customer, if we only have six months’ worth of data? The answer lies in the fact that: Average Lifetime of a Customer = 1 / Churn Rate The churn rate is the percentage of customers that cancel in a month. If half of your customers cancel each month, then your average customer lifetime is two months. The problem we faced was that we didn’t have enough data to make an estimate of one month’s cancellations reliable (because barely anybody cancels)! To deal with this data problem, we can take data from the last three months instead. This means we have more data to play with. We can still use the equation above, we just need to multiply the final result by three (as we worked out how many three month periods customers stay for, and we want our answer to be in months). Now these estimates are likely to be fairly unreliable; when there’s not a lot of data it pays to be cautious with inference. That said, the numbers we have look fairly consistent, and it’s super easy to revise our estimates when new data comes in. At the very least, these numbers give us a vague idea of whether a subscription business is viable. As far as Cloud Services goes, the business looks very viable indeed, and the low cancellation rates are much more than just data points in LTV equations; they show that the product is working out great for our customers, which is exactly what we’re looking for!

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• Olympics data available for all on Windows Azure SQL Database and Power View

  - by jamiet

  Are you looking around for some decent test data for your BI demos? Well, if so, Microsoft have provided some data about all medals won at the Olympics Games (1900 to 2008) at OlympicsData workbook - Excel, SSIS, Azure sample; it provides analysis over athletes, countries, medal type, sport, discipline and various other dimensions. The data has been provided in an Excel workbook along with instructions on how to load the data into a Windows Azure SQL Database using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Frankly though, the rigmarole of standing up your own Windows Azure SQL Database ok, SQL Azure database, is both costly (SQL Azure isn’t free) and time consuming (the provided instructions aren’t exactly an idiot’s guide and getting SSIS to work properly with Excel isn’t a barrel of laughs either). To ease the pain for all you BI folks out there that simply want to party on the data I have loaded it all into the SQL Azure database that I use for hosting AdventureWorks on Azure. You can read more about AdventureWorks on Azure below however I’ll summarise here by saying it is a SQL Azure database provided for the use of the SQL Server community and which is supported by voluntary donations. To view the data the credentials you need are: Server mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net  Database AdventureWorks2012 User sqlfamily Password sqlf@m1ly Type those into SSMS and away you go, the data is provided in four tables [olympics].[Sport], [olympics].[Discipline], [olympics].[Event] & [olympics].[Medalist]: I figured this would be a good candidate for a Power View report so I fired up Excel 2013 and built such a report to slice’n’dice through the data – here are some screenshots that should give you a flavour of what is available: A view of all the available data Where do all the gymastics medals go? Which countries do top ten all-time medal winners come from? You get the idea. There is masses of information here and if you have Excel 2013 handy Power View provides a quick and easy way of surfing through it. To save you the bother of setting up the Power View report yourself you can have the one that I took these screenshots from, it is available on my SkyDrive at OlympicsAnalysis.xlsx so just hit the link and download to play to your heart’s content. Party on, people! As I said above the data is hosted on a SQL Azure database that I use for hosting “AdventureWorks on Azure” which I first announced in March 2013 at AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure. I’ll repeat the pertinent parts of that blog post here: I am pleased to announce that as of today … [AdventureWorks2012] now resides on SQL Azure and is available for anyone, absolutely anyone, to connect to and use for their own means. This database is free for you to use but SQL Azure is of course not free so before I give you the credentials please lend me your ears eyes for a short while longer. AdventureWorks on Azure is being provided for the SQL Server community to use and so I am hoping that that same community will rally around to support this effort by making a voluntary donation to support the upkeep which, going on current pricing, is going to be $119.88 per year. If you would like to contribute to keep AdventureWorks on Azure up and running for that full year please donate via PayPal to [email protected] Any amount, no matter how small, will help. If those 50+ people that retweeted me beforehand all contributed $2 then that would just about be enough to keep this up for a year. If the community contributes more than we need then there are a number of additional things that could be done: Host additional databases (Northwind anyone??) Host in more datacentres (this first one is in Western Europe) Make a charitable donation That last one, a charitable donation, is something I would really like to do. The SQL Community have proved before that they can make a significant contribution to charitable orgnisations through purchasing the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book and I harbour hopes that AdventureWorks on Azure can continue in that vein. So please, if you think AdventureWorks on Azure is something that is worth supporting please make a contribution. I’d like to emphasize that last point. If my hosting this Olympics data is useful to you please support this initiative by donating. Thanks in advance. @Jamiet

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• Passing data between the VirtualBox Host and the Guest

  - by Fat Bloke

  Here's a good question: "How can you figure out the VM name from within the VM itself?" While this data is not automatically available, the general purpose, and very powerful VirtualBox "GuestProperty" APIs can be used from the host and guest to pass arbitrary data, in key/value pairs format, in and out of the guest. Note that this does require that the VirtualBox Guest Additions have been installed in the guest. To play with this, try using the "VBoxManage" command line on your VirtualBox host machine, and "VBoxControl" in the guest. Host syntax VBoxManage guestproperty get <vmname>|<uuid> <property> [--verbose] VBoxManage guestproperty set <vmname>|<uuid> <property> [<value> [--flags <flags>]] VBoxManage guestproperty enumerate <vmname>|<uuid> [--patterns <patterns>] VBoxManage guestproperty wait <vmname>|<uuid> <patterns> [--timeout <msec>] [--fail-on-timeout]   Guest syntax VBoxControl.exe guestproperty        get <property> [-verbose] VBoxControl.exe guestproperty        set <property> [<value> [-flags <flags>]] VBoxControl.exe guestproperty        enumerate [-patterns <patterns>] VBoxControl.exe guestproperty        wait <patterns>                                      [-timestamp <last timestamp>]                                      [-timeout <timeout in ms>  So to solve our problem above, we set the vm name in the Host system on an arbitrary key like this: $ VBoxManage guestproperty set "Windows 7 (x64)" /MyData/VMname "Windows 7 (x64)" And within the guest we can use: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox Guest Additions>VBoxControl.exe guestproperty get /MyData/VMname Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions Command Line Management Interface Version 4.1.14 (C) 2008-2012 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved. Value: Windows 7 (x64) The GuestProperty API is pretty powerful, so for the interested, get more info in the User Manual. - FB 

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• career planning advice [closed]

  - by JDB

  Possible Duplicate: Are certifications worth it? I am at the point in my career where people start to veer off into either management-type roles or they focus on solidifying their technical skills to stay in the development game for the long-haul. Here's my story: I've got a degree in economics, an MA in Political Science and an MBA in Finance and Management. In addition, I've done coursework in advanced math and software development (although no degree in math or software). All-in-all, I've got 13 years of post-secondary education under my belt. I, however, currently work as a software developer using C# for desktop, Silverlight, Flex and javascript for web, and objective c for mobile. I've been in software development for the past 3.3 years, and it seems like it comes pretty easy to me. I work in a field called "geospatial information systems," which just involves customization and manipulation of geospatial data. Right now I am looking at one of several certifications. Given this background, which of these certifications has the highest ceiling? CFA PMP various development/technological certifications from Microsoft, etc. Other? My academic and work experience are all heavy on the analytical/development side, esp. so given the MBA and the B.S. in Econ. The political science degree was really a lot of stats. So it seems that I would be good pursuing more of the CFA/analytical role. This is a difficult path, however, because I have no work experience in the financial sector, and the developers in finance are all "quants," which again, I am OK with, but I haven't done much statistical modeling in the past 3.3 years. The PMP would require knowledge of best practices as it pertains explicitly to software development. I also don't enjoy a lot of business travel, a common theme for most PMP jobs I've seen. If certifications is the route, which would you recommend? Anything else? I've thought about going back to try to knock out a B.S. in C.S., but I wasn't sure how long that would take, or what would be involved. Thoughts or recommendations? Thanks in advance! I turn 32 this weekend, which is what has forced me to think about these issues.

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• Ask the Readers: Which Browser is a Must-Have for You on Linux?

  - by Asian Angel

  Linux systems all come with their own particular set of default browsers, but those browsers may not be the ones you want or need. This week we would like to know which browser (or browsers) are considered “must-have” on your Linux systems. As a general rule many Linux distributions have Firefox and/or Konqueror as one of the default installation browsers. During this past year the open source browser Chromium has also been gaining a lot of traction as a default install for systems. For most people these browsers are the ones that they like best or feel work well enough to not make any changes. But there are other people who want more than what is available with a default system install. They may favor a particular browser for its’ extensibility or speed…others prefer a particular browser for its’ features or minimalist UI. Whatever your preferences may be, there is a browser out there to fit your style. Some people may even prefer to run only bleeding edge nightly releases or add them in with their current browsers. The important part is that you have choices when it comes to your Linux system. What we would like to know this week is which browser or browsers you make sure are always installed on your Linux systems. Does the Linux system you use already have your favorite browser installed as part of the default set? Maybe you are content with using the default set of browsers that come with the system. Or perhaps you prefer to rework the entire browser setup on your system by removing the defaults and adding your favorites. Let us know which browsers you consider “must have” and why in the comments! Note: You can make up to two selections on today’s poll since most people will likely have more than one browser that they make certain is always installed. How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive 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 BotSync Enables Secure FTP File Synchronization on Android Devices Enjoy Beautiful City Views with the Cityscape Theme for Windows 7 Luigi Installs Any OS on Google’s Cr-48 Notebook DIY iPad Stylus Offers Pen-Based Interaction on the Cheap Serene Blue Ubuntu Wallpaper for Your Desktop Enjoy Old School Style Video Game Fun with Chicken Invaders

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• Make the Time

  - by WonderOfItAll

  Took the little one to the pool tonight for swim lessons. Okay, Okay. They're not really lessons so much as they are "Hey, here's a few bucks, let me rent out a small section of your pool to swim around with my little one" Saw a dad at the pool. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, and two year old somewhere around there. Saw a mom at the pool. Arguing with her five year old to NOT take a shower after swimming. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, work laptop open on stadium seats. Her reasoning for not wanting the child to shower "Look, I have to get this stuff to the office by 6:30, we don't have time for you to shower. Let's go" Wait, isn't the whole point of this little experience called Mommy and Me (or, as in my case, Daddy and Me). Wherein Mommy/Daddy is supposed to spend time with little one. Not with the Bluetooth. Not with the work laptop. Dad (yeah, the same dad from earlier), in the pool. Bluetooth off (it's not waterproof or I'm sure he would've had it on), two year old in hand and iPad somewhere put away. Getting frustrated with kid because he won't 'perform' on command. Here's a little exchange Kid: "I don't wanna get in the water" Dad: "Well, we're here for 30 minutes, get in the water" Kid: "No, don't wanna" Dad: "Fine, I'm getting in" and, true to his word, in he goes, off to swim. Kid: Crying Dad: "Well, c'mon" Kid: Walking to stands Dad: Ignoring kid Kid: At stands Dad: Out of pool, drying off. Frustrated. Grabs bag, grabs kid, leaves How sad. It really seems like I am living in a generation of parents who view their children as one big scheduled distraction to another. It's almost like the dad was saying "Look, little 2 year old boy, I have a busy scheduled. Right now my Outlook Calendar tells me that I have 30 mins to spend with you, so, let's go kid: PERFORM because I have the time" Really? Can someone please tell me when the hell this happened? When did spending time with your kid, spending time with your family, spending time with your spouse, etc... become a distraction? I've seen people at work all day Tweeting throughout the day, checked in with Four Square, IM up and running constantly so they can 'stay in touch' only to see these same folks come home and be irritated because their kids or their spouse wants to connect with the. I've seen these very same people leave the house, go to the corner bar/store/you-name-the-place to be 'alone' only to find them there, plugged in, tweeting away, etc, etc, etc I LOVE technology. I love working with technology. But I also know that I am a human being. A person who, by very definition, is a social being. I needed social interactions and contact--and, no, I'm not talking about the Social Graph kind of connections, I'm talking about those interactions which, *GASP* involve eye to eye contact and human contact. A recent study found that the number one complaint of kids is that they feel they have to compete with technology for their parents time and attention. The number one wish from high school kids? That there parents would turn off the computer/tv/cell phone at dinner. This, coming from high school kids. Shouldn't that tell you a whole helluva lot? So, do yourself a favor tomorrow. Plug into technology all day. Throw yourself into it. Be passionate about what you do. When you walk through the door to your family, turn it all off for 30 mins and be there with your loved ones. If you can manage to play Angry Birds, I'm sure you can handle being disconnected for 30 minutes. Make the time

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• A .NET Developers day with the iPad.

  - by mbcrump

  The Apple iPad is currently getting a lot of buzz because of the app store, the book store and of course iTunes. I had the chance to play with one and this is what I have learned about the device. Let’s get this out of the way first, the iPad is awesome. It is the device for media consumption and casual web browsing. But how does it measure up to those of us with .NET on our brains all days. Let’s find out… Main Screen – you can customize everything on this page. I guess I should replace that image with a C# or VS logo. Its pretty standard stuff if you have an iPhone.   Programming Books If you have a subscription to Safari Books Online, then you are in luck, its very easy to read the books on the iPad. Just fire up Safari web browser and goto the Safari Books Online. The biggest benefit that I can see with the iPad is the ability to read books wherever and not have to worry about purchasing books that I already have the .PDF for. Below is a sample from Code Complete 2nd Edition. Below is a PDF of the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification. As you can see its very readable and you should have no problem reading actual code.   Example of Code shown below: It is however easier to read the PDF and store them with a 3rd party PDF reader. I have seen several for .99 cents or less. You can however switch the screen to vertical to get more viewing space as shown below: I was disappointed with the iBooks application. I could not find a single .NET programming book anywhere. I was able to download the excellent sci-fi book “A memory of Wind” for free though. If I just overlooked them, then please email me with the names and titles. I couldn’t even find a technology category in the categories list. Web Surfing – Technical Sites Below is an example of my site in Safari. The code is very readable and the experience was identical to viewing it in Firefox. I tried multiple programming site and the pages looked great except those that used flash and of course it did not display on those pages.   News Apps - Technical Content The standard NY Times and USA Today looked great, but the Technical Content was lacking. It would probably be better to use Google Reader for online technical news.     YouTube Videos – Technical Content  Since its YouTube, we already know that a lot of technical content exist and it plays great on the iPad. I watched several programming videos and could clearly see the code being written. Taking Technical Notes The iPad comes with a great notepad for taking notes. I found that it was easy to take notes regarding projects that I am currently working on.   Calendar The calendar that ships with the iPad is great for organizing. You can setup exchange server or manually enter the information. Pretty standard stuff.    Random Applications that I like: TweetDeck.   and Adobe Ideas. Adobe Ideas is kinda like SketchFlow except you use your finger to mock up the sketches.  Don’t forget that the iPad is great for any type of podcasting. That pretty much sums it up, I would definitely recommend this device as it will only get better. I believe the iOS4 comes out on the 24th and the iPad will only get more and more apps. You could save a few bucks by waiting for the 2nd generation, but that’s a call that only you can make.

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• Some PowerShell goodness

  - by KyleBurns

  Ever work somewhere where processes dump files into folders to maintain an archive?  Me too and Windows Explorer hates it.  Very often I find myself needing to organize these files into subfolders so that I can go after files without locking up Windows Explorer and my answer used to be to write a program in something like C# to do the job.  These programs will typically enumerate the files in a folder and move each file to a subdirectory named based on a datestamp.  The last such program I wrote had to use lower-level Win32 API calls to perform the enumeration because it appears the standard .Net calls make use of the same method of enumerating the directories that Windows Explorer chokes on when dealing with a large number of entries in a particular directory, so a simple task was accomplished with a lot of code. Of course, this little utility was just something I used to make my life easier and "not a production app", so it was in my local source folder and not source control when my hard drive died.  So... I was getting ready to re-create it and thought it might be a good idea to play with PowerShell a bit - something I had been wanting to do but had not yet met a requirement to make me do it.  The resulting script was amazingly succinct and even building the flexibility for parameterization and adding line breaks for readability was only about 25 lines long.  Here's the code with discussion following: param(     [Parameter(         Mandatory = $false,         Position = 0,         HelpMessage = "Root of the folders or share to archive.  Be sure to end with appropriate path separator"     )]     [String] $folderRoot="\\fileServer\pathToFolderWithLotsOfFiles\",       [Parameter(         Mandatory = $false,         Position = 1     )]     [int] $days = 1 ) dir $folderRoot|?{(!($_.PsIsContainer)) -and ((get-date) - $_.lastwritetime).totaldays -gt $days }|%{     [string]$year=$([string]$_.lastwritetime.year)     [string]$month=$_.lastwritetime.month     [string]$day=$_.lastwritetime.day     $dir=$folderRoot+$year+"\"+$month+"\"+$day     if(!(test-path $dir)){         new-item -type container $dir     }     Write-output $_     move-item $_.fullname $dir } The script starts by declaring two parameters.  The first parameter holds the path to the folder that I am going to be sorting into subdirectories.  The path separator is intended to be included in this argument because I didn't want to mess with determining whether this was local or UNC and picking the right separator in code, but this could be easily improved upon using Path.Combine since PowerShell has access to the full framework libraries.  The second parameter holds a minimum age in days for files to be removed from the root folder.  The script then pipes the dir command through a query to include only files (by excluding containers) and of those, only entries that meet the age requirement based on the last modified datestamp.  For each of those, the datestamp is used to construct a folder name in the format YYYY\MM\DD (if you're in an environment where even a day's worth of files need further divided, you could make this more granular) and the folder is created if it does not yet exist.  Finally, the file is moved into the directory. One of the things that was really cool about using PowerShell for this task is that the new-item command is smart enough to create the entire subdirectory structure with a single call.  In previous code that I have written to do this kind of thing, I would have to test the entire tree leading down to the subfolder I want, leading to a lot of branching code that detracted from being able to quickly look at the code and understand the job it performs. Overall, I have to say I'm really pleased with what has been done making PowerShell powerful and useful.

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• Collaborative Organizations build Organizational Culture

  “A Collaborative organization builds its culture based on the idea of the family or an athletic team.”(Hoefling, 2001) As I grew up, I participated in many different types of clubs, civic organizations, and sports teams.  Now looking back at the more successful undertakings, I can see three commonalities amongst them. They all shared a defined purpose or goal, defined functional roles, and a shared sense of responsibility to the group. Defined Purpose or Goal In order to unit people to work together, they must share a common goal or have a common purpose. An example of this would be the Lions Club International Foundation. There purpose is to help everyone to lead healthier and more productive lives, nurtures the potential of youth, promotes health, serves the elderly, empowers the disabled and helps victims of disasters. This organization holds localized meetings across the world and works in conjunction with other localized clubs within there organization along with other organizations to promote common goals. If there are no common goals for the group, then there is nothing that binds people to the group, and nothing will be done. Defined Functional Roles In order for an organization to work and function as a team, they must have defined roles and everyone must know how their roles are interdependent on each other. Lets shed light on this subject by looking at a football team’s offense.  Each player has an assigned role to play each time the ball is snapped. The offensive line blocks for the running back or quarterback, the quarterback passes the ball to the wide receiver or hands it off to the running back and the running back and wide receivers run with the ball towards the goal line. Each member of this team shares a common goal of scoring a touchdown, but if each team member does not fulfill their assigned roles the offences will collapse and the team will lose yards. This will provide a set back to the teams goal of scoring a touchdown because they potential are then farther away from the goal line.  In addition, if all the players do not know their roles and how they are part of a larger team then even larger yard losses can occur. Shared Sense of Personal Responsibility to the Group Shared responsibility comes with the shared common goals. Each person in the organization must do their part to promote the common shared goal or purpose based on their abilities. A prime example of this is a wrestling team competing in a match. Points are awarded to the team based on how many wins the team achieves in the meet and of that how many wins where won by decision or by pin. If a wrestler pins his opponent the teams will receive 2 points for the win, but if the wrestler wins by decision, then the team only gets one point for the win. So it is the responsibility of each person on the team to not get pinned if they are unable to win the match. If the team member gets pinned then the other team receives an additional point for the win. References: Hoefling, T. (2001). Working Virtually: Managing People for Successful Virtual Teams and Organizations. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

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• 4 Key Ingredients for the Cloud

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  It's a short week here with the US Thanksgiving Holiday. So, before we put on our stretch pants and get ready to belly up to the dinner table for turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes, let's spend a little time this week talking about the Cloud (kind of like the feathery whipped goodness that tops the infamous Thanksgiving pumpkin pie!) But before we dive into the Cloud, let's do a side by side comparison of the key ingredients for each. Cloud Whipped Cream  Application Integration  1 cup heavy cream  Security  1/4 cup sugar  Virtual I/O  1 teaspoon vanilla  Storage  Chilled Bowl It’s no secret that millions of people are connected to the Internet. And it also probably doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of those people are connected on social networking sites.  Social networks have become an excellent platform for sharing and communication that reflects real world relationships and they play a major part in the everyday lives of many people. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and hundreds of others have transformed the way we interact and communicate with one another.Social networks are becoming more than just an online gathering of friends. They are becoming a destination for ideation, e-commerce, and marketing. But it doesn’t just stop there. Some organizations are utilizing social networks internally, integrated with their business applications and processes and the possibility of social media and cloud integration is compelling. Forrester alone estimates enterprise cloud computing to grow to over $240 billion by 2020. It’s hard to find any current IT project today that is NOT considering cloud-based deployments. Security and quality of service concerns are no longer at the forefront; rather, it’s about focusing on the right mix of capabilities for the business. Cloud vs. On-Premise? Policies & governance models? Social in the cloud? Cloud’s increasing sophistication, security in applications, mobility, transaction processing and social capabilities make it an attractive way to manage information. And Oracle offers all of this through the Oracle Cloud and Oracle Social Network. Oracle Social Network is a secure private network that provides a broad range of social tools designed to capture and preserve information flowing between people, enterprise applications, and business processes. By connecting you with your most critical applications, Oracle Social Network provides contextual, real-time communication within and across enterprises. With Oracle Social Network, you and your teams have the tools you need to collaborate quickly and efficiently, while leveraging the organization’s collective expertise to make informed decisions and drive business forward. Oracle Social Network is available as part of a portfolio of application and platform services within the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud offers self-service business applications delivered on an integrated development and deployment platform with tools to rapidly extend and create new services. Oracle Social Network is pre-integrated with the Fusion CRM Cloud Service and the Fusion HCM Cloud Service within the Oracle Cloud. If you are looking for something to watch as you veg on the couch in a post-turkey dinner hangover, you might consider watching these how-to videos! And yes, it is perfectly ok to have that 2nd piece of pie

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• There are 2 jobs available - which one sounds better all round [closed]

  - by Steve Gates

  I am currently employed at a company where we scrape by each year breaking even, sometimes having a little profit. The development environment is very relaxed and we have a laugh. My colleagues are not interested in improving their knowledge unless they have to, so trying to get them to adopt things like TDD is a non-starter. My development manager is stuck in .Net 2 land and refuses to use things like LINQ. He over complicates architecture and writes very unreadable code, heres an example SortedList<int,<SortedList<int,SortedList<int, MyClass>>>> The MD of the company has no drive and lets the one sales guy bring in the contracts. We are not busy all the time and this allows me time to look at new technology and learn. In terms of using things like TDD, my development manager has no problem with it and can kind of see the purpose of it, he just wont use it himself. This means I am alone in learning new things and am often resorting to StackOverflow to make sure I get things right. The company has a lot of flexibility, I can work from home if needs be and when my daughter was born they let me work from home 1 day a week however they expect this flexibility in return often asking me to travel occasionally on a Friday afternoon for the following week. Sometimes its abroad. We are also pretty much on call 24/5 as we have engineers in various countries. Also we have no testers so most of the testing is done by us developers and some testing by engineers. Either way no-one likes testing! I have been offered a role at a company I worked at 5 years ago. They were quite Victorian in their working practices but it appears to have relaxed now although I suspect still reasonably formal. There is a new team of developers I don't know and they are about to move to new offices. The team lead is a guy that was there when I was and I get the impression he takes his role seriously and likes his formal procedures and documentation. I think some of the Victorian practices may have rubbed off on him. However he did say if things crop up then as long as I can trust the person they can work at home although he prefers people in the office. The team uses SCRUM, TDD and SOLID design principles so they are quite up to date in technology. They are reasonably Microsoft focused. It appears the Technical Director might be the R&D man and research new technology on his own not allowing developers to play with new technology. He possibly might be a super developer and makes all the decisions that no can argue with. They are currently moving to Entity Framework away from NHibernate based on issues that their queries seem to fail sometimes and they feel NHibernate is stagnant. They have analysts and a QA team. The MD is focused and they are an expanding company making profit each year. I'm not sure what the team morale is and whether they have a laugh. When I had a tour around the office they were there in dead silence. I'm really unsure which role is the best for me and going with my gut instinct is useless as I'm not sure what my gut is telling me. Based on the information above which role would you choose and why?

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• Multi subnet in ubuntu with dnsmasq

  - by Fox Mulder

  I have a multi lan port box that install ubuntu server 11.10. I am setup network in /etc/network/interfaces file as follow: auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static      address 192.168.128.254      netmask 255.255.255.0      network 192.168.128.0      broadcast 192.168.128.255      gateway 192.168.128.1      dns-nameservers xxxxxx auto eth1 iface eth1 inet static      address 192.168.11.1      netmask 255.255.255.0      network 192.168.11.0      broadcast 192.168.11.255 auto eth2 iface eth2 inet static      address 192.168.21.1      netmask 255.255.255.0      network 192.168.21.0      broadcast 192.168.21.255 auto eth3 iface eth3 inet static      address 192.168.31.1      netmask 255.255.255.0      network 192.168.31.0      broadcast 192.168.31.255 I am also enable the ip forward by echo 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/if_forward in rc.local. my dnsmasq config as follow except-interface=eth0 dhcp-range=interface:eth1,set:wifi,192.168.11.101,192.168.11.200,255.255.255.0 dhcp-range=interface:eth2,set:kids,192.168.21.101,192.168.21.200,255.255.255.0 dhcp-range=interface:eth3,set:game,192.168.31.101,192.168.31.200,255.255.255.0 the dhcp was working fine in eth1,eth2,eth3, any machine plug in the subnet can get correct subnet's ip. My problem was, each subnet machine can't ping each other. for example. 192.168.11.101 can't ping 192.168.21.101 but can ping 192.168.128.1 192.168.31.101 can't ping 192.168.21.101 but can ping 192.168.128.1 I am also try to using route add -net 192.168.11.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.11.1 (and also 192.168.21.0/192.168.31.0) at this multi-lan-port machine. But still won't work. Does anyone can help ? Thanks.

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• Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer?

  - by Asian Angel

  Most people have a single monitor for their computers, many have two, and some individuals enjoy “3 monitor plus” goodness. This week we would like to know how many monitors you use with your computer. Photo by DamnedNice. A good majority of people have a single monitor that they use with their computers and that single monitor serves their needs very well. It could be that these individuals do not engage in a heavy amount of work or play on their computers…they just need to do the basics like checking e-mail, using I.M., working with photos, etc. Another possibility is the use of virtual desktop software such as Dexpot, Yodm 3D, or Sysinternals Desktops on Windows systems. Linux systems such as Ubuntu already have that wonderful multi-desktop functionality built in. The wonderful part about virtual desktops is that a single monitor can feel equivalent to a small army of monitors. The ability to separate your open windows into “categories” and spread them out across multiple desktops is definitely nice. With each passing year dual monitor setups are becoming more common. Having twice the screen real-estate visible at the same time can be extremely convenient when you are multi-tasking. Perhaps you like to monitor your system’s stats and an e-mail account on the second monitor while working with software on the first. It certainly beats having windows popping up and down on your screen constantly while keeping on top of everything! Next we have the people who have three or more monitors in use with their computers. This may be a result of the type of work they do, an experiment to see if multiple monitors are right for them, or the cool, geeky factor that comes with having all those monitors. Needless to say these individuals can induce a good amount of envy and/or inspiration in the rest of us when we see their awesome setups. Are you perfectly content with a single monitor? Do you have two or more monitors that you use? If you have two or more monitors are they actually that useful to you? Perhaps you are getting ready even now to add additional monitors to your system. Whatever your situation may be at the moment, let us know your thoughts (and possible multi-monitor plans) in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. 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? Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster World of Warcraft Theme for Windows 7 Ubuntu Font Family Now Available for Download Oh No! WikiLeaks Published Santa Claus’s Naughty List [Video] Remember the Milk Now Supports HTTPS Encryption for the Entire Session

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• Remote Graphics Diagnostics with Windows RT 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2013/11/12/remote-graphics-diagnostics-with-windows-rt-8.1-and-visual-studio.aspxThis blog post is a brief follow up to my What’s New in Graphics and Game Development in Visual Studio 2013 post on the MVP Award blog. While writing that post I was testing out various features to try to make sure everything worked as expected. I had some trouble getting Remote Graphics Diagnostics (a/k/a remote graphics debugging) working on my first generation Surface RT (upgraded to Windows RT 8.1). It was more strange since I could use remote debugging when doing CPU debugging; it was just graphics debugging that was causing trouble. After some discussions with the great folks who work on the graphics tools in Visual Studio, they were able to repro the problem and recommend a solution. My Surface RT needed the ARM Kits policy installed on it. Once I followed the instructions on the previous link, I could successfully use Remote Graphics Diagnostics on my Surface RT. Please note that this requires Windows RT 8.1 RTM (i.e. not Preview) and that Remote Graphics Diagnostics on ARM only works when you are using Visual Studio 2013 as it is a new feature (it should work just fine using the Express for Windows version). Also, when I installed the ARM Kits policy I needed to do two things to get it to work properly. First, when following the “How to install the Kits policy” instructions, I needed to copy the SecureBoot folder into Program Files on my Surface RT (specifically, I copied the SecureBoot folder to “C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\arm\” on my Surface RT, creating any necessary directories). It may work if it’s in any system folder; I didn’t test any others after I got it working. I had initially put it in my Downloads folder and tried installing it from there. When the machine restarted it displayed a worrisome error message. I repeatedly pressed the button that would allow me to retry and eventually the machine rebooted and managed to recover itself to its previous state. Second, I needed to install it as an Administrator. The instructions say that this might be necessary. For me it was. This is a Remote Graphics Diagnostics is a great new feature in Visual Studio 2013 so I definitely encourage all of you to check it out!

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• Pinterest and the Rising Power of Imagery

  - by Mike Stiles

  If images keep you glued to a screen, you’re hardly alone. Countless social users are letting their eyes do the walking, waiting for that special photo to grab their attention. And perhaps more than any other social network, Pinterest has been giving those eyes plenty of room to walk. Pinterest came along in 2010. Its play was that users could simply create topic boards and pin pictures to the appropriate boards for sharing. Yes there are some words, captions mostly, but not many. The speed of its growth raised eyebrows. Traffic quadrupled in the last quarter of 2011, with 7.51 million unique visitors in December alone. It now gets 1.9 billion monthly page views. And it was sticky. In the US, the average time a user spends strolling through boards and photos on Pinterest is 15 minutes, 50 seconds. Proving the concept of browsing a catalogue is not dead, it became a top 5 referrer for several apparel retailers like Land’s End, Nordstrom, and Bergdorfs. Now a survey of online shoppers by BizRate Insights says that Pinterest is responsible for more purchases online than Facebook. Over 70% of its users are going there specifically to keep up with trends and get shopping ideas. And when they buy, the average order value is $179. Pinterest is also scoring better in terms of user engagement. 66% of pinners regularly follow and repin retailers, whereas 17% of Facebook fans turn to that platform for purchase ideas. (Facebook still wins when it comes to reach and driving traffic to 3rd-party sites by the way). Social posting best practices have consistently shown that posts with photos are rewarded with higher engagement levels. You may be downright Shakespearean in your writing, but what makes images in the digital world so much more powerful than prose? 1. They transcend language barriers. 2. They’re fun and addictive to look at. 3. They can be consumed in fractions of a second, important considering how fast users move through their social content (admit it, you do too). 4. They’re efficient gateways. A good picture might get them to the headline. A good headline might then get them to the written content. 5. The audience for them surpasses demographic limitations. 6. They can effectively communicate and trigger an emotion. 7. With mobile use soaring, photos are created on those devices and easily consumed and shared on them. Pinterest’s iPad app hit #1 in the Apple store in 1 day. Even as far back as 2009, over 2.5 billion devices with cameras were on the streets generating in just 1 year, 10% of the number of photos taken…ever. But let’s say you’re not a retailer. What if you’re a B2B whose products or services aren’t visual? Should you worry about your presence on Pinterest? As with all things, you need a keen awareness of who your audience is, where they reside online, and what they want to do there. If it doesn’t make sense to put a tent stake in Pinterest, fine. But ignore the power of pictures at your own peril. If not visually, how are you going to attention-grab social users scrolling down their News Feeds at top speed? You’re competing with every other cool image out there from countless content sources. Bore us and we’ll fly right past you.

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• Using Private Extension Galleries in Visual Studio 2012

  - by Jakob Ehn

  Note: The installer and the complete source code is available over at CodePlex at the following location: http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com   Extensions and addins are everywhere in the Visual Studio ALM ecosystem! Microsoft releases new cool features in the form of extensions and the list of 3rd party extensions that plug into Visual Studio just keeps growing. One of the nice things about the VSIX extensions is how they are deployed. Microsoft hosts a public Visual Studio Gallery where you can upload extensions and make them available to the rest of the community. Visual Studio checks for updates to the installed extensions when you start Visual Studio, and installing/updating the extensions is fast since it is only a matter of extracting the files within the VSIX package to the local extension folder. But for custom, enterprise-specific extensions, you don’t want to publish them online to the whole world, but you still want an easy way to distribute them to your developers and partners. This is where Private Extension Galleries come into play. In Visual Studio 2012, it is now possible to add custom extensions galleries that can point to any URL, as long as that URL returns the expected content of course (see below).Registering a new gallery in Visual Studio is easy, but there is very little documentation on how to actually host the gallery. Visual Studio galleries uses Atom Feed XML as the protocol for delivering new and updated versions of the extensions. This MSDN page describes how to create a static XML file that returns the information about your extensions. This approach works, but require manual updates of that file every time you want to deploy an update of the extension. Wouldn’t it be nice with a web service that takes care of this for you, that just lets you drop a new version of your VSIX file and have it automatically detect the new version and produce the correct Atom Feed XML? Well search no more, this is exactly what the Inmeta Visual Studio Gallery Service does for you :-) Here you can see that in addition to the standard Online galleries there is an Inmeta Gallery that contains two extensions (our WIX templates and our custom TFS Checkin Policies). These can be installed/updated i the same way as extensions from the public Visual Studio Gallery. Installing the Service Download the installler (Inmeta.VSGalleryService.Install.msi) for the service and run it. The installation is straight forward, just select web site, application pool and (optional) a virtual directory where you want to install the service.   Note: If you want to run it in the web site root, just leave the application name blank Press Next and finish the installer. Open web.config in a text editor and locate the the <applicationSettings> element Edit the following setting values: FeedTitle This is the name that is shown if you browse to the service using a browser. Not used by Visual Studio BaseURI When Visual Studio downloads the extension, it will be given this URI + the name of the extension that you selected. This value should be on the following format: http://SERVER/[VDIR]/gallery/extension/ VSIXAbsolutePath This is the path where you will deploy your extensions. This can be a local folder or a remote share. You just need to make sure that the application pool identity account has read permissions in this folder Save web.config to finish the installation Open a browser and enter the URL to the service. It should show an empty Feed page:   Adding the Private Gallery in Visual Studio 2012 Now you need to add the gallery in Visual Studio. This is very easy and is done as follows: Go to Tools –> Options and select Environment –> Extensions and Updates Press Add to add a new gallery Enter a descriptive name, and add the URL that points to the web site/virtual directory where you installed the service in the previous step   Press OK to save the settings. Deploying an Extension This one is easy: Just drop the file in the designated folder! :-)  If it is a new version of an existing extension, the developers will be notified in the same way as for extensions from the public Visual Studio gallery: I hope that you will find this sever useful, please contact me if you have questions or suggestions for improvements!

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• Should i continue my self-taught coding practice or learn how to do coding professionally?

  - by G1i1ch

  Lately I've been getting professional work, hanging out with other programmers, and making friends in the industry. The only thing is I'm 100% self-taught. It's caused my style to extremely deviate from the style of those that are properly trained. It's the techniques and organization of my code that's different. It's a mixture of several things I do. I tend to blend several programming paradigms together. Like Functional and OO. I lean to the Functional side more than OO, but I see the use of OO when something would make more sense as an abstract entity. Like a game object. Next I also go the simple route when doing something. When in contrast, it seems like sometimes the code I see from professional programmers is complicated for the sake of it! I use lots of closures. And lastly, I'm not the best commenter. I find it easier just to read through my code than reading the comment. And most cases I just end up reading the code even if there are comments. Plus I've been told that, because of how simply I write my code, it's very easy to read it. I hear professionally trained programmers go on and on about things like unit tests. Something I've never used before so I haven't even the faintest idea of what they are or how they work. Lots and lots of underscores "_", which aren't really my taste. Most of the techniques I use are straight from me, or a few books I've read. Don't know anything about MVC, I've heard a lot about it though with things like backbone.js. I think it's a way to organize an application. It just confuses me though because by now I've made my own organizational structures. It's a bit of a pain. I can't use template applications at all when learning something new like with Ubuntu's Quickly. I have trouble understanding code that I can tell is from someone trained. Complete OO programming really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet that seems to be what EVERYONE else is strictly using. It's left me not that confident in the look of my code, or wondering whether I'll cause sparks when joining a company or maybe contributing to open source projects. In fact I'm rather scared of the fact that people will eventually be checking out my code. Is this just something normal any programmer goes through or should I really look to change up my techniques?

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• Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

  - by haylem

  I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

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• Upgrade to Xubuntu 13.10 - Saucy Salamander

  As a common 'fashion' it is possible to upgrade an existing installation of Ubuntu or one of its derivates every six months. Of course, you might opt-in for the adventure and directly keep your system always on the latest version (including alphas and betas), or you might like to play safe and stay on the long-term support (LTS) versions which are updated every two years only. As for me, I'd like to jump from release to release on my main desktop machine. And since 17th October Saucy Salamander or also known as Ubuntu 13.10 has been released for general use. The following paragraphs document the steps I went in order to upgrade my system to the recent version. Don't worry about the fact that I'm actually using Xubuntu. It's mainly a flavoured version of Ubuntu running Xfce 4.10 as default X Window manager. Well, I have Gnome and LXDE on the same system... just out of couriosity. Preparing the system Before you think about upgrading you have to ensure that your current system is running on the latest packages. This can be done easily via a terminal like so: $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade --fix-missing Next, we are going to initiate the upgrade itself: $ sudo update-manager As a result the graphical Software Updater should inform you that a newer version of Ubuntu is available for installation. Ubuntu's Software Updater informs you whether an upgrade is available Running the upgrade After clicking 'Upgrade...' you will be presented with information about the new version. Details about Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Simply continue with the procedure and your system will be analysed for the next steps. Analysing the existing system and preparing the actual upgrade to 13.10 Next, we are at the point of no return. Last confirmation dialog before having a coffee break while your machine is occupied to download the necessary packages. Not the best bandwidth at hand after all... yours might be faster. Are you really sure that you want to start the upgrade? Let's go and have fun! Anyway, bye bye Raring Ringtail and Welcome Saucy Salamander! In case that you added any additional repositories like Medibuntu or PPAs you will be informed that they are going to be disabled during the upgrade and they might require some manual intervention after completion. Ubuntu is playing safe and third party repositories are disabled during the upgrade Well, depending on your internet bandwidth this might take something between a couple of minutes and some hours to download all the packages and then trigger the actual installation process. In my case I left my PC unattended during the night. Time to reboot Finally, it's time to restart your system and see what's going to happen... In my case absolutely nothing unexpected. The system booted the new kernel 3.11.0 as usual and I was greeted by a new login screen. Honestly, 'same' system as before - which is good and I love that fact of consistency - and I can continue to work productively. And also Software Updater confirms that we just had a painless upgrade: System is running Ubuntu 13.10 - Saucy Salamander - and up to date See you in six months again... ;-) Post-scriptum In case that you would to upgrade to the latest development version of Ubuntu, run the following command in a console: $ sudo update-manager -d And repeat all steps as described above.

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• Spotlight on an office - Nairobi, Kenya

  - by Maria Sandu

  Hi everyone, my name is Joash Mitei. I am a graduate Intern at Oracle Systems Kenya and I will briefly take you through our offices and the working environment here in Nairobi, Kenya. I’ve been with Oracle since February 2012 and I’m responsible for Applications Pre-sales focusing on Oracle EPM and E-Business Suite. My background is Finance and Accounting therefore joining Oracle was almost a totally a different ball game but the transition has been smooth. The Oracle offices here are located on the second floor of Mebank Towers. We moved to the 2nd floor just three months ago from the 5th floor mainly because of the growing workforce. We are covering the whole Eastern Africa region hence diversity in culture is evident. This is a plus since you get to interact with people of very different backgrounds, cultures and ways of thinking. The building itself is on the outskirts of the CBD hence free from the hustle and bustle of the town. The office is split into different sections; there is a main working area which has an open desk design that fosters interaction between colleagues, there are 4 conference rooms for meetings and presentations, there are 3 quiet rooms for a little privacy when needed and there is a dining area for meals and ‘hanging out’. The working environment is world-class, to say the least. The employees are very professional, quite smart and needless to say, very busy. There are 4 interns covering sales and pre-sales in both Tech and Apps. As an intern you get support from your supervisor but you are required to show initiative yourself and thus the need to be very pro-active and inquisitive. The local management is well structured and communicative to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in the office. Apart from the daily work, we usually have events to boost staff morale such as ‘TGIF hang -out’, football matches against each other or versus other companies, and team building retreats. All these are monumental in fostering the RED POTENTIAL. We also do numerous CSR activities in the local communities . Well, that’s the Kenyan office for you. Glad to be your tour guide. Have a superb day!

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• How to introduce a computer illiterate 50-year old to programming [closed]

  - by sunday

  The other day my dad asked me a question that I would have never expected from him. "How can I learn C++?" My dad is turning 56 this year and computers are a distant concept for him. He doesn't know how to use a phone very well besides calling numbers (no speed dial or contacts); though he has started to learn computers a little better - to the point that he knows how to open the internet (in Windows) and browse around (and has successfully completed several job applications entirely on his own online, of which he was offered positions too). But still, these are too narrow-windowed experiences to mean much, really. While he may not have the background, my dad knows how to read. And I mean reading as a skill, not just an ability. He has little to no college education (financial problems, family, etc.) and was fortunate enough to finish high school, but still taught himself to become a master electrician and has been one for almost 30 years now. He did the same with guitar, learning to play at a very professional level and has been praised for his skill. In high school, he picked up a weight lifting book - and was the only person in his high school at the time to qualify officially as an "athlete" by national standards. In all cases, he just needed something to read. Something to teach him. He absorbs information like a sponge. I have no doubt in my dad's motivation or capability of doing this, so my general goal is simply: Get my dad into the world of computers, and get him on the road to programming. I strongly believe that once I get him through the fundamentals, his drive and reading skill will keep him going on this own. So I'm asking you all: where should I start with all this? And what are the best resources out there? Should I get him to start Linux instead of Windows? Is C++ a bad idea? Remember, he needs to (IMO) learn computers first, and then get that first grasp (the "Hello world" experience) of programming. For money's sake and at top preference, I'd like free online resources that he can read, but by all means any good suggestions in print or paid-for-online are welcome (that I could possibly look into later to purchase). And also, I intend to start him off with C++ (no Python, Java, etc.), because I know it the best and will be able to help him along the way with code. (I have minimal knowledge right now in other languages). Edit: I'm getting a lot of persistent suggestions to use Python. The only reason I wanted to do C++ is that I KNOW it and can be THERE when my dad needs help. My VERY FIRST exposure to programming ever was Java. I learned Java, and I got good at it. I open to other suggestions, but please provide an effective application of your suggestions. EDIT #2: I understand my approach/thinking/knowledge could be lacking here. I'm a sophomore level undergraduate CS major. If you don't agree with anything in my post, tell me why - give me ideas, information - that's why I'm asking in the first place. To narrow down my general goal to specific reachable goals.

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