Search Results

Search found 13955 results on 559 pages for 'easy angel'.

Page 71/559 | < Previous Page | 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78  | Next Page >

• Follow the How-To Geek Writers on Twitter

  - by The Geek

  Ever wonder what the How-To Geek writers are up to? If you’re a Twitter user, you can connect with us directly. We’ve also setup a new @howtogeeknews account if you just want to keep up with the latest articles. So if you want just the latest articles… click the image below and then click the Follow button. Otherwise, if you’d like to connect with the rest of us that actually use Twitter, you can follow each of us separately through  the links below. Note: Let’s try to stick to discussion, and leave the tech support questions for our forum. the How-To Geek (that’s me!) -  @howtogeek Matthew Guay – @maguay Trevor Bekolay – @TrevorBekolay Asian Angel – @asian_angel  Andrew Gehman – @andrewgehman Some of the HTG writers are not currently using Twitter… but I’m gonna list their accounts just in case you wanted to follow them. Mark Virtue – @markvirtue Mysticgeek – @mysticgeek  (He’s far too productive to waste time on Twitter!) Enjoy the conversation! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Got Awesome Geek Skills? The How-To Geek is Looking for WritersGot Awesome Skills? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?Integrate Twitter With Microsoft OutlookState of the Geek 2009: Behind the Scenes and Other GeekeryAnnouncing the How-To Geek Blogs TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses Mashpedia is a Real-time Encyclopedia

  Read the article

• NHibernate 3.0 and FluentNHibernate, how to get up and running&hellip;.

  - by DesigningCode

  First up. Its actually really easy. I’m not very religious about my DB tech, I don’t really care, I just want something that works.  So I’m happy to consider all options if they provide an advantage, and recently I was considering jumping from NHibernate to EF 4.0.  However before ditching NHibernate and jumping to EF 4.0 I thought I should try the head version of NHibernates trunk and the Head version of FluentNHibernate. I currently have a “Repository / Unit of Work” Framework built up around these two techs.  All up it makes my life pretty simple for dealing with databases.   The problem is the current release of NHibernate + the Linq provider wasn’t too hot for our purposes.  Especially trying to plug it into older VB.NET code.   The Linq provider spat the dummy with VB.NET lambdas.  Mainly because in C# Query().Where(l => l.Name.Contains("x") || l.Name.Contains("y")).ToList(); is not the same as the VB.NET Query().Where(Function(l) l.Name.Contains("x") Or l.Name.Contains("y")).ToList VB.NET seems to spit out … well…. something different :-) so anyways… Compiling your own version of NHibernate and FluentNHibernate.  It’s actually pretty easy! First you’ll need to install tortisesvn NAnt and Git if you don’t already have them.  NHibernate first step, get the subversion trunk https://nhibernate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nhibernate/trunk/ into a directory somewhere.  eg \thirdparty\nhibernate Then use NAnt to build it.   (if you open the .sln it will show errors in that  AssemblyInfo.cs doesn’t exist ) to build it, there is a .txt document with sample command line build instructions,  I simply used :- NAnt -D:project.config=release clean build >output-release-build.log *wait* *wait* *wait* and ta da, you will have a bin directory with all the release dlls. FluentNHibernate This was pretty simple. there’s instructions here :- http://wiki.fluentnhibernate.org/Getting_started#Installation basically, with git, create a directory, and you issue the command git clone git://github.com/jagregory/fluent-nhibernate.git and wait, and soon enough you have the source. Now, from the bin directory that NHibernate spit out, take everything and dump it into the subdirectory “fluent-nhibernate\tools\NHibernate” Now, to build, you can use rake….which a ruby build system, however you can also just open the solution and build.   Which is what I did.  I had a few problems with the references which I simply re-added using the new ones.  Once built, I just took all the NHibnerate dlls, and the fluent ones and replaced my existing NHibernate / Fluent and killed off the old linq project. All I had to change is the places that used  .Linq<T>  and replace them with .Query<T>  (which was easy as I had wrapped it already to isolate my code from such changes) and hey presto, everything worked.  Even the VB.NET linq calls. I need to do some more testing as I’ve only done basic smoke tests, but its all looking pretty good, so for now, I will stick to NHibernate!

  Read the article

• Replacing ASP.NET Forms Authentication with WIF Session Authentication (for the better)

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  ASP.NET Forms Authentication and WIF Session Authentication (which has *nothing* to do with ASP.NET sessions) are very similar. Both inspect incoming requests for a special cookie that contains identity information, if that cookie is present it gets validated and if that is successful, the identity information is made available to the application via HttpContext.User/Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The main difference between the two is the identity to cookie serialization engine that sits below. Whereas ForsmAuth can only store the name of the user and an additional UserData string. It is limited to a single cookie and hardcoded to protection via the machine key. WIF session authentication in turn has these additional features: Can serialize a complete ClaimsPrincipal (including claims) to the cookie(s). Has a cookie overflow mechanism when data gets too big. In total it can create up to 8 cookies (á 4 KB) per domain (not that I would recommend round tripping that much data). Supports server side caching (which is an extensible mechanism). Has an extensible mechanism for protection (DPAPI by default, RSA as an option for web farms, and machine key based protection is coming in .NET 4.5) So in other words – session authentication is the superior technology, and if done cleverly enough you can replace FormsAuth without any changes to your application code. The only features missing is the redirect mechanism to a login page and an easy to use API to set authentication cookies. But that’s easy to add ;) FormsSessionAuthenticationModule This module is a sub class of the standard WIF session module, adding the following features: Handling EndRequest to do the redirect on 401s to the login page configured for FormsAuth. Reads the FormsAuth cookie name, cookie domain, timeout and require SSL settings to configure the module accordingly. Implements sliding expiration if configured for FormsAuth. It also uses the same algorithm as FormsAuth to calculate when the cookie needs renewal. Implements caching of the principal on the server side (aka session mode) if configured in an AppSetting. Supports claims transformation via a ClaimsAuthenticationManager. As you can see, the whole module is designed to easily replace the FormsAuth mechanism. Simply set the authentication mode to None and register the module. In the spirit of the FormsAuthentication class, there is also now a SessionAuthentication class with the same methods and signatures (e.g. SetAuthCookie and SignOut). The rest of your application code should not be affected. In addition the session module looks for a HttpContext item called “NoRedirect”. If that exists, the redirect to the login page will *not* happen, instead the 401 is passed back to the client. Very useful if you are implementing services or web APIs where you want the actual status code to be preserved. A corresponding UnauthorizedResult is provided that gives you easy access to the context item. The download contains a sample app, the module and an inspector for session cookies and tokens. Let’s hope that in .NET 4.5 such a module comes out of the box. HTH

  Read the article

• Use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a Boxee Remote

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you a Boxee user looking for a remote control solution? Well, you might not need to look any further than your pocket. The free Boxee Remote App turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a a simple and easy-to-use Boxee remote. The Boxee Remote App works over WiFi, so there is no need for to buy or install additional hardware on your PC. Plus, you don’t even need to be within the line of sight for it to work. Using the Boxee Remote App Download the free Boxee Remote App from the App Store and install it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. See download link below. Next, make sure you have Boxee running on your PC. Select the Boxee icon to open the App.   The first time you log in you’ll be greeted by an introduction screen that will explain the two modes. Click Continue. When opened in “Button” mode, you’ll be presented with 4 directional buttons, an “OK” button, and a back arrow button that works like the Esc key does in Boxee. Button mode performs just as a normal remote. Touching the directional buttons moves your on screen selection right, left, up, and down. Tap the OK button to open or select an item. To enter “Gesture” mode, tap the Gesture button along the top of the Screen. Gesture mode works similar to a touch pad or trackball on a laptop. You drag the Boxee icon with your thumb or finger across the screen to move around within Boxee. The icon will turn red while being dragged or touched. Simply tap the icon to select.   The Settings button allows you to manually add or delete a host computer, or adjust the sensitivity of the controls.     If you need to enter text, such as enter logon credentials for an App, the on screen keyboard will pop up. While watching a video you’ll have on-screen Stop and Pause buttons along with a volume slider.   The Boxee Remote App is simple and easy to use. As long as you can connect via WiFi, you can use it to control any instance of Boxee running on any computer on your network. Download the Boxee Remote App Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]Getting Started with BoxeeIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Watch Netflix Instant Movies in BoxeeWin a Free iPod Touch in the How-To Geek Facebook Giveaway! TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) If it were only this easy Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook

  Read the article

• Essential Links for the SharePoint Client Side Developer

  - by Mark Rackley

  Front End Developer? Client Side Developer? Middle Tier??? I’m covering all my bases.  Regardless, I’m sick and tired of Googling with Bing when I forget where information that I need often is located. I was getting ready to bookmark some of them when it hit me… “Hey Mark… (I don’t actually refer to myself in the third person), Why don’t you put the links in a blog so that it looks like you are being helpful!” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back to some of my old blogs to remember how I did something. Seriously people, you need to start a blog, it’s the best way to remember how the frick you got something to work… and it looks like you are being helpful when in reality you are just forgetful.  So… where was I? Oh yeah.. essential information that I’ve needed from time to time when I was not using Visual Studio. All of this info has come in handy from time to time. Know about these things and keep them in your tool belt, it’s amazing the stuff you can accomplish with just knowing where to look. What Why SPServices Widely used library written by Marc Anderson used to call SharePoint Web Services with jQuery jQuery For SPServices and other cool stuff Easy Tabs Essential tool for quick page enhancements. This widely used too from Christophe Humbert groups multiple web parts into one tabbed display. Very quick and easy way to get oohs and ahs from End Users. Convert Calculated Columns to HTML Also from Christophe, I use this script all the time to convert html in my calculated columns to actually display as html and not with the tags. Unlocking the Mysteries of Data View Web Part XSL Tags This blog series from Marc Anderson makes it very easy to understand what’s going on with all those weird xsl tags in your data view web parts. Essential to make those things do what you want them to do. Creating Parent / Child list relationships (2007) Creating Parent / Child list relationships (2010) By far my most viewed blog posts (tens and tens of thousands).  I have posts for both 2007 and 2010 that walk you through automatically setting the lookup id on a list to its “parent”. Set SharePoint Form fields using Query String Variables Also widely read, this one walks you through taking a variable from your Query String and set a form field to that value.   Hmmm… I KNOW there are more, but I’m tired and drawing a blank.  I’ll try to add them when I remember them (or need them again and think “Oh, I forgot to add that one”) But it’s a start, and please feel free to add your own in the comments… So, it’s YOUR turn to be helpful. What little tip or trick do you find yourself using ALL the time that you think everyone should know about??

  Read the article

• DISA Cross Domain Enterprise Solutions on the NetBeans Platform

  - by Geertjan

  Bray 2.0 is a tool based on the NetBeans Platform that assists in creating valid Data Flow Configuration (DFC) files. The DFC Specification was developed to provide a standardized way for defining, validating, and approving data flows for use on cross-domain guarding solutions. A DFC document specifies key entities such as security domains, guards that facilitate data between security domains, data flows that describe how data travels between security domains, filters that transform and validate the data and more. Related info: http://www.disa.mil/Services/Information-Assurance/Cross-Domain-Solutions The Bray product is in development at Fulcrum IT (http://www.fulcrumco.com). The DFC Specification and Bray were developed in support of the US Department of Defense. Bray 2.0 marks the first release of Bray on the NetBeans Platform and utilizes a number of features that are core to the NetBeans Platform: Modular plugability. Bray consumers can integrate their own tools, file types, and more into the product with relative ease. Robust UI. The NetBeans Platform intuitive UI makes it easy to access and manipulate multiple aspects of a DFC. Explorer. The Explorer is a key component that makes the DFC XML easy to traverse, edit, and find errors. Context-sensitive help. JavaHelp can be readily integrated for the product as well as all the UI within. Editors. Any external file can be added to a DFC. Users can register their own editors or use the provided NetBeans editors to edit files. Printing. The NetBeans Platform Print API makes it easy to determine what should be printed and how.   A screenshot: Bray 2.0 provides a lot of key features in developing valid, robust DFC files:  XML validation. A DFC can be validated against the DFC schema specification. DFC Check List. An interactive, minimal guide for creating a complete DFC. Summary Window. The Summary Window functions like the Navigator in NetBeans IDE. The current "item of interest" is checked against various business rules and provides the ability to quickly find and fix errors. Change Log. Bray audits every change to a DFC and places them in a change log for users to peruse. Comments. Users can optionally add comments for other users to see. Digital signatures. DFC files can be digitally signed. A signature history and signature validation is provided in Bray. Pluggable security schemes. Bray ships with plain text and IC-ISM security schemes. If needed, users can integrate additional ones.  ...and more to come! New features for Bray are constantly in development including use of the NetBeans Visual Library, language support, and more. More screenshots:

  Read the article

• Get the Picture: Pinterest for Marketers

  - by Mike Stiles

  When trying to determine on which networks to conduct social marketing, the usual suspects immediately rise to the top; Facebook & Twitter, then LinkedIn (especially if you’re B2B), then maybe some Google Plus to hedge SEO bets.  So at what juncture do brands get excited about Pinterest? Pinterest has been easy for marketers to de-prioritize thanks to the perception its usage is so dominated by women. Um, what’s wrong with that? Women make an estimated 85% of all consumer purchases. So if there are indeed over 30 million US women active on it monthly, and they do 92% of the pinning, and 84% are still active on it after 4 years, when did an audience of highly engaged, very likely sales conversions become low priority? Okay, if you’re a tech B2B SaaS product like the Oracle Social Cloud, Pinterest may not be where you focus. But if you operate in the top Pinterest categories, which are truly far-reaching, it’s time to take note of Pinterest’s performance to date: 40.1 million monthly users in the US (eMarketer). Over 30 billion pins, half of which were pinned in the last 6 months. (Big momentum) 75% of usage is on their mobile app. (In solid shape for the mobile migration) Pinterest sharing grew 58% in 2013, beating Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. (ShareThis) Pinterest is the 3rd most popular sharing platform overall (over email), with 48% of all sharing on tablets. Users referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy on e-commerce sites and tend to spend twice that of users coming from Facebook. (Shopify) To be fair, brands haven’t had any paid marketing opportunities on that platform…until recently. Users are seeing Promoted Pins in both category and search feeds from rollout brands like Gap, ABC Family, Ziploc, and Nestle. Are the paid pins annoying users? It seems more so than other social networks, they’re fitting right in to the intended user experience and being accepted, getting almost as many click-throughs as user pins. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose laid it out succinctly; Pinterest offers a place that’s image-centric, search-friendly, makes things easy to purchase, makes things easy to share, and puts users in an aspirational mood to buy. Pinterest is very confident in the value of that combo and that audience, with CPM rates 5x that of the most expensive Facebook ad, plus (at least for now) required spending commitments and required pin review by Pinterest for quality. The latest developments; a continued move toward search and discovery with enhancements like Guided Search to help you hone in on what interests you, Custom Categories, and the rumored Visual Search that stands to be a liberation from text. And most recently, Pinterest has opened up its API so brands can get access to deeper insights into the best search terms and categories in which to play ball, as well as what kinds of pins stand to perform best in those areas. As we learned in our rundown this week of Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, around 50% of marketers specifically intend on upping their use of Pinterest. If you’re a big believer in fishing where the fish are, that’s probably an efficient position to take. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Adam Lambert_Gorwyn, freeimages.com

  Read the article

• RPi and Java Embedded GPIO: Big Data and Java Technology

  - by hinkmond

  Java Embedded and Big Data go hand-in-hand, especially as demonstrated by prototyping on a Raspberry Pi to show how well the Java Embedded platform can perform on a small embedded device which then becomes the proof-of-concept for industrial controllers, medical equipment, networking gear or any type of sensor-connected device generating large amounts of data. The key is a fast and reliable way to access that data using Java technology. In the previous blog posts you've seen the integration of a static electricity sensor and the Raspberry Pi through the GPIO port, then accessing that data through Java Embedded code. It's important to point out how this works and why it works well with Java code. First, the version of Linux (Debian Wheezy/Raspian) that is found on the RPi has a very convenient way to access the GPIO ports through the use of Linux OS managed file handles. This is key in avoiding terrible and complex coding using register manipulation in C code, or having to program in a less elegant and clumsy procedural scripting language such as python. Instead, using Java Embedded, allows a fast way to access those GPIO ports through those same Linux file handles. Java already has a very easy to program way to access file handles with a high degree of performance that matches direct access of those file handles with the Linux OS. Using the Java API java.io.FileWriter lets us open the same file handles that the Linux OS has for accessing the GPIO ports. Then, by first resetting the ports using the unexport and export file handles, we can initialize them for easy use in a Java app. // Open file handles to GPIO port unexport and export controls FileWriter unexportFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/unexport"); FileWriter exportFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/export"); ... // Reset the port unexportFile.write(gpioChannel); unexportFile.flush(); // Set the port for use exportFile.write(gpioChannel); exportFile.flush(); Then, another set of file handles can be used by the Java app to control the direction of the GPIO port by writing either "in" or "out" to the direction file handle. // Open file handle to input/output direction control of port FileWriter directionFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/gpio" + gpioChannel + "/direction"); // Set port for input directionFile.write("in"); // Or, use "out" for output directionFile.flush(); And, finally, a RandomAccessFile handle can be used with a high degree of performance on par with native C code (only milliseconds to read in data and write out data) with low overhead (unlike python) to manipulate the data going in and out on the GPIO port, while the object-oriented nature of Java programming allows for an easy way to construct complex analytic software around that data access functionality to the external world. RandomAccessFile[] raf = new RandomAccessFile[GpioChannels.length]; ... // Reset file seek pointer to read latest value of GPIO port raf[channum].seek(0); raf[channum].read(inBytes); inLine = new String(inBytes); It's Big Data from sensors and industrial/medical/networking equipment meeting complex analytical software on a small constraint device (like a Linux/ARM RPi) where Java Embedded allows you to shine as an Embedded Device Software Designer. Hinkmond

  Read the article

• Fetching Partition Information

  - by Mike Femenella

  For a recent SSIS package at work I needed to determine the distinct values in a partition, the number of rows in each partition and the file group name on which each partition resided in order to come up with a grouping mechanism. Of course sys.partitions comes to mind for some of that but there are a few other tables you need to link to in order to grab the information required. The table I’m working on contains 8.8 billion rows. Finding the distinct partition keys from this table was not a fast operation. My original solution was to create  a temporary table, grab the distinct values for the partitioned column, then update via sys.partitions for the rows and the $partition function for the partitionid and finally look back to the sys.filegroups table for the filegroup names. It wasn’t pretty, it could take up to 15 minutes to return the results. The primary issue is pulling distinct values from the table. Queries for distinct against 8.8 billion rows don’t go quickly. A few beers into a conversation with a friend and we ended up talking about work which led to a conversation about the task described above. The solution was already built in SQL Server, just needed to pull it together. The first table I needed was sys.partition_range_values. This contains one row for each range boundary value for a partition function. In my case I have a partition function which uses dayid values. For example July 4th would be represented as an int, 20130704. This table lists out all of the dayid values which were defined in the function. This eliminated the need to query my source table for distinct dayid values, everything I needed was already built in here for me. The only caveat was that in my SSIS package I needed to create a bucket for any dayid values that were out of bounds for my function. For example if my function handled 20130501 through 20130704 and I had day values of 20130401 or 20130705 in my table, these would not be listed in sys.partition_range_values. I just created an “everything else” bucket in my ssis package just in case I had any dayid values unaccounted for. To get the number of rows for a partition is very easy. The sys.partitions table contains values for each partition. Easy enough to achieve by querying for the object_id and index value of 1 (the clustered index) The final piece of information was the filegroup name. There are 2 options available to get the filegroup name, sys.data_spaces or sys.filegroups. For my query I chose sys.filegroups but really it’s a matter of preference and data needs. In order to bridge between sys.partitions table and either sys.data_spaces or sys.filegroups you need to get the container_id. This can be done by joining sys.allocation_units.container_id to the sys.partitions.hobt_id. sys.allocation_units contains the field data_space_id which then lets you join in either sys.data_spaces or sys.file_groups. The end result is the query below, which typically executes for me in under 1 second. I’ve included the join to sys.filegroups and to sys.dataspaces, and I’ve  just commented out the join sys.filegroups. As I mentioned above, this shaves a good 10-15 minutes off of my original ssis package and is a really easy tweak to get a boost in my ETL time. Enjoy.

  Read the article

• Mobile Deals: the Consumer Wants You in Their Pocket

  - by Mike Stiles

  Mobile deals offer something we talk about a lot in social marketing, relevant content. If a consumer is already predisposed to liking your product and gets a timely deal for it that’s easy and convenient to use, not only do you score on the marketing side, it clearly generates some of that precious ROI that’s being demanded of social. First, a quick gut-check on the public’s adoption of mobile. Nielsen figures have 55.5% of US mobile owners using smartphones. If young people are indeed the future, you can count on the move to mobile exploding exponentially. Teens are the fastest growing segment of smartphone users, and 58% of them have one. But the largest demographic of smartphone users is 25-34 at 74%. That tells you a focus on mobile will yield great results now, and even better results straight ahead. So we can tell both from statistics and from all the faces around you that are buried in their smartphones this is where consumers are. But are they looking at you? Do you have a valid reason why they should? Everybody likes a good deal. BIA/Kelsey says US consumers will spend $3.6 billion this year for daily deals (the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world), up 87% from 2011. The report goes on to say over 26% of small businesses are either "very likely" or "extremely likely" to offer up a deal in the next 6 months. Retail Gazette reports 58% of consumers shop with coupons, a 40% increase in 4 years. When you consider that a deal can be the impetus for a real-world transaction, a first-time visit to a store, an online purchase, entry into a loyalty program, a social referral, a new fan or follower, etc., that 26% figure shows us there’s a lot of opportunity being left on the table by brands. The existing and emerging technologies behind mobile devices make the benefits of offering deals listed above possible. Take how mobile payment systems are being tied into deal delivery and loyalty programs. If it’s really easy to use a coupon or deal, it’ll get used. If it’s complicated, it’ll be passed over as “not worth it.” When you can pay with your mobile via technologies that connects store and user, you get the deal, you get the loyalty credit, you pay, and your receipt is uploaded, all in one easy swipe. Nothing to keep track of, nothing to lose or forget about. And the store “knows” you, so future offers will be based on your tastes. Consider the endgame. A customer who’s a fan of your belt buckle store’s Facebook Page is in one of your physical retail locations. They pull up your app, because they’ve gotten used to a loyalty deal being offered when they go to your store. Voila. A 10% discount active for the next 30 minutes. Maybe the app also surfaces social references to your brand made by friends so they can check out a buckle someone’s raving about. If they aren’t a fan of your Page or don’t have your app, perhaps they’ve opted into location-based deal services so you can still get them that 10% deal while they’re in the store. Or maybe they’ve walked in with a pre-purchased Groupon or Living Social voucher. They pay with one swipe, and you’ve learned about their buying preferences, credited their loyalty account and can encourage them to share a pic of their new buckle on social. Happy customer. Happy belt buckle company. All because the brand was willing to use the tech that’s available to meet consumers where they are, incentivize them, and show them how much they’re valued through rewards.

  Read the article

• 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!

  Read the article

• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

  Read the article

• Don’t string together XML

  - by KyleBurns

  XML has been a pervasive tool in software development for over a decade.  It provides a way to communicate data in a manner that is simple to understand and free of platform dependencies.  Also pervasive in software development is what I consider to be the anti-pattern of using string manipulation to create XML.  This usually starts with a “quick and dirty” approach because you need an XML document and looks like (for all of the examples here, we’ll assume we’re writing the body of a method intended to take a Contact object and return an XML string): return string.Format("<Contact><BusinessName>{0}</BusinessName></Contact>", contact.BusinessName);   In the code example, I created (or at least believe I created) an XML document representing a simple contact object in one line of code with very little overhead.  Work’s done, right?  No it’s not.  You see, what I didn’t realize was that this code would be used in the real world instead of my fantasy world where I own all the data and can prevent any of it containing problematic values.  If I use this code to create a contact record for the business “Sanford & Son”, any XML parser will be incapable of processing the data because the ampersand is special in XML and should have been encoded as &amp;. Following the pattern that I have seen many times over, my next step as a developer is going to be to do what any developer in his right mind would do – instruct the user that ampersands are “bad” and they cannot be used without breaking computers.  This may work in many cases and is often accompanied by logic at the UI layer of applications to block these “bad” characters, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out that other applications allow for them and will want the same.  This often leads to the creation of “cleaner” functions that perform a replace on the strings for every special character that the person writing the function can think of.  The cleaner function will usually grow over time as support requests reveal characters that were missed in the initial cut.  Sooner or later you end up writing your own somewhat functional XML engine. I have never been told by anyone paying me to write code that they would like to buy a somewhat functional XML engine.  My employer/customer’s needs have always been for something that may use XML, but ultimately is functionality that drives business value. I’m not going to build an XML engine. So how can I generate XML that is always well-formed without writing my own engine?  Easy – use one of the ones provided to you for free!  If you’re in a shop that still supports VB6 applications, you can use the DomDocument or MXXMLWriter object (of the two I prefer MXXMLWriter, but I’m not going to fully describe either here).  For .Net Framework applications prior to the 3.5 framework, the code is a little more verbose than I would like, but easy once you understand what pieces are required:             using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())             {                 using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw))                 {                     writer.WriteStartDocument();                     writer.WriteStartElement("Contact");                     writer.WriteElementString("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName);                     writer.WriteEndElement(); // end Contact element                     writer.WriteEndDocument();                     writer.Flush();                     return sw.ToString();                 }             }   Looking at that code, it’s easy to understand why people are drawn to the initial one-liner.  Lucky for us, the 3.5 .Net Framework added the System.Xml.Linq.XElement object.  This object takes away a lot of the complexity present in the XmlTextWriter approach and allows us to generate the document as follows: return new XElement("Contact", new XElement("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName)).ToString();   While it is very common for people to use string manipulation to create XML, I’ve discussed here reasons not to use this method and introduced powerful APIs that are built into the .Net Framework as an alternative.  I’ve given a very simplistic example here to highlight the most basic XML generation task.  For more information on the XmlTextWriter and XElement APIs, check out the MSDN library.

  Read the article

• Does Perl's Net::Cassandra module support UTF-8?

  - by knorv

  I've run into a really strange UTF-8 problem with Net::Cassandra::Easy (which is built upon Net::Cassandra): UTF-8 strings written to Cassandra are garbled upon retrieval. The following code shows the problem: use strict; use utf8; use warnings; use Net::Cassandra::Easy; binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"); my $key = "some_key"; my $column = "some_column"; my $set_value = "\x{2603}"; my $cassandra = Net::Cassandra::Easy->new(keyspace => "Keyspace1", server => "localhost"); $cassandra->connect(); $cassandra->mutate([$key], family => "Standard1", insertions => { $column => $set_value }); my $result = $cassandra->get([$key], family => "Standard1", standard => 1); my $get_value = $result->{$key}->{"Standard1"}->{$column}; if ($set_value eq $get_value) { # this is the path I want. print "OK: $set_value == $get_value\n"; } else { # this is the path I get. print "ERR: $set_value != $get_value\n"; } When running the code above $set_value eq $get_value evaluates to false. What am I doing wrong?

  Read the article

• How effective can this Tagging solution be?

  - by Pablo

  Im working on an image sharing site and want to implement tagging for the images. I've read Questions #20856 and #2504150 I have few concerns with the approach on the questions above. First of all it looks easy to link an image to a tag. However getting images by tag relation is not as easy. Not easy because you will have to get the image-to-tag relation from one table and then make a big query with a bunch of OR statements( one OR for every image). Before i even research the tagging topic i started testing the following method: This tables as examples: Table: Image Columns: ItemID, Title, Tags Table: Tag Columns: TagID, Name The Tags column in the Image table takes a string with multiple tagID from the Tag table enclosed by dashes(-). For example: -65-25-105- Links an image with the TagID 65,25 and 105. With this method i find it easier to get images by tag as i can get the TagID with one query and get all the images with another simple query like: SELECT * FROM Image WHERE Tags LIKE %-65-% So if i use this method for tagging, How effective this is? Is querying by LIKE %-65-% a slow process? What problems can i face in the future?

  Read the article

• jQuery autocomplete: taking JSON input and setting multiple fields from single field

  - by Sly

  I am trying to get the jQuery autocomplete plugin to take a local JSON variable as input. Once the user has selected one option from the autocomplete list, I want the adjacent address fields to be autopopulated. Here's the JSON variable that declared as a global variable in the of the HTML file: var JSON_address={"1":{"origin":{"nametag":"Home","street":"Easy St","city":"Emerald City","state":"CA","zip":"9xxxx"},"destination":{"nametag":"Work","street":"Factory St","city":"San Francisco","state":"CA","zip":"94104"}},"2":{"origin":{"nametag":"Work","street":"Umpa Loompa St","city":"San Francisco","state":"CA","zip":"94104"},"destination":{"nametag":"Home","street":"Easy St","city":"Emerald City ","state":"CA","zip":"9xxxx"}}}</script> I want the first field to display a list of "origin" nametags: "Home", "Work". Then when "Home" is selected, adjacent fields are automatically populated with Street: Easy St, City: Emerald City, etc. Here's the code I have for the autocomplete: $(document).ready(function(){ $("#origin_nametag_id").autocomplete(JSON_address, { autoFill:true, minChars:0, dataType: 'json', parse: function(data) { var rows = new Array(); for (var i=0; i<=data.length; i++) { rows[rows.length] = { data:data[i], value:data[i].origin.nametag, result:data[i].origin.nametag }; } return rows; } }).change(function(){ $("#street_address_id").autocomplete({ dataType: 'json', parse: function(data) { var rows = new Array(); for (var i=0; i<=data.length; i++) { rows[rows.length] = { data:data[i], value:data[i].origin.street, result:data[i].origin.street }; } return rows; } }); }); }); So this question really has two subparts: 1) How do you get autocomplete to process the multi-dimensional JSON object? (When the field is clicked and text entered, nothing happens - no list) 2) How do you get the other fields (street, city, etc) to populate based upon the origin nametag sub-array? Thanks in advance!

  Read the article

• Creating customized .dmg files upon download

  - by Marten

  I want to distribute a cross-platform application for which the executable file is slightly different, depending on the user who downloaded it. This is done by having a placeholder string somewhere in the executable that is replaced with something user-specific upon download. The webserver that has to do these string replacements is a Linux machine. For Windows, the executable is not compressed in the installer .exe, so the string replacement is easy. For uncompressed Mac OS X .dmg files, this is also easy. However, .dmg files that are compressed with either gzip or bzip2 are not so easy. For example, in the latter case, the compressed .dmg is not one big bzip2-compressed disk image, but instead consists of a few different bzip2-compressed parts (with different block sizes) and a plist suffix. Also, decompressing and recompressing the different parts with bzip2 does not result in the original data, so I'm guessing Apple uses some different parameters to bzip2 than the command-line tool. Is there a way to generate a compressed .dmg from an uncompressed one on Linux (which does not have hdiutil)? Or maybe another suggestion for creating customized applications without pregenerating them? It should work without any input by the user.

  Read the article

• Using .NET XmlSerializer with get properties and setter functions

  - by brone

  I'm trying to use XmlSerializer from C# to save out a class that has some values that are read by properties (the code being just a simple retrieval of field value) but set by setter functions (since there is a delegate called if the value changes). What I'm currently doing is this sort of thing. The intended use is to use the InT property to read the value, and use SetInT to set it. Setting it has side-effects, so a method is more appropriate than a property here. XmlSerializationOnly_InT exists solely for the benefit of the XmlSerializer (hence the name), and shouldn't be used by normal code. class X { public double InT { get { return _inT; } } public void SetInT(double newInT) { if (newInT != _inT) { _inT = newInT; Changed();//includes delegate call; potentially expensive } } private double _inT; // not called by normal code, as the property set is not just a simple // field set or two. [XmlElement(ElementName = "InT")] public double XmlSerializationOnly_InT { get { return InT; } set { SetInT(value); } } } This works, it's easy enough to do, and the XML file looks like you'd expect. It's manual labour though, and a bit ugly, so I'm only somewhat satisfied. What I'd really like is to be able to tell the XML serialization to read the value using the property, and set it using the setter function. Then I wouldn't need XmlSerializationOnly_InT at all. I seem to be following standard practise by distinguishing between property sets and setter functions in this way, so I'm sure I'm not the only person to have encountered this (though google suggests I might be). What have others done in this situation? Is there some easy way to persuade the XmlSerializer to handle this sort of thing better? If not, is there perhaps some other easy way to do it?

  Read the article

• Going from small to medium sized websites.

  - by Landitus

  I've been coding websites for a couple of years now, mostly in php and xhtml. I come from the design world, but I'm proud of doing standart compliant websites and great interfaces. Also used Wordpress and loved it. Most of the time there were really simple commercial websites, with no database included, where everything is done from scratch. Every page is parsed through an index?page=xxx and But I have a few prospects that are larger websites (let's call them 'medium sized websites') where I feel I'm lacking the following: How to dispach or render the pages (MVC controller instead of index?page=???) Proper page hierarchy and easy breadcrumbs implementation Auto generation of navigation menu, or an easy way to maintain them? Clean URLs Form validation Easy database support I really don't know if I should be looking into php scripts, and refine my skills or get into a CMS (like drupal) or a PHP framework. I found Wordpress very assuring and didn't feel trapped into crazy conventions, but I feel is not the right tool for this. I hate the CMS Page with the big textbox as I am used to code every page by hand my pages are not a title and a textbox. Got the feeling? My php skills are sort of medium/low still, but I would like to hear some thoughts of what I should learn to take the next step!

  Read the article

• Why is curl in Ruby slower than command-line curl?

  - by Stiivi

  I am trying to download more than 1m pages (URLs ending by a sequence ID). I have implemented kind of multi-purpose download manager with configurable number of download threads and one processing thread. The downloader downloads files in batches: curl = Curl::Easy.new batch_urls.each { |url_info| curl.url = url_info[:url] curl.perform file = File.new(url_info[:file], "wb") file << curl.body_str file.close # ... some other stuff } I have tried to download 8000 pages sample. When using the code above, I get 1000 in 2 minutes. When I write all URLs into a file and do in shell: cat list | xargs curl I gen all 8000 pages in two minutes. Thing is, I need it to have it in ruby code, because there is other monitoring and processing code. I have tried: Curl::Multi - it is somehow faster, but misses 50-90% of files (does not download them and gives no reason/code) multiple threads with Curl::Easy - around the same speed as single threaded Why is reused Curl::Easy slower than subsequent command line curl calls and how can I make it faster? Or what I am doing wrong? I would prefer to fix my download manager code than to make downloading for this case in a different way. Before this, I was calling command-line wget which I provided with a file with list of URLs. Howerver, not all errors were handled, also it was not possible to specify output file for each URL separately when using URL list. Now it seems to me that the best way would be to use multiple threads with system call to 'curl' command. But why when I can use directly Curl in Ruby? Code for the download manager is here, if it might help: Download Manager (I have played with timeouts, from not-setting it to various values, it did not seem help) Any hints appreciated.

  Read the article

• A Digg-like rotating homepage of popular content, how to include date as a factor?

  - by Ferdy

  I am building an advanced image sharing web application. As you may expect, users can upload images and others can comments on it, vote on it, and favorite it. These events will determine the popularity of the image, which I capture in a "karma" field. Now I want to create a Digg-like homepage system, showing the most popular images. It's easy, since I already have the weighted Karma score. I just sort on that descendingly to show the 20 most valued images. The part that is missing is time. I do not want extremely popular images to always be on the homepage. I guess an easy solution is to restrict the result set to the last 24 hours. However, I'm also thinking that in order to keep the image rotation occur throughout the day, time can be some kind of variable where its offset has an influence on the image's sorting. Specific questions: Would you recommend the easy scenario (just sort for best images within 24 hours) or the more sophisticated one (use datetime offset as part of the sorting)? If you advise the latter, any help on the mathematical solution to this? Would it be best to run a scheduled service to mark images for the homepage, or would you advise a direct query (I'm using MySQL) As an extra note, the homepage should support paging and on a quiet day should include entries of days before in order to make sure it is always "filled" I'm not asking the community to build this algorithm, just looking for some advise :)

  Read the article

• Advanced All In One .NET Framework

  - by alfredo dobrekk

  Hi, i m starting a new project that would basically take input from user and save them to database among about 30 screens, and i would like to find a framework that will allow the maximum number of these features out of the box : .net c#. windows form. unit testing continuous integration screens with lists, combo boxes, text boxes, add, delete, save, cancel that are easy to update when you add a property to your classes or a field to your database. auto completion on controls to help user find its way use of an orm like nhibernate easy multithreading and display of wait screens for user easy undo redo tabbed child windows search forms ability to grant access to some functionnalities according to user profiles mvp/mvvm or whatever design patterns either some code generation from database to c# classe or generation of database schema from c# classes some kind of database versioning / upgrade to easily update database when i release patches to application once in production automatic control resizing code metrics analysis some code generator i can use against my entities that would generate some rough form i can rearrange after code documentation generator ... Any ideas ? I know its lot but i really would like to use existing code to build upon so i can focus on business rules. Could splitting the requirements on 3 or 4 existing open source framework be possible ? Do u have any suggestion to add to the list before starting ? What open source tools would u use to achieve these ?

  Read the article

• How to simplify this code or a better design?

  - by Tattat

  I am developing a game, the game have different mode. Easy, Normal, and Difficult. So, I'm thinking about how to store the game mode. My first idea is using number to represent the difficulty. Easy = 0 Normal = 1 Difficult = 2 So, my code will have something like this: switch(gameMode){ case 0: //easy break; case 1: //normal break; case 3: //difficult break; } But I think it have some problems, if I add a new mode, for example, "Extreme", I need to add case 4... ... it seems not a gd design. So, I am thinking making a gameMode object, and different gameMode is sub class of the super class gameMode. The gameMode object is something like this: class GameMode{ int maxEnemyNumber; int maxWeaponNumber; public static GameMode init(){ GameMode gm = GameMode(); gm.maxEnemyNumber = 0; gm.maxWeaponNumber = 0; return gm; } } class EasyMode extends GameMode{ public static GameMode init(){ GameMode gm = super.init(); gm.maxEnemyNumber = 10; gm.maxWeaponNumber = 100; return gm; } } class NormalMode extends GameMode{ public static GameMode init(){ GameMode gm = super.init(); gm.maxEnemyNumber = 20; gm.maxWeaponNumber = 80; return gm; } } But I think it seems too "bulky" to create an object to store gameMode, my "gameMode" only store different variables for game settings.... Is that any simple way to store data only instead of making an Object? thz u.

  Read the article

• iPhone Adding Controls (UIButton, UILabel etc.) on a Playing Video!

  - by Taimur Hamza

  I have been assigned an 'easy' task of adding a button over a playing video. I m terming it easy as i have got the sample code downloaded from Apple's sample code. http://rapidshare.com/files/393248642/MoviePlayer_iPhone.zip Anybody who wants to reply to my query and intends to help should download this project and run it otherwise it wudnt be easy to understand my problem. Thanks! And now the weird problem i am facing is: In the sample project developer has added the view ( UILabel and UIButton ) in the Appdelegate. And i want it other xib files not the App delegate . Fine i added a view 'myButtonABC' instead of 'My Overlay View'. And added this code in my xib file's implementation file. (void)viewDidLoad { TaimurAppDelegate *appDelegate = (TaimurAppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate]; [appDelegate initAndPlayMovie:[self localMovieURL]]; NSArray *windows = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] windows]; if ([windows count] 1) { UIWindow *moviePlayerWindow = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow]; [moviePlayerWindow addSubview:self.myABC]; } } Now my question is do i need to declare a UIWindow object in the header file here. As i am not working in the app delegate class. As i said previously i have to add this button over a video in other screen and not on the main screen. The third question is can anyone, which in fact is the most imp of all. In my view , if i am able to do this one my problem would be solved. As i have spend considerable amount of time on this task so far. The question is " How can i connect myABCButton (which is a view added to my xib file ) to the File's Owner. Thanks for your patience. Replies Appreciated ! Taimur

  Read the article

• Where is the Open Source alternative to WPF?

  - by Evan Plaice

  If we've learned anything from HTML/CSS it's that, declarative languages (like XML) work best to describe User Interfaces because: It's easy to build code preprocessors that can template the code effectively. The code is in a well defined well structured (ideally) format so it's easy to parse. The technology to effectively parse or crawl an XML based source file already exists. The UIs scripted code becomes much simpler and easier to understand. It simple enough that designers are able to design the interface themselves. Programmers suck at creating UIs so it should be made easy enough for designers. I recently took a look at the meat of a WPF application (ie. the XAML) and it looks surprisingly familiar to the declarative language style used in HTML. It's blindingly apparent to me that the current state of desktop UI development is largely fractionalized, otherwise there wouldn't be so much duplicated effort in the domain of user interfaces (IE. GTK, XUL, Qt, Winforms, WPF, etc). There are 45 GUI platforms for Python alone It's painfully obvious to me that there should be a general purpose, open source, standardized, platform independent, markup language for designing desktop GUIs. Much like what the W3C made HTML/CSS into. WPF, or more specifically XAML seems like a pretty likely step in the right direction. Why hasn't anyone in the Open Source community (AFAIK) even scratched the surface of this issue. Now that the 'browser wars' are over should we look forward to a future of 'desktop gui wars?' Note: This topic is relatively subjective in the attempt to be 'future-thinking.' I think that desktop GUI development in its current state sucks ((really)hard) and, even though WPF is still in it's infancy, it presents a likely solution to the problem. Has no one in the OS community looked into developing something similar because they don't see the value, or because it's not worth the effort?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78  | Next Page >