Search Results

Search found 2433 results on 98 pages for 'deep freeze'.

Page 74/98 | < Previous Page | 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81  | Next Page >

• TechEd 2012: Windows 8 And Metro

  - by Tim Murphy

  Windows 8 is here (or at least very close) and that was the main feature of this morning’s key note.  Antoine LeBlond started off by apologizing to the IT professionals since he planned on showing code.  I’m not sure if IT Pros are that easily confused or why you would need such a disclaimer.  Developers do real work, IT Pros just play with toys (just kidding). The highlights of the Windows 8 keynote for me started with some of the UI design elements that I had not seen when I was shown one of the Build tablets.  Specifically I liked the AppBar features that we have become used to with Windows Phone and some of the gesture features.  Even though they have been available on other platforms before I think Microsoft really got them right. Two other great features of Windows 8 that they demonstrated were the Hyper-V capabilities and the ability to run Windows 8 anywhere from a USB key.  My jaw dropped through the floor seeing a feature rich OS boot off of a thumb drive. WOW!  I also can’t wait to get rid of dual booting just to run Hyper-V images when developing. The morning continued with a session on Metro XAML development with Tim Heuer.  While included a lot of great XAML Metro demos, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things I found out about Visual Studio 2012.  Finding out that Blend is now integrated with VS2012 was a nice addition after working with them as separate applications was an encouraging start. Moving on to Metro he introduced the nugget that WinRT is Async everywhere.  How deep this model goes will be an interesting thing to find out as I learn more about developing for the platform.  Thankfully he followed that up with a couple of new keywords, await and async, that eliminates a lot of plumbing that has been required in the past for asynchronous transactions. Tim also related that since the Metro framework is relatively small and most apps will use a significant amount of it the entire surface is referenced by default.  This is a contrast to adding namespace and assemblies one after another as we normally do. This was such a power packed session that I can’t detail it all here so here is the teaser list. New icons in VS2012 for extension methods Emulator/simulator testing features for gestures Portable class libraries XAML no longer managed code And so much more …   del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Metro,Tim Heuer,XAML,Widows Phone,Hyper-V,Antoine LeBlond,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012,Visual Studio

  Read the article

• Representing complex object dependencies

  - by max

  I have several classes with a reasonably complex (but acyclic) dependency graph. All the dependencies are of the form: class X instance contains an attribute of class Y. All such attributes are set during initialization and never changed again. Each class' constructor has just a couple parameters, and each object knows the proper parameters to pass to the constructors of the objects it contains. class Outer is at the top of the dependency hierarchy, i.e., no class depends on it. Currently, the UI layer only creates an Outer instance; the parameters for Outer constructor are derived from the user input. Of course, Outer in the process of initialization, creates the objects it needs, which in turn create the objects they need, and so on. The new development is that the a user who knows the dependency graph may want to reach deep into it, and set the values of some of the arguments passed to constructors of the inner classes (essentially overriding the values used currently). How should I change the design to support this? I could keep the current approach where all the inner classes are created by the classes that need them. In this case, the information about "user overrides" would need to be passed to Outer class' constructor in some complex user_overrides structure. Perhaps user_overrides could be the full logical representation of the dependency graph, with the overrides attached to the appropriate edges. Outer class would pass user_overrides to every object it creates, and they would do the same. Each object, before initializing lower level objects, will find its location in that graph and check if the user requested an override to any of the constructor arguments. Alternatively, I could rewrite all the objects' constructors to take as parameters the full objects they require. Thus, the creation of all the inner objects would be moved outside the whole hierarchy, into a new controller layer that lies between Outer and UI layer. The controller layer would essentially traverse the dependency graph from the bottom, creating all the objects as it goes. The controller layer would have to ask the higher-level objects for parameter values for the lower-level objects whenever the relevant parameter isn't provided by the user. Neither approach looks terribly simple. Is there any other approach? Has this problem come up enough in the past to have a pattern that I can read about? I'm using Python, but I don't think it matters much at the design level.

  Read the article

• Was I wrong about JavaScript?

  - by jboyer

  Yes, I was. Recently, I’ve taken a good hard look at JavaScript. I’ve used it before but mostly in the capacity of web design. Using JQuery to make your web page do cool stuff is different than really creating a JavaScript application using all of the language constructs. What I’m finding as I use it more is that I may have been wrong about my assumptions about it. Let me explain.   I enjoyed doing cool stuff with JQuery but the limited experience with JavaScript as a language coupled with the bad things that I heard about it led me to not have any real interest in it. However, JavaScript is ubiquitous on the web and if I want to do any web development, which I do, I need to learn it. So here I am, diving deep into the language with the help of the JavaScript Fundamentals training course at Pluralsight (great training for a low price) and the JavaScript: The Good Parts book by Douglas Crockford.   Now, there are certainly parts of JavaScript that are bad. I think these are well known by any developer that uses it. The parts that I feel are especially egregious are the following: The global object null vs. undefined truthy and falsy limited (nearly nonexistent) scoping ‘==’ and ‘===’ (I just don’t get the reason for coercion)   However, what I am finding hiding under the covers of the bad things is a good language. I am finding that I am legitimately enjoying JavaScript. This I was not expecting. I’m not going to go into a huge dissertation on what I like about it, but some things include: Object literal notation dynamic typing functional style (JavaScript: The Good Parts describes it as LISP in C clothing) JSON (better than XML) There are parts of JavaScript that seem strange to OOP developers like myself. However, just because it is different or seems strange does not mean it is bad. Some differences are quite interesting and useful.   I feel that it is important for developers to challenge their assumptions and also to be able to admit when they are wrong on a topic. Many different situations can arise that lead to this, such as choosing the wrong technology for a problem’s solution, misunderstanding the requirements, etc. I decided to challenge my assumptions about JavaScript instead of moving straight into CoffeeScript or Dart. After exploring it, I find that I am beginning to enjoy it the more I use it. As long as there are those like Crockford to help guide me in the right way to code in JavaScript, I can create elegant and efficient solutions to problems and add another ‘arrow’ to the ‘quiver’, so to speak. I do still intend to learn CoffeeScript to see what the hub-bub is about, but now I no longer have to be afraid of JavaScript as a legitimate programming language.   Has something similar ever happened to you? Tell me about it in the comments below.

  Read the article

• Styling Windows Phone Silverlight Applications

  - by Tim Murphy

  If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get.  One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade.  What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file.  This is of course analogous to placing a style in your HTML file versus an external CSS file.  This is the type of style I will concentrate on in this post. The first thing to look it how styles associate to elements.  TargetType defines the object type that your style will apply to.  In the example below the style is targeting the TextBlock object type. <Style x:Key="TextBlockSmallGray" TargetType="TextBlock"> Next we use a Setter which allows you to apply values for specific attributes of the target object type.  The setters can be a simple value or complex.  The first example here is simply applying a color to the background property of the target. <Setter Property="Background" Value="White"/> The second setter example here is for the same property, but we are applying a the definition of a LinearGradientBrush. <Setter Property="Background"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush> <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Black"/> <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="White"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> The last thing I want to cover here is that you can leverage the system styles and then override or extend them.  The BasedOn attribute of the Style tag allows this sort of inheritance.  In the example below I am going to start with the PhoneTextTitleStyle and then override properties as needed. <Style x:Key="TextBlockTitle" BasedOn="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" TargetType="TextBlock"> So now that we have our styles defined applying it is fairly straight forward.  Add the style name as a static resource to the style property of the element in your page and off you go. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Style="{StaticResource PageGridStyle}"> So this is one step in creating consistency in your application’s look.  In future posts I will dig a little deeper. del.icio.us Tags: windows phone 7,mobile development,windows phone 7 development,.NET,software development,design,UX

  Read the article

• Why would I learn C++11, having known C and C++?

  - by Shahbaz

  I am a programmer in C and C++, although I don't stick to either language and write a mixture of the two. Sometimes having code in classes, possibly with operator overloading, or templates and the oh so great STL is obviously a better way. Sometimes use of a simple C function pointer is much much more readable and clear. So I find beauty and practicality in both languages. I don't want to get into the discussion of "If you mix them and compile with a C++ compiler, it's not a mix anymore, it's all C++" I think we all understand what I mean by mixing them. Also, I don't want to talk about C vs C++, this question is all about C++11. C++11 introduces what I think are significant changes to how C++ works, but it has introduced many special cases that change how different features behave in different circumstances, placing restrictions on multiple inheritance, adding lambda functions, etc. I know that at some point in the future, when you say C++ everyone would assume C++11. Much like when you say C nowadays, you most probably mean C99. That makes me consider learning C++11. After all, if I want to continue writing code in C++, I may at some point need to start using those features simply because my colleagues have. Take C for example. After so many years, there are still many people learning and writing code in C. Why? Because the language is good. What good means is that, it follows many of the rules to create a good programming language. So besides being powerful (which easy or hard, almost all programming languages are), C is regular and has few exceptions, if any. C++11 however, I don't think so. I'm not sure that the changes introduced in C++11 are making the language better. So the question is: Why would I learn C++11? Update: My original question in short was: "I like C++, but the new C++11 doesn't look good because of this and this and this. However, deep down something tells me I need to learn it. So, I asked this question here so that someone would help convince me to learn it." However, the zealous people here can't tolerate pointing out a flaw in their language and were not at all constructive in this manner. After the moderator edited the question, it became more like a "So, how about this new C++11?" which was not at all my question. Therefore, in a day or too I am going to delete this question if no one comes up with an actual convincing argument. P.S. If you are interested in knowing what flaws I was talking about, you can edit my question and see the previous edits.

  Read the article

• Can a 10-bit monitor connection preserve all tones in 8-bit sRGB gradients on a wide-gamut monitor?

  - by hjb981

  This question is about color management and the use of a higher color depth, 10 bits per channel (30 bits in total, resulting in 1.07 billion colors, or 1024 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "deep color") compared to the standard of 8 bits per channel (24 bits in total, 16.7 million colors, 256 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "true color"). Do not confuse with "32 bit color", which usually refers to standard 8 bit color with an extra channel ("alpha channel") for transparency (used to achieve effects like semi-transparent windows etc). The following can be assumed to be in place: 1: A wide-gamut monitor that supports 10-bit input. Further, it can be assumed that the monitor has been calibrated to its native gamut and that an ICC color profile has been created. 2: A graphics card that supports 10-bit output (and is connected to the monitor via DisplayPort). 3: Drivers for the graphics card that support 10-bit output. If applications that support 10-bit output and color profiles would be used, I would expect them to display images that were saved using different color spaces correctly. For example, both an sRGB and an adobeRGB image should be displayed correctly. If an sRGB image was saved using 8 bits per channel (almost always the case), then the 10-bit signal path would ensure that no tonal gradients were lost in the conversion from the sRGB of the image to the native color space of the monitor. For example: If the image contains a pixel that is pure red in 8 bits (255,0,0), the corresponding value in 10 bits would be (1023,0,0). However, since the monitor has a larger color space than sRGB, sending the signal (1023,0,0) to the monitor would result in a red that was too saturated. Therefore, according to the ICC color profile, the signal would be transformed into a different value with less red saturation, for example (987,0,0). Since there are still plenty of levels left between 0 and 987, all 256 values (0-255) for red in the sRGB color space of the file could be uniquely mapped to color-corrected 10-bit values in the monitor's native color space. However, if the conversion was done in 8 bits, (255,0,0) would be translated to (246,0,0), and there would now only be 247 available levels for the red channel instead of 256, degrading the displayed image quality. My question is: how does this work on Ubuntu? Let's say that I use Firefox (which is color-aware and uses ICC color profiles). Would I get 10-bit processing, thus preserving all levels of an 8-bit picture? What is the situation like for other applications, especially photo applications like Shotwell, Rawtherapee, Darktable, RawStudio, Photivo etc? Does Ubuntu differ from other operating systems (Linux and others) on this point?

  Read the article

• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; Ants Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  I just downloaded ANTS Profiler 7.4 to check how fast it is and how deep I can analyze the startup of Visual Studio 2012. The Pro version which is useful does cost 445€ which is ok. To measure a complex system I decided to simply profile VS2012 (Update 1) on my older Intel 6600 2,4GHz with 3 GB RAM and a 32 bit Windows 7. Ants Profiler is really easy to use. So lets try it out. The Ants Profiler does want to start the profiled application by its own which seems to be rather common. I did choose Method Level timing of all managed methods. In the configuration menu I did want to get all call stacks to get full details. Once this is configured you are ready to go.   After that you can select the Method Grid to view Wall Clock Time in ms. I hate percentages which are on by default because I do want to look where absolute time is spent and not something else.   From the Method Grid I can drill down to see where time is spent in a nice and I can look at the decompiled methods where the time is spent. This does really look nice. But did you see the size of the scroll bar in the method grid? Although I wanted all call stacks I do get only about 4 pages of methods to drill down. From the scroll bar count I would guess that the profiler does show me about 150 methods for the complete VS startup. This is nonsense. I will never find a bottleneck in VS when I am presented only a fraction of the methods that were actually executed. I have also tried in the configuration window to also profile the extremely trivial functions but there was no noticeable difference. It seems that the Ants Profiler does filter away way too many details to be useful for bigger systems. If you want to optimize a CPU bound operation inside NUnit then Ants Profiler is with its line level timings a very nice tool to work with. But for bigger stuff it is certainly not usable. I also do not like that I must start the profiled application from the profiler UI. This makes it hard to profile processes which are started by some other process. Next: JetBrains dotTrace

  Read the article

• Feedback from SQLBits 8

  - by Peter Larsson

  This years SQLBits occurred in Brighton. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to attend the full conference, I did a presentation at Saturday. Getting to Brighton was easy. Drove to Copenhagen airport at 0415, flew 0605 and arrived at Gatwick 0735. Then I took the direct train to Brighton and showed up at 0830, just one hour before presenting. This was the easy part. Getting home was much worse. Presentation ended at 1030 and I had to rush to the train station to get back to London, change to tube for Heathrow. Made it at the gate just 15 seconds before closing. That included a half mile run in the airport… Anyway, yesterday I got the feedback for my presentation. It does look good, especially since English is not my first language. This is the first graph Seems to be just halfway between conference average and best session. I can live with that. Second graph shows more detail about attendees voting. It also look acceptable. A wider spread for the 9’s, but it is an inevitable effect from how attendees percept the session. I did get a lot of 8’s and the lower grades in an descending order. The two people voting 4 and 5 didn’t say why they voted this so I don’t know how to remedy this. Third graph is about each category of votes.   Again, I find this acceptable. The Session abstract and Speaker’s knowledge seems to follow attendees expectations compared to conference average. I seem to have met the attendees expectations (and some more) for the other four categories, also compared to conference average. Since this did encourage me, I believe I will present some more at future meetings. I do have a new presentation about something all developers are doing every day but they may not know it. I will also cover this new topic in the next Deep Dives II book. Stay tuned! //Peter

  Read the article

• Oracle BPM and Open Data integration development

  - by drrwebber

  Rapidly developing Oracle BPM application solutions with data source integration previously required significant Java and JDeveloper skills. Now using open source tools for open data development significantly reduces the coding needed.  Key tasks can be performed with visual drag and drop designing combined with menu selections entry and automatic form generation directly from XSD schema definitions. The architecture used is extremely lightweight, portable, open platform and scalable allowing integration with a variety of Oracle and non-Oracle data sources and systems. Two videos available on YouTube walk through the process at both an introductory conceptual level and then a deep dive into the programming needed using JDeveloper, Oracle BPM composer and Oracle WLS (WebLogic Server) along with the CAM editor and Open-XDX open source tools. Also available are coding samples and resources from the GitHub project page, along with working online demonstration resources on the VerifyXML site. Combining Oracle BPM with these open source tools provides a comprehensive simple and elegant solution set. Development times are slashed and rapid prototyping is enabled. Also existing data sources can be integrated using open data formats with either XML or JSON along with CRUD accessing via the Open-XDX Java component. The Open-XDX tool is a code-free approach where data mapping is configured as templates using visual drag and drop in the CAM Editor open source tool.  XML or JSON is then automatically generated or processed (output or input) and appropriate SQL statements created to support the data accessing.   Also included is the ability to integrate with fillable PDF forms via the XML templates and the Java PDF form filling library.  Again minimal Java coding is needed to associate the XML source content with the PDF named fields.  The Oracle BPM forms can be automatically generated from XSD schema definitions that are built from the data mapping templates.  This dramatically simplifies development work as all the integration artifacts needed are created by the open source editor toolset. The developer level video is designed as a tutorial with segments, hands-on demonstrations and reviews.  This allows developers to learn the techniques and approaches used in incremental steps. The intended audience ranges from data analysts to developers and assumes only entry level Java skills and knowledge.  Most actions are menu driven while Java coding is limited to simply configuring values and parameters along with performing builds and deployments from JDeveloper and Oracle WLS.   Additional existing Oracle online training resources can be referenced on Oracle BPM and WLS that cover other normal delivery aspects such as user management and application deployment.

  Read the article

• A little gem from MPN&ndash;FREE online course on Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform

  - by Eric Nelson

  I know a lot of technical people who work in partners (ISVs, System Integrators etc). I know that virtually none of them would think of going to the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) learning portal to find some deep and high quality technical content. Instead they would head to MSDN, Channel 9, msdev.com etc. I am one of those people :-) Hence imagine my surprise when i stumbled upon this little gem Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform (your company and hence your live id need to be a member of MPN – which is free to join). This is first class stuff – and represents about 4 hours which is really 8 if you stop and ponder :) Course Structure The course is divided into eight modules.  Each module explores a different factor that needs to be considered as part of the migration process. Module 1:  Introduction:  This section provides an introduction to the training course, highlighting the values of the Windows Azure Platform for developers. Module 2:  Dynamic Environment: This section goes into detail about the dynamic environment of the Windows Azure Platform. This session will explain the difference between current development states and the Windows Azure Platform environment, detail the functions of roles, and highlight development considerations to be aware of when working with the Windows Azure Platform. Module 3:  Local State: This session details the local state of the Windows Azure Platform. This section details the different types of storage within the Windows Azure Platform (Blobs, Tables, Queues, and SQL Azure). The training will provide technical guidance on local storage usage, how to write to blobs, how to effectively use table storage, and other authorization methods. Module 4:  Latency and Timeouts: This session goes into detail explaining the considerations surrounding latency, timeouts and how to assess an IT portfolio. Module 5:  Transactions and Bandwidth: This session details the performance metrics surrounding transactions and bandwidth in the Windows Azure Platform environment. This session will detail the transactions and bandwidth costs involved with the Windows Azure Platform and mitigation techniques that can be used to properly manage those costs. Module 6:  Authentication and Authorization: This session details authentication and authorization protocols within the Windows Azure Platform. This session will detail information around web methods of authorization, web identification, Access Control Benefits, and a walkthrough of the Windows Identify Foundation. Module 7:  Data Sensitivity: This session details data considerations that users and developers will experience when placing data into the cloud. This section of the training highlights these concerns, and details the strategies that developers can take to increase the security of their data in the cloud. Module 8:  Summary Provides an overall review of the course.

  Read the article

• The Minimalist's Approach to Content Governance

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  This week on the blog, we want to focus on the content lifecylce and how important it is to have the tools in place to be able to properly manage all te phases of the content lifecylce. John Brunswick has some great advice when it comes to this topic, so expect to hear a lot from him this week! Originally posted by John Brunswick. Let's be honest - content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting. It is easy to quickly start producing content, but the challenge is ensuring that the environment is easy to navigate and use on the third week and during the third year.   What can be done to bridge this gap? Over the next few blog entries let's take a pragmatic, minimalistic view of a process that can help any team manage a wealth of unstructured information. Based on an earlier article that I wrote around Portal Governance, I am going to focus on using technology as much as possible to support the governance of content with minimal involvement from users. The only certainty about content production is that business users are not fans of maintaining content. Maintenance is overhead and is a long-term investment thats value will possibly not be realized under the current content creator's watch. To add context to how we will use technical tools in this process, each post will highlight one section of the content lifecycle process as outlined below Content Lifecycle Stages 1. Request - Understand the education, purpose, resource and success criteria for content 2. Create - Determine access and workflow for content 3. Manage - Understand ownership and review cycles 4. Retire - Act on thresholds established during the request stage Within each state we will also elaborate as to 1. Why - why would we entertain doing this? 2. How - the steps that are needed to make it happen 3. Impact - what is the net benefit or loss based on the process Over the course of this week, we will dive deep into the stages and the minimal amount of time, effort and process within each to make some meaningful gains in the improvement of user experience and productivity in their search for information. It might be a stretch to say that we can make content governance exciting, but hopefully it can end up being painless and paying dividends. And if you'd like to hear first hand from a customer that is managing their content lifecycle with Oracle WebCenter, be sure to join us on Wednesday for this webcast "ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter"!

  Read the article

• OTN Virtual Technology Summit - July 9 - Middleware Track

  - by OTN ArchBeat

  The Architecture of Analytics: Big Time Big Data and Business Intelligence This four-session track, part of the free OTN Virtual Technology Summit on July 9, will present a solution architect's perspective on how business intelligence products in Oracle's Fusion Middleware family and beyond fit into an effective big data architecture, offering insight and expertise from Oracle ACE Directors and product team experts specializing in business Intelligence to help you meet your big data business intelligence challenges. Register now! Sessions Oracle Big Data Appliance Case Study: Using Big Data to Analyze Cancer-Genome Relationships Tom Plunkett, Lead Author of the Oracle Big Data Handbook What does it take to build an award winning Big Data solution? This presentation takes a deep technical dive into the use of the Oracle Big Data Appliance in a project for the National Cancer Institute's Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. The Frederick National Laboratory and the Oracle team won several awards for analyzing relationships between genomes and cancer subtypes with big data, including the 2012 Government Big Data Solutions Award, the 2013 Excellence.Gov Finalist for Innovation, and the 2013 ComputerWorld Honors Laureate for Innovation. [30 mins] Getting Value from Big Data Variety Richard Tomlinson, Director, Product Management, Oracle Big data variety implies big data complexity. Performing analytics on diverse data typically involves mashing up structured, semi-structured and unstructured content. So how can we do this effectively to get real value? How do we relate diverse content so we can start to analyze it? This session looks at how we approach this tricky problem using Endeca Information Discovery. [30 mins] How To Leverage Your Investment In Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Within a Big Data Architecture Oracle ACE Director Kevin McGinley More and more organizations are realizing the value Big Data technologies contribute to the return on investment in Analytics. But as an increasing variety of data types reside in different data stores, organizations are finding that a unified Analytics layer can help bridge the divide in modern data architectures. This session will examine how you can enable Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to play a role in a unified Analytics layer and the benefits and use cases for doing so. [30 mins] Oracle Data Integrator 12c As Your Big Data Data Integration Hub Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c), as well as being able to integrate and transform data from application and database data sources, also has the ability to load, transform and orchestrate data loads to and from Big Data sources. In this session, we'll look at ODI12c's ability to load data from Hadoop, Hive, NoSQL and file sources, transform that data using Hive and MapReduce processing across the Hadoop cluster, and then bulk-load that data into an Oracle Data Warehouse using Oracle Big Data Connectors. We will also look at how ODI12c enables ETL-offloading to a Hadoop cluster, with some tips and techniques on real-time capture into a Hadoop data reservoir and techniques and limitations when performing ETL on big data sources. [90 mins] Register now!

  Read the article

• I didn't mean to become a database developer, but now I am. Should I stop or try to get better?

  - by pretlow majette

  20 years ago I couldn't afford even a cheap POS program when I opened my first surf shop in the Virgin Islands. I bought a copy of Paradox (remember that?) in 1990 and spent months in a back room scratching out a POS application. Over many iterations, including a switch to Access (2000)/SQL Server (2003), I built a POS and backoffice solution that runs four stores with multiple cash registers, a warehouse and office. Until recently, all my stores were connected to the same LAN (in a small shopping center) and performance wasn't an issue. Now that we've opened a location in the States that's changed. Connecting to my local server via the internet has slowed that locations application to a crawl. This is partly due to the slow and crappy dsl service we have in the Virgin Islands, and partly due to my less-than-professional code and sql. With other far-away stores in the works, I need a better solution. I like my application. My staff knows it well, and I'm not inclined to take on the expense of a proper commercial solution. So where does that leave me? I should probably host my sql online to sidestep the slow dsl here. I think I can handle cleaning up my SQL querries to speed that up a bit. What about Access? My version seems so old, but I don't like the newer versions with the 'ribbon'. There are so many options... Should I be learning Visual Studio with an eye on moving completely to the web? Will my VBA skills help me at all there? I don't have the luxury of a year at the keyboard to figure it out anymore. What about dotnetnuke, sharepoint, or lightswitch? They all seem like possibilities, but even understanding their capabilities is daunting. I'm pretty deep into it, but maybe I should bail and hire a consultant or programmer. That sounds expensive tho, and there's no guarantee there either... Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Or, if anybody is interested in buying a small chain of surf shops...

  Read the article

• Are You Meeting Social Customer Service Expectations?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Whether it’s B2B or B2C, one sure path to repeat business is making sure your buyer has a memorably pleasant and successful customer service experience with you. If they get that kind of treatment consistently, that’s called a relationship. And those aren’t broken easily. Social customer service, driven by integrated SRM (social relationship management) technology, is the venue that can effectively connect customers not only to the brand, but to other customers. Positive experiences, once administered, don’t just rest with the recipient. They’re published in the form of public raves and peer-to-peer recommendation, a force far more actionable than push advertising. What’s more, your customers have come to expect access to you and satisfaction from you using social. An NM Incite study shows 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect to get an answer from brands the same day they post to them on their social assets. To make sure you’re responding, you’ve got to have a tech platform that’s set up to moderate and alert so you’ll know ASAP a customer needs help. The more integrated your social enterprise is, the faster you can not only respond, but respond with the answer they’re looking for, because your system is connected to the internal resources that can surface the answer or put wheels in motion to rectify the situation in the shortest amount of time possible. But if you go to the necessary lengths to make sure your customers feel valued and important, will they really reward you? The study says 71% of consumers who got quick and effective responses from companies they contacted via social were more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and followers. So yes, sweeping people off their feet pays big dividends in terms of word-of-mouth marketing. But you should be keenly aware of the reverse side of that coin. Give people a negative experience, either in real world or virtual customer service, and that message is highly likely to get amplified through social channels faster and louder. Only 36% of the NM Incite study’s respondents reported that their problems were solved quickly and effectively. 36%? That’s hardly an impressive number. It gets worse. 10% never got so much as a response - at all. Going back to the relationship analogy, companies that are this deep in the ditch where customer service is concerned are making their girl or boyfriends really easy for a competitor to steal. Given the technology tools and data available right now for having an intimate knowledge of the customer, what products they’ve purchased, likely problems with those products, effective resolutions to those problems, and follow-up communication to gauge satisfaction, there are fewer excuses than ever for making the lifeblood of your business feel like you couldn’t care less. @mikestiles

  Read the article

• Response: Agile's Second Chasm

  - by Malcolm Anderson

  William Pietri over at Agile Focus has written an interesting article entitled, "Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)" in which he talks about how agile development has fallen into a common trap where large companies are now spending a lot of money hiring agile (Scrum) consultants just so that they can say they are agile, but all the while avoiding any change that is required by Scrum.   It echoes the questions that I've been asking for a while, "Can a fortune 500 company actually do agile development?"  I'm starting to think that the answer is "usually not"   William ask 3 questions at the end of his article that I will answer here.   1) Have I seen agile development brought in and then preemptively customized (read: made into ScrummerFall)?   Yes, Scrum is hard and disruptive.  It's a spotlight on company dysfunction.  In a low trust environment like most fortune 500 companies Scrum will be subverted by anyone who has ever seen "transparency" translate into someone being laid off.   2) If I had to do it all over again, would I change anything?  No, this is a natural progression, but the agile principles are powerful enough, that the companies that don't adopt them will no longer be competitive and will start to fail.   3) Is this situation solvable?  I think it is.  I think that one of the issues is that you often see companies implementing Scrum, but avoiding the agile engineering practices.  I believe that you cannot do one without the other.  Scrum keeps the ship sailing in smooth deep waters.  The agile engineering practices keep the engine running smoothly and cleanly.  If you implement agile engineering practices without Scrum, you run the risk of ending up with a great running piece of software that is useful to no one.  On the other hand, implementing cargo-cult Scrum without the agile engineering practices and you end up (especially in a fortune 500 company) being steered in the right direction, but with your development practices coming to a dead halt because you have code that can not keep up with the changes in requirements.   If you are trying to do Scrum, make sure that you hire some agile engineering coaches, or else you may find your deveolpment engines grinding to a dead halt in the middle of the open ocean.

  Read the article

• Rolling With the Punches

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  So I’ve been tweeting the last little while “Rolling with the punches” and I’ve had some people ask me what that meant. Whether you’re running a conference (like I am this week), or a project, or a birthday party for a 2 year old, you need to be ready to handle those things that are unexpected. Risk mitigation can only go so far and its at those times that you need to become resourceful. So let me tell you what the last few days have been like. Today is the first day of Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg, a conference that I run. On Friday I was informed that my keynote speaker had lost his voice, one of my speakers had a family emergency and had to back out, and I got a warning from another that he was travelling over the weekend and if there was a storm or something he may not be able to get back by Monday for his talk. A storm didn’t happen, but their car did break down and he was delayed. Finally, Saturday night I took my printing order to Staples. It was at 5 and they closed at 6, and I had a bunch of surveys to be printed and cut. The girl working said that she’d have it ready by the next day (Sunday). Her intent was to come in the next morning and finish the job. Unfortunately, she had to be hospitalized that night and never made it into work…and never informed anyone of the remaining work. They found out at 3pm when I came to pick it up and there was no way they’d be able to cut everything in time. So how did we roll with these punches? - Miguel, my keynote speaker, was a trooper and was able to do the keynote but asked that his session get moved from Monday to Tuesday. This is why I wait until the last day before printing out schedules, they can change up to the event and even later. - I was able to move some sessions around to accommodate my stranded speaker and fill the empty slot from the speaker that couldn’t make it. - Staples was able to get me half the cut surveys so I took those and my wife will pick up the rest today. I altered how we’d collect session surveys, and actually I think it’ll work better. So all of this is to say, plan but also plan for what you can’t plan for – there will be things that happen that blindside you, that you’re not sure how to handle or solve. Stop, take a deep breath, and don’t feel that you need to limit yourself to the boundaries that you initially set for yourself. Roll with the punch and learn from it so that you can avoid the blow next time. Now, back to the conference! D

  Read the article

• GRUB 2 freezing at OS selection screen, what could be the cause?

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Mains power is somewhat unreliable where I live, so every now and then, the computer gets rebooted when the PSU can't maintain proper voltage during a brown-out or momentary black-out. It's happened a few times recently that when power is restored, the BIOS POST completes successfully, GRUB starts to load and then freezes. I've seen this at the Welcome to GRUB! message, but it seems to happen more often just past the switch to the graphical OS list. At this point, the computer will not respond to anything (arrow keys, control commands, Ctrl+Alt+Del, ...) - it simply sits there displaying this image, seemingly doing nothing more. At that point, turning the computer off using the power button and letting it sit for a while (cooling down?) has allowed it to boot successfully. Turning the computer off and immediately back on seems to give the same result (successful POST then freeze in GRUB). This behavior began recently, although does not seem to be directly correlated with my hard disk woes (although it may be relevant that GRUB resides on that physical disk, I don't know). Once the computer has booted, it runs without a hitch. I know that a "proper" solution would be to invest in a UPS, but what might be causing behavior like this? I was thinking in terms of perhaps the CPU shutting down as a thermal control measure, but if that was the cause then wouldn't I see similar freezes during use (which I do not)? What else could cause freezes apparently closely but not perfectly related to the BIOS handover from POST to OS bootloader? The BIOS settings are to reset to previous power status after a power loss. Since the PC in question is almost always turned on, this means restore to full power status. I have no expansion cards installed that make any BIOS extensions known by screen output during the boot process, at least, but I do have a few expansion cards installed. Haven't made any changes in that regard in a long time, now. I haven't touched GRUB itself for a long time, whether configuration or binaries, so I don't think that's the problem. Also, it doesn't really make sense that a bug in GRUB would manifest itself only once in a blue moon but significantly more often after a power failure.

  Read the article

• Disable Acer eRecovery system

  - by Joel Coehoorn

  The meat of this question is that I'm looking for a way to either require a password before using a recovery partition or "break" the recovery partition (specifically, Acer eRecovery) in a way that I can later "unbreak" only by booting normally into windows first. Here's the full details: I have a set of new Acer Veriton n260g machines in a computer lab. A lot work went into setting up this lab to work well - for example, Office 2007 and other programs needed by the students were installed, all windows updates are applied, and a default desktop is setup. All in all it's several hours work to fully set up one machine. Unfortunately, I don't currently have the ability to easily image these machines, and even if I did I would want to avoid downtime even while an image is restored. Therefore, I've taken steps to lock them down — namely DeepFreeze and a bios password to prevent booting from anywhere but the frozen hard drive. DeepFreeze is an amazing product — as long as you boot from the frozen hard drive, there is no way to actually make permanent changes to that hard drive. Anything you do is wiped after the machine restarts. It lets me give students the leeway to do what they want on lab computers without worrying about them breaking something. The problem is that even with the bios locked and set to only boot from the hard drive, these Acers still have a simple way to choose a different boot source: shut them down and put a paper click in a little hole at the top while you turn it on again. This puts them into the "Acer eRecovery" mode. This by itself is no big deal — you can still power cycle with no impact. But if you then click through the menu to reset the machine (we're now past the point of curiosity and on to intent) it will wipe the hard drive and restore it to the original state. Of course, a few students have already figured this out and reset a couple machines. That's unfortunate, but inevitable. I don't want to destroy the ability to do this entirely (which I could by repartitioning the drives to remove the recovery partition) but I would like a way to require a password first, or "break" the recovery system in a way that I can "unbreak" only if I first un-freeze the hard drive in DeepFreeze. Any ideas?

  Read the article

• Avoid read-write access to bad sectors on HDD to continue working on the HDD

  - by goldenmean

  I have a HP Pavilion dv6446 notebook. It had Windows Vista Home premium. After 4.5+ years of usage, just recently it started malfunctioning. While working fine, its screen goes white or sometimes some thin black lines horizontally. Laptop freezes. Hard reboot works. Again it works for some 2 hrs or so, same error. To diagnose I did run the Memory and Hard disk check which is present in the Bios Setup. Memory test passed. Hard disk test returned an error saying something like - "Replace the hard disk". Bad.. Some sectors or platters have gone bad on the disk. (I confirmed this later by further tests mentioned below) Then I tried installing a Ubuntu 11.10. It listed 3 partitions /dev/sda1, sda2, sda2. It again gave error and could not install grub loader on /dev/sda1. Bad sectors. Then redid the Ubuntu installation, this time asked to to install the Ubuntu on /dev/sda3. and kept /dev/sda1 for /home. Installed fine, and works fine as well. Due to unavailability of WiFi/ Ethernet driver for that adapters under Ubuntu( at least I could not configure them and get the networking working at all), I decided to go back to reinstall windows Vista. It did install fine. I did not have to format one data partition which has my data. I just formatted one partition which installed Windows So in effect HDD has not undergone a full format here. Worked ok for 1 day. But same white screen and freeze happened. Looks like while it is in use, it accesses the bad sectors for storing some data and that's when it bombs. I am inclined to think HDD has not failed fully or crashed but has developed bad sectors. Else if it was a HDD crash, it would have refused to boot at all let alone install on it. Questions: Is there any HDD test check under windows or any such tools windows/linux based ewhere which can identify the bad sectors of the HDD and 'lock/isolate' them from further read-write access of any kind. If not what are my options, if any to salvage this laptop HDD without replacing it. EDIT: Would the Disk Error checking tool under windows help in any way?

  Read the article

• Should use EXT4 or XFS to be able to 'sync'/backup to S3?

  - by Rafa

  It's my first message here, so bear with me... (I have already checked quite a few of the "Related Questions" suggested by the editor) Here's the setup, a brand new dedicated server (8GB RAM, some 140+ GB disk, Raid 1 via HW controller, 15000 RPM) it's a production web server (with MySQL in it, too, not just serving web requests); not a personal desktop computer or similar. Ubuntu Server 64bit 10.04 LTS We have an Amazon EC2+EBS setup with the EBS volume formatted as XFS for easily taking snapshots to S3, via AWS' console. We are now migrating to the dedicated server and I want to be able to backup our data to Amazon's S3. The main reason being the possibility of using the latest snapshot from an EC2 instance in case of hardware failure on the dedicated server. There are two approaches I am thinking of: do a "simple" file-based backup with rsync, dumping the database' and other files, and uploading to amazon via S3 API commands, or to an EC2 instance, or something. do a file-system "freeze" (using XFS) with the usual ebs/ec2 snapshot tool to take part of the file system, take a snapshot, and upload it to Amazon. Here's my question (or series of questions): Can I safely use XFS for the whole system as the main and only format on the dedicated server? If not, is it safe to use EXT4? Or should I use something else? would then be possible to make snapshots of the system to upload to Amazon? Is it possible/feasible/practical to do what I want to do, anyway? any recommendations? When searching around for S3/EBS/XFS, anything relevant to my problem is usually focused on taking snapshots of a XFS system that is already an EBS volume. My intention is to do it in a "real"/metal dedicated server. Update: I just saw this on Wikipedia: XFS does not provide direct support for snapshots, as it expects the snapshot process to be implemented by the volume manager. I had always assumed that I could choose 2 ways of doing snapshots: via LVM or via XFS (without LVM). After reading this, I realize these 2 options are more like it: With XFS: 1) do xfs_freeze; 2) copy the frozen files via, eg, rsync; 3) unfreeze xfs With LVM and XFS: 1) do xfs_freeze; 2) make a binary copy of the frozen fs via lvcreate and related commands; 3) unfreeze xfs; 4) somehow backup the LVM snapshot. Thanks a lot in advance, Let me know if I need to clarify something.

  Read the article

• Google Chrome issues

  - by Ben Hooper

  I'm an avid user of Chrome and would defend it to the death but there is no denying that it has issues, and I've been experiencing a lot of them recently. Issues Stuck tabs Issue: Around 60% of the time (higher when the system has just started), when Chrome is launched, some or all of the pinned tabs and startup pages will get stuck in the counter-clockwise-rotating "contacting server" mode and never snap out of it. Fix: Quit and launch Chrome until they load properly (this really isn't good, as quitting and launching Chrome can and has cleared all pinned tabs). Extra Information: If you stop the loading and re-enter the URL then the page will load perfectly. The amount of pinned tabs or startup pages seems to be irrelevant, but I could be wrong.   "Downloaded/out of" Issue: Each item in the download bar has a downloaded status section, formatted as "downloaded/out of". Sometimes Chrome doesn't display the "out of" part.   Collapsed settings windows Issue: In Chrome version 19(ish)+, settings are configured via overlayed / popup windows. Sometimes, the window will open fully collapsed. Fix: Resize Chrome's window or open the developer tools. "Network Error" with large downloads Issue: Sometimes, when downloading large files (500MB+) Chrome will download the entire file, the download status will freeze (for example, "1 GB/1 GB") for a few minutes, report "Network error", and delete the .crdownload file. Extra Information: The same file from the same website on the same computer downloads perfectly in other browsers. The website and file type seem to be irrelevant.   Information: I've experienced some of these issues on my home PC and some on my work PC, both of which are Windows 7 Ultimate x64. The only things that link them are my Google account (all settings are synced). Updating Chrome hasn't worked. Most of these issues presented themselves around about version 17 and have continued right through to 21 (current). Uninstalling Chrome, deleting all data in %programFiles(x86)%\Google and %localAppData%\Google, and reinstalling hasn't worked. I have yet to see whether disabling all extensions would make a difference, but it's hard to diagnose as these issues don't occur 100% of the time.   In my case, I don't know if there's an actual solution. I'm just curious as to whether anyone else is having similar issues to those that I'm experiencing. At least then I'll know it's an issue with Chrome itself.

  Read the article

• Transient network dropout for Xen DomU's

  - by Stephen C

  We've got a CentOS server running a cluster of virtuals. Occasionally the cluster's internal network drops out for a minute or so ... and then comes back. The problem is somehow related to the actual network traffic, but it is not a simple load issue. (The system is generally lightly loaded, and the problem occurs irrespective of actual load.) The setup: CentOS 5.6 on Dom0, various CentOS on the DomU's Hardware - a Dell R710 with a BroadCom NextXpress 2 NIC (sigh) using the latest drivers for the NIC from BroadCom Xen configured to use network-bridge and vif-bridge Some iptable tweaks to route an unrelated port to one of the virtuals. The system has one externally visible IP address, and Dom0 runs an Apache httpd configured with a number of virtual hosts each of which reverse proxies to web servers running on the virtuals. (The virtuals have to be NAT'ed, primarily because we don't have enough allocated public IP addresses.) The symptoms: Works fine most of the time. When someone tries to UPLOAD a large file to one virtuals, the internal network drops out ... for all virtuals: The Dom0 httpd sees a network timeout talking to the backend server on the virtual and reports a 502. A previously established ssh connection from Dom0 to any of the DomU's freezes. Our monitoring shows ping failures for traffic between virtuals. The Xen consoles to the DomU's do not freeze. No log messages in any log files that I can see, on either Dom0 or the DomU's ... apart from the Dom0 httpd logs. After a minute or so, the problem clears by itself. This is 100% reproducible. What we've tried: Downloading, building and installing the latest BNX2 driver on Dom0 Turning off MSI on the NIC - adding "options bnx2 disable_msi=1" to /etc/modprobe.conf Turning off tcp segmentation offload - "ethtool -K eth0 tso off". Sacrificing a black rooster at midnight. I've exhausted all my options apart from switching to KVM ... or slaughtering more roosters. Any suggestions?

  Read the article

• Well....a ghost lives in my server...

  - by tsgiannis

  Hello to every body and greetings from Greece I have a rather unusual situation and i am running out of ideas. I have this old server (IBM x205 - P4 2.4Ghz,3xSCSI 36gb) and i was about a year ago i decided to use it as an additional domain controller,fax & file server...for this task i had a Delock 70154 SATA card along with 2x320 SATA II HDDs Everything was going super smoothly until about 3 weeks ago. I was on a trip and i was informermed when i got back that the server was found frozen...well i considered it was a glitch since a simple powerdown power up fixed everything.Again 2 weeks ago another freeze situation....it got suspicious but again power down power up everything was running.... Last again it frozen and when i power it up it came with a message that the Domain services could not start due to NTDS corruption....booting in safe mode revealed that there was an issue with the SATA Raid (degraded). After a lot of searching i degraded the server...cleaned Active Directory and pulled both HDDs out (one of these was really BAD ) and recovered my files (i had some problems with ho Delock handles the redudant HDD). Right now my server is vanilla simple...with only what the factory installed and here is where the fun begins. Everyday when i arrive at the office i find this particular machine dead..and i mean total dead...just a black screen and nothing else...the cpu fan is working ,the psu is working .keyboard and mouse are dead(they also lock my kvm) ...network is dead.... the machine is DEAD. I power it down forcilly ...i power it up and for the 8 hours i am in the office it works,either idling or running some kind of diagnostic...when i leave the office after some time..it maybe half an hour ...it maybe 4 hours the machine dies...at least this is the information the event log shows (" the previous shutdown at xx:xx:xx was unexpected) Well i must admit i am runnig out of ideas.... I have tried Memtest....nothing Passmark burn in test.....nothing Carefull study of the event log.....nothing Set Instead of restart..BSOD....nothing Power sceheme to sleep...all set to never. i know there are a lot of other tools that heavily stress a machine like occt but .... the machine is old...today i will give them a try nevertheless ..... One idea is to reformat it...but ... i really like to find what is causing this because i could get to a situation that everything is working for a while and kaboom...one day again is dying.. I really need a helping hand and every opinion / idea is well welcomed.... iknow the obvious solution is to never leave the office but....i have a life...sory server...:) P.S this situation with the machine dying some time after is going on for about one week...everyday i would set either the RAID to rebuild....or to copy/recover files and while everythig was working

  Read the article

• Linux bonded Interfaces hanging periodically

  - by David

  I've several hosts that are showing problems with connectivity. When working from the command line, for example, typing is frozen for a second or so, then recovers - then it does it again. The most egregious example host would freeze (input) for 15-30 seconds, then recover and go out 5 seconds later. Switching cables didn't do anything - but removing one of the physical cables caused everything to clear up instantly (which why I think this is a network problem). Looking at the network I couldn't see any packets floating that would explain this. These ethernet interfaces (Gigabit Dell) were working normally previously, but since we moved the systems - and put them on a new set of switches - this has been a problem on multiple theoretically identically-configured hosts. The original switches were an HP Procurve 1810-24G and an HP Procurve 1800-24G connected with LLDP; the new switches are both Cisco SG 200-26, which I understand are rebranded Linksys switches. Is this caused by a problem with the switches? Is it the switch configurations? Are the Cisco switches incapable of handling this? I don't see where the configuration is located; I searched the usual /etc/sysconfig/network/devices but there's nothing in there about options (like mii polling) and nothing about the method of balancing the two. Searching scripts, I can't find anything in /etc/init.d/network either. The hosts are almost all Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x systems (5.6, 5.7) but some are Ubuntu Server 10.04.3 Lucid Lynx. I need help with both if it comes to that. UPDATE: We're also seeing some problems with servers on the original switches. The HP switches and the Cisco switches are also interconnected (temporarily); there is a cable run from one switch to the next. Pings on any of these hosts show about one ICMP packet out of every 5-6 getting dropped (timed out). Could there be an interaction between the two switches? Oh, and the hosts are using bonding with Balance-RR as the method.

  Read the article

• How to allow unprivileged apache/PHP to do a root task (CentOS)

  - by Chris

  I am setting up a sort of personal dropbox for our customers on a CentOS 6.3 machine. The server will be accessible thru SFTP and a proprietary http service base on PHP. This machine will be in our DMZ so it has to be secure. Because of this I have apache running as an unprivileged user, hardened the security on apache, the OS, PHP, applied a lot of filtering in iptables and applied some restrictive TCP Wrappers. Now you might have suspected this one was coming, SELinux is also set to enforcing. I'm setting up PAM to use MySQL so my users in the web application can login. These users will all be in a group that can use SSH only for SFTP and users will be chrooted to their own 'home' folder. To allow this SELinux wants the folders to have the user_home_t tag. Also the parent directory needs to be writable by root only. If these restrictions are not met SELinux will kill the SSH pipe immediately. The files that need to be accessible thru both http and SFTP so I have made a SELinux module to allow Apache to search/attr/read/write etc. to directories with the user_home_dir_t tag. As sftp users are stored in MySQL I want to setup their home dirs upon user creation. This is a problem since Apache has no write access to the /home dir, it's only writable by root since it's required to keep SELinux and OpenSSH happy. Basically I need to let Apache do only a few tasks as root and only within /home. So I need to somehow elevate the privileges temporarily or let root do these tasks for apache instead. What I need to have apache do with root privileges is the following. mkdir /home/userdir/ mkdir /home/userdir/userdir chmod -R 0755 /home/userdir umask 011 /home/userdir/userdir chcon -R -t user_home_t /home/userdir chown -R user:sftp_admin /home/userdir/userdir chmod 2770 /home/userdir/userdir This would create a home for the user, now I have an idea that might work, cron. That would mean the server needs to check for users that have no home every minute, then when creating users the interface would freeze for an average of 30 seconds before the account creation can be confirmed which I do not prefer. Does anybody know if something can be done with sudoers? Or any other idea's are welcome... Thanks for your time!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81  | Next Page >