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• Simple tips to design a Customer Journey Map

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  “A model can abstract to a level that is comprehensible to humans, without getting lost in details.” -The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Inception using Post-it, StoryBoards, Lego or Mindmaping Techniques The first step in a Customer Experience project is to describe customer interactions creating a customer journey map. Modeling is never easy, so to succeed on this effort, it is very convenient that your CX´s team have some “abstract thinking” skills. Besides is very helpful to consult a Business Service Design offered by an Interactive Agency to lead your inception process. Initially, you may start by a free discussion using post-it cards; storyboards; even lego or any other brainstorming technique you like. This will help you to get your mind into the path followed by the customer to purchase your product or to consume any business service you actually offer to your customers, or plan to offer in the near future. (from www.servicedesigntools.org) Colorful Mind Maps are very useful to document and share meeting ideas. Some Mind Maps software providers as ThinkBuzzan provide trial versions, and you will find more mindmapping options on this post by Mashable. Finally to produce a quick one, I do recommend Wise, an entirely online mindmaping service. On my view the best results in terms of communication will always come for an artistic hand-made drawing. Customer Experience Mind Map Example Making your first Customer Journey Map To add some more formalization to your thoughts, there is a wide offering for designing Customer Journey Maps. A Customer Map can be represented as an oriented graph in which another follows each step. The one below is the most simple Customer Journey you can draw. Nothing more than a couple of pictures, numbers and lines to design the customer steps sequence in the purchase process. Very simple Customer Journey for Social Mobile Shopping There are a lot of Customer Journey templates much more sophisticated available  in the Web using a variety of styles, as per example this one with a focus on underlining emotional experience, or this other worksheet template. Representing different interaction devices on the vertical axis, and touchpoints / requirements and existing gaps horizontally  is today´s most common format for Customer Journeys. From Customer Journey Maps to CX Technology Adoption Plans Once you have your map ready, you can start to identify the IT infrastructure requirements for your CXProject. By analyzing customer problems and improvement opportunities with maps, you will then identify the technology gaps and the new investment requirements in your IT infrastructure. Deeping step by step from the more abstract to the more concrete is the best guarantee to take the right IT investment decisions.  ¡Remember to keep your initial customer journey safe on your pocket in every one of your CX´s project meetings- that´s you map to success!

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• Live CD / Live USB much faster than full install

  - by user29347

  I've observed it on both laptops I own! HP Compaq nx6125 and Ubuntu 11.04 x64 - somewhat solved Lenovo Thinkpad T500 and Ubuntu 11.10 x64 - help needed! I'm still struggling with the Thinkpad to get performance level similar to that of 10 y.o. laptops... All in all a really serious issue with multiple versions of Ubuntu that renders computers with perfectly compatible hardware unusable, as far as out of the box experience is concerned. Troubleshooting resultant issues seems to be a hard case even for users with some experience with installing graphics drivers. EDIT: I can't really post additional details. Two different ubuntu versions, two laptops, two different set of graph. drivers (OS vs ATI prop.) - all with the same symptoms. Also I can't stress enough how massive the performance degradation is compared to a healthy system. For that reason I ask for input from people who may know roughly what are we dealing with here. I can post more details if we were to focus on my current Thinkpad T500. In that case my current system details: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Ubuntu 11.10 x64 ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 (also see the "What I have already tried" section about Intel graphics tested) ATI Catalyst 11.10 drivers OCZ Agility 3 SSD but! same with the default driver for ATI the card same with the prop. driver for the ATI card from Jockey (Additional drivers applet) What I have already tried: 0. Switching to Intel integrated card (Intel GMA 4500M HD) with the default driver - same effects = may indicate not driver related problem but a problem with something of global influence like e.g. nomodeset or other I don't even know about. (What you can read above) ATI Catalyst 11.10 and radeon.modeset=0 boot parameter + disabled Wait for VBlank. Unity 2D Ubuntu 10.04 LTS tested (ubuntu-10.04.3-desktop-i386.iso): Both live USB and installed version blazing fast! (on the default drivers - without even installing the proprietary fglrx drivers). re2 a) seems to give me the only significant results (still poor) - perfect Unity elements performance with the same crawling stuttering/lagging when dragging windows around. re2 b) this happens often http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b68/Bucic/ubuntuforumsorg/Screenshotat2011-10-28083140.png re2 c) Sometimes I am able to witness a normal performance when dragging a window around but only for a second or two. When I try to shake it longer it starts to lag and it will keep lagging like that with an increased probability of what you see in the sshot in point re2 b). re2 d) I can't establish the radeon.modeset=0 influence though. Once it seems to work be smooth with it, the other time - without it. Really can't tell.

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• Create Image Maps with GIMP

  - by SGWellens

  Having a clickable image in a web page is not a big deal. Having an image in a web page with clickable hotspots is a big deal. The powerful GIMP editor has a tool to make creating clickable hotspots much easier. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Its home page and download links are here: http://www.gimp.org/ (it is completely free). Beware: GIMP is an extraordinarily advanced and powerful image editor. If you wish to use it for general image editing tasks, you have a steep learning curve to climb. FYI: I used it to create the shadows you see on the images below. Fortunately, the tool to make Image Maps is separate from the main program. To start, open an image with GIMP or, drag and drop an image onto the GIMP main window. I'm using the image of a bar graph. Next, we have to find the Image Map tool and launch it (Filters->Web->Image Map…): Why is the Image Map tool under Filters and not Tools? I don't know. It's mystery—much like the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, or why my socks keep disappearing when I do laundry. I swear I've got twenty single unmatched socks. But I digress… Here is what the Image Map tool looks like: If we click the blue 'I' button, we can add information to the Image Map: Now we'll use the rectangle tool to create some clickable hotspots. Select the Blue Rectangle tool, drag a rectangle, click when done and you'll get something like this: You can also make circle/oval and polygon areas. You can edit all the parameters of an image map area after drawing it. Rectangle settings (for fine tweaking): JavaScript functions (it's up to you to write them): Here is a setup with two rectangles and one polygon area: When you hit save a map file is generated that looks something like this: Paste the contents into a web page and you are almost there. I made some tweaks before it became usable: Replaced &apos; with apostrophes in the javascript functions. Changed the image path so it would find the image in my images directory Tweaked the href urls. Added Title="Some Text" to get tool tips. Cleaned out the comments. Result: The final markup (with JavaScript function): function ImageMapMouseHover(Msg) { $("#Label1").html(Msg); } It may seem like a lot of bother but, the tool does the heavy lifting: i.e. the coordinates. Getting the regions positioned and sized is easy using a visual tool…much better than doing it by hand. This, of course, isn't a full treatise on the tool but it should give you enough information to decide if it's helpful. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens

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• Auto Mocking using JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  Auto mocking containers are designed to reduce the friction of keeping unit test beds in sync with the code being tested as systems are updated and evolve over time. This is one sentence how you define auto mocking. Of course this is a more or less formal. In a more informal way auto mocking containers are nothing but a tool to keep your tests synced so that you don’t have to go back and change tests every time you add a new dependency to your SUT or System Under Test. In Q3 2012 JustMock is shipped with built in auto mocking container. This will help developers to have all the existing fun they are having with JustMock plus they can now mock object with dependencies in a more elegant way and without needing to do the homework of managing the graph. If you are not familiar with auto mocking then I won't go ahead and educate you rather ask you to do so from contents that is already made available out there from community as this is way beyond the scope of this post. Moving forward, getting started with Justmock auto mocking is pretty simple. First, I have to reference Telerik.JustMock.Container.DLL from the installation folder along with Telerik.JustMock.DLL (of course) that it uses internally and next I will write my tests with mocking container. It's that simple! In this post first I will mock the target with dependencies using current method and going forward do the same with auto mocking container. In short the sample is all about a report builder that will go through all the existing reports, send email and log any exception in that process. This is somewhat my  report builder class looks like: Reporter class depends on the following interfaces: IReporBuilder: used to  create and get the available reports IReportSender: used to send the reports ILogger: used to log any exception. Now, if I just write the test without using an auto mocking container it might end up something like this: Now, it looks fine. However, the only issue is that I am creating the mock of each dependency that is sort of a grunt work and if you have ever changing list of dependencies then it becomes really hard to keep the tests in sync. The typical example is your ASP.NET MVC controller where the number of service dependencies grows along with the project. The same test if written with auto mocking container would look like: Here few things to observe: I didn't created mock for each dependencies There is no extra step creating the Reporter class and sending in the dependencies Since ILogger is not required for the purpose of this test therefore I can be completely ignorant of it. How cool is that ? Auto mocking in JustMock is just released and we also want to extend it even further using profiler that will let me resolve not just interfaces but concrete classes as well. But that of course starts the debate of code smell vs. working with legacy code. Feel free to send in your expert opinion in that regard using one of telerik’s official channels. Hope that helps

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• Blank Cacti Graphs

  - by tortib

  I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I'm having an issue with Cacti 0.8.8b not displaying any data in graphs. The graphs are being created and I see files in /var/lib/cacti/rra. My crontab entry for root is the following: */1 * * * * sudo -u www-data php -q /usr/share/cacti/site/poller.php > /dev/null The output of ls -la /var/lib/cacti/rra is the following: # ls -la /var/lib/cacti/rra/ total 1008 drwxrwx--- 2 www-data www-data 4096 Aug 20 19:27 . drwxr-xr-x 3 www-data www-data 4096 Aug 17 01:41 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:23 tortib_com_cpu_nice_34.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:24 tortib_com_cpu_system_35.rrd -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:25 tortib_com_cpu_user_36.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:27 tortib_com_hdd_used_43.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:23 tortib_com_hdd_used_44.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:27 tortib_com_load_15min_38.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:26 tortib_com_load_1min_37.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:23 tortib_com_load_5min_39.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:24 tortib_com_mem_buffers_40.rrd -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:25 tortib_com_mem_cache_41.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:26 tortib_com_mem_free_42.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:24 tortib_com_traffic_in_45.rrd -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:25 tortib_com_traffic_in_46.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:26 tortib_com_traffic_in_47.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:27 tortib_com_users_48.rrd I tried to run the poller as root from the command line but it doesn't output anything useful nor does it graph any data. The device in cacti shows that that it's able to query snmp and ping is alive. The graphs are still empty though. snmpwalk 127.0.0.1 -v2c -c public works as it should. It walks all MIBs. I'm quite perplexed as to why this isn't working any longer. It was graphing data but then it just stopped. And when it was graphing data it was graphing it intermittently. Thank you for reading this problem and helping.

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• Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration. Then it was thought that marketers should focus their efforts on a relative few super-influencers that would then sway the masses. History shows a few successes with this approach but lacked any consistency or predictability. After all, if super-influencers were easy to find, most campaigns would easily go viral. Alas, research shows that most wide-spread trends were the result of several fortunate events, including some luck. So do people exert influence over each other when it comes to purchase decisions? Of course they do, all the time. But that influence is usually limited to a small set of friends and specific specialization. For instance, although I have 165 friends on Facebook, I am only able to influence my close friends and family on PC purchases, and I have no sway at all for fashion purchases. People trust my knowledge on technology, but nobody asks my advice on shoes. How then should retailers leverage social networks in order to reinforce brand image and push promotions? Two obvious ways are Like and Share. Online advertisements or wall-postings receive more clicks when the viewer sees that friends have "liked" the posting. That's our modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. Statistics show that endorsements from friends make it more likely a person will engage. If my friends and I liked it, then I might also "share" (or "retweet" in the case of Twitter) it with other friends. In that case the retailer has paid for X showings of the advertisement, but sharing has pushed it to an additional Y people at no cost. And further, the implicit endorsement by the sharer makes it more likely the recipient will engage. So a good first step is to find people active in social networks that will Like and Share in order to exert influence. Its still tough to go viral, but doubling engagement is still a big step in the right direction. More complex social graph analysis would be a second step, but I'll leave that topic for another day. If you're interested in the academic side of social dynamics, I suggest reading Duncan Watts' work.

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• Extending Currying: Partial Functions in Javascript

  - by kerry

  Last week I posted about function currying in javascript.  This week I am taking it a step further by adding the ability to call partial functions. Suppose we have a graphing application that will pull data via Ajax and perform some calculation to update a graph.  Using a method with the signature ‘updateGraph(id,value)’. To do this, we have do something like this: 1: for(var i=0;i<objects.length;i++) { 2: Ajax.request('/some/data',{id:objects[i].id},function(json) { 3: updateGraph(json.id, json.value); 4: } 5: } This works fine.  But, using this method we need to return the id in the json response from the server.  This works fine, but is not that elegant and increase network traffic. Using partial function currying we can bind the id parameter and add the second parameter later (when returning from the asynchronous call).  To do this, we will need the updated curry method.  I have added support for sending additional parameters at runtime for curried methods. 1: Function.prototype.curry = function(scope) { 2: scope = scope || window 3: var args = []; 4: for (var i=1, len = arguments.length; i < len; ++i) { 5: args.push(arguments[i]); 6: } 7: var m = this; 8: return function() { 9: for (var i=0, len = arguments.length; i < len; ++i) { 10: args.push(arguments[i]); 11: } 12: return m.apply(scope, args); 13: }; 14: } To partially curry this method we will call the curry method with the id parameter, then the request will callback on it with just the value.  Any additional parameters are appended to the method call. 1: for(var i=0;i<objects.length;i++) { 2: var id=objects[i].id; 3: Ajax.request('/some/data',{id: id}, updateGraph.curry(id)); 4: } As you can see, partial currying gives is a very useful tool and this simple method should be a part of every developer’s toolbox.

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• Dawn of the Enterprise Social Developer

  - by Mike Stiles

  Social is not just for poking friends, posting videos of cats playing pianos, or even just for brand marketing anymore. It has become a key form of communication internally and externally across every area of the enterprise. As a Java developer, are you positioning yourself for the integration of social into enterprise business systems that’s on the near horizon? Because it’s the work you do and the applications you build that will influence what the social-enabled enterprise is going to look like and how it’s going to operate. But as a social developer, step one is wrapping your arms around all the things that are possible. Traditionally, the best exploration, brainstorming and innovation come from collaborating with other developers. That’s how the big questions can be hashed (or hacked) out. Is Java the best social development environment? If not, what is? What’s already being done in terms of application integration? The JavaOne Social Developer Program will offer up a series of talks and events on those very issues Tuesday, October 2 at the San Francisco Hilton. If you’re interested in embarking on this newest frontier of enterprise social development, you can connect with others who are thinking the same thing and get moving on your first project.Talks will include: Emergence Of The Social EnterpriseExtending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business ProcessesIntro to Open Graph and Facebook's APIs Building the Next Wave of Social Commerce Platforms Social Data and the Enterprise LinkedIn: A Professional Network Built with Java Technologies and Agile Practice Social Developer Hackathon In addition to these learning and discussion opportunities, you might consider joining the new Oracle Social Developer Community (OSDC), where the interaction and collaboration can continue indefinitely. It doesn’t take a lot of tea leaf reading to know that the cloud will house the enterprise technology of the future, and social (as well as the rich data it brings) is going to be a major part of that as social integrates across every business function as there’s proven value for consumer facing initiatives. The next phase of social development is going to involve combining enterprise data from multiple sources, new and existing, social and traditional, in order to tell compelling and usable stories. And social is coming to the enterprise quickly, meaning you as a development leader should seek to understand not just what's worked on the consumer side, but what aspects of those successes can be applied inside the organization. Get educated, get connected, and consider registering for this forward-looking event now to get started with enterprise social development.

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• Identify memory leak in Java app

  - by Vincent Ma

  One important advantage of java is programer don't care memory management and GC handle it well. Maybe this is one reason why java is more popular. As Java programer you real dont care it? After you meet Out of memory you will realize it it’s not true. Java GC and memory is big topic you can get some information in here Today just let me show how to identify memory leak quickly. Let quickly review demo java code, it’s one kind of memory leak in our code, using static collection and always add some object. import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List; public class MemoryTest { public static void main(String[] args) { new Thread(new MemoryLeak(), "MemoryLeak").start(); }} class MemoryLeak implements Runnable { public static List<Integer> leakList = new ArrayList<Integer>(); public void run() { int num =0; while(true) { try { Thread.sleep(1); } catch (InterruptedException e) { } num++; Integer i = new Integer(num); leakList.add(i); } }} run it with java -verbose:gc -XX:+PrintGCDetails -Xmx60m -XX:MaxPermSize=160m MemoryTest after about some minuts you will get Exception in thread "MemoryLeak" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:2760) at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:2734) at java.util.ArrayList.ensureCapacity(ArrayList.java:167) at java.util.ArrayList.add(ArrayList.java:351) at MemoryLeak.run(MemoryTest.java:25) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)Heap def new generation total 18432K, used 3703K [0x045e0000, 0x059e0000, 0x059e0000) eden space 16384K, 22% used [0x045e0000, 0x0497dde0, 0x055e0000) from space 2048K, 0% used [0x055e0000, 0x055e0000, 0x057e0000) to space 2048K, 0% used [0x057e0000, 0x057e0000, 0x059e0000) tenured generation total 40960K, used 40959K [0x059e0000, 0x081e0000, 0x081e0000) the space 40960K, 99% used [0x059e0000, 0x081dfff8, 0x081e0000, 0x081e0000) compacting perm gen total 12288K, used 2083K [0x081e0000, 0x08de0000, 0x10de0000) the space 12288K, 16% used [0x081e0000, 0x083e8c50, 0x083e8e00, 0x08de0000)No shared spaces configured. OK let us quickly identify it using JProfile Download JProfile in here  Run JProfile and attach MemoryTest get largest size of  Objects in Memory View in here is Integer then select Integer and go to Heap Walker. get GC Graph for this object  Then you get detail code raise this issue quickly now.  That is enjoy it.

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• More on PHP and Oracle 11gR2 Improvements to Client Result Caching

  - by christopher.jones

  Oracle 11.2 brought several improvements to Client Result Caching. CRC is way for the results of queries to be cached in the database client process for reuse.  In an Oracle OpenWorld presentation "Best Practices for Developing Performant Application" my colleague Luxi Chidambaran had a (non-PHP generated) graph for the Niles benchmark that shows a DB CPU reduction up to 600% and response times up to 22% faster when using CRC. Sometimes CRC is called the "Consistent Client Cache" because Oracle automatically invalidates the cache if table data is changed.  This makes it easy to use without needing application logic rewrites. There are a few simple database settings to turn on and tune CRC, so management is also easy. PHP OCI8 as a "client" of the database can use CRC.  The cache is per-process, so plan carefully before caching large data sets.  Tables that are candidates for caching are look-up tables where the network transfer cost dominates. CRC is really easy in 11.2 - I'll get to that in a moment.  It was also pretty easy in Oracle 11.1 but it needed some tiny application changes.  In PHP it was used like: $s = oci_parse($c, "select /*+ result_cache */ * from employees"); oci_execute($s, OCI_NO_AUTO_COMMIT); // Use OCI_DEFAULT in OCI8 <= 1.3 oci_fetch_all($s, $res); I blogged about this in the past.  The query had to include a specific hint that you wanted the results cached, and you needed to turn off auto committing during execution either with the OCI_DEFAULT flag or its new, better-named alias OCI_NO_AUTO_COMMIT.  The no-commit flag rule didn't seem reasonable to me because most people wouldn't be specific about the commit state for a query. Now in Oracle 11.2, DBAs can now nominate tables for caching, either with CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE.  That means you don't need the query hint anymore.  As well, the no-commit flag requirement has been lifted.  Your code can now look like: $s = oci_parse($c, "select * from employees"); oci_execute($s); oci_fetch_all($s, $res); Since your code probably already looks like this, your DBA can find the top queries in the database and simply tune the system by turning on CRC in the database and issuing an ALTER TABLE statement for candidate tables.  Voila. Another CRC improvement in Oracle 11.2 is that it works with DRCP connection pooling. There is some fine print about what is and isn't cached, check the Oracle manuals for details.  If you're using 11.1 or non-DRCP "dedicated servers" then make sure you use oci_pconnect() persistent connections.  Also in PHP don't bind strings in the query, although binding as SQLT_INT is OK.

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• ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0

  - by Sam Abraham

  In the next few lines, I would like to briefly review ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0.  I was honored to be extended the opportunity to review this valuable tool as part of the GeeksWithBlogs influencers Program, a quarterly award providing its recipients access to valuable tools and enabling them with an opportunity to provide a brief write-up reviewing the complimentary tools they receive.   Typical Usage   ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 is very intuitive and easy to use for any user be it novice or expert. A simple yet comprehensive menu screen enables the selection of the appropriate program type to profile as well as the executable or site for this program.   A typical use case starts with establishing a baseline memory snapshot, which tells us the initial memory cost used by the program under normal or low activity conditions. We would then take a second snapshot after the program has performed an activity which we want to investigate for memory leaks. We can then compare the initial baseline snapshot against the snapshot when the program has completed processing the activity in question to study anomalies in memory that did not get freed-up after the program has completed its performed function. The following are some screenshots outlining the selection of the program to profile (an executable for this demonstration’s purposes).   Figure 1 - Getting Started   Figure 2 - Selecting an Application to Profile     Features and Options   Right after the second snapshot is generated, Memory Profiler gives us immediate access to information on memory fragmentation, size differences between snapshots, unmanaged memory allocation and statistics on the largest classes taking up un-freed memory space.   We would also have the option to itemize objects held in memory grouped by object types within which we can study the instances allocated of each type. Filtering options enable us to quickly narrow object instances we are interested in.   Figure 3 - Easily accessible Execution Memory Information   Figure 4 - Class List   Figure 5 - Instance List   Figure 6-  Retention Graph for a Particular Instance   Conclusion I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to evaluate ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0. The tool's intuitive User Interface design and easily accessible menu options enabled me to quickly identify problem areas where memory was left unfreed in my code.     Tutorials and References  FInd out more About ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 http://www.red-gate.com/supportcenter/Product?p=ANTS Memory Profiler   Checkout what other reviewers of this valuable tool have already shared: http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2011/03/10/ants-memory-profiler-7.0.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/28/ants-memory-profiler-7.0-review.aspx

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• Big Companies Influence Retail in 2010

  - by David Dorf

  From a retail industry perspective, 2010 will go down as the year mobile went mainstream, the economy recovered from the crash, and Facebook surpassed Google as the most influential online property. While the economy certainly had the biggest impact on the retail industry, a few big companies also exerted influence. Here's a rundown and a look back at 2010: Apple -- Steve Jobs and company continued to lead the mobile pack. Consumers are using their iPhones to shop, retailers are using the iPod Touch for mobile checkout, and both are embracing the iPad as the next wave of technology. The Next Technology from Apple Mobile Platforms in Retail Apple Stores, Touch2Systems, and the iPad Google -- Not to be outdone, Google's Android platform grew faster than Apple's, plus they support QRCodes natively and will probably beat Apple to NFC. Google Checkout, Product Search, and Boutiques.com continue to impact the e-commerce scene. Google Leverages Like.com Facebook -- While the movie The Social Network certainly made Facebook a household name, Connect, Places, and seeing the "like" button all over the Web really pushed Facebook everywhere. 2010 set the foundations for f-commerce. Facebook Participatory Promotions Crowd Savers What's the value of a Facebook fan? Step Aside Google Leveraging Social Networks for Retail Social Shopping at Nine West Groupon -- This newcomer executed on a simple concept flawlessly, making them the fasted company to reach $1B in revenue. (See cool chart from Silicon Alley Insider.) Google's offer of $5-6B wasn't enough, so now they are raising an additional $1B in funding, presumably to buy-up all the copycats across the globe. Changing the Way We Shop Amazon -- As if leading the e-commerce charge wasn't enough, Amazon shook things up with their purchase of Woot and release of their Price Checker mobile app. They continue to push boundaries with Kindle, and don't seem worried about the iPad at all. You Can't Win on Price Amazon Looks at Your Social Graph eBay -- Acquiring Skype didn't exactly work out, but eBay's purchase of PayPal and RedLaser are driving the company forward. They are still a major force. Bump the Bill Oracle, SAP, HP, IBM, and Cisco left their marks on the retail industry as well with various acquisitions and CxO shake-ups. We'll just have to wait and see what 2011 brings next.

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• Pathfinding for fleeing

  - by Philipp

  As you know there are plenty of solutions when you wand to find the best path in a 2-dimensional environment which leads from point A to point B. But how do I calculate a path when an object is at point A, and wants to get away from point B, as fast and far as possible? A bit of background information: My game uses a 2d environment which isn't tile-based but has floating point accuracy. The movement is vector-based. The pathfinding is done by partitioning the game world into rectangles which are walkable or non-walkable and building a graph out of their corners. I already have pathfinding between points working by using Dijkstras algorithm. The use-case for the fleeing algorithm is that in certain situations, actors in my game should perceive another actor as a danger and flee from it. The trivial solution would be to just move the actor in a vector in the direction which is opposite from the threat until a "safe" distance was reached or the actor reaches a wall where it then covers in fear. The problem with this approach is that actors will be blocked by small obstacles they could easily get around. As long as moving along the wall wouldn't bring them closer to the threat they could do that, but it would look smarter when they would avoid obstacles in the first place: Another problem I see is with dead ends in the map geometry. In some situations a being must choose between a path which gets it faster away now but ends in a dead end where it would be trapped, or another path which would mean that it wouldn't get that far away from the danger at first (or even a bit closer) but on the other hand would have a much greater long-term reward in that it would eventually get them much further away. So the short-term reward of getting away fast must be somehow valued against the long-term reward of getting away far. There is also another rating problem for situations where an actor should accept to move closer to a minor threat to get away from a much larger threat. But completely ignoring all minor threats would be foolish, too (that's why the actor in this graphic goes out of its way to avoid the minor threat in the upper right area): Are there any standard solutions for this problem?

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• Help with Strategy-game AI

  - by f20k

  Hi, I am developing a strategy-game AI (think: Final Fantasy Tactics), and I am having trouble coming up for the design of the AI. My main problem is determining which is the optimal thing for it to do. First let me describe the priority of what action I would like the AI to take: Kill nearest player unit Fulfill primary directive (kill all player units, kill target unit, survive for x turns) Heal ally unit / cast buffer Now the AI can do the following in its turn: Move - {Attack / Ability / Item} (either attack or ability or item) {Attack / Ability / Item} - Move Move closer (if targets not in range) {Attack / Ability / Item} (if move not available) Notes Abilities have various ranges / effects / costs / effects. Each ai unit has maybe 5-10 abilities to choose from. The AI will prioritize killing over safety unless its directive is to survive for x turns. It also doesn't care about ability cost much. While a player may want to save a big spell for later, the AI will most likely use it asap. Movement is on a (hex) grid num of player units: 3-6 num of ai units: 3-7 or more. Probably max 10. AI and player take turns controlling ONE unit, instead of all at the same time. Platform is Android (if program doesnt respond after some time, there will be a popup saying to Force Quit or Wait - which looks really bad!). Now comes the questions: The best ability to use would obviously be the one that hits the most targets for the most damage. But since each ability has different ranges, I won't know if they are in range without exploring each possible place I can move to. One solution would be to go through each possible places to move to, determine the optimal attack at that location - which gives me a list of optimal moves for each location. Then choose the optimal out of the list and execute it. But this will take a lot of CPU time. Is there a better solution? My current idea is to move as close as possible towards the closest, largest group of people, and determine the optimal attack/ability from there. I think this would be a lot less work for the CPU and still allow for wide-range attacks. Its sub-optimal but the AI will still seem 'smart'. Other notes/questions: Am I over-thinking/over-complicating it? Better solution? I am open to all sorts of suggestions I have taken a look at the spell-casting question, but it doesn't take into account the movement - so perhaps use that algo for each possible move location? The top answer mentioned it wasn't great for area-of-effect and group fights - so maybe requires more tweaking? Please, if you mention a graph/tree, let me know basically how to use it. E.g. Node means ability, level corresponds to damage, then search for the deepest node.

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• Nashorn in the Twitterverse

  - by jlaskey

  I have been following how often Nashorn has been showing up on the net.  Nashorn got a burst of tweets when we announced Project Nashorn and I was curious how Nashorn was trending per day, maybe graph the result.  Counting tweets manually seemed mindless, so why not write a program to do the same. This is where Nashorn + Java came shining through.  There is a very nice Java library out there called Twitter4J https://github.com/yusuke/twitter4j that handles all things Twitter.  After running bin/getAccessToken.sh to get a twitter4j.properties file with personal authorization, all I had to do to run my simple exploratory app was; nashorn -cp $TWITTER4J/twitter4j-core-3.0.1.jar GetHomeTimeline.js The content of GetHomeTimeline.js is as follows; var twitter4j      = Packages.twitter4j; var TwitterFactory = twitter4j.TwitterFactory; var Query          = twitter4j.Query; var twitter = new TwitterFactory().instance; var query   = new Query("nashorn OR nashornjs"); query.count = 100; do {     var result = twitter.search(query);     var tweets = result.tweets;     for each (tweet in tweets) {         print("@" + tweet.user.screenName + "\t" + tweet.text);     } } while (query = result.nextQuery()); How easy was that?  Now to hook it up to the JavaFX graphing library... 

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• Designing Snake AI

  - by Ronald

  I'm new to this gamedev stackechange but have used the math and cs sites before. So, I'm in a competition to create AI for a snake that will compete with 3 other snakes in 5 minute rounds where the rules are much like the traditional Nokia snake game except that there are 4 snakes, the board is 50x50 and there are a number of small obstacles on the field. Like the Nokia game, your snake grows when you get to the fruit and if you crash into yourself, another snake or the wall you die. The game runs with a 50ms delay between moves and the server sends the new game state every 50ms which the code must analyze and what not and output the next move. The winner is the snake who had the longest length at any point in the game. Tie breakers are decided by kills. So far what I have done is implemented an A* graph search from each snake to determine if my snake is the closest to the apple and if it is, it goes for the apple. Otherwise, I made a neat little algorithm to determine the emptiest area of the board, which my snake goes for, to anticipate the next apple. Other than this I have some small survivability checks to ensure my snake isn't walking into a trap that it can't get out and if it does get stuck, I have something to give it a better chance of getting out. ... Anyway, I've tested my snake on a test server and it does quite well. Generally, my strategy of only going for the apple when its a sure thing and finding space when its not makes it grow faster than any other snakes (some snakes do a similar thing but often just go to the middle or a corner) sometimes it wins these trial games but is more often than not beaten by the same snake who seems to have the edge on survivability(my snake grows quicker but then dies somehow and this other snake just plods slowly along and wins on consistency. So I was wondering about any ideas anyone has to try and improve my snake. Or maybe ideas at a new approach to take. My functions and classes are good so changes that might seem drastic shouldn't be too bad. I encourage all ideas. Any thoughts ??

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• PASS: FY10 Actuals Posted

  - by Bill Graziano

  Earlier this year we published preliminary fiscal year 2010 financials to the Governance page on the PASS web site.  Please remember that FY10 runs from July 1st, 2009 through June 30th, 2010 and includes the November 2009 Summit.  We do our fiscal year this way so that the Summit falls earlier in the fiscal year.  The financials we had posted were P&L numbers at the portfolio level.  Prior to this we had posted our detailed budget but only posted the auditors report at the end of each year.  Today we updated our published financials to include: Pre-audit actuals from FY10 at the same level as our budget.  The document has both actuals and budget for FY10 side by side.  This is over 20 pages of detailed financial information covering hundreds of line-items. A letter describing key differences between our budget and actuals.  I walked through each line item where the difference was greater than $25,000 and explained what happened and why. We updated the financial graph going back to 2003 to include FY10. This update should “close the loop” on our financials.  You can now start with the published budget and compare it to the finished financials at the same level of detail.  We also plan to publish the auditor’s report when that is completed -- as we do every year. Overall I’m very happy with how FY10 turned out.  Keep in mind that this was the November 2009 Summit so we were still facing economic challenges.  With all that we were roughly break-even showing a $15,000 profit on $3.9 million of revenue.  I didn’t find anything shocking in reviewing our actual vs. budget but there were a few things that needed explanation.  You can see those in the letter on the governance page. Please keep in mind that these are the actuals from our operating financials.  The auditor may have us make adjustments for depreciation or other financial transactions.  We may also account for certain transactions differently for tax purposes than we do for financial reporting purposes.  I feel these financial statements give you the clearest picture of how our organization spends its money. We were late publishing these this year.  We were working through some tax issues and that delayed our ability to file our final tax forms which delayed this process.  In hindsight I should have published these documents as soon as we had them and not waited for the tax issues.  We’ll do this better in the future. And on a final note, you don’t need to login to view these documents.  If you have any questions you can post them here.  If we get more than a few questions we may see about creating some forums for financial issues on the PASS web site.

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• Getting started with object detection - Image segmentation algorithm

  - by Dev Kanchen

  Just getting started on a hobby object-detection project. My aim is to understand the underlying algorithms and to this end the overall accuracy of the results is (currently) more important than actual run-time. I'm starting with trying to find a good image segmentation algorithm that provide a good jump-off point for the object detection phase. The target images would be "real-world" scenes. I found two techniques which mirrored my thoughts on how to go about this: Graph-based Image Segmentation: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~dph/papers/seg-ijcv.pdf Contour and Texture Analysis for Image Segmentation: http://www.eng.utah.edu/~bresee/compvision/files/MalikBLS.pdf The first one was really intuitive to understand and seems simple enough to implement, while the second was closer to my initial thoughts on how to go about this (combine color/intensity and texture information to find regions). But it's an order of magnitude more complex (at least for me). My question is - are there any other algorithms I should be looking at that provide the kind of results that these two, specific papers have arrived at. Are there updated versions of these techniques already floating around. Like I mentioned earlier, the goal is relative accuracy of image segmentation (with an eventual aim to achieve a degree of accuracy of object detection) over runtime, with the algorithm being able to segment an image into "naturally" or perceptually important components, as these two algorithms do (each to varying extents). Thanks! P.S.1: I found these two papers after a couple of days of refining my search terms and learning new ones relevant to the exact kind of techniques I was looking for. :) I have just about reached the end of my personal Google creativity, which is why I am finally here! Thanks for the help. P.S.2: I couldn't find good tags for this question. If some relevant ones exist, @mods please add them. P.S.3: I do not know if this is a better fit for cstheory.stackexchange (or even cs.stackexchange). I looked but cstheory seems more appropriate for intricate algorithmic discussions than a broad question like this. Also, I couldn't find any relevant tags there either! But please do move if appropriate.

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• Powerpoint missing from DCOM config

  - by Paul Prewett

  I have an application that automates the creation of powerpoint files in an ASP.NET environment. This requires that I install powerpoint on the server and also set permissions in the DCOM configuration snap-in (dcomcnfg) to give permissions to the launching user ([DOMAIN]\ASPNET in this case) to run the application. I have this setup running successfully on several Win2k3 machines. I am configuring my first Win2k8 machine and after installing powerpoint on the server, the "Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation" node in DCOM config is not showing up. Other installed Office apps are showing (Excel, Graph, etc...), just not Powerpoint. So when I attempt to run the application, I get an "Access denied" error, which is exactly what I would expect. The user doesn't have permission. Therefore, access denied. The specific error log entry is: The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {91493441-5A91-11CF-8700-00AA0060263B} to the user [DOMAIN]\ASPNET I searched the entire list for the CLSID, too, thinking maybe the name wasn't loading properly. No dice. I also re-ran the setup program for Office thinking maybe there would be some option or something I unchecked in the custom setup options, but I saw nothing that looked helpful. I'm flummoxed. Can anyone out there suggest something to help me get Powerpoint to show up in the list of DCOM applications? Many thanks.

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• "Unable to open MRTG log file" error with nagios and mrtg

  - by Simone Magnaschi

  We have a strange issue with our setup of icinga / nagios and mrtg. Icinga is working great and has no problem, it can monitor basically everything without issues. We setup mrtg to gather bandwith data from our routers and switches. MRTG is working fine: it stores the log data in the /var/www/mrtg/ directory and displays the graph data via web. We assume so MRTG is doing great. We tried to setup bandwidth checks in nagios: define service{ use generic-service ; Inherit values from a template host_name zywall-agora service_description ZYWALL AGORA TRAFFICO check_command check_local_mrtgtraf!/var/www/mrtg/x.x.x.x_2.log!AVG!1000000,2000000!5000000,5000000!1000 check_interval 1 ; Check the service every 1 minute under normal conditions retry_interval 1 ; Re-check every minute until its final/hard state is determined } Where /var/www/mrtg/x.x.x.x_2.log is the correct log path file. We keep on getting Unable to open MRTG log file error in the test result in icinga web interface. We tried everything: give ownership to user nagios or icinga to the log file give chmod 777 to the file try to copy the file in another directory and give it full permission Same error. The strange thing is that if we use the command that nagios generate in a bash session the command works like a charm: /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_mrtgtraf -F /var/www/mrtg/x.x.x.x_2.log -a AVG -w 10,20 -c 5000000,5000000 -e 10 Result: Traffic WARNING - Avg. In = 17.9 KB/s, Avg. Out = 5.0 KB/s|in=17.877930KB/s;10.000000;5000000.000000;0.000000 out=5.000000KB/s;20.000000;5000000.000000;0.000000 We ran that command line as root, as user nagios and as user icinga and all three worked ok. We thought that the command that nagios perform maybe has something wrong in it, so we debugged nagios but we found out that the generated command from nagios is the same as above. Searching on google for these kind of problem returns only issues of systems where mrtg is not installed or issues with the wrong path to the log file, but these seems not to be our case. We are stuck, can somebody help?

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• Can compressing Program Files save space *and* give a significant boost to SSD performance?

  - by Christopher Galpin

  Considering solid-state disk space is still an expensive resource, compressing large folders has appeal. Thanks to VirtualStore, could Program Files be a case where it might even improve performance? Discovery In particular I have been reading: SSD and NTFS Compression Speed Increase? Does NTFS compression slow SSD/flash performance? Will somebody benchmark whole disk compression (HD,SSD) please? (may have to scroll up) The first link is particularly dreamy, but maybe head a little too far in the clouds. The third link has this sexy semi-log graph (logarithmic scale!). Quote (with notes): Using highly compressable data (IOmeter), you get at most a 30x performance increase [for reads], and at least a 49x performance DECREASE [for writes]. Assuming I interpreted and clarified that sentence correctly, this single user's benchmark has me incredibly interested. Although write performance tanks wretchedly, read performance still soars. It gave me an idea. Idea: VirtualStore It so happens that thanks to sanity saving security features introduced in Windows Vista, write access to certain folders such as Program Files is virtualized for non-administrator processes. Which means, in normal (non-elevated) usage, a program or game's attempt to write data to its install location in Program Files (which is perhaps a poor location) is redirected to %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore, somewhere entirely different. Thus, to my understanding, writes to Program Files should primarily only occur when installing an application. This makes compressing it not only a huge source of space gain, but also a potential candidate for performance gain. Testing The beginning of this post has me a bit timid, it suggests benchmarking NTFS compression on a whole drive is difficult because turning it off "doesn't decompress the objects". However it seems to me the compact command is perfectly capable of doing so for both drives and individual folders. Could it be only marking them for decompression the next time the OS reads from them? I need to find the answer before I begin my own testing.

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• What can cause an increase in inactive memory and how to reclaim it?

  - by Boaz

  Hi All, I have heavy application running on a CentOS server and I'm seeing a strange memory behavior. Here is a snapshot of a munin graph: As you can see the amount of committed memory increases gradually causing the swap file to be use. What strikes me odd is that the amount of inactive memory keeps growing as well. It is my understanding that the inactive memory is actually memory freed up but not yet clean by the OS and put back in the free memory pool. It seems that running out of memory is acutally caused by this lack of clean up, but I may be wrong. Can you give some tips to find the cause of the problem and/or cause CentOS to reclaim the inactive memory? Thanks. Some extra info: 1) I have a tmpfs mounted on /tmp and the number of files stored there grows (but it is double the amount of the inactive memory). 2) cat /proc/meminfo (at a later stage than the image) gives: MemTotal: 14371428 kB MemFree: 1207108 kB Buffers: 35440 kB Cached: 4276628 kB SwapCached: 785316 kB Active: 9038924 kB Inactive: 3902876 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 14371428 kB LowFree: 1207108 kB SwapTotal: 10223608 kB SwapFree: 6438320 kB Dirty: 627792 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 7844560 kB Mapped: 49304 kB Slab: 146676 kB PageTables: 27480 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB CommitLimit: 17409320 kB Committed_AS: 16471488 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 275852 kB VmallocChunk: 34359462007 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB 3) The application is a combination of MySQL, Heritrix (http://crawler.archive.org/ ) and a Tomcat based Java servlet to manage things.

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• What can cause an increase in inactive memory and how to reclaim it?

  - by Boaz

  I have heavy application running on a CentOS server and I'm seeing a strange memory behavior. Here is a snapshot of a munin graph: As you can see the amount of committed memory increases gradually causing the swap file to be use. What strikes me odd is that the amount of inactive memory keeps growing as well. It is my understanding that the inactive memory is actually memory freed up but not yet clean by the OS and put back in the free memory pool. It seems that running out of memory is acutally caused by this lack of clean up, but I may be wrong. Can you give some tips to find the cause of the problem and/or cause CentOS to reclaim the inactive memory? Thanks. Some extra info: 1) I have a tmpfs mounted on /tmp and the number of files stored there grows (but it is double the amount of the inactive memory). 2) cat /proc/meminfo (at a later stage than the image) gives: MemTotal: 14371428 kB MemFree: 1207108 kB Buffers: 35440 kB Cached: 4276628 kB SwapCached: 785316 kB Active: 9038924 kB Inactive: 3902876 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 14371428 kB LowFree: 1207108 kB SwapTotal: 10223608 kB SwapFree: 6438320 kB Dirty: 627792 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 7844560 kB Mapped: 49304 kB Slab: 146676 kB PageTables: 27480 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB CommitLimit: 17409320 kB Committed_AS: 16471488 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 275852 kB VmallocChunk: 34359462007 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB 3) The application is a combination of MySQL, Heritrix (http://crawler.archive.org/ ) and a Tomcat based Java servlet to manage things.

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• What can cause an increase in inactive memory and how to reclame it?

  - by Boaz

  Hi All, I have heavy application running on a CentOS server and I'm seeing a strange memory behavior. Here is a snapshot of a munin graph: As you can see the amount of committed memory increases gradually causing the swap file to be use. What strikes me odd is that the amount of inactive memory keeps growing as well. It is my understanding that the inactive memory is actually memory freed up but not yet clean by the OS and put back in the free memory pool. It seems that running out of memory is acutally caused by this lack of clean up, but I may be wrong. Can you give some tips to find the cause of the problem and/or cause CentOS to reclaim the inactive memory? Thanks. Some extra info: 1) I have a tmpfs mounted on /tmp and the number of files stored there grows (but it is double the amount of the inactive memory). 2) cat /proc/meminfo (at a later stage than the image) gives: MemTotal: 14371428 kB MemFree: 1207108 kB Buffers: 35440 kB Cached: 4276628 kB SwapCached: 785316 kB Active: 9038924 kB Inactive: 3902876 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 14371428 kB LowFree: 1207108 kB SwapTotal: 10223608 kB SwapFree: 6438320 kB Dirty: 627792 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 7844560 kB Mapped: 49304 kB Slab: 146676 kB PageTables: 27480 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB CommitLimit: 17409320 kB Committed_AS: 16471488 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 275852 kB VmallocChunk: 34359462007 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB

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• Why the system information message when accessing an Ubuntu server doesn't match free -m?

  - by Andres

  Each time I SSH into my AWS Ubuntu servers I see a system information message, showing load, memory usage and packages available to install, like this: Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-51-virtual x86_64) * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/ System information as of Sun Nov 10 18:06:43 EST 2013 System load: 0.08 Processes: 127 Usage of /: 4.9% of 98.43GB Users logged in: 1 Memory usage: 69% IP address for eth0: 10.236.136.233 Swap usage: 100% Graph this data and manage this system at https://landscape.canonical.com/ 13 packages can be updated. 0 updates are security updates. Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud Use Juju to deploy your cloud instances and workloads. https://juju.ubuntu.com/#cloud-precise *** /dev/xvda1 will be checked for errors at next reboot *** *** System restart required *** My question is about the memory percentage shown. In this case, it's showing a 69% of memory usage, but since the swap usage was 100% I checked it by myself. So when I run free -m I get this: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1652 1635 17 0 4 29 -/+ buffers/cache: 1601 51 Swap: 895 895 0 And that's of course closer to 100% than to 69%

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