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  • Tab Sweep: Primefaces3, @DataSourceDefinition, JPA Extensions, EclipseLink, Typed Query, Ajax, ...

    - by arungupta
    Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more : • JSF2 + Primefaces3 + EJB3 & JPA2 Integration Project (@henk53) • The state of @DataSourceDefinition in Java EE (@henk53) • Java Persistence API (JPA) Extensions Reference for EclipseLink (EclipseLink) • JavaFX 2.2 Pie Chart with JPA 2.0 (John Yeary) • Typed Query RESTful Service Example (John Yeary) • How to set environment variables in GlassFish admin console (Jelastic) • Architect Enterprise Applications with Java EE (Oracle University) • Glassfish – Basic authentication (Marco Ghisellini) • Solving GlassFish 3.1/JSF PWC4011 warning (Rafael Nadal) • PrimeFaces AJAX Enabled (John Yeary)

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  • Power Pivot - Average time per item

    - by Username
    I'm trying to calculate on average, how long it takes to make each item. Here is the data table: Date Item Quantity Operator 01/01/2014 Item1 3 John 01/01/2014 Item2 5 John 02/01/2014 Item1 7 Bob 02/01/2014 Item2 4 John 03/01/2014 Item1 2 Bob 07/01/2014 Item2 3 John On 01/01/2014 John made 3 of Item 1 and 5 of Item 2. If we only had the first 2 rows we can guess that it takes 0.375 days to make Item 1 and 0.625 days to make Item 2. I want to be able to calculate this on average using all the data and taking in to account the operators obviously working on different items. Thank you

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  • Using Extended Events in SQL Server Denali CTP1 to Map out the TransactionLog SQL Trace Event EventSubClass Values

    - by Jonathan Kehayias
    John Samson ( Blog | Twitter ) asked on the MSDN Forums about the meaning/description for the numeric values returned by the EventSubClass column of the TransactionLog SQL Trace Event.  John pointed out that this information is not available for this Event like it is for the other events in the Books Online Topic ( TransactionLog Event Class ), or in the sys.trace_subclass_values DMV.  John wanted to know if there was a way to determine this information.  I did some looking and found...(read more)

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  • Transmission-daemon not picking up on watch directory

    - by Mild Fuzz
    Trying to get my transmission-daemon to pick up files from a dropbox folder, to make remote starting easier (it's a headless system). As far as I can tell, the settings.json file is as expected, but none of the files I place in the folder get picked up. I have checked that dropbox is syncing correctly. Here is the whole settings.json file, but the relevant lines are included below: "watch-dir": "/home/john/Dropbox/torrents", "watch-dir-enabled": true Update It appears to be a permissions issue. From /var/log/syslog: Unable to watch "/home/john/Dropbox/torrents": Permission denied (watch.c:79) I have tried stopping the daemon - sudo service transmission-daemon stop - changing permissions of folder using chown - sudo chown -R john /home/john/Dropbox/torrents - restarting daemon - sudo service transmission-daemon start Same result, however Update 2 Permissions for the folder are: drwsrwsrwx 2 john debian-transmission 4096 2012-04-09 19:40

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  • How to calculate running totals of subsets of data in a table

    - by John
    I have 4 columns: Name, Week, Batch and Units Produced (Cols, A,B,C,D). In column E, I need to keep running totals based on name and week. When the week changes for the same person, restart the total. Fred, 12, 4001, 129.0 Answer in e: 129.0 Fred, 12, 4012, 234.0 Answer in e: 363.0 Fred, 13, 4023, 12.0 Answer in e: 12.0 John, 12, 4003, 420.0 Answer in e: 420.0 John, 13, 4021, 1200.0 Answer in e: 1200.0 John, 13, 4029, 120.0 Answer in e: 1320.0 I need to be able to copy the formula to over 1000 rows.

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  • Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

    - by Roger Hart
    Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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  • SQL Joining on a one-to-many relationship

    - by Harley
    Ok, here was my original question; Table one contains ID|Name 1 Mary 2 John Table two contains ID|Color 1 Red 1 Blue 2 Blue 2 Green 2 Black I want to end up with is ID|Name|Red|Blue|Green|Black 1 Mary Y Y 2 John Y Y Y It seems that because there are 11 unique values for color and 1000's upon 1000's of records in table one that there is no 'good' way to do this. So, two other questions. Is there an efficient way to query to get this result? I can then create a crosstab in my application to get the desired result. ID|Name|Color 1 Mary Red 1 Mary Blue 2 John Blue 2 John Green 2 John Black If I wanted to limit the number of records returned how could I do a query to do something like this? Where ((color='blue') AND (color<>'red' OR color<>'green')) So using the above example I would then get back ID|Name|Color 1 Mary Blue 2 John Blue 2 John Black I connect to Visual FoxPro tables via ADODB to use SQL. Thanks!

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  • Simple Select Statement on MySQL Database Hanging

    - by AlishahNovin
    I have a very simple sql select statement on a very large table, that is non-normalized. (Not my design at all, I'm just trying to optimize while simultaneously trying to convince the owners of a redesign) Basically, the statement is like this: SELECT FirstName, LastName, FullName, State FROM Activity Where (FirstName=@name OR LastName=@name OR FullName=@name) AND State=@state; Now, FirstName, LastName, FullName and State are all indexed as BTrees, but without prefix - the whole column is indexed. State column is a 2 letter state code. What I'm finding is this: When @name = 'John Smith', and @state = '%' the search is really fast and yields results immediately. When @name = 'John Smith', and @state = 'FL' the search takes 5 minutes (and usually this means the web service times out...) When I remove the FirstName and LastName comparisons, and only use the FullName and State, both cases above work very quickly. When I replace FirstName, LastName, FullName, and State searches, but use LIKE for each search, it works fast for @name='John Smith%' and @state='%', but slow for @name='John Smith%' and @state='FL' When I search against 'John Sm%' and @state='FL' the search finds results immediately When I search against 'John Smi%' and @state='FL' the search takes 5 minutes. Now, just to reiterate - the table is not normalized. The John Smith appears many many times, as do many other users, because there is no reference to some form of users/people table. I'm not sure how many times a single user may appear, but the table itself has 90 Million records. Again, not my design... What I'm wondering is - though there are many many problems with this design, what is causing this specific problem. My guess is that the index trees are just too large that it just takes a very long time traversing the them. (FirstName, LastName, FullName) Anyway, I appreciate anyone's help with this. Like I said, I'm working on convincing them of a redesign, but in the meantime, if I someone could help me figure out what the exact problem is, that'd be fantastic.

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  • Is adding users to the group www-data safe on Debian?

    - by John
    Many PHP applications do self-configuration and self-updating. This requires apache to have write access to the PHP files. While chgrp'ing them all to www-data appears like a good practice to avoid making them world writable, I also wish to allow users to create new files and edit existing one. Is adding users to the group www-data safe on Debian? For example: 775 root www-data /var/www 644 john www-data /var/www/johns_php_application.php 660 john www-data /var/www/johns_php_applications_configuration_file

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  • Handwritten linked list is segfaulting and I don't understand why

    - by Born2Smile
    Hi I was working on a bit of fun, making an interface to run gnuplot from within c++, and for some reason the my linked list implementation fails. The code below fails on the line plots-append(&plot). Stepping through the code I discovered that for some reason the destructor ~John() is called immediately after the constructor John(), and I cannot seem to figure out why. The code included below is a stripped down version operating only on Plot*. Originally I made the linked list as a template class. And it worked fine as ll<int and ll<char* but for some reason it fails as ll<Plot*. Could youp please help me figure out why it fails? and perhaps help me understand how to make it work? In advance: Thanks a heap! //B2S #include <string.h class Plot{ char title[80]; public: Plot(){ } }; class Link{ Plot* element; Link* next; Link* prev; friend class ll; }; class ll{ Link* head; Link* tail; public: ll(){ head = tail = new Link(); head-prev = tail-prev = head-next = tail-next = head; } ~ll(){ while (head!=tail){ tail = tail-prev; delete tail-next; } delete head; } void append(Plot* element){ tail-element = element; tail-next = new Link(); tail-next-prev = tail; tail-next = tail; } }; class John{ ll* plots; public: John(){ plots= new ll(); } ~John(){ delete plots; } John(Plot* plot){ John(); plots-append(plot); } }; int main(){ Plot p; John k(&p); }

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  • SQL Server Distinct Question

    - by RPS
    I need to be able to select only the first row for each name that has the greatest value. I have a table with the following: id name value 0 JOHN 123 1 STEVE 125 2 JOHN 127 3 JOHN 126 So I am looking to return: id name value 1 STEVE 125 2 JOHN 127 Any idea on the MSSQL Syntax on how to perform this operation?

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  • string.Replace does not work for quote

    - by Azhar
    ((string)dt.Rows[i][1]).Replace("'", "\'") I want the result that if any string have quote it change it into slash quote e.g John's - John\'s but the above replace function is not working fine. it results like John\'s but if we change the code to ((string)dt.Rows[i][1]).Replace("'", "\'") it gives the Result like John's does change it anyway.

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  • PHP Find and replace after in a string?

    - by TheBlackBenzKid
    I have some strings which contain the words LIMIT 3, 199 or LIMIT 0, 100. Basically I want to replace the word LIMIT and everything after it in my string. How do I do this in PHP? str_replace only replaces an item and the LIMIT text after is dynamic/ So it could be WHEN JOHN WAS TRYING HIS SQL QUERY, HE FOUND THAT LIMIT, 121 // RETURN WOULD BE WHEN JOHN WAS TRYING HIS SQL QUERY, HE FOUND THAT WHEN JOHN TRIED LIMIT 343, 333 HE FOUND // RETURN WOULD BE WHEN JOHN TRIED

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  • Exchange 2010 OWA - a few questions about using multiple mailboxes

    - by Alexey Smolik
    We have an Exchange 2010 SP2 deployment and we need that our users could access multiple mailboxes in OWA. The problem is that a user (eg John Smith) needs to access not just somebody else's (eg Tom Anderson) mailboxes, but his OWN mailboxes, e.g. in different domains: john[email protected], john[email protected], john[email protected], etc. Of course it is preferable for the user to work with all of his mailboxes from a single window. Such mailboxes can be added as multiple Exchange accounts in Outlook, that works almost fine. But in OWA, there are problems: 1) In the left pane - as I've learned - we can open only Inbox folders from other mailboxes. No way to view all folders like in Outlook? 2) With Send-As permissions set, when trying to send a message from another address, that message is saved in the Sent Items folder of the mailbox that is opened in OWA, and not in the mailbox the message is sent from. The same thing with the trash can. Is there a way to fix that? Also, this problem exists in desktop Outlook when mailboxes are added automatically via the Auto Mapping feature, so that we need to turn it off and add the accounts manually. Is there a simpler workaround? 3) Okay, suppose we only open Inbox folders in the left pane. The problem is that the mailbox names shown there are formed from Display Name attributes. But those names are all identical! All the mailboxes are owned by John Smith, so they should be all named John Smith - so that letter recepient sees "John Smith" in the "from" field, no matter what mailbox it is sent from. Also, the user knows what's his name - no need to tell him. He wants to know what mailbox he works with. So we need a way to either: a) customize OWA to show mailbox email address instead of user Display Name, or b) make Exchange use another attribute to put in the "from" field when sending letters 4) Okay, we can switch between mailboxes using "Open Other Mailbox" in the upper-right corner menu. But: a) To select a mailbox we need to enter its name (or first letters). It there a way to show a list of links to mailboxes the user has full access to? Eg in the page header... b) If we start entering the first letters, we see a popup list with possible mailboxes to be opened. But there are all mailboxes (apparently from GAL), not only mailboxes the user has permission to open! How to filter that popup list? c) The same problem as in (3) with mailbox naming. We can see the opened mailbox email address ONLY in the page URL, which is insufficient for many users. In the left pane we see "John Smith" which is useless. 5) Each mailbox is tied with a separate user in AD. If one has several mailboxes, we need to have additional dummy AD accounts, create additional OUs to store them, etc. That's not very nice, is there any standartized, optimal way to build such a structure? We would really appreciate any answers or additional info for any of these questions. Thank you in advance.

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  • Rhythmbox 2.99.1 crashes when playing any song on Ubuntu 13.10

    - by John H
    Yesterday rhythmbox was running smoothly but today it crashes only a few seconds after I hit the play button, regardless of track. I've tried disabling plugins, re-installing rhythmbox via synaptics, clearing the library and the rhythmdb.xml-file and just adding one album. Still, it crashes. If I run the rhythmbox from the command line i get the following before I have to force quit: :~$ rhythmbox Failed to create secure directory (/run/user/1000/pulse): Permission denied Killed :~$ However, if i run rhythmbox via the command line as superuser it does work. But i get the following errors: sudo rhythmbox (rhythmbox:8335): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to register client: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files (rhythmbox:8335): IBUS-WARNING **: The owner of /home/john/.config/ibus/bus is not root! (rhythmbox:8335): Rhythmbox-WARNING **: Unable to grab media player keys: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SettingsDaemon was not provided by any .service files Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/rb/Loader.py", line 47, in _contents_cb (ok, contents, etag) = file.load_contents_finish(result) gi._glib.GError: Operation not supported Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/overrides/GLib.py", line 634, in return (lambda data: callback(*data), user_data) […] I'm running rhythmbox on a Lenovo e335 thikpad edge. I hope I've supplied enough information. Cheers -John

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  • Mexico leading in Business Transformation Strategies:

    - by [email protected]
    By john[email protected] on April 15, 2010 8:31 AM By John Burke Group Vice President Oracle Applications Business Unit I recently completed a business tour in Mexico, and was surprised by both the economic vibrancy of the country and the thought leadership expressed by many of the customers I met. An example of the economic vibrancy of the country: across the street from my hotel was the local Bentley dealership, Coach Store, Yves Saint Laurent and of course a Starbucks. I only made it to Starbucks. Both the Coach Store and YSL had a line of folks waiting to get in... As for thought leadership, there were several illustrations only on the first day. I had the opportunity to meet with a branch of the Mexican Federal Government. Their questions were not about clerical task automation, far from it! We discussed citizen on-line access to fees and services - for example looking up the duty on an international goods shipment, or tracking that my taxes have been received, or the status of my request for a certain service. Eligibility, policies and status. Having an integrated rules or policy automation system that would allow businesses and citizens to access accurate information and ensure the proper collection of fees and payment for 3rd party provided services. Then in the afternoon, I met with the owner of a roofing company (note: most roofs in Mexico are flat and made of cement). This CEO started discussing how he wanted to transform his business from a cement products company to a service company and market 5-10-15 year service contracts which would guarantee the structural integrity of the roof and of course that the roof would remain waterproof. Although his products were guaranteed, they required an annual inspection and most home owners never schedule that inspection until it is too late and water damage has occurred. These emergency calls reduce his margin and reduce customer satisfaction. This lead to a discussion of business models in general and why long term differentiation can only come from service, not just for the music or news industries, but also for roofing companies! I completely agreed with the transformational concepts described in both meetings and quickly understood why there is a Bentley dealership near my hotel.

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  • Ubuntu 12.10 unmet dependencies

    - by John
    I have Ubuntu 12.10 with 3.2.0.24-generic #39-Ubuntu running on a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop. I have unmet dependencies as follows: root@John-700m:/home/John# sudo apt-get remove --purge linux-image-3.5.0-{18,27,31,34}-generic Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package 'linux-image-3.5.0-18-generic' is not installed, so not removed Package 'linux-image-3.5.0-27-generic' is not installed, so not removed Package 'linux-image-3.5.0-31-generic' is not installed, so not removed Package 'linux-image-3.5.0-34-generic' is not installed, so not removed You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: linux-generic : Depends: linux-image-generic but it is not going to be installed linux-image-extra-3.5.0-18-generic : Depends: linux-image-3.5.0-18-generic but it is not going to be installed linux-image-extra-3.5.0-27-generic : Depends: linux-image-3.5.0-27-generic but it is not going to be installed linux-image-extra-3.5.0-31-generic : Depends: linux-image-3.5.0-31-generic but it is not going to be installed linux-image-extra-3.5.0-34-generic : Depends: linux-image-3.5.0-34-generic but it is not going to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). I tried to remove the packages, but I still get the same error message. Any help would certainly be appreciated. @Eric, well noted. Here is the reults: model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up bts est tm2 Thanks again. @Eric, If I need to downgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 from 12.10, can I do it without having to mess my current partition or files? I also have Windows XP running on the machine. Best. @Eric, if you are online, I could use your help (or anybody's else). I installed the package for non-pae unit and I still get the same error. Any suggestions? Thanks

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  • Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

    - by Roger Hart
    In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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  • To ref or not to ref

    - by nmarun
    So the question is what is the point of passing a reference type along with the ref keyword? I have an Employee class as below: 1: public class Employee 2: { 3: public string FirstName { get; set; } 4: public string LastName { get; set; } 5:  6: public override string ToString() 7: { 8: return string.Format("{0}-{1}", FirstName, LastName); 9: } 10: } In my calling class, I say: 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee.FirstName = "Smith"; 18: employee.LastName = "Doe"; 19: } 20: }   After having a look at the code, you’ll probably say, Well, an instance of a class gets passed as a reference, so any changes to the instance inside the CallSomeMethod, actually modifies the original object. Hence the output will be ‘John-Doe’ on the first call and ‘Smith-Doe’ on the second. And you’re right: So the question is what’s the use of passing this Employee parameter as a ref? 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(ref employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee.FirstName = "Smith"; 18: employee.LastName = "Doe"; 19: } 20: } The output is still the same: Ok, so is there really a need to pass a reference type using the ref keyword? I’ll remove the ‘ref’ keyword and make one more change to the CallSomeMethod method. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee = new Employee 18: { 19: FirstName = "Smith", 20: LastName = "John" 21: }; 22: } 23: } In line 17 you’ll see I’ve ‘new’d up the incoming Employee parameter and then set its properties to new values. The output tells me that the original instance of the Employee class does not change. Huh? But an instance of a class gets passed by reference, so why did the values not change on the original instance or how do I keep the two instances in-sync all the times? Aah, now here’s the answer. In order to keep the objects in sync, you pass them using the ‘ref’ keyword. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: Employee employee = new Employee 6: { 7: FirstName = "John", 8: LastName = "Doe" 9: }; 10: Console.WriteLine(employee); 11: CallSomeMethod(ref employee); 12: Console.WriteLine(employee); 13: } 14:  15: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref Employee employee) 16: { 17: employee = new Employee 18: { 19: FirstName = "Smith", 20: LastName = "John" 21: }; 22: } 23: } Viola! Now, to prove it beyond doubt, I said, let me try with another reference type: string. 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: string name = "abc"; 6: Console.WriteLine(name); 7: CallSomeMethod(ref name); 8: Console.WriteLine(name); 9: } 10:  11: private static void CallSomeMethod(ref string name) 12: { 13: name = "def"; 14: } 15: } The output was as expected, first ‘abc’ and then ‘def’ - proves the 'ref' keyword works here as well. Now, what if I remove the ‘ref’ keyword? The output should still be the same as the above right, since string is a reference type? 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main() 4: { 5: string name = "abc"; 6: Console.WriteLine(name); 7: CallSomeMethod(name); 8: Console.WriteLine(name); 9: } 10:  11: private static void CallSomeMethod(string name) 12: { 13: name = "def"; 14: } 15: } Wrong, the output shows ‘abc’ printed twice. Wait a minute… now how could this be? This is because string is an immutable type. This means that any time you modify an instance of string, new memory address is allocated to the instance. The effect is similar to ‘new’ing up the Employee instance inside the CallSomeMethod in the absence of the ‘ref’ keyword. Verdict: ref key came to the rescue and saved the planet… again!

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  • Merge\Combine two datatables

    - by madlan
    I'm trying to merge\combine two datatables. I've looked at various examples and answers but they seem to create duplicate rows or require indexes (merge on datatable etc) I can't do this via SQL as one source is from a linked Oracle server accessed via MSSQL and the other from a different MSSQL Server that does not have linked access. The data is currently very simple: Name, Email, Phone DataTable1: "John Clark", "", "01522 55231" "Alex King", "[email protected]", "01522 55266" "Marcus Jones", "[email protected]", "01522 55461" DataTable2: "John Clark", "john[email protected]", "01522 55231" "Alex King", "[email protected]", "" "Marcus Jones", "[email protected]", "01522 55461" "Warren bean", "[email protected]", "01522 522311" Giving a datatable with the following: "John Clark", "john[email protected]", "01522 55231" "Alex King", "[email protected]", "01522 55266" "Marcus Jones", "[email protected]", "01522 55461" "Warren bean", "[email protected]", "01522 522311" Name is the field to match records on, with the first datatable taking priority.

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  • What was missing from the Content Strategy Forum?

    - by Roger Hart
    In April, Paris hosted the first ever Content Strategy Forum. The event's website proudly proclaims: 170 attendees, 18 nationalities, 17 speakers, 1 volcano... Content Strategy Forum 2010 rocked the world! The volcano was in Iceland, and the closest we came to rocking the world was a cursory mention in the Huffington Post, but I'll grant the event was awesome. One thing missing from that list, however, is "94 companies" (Plus a couple of universities and freelancers, and what have you). A glance through the attendees directory reveals a fairly wide organisational turnout - 24 students from two Parisian universities, countless design and marketing agencies, a series of tech firms, small and large. Two delegates from IBM, two from ARM, an appearance from RIM, Skype, and Facebook; twelve from the various bits of eBay. Oh, and, err, nobody from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Play, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, the BBC, no banks I noticed, and I didn't spot a newspaper. You get the idea. Facebook notwithstanding, you have to scroll through a few pages to Alexa rankings to find company names from the attendee list. I find this interesting, and I'm not wholly sure what to make of it. Of the large, web-centric, content-rich organizations conspicuously absent, at least one of two things is true: They didn't know about the event They didn't care about the event Maybe these guys all have content strategy completely sorted, and it's an utterly naturalised part of their business process. Maybe nobody at say, Apple or Play.com ever publishes a single piece of content that isn't neatly tailored to their (clearly defined, of course) user and business goals. Wouldn't that be lovely? The thing is, in that rosy and beatific world, there's still a case for those folks to join the community. There are bound to be other perspectives, and things to learn. You see, the other thing achingly conspicuous by its absence was case studies. In her keynote address, Kristina Halvorson made the point that what content strategy really needs is some big, loud success stories. A point I'd firmly second as a content strategist working within an organisation. Sarah Cancilla's presentation on content strategy at Facebook included some very neat, specific examples, and was richer for it. It didn't hurt that the example was Facebook - you're getting impressively big numbers off base. What about the other big boys? Is there anybody out there with a perspective? Do we all just look very silly to you, fretting away over text and images and users and purposes? Is content validation and maintenance so accustomed a part of your business that calling attention to it is like sniffing the air and saying "Hmm, a lot of nitrogen about today."? And if it is, do you have any wisdom to share?

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  • Tron: Legacy, 3D goggles, and embedded UA

    - by Roger Hart
    The 3D edition of Tron: Legacy opens with embedded user assistance. The film starts with an iconic white-on-black command-prompt message exhorting viewers to keep their 3D glasses on throughout. I can't quote it verbatim, and at the time of writing nor could anybody findable with 5 minutes of googling. But it was something like: "Although parts of the movie are 2D, it was shot in 3D, and glasses should be worn at all times. This is how it was intended to be viewed" Yeah - "intended". That part is verbatim. Wow. Now, I appreciate that even out of the small sub-set of readers who care a rat's ass for critical theory, few will be quite so gung-ho for the whole "death of the author" shtick as I tend to be. And yes, this is ergonomic rather than interpretive, but really - telling an audience how you expect them to watch a movie? That's up there with Big Steve's "you're holding it wrong" Even if it solves the problem, it's pretty arrogant. If anything, it's worse than RTFM. And if enough people are doing it wrong that you have to include the announcement, then maybe - just maybe - you've got a UX and/or design problem. Plus, current 3D glasses are like sitting in a darkened room, cosplaying the lovechild of Spider Jerusalem and Jarvis Cocker. Ok, so that observation was weirder than it was helpful; but seriously, nobody wants to wear the glasses if they don't have to. They ruin the visual experience of the non-3D sections, and personally, I find them pretty disruptive to the suspension of disbelief. This is an old, old, problem, and I'm carping on about it because Tron is enjoyable mass-market slush. It's easier for me to say "no, I can't just put some text on it. It's fundamentally broken, redesign it." in the middle of a small-ish, agile, software project than it would be for some beleaguered production assistant at the end of editing a $200 million movie. But lots of folks in software don't even get to do that. Way more people are going to see Tron, and be annoyed by this, than will ever read a technical communication blog. So hopefully, after two hours of being mildly annoyed, wanting to turn the brightness up, and slowly getting a headache, they'll realise something very, very important: you just can't document your way out of a shoddy UI.

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  • Google, typography, and cognitive fluency for persuasion

    - by Roger Hart
    Cognitive fluency is - roughly - how easy it is to think about something. Mere Exposure (or familiarity) effects are basically about reacting more favourably to things you see a lot. Which is part of why marketers in generic spaces like insipid mass-market lager will spend quite so much money on getting their logo daubed about the place; or that guy at the bus stop starts to look like a dating prospect after a month or two. Recent thinking suggests that exposure effects likely spin off cognitive fluency. We react favourably to things that are easier to think about. I had to give tech support to an older relative recently, and suggested they Google the problem. They were confused. They could not, apparently, Google the problem, because part of it was that their Google toolbar had mysteriously vanished. Once I'd finished trying not to laugh, I started thinking about typography. This is going somewhere, I promise. Google is a ubiquitous brand. Heck, it's a verb, and their recent, jaw-droppingly well constructed Paris advert is more or less about that ubiquity. It trades on Google's integration into any information-seeking behaviour. But, as my tech support encounter suggests, people settle into comfortable patterns of thinking about things. They build schemas, and altering them can take work. Maybe the ubiquity even works to cement that. Alongside their online effort, Google is running billboard campaigns to advertise Chrome, a free product in a crowded space. They are running these ads in some kind of kooky Calibri / Comic Sans hybrid. Now, at first it seems odd that one of the world's more ubiquitous brands needs to run a big print campaign in public places - surely they have all the fluency they need? Well, not so much. Chrome, after all, is not the same as their core product, so there's some basic awareness work to do, and maybe a whole new batch of exposure effect to try and grab. But why the typeface? It's heavily foregrounded, and the ads are extremely textual. Plus, don't we all know that jovial, off-beat fonts look unprofessional, or something? There's a whole bunch of people who want (often rightly) to ban Comic Sans I wonder, though. Are Google trying to subtly disrupt cognitive fluency? There's an interesting paper (pdf) about - among other things - the effects of typography on they way people answer survey questions. Participants given the slightly harder to read question gave more abstract answers. The paper references other work suggesting that generally speaking, less-fluent question framing elicits more considered answers. The Chrome ad typeface is less fluent for print. Reactions may therefore be more considered, abstract, and disruptive. Is that, in fact, what Google need? They have brand ubiquity, but they want here to change accustomed behaviour, to get people to think about changing their browser. Is this actually a very elegant piece of persuasive information design? If you think about their "what is a browser?" vox pop research video, there's certainly a perceptual barrier they're going to have to tackle somehow.

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  • Ad-hoc taxonomy: owning the chess set doesn't mean you decide how the little horsey moves

    - by Roger Hart
    There was one of those little laugh-or-cry moments recently when I heard an anecdote about content strategy failings at a major online retailer. The story goes a bit like this: successful company in a highly commoditized marketplace succeeds on price and largely ignores its content team. Being relatively entrepreneurial, the founders are still knocking around, and occasionally like to "take an interest". One day, they decree that clothing sold on the site can no longer be described as "unisex", because this sounds old fashioned. Sad now. Let me just reiterate for the folks at the back: large retailer, commoditized market place, differentiating on price. That's inherently unstable. Sooner or later, they're going to need one or both of competitive differentiation and significant optimization. I can't speak for the latter, since I'm hypothesizing off a raft of rumour, but one of the simpler paths to the former is to become - or rather acknowledge that they are - a content business. Regardless, they need highly-searchable terminology. Even in the face of tooth and claw resistance to noticing the fundamental position content occupies in driving sales (and SEO) on the web, there's a clear information problem here. Dilettante taxonomy is a disaster. Ok, so this is a small example, but that kind of makes it a good one. Unisex probably is the best way of describing clothing designed to suit either men or women interchangeably. It certainly takes less time to type (and read). It's established terminology, and as a single word, it's significantly better for web readability than a phrasal workaround. Something like "fits men or women" is short, by could fall foul of clause-level discard in web scanning. It's not an adjective, so for intuitive reading it's never going to be near the start of a title or description. It would also clutter up search results, and impose cognitive load in list scanning. Sorry kids, it's just worse. Even if "unisex" were an archaism (which it isn't), the only thing that would weigh against its being more usable and concise terminology would be evidence that this archaism were hurting conversions. Good luck with that. We once - briefly - called one of our products a "Can of worms". It was a bundle in a bug-tracking suite, and we thought it sounded terribly cool. Guess how well that sold. We have information and content professionals for a reason: to make sure that whatever we put in front of users is optimised to meet user and business goals. If that thinking doesn't inform style guides, taxonomy, messaging, title structure, and so forth, you might as well be finger painting.

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  • Supporting users if they're not on your site

    - by Roger Hart
    Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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