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  • Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

    - by Piet
    Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter? I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days. Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is. It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood. When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links. To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors. This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter. How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me) On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ’shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects. Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links: AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com) Java/1.6.0_13 Java/1.6.0_14 libwww-perl/5.816 MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/) Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5 OpenCalaisSemanticProxy PycURL/7.18.2 PycURL/7.19.3 Python-urllib/1.17 Twingly Recon twitmatic Twitturly / v0.6 Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified) Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified) Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there. Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters. I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit. Same experiment with a real, established twitter account Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ’status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio. Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you? I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am. On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign. Reposting the same link over and over again helps On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals. I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search. Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course. This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to) Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though. Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter? Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

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  • F# in ASP.NET, mathematics and testing

    - by DigiMortal
    Starting from Visual Studio 2010 F# is full member of .NET Framework languages family. It is functional language with syntax specific to functional languages but I think it is time for us also notice and study functional languages. In this posting I will show you some examples about cool things other people have done using F#. F# and ASP.NET As I am ASP/ASP.NET MVP I am – of course – interested in how people use different languages and technologies with ASP.NET. C# MVP Tomáš Petrícek writes about developing ASP.NET MVC applications using F#. He also shows how to use LINQ To SQL in F# (using F# PowerPack) and provides sample solution and Visual Studio 2010 template for F# MVC web applications. You may also find interesting how you can create controllers in F#. Excellent work, Tomáš! Vladimir Matveev has interesting example about how to use F# and ApplicationHost class to process ASP.NET requests ouside of IIS. This is simple and very straight-forward example and I strongly suggest you to take a look at it. Very cool example is project Strom in Codeplex. Storm is web services testing tool that is fully written on F#. Take a look at this site because Codeplex offers also source code besides binaries. Math Functional languages are strong in fields like mathematics and physics. When I wrote my C# example about BigInteger class I found out that recursive version of Fibonacci algorithm in C# is not performing well. In same time I made same experiment on F# and in F# there were no performance problems with recursive version. You can find F# version of Fibonacci algorithm from Bob Palmer’s blog posting Fibonacci numbers in F#. Although golden spiral is useful for solving many problems I looked for some practical code example and found one. Kean Walmsley published in his Through the Interface blog very interesting posting Creating Fibonacci spirals in AutoCAD using F#. There are also other cool examples you may be interested in. Using numerical components by Extreme Optimization  it is possible to make some numerical integration (quadrature method) using F# (also C# example is available). fsharp.it introduces factorials calculation on F#. Robert Pickering has made very good work on programming The Game of Life in Silverlight and F# – I definitely suggest you to try out this example as it is very illustrative too. Who wants something more complex may take a look at Newton basin fractal example in F# by Jonathan Birge. Testing After some searching and surfing I found out that there is almost everything available for F# to write tests and test your F# code. FsCheck - FsCheck is a port of Haskell's QuickCheck. Important parts of the manual for using FsCheck is almost literally "adapted" from the QuickCheck manual and paper. Any errors and omissions are entirely my responsibility. FsTest - This project is designed to Language Oriented Programming constructs around unit testing and behavior testing in F#. The goal of this project is to create a Domain Specific Language for testing F# code in a way that makes sense for functional programming. FsUnit - FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework. xUnit.NET - xUnit.net is a developer testing framework, built to support Test Driven Development, with a design goal of extreme simplicity and alignment with framework features. It is compatible with .NET Framework 2.0 and later, and offers several runners: console, GUI, MSBuild, and Visual Studio integration via TestDriven.net, CodeRush Test Runner and Resharper. It also offers test project integration for ASP.NET MVC. Getting started Well, as a first thing you need Visual Studio 2010. Then take a look at these resources: F# samples @ MSDN Microsoft F# Developer Center @ MSDN F# Language Reference @ MSDN F# blog F# forums Real World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C# (Amazon) Happy F#-ing! :)

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  • Measuring ASP.NET and SharePoint output cache

    - by DigiMortal
    During ASP.NET output caching week in my local blog I wrote about how to measure ASP.NET output cache. As my posting was based on real work and real-life results then I thought that this posting is maybe interesting to you too. So here you can read what I did, how I did and what was the result. Introduction Caching is not effective without measuring it. As MVP Henn Sarv said in one of his sessions then you will get what you measure. And right he is. Lately I measured caching on local Microsoft community portal to make sure that our caching strategy is good enough in environment where this system lives. In this posting I will show you how to start measuring the cache of your web applications. Although the application measured is built on SharePoint Server publishing infrastructure, all those counters have same meaning as similar counters under pure ASP.NET applications. Measured counters I used Performance Monitor and the following performance counters (their names are similar on ASP.NET and SharePoint WCMS): Total number of objects added – how much objects were added to output cache. Total object discards – how much objects were deleted from output cache. Cache hit count – how many times requests were served by cache. Cache hit ratio – percent of requests served from cache. The first three counters are cumulative while last one is coefficient. You can use also other counters to measure the full effect of caching (memory, processor, disk I/O, network load etc before and after caching). Measuring process The measuring I describe here started from freshly restarted web server. I measured application during 12 hours that covered also time ranges when users are most active. The time range does not include late evening hours and night because there is nothing to measure during these hours. During measuring we performed no maintenance or administrative tasks on server. All tasks performed were related to usual daily content management and content monitoring. Also we had no advertisement campaigns or other promotions running at same time. The results You can see the results on following graphic.   Total number of objects added   Total object discards   Cache hit count   Cache hit ratio You can see that adds and discards are growing in same tempo. It is good because cache expires and not so popular items are not kept in memory. If there are more popular content then the these lines may have bigger distance between them. Cache hit count grows faster and this shows that more and more content is served from cache. In current case it shows that cache is filled optimally and we can do even better if we tune caches more. The site contains also pages that are discarded when some subsite changes (page was added/modified/deleted) and one modification may affect about four or five pages. This may also decrease cache hit count because during day the site gets about 5-10 new pages. Cache hit ratio is currently extremely good. The suggested minimum is about 85% but after some tuning and measuring I achieved 98.7% as a result. This is due to the fact that new pages are most often requested and after new pages are added the older ones are requested only sometimes. So they get discarded from cache and only some of these will return sometimes back to cache. Although this may also indicate the need for additional SEO work the result is very well in technical means. Conclusion Measuring ASP.NET output cache is not complex thing to do and you can start by measuring performance of cache as a start. Later you can move on and measure caching effect to other counters such as disk I/O, network, processors etc. What you have to achieve is optimal cache that is not full of items asked only couple of times per day (you can avoid this by not using too long cache durations). After some tuning you should be able to boost cache hit ratio up to at least 85%.

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  • Using PHP to store results of a post request

    - by Paul M
    Im currently working with an API which requires we send our collection details in xml to their server using a post request. Nothing major there but its not working, so I want to output the sent xml to a txt file so I can look at actually whats being sent!! Instead of posting to the API im posting to a document called target, but the xml its outputting its recording seems to be really wrong. Here is my target script, note that the posting script posts 3 items, so the file being written should have details of each post request one after the other. <?php error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1); // get the request data... $payload = ''; $fp = fopen('php://input','r'); $output_file = fopen('output.txt', 'w'); while (!feof($fp)) { $payload .= fgets($fp); fwrite($output_file, $payload); } fclose($fp); fclose($output_file); ?> I also tried the following, but this just recorded the last post request so only 1 collection item was recorded in the txt file, instead of all 3 output_file = fopen('output.txt', 'w'); while (!feof($fp)) { $payload .= fgets($fp); } fwrite($output_file, $payload); fclose($fp); fclose($output_file); I know im missing something really obvious, but ive been looking at this all morning!

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  • Initial text and paperclipped-URL for action in UIActivityViewController & UIActivityItemSource?

    - by Benjamin Kreeger
    Finally been making it through Apple's (rather dismal) documentation on the new UIActivityViewController class and the UIActivityItemSource protocol, and I'm trying to send different data sets to different actions called from the activity view. To simplify things, I'm looking at two things. A Facebook posting action, which should say "Check this out!" and also attach a URL to the post (with that cute little paperclip). A Twitter posting action, which should say "Check this out, with #hashtag!" and also attach that same URL (with the same paperclip). Here's the code I've got implemented right now. - (id)activityViewController:(UIActivityViewController *)activityViewController itemForActivityType:(NSString *)activityType { if ([activityType isEqualToString:UIActivityTypePostToFacebook]) { return @"Check this out!"; } else if ([activityType isEqualToString:UIActivityTypePostToTwitter]) { return @"Check this out, with #hashtag!"; } return @""; } - (id)activityViewControllerPlaceholderItem:(UIActivityViewController *)activityViewController { return @""; } And then when I set up this activity view controller (it's in the same class), this is what I do. UIActivityViewController *activityView = [[UIActivityViewController alloc] initWithActivityItems:@[self] applicationActivities:nil]; [self presentViewController:activityView animated:YES completion:nil]; My dilemma is how to attach that NSURL object. It's relatively easy when calling the iOS 6 SL-class posting modals; you just call the individual methods to attach a URL or an image. How would I go about doing this here? I'll note that instead of returning NSString objects from -activityViewController:itemForActivityType, if I return just NSURL objects, they show up with that paperclip, with no body text in the post. If I return an array of those two items, nothing shows up at all.

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  • Communication with different social networks, strategy pattern?

    - by bclaessens
    Hi For the last few days I've been thinking how I can solve the following programming problem and find the ideal, flexible programming structure. (note: I'm using Flash as my platform technology but that shouldn't matter since I'm just looking for the ideal design pattern). Our Flash website has multiple situations in which it has to communicate with different social networks (Facebook, Netlog and Skyrock). Now, the communication strategy doesn't have to change multiple times over one "run". The strategy should be picked once (at launch time) for that session. The real problem is the way the communication works between each social network and our website. Some networks force us to ask for a token, others force us to use a webservice, yet another forces us to set up its communication through javascript. The problem becomes more complicated when our website has to run in each network's canvas. Which results in even more (different) ways of communicating. To sum up, our website has to work in the following cases: standalone on the campaign website url (user chooses their favourite network) communicate with netlog OR communicate with facebook OR communicate with skyrock run in a netlog canvas and log in automatically (website checks for netlog parameters) run in a facebook canvas and log in automatically (website checks for facebook params) run in a skyrock canvas and log in automatically (website checks for skyrock params) As you can see, our website needs 6 different ways to communicate with a social network. To be honest, the actual significant difference between all communication strategies is the way they have to connect to their individual network (as stated above in my example). Posting an image, make a comment, ... is the same whether it runs standalone or in the canvas url. WARNING: posting an image, posting a comment DOES differ from network to network. Should I use the strategy pattern and make 6 different communication strategies or is there a better way? An example would be great but isn't required ;) Thanks in advance

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  • Why does this sql statement keep saying it is a boolean and not a paramter? (php/Mysql)

    - by ggfan
    In this statement, I am trying to see if there if the latest posting in the database that has the exact same title, price, city, state, detail. If there is, then it would say to the user that the exact post has been already made; if not then insert the posting into the dbc. (This is one type of check so that users can't accidentally post twice. This may not be the best check, but this statement error is annoying me, so I want it to work :)) Why won't this sql work? I think it's not letting the title=$title and not getting the value in the $title... ERROR: mysqli_num_rows() expects parameter 1 to be mysqli_result, boolean given in postad.php on line 365 //there is a form that users fill out that has title, price, city, etc <form> blah blah </form> //if users click submit, then does all the checks and if all okay, insert to dbc if (isset($_POST['submit'])) { // Grab the pposting data from the POST and gets rid of any funny stuff $title = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['title'])); $price = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['price'])); $city = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['city'])); $state = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['state'])); $detail = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['detail'])); if (!is_numeric($price) && !empty($price)) { echo "<p class='error'>The price can only be numbers. No special characters, etc</p>"; } //Error problem...won't let me set title=$title, detail=$detail, etc. //this statement after all the checks so that none of the variables are empty $query="Select * FROM posting WHERE user_id={$_SESSION['user_id']} AND title=$title AND price=$price AND city=$city AND state=$state AND detail=$detail"; $data = mysqli_query($dbc, $query); if(mysqli_num_rows($data)==1) { echo "You already posted this ad. Most likely caused by refreshing too many times."; } }

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  • Why does this sql statement keep saying it is a boolean and not a parameter? (php/Mysql)

    - by ggfan
    In this statement, I am trying to see if there if the latest posting in the database that has the exact same title, price, city, state, detail. If there is, then it would say to the user that the exact post has been already made; if not then insert the posting into the dbc. (This is one type of check so that users can't accidentally post twice. This may not be the best check, but this statement error is annoying me, so I want it to work :)) Why won't this sql work? I think it's not letting the title=$title and not getting the value in the $title... ERROR: mysqli_num_rows() expects parameter 1 to be mysqli_result, boolean given in postad.php on line 365 //there is a form that users fill out that has title, price, city, etc <form> blah blah </form> //if users click submit, then does all the checks and if all okay, insert to dbc if (isset($_POST['submit'])) { // Grab the pposting data from the POST and gets rid of any funny stuff $title = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['title'])); $price = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['price'])); $city = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['city'])); $state = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['state'])); $detail = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['detail'])); if (!is_numeric($price) && !empty($price)) { echo "<p class='error'>The price can only be numbers. No special characters, etc</p>"; } //Error problem...won't let me set title=$title, detail=$detail, etc. //this statement after all the checks so that none of the variables are empty $query="Select * FROM posting WHERE user_id={$_SESSION['user_id']} AND title=$title AND price=$price AND city=$city AND state=$state AND detail=$detail"; $data = mysqli_query($dbc, $query); if(mysqli_num_rows($data)==1) { echo "You already posted this ad. Most likely caused by refreshing too many times."; } }

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  • Looking for a very bare and basic blog system?

    - by Shedo Chung-Hee Surashu
    Does anyone know of a user-hosted blog which can be an alternative to WordPress only, it should only have the bare necessities of a blog. I'll just take it from there. It should only have the following: Admin Account (for posting, editing, etc) Archive System Posting System with character limitation (For the Read More links.) Accept Comments from other users (only requires the user's name and email and / or website, then the actual comment). Pages (Allows me to create pages for custom content.) The reason I want this is because WordPress is already too bloated up that there are a ton of features that I don't need. I'd mostly be satisfied with a blogging system that has the above feature-set and I'll just work my way to add my own feature as I require it along the way.

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  • RewriteCond in .htaccess file gives me bad flag delimiters

    - by Steven
    I'm upgrading a website and I use this .htaccess file to show maintenance page: #MAINTENANCE-PAGE REDIRECT RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^127\.0\.0\.0 # Bogus IP address for posting here RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^127\.0\.0\.0 # Bogus IP address for posting here RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance\.html$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.no/maintenance.html [R=307,L] This opens the maintenance page for all users except the two IP addresses I've added. They get an Internal Server Error. I've used thesame script on another site, and that worked fine. Looking at the error log, I see the following: /var/www/vhosts/mysite.no/httpdocs/.htaccess: RewriteCond: bad flag delimiters If I remove my .htaccess file, I can work with my site just fine. My site is hosted on a VPN using CentOS 5. How can I fix this problem?

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  • Having some trouble in my pagation code(PHP)

    - by user300371
    My table is posting and in that table, it shows all the posting people put in. I am trying to make page navigation links at the bottom of the posts. the function generateenter code here_page_links does all the work. The code seem to be only showing the "<-" and "-" and not the link numbers. I think the function is only reading the $_GET['posting'] ==1. (this code is from the Oreilly PHP/MySQL book. I am using it as practice) function generate_page_links($cur_page, $num_pages) { $page_links = ''; // If this page is not the first page, generate the "previous" link if ($cur_page > 1) { //cur_page is just a number that is gotten from the url. $page_links .= '<a href="' . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . '?page=' . ($cur_page - 1) . '"><--</a> '; } else { $page_links .= '<- '; } // Loop through the pages generating the page number links for ($i = 1; $i <= $num_pages; $i++) { if ($cur_page == $i) { $page_links .= ' ' . $i; } else { $page_links .= ' <a href="' . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . '?usersearch=' . $user_search . '&sort=' . $sort . '&page=' . $i . '"> ' . $i . '</a>'; } } // If this page is not the last page, generate the "next" link if ($cur_page < $num_pages) { $page_links .= ' <a href="' . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . '?usersearch=' . $user_search . '&sort=' . $sort . '&page=' . ($cur_page + 1) . '">-></a>'; } if ($cur_page == $num_pages){ //the last page $page_links .= ' ->'; } return $page_links; //need to return this variable in the function } // Calculate pagination information $cur_page = isset($_GET['page']) ? $_GET['page'] : 1; $results_per_page = 3; // number of results per page $skip = (($cur_page - 1) * $results_per_page); $query = "SELECT * FROM posting ORDER BY date_added DESC"; $data = mysqli_query($dbc, $query); $total = mysqli_num_rows($data); $num_pages = ceil($total / $results_per_page); //Query again to get just the subset of results $query = $query . " LIMIT $skip, $results_per_page"; $result = mysqli_query($dbc, $query); echo '<table>'; echo '<tr><td><b>Title</b></td><td><b>Date Posted</b></td></tr>'; while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) { echo '<tr><td><a href="ad.php? posting_id='.$row['posting_id'].' ">'.$row['title'].'</a></td>'; echo '<td>'.$row['date_added'].'</td>'; //echo '<td>'.$row['name'].'</td></tr>'; } echo '</table>'; // Generate navigational page links if we have more than one page if ($num_pages > 1) { echo generate_page_links($user_search, $sort, $cur_page, $num_pages); }

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  • I'm Not Bi-Polar, I'm Bi-Winning

    - by David Dorf
    On March 1st, Charlie Sheen joined Twitter and was able to amass 1M followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes, setting an official world record.  So why does it take your brand so long to collect followers?  Easy: you're brand isn't a train wreck.Wouldn't it be great if your customers we chatting about your products as much as they're talking about Charlie #winning?  There are a couple things retailers can do.  First, you can offer check-ins to your customers, which can occasionally get a "ooh, what are you buying there?" in the social network. Another methods is to allow customer to "like" particular products on your Web site.  Companies like Wet Seal excel at that.We've been experimenting with automatic posting from the POS, assuming a customer has opted-in.  When you buy something in a store, the POS can automatically post "Dave just bought something at Wet Seal" to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare simultaneously.  We stopped short of mentioning the specific product so we don't pull a Beacon.  The idea is the same: get the conversation started.  Give customers a virtual water-cooler where they can discuss products and influence buying decisions.The guys over at ShopSocially have done something very similar.  On the Facebook page for Cafe Press, customers can claim purchases, effectively bragging on their walls.  Each posting goes through the Facebook newsfeed and gets friends interested.  They are seeing over 1,000 purchases being shared daily, and that's generating over 300,000 brand impressions.Sounds like a winning idea.

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  • Big Data for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    Right up there with mobile, social, and cloud is the term "big data," which seems to be popping up lots in the press these days.  Companies like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have popularized a new class of data technologies meant to solve the problem of processing large amounts of data quickly.  I first mentioned this in a posting back in March 2009.  Put simply, big data implies datasets so large they can't normally be processed using a standard transactional database.  The term "noSQL" is often used in this context as well. Actually, using parallel processing within the Oracle database combined with Exadata can achieve impressive results.  Look for more from Oracle at OpenWorld as hinted by Jean-Pierre Dijcks. McKinsey recently released a report on big data in which retail was specifically mentioned as an industry that can benefit from the new technologies.  I won't rehash that report because my friend Rama already did such a good job in his posting, Impact of "Big Data" on Retail. The presentation below does a pretty good job of framing the problem, although it doesn't really get into the available technologies (e.g. Exadata, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.) and isn't retail specific. Determine the Right Analytic Database: A Survey of New Data Technologies So when a retailer asks me about big data, here's what I say:  Big data refers to a set of technologies for processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data.  Imagine collecting everything uttered by your customers on Facebook and Twitter and combining it with all the data you can find about the products you sell (e.g. reviews, images, demonstration videos), including competitive data.  Assuming you could process all that data, you could then personalize offers to specific customers based on their tastes, ensure prices are competitive, and implement better local assortments.  It's really not that far off.

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  • OS X Mavericks Won't Connect To Ubuntu Server (Netatalk, Avahi)

    - by Andy Ibanez
    I'm really sorry for posting this. I know it may have been asked a thousand times. I have googled like crazy and I'm on the verge of desperation here. Basically, I followed this guide: http://motionsoundfx.com/2012/05/ubuntu-vnc-afp-macosx/ To create a small personal file server. When I installed it, I was able to connect to it just fine, I connected with my Ubuntu username and password and I was able to see the home directory. But later, I had to restart the file server so I could prepare a couple of other hard drives to put in. When the server restarted, I tried to connect to it, but I got an error message on my Mac: "The version of the server you're trying to connect to is not supported. Please contact your system administrator to solve this problem." Again, I have googled like crazy for this, and everybody says it is a problem with OS X Lion and up (assuming it affects Mavericks too). I have tried all the fixes mentioned for Lion and Mountain Lion and I haven't had any luck. That's the reason I'm posting this here: I suspect the problem is with my Ubuntu server. This happened after I restarted the server. Before restarting the server, I just put in my credentials and saw my home directory. Something when I restarted the server must have been messed up. I have found some other solutions, including to use "SHX2" in the conf file, but it hasn't worked for me. I ask for your help to solve this issue. Also please understand I'm completely illiterate when it comes to Linux. This is a nice chance to me to learn the OS so please give me detailed steps to do things if you deem it necessary. Thank you! I'm using Ubuntu Server 13.10 (the latest one as of today).

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  • Facebook Stories for Retailers

    - by David Dorf
    Getting people to "like" a brand is important because it opens the door to a possible B2C relationship. Once a person likes that brand, the brand can post to their newsfeed with promotions, announcements, and surveys. At least for me, I "hide" the noisy brands and just monitor the ones that keep posts under 4 times a week. I see lots of people, especially with fashion brands, comment on postings at which point the posting is seen by their network. A metric I've heard (but not verified) is that for every person that comments, ten of their friends see the original posting. That's a pretty cheap way to communicate to potential customers in a viral way. Over at mainstreet.com they compiled the a list of the top liked retailers on Facebook as of Feb 1, 2011. They are listed below: 19,414,892 Starbucks 11,302,939 Victoria's Secret 7,925,184 Zara 7,032,398 McDonald's 6,117,222 H&M 5,400,586 Taco Bell 4,665,760 Subway 4,494,849 Lacoste 4,185,570 Hollister 3,973,181 Forever 21 So I guess the public likes their fast-food and fashion. To take this to the next level, Facebook is now displaying Sponsored Stories, which I saw for the first time on my page this weekend. I found this picture at the Wall Blog that depicits Sponsored Stories very well. Over on the right-hand column of a person's page, where they see advertisements and such, Facebook will post stories involving their network of friends and their interaction with sponsored brands. Now their "likes" can suddenly become your ads. "Jessica and Philip like Starbucks. What are you waiting for?" This is another great way to take messages viral by accessing social graphs. As usual there will be a certain level of outcry from privacy advocates, but given the other more iniquitous issues, I believe this will fall by the wayside. Retailers should consider using Sponsored Stories to increase their Likes, and thus increase their voice in the social world.

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  • Using Sandcastle to build code contracts documentation

    - by DigiMortal
    In my last posting about code contracts I showed how code contracts are documented in XML-documents. In this posting I will show you how to get code contracts documented with Sandcastle and Sandcastle Help File Builder. Before we start, let’s download Sandcastle tools we need: Sandcastle Sandcastle Help File Builder Install Sandcastle first and then Sandcastle Help File Builder. Because we are generating only HTML based documentation we upload to server we don’t need any other tools. Of course, we need Cassini or IIS, but I expect it to be already there in your machine. Open your project and turn on XML-documentation for project and contracts. Now let’s run Sandcastle Help File Builder. We have to create new project and add our Visual Studio solution to this project. Now set the HelpFileFormat parameter value to be Website and let builder build the help. You have to wait about two or three minutes until help is ready. Take a look at your documentation that Sandcastle generated – you see not much information there about code contracts and their rules. Enabling code contracts documentation Now let’s include code contracts to documentation. Follow these steps: Open Sandcastle folder and make copy of vs2005 folder. Open CodeContracts folder (c:\program files\microsoft\contracts\) and unzip the archive from sandcastle folder. Copy all unzipped files to Sandcastle folder. Create (yes, create new) and build your Sandcastle Help File Builder documentation project again. Open help. In my case I see something like this now. As you can see then contracts are documented pretty well. We can easily turn on code contracts XML-documentation generation and all our contracts are documented automatically. To get documentation work we had to use Sandcastle help file fixes that are installed with code contracts and if we had previously Sandcastle Help File Builder project we had to create it from start to get new rules accepted. Once the documentation support for contracts works we have to do nothing more to get contracts documented.

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  • WolframAlpha Can Now Do In-depth Analysis of Your Facebook Account

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    If you’re a big fan of WolframAlpha’s ability to crunch the numbers on just about anything–and we certainly are–you’ll likely be just as delighted as we were to watch it massage the data from your Facebook account. Find out your most liked, discussed, and shared posts, see your Facebook habits, and other neat trends. I unleashed it on my account this morning, not sure what to expect from the results. Within the results tabulation WolframAlpha provided me with all sorts of neat data break downs. I now know exactly how many days it is to my next birthday, the composition of my aggregate posting habits (how many posts are status updates, links, or photos), the time of day when I do the most posting (and what the composition of those posts is), and my average post length. I also know my most liked post and my most commented on post. It will even crunch the numbers on your network of friends (60.6% of my friends are married, for example). By far one of the more interesting data analysis it does on the friendship data, however, is organizing all your friends into relationship clusters so you can see who in your Facebook network is friends with other people in your Facebook network. The service from WolframAlpha is free: simply visit the WolframAlpha search portal and type in “Facebook report” to start the process. You’ll be prompted to create a WolframAlpha account if you don’t have one and to authorize the WolframAlpha Facebook app to access your data. Your Facebook data is cached to your WolframAlpha account for one hour in order to crunch the numbers and display the results. WolframAlpha HTG Explains: How Windows Uses The Task Scheduler for System Tasks HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows? Java is Insecure and Awful, It’s Time to Disable It, and Here’s How

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  • Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors July to December, 2010

    - by Dave Campbell
    It's past the first of January, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is January 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7304 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 317 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 783 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 119 posts over last month, or over a third of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

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  • Can I become a Game Designer? [on hold]

    - by user32721
    This is my first time posting something on a forum in 4 years. I am posting this because I want to adjust my expectations and goals regarding game design. I am in college in Morocco (Al Akhawayn university). just started my junior year. I am a communications major (school of humanities) and a gender studies minor. I want to become a video game designer. It is the only career that I am interested in. I have been playing ever since I was 5 and haven't stopped yet. Currently I don't have any noteworthy skills to become a designer. I don't know how to program (don't really have the patience for it) and I can't draw to save my life. I haven't tried visual software like MAYA or MAX so I can't comment on graphic design. So I basically want to know whether my current education is capable of helping me reach my goal. If not then should I take a master's in game design (in the U.S?) or switch my minor to computer science? I am sorry that this post is long! I look forward to hearing your advice!

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  • Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors August, 2010 to January, 2011

    - by Dave Campbell
    It's *way* past the first of February, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for August 1, 2010 through January 31, 2011: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is March 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7304 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 265 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 783 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 155 posts over last month, or over half of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

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  • Strange spam posts not making sense

    - by Paaland
    I'm running a web site with a forum where one small part is open for posting from unregistered users. The site uses captcha, but still some spam posts get through every day. Here is the thing. All of the messages follow the same pattern, but all also come from different IP's. That makes me thing this is some sort of automated scripted "attack" from a botnet of some sorts. The strange thing is that all the messages start with six random characters and contains a couple of links. The words have no meaning and the domains in the links does not even exist. Why would anyone use time and resources spreading these things? Below you can see two of these messages: A5Zfs6 exrzvrbspntz, [url=http://nktqoqllnuab.com/]nktqoqllnuab[/url], [link=http://wtrenldadvsy.com/]wtrenldadvsy[/link], [http://rnlrqfgdvdot.com/] O2oLpL nqeffxhryfdk, [url=http://jutyurbpfxow.com/]jutyurbpfxow[/url], [link=http://jpcdtmdalpow.com/]jpcdtmdalpow[/link], [http://qopqwqxwjdjx.com/] Since all the messages come from different IP's I can't see blocking those will help much. For now I'm considering just dropping all messages following this pattern since it's quite easy to match with a regexp. Have anyone else seen these kinds of messages or know the point of posting them?

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  • Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors September, 2010 to February, 2011

    - by Dave Campbell
    It's a bit past the first of March, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for September 1, 2010 through February 28, 2011: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is March 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7672 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 368 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 984 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 201 posts over last month, or 54% of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

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  • Hello PCI Council, are you listening?

    - by David Dorf
    Mention "PCI" to any retailer and you'll instantly see them take a deep breath and start looking for the nearest exit.  Nobody wants to be insecure, but few actually believe that PCI does anything more than focus blame directly on retailers.  I applaud PCI for making retailers more aware of the importance of security, but did you have to make them PAINFULLY aware?  POS vendors aren't immune to this pain either as we have to undergo lengthy third-party audits in addition to the internal secure programming programs.  There's got to be a better way. There's a timely article over at StorefrontBacktalk that discusses the inequity of PCI's rules, and also mentions that the PCI Council is accepting comments until April 15th. As a vendor, my biggest issue with PCI is that they require vendors to disclose the details of any breaches, in effect "ratting out" customers.  I don't think its a vendor's place to do this.  I'd rather have the trust of my customers so we can jointly solve the problem. Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's Chief Security Officer, has an interesting blog posting on this very topic.  Its a bit of a long read, but I found it very entertaining and thought-provoking.  Here's an excerpt: ...heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give [the] PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. I encourage you to read the entire posting, Pain Comes Instantly, and then provide feedback to the PCI Council.

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  • What's new at Oracle in Gamification?

    - by erikanollwebb
    It's been a crazy few weeks in Apps UX.  We are actively working on some gamification designs in now 4 different application product areas, as well as supporting some teams in other areas of Oracle.  Since that gets to be a pretty diverse group with a lot of resources and ideas, we've started a group in the Oracle Social Network on Gamification at Oracle.  That's limited to internal users at Oracle, but if you are interested in joining,  ping me directly for more information at [email protected]. We're planning another design jam like we did here at Oracle in May and at the Enterprise Gamification Forum in San Diego in September.  This time, we're taking the show to the UK, and hosting it with a group of customers on the Oracle Usability Advisory Board.  It should be a great event!   We're also actively designing some gamified flows which we'll be testing with users at the UKOUG to see what our customers think about some of our gamification ideas. We're looking at more feedback opportunities.  Internally, we surveyed 444 folks within Oracle about gamification and we'll be posting some of our findings on that here soon.  I'll be posting a blog on gamification for our customers at useableapps.oracle.com  in the next few weeks and I'll cross-post to here when it comes out.  So even though it's been quiet on this blog, we are busy and I'm hoping to push out more content in the next few weeks!  Would love to know what's most interesting to the folks reading so if there's something you especially want to see, feel free to comment or email me about it.

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  • Is StackOverflow making me stupid? [closed]

    - by Ayush Goyal
    Possible Duplicate: When stuck, how quickly should one resort to Stack Overflow? Its good that solution to almost every programming problem is available at my disposal, either someone has asked it before or programming gurus are waiting for me to post it..sometimes its just the matter of seconds after posting the question and someone points out the error-causing-line or proposes alternate (easier, lightweight and efficient) solution. But today it struck me "is this making me dumb?" In good (umm..not so good) old days I used to figure out the source of my problem and then work it out myself, though it used to eat up lot of time but it helped in developing my logical thinking as it used to make an impression in my mind due to which I tend to avoid that situation in future codes. Now, as soon as I encounter a problem I just give it a shot or two and head towards the community. Many times after looking at the solution it turns out that answer was all in front of me..all I needed was to take a break, hover it once and its solved. Both the approaches make me feel guilty, for wasting time when I could have asked and solved it within minutes OR being too lazy to look over it again before posting the code snippet.

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