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• Transparent Technology from Amazon

  - by David Dorf

  Amazon has been making some interesting moves again, this time in the augmented humanity area.  Augmented humanity is about helping humans overcome their shortcomings using technology.  Putting a powerful smartphone in your pocket helps you in many ways like navigating streets, communicating with far off friends, and accessing information.  But the interface for smartphones is somewhat limiting and unnatural, so companies have been looking for ways to make the technology more transparent and therefore easier to use. When Apple helped us drop the stylus, we took a giant leap forward in simplicity.  Using touchscreens with intuitive gestures was part of the iPhone's original appeal.  People don't want to know that technology is there -- they just want the benefits.  So what's the next leap beyond the touchscreen to make smartphones even easier to use? Two natural ways we interact with the world around us is by using sight and voice.  Google and Apple have been using both in their mobile platforms for limited uses cases.  Nobody actually wants to type a text message, so why not just speak it?  Any if you want more information about a book, why not just snap a picture of the cover?  That's much more accurate than trying to key the title and/or author. So what's Amazon been doing?  First, Amazon released a new iPhone app called Flow that allows iPhone users to see information about products in context.  Yes, its an augmented reality app that uses the phone's camera to view products, and overlays data about the products on the screen.  For the most part it requires the barcode to be visible to correctly identify the product, but I believe it can also recognize certain logos as well.  Download the app and try it out but don't expect perfection.  Its good enough to demonstrate the concept, but its far from accurate enough.  (MobileBeat did a pretty good review.)  Extrapolate to the future and we might just have a heads-up display in our eyeglasses. The second interesting area is voice response, for which Siri is getting lots of attention.  Amazon may have purchased a voice recognition company called Yap, although the deal is not confirmed.  But it would make perfect sense, especially with the Kindle Fire in Amazon's lineup. I believe over the next 3-5 years the way in which we interact with smartphones will mature, and they will become more transparent yet more important to our daily lives.  This will, of course, impact the way we shop, making information more readily accessible than it already is.  Amazon seems to be positioning itself to be at the forefront of this trend, so we should be watching them carefully.

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• 5 Ways to Determine Mobile Location

  - by David Dorf

  In my previous post, I mentioned the importance of determining the location of a consumer using their mobile phone.  Retailers can track anonymous mobile phones to determine traffic patterns both inside and outside their stores.  And with consumers' permission, retailers can send location-aware offers to mobile phones; for example, a coupon for cereal as you walk down that aisle.  When paying with Square, your location is matched with the transaction.  So there are lots of reasons for retailers to want to know the location of their customers.  But how is it done? I thought I'd dive a little deeper on that topic and consider the approaches to determining location. 1. Tower Triangulation By comparing the relative signal strength from multiple antenna towers, a general location of a phone can be roughly determined to an accuracy of 200-1000 meters.  The more towers involved, the more accurate the location. 2. GPS Using Global Positioning Satellites is more accurate than using cell towers, but it takes longer to find the satellites, it uses more battery, and it won't well indoors.  For geo-fencing applications, like those provided by Placecast and Digby, cell towers are often used to determine if the consumer is nearing a "fence" then switches to GPS to determine the actual crossing of the fence. 3. WiFi Triangulation WiFi triangulation is usually more accurate than using towers just because there are so many more WiFi access points (i.e. radios in routers) around. The position of each WiFi AP needs to be recorded in a database and used in the calculations, which is what Skyhook has been doing since 2008.  Another advantage to this method is that works well indoors, although it usually requires additional WiFi beacons to get the accuracy down to 5-10 meters.  Companies like ZuluTime, Aisle411, and PointInside have been perfecting this approach for retailers like Meijer, Walgreens, and HomeDepot. Keep in mind that a mobile phone doesn't have to connect to the WiFi network in order for it to be located.  The WiFi radio in the phone only needs to be on.  Even when not connected, WiFi radios talk to each other to prepare for a possible connection. 4. Hybrid Approaches Naturally the most accurate approach is to combine the approaches described above.  The more available data points, the greater the accuracy.  Companies like ShopKick like to add in acoustic triangulation using the phone's microphone, and NearBuy can use video analytics to increase accuracy. 5. Magnetic Fields The latest approach, and this one is really new, takes a page from the animal kingdom.  As you've probably learned from guys like Marlin Perkins, some animals use the Earth's magnetic fields to navigate.  By recording magnetic variations within a store, then matching those readings with ones from a consumer's phone, location can be accurately determined.  At least that's the approach IndoorAtlas is taking, and the science seems to bear out.  It works well indoors, and doesn't require retailers to purchase any additional hardware.  Keep an eye on this one.

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• How to impale and stack targets correctly according to the collider and its coordinate?

  - by David Dimalanta

  I'm making another simple game, a catch game, where a spawning target game object must be captured using a skewer to impale it. Here how: At the start, the falling object (in red) will fall in a vertical direction (in blue) When aimed properly, the target will fall down along the line of the skewer. (in blue) Then, another target is spawned and will fall vertically. (in red) When aimed successfully again in a streak, the second target will fall along the skewer and stacked. Same process over and over when another target is spawned. However, when I test run it on the scene tab in Unity, when impaled several targets, instead of a smooth flow and stacking it ended up overlaying it instead of stacking it up like a pancake. Here's what it look like: As I noticed when reaching the half-way of my progress, I tried to figure out how to deal with collider bodies without sticking each other so that it will actually stack like in the example of the image at no. 3. Here's the script code I added in the target game object: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class ImpaleStateTest : MonoBehaviour { public GameObject target; public GameObject skewer; public bool drag = false; private float stack; private float impaleCount; void Start () { stack = 0; impaleCount = 0; } void Update () { if(drag) { target.transform.position = new Vector3 (DragTest.dir.transform.position.x, DragTest.dir.transform.position.y - 0.35f, 0); target.transform.rotation = DragTest.degrees; target.rigidbody2D.fixedAngle = true; target.rigidbody2D.isKinematic = true; target.rigidbody2D.gravityScale = 0; if(Input.GetMouseButton(0)) { Debug.Log ("Skewer: " + DragTest.dir.transform.position.x); Debug.Log ("Target: " + target.transform.position.x); } } } void OnTriggerEnter2D(Collider2D collider) { impaleCount++; Debug.Log ("Impaled " + impaleCount + " time(s)!"); drag = true; audio.Play (); } } Aside from that, I'm not sure if it's right but, the only way to stick the impaled targets while dragging the skewer left or right is to get the X coordinates from the skewer only. Is there something else to recommend it in order to improve this behavior as realistic as possible? Please help.

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• ODI 12c - Getting up and running fast

  - by David Allan

  Here's a quick A-B-C to show you how to quickly get up and running with ODI 12c, from getting the software to creating a repository via wizard or the command line, then installing an agent for running load plans and the like. A. Get the software from OTN and install studio. Check out this viewlet here for quickly doing this. B. Create a repository using the RCU, check out this viewlet here which uses the FMW Repository Creation Utility.  You can also silently create (and drop) a repository using the command line, this is really easy. .\rcu -silent -createRepository -connectString yourhost:1521:orcl.st-users.us.oracle.com -dbUser sys -dbRole sysdba -useSamePasswordForAllSchemaUsers true -schemaPrefix X -component ODI -component IAU  -component IAU_APPEND  -component IAU_VIEWER -component OPSS < passwords.txt where the passwords file contains info such as; sysdba_passwd newschema_passwd odi_user_passwd D workreposname workrepos_passwd  You can find details about the silent use of RCU here in the FMW documentation. C. Quickly create an agent for executing load plans and the like -  there is a great OBE for this, check it out here. If you are on your laptop and just wanting as minimal an agent as possible then this link is a must. With these three steps you are ready to get to the fun stuff! Check out more OBEs here - keep on the lookout for more!

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• Plymouth did not install properly

  - by David Starkey

  I was installing the plymouth manager in hopes of making a custom loading screen. While the terminal was working, my computer unexpectedly powered off. I can open up the manager and it appears to do what it is supposed to (minus the fact that I can't make my own theme) and the screen only shows on powering down. Anyway, all of the advice I have seen so far have resulted in errors and nothing getting fixed. I do not have permissions to simply select the folder and delete it for some reason and I have not been able to find out how to grant myself those permissions. I guess my question then is how do I get rid of the plymouth manager so I can reinstall it properly? Already tried: -Installation - http://www.noobslab.com/2011/11/install-plymouth-manager-and-change.html -Removal - How to remove Plymouth Boot Animation manager and keep the default boot screen -Permissions - How do I change my user permissions to edit /etc/apt/sources.list? -Theming Guide - http://brej.org/blog/?p=158

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• How do I get google to see keywords on a one page web application site?

  - by David

  I'm going to have to link to the web site to explain this, http://www.diagram.ly, it's a free service, so I hope this doesn't break advertising rules. Basically, it's a one page web application, I don't want to create a web site for it. Some background text loads and if JavaScript is enabled, the web application itself then loads. The problem is that Google only seems to be picking up the title of the page and the text on the footer, so the site only appear on Google search for very limited text (based on the title and meta description mostly). I was hoping that search engines would pick up on the background text and index that. The text is factual, not keyword stuffed. Yahoo seems to pick up the text, just not Google. Does anyone have any experience of how Google would view such a site and where I could put the text for a better result? Edit I should mention that Google Webmaster Tools lists the site keywords as "Component, diagramly, feed, mxgraph, share and twitter". Basically the footer and little else.

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• How to fix bad Collada produced by FBX?

  - by David

  I tried to use the FBX SDK (2011.3.1) to load FBX files and save them as Collada files in order to be able to import FBX files in Panda3D. Unfortunately the resulting Collada files are not usable for several reasons, among them: There's a Maya specific extra technique diffuse <diffuse> <texture texture="Map__2-image" texcoord="CHANNEL0"> <extra> <technique profile="MAYA"> <wrapU sid="wrapU0">TRUE</wrapU> <wrapV sid="wrapV0">TRUE</wrapV> <blend_mode>ADD</blend_mode> </technique> </extra> </texture> </diffuse> It assigns a texcoord channel name that isn't referenced anywhere else in the file (in the previous code sample, no geometry uses "CHANNEL0"...) Every polygon is exported twice, a first time with a basic material (only diffuse color, specular color, etc.) and a second time with a textured material -- this doubles the number of polygons of each model without any valuable reason Anyway, the resulting Collada file cannot be opened correctly either with OpenCOLLADA or Panda3D's "dae2egg". Anyone has any experience on how to "fix" it and make it understandable by common and well-reputed Collada importers such as OpenCOLLADA?

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• How to fix sudo: setreuid(ROOT_UID, user_uid): Operation not permitted error?

  - by David R.

  I am using LDAP authentication on my Ubuntu 11.10 server. I installed libpam-ldap, and configured things accordingly. It works great, except that I get this error every once in a while when I try to sudo: sudo: setreuid(ROOT_UID, user_uid): Operation not permitted I know I have sudoers set up correctly, since it works most of the time. It's not just my log in either, others have the same problem when I have it. When this error is occurring, I can't ssh in with my regular system user at all. When I sign in directly, I can't get any gnome-terminal to start. Once I restart the server, the problem goes away. 'Course, that's not a solution, if it was a prod server, I'd be in trouble. How do I fix this? Edit 3/1/12: I just figured out that if stop and start the nscd service, the problem goes away. service nscd stop service nscd start Not much of a solution since I have to be logged into the server directly, not via ssh.

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• How to Handle frame rates and synchronizing screen repaints

  - by David Kroukamp

  I would first off say sorry if the title is worded incorrectly. Okay now let me give the scenario I'm creating a 2 player fighting game, An average battle will include a Map (moving/still) and 2 characters (which are rendered by redrawing a varying amount of sprites one after the other). Now at the moment I have a single game loop limiting me to a set number of frames per second (using Java): Timer timer = new Timer(0, new AbstractAction() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { long beginTime; //The time when the cycle begun long timeDiff; //The time it took for the cycle to execute int sleepTime; //ms to sleep (< 0 if we're behind) int fps = 1000 / 40; beginTime = System.nanoTime() / 1000000; //execute loop to update check collisions and draw gameLoop(); //Calculate how long did the cycle take timeDiff = System.nanoTime() / 1000000 - beginTime; //Calculate sleep time sleepTime = fps - (int) (timeDiff); if (sleepTime > 0) {//If sleepTime > 0 we're OK ((Timer)e.getSource()).setDelay(sleepTime); } } }); timer.start(); in gameLoop() characters are drawn to the screen ( a character holds an array of images which consists of their current sprites) every gameLoop() call will change the characters current sprite to the next and loop if the end is reached. But as you can imagine if a sprite is only 3 images in length than calling gameLoop() 40 times will cause the characters movement to be drawn 40/3=13 times. This causes a few minor anomilies in the sprited for some charcters So my question is how would I go about delivering a set amount of frames per second in when I have 2 characters on screen with varying amount of sprites?

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• OWB – How to update OWB after Database Cloning

  - by David Allan

  One of the most commonly asked questions led to one of the most commonly accessed support documents (strange that) for OWB is the document describing how to update the OWB repository details after cloning the Oracle database. The document in the Oracle support site has id 434272.1, and is titled 'How To Update Warehouse Builder After A Database Cloning (Doc ID 434272.1)'. This post is really for me to remember the document id;-)

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• MDM for Tax Authorities

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  In last week’s MDM blog, we discussed MDM in the Public Sector. I want to continue that thread. After all, no industry faces tougher data quality problems than governmental organizations, and few industries suffer more significant down side consequences to poor operations than local, state and federal governments. One key challenge area is taxation. Tax Authorities face a multitude of IT challenges. Firstly, the data used in tax calculations is increasing in volume and complexity. They must improve service by introducing multi-channel contact centers and self-service capabilities. Security concerns necessitate increasingly sophisticated data protection procedures. And cost constraints are driving Tax Authorities to rely on off-the-shelf software for many of their functional areas. Compounding these issues is the fact that the IT architectures in operation at most revenue and collections agencies are very complex. They typically include multiple, disparate operational and analytical systems across which the sum total of data about individual constituents is fragmented. To make matters more complicated, taxation is not carried out by a single jurisdiction, and often sources of income including employers, investments and other sources of taxable income and deductions must also be tracked and shared among tax authorities. Collectively, these systems are involved in tax assessment and collections, risk analysis, scoring, tracking, auditing and investigation case management. The Problem of Constituent Data Management The infrastructure described above makes it very difficult to create a consolidated representation of a given party. Differing formats and data models mean that a constituent may be represented in one way in one system and in a different way in another. Individual records are frequently inaccurate, incomplete, out of date and/or inconsistent with other records relating to the same constituent. When constituent data must be aggregated and scored, information within each system must be rationalized and normalized so the agency can produce a constituent information file (CIF) that provides a single source of truth about that party. If information about that constituent changes, each system in turn must be updated. There have been many attempts to solve this problem with technology: from consolidating transactional systems to conducting manual systems integration projects and superimposing layers of business intelligence and analytics. All these approaches can be successful in solving a portion of the problem at a specific point in time, but without an enterprise perspective, anything gained is quickly lost again. Oracle Constituent Data Mastering for Tax Authorities: A Single View of the Constituent Oracle has a flexible and long-term solution to the problem of securely integrating and managing constituent data. The Oracle Solution for mastering Constituent Data for Tax Authorities is based on two core product offerings: Oracle Customer Hub and – optionally – Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA). Customer Hub is a master data management (MDM) product that centralizes, de-duplicates, and enriches constituent data. It unifies fragmented information without disrupting existing business processes or IT investments. Role based data access and privacy rules guarantee maximum security and privacy. Data is continuously and automatically synchronized with all source systems. With the Oracle Customer Hub managing the master constituent identity, every department can capture transaction activity against the same record, improving reporting accuracy, employee productivity, reliability of constituent analytics, and day-to-day constituent relationships. Oracle Application Integration Architecture provides a collection of core pre-built processes to support out of the box Master Data Governance across Oracle Customer Hub, Siebel CRM, and Oracle E-Business Suite. It also provides a framework to enable MDM integrations with other Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Oracle AIA removes some of the key inhibitors to implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) by providing a pre-built SOA-based middleware foundation as well as industry-optimized service oriented applications, all built around a SOA governance model that encourages effective design and reuse. I encourage you to read Oracle Solution for Mastering Constituents Data for Public Sector – Tax Authorities by Roberto Negro. It is an outstanding whitepaper that describes how the Oracle MDM solution allows you to create a unified, reconciled source of high-quality constituent data and gain an accurate single view of each constituent. This foundation enables you to lower the costs associated with data quality and integration and create a tax organization that is efficient, secure and constituent-centric. Also, don’t forget the upcoming webcast on Thursday, February 10th: Deliver Improved Services to Citizens at Lower Cost to your Organization Our Guest Speaker is Ruben Spekle, from Capgemini. He will also provide insight into Public Sector Master Data Management and Case Management implementations including one that was executed for a Dutch Government Agency. If you are interested in how governmental organizations from around the world are using MDM to advance their cause, click here to register for the webcast.

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• Windows Phone 7 Development &ndash; Useful Links

  - by David Turner

  Here are some excellent links for anyone developing for Windows Phone 7: J.D. Meier’s Windows Phone Developer Guidance Map – this is immense.  Also check out the Silverlight version Justin Angel’s site – some really great articles on unlocked roms, automation and Continuous Integration Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices Wiki Jeff Blankenburg’s 31 days of Windows Phone 7 This post of Links to sample code for Windows Phone Tim Heuers blog, particularly this post of Tips and Tricks Kevin Marshall's blog, particularly the epic WP7 Development Tips Part 1 post Code Samples for Windows Phone on MSDN If you have unlocked your phone for development, then you can use the WPConnect tool to connect to the device rather than using the Zune client.  I found it useful to pin a shortcut to WPConnect in my Start Menu. The Performance Counters displayed when you debug your app on a device are useful for seeing things like frame rate and memory usage, this page on MSDN explains what the numbers mean.  Jeff Blankenburg covers this in more details on his blog I also came across this set of links to tutorials recently which looks very useful. Creating Windows Phone 7 Application and Marketplace Icons: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/gg317447.aspx

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• How do I get same scrollbar style for gtk-2.0 and gtk-3.0 apps?

  - by David López

  Sorry for my English mistakes, I'm Spanish. I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 in a tablet. I've removed overlay-scrollbars and I have increased the scrollbars size to use them with fingers. In /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc I've changed: GtkScrollbar::slider-width = 23 GtkScrollbar::min-slider-length = 51 and added: GtkScrollbar::has-backward-stepper = 0 GtkScrollbar::has-forward-stepper = 0 In /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css I've changed: GtkScrollbar-min-slider-length: 51; GtkRange-slider-width: 23; (in .scrollbar item) Now my scrollbars are usable with fingers, but they seem different for gtk-2.0 and gtk-3.0 apps. In the picture the left scrollbar is a gtk-2.0 app and the right one is a gtk-3.0 I want to setup gtk2.0 bar to be exactly the same as gtk3.0, that is Make upper and lower extremes empty (oranges circles in the picture) Reduce the length of the 3 horizontal lines (black ellipse) Can somebody help me? Thanks. Hola. Uso ubuntu 11.10 en una tableta; he quitado overlay-scrollbars y he incrementado el tamaño de las barras para poder usarlas con los dedos. Concretamente en /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc be cambiado GtkScrollbar::slider-width = 23 GtkScrollbar::min-slider-length = 51 y añadido GtkScrollbar::has-backward-stepper = 0 GtkScrollbar::has-forward-stepper = 0 En /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css he cambiado GtkScrollbar-min-slider-length: 51; GtkRange-slider-width: 23; (en el apartado.scrollbar) Mis barras son manejables con dedos, pero se ven muy distintas para aplicaciones gtk-2.0 y gtk-3.0. La barra de la izquierda de la imagen es 2.0 y la de la derecha es 3.0 Quiero configurar las barras 2.0 exactamente como las 3.0, para lo que necesito Vaciar los extremos de la barra (círculos naranjas en la imagen) Reducir la longitud de las 3 líneas horizontales (elipses negras en la imagen) ¿Alguna idea? Gracias.

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• Remote install of Ubuntu Server

  - by David Walker

  Hi all, I have a machine located 500 miles away that's running Ubuntu 8.04. I figure it's just about time that I upgrade to the latest LTS. However, there's a software raid (md_raid) in there, and I'm afraid that just a dist-upgrade when I switch over the sources.list will end with catastrophic failure. Like a panic on boot that the raid'd disk can't be read, or something else. First, hoping that's not the case, however, if it ends up happening I'm wondering if there's a means of having someone drop in a Ubuntu 10.04 server install disk, and flip on ssh, and some means for me to hop on and re-run the installer remotely. Is this feasible? If so, what would one need to do aside run apt-get install ssh on the target machine? I do have friends who can be in front of the target machine to initiate the process, just not execute it out.

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• Customizing Google Sites look and feel

  - by David Parunakian

  I find the site layout and theming capabilities in Google Sites (found in the Manage Site screen) very limited; for instance, I do not seem to be able to place the horizontal navigation buttons directly to the right of the logo and to customize their style, as well as to use the standard trick of making a horizontally stretchable background image of a box with rounded corners by splitting it into three parts and replicating the middle one, etc. Am I missing something? Are there any advanced settings available? Thanks.

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• What are the main programmers web sites in other countries?

  - by David

  Looking at the demographics of sites like this one, there seems to be a very heavy US weighing of users. I know there have been discussions about using English as a programmer, but the are some large countries with large programmer bases that must be using localized sites. Countries like Brazil and China, in particular, what sites do programmers go for discussions? Do a lot of the threads link up to English speaking sites like these? In France they obviously prefer their own language, what do the equivalent sites look like? I don't want to turn this into an English language speaking discussion like this one, it's more a general trans-cultural programming curiosity.

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• Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

  - by David Dorf

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

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• Calgary .NET User Group Visual Studio 2010 Presentation (April 28, 2010)

  - by David Paquette

  If you’re in Calgary, come join us on April 28th, 2010.  Habib Heydarian (Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft) will be presenting the new debugging features in Visual Studio 2010 including IntelliTrace, multi-tier performance analysis, importing/exporting breakpoints and many other features. Register at www.dotnetcalgary.com.

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• Social Analytics and the Customer

  - by David Dorf

  Many successful retailers put the customer at the center of everything they do, so its important that the customer is modeled correctly across all their systems.  The path to omni-channel starts and ends with the customer so at ARTS, our next big project is focused on ensuring a consistent representation of customers across our transactional data model, datawarehouse model, and XML schemas.  Further, we've started a new whitepaper that describes how Big Data and Social Media Analytics should be leveraged by retailers to add and additional level of customer insight. Let's start by taking a closer look at the meaning of social analytics.  Here's my definition: Social Analytics, in the retail context, describes the analysis of data obtained from social media sources in an effort to better comprehend and interact with the community of consumers.  This discipline seeks to understand what’s being said by the community about brands and products (“monitoring”), as well as understand the behaviors of those in the community (“profiling”).  The results are used to enforce the brand image, improve product decisions, and better focus marketing, all of which lead to increased sales. To help illustrate the facets of social analytics, I drew the diagram below which was originally published by Retail Touchpoints. There are lots of tools on the market that allow retailers to monitor social media for brand and product mentions.  These include analysis of sentiment, reach, share of voice, engagement, etc.  When your brand is mentioned, good or bad, its an opportunity to engage with the customer and possibly lead to a sale.  Because products are not always unique, its much more difficult to monitor product mentions, but detecting product trends early can help a retailer make better merchandising decisions, especially in fashion. Once a retailer understands what's being said, the next step is learn more about who's saying it.  That involves profiling customers beyond simple demographics to understand their motivations.  Much can be learned from patterns, and even more when customers voluntarily share their data.  Knowing that a customer is passionate about, for example, mountain biking allows the retailer to make relevant offers on helmets, ask for opinions on hydration, and help spread marketing messages. Social analytics has many facets that benefit retailers, some of which are easy but many of which are hard.  Its important for the CMO and CIO to work closely together to plan for these capabilities and monitor the maturity of tools on the market.  This is an area that will separate winners from losers.

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• Loading sound in XNA without the Content Pipeline

  - by David Gouveia

  I'm working on a "Game Maker"-type of application for Windows where the user imports his own assets to be used in the game. I need to be able to load this content at runtime on the engine side. However I don't want the user to have to install anything more than the XNA runtime, so calling the content pipeline at runtime is out. For images I'm doing fine using Texture2D.FromStream. I've also noticed that XNA 4.0 added a FromStream method to the SoundEffect class but it only accepts PCM wave files. I'd like to support more than wave files though, at least MP3. Any recommendations? Perhaps some C# library that would do the decoding to PCM wave format.

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• Can't reinstall VLC

  - by David matthews

  I use VLC a lot. And when 2.0 came out Ubuntu did not update to that version, the REPO had the older version even months later, So I added the daily repo: http://ppa.launchpad.net/videolan/stable-daily/ubuntu and that worked for a while, after a few months later I received a 'Distribution upgrade' and when I installed it, it removed VLC. when I tried to re-install it gave me a bunch of unmet dependency's, so I disabled the source, ran apt-get update, and tried to install the older VLC, that did not work either. I eventually found a web page, and it helped me get it working, and I was also able to get the 'Stable Daily' working too But last night, I got another 'distro upgrade' and it uninstalled VLC again. when I try to reinstall from daily I get: The following packages have unmet dependencies: vlc : Depends: fonts-freefont-ttf but it is not installable Depends: vlc-nox (= 2.0.3+git20121005+r392-0~r42~precise1) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libvlccore5 (>= 2.0.0) but it is not going to be installed Recommends: vlc-plugin-notify (= 2.0.3+git20121005+r392-0~r42~precise1) but it is not going to be installed Recommends: vlc-plugin-pulse (= 2.0.3+git20121005+r392-0~r42~precise1) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. and from the default source: vlc : Depends: vlc-nox (= 2.0.3-0ubuntu0.12.04.1) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libvlccore5 (>= 2.0.0) but it is not going to be installed Recommends: vlc-plugin-notify (= 2.0.3-0ubuntu0.12.04.1) but it is not going to be installed vlc-plugin-pulse : Depends: vlc-nox (= 2.0.3-0ubuntu0.12.04.1) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libvlccore5 (>= 2.0.0) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Any ideas? I am using ubuntu 12.04 64bit.

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• No Internet On 12.04.1

  - by David Ramos

  I have no internet on Ubuntu 12.04.1 so i'm on a desktop so I got to install a .exe program to run my wireless card for my desktop so I got internet access, But I can't seem to download wine or its source files. If I do I put on my usb and boot into Ubuntu but then when I try to open it I get the programs source files etc. Anyone who could help me Please do :| ( I can't install wine from software center since I have no connection online). Note : I can download my stuff on windows 8 boot so I can transfer files to my usb to run on Ubuntu.

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• Nautilus is really slow

  - by david

  Nautilus used to be lightning fast.Now it's dead slow. I have tried upgrading the video card but that does not seem to be the problem. Also I found that there was a problem with the Dropbox uninstall, finally I replace it with pcmanfm which appears to be much faster but the down side is that I no longer have the gwibber social client and a lot of stuff don't work like they use to. Also I completely removed nautilus and couldn't even login to ubuntu to install again nautilus.How can I remove or repair nautilus, and use pcmanfm instead? I have a dell inspiron 1440 3gb ram / disk 300gb / Additionally, why does nautilus run fast when I run it as root? There are no USB devices attached to my computer. Thanks in advance

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• ODI 11g - Dynamic and Flexible Code Generation

  - by David Allan

  ODI supports conditional branching at execution time in its code generation framework. This is a little used, little known, but very powerful capability - this let's one piece of template code behave dynamically based on a runtime variable's value for example. Generally knowledge module's are free of any variable dependency. Using variable's within a knowledge module for this kind of dynamic capability is a valid use case - definitely in the highly specialized area. The example I will illustrate is much simpler - how to define a filter (based on mapping here) that may or may not be included depending on whether at runtime a certain value is defined for a variable. I define a variable V_COND, if I set this variable's value to 1, then I will include the filter condition 'EMP.SAL > 1' otherwise I will just use '1=1' as the filter condition. I use ODIs substitution tags using a special tag '<$' which is processed just prior to execution in the runtime code - so this code is included in the ODI scenario code and it is processed after variables are substituted (unlike the '<?' tag).  So the lines below are not equal ... <$ if ( "#V_COND".equals("1")  ) { $> EMP.SAL > 1 <$ } else { $> 1 = 1 <$ } $> <? if ( "#V_COND".equals("1")  ) { ?> EMP.SAL > 1 <? } else { ?> 1 = 1 <? } ?> When the <? code is evaluated the code is executed without variable substitution - so we do not get the desired semantics, must use the <$ code. You can see the jython (java) code in red is the conditional if statement that drives whether the 'EMP.SAL > 1' or '1=1' is included in the generated code. For this illustration you need at least the ODI 11.1.1.6 release - with the vanilla 11.1.1.5 release it didn't work for me (may be patches?). As I mentioned, normally KMs don't have dependencies on variables - since any users must then have these variables defined etc. but it does afford a lot of runtime flexibility if such capabilities are required - something to keep in mind, definitely.

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• WPF Applications &ndash; Handling the Unhandled

  - by David Totzke

  Instead of just letting your application crash, you can attach a method to the DispatcherUnhandledExceptionEventHandler and one to the AppDomain.Current.UnhandledException.  You wire these up in the code behind of your application which by default is App.xaml.cs.  You can log these errors or throw up a message Don Box and tell the user what happened.  Then you shut down the app gracefully.  You shut it down because something bad happened that you weren’t expecting and at this point there is no guarantee as to the state of the stack or memory or anything really.  All bets are off. If, on the other hand, the method for the UnhandledException is empty and the method for the DispatcherUnhandledEventHandler ends up in a call to a method called LogError() and the LogError() method is FUCKING EMPTY, and you just swallow the exceptions and keep on running, then, not so much.  I spent nearly a day trying to track down a bug that would have been obvious had something been logged or if it just crashed.  It’s my own fault I suppose.  I knew these were hooked up.  I just never suspected that there wouldn’t be any implementation at all.  Live and learn. Customs Man at Heathrow: Anything to declare, Sir? Jekyll and Hyde: Man has not evolved an inch from the slime that spawned him. Customs Man at Heathrow: Very Good, Sir. I tend to agree. Dave Just because I can…

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