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  • Create PDF in memory instead of physical file using C#

    - by acadia
    Hello, How do one create PDF in memorystream instead of physical file using itextsharp. The code below is creating actual pdf file. Instead how can I create a byte[] and store it in the byte[] so that I can return it through a function using iTextSharp.text; using iTextSharp.text.pdf; Document doc = new Document(iTextSharp.text.PageSize.LETTER, 10, 10, 42, 35); PdfWriter wri = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, new FileStream("c:\\Test11.pdf", FileMode.Create)); doc.Open();//Open Document to write Paragraph paragraph = new Paragraph("This is my first line using Paragraph."); Phrase pharse = new Phrase("This is my second line using Pharse."); Chunk chunk = new Chunk(" This is my third line using Chunk."); doc.Add(paragraph); doc.Add(pharse); doc.Add(chunk); doc.Close(); //Close document

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  • DELETING doubled users (MySQL)

    - by vizzdoom
    Hi I have two tables. There are users informations from two sites: p_users p_users2 There are 3726 users in first and 13717 in second. Some users in p_users2 are in p_users. I want merge this two tables to the one big table - but rows with same usernames can't be doubled. How can I do this? I tried something like this: DELETE FROM p_users2 WHERE user_id IN ( select p.user_id from p_users p join p_users2 p2 on p.username=p2.username ) After that I should receive a table with unique usernames, which I want to export and import to the first one. But when I execute my query I got error: SQL Error (1093): You can't specify target table 'p_users2' for update in FROM clause. (MYSQL)

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  • How does UIImage work in low-memory situations?

    - by kubi
    According to the UIImage documentation: In low-memory situations, image data may be purged from a UIImage object to free up memory on the system. Does anyone know how this works? It appears that this process is completely transparent and will occur in the background with no input from me, but I can't find any definitive documentation one way or the other. Second, will this data-purge occur when the image is not loaded by me? (I'm getting the image from UIImagePicker). Here's the situation: I'm taking a picture with the UIImagePickerController and and immediately taking that image and sending it to a new UIViewController for display. Sending the raw image to the new controller crashes my app with memory warnings about 30% of the time. Resizing the image takes a few moments, time that I'd rather not spend if there's a 3rd option available to me.

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  • XML to DOC to PDF

    - by Max
    what is the easiest(and fastest) way to perform this kind of transformation: "Data in XML" to "Some MS Word 2003 Supported format" to PDF using Java? My first guess was to fill the template with XML data (using Placeholders for example) and then save it and convert it to PDF. But I can't just put placeholders to DOC files, and I can't convert from some other Word formats to PDF... My primary task is to convert XML Data to PDF allowing users to change the PDF on-demand. The best way to change the PDF on-demand seems to give user some kind of MS Word readable document, and then convert it back. There are 2 main problems with this task: 1) I can't use OpenOffice for conversion. 2) System should be able to convert ~1 page of table-based document per 1 second on 2Ghz Core. 3) RTF does not provide enough styling, so some more complex format should be used. Thanks in advance.

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  • The case of the phantom ADF developer (and other yarns)

    - by Chris Muir
    A few years of ADF experience means I see common mistakes made by different developers, some I regularly make myself.  This post is designed to assist beginners to Oracle JDeveloper Application Development Framework (ADF) avoid a common ADF pitfall, the case of the phantom ADF developer [add Scooby-Doo music here]. ADF Business Components - triggers, default table values and instead of views. Oracle's JDeveloper tutorials help with the A-B-Cs of ADF development, typically built on the nice 'n safe demo schema provided by with the Oracle database such as the HR demo schema. However it's not too long until ADF beginners, having built up some confidence from learning with the tutorials and vanilla demo schemas, start building ADF Business Components based upon their own existing database schema objects.  This is where unexpected problems can sneak in. The crime Developers may encounter a surprising error at runtime when editing a record they just created or updated and committed to the database, based on their own existing tables, namely the error: JBO-25014: Another user has changed the row with primary key oracle.jbo.Key[x] ...where X is the primary key value of the row at hand.  In a production environment with multiple users this error may be legit, one of the other users has updated the row since you queried it.  Yet in a development environment this error is just plain confusing.  If developers are isolated in their own database, creating and editing records they know other users can't possibly be working with, or all the other developers have gone home for the day, how is this error possible? There are no other users?  It must be the phantom ADF developer! [insert dramatic music here] The following picture is what you'll see in the Business Component Browser, and you'll receive a similar error message via an ADF Faces page: A false conclusion What can possibly cause this issue if it isn't our phantom ADF developer?  Doesn't ADF BC implement record locking, locking database records when the row is modified in the ADF middle-tier by a user?  How can our phantom ADF developer even take out a lock if this is the case?  Maybe ADF has a bug, maybe ADF isn't implementing record locking at all?  Shouldn't we see the error "JBO-26030: Failed to lock the record, another user holds the lock" as we attempt to modify the record, why do we see JBO-25014? : Let's verify that ADF is in fact issuing the correct SQL LOCK-FOR-UPDATE statement to the database. First we need to verify ADF's locking strategy.  It is determined by the Application Module's jbo.locking.mode property.  The default (as of JDev 11.1.1.4.0 if memory serves me correct) and recommended value is optimistic, and the other valid value is pessimistic. Next we need a mechanism to check that ADF is issuing the LOCK statements to the database.  We could ask DBAs to monitor locks with OEM, but optimally we'd rather not involve overworked DBAs in this process, so instead we can use the ADF runtime setting –Djbo.debugoutput=console.  At runtime this options turns on instrumentation within the ADF BC layer, which among a lot of extra detail displayed in the log window, will show the actual SQL statement issued to the database, including the LOCK statement we're looking to confirm. Setting our locking mode to pessimistic, opening the Business Components Browser of a JSF page allowing us to edit a record, say the CHARGEABLE field within a BOOKINGS record where BOOKING_NO = 1206, upon editing the record see among others the following log entries: [421] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[422] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[423] Where binding param 1: 1206  As can be seen on line 422, in fact a LOCK-FOR-UPDATE is indeed issued to the database.  Later when we commit the record we see: [441] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[442] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 1 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[443] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[444] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[445] Update binding param 1: N[446] Where binding param 2: 1206[447] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [448] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [449] EntityCache close prepared statement ....and as a result the changes are saved to the database, and the lock is released. Let's see what happens when we use the optimistic locking mode, this time to change the same BOOKINGS record CHARGEABLE column again.  As soon as we edit the record we see little activity in the logs, nothing to indicate any SQL statement, let alone a LOCK has been taken out on the row. However when we save our records by issuing a commit, the following is recorded in the logs: [509] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[510] OracleSQLBuilder Executing doEntitySelect on: BOOKINGS (true)[511] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[512] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[513] Where binding param 1: 1205[514] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 2 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[515] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[516] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[517] Update binding param 1: Y[518] Where binding param 2: 1205[519] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [520] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [521] EntityCache close prepared statement Again even though we're seeing the midtier delay the LOCK statement until commit time, it is in fact occurring on line 412, and released as part of the commit issued on line 419.  Therefore with either optimistic or pessimistic locking a lock is indeed issued. Our conclusion at this point must be, unless there's the unlikely cause the LOCK statement is never really hitting the database, or the even less likely cause the database has a bug, then ADF does in fact take out a lock on the record before allowing the current user to update it.  So there's no way our phantom ADF developer could even modify the record if he tried without at least someone receiving a lock error. Hmm, we can only conclude the locking mode is a red herring and not the true cause of our problem.  Who is the phantom? At this point we'll need to conclude that the error message "JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is somehow legit, even though we don't understand yet what's causing it. This leads onto two further questions, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, and what's been changed anyway? To answer the first question, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, the Fusion Guide's section 4.10.11 How to Protect Against Losing Simultaneous Updated Data , that details the Entity Object Change-Indicator property, gives us the answer: At runtime the framework provides automatic "lost update" detection for entity objects to ensure that a user cannot unknowingly modify data that another user has updated and committed in the meantime. Typically, this check is performed by comparing the original values of each persistent entity attribute against the corresponding current column values in the database at the time the underlying row is locked. Before updating a row, the entity object verifies that the row to be updated is still consistent with the current state of the database.  The guide further suggests to make this solution more efficient: You can make the lost update detection more efficient by identifying any attributes of your entity whose values you know will be updated whenever the entity is modified. Typical candidates include a version number column or an updated date column in the row.....To detect whether the row has been modified since the user queried it in the most efficient way, select the Change Indicator option to compare only the change-indicator attribute values. We now know that ADF BC doesn't use the locking mechanism at all to protect the current user against updates, but rather it keeps a copy of the original record fetched, separate to the user changed version of the record, and it compares the original record against the one in the database when the lock is taken out.  If values don't match, be it the default compare-all-columns behaviour, or the more efficient Change Indicator mechanism, ADF BC will throw the JBO-25014 error. This leaves one last question.  Now we know the mechanism under which ADF identifies a changed row, what we don't know is what's changed and who changed it? The real culprit What's changed?  We know the record in the mid-tier has been changed by the user, however ADF doesn't use the changed record in the mid-tier to compare to the database record, but rather a copy of the original record before it was changed.  This leaves us to conclude the database record has changed, but how and by who? There are three potential causes: Database triggers The database trigger among other uses, can be configured to fire PLSQL code on a database table insert, update or delete.  In particular in an insert or update the trigger can override the value assigned to a particular column.  The trigger execution is actioned by the database on behalf of the user initiating the insert or update action. Why this causes the issue specific to our ADF use, is when we insert or update a record in the database via ADF, ADF keeps a copy of the record written to the database.  However the cached record is instantly out of date as the database triggers have modified the record that was actually written to the database.  Thus when we update the record we just inserted or updated for a second time to the database, ADF compares its original copy of the record to that in the database, and it detects the record has been changed – giving us JBO-25014. This is probably the most common cause of this problem. Default values A second reason this issue can occur is another database feature, default column values.  When creating a database table the schema designer can define default values for specific columns.  For example a CREATED_BY column could be set to SYSDATE, or a flag column to Y or N.  Default values are only used by the database when a user inserts a new record and the specific column is assigned NULL.  The database in this case will overwrite the column with the default value. As per the database trigger section, it then becomes apparent why ADF chokes on this feature, though it can only specifically occur in an insert-commit-update-commit scenario, not the update-commit-update-commit scenario. Instead of trigger views I must admit I haven't double checked this scenario but it seems plausible, that of the Oracle database's instead of trigger view (sometimes referred to as instead of views).  A view in the database is based on a query, and dependent on the queries complexity, may support insert, update and delete functionality to a limited degree.  In order to support fully insertable, updateable and deletable views, Oracle introduced the instead of view, that gives the view designer the ability to not only define the view query, but a set of programmatic PLSQL triggers where the developer can define their own logic for inserts, updates and deletes. While this provides the database programmer a very powerful feature, it can cause issues for our ADF application.  On inserting or updating a record in the instead of view, the record and it's data that goes in is not necessarily the data that comes out when ADF compares the records, as the view developer has the option to practically do anything with the incoming data, including throwing it away or pushing it to tables which aren't used by the view underlying query for fetching the data. Readers are at this point reminded that this article is specifically about how the JBO-25014 error occurs in the context of 1 developer on an isolated database.  The article is not considering how the error occurs in a production environment where there are multiple users who can cause this error in a legitimate fashion.  Assuming none of the above features are the cause of the problem, and optimistic locking is turned on (this error is not possible if pessimistic locking is the default mode *and* none of the previous causes are possible), JBO-25014 is quite feasible in a production ADF application if 2 users modify the same record. At this point under project timelines pressure, the obvious fix for developers is to drop both database triggers and default values from the underlying tables.  However we must be careful that these legacy constructs aren't used and assumed to be in place by other legacy systems.  Dropping the database triggers or default value that the existing Oracle Forms  applications assumes and requires to be in place could cause unexpected behaviour and bugs in the Forms application.  Proficient software engineers would recognize such a change may require a partial or full regression test of the existing legacy system, a potentially costly and timely exercise, not ideal. Solving the mystery once and for all Luckily ADF has built in functionality to deal with this issue, though it's not a surprise, as Oracle as the author of ADF also built the database, and are fully aware of the Oracle database's feature set.  At the Entity Object attribute level, the Refresh After Insert and Refresh After Update properties.  Simply selecting these instructs ADF BC after inserting or updating a record to the database, to expect the database to modify the said attributes, and read a copy of the changed attributes back into its cached mid-tier record.  Thus next time the developer modifies the current record, the comparison between the mid-tier record and the database record match, and JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is no longer an issue. [Post edit - as per the comment from Oracle's Steven Davelaar below, as he correctly points out the above solution will not work for instead-of-triggers views as it relies on SQL RETURNING clause which is incompatible with this type of view] Alternatively you can set the Change Indicator on one of the attributes.  This will work as long as the relating column for the attribute in the database itself isn't inadvertently updated.  In turn you're possibly just masking the issue rather than solving it, because if another developer turns the Change Indicator back on the original issue will return.

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  • Spatial index for geo coordinates?

    - by Michael Borgwardt
    What kind of data structure could be used for an efficient nearest neighbor search in a large set of geo coordinates? With "regular" spatial index structures like R-Trees that assume planar coordinates, I see two problems (Are there others I have overlooked?): Wraparound at the poles and the International Date Line Distortion of distances near the poles How can these factors be allowed for? I guess the second one could compensated by transforming the coordinates. Can an R-Tree be modified to take wraparound into account? Or are there specialized geo-spatial index structures?

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  • Why the CCLayer can't use a for loop in draw method??

    - by Tattat
    I have a CClayer, that have a draw method, every second, it will call the draw method 60 times. So, I have method like this: -(void)draw{ glEnable(GL_LINE_SMOOTH); glColor4f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glLineWidth(5.0f); ccDrawLine(ccp(300,20), CGPointZero); } I work great. but after I added a for looop, for example....: -(void)draw{ glEnable(GL_LINE_SMOOTH); glColor4f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glLineWidth(5.0f); ccDrawLine(ccp(300,20), CGPointZero); for(int i=0; i<5; i++){ NSLog(@"Testing the loop, %i", i); } } It can't draw anything, the screen only black. But I can see the Testing the loop is keep calling.... Why? thank you.

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  • Dynamic find methods Vs conditional statements

    - by piemesons
    Student.find(:all, :conditions => [‘name = ? and status = ?’ ‘mohit’, 1]) Vs Student.find_all_by_name_and_status(‘mohit’, 1) Both the queries will result the same set of row but first one is preferable cause in the second way there will be exception generated method_missing and then rails will try to relate it as dynamic method. if fine then result set to returned. Can any body explain me this in a good manner. What exactly is happening behind the screen. Please correct me if i am wrong.

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  • Lucene's nested query evaluation regarding negation

    - by ponzao
    Hi, I am adding Apache Lucene support to Querydsl (which offers type-safe queries for Java) and I am having problems understanding how Lucene evaluates queries especially regarding negation in nested queries. For instance the following two queries in my opinion are semantically the same, but only the first one returns results. +year:1990 -title:"Jurassic Park" +year:1990 +(-title:"Jurassic Park") The simplified object tree in the second example is shown below. query : Query clauses : ArrayList [0] : BooleanClause "MUST" occur : BooleanClause.Occur "year:1990" query : TermQuery [1] : BooleanClause "MUST" occur : BooleanClause.Occur query : BooleanQuery clauses : ArrayList [0] : BooleanClause "MUST_NOT" occur : BooleanClause.Occur "title:"Jurassic Park"" query : TermQuery Lucene's own QueryParser seems to evaluate "AND (NOT" into the same kind of object trees. Is this a bug in Lucene or have I misunderstood Lucene's query evaluation? I am happy to give more information if necessary.

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  • jquery autocomplete filtering

    - by eidylon
    Hello all, I have a page, which uses jQuery Autocomplete on the second two textboxes (investigator and institution). It is getting the data fine, and displaying it, but for some reason it is not filtering the list of data as i continue to type. Anyone know why? Is there something i need to do to turn this on? According to the jQuery site, the only options to the autocomplete initializer are delay, minLength and source. Thanks in advance! I'm using jQ v1.4.1 and jQui v.1.8rc1. Below is the code which I am calling on $(document).ready(). function hookUpAutoCompletes() { $('table#params input[name=sinvestigator]').autocomplete({ source: "json-investigators.asp", minLength: 2 }) $('table#params input[name=sinstitution]').autocomplete({ source: "json-institutions.asp", minLength: 2 }) }

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  • C# Delegate Invoke Required Issue

    - by Goober
    Scenario I have a C# windows forms application that has a number of processes. These processes run on separate threads and all communicate back to the Main Form class with updates to a log window and a progress bar. I'm using the following code below, which up until now has worked fine, however, I have a few questions. Code delegate void SetTextCallback(string mxID, string text); public void UpdateLog(string mxID, string text) { if (txtOutput.InvokeRequired) { SetTextCallback d = new SetTextCallback(UpdateLog); this.BeginInvoke(d, new object[] { mxID, text }); } else { UpdateProgressBar(text); } } Question Will, calling the above code about 10 times a second, repeatedly, give me errors, exceptions or generally issues?.....Or more to the point, should it give me any of these problems? Occasionally I get OutofMemory Exceptions and the program always seems to crash around this bit of code......

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  • Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

    - by Roger Hart
    Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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  • DIV Overlaying DIV, links in backmost DIV non-accessible

    - by Shawn
    I have a photoshop image that is 500x600 that I am using as a background image for the first div. The second div sits over top of the first div and is populated with images. The z-index of the first div is set to 100. The effect is the photoshop image sits over top of all of the smaller images. The photoshop image is a letter with the inner-content of it set to be transparent and the small images create the filling. Each of the small images however is a link, but none of the links are accessible. How can I remedy that? I would post the code here, but I have absolutely no clue how to format it. I quite simply do not understand typing a backtick followed by the tab key and then a dollar sign. All that ends up is I type a backtick here followed by a dollar sign in the Tags section below.

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  • Create PDF in memory instead of physical file

    - by acadia
    How do one create PDF in memorystream instead of physical file using itextsharp. The code below is creating actual pdf file. Instead how can I create a byte[] and store it in the byte[] so that I can return it through a function using iTextSharp.text; using iTextSharp.text.pdf; Document doc = new Document(iTextSharp.text.PageSize.LETTER, 10, 10, 42, 35); PdfWriter wri = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, new FileStream("c:\\Test11.pdf", FileMode.Create)); doc.Open();//Open Document to write Paragraph paragraph = new Paragraph("This is my first line using Paragraph."); Phrase pharse = new Phrase("This is my second line using Pharse."); Chunk chunk = new Chunk(" This is my third line using Chunk."); doc.Add(paragraph); doc.Add(pharse); doc.Add(chunk); doc.Close(); //Close document

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  • Practical guide to programming paradigms ?

    - by Pierre
    I think I might be misunderstanding the whole thing and I am looking for some programming wisdom. When faced with a programming challenge, I feel the most important question is "which programming paradigm(s) are better suited to handle it, and how to apply them". A distant second is "which language to use". Yet it seems that most of the programming related content I stumble upon on the Internet has it exactly backwards and focuses mostly on the language choice. An object-oriented solution is fundamentaly the same, whether it's implemented in c++, Java or PHP... So where is the paradigm centered content? Where is the "practical guide to programming paradigms and implementations" and other literature helping bringing real-world and programming concepts together? Note: I already know about "Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know" from Peter Van Roy.

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  • Regex to represent "NOT" in a group

    - by Joe Ijam
    I have this Regex; <(\d+)(\w+\s\d+\s\d+(?::\d+){2})\s([\w\/.-])(.) What I want to do is to return FALSE(Not matched) if the third group is "MSWinEventLog" and returning "matched" for the rest. <166Apr 28 10:46:34 AMC the remaining phrase <11Apr 28 10:46:34 MSWinEventLog the remaining phrase <170Apr 28 10:46:34 Avantail the remaining phrase <171Apr 28 10:46:34 Avantail the remaining phrase <172Apr 28 10:46:34 AMC the remaining phrase <173Apr 28 10:46:34 AMC the remaining phrase <174Apr 28 10:46:34 Avantail the remaining phrase <175Apr 28 10:46:34 AMC the remaining phrase <176Apr 28 10:46:34 AMC the remaining phrase <177Apr 28 10:46:34 Avantail the remaining phrase <178Apr 28 10:46:34 AMC the remaining phrase <179Apr 28 10:46:34 Avantail the remaining phrase <180Apr 28 10:46:34 Avantail the remaining phrase How to put " NOT 'MSWinEventLog' " in the regex group ([\w\/.-]*) ? Note : The second phrase above should return "not matched"

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  • Azure, SLAs and CAP theorem

    - by dayscott
    Azure itself is imo PaaS and not IaaS. Do you agree? MS gurantees an availability of 99% and a strong consistency. You can find MS SLAs here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sla (three SLAs Uptime: http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/4889/unbenanntqt.png ) I can't find anyhing about how they are going to archive that. Do they do backups? If Yes: How do they manage consistency? According to the Cap theorem (http://camelcase.blogspot.com/2007/08/cap-theorem.html ) their claims are not realistic. 2.1 Do you know detailed technical stuff about the how they are going to realize the claims about consistency and availability? On the MS page you'll find three SLAs .docs, one for SQL Azure, the second for Azure AppFabric/.Net Services and the third for Azure Compute&Storage.(Screenshot in 1.) How can one track whether SLAs are violated? Do they offer some sort of monitor, so I don't have to measure the uptime by myself?

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  • Use Any() and Count() in Dynamic Linq

    - by ArpanDesai
    I am trying to write dynamic Linq Library query to fetch record on condition, Customers who has order count is greater than 3 and ShipVia field equal 2. Below is my syntax what i have tried. object[] objArr = new object[10]; objArr[0] = 1; IQueryable<Customer> test = db.Customers.Where("Orders.Count(ShipVia=2)", objArr); and IQueryable<Customer> test = db.Customers.Where("Orders.Any(ShipVia=2).Count()", objArr); But both are not working. In second query Any returns true so it won't work with Count. Suggest me a way to implement this.

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  • c# windows forms link button to listview

    - by Richard
    Hi, I am using c# windows forms. I have multiple buttons linked to a listview which when a button is pressed, a new item is added to the listview. The column headers in the listview are 'Name' and 'Amount'. When a different button is pressed, a different item is added to the listview. The thing i need help with is as follows: When the same button is pressed twice, I want the amount to go from "1" to "2" on the second click. So the item name isnt duplicated but the amount is increase. The problem is I am using text to link the button to the linklist at the moment e.g. ("Coca Cola", "1") which adds the item name as coca cola and the amount as 1. I know it is something to do with integers so please help!! Thanks

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  • Catching url in htaccess rewrite condition

    - by Rickard
    Hi! I got this url /search/renttype-all.place-all.type-all.bedrooms-all.0.0/ I want to get the text after the second "/" and the third "/". The URL can end at the third "/" or go on with more text and "/". I have been trying with a lot of rules but never got any to work. My last try was RewriteRule ^search/(.+)/$ index.php?Search=0&Arg=$1 [NC] RewriteRule ^search/(.+)/(.+)$ index.php?Search=0&Arg=$1 [NC] Anyone that can show me how to make a rule that works? :) Thanks for reading my question!

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  • Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility, MPF and language services

    - by MainMa
    Hi, I am trying to extend Visual Studio 2010 RC to be able to use a custom programming language. The first two things I've tried to do is a syntax highlight/Intellisense feature (easily done, thanks to "Ook!" sample from PDC09) and a possibility to create new project templates (i.e. be able to open *.myproj files). For this second task, I can't find any easy tutorials or samples. Most samples are for Visual Studio 2008 (as for IronPython integration) or even VS2003. The few samples available for VS2010 do not work (including MPFProj) or do not compile, and are too hard to understand. Is there any easy-to-understand sample, either using MPFProj or a standalone solution, showing how to integrate templates for a custom language inside Visual Studio 2010?

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  • Why I am not able to display image using swing worker?

    - by Vimal Basdeo
    I was trying some codes to implement a scheduled task and came up with these codes . import java.util.*; class Task extends TimerTask { int count = 1; // run is a abstract method that defines task performed at scheduled time. public void run() { System.out.println(count+" : Mahendra Singh"); count++; } } class TaskScheduling { public static void main(String[] args) { Timer timer = new Timer(); // Schedule to run after every 3 second(3000 millisecond) timer.schedule( new Task(), 3000); } } My output : 1 : Mahendra Singh I expected the compiler to print a series of Mahendra Singh at periodic interval of 3 s but despite waiting for around 15 minutes, I get only one output...How do I solve this out?

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  • Change the size of the text in legend according to the length of the legend vector in the graph

    - by user1021713
    I have to draw a 20 plots and horizontally place a legends in each plots. I gave the following command for the first plot: plot(x=1:4,y=1:4) legend("bottom",legend = c("a","b","c","d"),horiz=TRUE,text.font=2,cex=0.64) then for the second plot I tried : plot(x=1:2,y=1:2) legend("bottom",legend = c("a","b"),horiz=TRUE,text.font=2,cex=0.64) But because the size of the character vector passed to legend argument are different I get the size of the legend different. Since I have to plot so many different plots having varying sizes of legends,I would want to do it in an automated fashion. Is there a way to do this which can fix the size of the legend in all the plots and fit it to graph size?

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  • android linear layout solution

    - by dykzei
    ![alt text][1] [1]: http://s48.radikal.ru/i120/1005/ff/6e439e04bbc8.jpg hi what i'm trying to achieve is #1 but what i get is #2 it seems linear layout stacks with height of it's first element and shrinks second's element height to that. the xml for those is the following: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> android:layout_weight="5" / android:text="Aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa a, aaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aa. Aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa a, aaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aa. Aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa a, aaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aa. Aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa a, aaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aa. Aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa a, aaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aa. Aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa a, aaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aa." /

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  • Diff between $.ajaxSetup and $.ajax in jquery

    - by Deeptechtons
    title is a bit misleading but i would like to know internally (what happens during ajax request) when i execute Code 1 and Code 2 in turns Code 1 $.ajax({url:"1.aspx/HelloWorld",type:"GET",dataType:"json",contentType:"application/json"}); Code 2 $.ajaxSetup({ contentType: "application/json", dataType: "json" }); $.get("1.aspx/HelloWorld","",$.noop,"json"); i ask this because the method HelloWorld in page 1.aspx is executed correctly when run Code 1. But the seconds one refuses to invoke the pageMethod. I have set the ContentType and data as expected but the second request in Code 2 refuses to invoke the method does anyone have a reason for this ?

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