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  • LINQ to Twitter v2.1.09 Released

    - by Joe Mayo
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/10/15/linq-to-twitter-v2.1.09-released.aspxToday, I released LINQ to Twitter v2.1.09. Here are important new changes. Bug Fixes This is primarily a bug fix release. Most notably, there were authentication problems in WinRT apps. This is now fixed. New Features One new feature is the addition of ApplicationOnlyAuthentication for WinRT. It is fully async.  Here’s how it works: var auth = new WinRtApplicationOnlyAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" } }; if (auth == null || !auth.IsAuthorized) { await auth.AuthorizeAsync(); } var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); (from search in twitterCtx.Search where search.Type == SearchType.Search && search.Query == SearchTextBox.Text select search) .MaterializedAsyncCallback( async response => await Dispatcher.RunAsync( CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, async () => { Search searchResponse = response.State.Single(); string message = string.Format( "Search returned {0} statuses", searchResponse.Statuses.Count); await new MessageDialog(message, "Search Complete").ShowAsync(); })); It’s called the WinRtApplicationOnlyAuthorizer. You only need two tokens, ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret, which come from your Twitter API application settings page. Note: You need a Twitter Application, which you can create at https://dev.twitter.com/. The MaterializedAsyncCallback materializes your query and handles the response. I put everything together in a lambda for demonstration purposes, but you can always replace the callback with a handler of type Action<TwitterAsyncResponse<IEnumerable<T>>>, where T is Search for this example. On the Horizon The next version of LINQ to Twitter is in development. I discussed it at LINQ to Twitter Async. This isn’t complete, but you can download the source code at the LINQ to Twitter site on CodePlex. I’ve competed all the spikes for what I thought would be the hard parts and now have prototypes of queries and commands working. This would be a good time to provide feedback if there are features in the current version that you think could be improved. The current driving forces for the next version will be async and PCL.   @JoeMayo

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  • Are they asking too much of me?

    - by Tesserex
    Or am I just whining? Background: I work for a "startup," which I put in air quotes because the company has been around for 4 years. We have about 40 employees in three offices, 9 here plus some part time. We have a good amount of investment and bring in about 75% of what we spend (so not profitable just yet.) Standard work week is supposed to be about 60 hours, but they justify that as we have to be online when our international (Taiwan and Vietnam) offices are awake. When I started the job 6 months ago, I spent about a month prototyping an iphone app and did really well on my own. They also found out about my facebook applications and how many users they got. Putting 2 and 2 together (and winding up at -7) they realized 1. I'm independent and innovative (because I was able to use stackoverflow to answer my iOS questions instead of bugging my superiors) and 2. I must have an eye for marketing (since my fb apps grew totally organically without me doing any advertising), and assigned me to a project optimizing adwords campaigns. Today I got reviewed, and then chewed out, by our CEO for not totally rocking this project. Now I thought I was doing ok, but the CEO said the project is stagnant and they're expecting more from me. But since it's a startup, they play loose with job roles and I've had plenty of other things to do in the past three months. Every time I ask what's most important, I get conflicting responses depending who I ask, and the end result is that almost everything has equal priority - high. I could go on about how I don't think adwords is worthwhile for us since our profit margin is so slim, and how we should be trying to improve our website first, but that's not the point. I also have explained to the office director (who originally assigned me the project, not the CEO) that I don't actually know anything about marketing, I'm just a decent programmer, but they think my general smarts will prove capable of tackling this challenge. The CEO also clarified that he wants a more technical and algorithmic approach to the problem. So is there something I can do to address this? Combined with my existing and confusing workload, should I be raising an issue? Or should I do the grown up thing and give it my all, asking for help when I need it and hoping for the best? Sorry if this is very rant-ish.

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  • Why is everything crashing?

    - by Kopkins
    I've been using Ubuntu for a while now and I love it, I wouldn't think of using another OS unless I can't fix this issue. The install I'm on is only around a month and a half old. I'm running 12.04 64bit on a 8,1 MBP. Up until around 2 weeks ago everything was running smoothly. Around then applications started crashing and weird things started happening. At first I thought it was just certain applications. The first thing to start giving me trouble was compiz. Occasionally compiz will stop decorating windows and lost many other functionalities. running compiz --replace fixes this, but I don't feel like doing it usually once a day. The other thing with this is that after running compiz --replace, my conky window gets lost somewhere and so I run killall conky && conky -c .conkyrc. But this isn't with just a couple applications, it seems like it is proliferating through my system. Last week fontforge started crashing while doing whatever task. So I ended up unable to finish what I was working on to completeness. Didn't find a fix. Today rhythmbox started crashing. Whenever I try to play anything, Rhythmbox becomes unresponsive and needs to be forced to close. When I try to do certain things with the disk utility, it crashes. I get the Ubuntu has experienced an internal error message much more often than I would like. Frequently applications stop appearing in the launcher. Wine almost never does anymore. After not being active for a little while, thunderbird can only fetch my mail after restarting wireless, sudo rmmod b43 && sudo modprobe b43 Occasionally some of my startup apps don't start. What is my best option here? Could they be bugs? I don't want to submit a ton of vague bug reports. Reinstall? switch OS? Thank you to anyone who responds. Kopkins

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  • Why are MVC & TDD not employed more in game architecture?

    - by secoif
    I will preface this by saying I haven't looked a huge amount of game source, nor built much in the way of games. But coming from trying to employ 'enterprise' coding practices in web apps, looking at game source code seriously hurts my head: "What is this view logic doing in with business logic? this needs refactoring... so does this, refactor, refactorrr" This worries me as I'm about to start a game project, and I'm not sure whether trying to mvc/tdd the dev process is going to hinder us or help us, as I don't see many game examples that use this or much push for better architectural practices it in the community. The following is an extract from a great article on prototyping games, though to me it seemed exactly the attitude many game devs seem to use when writing production game code: Mistake #4: Building a system, not a game ...if you ever find yourself working on something that isn’t directly moving your forward, stop right there. As programmers, we have a tendency to try to generalize our code, and make it elegant and be able to handle every situation. We find that an itch terribly hard not scratch, but we need to learn how. It took me many years to realize that it’s not about the code, it’s about the game you ship in the end. Don’t write an elegant game component system, skip the editor completely and hardwire the state in code, avoid the data-driven, self-parsing, XML craziness, and just code the damned thing. ... Just get stuff on the screen as quickly as you can. And don’t ever, ever, use the argument “if we take some extra time and do this the right way, we can reuse it in the game”. EVER. is it because games are (mostly) visually oriented so it makes sense that the code will be weighted heavily in the view, thus any benefits from moving stuff out to models/controllers, is fairly minimal, so why bother? I've heard the argument that MVC introduces a performance overhead, but this seems to me to be a premature optimisation, and that there'd more important performance issues to tackle before you worry about MVC overheads (eg render pipeline, AI algorithms, datastructure traversal, etc). Same thing regarding TDD. It's not often I see games employing test cases, but perhaps this is due to the design issues above (mixed view/business) and the fact that it's difficult to test visual components, or components that rely on probablistic results (eg operate within physics simulations). Perhaps I'm just looking at the wrong source code, but why do we not see more of these 'enterprise' practices employed in game design? Are games really so different in their requirements, or is a people/culture issue (ie game devs come from a different background and thus have different coding habits)?

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  • What is the most appropriate testing method in this scenario?

    - by Daniel Bruce
    I'm writing some Objective-C apps (for OS X/iOS) and I'm currently implementing a service to be shared across them. The service is intended to be fairly self-contained. For the current functionality I'm envisioning there will be only one method that clients will call to do a fairly complicated series of steps both using private methods on the class, and passing data through a bunch of "data mangling classes" to arrive at an end result. The gist of the code is to fetch a log of changes, stored in a service-internal data store, that has occurred since a particular time, simplify the log to only include the last applicable change for each object, attach the serialized values for the affected objects and return this all to the client. My question then is, how do I unit-test this entry point method? Obviously, each class would have thorough unit tests to ensure that their functionality works as expected, but the entry point seems harder to "disconnect" from the rest of the world. I would rather not send in each of these internal classes IoC-style, because they're small and are only made classes to satisfy the single-responsibility principle. I see a couple possibilities: Create a "private" interface header for the tests with methods that call the internal classes and test each of these methods separately. Then, to test the entry point, make a partial mock of the service class with these private methods mocked out and just test that the methods are called with the right arguments. Write a series of fatter tests for the entry point without mocking out anything, testing the entire functionality in one go. This looks, to me, more like "integration testing" and seems brittle, but it does satisfy the "only test via the public interface" principle. Write a factory that returns these internal services and take that in the initializer, then write a factory that returns mocked versions of them to use in tests. This has the downside of making the construction of the service annoying, and leaks internal details to the client. Write a "private" initializer that take these services as extra parameters, use that to provide mocked services, and have the public initializer back-end to this one. This would ensure that the client code still sees the easy/pretty initializer and no internals are leaked. I'm sure there's more ways to solve this problem that I haven't thought of yet, but my question is: what's the most appropriate approach according to unit testing best practices? Especially considering I would prefer to write this test-first, meaning I should preferably only create these services as the code indicates a need for them.

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  • MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8.2 has been released!

    - by Hema Sridharan
    MySQL Enterprise Backup v3.8.2, a maintenance release of online MySQL backup tool, is now available for download from My Oracle Support  (MOS) website as our latest GA release.  It will also be available via the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in approximately 1-2 weeks. A brief summary of the changes in MySQL Enterprise Backup version 3.8.2 is given below.   A. Functionality Added or Changed:  MySQL Enterprise Backup has a new --on-disk-full command line option. mysqlbackup could hang when the disk became full, rather than detecting the low space condition. mysqlbackup now monitors disk space when running backup commands, and users can now specify the action to take at a disk-full condition with the --on-disk-full option. For more details, refer this page MySQL Enterprise Backup has a new progress report feature, which periodically outputs short progress indicators on its  operations to user-selected destinations (for example, stdout, stderr, a file, or other choices). For more details on progress report options, refer here   B. Bugs Fixed: When --innodb-file-per-table=ON, if a table was renamed and backup-to-image was in progress, apply-log would fail when being run on the backup. (Bug #16903973)   MySQL Server failed to start after a backup was restored if  there had been online DDL transactions on partitioned tables during the time of backup. (Bug #16924499)   apply-log failed if ALTER TABLE ... REORGANIZE PARTITION was applied to partitioned InnoDB tables during backup. (Bug #16721824, Bug #16903951)  apply-incremental-backup might fail with an assertion error if  the InnoDB tables being backed up were created in Barracuda format and with their KEY_BLOCK_SIZE  values  different from the innodb_page_size . This fix ensures that different KEY_BLOCK_SIZE  values are handled properly during incremental backup and apply-incremental-backup operations.  If a table was renamed following a full backup, a subsequent incremental backup could copy the .frm file with the new name, but not the associated .ibd file with the new name. After a  restore, the InnoDB data dictionary could be in an  inconsistent state. This issue primarily occurred if the table  was not changed between the full backup and the subsequent  incremental backup. Bug #16262690)  After a full backup, if a table was renamed and modified,  apply-incremental-backup would crash when run on the backup directory. (Bug #16262609) The value of the binary log position in backup_variables.txt  could be different from the output displayed during the   backup-and-apply-log operation. (This issue did not occur if  the backup and apply-log steps were done separately.) (Bug  #16195529) When using the --only-innodb-with-frm option, MySQL Enterprise Backup tried to create temporary files at unintended locations in the file system, which might cause a failure when, for example, the user had no write privilege for those locations.   This fix makes sure the paths for the temporary files are  correct. (Bug #14787324)  A backup process might hang when it ran into an LSN mismatch between a data file  and the redo log. This fix makes sure the process does not hang and it displays an error message showing the  name of the problematic data file (Bug #14791645) Please post your questions / comments about Backup in forums. Thanks, MEB Team

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  • College Ratings via the Federal Government

    - by user9147039
    A few weeks back you might remember news about a higher education rating system proposal from the Obama administration. As I've discussed previously, political and stakeholder pressures to improve outcomes and increase transparency are stronger than ever before. The executive branch proposal is intended to make progress in this area. Quoting from the proposal itself, "The ratings will be based upon such measures as: Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and Outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates.” This is going to be quite complex, to say the least. Most notably, higher ed is not monolithic. From community and other 2-year colleges, to small private 4-year, to professional schools, to large public research institutions…the many walks of higher ed life are, well, many. Designing a ratings system that doesn't wind up with lots of unintended consequences and collateral damage will be difficult. At best you would end up potentially tarnishing the reputation of certain institutions that were actually performing well against the metrics and outcome measures that make sense in their "context" of education. At worst you could spend a lot of time and resources designing a system that would lose credibility with its "customers". A lot of institutions I work with already have in place systems like the one described above. They are tracking completion rates, completion timeframes, transfers to other institutions, job placement, and salary information. As I talk to these institutions there are several constants worth noting: • Deciding on which metrics to measure is complicated. While employment and salary data are relatively easy to track, qualitative measures are more difficult. How do you quantify the benefit to someone who studies in one field that may not compensate him or her as well as another field but that provides huge personal fulfillment and reward is a difficult measure to quantify? • The data is available but the systems to transform the data into actual information that can be used in meaningful ways are not. Too often in higher ed information is siloed. As such, much of the data that need to be a part of a comprehensive system sit in multiple organizations, oftentimes outside the reach of core IT. • Politics and culture are big barriers. One of the areas that my team and I spend a lot of time talking about with higher ed institutions all over the world is the imperative to optimize for student success. This, like the tracking of the students’ achievement after graduation, requires a level or organizational capacity that does not currently exist. The primary barrier is the culture of "data islands" in higher ed, and the need for leadership to drive out the divisions between departments, schools, colleges, etc. and institute academy-wide analytics and data stewardship initiatives that will enable student success. • Data quality is a very big issue. So many disparate systems exist (some on premise, some "in the cloud") that keep data about "persons" using different means to identify them. Establishing a single source of truth about an individual and his or her data is difficult without some type of data quality policy and tools. Good tools actually exist but are seldom leveraged. Don't misunderstand - I think it's a great idea to drive additional transparency and accountability into the system of higher education. And not just at home, but globally. Students and parents need access to key data to make informed, responsible choices. The tools exist to not only enable this kind of information to be shared but to capture the very metrics stakeholders care most about and in a way that makes sense in the context of a given institution's "place" in the overall higher ed panoply.

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  • How can we unify business goals and technical goals?

    - by BAM
    Some background I work at a small startup: 4 devs, 1 designer, and 2 non-technical co-founders, one who provides funding, and the other who handles day-to-day management and sales. Our company produces mobile apps for target industries, and we've gotten a lot of lucky breaks lately. The outlook is good, and we're confident we can make this thing work. One reason is our product development team. Everyone on the team is passionate, driven, and has a great sense of what makes an awesome product. As a result, we've built some beautiful applications that we're all proud of. The other reason is the co-founders. Both have a brilliant business sense (one actually founded a multi-million dollar company already), and they have close ties in many of the industries we're trying to penetrate. Consequently, they've brought in some great business and continue to keep jobs in the pipeline. The problem The problem we can't seem to shake is how to bring these two awesome advantages together. On the business side, there is a huge pressure to deliver as fast as possible as much as possible, whereas on the development side there is pressure to take your time, come up with the right solution, and pay attention to all the details. Lately these two sides have been butting heads a lot. Developers are demanding quality while managers are demanding quantity. How can we handle this? Both sides are correct. We can't survive as a company if we build terrible applications, but we also can't survive if we don't sell enough. So how should we go about making compromises? Things we've done with little or no success: Work more (well, it did result in better quality and faster delivery, but the dev team has never been more stressed out before) Charge more (as a startup, we don't yet have the credibility to justify higher prices, so no one is willing to pay) Extend deadlines (if we charge the same, but take longer, we'll end up losing money) Things we've done with some success: Sacrifice pay to cut costs (everyone, from devs to management, is paid less than they could be making elsewhere. In return, however, we all have creative input and more flexibility and freedom, a typical startup trade off) Standardize project management (we recently started adhering to agile/scrum principles so we can base deadlines on actual velocity, not just arbitrary guesses) Hire more people (we used to have 2 developers and no designers, which really limited our bandwidth. However, as a startup we can only afford to hire a few extra people.) Is there anything we're missing or doing wrong? How is this handled at successful companies? Thanks in advance for any feedback :)

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  • Understanding the Value of SOA

    - by Mala Narasimharajan
    Written By: Debra Lilley, ACE Director, Fusion Applications Again I want to talk from my area of expertise of Fusion Applications and talk about their design fundamentals. If you look at the table below and start at the bottom Oracle have defined all of the business objects e.g. accounts, people, customers, invoices etc. used by Fusion Applications; each of these objects contain all of the information required and can be expanded if necessary.  That Oracle have created for each of these business objects every action that is needed for the applications e.g. all the actions to create a new customer, checking to see if it exists, credit checking with D&B (Dun & Bradstreet < http://www.dnb.co.uk/> ) , creating the record, notifying those required etc. Each of these actions is a stand-alone web service. Again you can create a new actions or subscribe to an external provided web service e.g. the D&B check. The diagram also shows that all of development of Fusion Applications is from their Fusion Middleware offerings. Then the Intelligent Business Process is the order in which you run these actions, this is Service Orientated Architecture, SOA. Not only is SOA used to orchestrate actions within Fusion Applications it is also used in the integration of Fusion Applications with the rest of the Oracle stable of applications such as EBS, PeopleSoft, JDE and Siebel. The other applications are written with propriety development tools so how do they work with SOA? It’s a very simple answer, with the introduction of the Oracle SOA platform each process within these applications was made available to be called as a web service. I won’t go into technically how that is done but what’s known as a wrapper to allow each of them to act in this way was added. Finally at the top of the diagram are the questions that each Fusion Application process must answer, and this is the ‘special’ sauce that makes them so good, the User Experience, but that is a topic for another day, or you can read about it in my blog http://debrasoracle.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/going-on-record-about-fusion-apps-cloud.html or Oracle’s own UX blog https://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/ The concept behind AppAdvantage is not new the idea that Oracle technology can add value to your Oracle applications investments is pretty fundamental. Nishit Rao who is in AppAdvantage team provided myself and other ACE Directors with demo kits so that we could demonstrate SOA running with the applications. The example I learnt to build was that of the EBS inventory open interface. The simple concept is that request records can be added to a table and an import run that creates these as transactions in inventory. What’s SOA allows you to do is to add to the table from any source and then run this process automatically whereas traditionally you had to run the process at regular intervals because you didn’t know if the table was empty or not. This may just sound like a different way of doing the same thing but if the process is critical for your business then the interval was very small and the process run potentially many times unnecessarily. Using SOA it only happened when necessary without any delay. So in my post today I’ve talked about how SOA is used with Fusion Applications and in the linking with more traditional applications but that is only the tip of the iceberg of potential, your applications are just part of your IT systems and SOA can orchestrate your data across all of them; the beauty of open standards.  Debra Lilley, Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director.  Lilley has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Lead and Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts

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  • The type of programmer I want to be [closed]

    - by Aventinus_
    I'm an undergraduate Software Engineer student, although I've decided that pure programming is what I want to do for the rest of my life. The thing is that programming is a vast field and although most of its aspects are extremely interesting, soon or later I'll have to choose one (?) to focus on. I have several ideas on small projects I'd like to develop this summer, having in mind that this will gain me some experience and, in the best scenario, some cash. But the most important reason I'd like to develop something close to “professional” is to give myself direction on what I want to do as a programmer. One path is that of the Web Programmer. I enjoy PHP and MySQL, as well as HTML and CSS, although I don't really like ASP.NET. I can see myself writing web apps, using the above technologies, as well as XML and Javascript. I also have a neat idea on a Facebook app. The other path is that of the Desktop Programmer. This is a little more complicated cause I really-really enjoy high level languages such as Java and Python but not the low level ones, such as C. I use both Linux and Windows for the last 6 years and I like their latest DEs (meaning Gnome Shell and Metro). I can see myself writing desktop applications for both OSs as long as it means high level programming. Ideally I'd like being able to help the development of GNOME. The last path that interests me is the path of the Smartphone Programmer. I have created some sample applications on Android and due to Java I found it a quite interesting experience. I can also see myself as an independent smartphone developer. These 3 paths seem equally interesting at the moment due to the shallowness of my experience, I guess. I know that I should spend time with all of them and then choose the right one for me but I'd like to know what are the pros and cons in terms of learning curve, fun, job finding and of course financial rewards with each of these paths. I have fair or basic understanding of the languages/technologies I described earlier and this question will help me choose where to focus, at least for now.

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  • Ubuntu 12.04 - PPTP VPN is the only Internet Access

    - by user212553
    I know this has been covered. I've read dozens of posts but still have questions. I have a work server whose traffic should never leave my house without encryption. The VPN is PPTP. Currently I have a cron job that checks the status of the ppp0 adapter each minute. If the connection drops, which it does fairly often, it shuts key components down. It's fairly easy to restart PPTP with "nmcli con up id 'myVPNServer'" but there's no assurance it will reconnect and I need a better way to stop traffic (other than killing apps) when ppp0 is down. The two options I've seen discussed are the firewall (UFW, Firestarter, IPTables) or the route tables. I could be easily swayed to consider the firewall option but I focused on the route tables since no new function needs to be started. My questions involve the way the route tables change and then specifics on rules. When I start the PPTP VPN the route tables change. That suggests that if the VPN drops, the table will change back, defeating my stated intent of preventing external traffic. How can I make "sticky" changes to the route table that will persist even if the VPN connection drops? Perhaps the check boxes "Ignore automatically obtained routes" or "Use this connection only for resources on it's network" (which are part of the VPN configuration options)? It would seem that, if I can force the active VPN route table to stay in effect, even when the VPN drops, that this will effectively kill any external traffic should the VPN drop. This will give me the latitude to run a routine to restart the VPN from the command line (assuming the route table rules don't prevent me re-establishing the connection). My route table, with the VPN active is (ip route list): Any comments on what 10.10.1.1 is? $ ip route list default dev ppp0 proto static 10.10.1.1 dev ppp0 proto kernel scope link src 10.10.1.11 VPN_Server_IP_Address via 192.168.1.1 dev eth0 proto static VPN_Server_IP_Address via 192.168.1.1 dev eth0 src 192.168.1.60 169.254.0.0/16 dev eth0 scope link metric 1000 192.168.1.0/24 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.1.60 metric 1

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  • The difference

    So with the CTP tools available, weve been building a few apps, just to get a feel for the tools and whats supported in the framework.  Whats been great is that everything is fairly familiar and consistent, largely to do with the .net framework and Microsofts focus on providing good tools.  Weve produced mobile applications, mostly in concept form, for Windows Phone Classic, iPhone and Android but never so quickly and not of such high quality and visual impression.  I attribute some of this obviously to our familiarity to the Microsoft platform and tools.  Though when you look at the designs our team has produced, it becomes clear that this is not just another mobile application container.                                                            The Metro design language implores content prominence with fluid motion and transitions, with a crisp font and easily organized features and services placement.  In addition to a purposeful right edge tease, where the intent is for users to discover new premium content and services.   The concept that enables this is called hubs, building application with hubs changes your thinking from a single mobile application task, to thinking creatively about a mobile experience. Its engaging to think of the other brands and industry verticals that will take advantage of this core feature.  Combine this with Windows Phone 7 live tiles, more on that later, and you have a recipe for a solid mobile services platform.                                                              This so much more fun and liberating than my icon on a gridDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 3: Key Concerns

    - by Tim Murphy
    This is part 3 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Keys Concerns Of Smartphones In The Enterprise These are the factors that you need to be aware of and address in order to build successful enterprise smartphone applications.  Most of them have nothing to do with the application itself as you will see here. Managing Devices Managing devices is a factor that is going to effect how much your company will have to spend outside of developing the applications.  How will you track the devices within the corporation?  How often will you have to replace phones and as a consequence have to upgrade your applications to support new phones?  The devices can represent a significant investment of capital.  If these questions are not addressed you will find a number of hidden costs throughout the life of your solution. Purchase or BYOD We have seen the trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) lately within the enterprise.  How many meetings have you been in where someone is on their personal iPad, iPhone, Android phone or Windows Phone?  The issue is if you can afford to support everyone's choice in device? That is a lot to take on even if you only support the current release of each platform. Do you go with the most popular device or do you pick a platform that best matches your current ecosystem and distribute company owned devices?  There is no easy answer here, but you should be able give some dollar value to both hardware and development costs related to platform coverage. Asset Tracking/Insurance Smartphones are devices that are easier to lose or have stolen than laptops and desktops. Not only do you have your normal asset management concerns but also assignment of financial responsibility. You also will need to insure them against damage and theft and add legal documents that spell out the responsibilities of the employees that use these devices. Personal vs. Corporate Data What happens when you terminate an employee?  How do you recover the device?  What happens when they have put personal data on the device?  These are all situation that can cause possible loss of corporate intellectual property or legal repercussions of reclaiming a device with personal data on it.  Policies need to be put in place that protect the company from being exposed to type of loss.  This can mean significant legal and procedural cost that you need to consider. Coming Up In the last installment of this series I will cover application development considerations. del.icio.us Tags: Smartphones,Enterprise Smartphone Apps,Architecture

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  • Spotlight on an office - Nairobi, Kenya

    - by Maria Sandu
    Hi everyone, my name is Joash Mitei. I am a graduate Intern at Oracle Systems Kenya and I will briefly take you through our offices and the working environment here in Nairobi, Kenya. I’ve been with Oracle since February 2012 and I’m responsible for Applications Pre-sales focusing on Oracle EPM and E-Business Suite. My background is Finance and Accounting therefore joining Oracle was almost a totally a different ball game but the transition has been smooth. The Oracle offices here are located on the second floor of Mebank Towers. We moved to the 2nd floor just three months ago from the 5th floor mainly because of the growing workforce. We are covering the whole Eastern Africa region hence diversity in culture is evident. This is a plus since you get to interact with people of very different backgrounds, cultures and ways of thinking. The building itself is on the outskirts of the CBD hence free from the hustle and bustle of the town. The office is split into different sections; there is a main working area which has an open desk design that fosters interaction between colleagues, there are 4 conference rooms for meetings and presentations, there are 3 quiet rooms for a little privacy when needed and there is a dining area for meals and ‘hanging out’. The working environment is world-class, to say the least. The employees are very professional, quite smart and needless to say, very busy. There are 4 interns covering sales and pre-sales in both Tech and Apps. As an intern you get support from your supervisor but you are required to show initiative yourself and thus the need to be very pro-active and inquisitive. The local management is well structured and communicative to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in the office. Apart from the daily work, we usually have events to boost staff morale such as ‘TGIF hang -out’, football matches against each other or versus other companies, and team building retreats. All these are monumental in fostering the RED POTENTIAL. We also do numerous CSR activities in the local communities . Well, that’s the Kenyan office for you. Glad to be your tour guide. Have a superb day!

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  • Windows Phone 7, taking the mobile out of mobile

    - by markritchie
    I’ll start off this blog entry with a little background which is necessary for you to understand my situation. I moved from to the UK to Germany about three years ago and while I can converse in German, English is still very much my first language and the language I want my content delivered in. I happily purchased a HTC HD7 when WP7 was released here in Germany thinking foolishly that Microsoft really would get internationalization and localization as it’s at the heart of their business and developer products. Overall I’m very happy with my WP7, the camera sucks but that’s more HTC’s fault that Microsoft, but other than that it’s a very promising platform. My problems started when I purchased my first app. Initially everything appeared to be fine and things were as smooth as things had been with my previous free applications, however about a month after I received an email from Zune informing me that the credit card that they had registered against my account had expired. No problem I foolishly thought; I’ll simply add a new one. I don’t want to bore you with the details of what I’ve been through other than to take the low-lights: trying numerous websites, posts on Microsoft Answers and a tweet to Microsoft Support all to no avail. Today somebody suggested that I call the Xbox support line in the UK as they had solved their billing problems this way. So I called up the Xbox support line since I hadn’t resolved the problem using the Zune portal to resolve my problem with my WP7 (anybody else thinks Microsoft might need some consolidation here). After being on the phone with a very friendly representative in Ireland I was informed that because my British credit card has a billing address in Germany they are unable to accept it as a credit card. Because my Live ID and Zune Tag are registered in the UK they cannot take my card. Their solution is that I have to create a new Zune Tag that has its locale in Germany and then associate it with my phone. Now, first thing I go to register for a Zune Tag with a German locale it very kindly switches into German for me, nothing quite like reading a EULA in a language you’re not fluent in. I’ve no idea how this will affect the apps that are available to me in the app store, and I’m pretty sure it means that all my Xbox live achievements will become history. And what if I was to move to say France at some point do I have to go through all this again? At the end of the day I’m trying to set something up so I can give them my money and they’re making it VERY difficult for me. Could you imagine walking into a book store when you were on holiday and being told by the clerk that they couldn’t take your credit card because you came from another country?

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  • What do you need to know to be a world-class master software developer? [closed]

    - by glitch
    I wanted to bring up this question to you folks and see what you think, hopefully advise me on the matter: let's say you had 30 years of learning and practicing software development in front of you, how would you dedicate your time so that you'd get the biggest bang for your buck. What would you both learn and work on to be a world-class software developer that would make a large impact on the industry and leave behind a legacy? I think that most great developers end up being both broad generalists and specialists in one-two areas of interest. I'm thinking Bill Joy, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, K&R and so on. I'm thinking that perhaps one approach would be to break things down by categories and establish a base minimum of "software development" greatness. I'm thinking: Operating Systems: completely internalize the core concepts of OS, perhaps gain a lot of familiarity with an OSS one such as Linux. Anything from memory management to device drivers has to be complete second nature. Programming Languages: this is one of those topics that imho has to be fully grokked even if it might take many years. I don't think there's quite anything like going through the process of developing your own compiler, understanding language design trade-offs and so on. Programming Language Pragmatics is one of my favorite books actually, I think you want to have that internalized back to back, and that's just the start. You could go significantly deeper, but I think it's time well spent, because it's such a crucial building block. As a subset of that, you want to really understand the different programming paradigms out there. Imperative, declarative, logic, functional and so on. Anything from assembly to LISP should be at the very least comfortable to write in. Contexts: I believe one should have experience working in different contexts to truly be able to appreciate the trade-offs that are being made every day. Embedded, web development, mobile development, UX development, distributed, cloud computing and so on. Hardware: I'm somewhat conflicted about this one. I think you want some understanding of computer architecture at a low level, but I feel like the concepts that will truly matter will be slightly higher level, such as CPU caching / memory hierarchy, ILP, and so on. Networking: we live in a completely network-dependent era. Having a good understanding of the OSI model, knowing how the Web works, how HTTP works and so on is pretty much a pre-requisite these days. Distributed systems: once again, everything's distributed these days, it's getting progressively harder to ignore this reality. Slightly related, perhaps add solid understanding of how browsers work to that, since the world seems to be moving so much to interfacing with everything through a browser. Tools: Have a really broad toolset that you're familiar with, one that continuously expands throughout the years. Communication: I think being a great writer, effective communicator and a phenomenal team player is pretty much a prerequisite for a lot of a software developer's greatness. It can't be overstated. Software engineering: understanding the process of building software, team dynamics, the requirements of the business-side, all the pitfalls. You want to deeply understand where what you're writing fits from the market perspective. The better you understand all of this, the more of your work will actually see the daylight. This is really just a starting list, I'm confident that there's a ton of other material that you need to master. As I mentioned, you most likely end up specializing in a bunch of these areas as you go along, but I was trying to come up with a baseline. Any thoughts, suggestions and words of wisdom from the grizzled veterans out there who would like to share their thoughts and experiences with this? I'd really love to know what you think!

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  • What's a good way to get an IT internship? [closed]

    - by user1419715
    I'm a second year CS student who's worked really hard to build and expand my skills. I've spent the past week now trying to find a place to volunteer (i.e. work for FREE) so I can get a little bit of in-the-door experience with web development. I have a portfolio with several decent projects, a handful of languages and other hard/soft skills that employers constantly say they're clamoring for. I can't even get people to take my calls. This is me offering to work for them for FREE, remember. I'm in a reputable program at a respected school, get decent grades and...yeah, I've worked really hard to be presentable. On the rare occassions I actually get to speak to somebody at a design firm they hedge and do everything they can to get me off the phone. Nobody's ever expressed even the slightest interest in taking me on. The answer to the experience problem is supposed to be "you need to spend a year or two building up a big portfolio of projects on your own" so that employers will be impressed. I've done that. Websites, standalone apps, etc.. Nobody will even look at my resume, though. Question: Why does there seem to be so little interest in taking on upaid interns in the world of IT? Update: Sorry you all think I'm too aggressive or angry. It wasn't my intent to be a jerk to people while asking them for their opinions. That said, how would you feel if employer after employer turned you down cold when you offered yourself to them without asking for remuneration? One can't even get an unpaid job in this economy now, it seems. How am I going about my search? I find web firms in my area and contact them via email with a brief sales pitch of myself and a resume attached. Then a couple of days later I follow up with a phone contact. Nobody--anywhere--is advertising for interns of any kind. If there were I'm sure there'd be about 500 resumes per position, even unpaid. I've had good experiences in the past with cold-calling firms for actual paid jobs in other industries (hiring is a pain in the ass process and a call like this can show initiative while reducing a busy employer's need to do all the hiring overhead work), so I thought volunteering would work at least as well. My skills are pretty good for a CS student and include the usual suspects: HTML/CSS/Javascript, Python, Java, C, C#/.Net etc etc. I made a point on my resume to tie each ability claim to a project as well. Oh, and regarding the "working for free still costs the employer money" argument: that's an excellent point I hadn't though of. But it means...what? I have to pay the employer for the privilege of working there now?

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  • Azure - Unable To Get SQL Azure Invitation Code!

    - by Goober
    Scenario I'm trying to convert my Silverlight Business Application over to the cloud with the help of Azure. I have been following this link from Brad Abrams blog. Both the links to Windows Azure and SQL Azure crash out in Google Chrome, they work in Internet Explorer, but it's literally one of the worst user experiences I've ever had. The Problem I'm asked to sign in to Microsoft connect with my Live ID. I do so, I'm then asked to register!? - I do so. I'm then sent a verification email which I verify. I'm then signed out!?!?! When I sign back in, it repeats the process.... ANY IDEAS!??! Edit/Update: Finally managed to get signed up/in to connect. From here I was able to get hold of an invitation code to Windows Azure. Now I need an invitation code for SQL Azure. I cannot see ANYWHERE that advertises a way of getting this SQL Azure code, the only thing that I have seen is some text saying that there "may be a delay" in receiving codes due to volume of interest, which quite frankly I find hard to believe......... It's so far been 3 days now.This officially Sucks! If I have any more news I'll post back here.

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  • Windows Azure : Storage Client Exception Unhandled

    - by veda
    I am writing a code for upload large files into the blobs using blocks... When I tested it, it gave me an StorageClientException It stated: One of the request inputs is out of range. I got this exception in this line of the code: blob.PutBlock(block, ms, null); Here is my code: protected void ButUploadBlocks_click(object sender, EventArgs e) { // store upladed file as a blob storage if (uplFileUpload.HasFile) { name = uplFileUpload.FileName; byte[] byteArray = uplFileUpload.FileBytes; Int64 contentLength = byteArray.Length; int numBytesPerBlock = 250 *1024; // 250KB per block int blocksCount = (int)Math.Ceiling((double)contentLength / numBytesPerBlock); // number of blocks MemoryStream ms ; List<string>BlockIds = new List<string>(); string block; int offset = 0; // get refernce to the cloud blob container CloudBlobContainer blobContainer = cloudBlobClient.GetContainerReference("documents"); // set the name for the uploading files string UploadDocName = name; // get the blob reference and set the metadata properties CloudBlockBlob blob = blobContainer.GetBlockBlobReference(UploadDocName); blob.Properties.ContentType = uplFileUpload.PostedFile.ContentType; for (int i = 0; i < blocksCount; i++, offset = offset + numBytesPerBlock) { block = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(i)); ms = new MemoryStream(); ms.Write(byteArray, offset, numBytesPerBlock); blob.PutBlock(block, ms, null); BlockIds.Add(block); } blob.PutBlockList(BlockIds); blob.Metadata["FILETYPE"] = "text"; } } Can anyone tell me how to solve it...

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  • Is make -j distcc possible to scale over 5 times?

    - by holmes
    Since distcc cannot keep states and just possible to send jobs and headers and let those servers to use only the data just sent and preprocess and compile, I think the lastest distcc has problem in scalability. In my local build environment which has appx. 10,000 c/c++ files to build, I could only make 2 times faster than not using distcc (but using make -j) when having 20 build servers. What do you think is the problem? If anyone has achieved scalability more than 10 - 20 times using make -j and distcc, please let me know. The following product claims that it is impossible to scale make -j and distcc faster than 5 times. http://www.electric-cloud.com/products/electricaccelerator.php I think this can be improved by: Letting the distccd server to maintain sessions Tied to those sessions, they will cache their own header directories Preprocess will be done demand base from the distccd server This will be done through a LD_PRELOADed library libdistcc.so which will replace stat/open syscalls and fetches the header files over network. ... Has anyone done this kind of thing?

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  • Navigating through a sea of hype

    - by wouldLikeACrystalBall
    This is a vague, open question, so if you have no interest in these, please leave now. A few years ago it seemed everyone thought the death of desktop software was imminent. Web applications were the future. Everyone would move to cloud-based software-as-a-service systems, and developing applications for specific end-user platforms like Windows would soon become something of a ghetto. Joel's "How Microsoft Lost the API War" was but one of many such pieces sounding the death knell for this way of software development. Flash-forward to 2010, and the hype is all around mobile devices, particularly the iPhone. Software-as-a-Service vendors--even small ones such as YCombinator startups--go out of their way to build custom applications for the iPhone and other smart phone devices; applications that can be quite sophisticated, that run only on specific hardware and software architectures and are thus inherently incompatible. Now some of you are probably thinking, "Well, only the decline of desktop software was predicted; mobile devices aren't desktops." But the term was used by those predicting its demise to mean laptops also, and really any platform capable of running a browser. What was promised was a world where HTML and related standards would supplant native applications and their inherent difficulties. We would all code to the browser, not the OS. But here we are in 2010 with the AppStore bulging and development for the iPad just revving up. A few days ago, I saw someone on Hacker News claim that the future of computing was entirely in small, portable devices. Apparently the future is underpowered, requires dexterous thumbs and induces near-sightedness. How do those who so vehemently asserted one thing now assert the opposite with equal vehemence, without making even the slightest admission of error? And further, how are we as developers supposed to sift through all of this? I bought into the whole web-standards utopianism that was in vogue back in '06-'07 and now feel like it was a mistake. Is there some formula one can apply rather than a mere appeal to experience?

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  • Resources related to data-mining and gaming on social networks

    - by darren
    Hi all I'm interested in the problem of patterning mining among players of social networking games. For example detecting cheaters of a game, given a company's user database. So far I have been following the usual recipe for a data mining project: construct a data warehouse that aggregates significant information select a classifier, and train it with a subsectio of records from the warehouse validate classifier with another test set lather, rinse, repeat Surprisingly, I've found very little in this area regarding literature, best practices, etc. I am hoping to crowdsource the information gathering problem here. Specifically what I'm looking for: What classifiers have worked will for this type of pattern mining (it seems highly temporal, users playing games, users receiving rewards, users transferring prizes etc). Are there any highly agreed upon attributes specific to social networking / gaming data? What is a practical amount of information that should be considered? One problem I've run into is data overload, where queries and data cleansing may take days to complete. Related to point above, what hardware resources are required to produce results? I've found it difficult to estimate the amount of computing power I will require for production use. It has become apparent that a white box in the corner does not have enough horse-power for such a project. Are companies generally resorting to cloud solutions? Are they buying clusters? Basically, any resources (theoretical, academic, or practical) about implementing a social networking / gaming pattern-mining program would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

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  • Best practice for structuring a new large ASP.NET MVC2 plus EF4 VS2010 solution?

    - by Nick
    Hi, we are building a new web application using Microsoft ASP.NET MVC2 and Entity Framework 4. Although I am sure there is not one right answer to my question, we are struggling to agree a VS2010 solution structure. The application will use SQL Server 2008 with a possible future Azure cloud version. We are using EF4 with T4 POCOs (model-first) and accessing a number of third-party web-services. We will also be connecting to a number of external messaging systems. UI is based on standard ASP.NET (MVC) with jQuery. In future we may deliver a Silverlight/WPF version - as well as mobile. So put simply, we start with a VS2010 blank solution - then what? I have suggested 4 folders Data (the EF edmx file etc), Domain (entities, repositories), Services (web-services access), Presentation (web ui etc). However under Presentation, creating the ASP.NET MVC2 project obviously creates it's own Models folder etc and it just doesn't seem to fit too well in this proposed structure. I'm also missing a business layer (or does this sit in the domain?). Again I am sure there is no one right way to do it, but I'd really appreciate your views on this. Thanks

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  • Silverlight 4, Out of browser, Printing, Automatic updates

    - by minal
    I have a very critial business application presently running using Winforms. The application is a very core UI shell. It accepts input data, calls a webservice on my server to do the computation, displays the results on the winforms app and finally send a print stream to the printer. Presently the application is deployed using Click-once. Moving forward, I am trying to contemplate wheather I should move the application into a Silverlight application. Couple of reasons I am thinking silverlight. Gives clients the feel that it is a cloud based solution. Can be accessed from any PC. While the clickonce app is able to do this as well, they have to install an app, and when updates are available they have to click "Yes" to update. The application presently has a drop down list of customers, this list has expanded to over 3000 records. Scrolling through the list is very painful. With Silverlight I am thinking of the auto complete ability. Out of the browser - this will be handy for those users who use the app daily. I haven't used Silverlight previous hence looking for some expert advice on a few things: Printing - does silverlight allow sending raw print data to the printer. The application prints to a Zebra Thermal label printer. I have to send raw bytes to the printer with the commands. Can this be done with SL, or will it always prompt the "Print" dialog? Out of browser - when SL apps are installed as out of browser, how to updates come through, does the app update automatically or is the user prompted to opt for update?

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  • opacity and zIndex not getting set when hovered

    - by Catfish
    I'm messing around with a jquery carousel script and i'm trying to get it so when you hover over an image, the size will be doubled(which i have working) and the opacity will be 100. The script is here http://steph.net23.net/ImageCarousel/ This is the part i've added to double the width and height but the opacity is not taking effect. The original script came from here http://www.devirtuoso.com/2009/08/how-to-create-a-3d-tag-cloud-in-jquery/ $('#list a img').hover( function() { clearInterval(go); $(this).css('height', '200px'); $(this).css('width', '400px'); $(this).css('margin-left', '-100px'); $(this).css('opacity', '100'); var opac = $(this).css('opacity'); $(this).css('zIndex', '0'); var z = $(this).css('zIndex'); console.log("opacity = "+opac); console.log("zindex = "+z); }, function() { go = setInterval(render, 20); $(this).css('height', '100px'); $(this).css('width', '200px'); $(this).css('margin-left', '0'); });

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