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• Hadoop, NOSQL, and the Relational Model

  - by Phil Factor

  (Guest Editorial for the IT Pro/SysAdmin Newsletter)Whereas Relational Databases fit the world of commerce like a glove, it is useless to pretend that they are a perfect fit for all human endeavours. Although, with SQL Server, we’ve made great strides with indexing text, in processing spatial data and processing markup, there is still a problem in dealing efficiently with large volumes of ephemeral semi-structured data. Key-value stores such as Cassandra, Project Voldemort, and Riak are of great value for ephemeral data, and seem of equal value as a data-feed that provides aggregations to an RDBMS. However, the Document databases such as MongoDB and CouchDB are ideal for semi-structured data for which no fixed schema exists; analytics and logging are obvious examples. NoSQL products, such as MongoDB, tackle the semi-structured data problem with panache. MongoDB is designed with a simple document-oriented data model that scales horizontally across multiple servers. It doesn’t impose a schema, and relies on the application to enforce the data structure. This is another take on the old ‘EAV’ problem (where you don’t know in advance all the attributes of a particular entity) It uses a clever replica set design that allows automatic failover, and uses journaling for data durability. It allows indexing and ad-hoc querying. However, for SQL Server users, the obvious choice for handling semi-structured data is Apache Hadoop. There will soon be an ODBC Driver for Apache Hive .and an Add-in for Excel. Additionally, there are now two Hadoop-based connectors for SQL Server; the Apache Hadoop connector for SQL Server 2008 R2, and the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) connector. We can connect to Hadoop process the semi-structured data and then store it in SQL Server. For one steeped in the culture of Relational SQL Databases, I might be expected to throw up my hands in the air in a gesture of contempt for a technology that was, judging by the overblown journalism on the subject, about to make my own profession as archaic as the Saggar makers bottom knocker (a potter’s assistant who helped the saggar maker to make the bottom of the saggar by placing clay in a metal hoop and bashing it). However, on the contrary, I find that I'm delighted with the advances made by the NoSQL databases in the past few years. Having the flow of ideas from the NoSQL providers will knock any trace of complacency out of the providers of Relational Databases and inspire them into back-fitting some features, such as horizontal scaling, with sharding and automatic failover into SQL-based RDBMSs. It will do the breed a power of good to benefit from all this lateral thinking.

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• What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase?

  - by GordonM

  I'm currently working at a company with 2 other PHP developers aside from me, and 1 junior developer. The senior developer who originally built the system we're all working on has resigned and will only be here for a matter of weeks. The other developer, who is the only other guy who knows anything about the system, is unhappy here and is looking for a new job. I'm very real danger of being left behind as the only experienced developer on this codebase. Since I've joined this company I've tried to push for better coding standards, project documentation, etc and I do think I've made some headway, but the vast majority of the code is simply unmaintainable and uncommented. A lot of this has to do with the need to get things done fast at points in the project before I joined, but now the technical debt is enormous, even with the two developers who do understand the system on board. Without them, it will simply be impossible to do anything with it. The senior developer is working on trying to at least comment all his code before he leaves but I think the codebase is simply too vast to properly document in the remaining time. Besides, when he does comment it still doesn't make things as clear as it could. If the system was better organized and documented I could probably start refactoring it incrementally, but the whole thing is so tightly coupled that it's very difficult to make any changes in one module without having unintended knock-on effects in other modules. Naturally, there's no unit tests either, and I honestly don't think this codebase could possibly be unit tested anyway given how it's implemented. There also never seems to be enough time to get things done even with 3 developers and 1 junior developer. With one developer and one junior, neither of which had significant input into the early design of the system, I don't see how we could possibly get anything done with keeping the current system working, implementing new features as needed and developing a replacement for the current codebase that is better organized. Is there an approach I can take to cope with this situation, or should I be getting my own CV in order as well at this point? If it was just me and the junior designer who would be left I'd go for the latter option almost without question. However, there's a team of front-end developers and content managers as well, and I'm worried what would become of them if I left and put them in a position where there would be no developers at all. The department might just be closed down altogether under such circumstances, and then I'd have their unemployment on my conscience as well!

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• How to properly document functionality in an agile project?

  - by RoboShop

  So recently, we've just finished the first phase of our project. We used agile with fortnightly sprints. And whilst the application turned out well, we're now turning our eyes on some of the maintenance tasks. One maintenance task is that all of our documentation appears in the form of specs. These specs describe 1 or more stories and generally are a body of work which a few devs could knock over in a week. For development, that works really well - every two weeks, the devs get handed a spec and it's a nice discrete chunk of work that they can just do. From a documentation point of view, this has become a mess. The problem with writing specs that are focused on delivering just-in-time requirements to developers is we haven't placed much emphasis on the big picture. Specs come from all different angles - it could be describing a standard function, it could describing parts of a workflow, it could be describing a particular screen... And now, we have business rules about our application scattered across 120 documents. Looking for any document for a particular business rule or function in particular is quite hard because you don't know which document has this information, and making a change request is equally hard because once again, we are unsure about which spec to make the change. So we have maybe a couple of weeks of lull before it's back to specing out functionality for the next phase but in this time, I'd like to re-visit our processes. I think the way we have worked so far in terms of delivering fortnightly specs works well. But we also need a way to manage our documentation so that our business rules for a given function / workflow are easy to locate / change. I have two ideas. One is we compile all of our specs into a series of master specs broken by a few broad functional areas. The specs describe the sprint, the master spec describe the system. The only problem I can see is 1) Our existing 120 specs are not all neatly defined into broad functional areas. Some will require breaking up, merging etc. which will take a lot of time. 2) We'll be writing specs and updating master specs in each new sprint. Seems like double the work, and then do the devs look at the spec or the master spec? My other suggestion is to concede that our documentation is too big of a mess, and manage that mess going forward. So we go through each spec, assign like keywords to it, and then when we want to search for a function, we search for that keyword. Problems I can see 1) Still the problem of business rules scattered everywhere, keywords just make it easier to find it. anyway, if anyone has any decent ideas or any experience to share about how best to manage documentation, would really appreciate it.

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• Laptop authentication/logon via accelerometer tilt, flip, and twist

  - by wonsungi

  Looking for another application/technology: A number of years ago, I read about a novel way to authenticate and log on to a laptop. The user simply had to hold the laptop in the air and execute a simple series of tilts and flips to the laptop. By logging accelerometer data, this creates a unique signature for the user. Even if an attacker watched and repeated the exact same motions, the attacker could not replicate the user's movements closely enough. I am looking for information about this technology again, but I can't find anything. It may have been an actual feature on a laptop, or it may have just been a research project. I think I read about it in a magazine like Wired. Does anyone have more information about authentication via unique accelerometer signatures? Here are the closest articles I have been able to find: Knock-based commands for your Linux laptop Shake Well Before Use: Authentication Based on Accelerometer Data[PDF] Inferring Identity using Accelerometers in Television Remote Controls User Evaluation of Lightweight User Authentication with a Single Tri-Axis Accelerometer Identifying Users of Portable Devices from Gait Pattern with Accelerometers[PDF] 3D Signature Biometrics Using Curvature Moments[PDF] MoViSign: A novel authentication mechanism using mobile virtual signatures

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• Simple way to set up port knocking on Linux?

  - by Ace Paus

  There are well known benefits of Port Knocking utilities when utilized in combination with firewall IP table modification. Port Knocking is best used to provide an additional layer of security over other tools such as the OpenSSH server. I would like some help setting it up on a ubuntu server. I looked at some port knocking implementations here: PORTKNOCKING - A system for stealthy authentication across closed ports. IMPLEMENTATIONS http://www.portknocking.org/view/implementations fwknop looked good. I found an Android client here. And fwknop (both client and server) is in the ubuntu repos. Unfortunately, setting it up (on the server) looks difficult. I do not have iptables set up. My proficiency with iptables is limited (but I understand the basics). I'm looking for a series of simple steps to set it up. I only want to open the SSH port in response to a valid knock. Alternatively, I would consider other port knocking implementations, if they are much simpler to set up and the desired Linux and Android clients are available.

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• Laptop authentication/logon via accelometer tilt, flip, and twist

  - by wonsungi

  Looking for another application/technology: A number of years ago, I read about a novel way to authenticate and log on to a laptop. The user simply had to hold the laptop in the air and execute a simple series of tilts and flips to the laptop. By logging accelerometer data, this creates a unique signature for the user. Even if an attacker watched and repeated the exact same motions, the attacker could not replicate the user's movements closely enough. I am looking for information about this technology again, but I can't find anything. It may have been an actual feature on a laptop, or it may have just been a research project. I think I read about it in a magazine like Wired. Does anyone have more information about authentication via unique accelerometer signatures? Here are the closest articles I have been able to find: Knock-based commands for your Linux laptop Shake Well Before Use: Authentication Based on Accelerometer Data[PDF] Inferring Identity using Accelerometers in Television Remote Controls User Evaluation of Lightweight User Authentication with a Single Tri-Axis Accelerometer Identifying Users of Portable Devices from Gait Pattern with Accelerometers[PDF] 3D Signature Biometrics Using Curvature Moments[PDF] MoViSign: A novel authentication mechanism using mobile virtual signatures

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• Port knocking via SSH tunnels

  - by j0ker

  I have a server running in my university's internal network. There is only one SSH daemon running which is secured by port knocking with knockd. Works fine if I try to connect from within the internal network. But since the server has no external IP, I have to tunnel into the internal network every time I want to access the server from outside. And since tunneling only works for a single port I cannot do the port knocking as easily as from an internal client. In fact, I don't get it to work at all. What I'm trying is opening tunnels for all the different ports that have to be knocked. Then I send TCP-SYN packets into the tunnels. But that doesn't work even for a single port. If I establish the tunnel on the first port in the knock sequence and send a packet through it, it doesn't reach the server. There is no entry in the log file of knockd, while there should be something like 123.45.67.89: openSSH: Stage 1 (as shown with internal knocks). So I guess, the problem doesn't exist within my knocking script but is a more general one. Are there any known problems with what I'm trying to do? Is it even possible or am I missing something? Thanks in advance!

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• Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

  - by Divya Malik

  A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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• Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

  - by Divya Malik

  A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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• IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

  - by BobPalmer

  In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers.  And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean.    After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?'   This of course would not do.  So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site.    He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby.  Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks.   Here's a link to a video of the current prototype:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I   Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text.  (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx).   As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right.  I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated.   For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out.  Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients.  Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages.   The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving.   The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video).   The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor.  Website slow?  You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance.  Website crashing?  Look for a wall of giant red bubbles.  No activity at all?  Maybe the site is down.  Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database...   As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#.   The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness.  The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap).   My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module.  For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login.     Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource.     Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

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• Impressions of my ASUS eee slate EP121 - Dual core 4GB, 64GB SSD

  - by tonyrogerson

  This thing is lovely, very nice bluetooth keyboard that has nice feedback on the keypress, there is no mouse but you can use the stylus or get yourself a bluetooth mouse, me, I've opted for a Microsoft ARC mouse which is a delight to use, the USB doors are a pain to open for the first time if like me you don't have any finger nails. It came as a suprise that the slate shows four processors, Dual Core with multi-threading, I didn't really look at the processor I was more interested in the amount of memory and the SSD; you don't get the full 4GB even with the 64 bit version of Windows 7 installed (which I immediately upgraded to Ultimate through my MSDN subscription). The box is extremely responsive - extremely, it loads Winword in literally a second. I've got office 2010 and onenote 2010 on there now; one problem is that on applying all (43) windows updates since the upgrade the machine is still sat on step 3 of 3 on the start up configuring updates screen after about an hour, you can't turn this machine off without using a paper clip to reset it and as I have just found you need a paper clip :). Installing Windows 7 SP1 was effortless. One of the first things I did on it was to reduce the size of the font, by default its set at 125%, my eye sight is ok :) so I've set that back down. Amazon Kindle for the PC works really well, plenty of text on the screen when viewed portrait, the case it comes with also allows the slate to stand up in various positions - portrait, horizontal - seems stable enough. The wireless works well, seems to have a better signal than my other two laptop machines which is good news. The gadget passed the pose test at work :). I use offline files to keep a copy of all my work stuff locally, I'm not sure what it is, well, its probably my server but whenever I try and sync it runs for a couple of minutes then fails with network name no longer contactable, funnily enough its fine from my big laptop so I can only guess this may be a driver type issue on the EP121 itself - very odd and very annoying. I do a lot of presenting and need to plug into a VGA project because most sites that's all that is offered, the EP121 has a mini-hdmi output which is great except for this scenario, hdmi is digital, vga is analogue, you will struggle to find a cost effective solution, I found HDFury and also a device HP do, however, a better solution appears to be getting a USB graphics adapter for instance the one I've ordered is the ClimaxDigital USB 2.0 to DVI,VGA or HDMI Adaptor which gives everything I need - VGA and DVI output and great resolution as well - ok, so fingers crossed because I'm presenting next Wednesday in Edinburgh and not taking my 300kg lenovo w700 (I'm sure my back just sighed in relief) - it certainly works really well on my LED TV, the install was simple - it just works! One of the several reasons for buying this piece of kit was to use it on my LED TV to remote into my main machine to check stuff whilst sat in my living room, also to watch webcasts and lecture videos in comfort away from my office, because of the wireless speed and limitation I'm opting for a USB network adapter from Belkin - that will also allow me to take advantage of my home gigabit network, there are only 2 usb ports on the slate so I'm going to knock up a hub so connecting it in is straight forward and simple, I'm also going to purchase a second power supply so I don't have to faff about with that either.I now have the developer x64 edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, yes everything :) - about 16GB left to play with on the machine now but that will be fine, I'll put AdventureWorks on there so I can play and demo stuff which is all I'm after from this, my development machine is significantly more powerful and meets my storage needs too.Travel test this weekend and next week, I'm in Dundee for my final exam for the masters degree.

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• Social Search: Looking for Love

  - by Mike Stiles

  For marketers and enterprise executives who have placed a higher priority on and allocated bigger budgets to search over social, it might be time to notice yet another shift that’s well underway. Social is search. Search marketing was always more of an internal slam-dunk than other digital initiatives. Even a C-suite that understood little about the new technology world knew it’s a good thing when people are able to find you. Google was the new Yellow Pages. Only with Google, you could get your listing first without naming yourself “AAAA Plumbing.” There were wizards out there who could give your business prominence in front of people who were specifically looking for what you offered. Other search giants like Bing also came along to offer such ideal matchmaking possibilities. But what if the consumer isn’t using a search engine to find what they’re looking for? And what if the search engines started altering their algorithms so that search placement manipulation was more difficult? Both of those things have started to happen. Experian Hitwise’s numbers show that visits to the major search engines in the UK dropped 100 million through August. Search engines are far from dead, or even challenged. But more and more, the public is discovering the sites and brands they need through advice they get via social, not search. You’ll find the worlds of social and search increasingly co-mingling as well. Search behemoths Google and Bing are including Facebook and Google+ into their engines. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have done some integration of global web search into their platforms. So what makes social such a worthwhile search entity for brands? First and foremost, the consumer has demonstrated a behavior of acting on recommendations from social connections. A cry in the wilderness like, “Anybody know any good catering companies?” will usually yield a link (and an endorsement) from a friend such as “Yeah, check out Just-Cheese-Balls Catering.” There’s no such human-driven force/influence behind the big search engines. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others call it “Friend Mining.” It is, in essence, searching for answers from friends’ experiences as opposed to faceless code. And Facebook has all of those friends’ experiences already stored as data. eMarketer says search in an $18 billion business, and investors are really into it. So no shock Facebook’s ready to leverage their social graph into relevant search. What do you do about all this as a brand? For one thing, it’s going to lead to some interesting paid marketing opportunities around the corner, including Sponsored Stories bought against certain queries, inserting deals into search results, capitalizing on social search results on mobile, etc. Apart from that, it might be time to stop mentally separating social and search in your strategic planning and budgeting. Courting your fans on social will cumulatively add up to more valuable, personally endorsed recommendations for your company when a consumer conducts a search on social. Fail to foster those relationships, fail to engage, fail to provide knock-em-dead customer service, fail to wow them with your actual products and services…and you’ll wind up with the visibility you deserve in social search results.

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• D&rsquo;Arcy&rsquo;s Book Club - The New Strategic Selling

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  The New Strategic Selling Miller and Heiman Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters Everybody is a salesmen. Every day, without knowing it, we sell something to someone. Now, the typical vision people think of when they hear the word “sales” is the sleazy used car salesperson who does whatever they can to get you to buy the clunker on their lot. But selling is not an action tied to money and products. Selling is about convincing people to see your point of view and act on it. If you want your company to cover a trip to a conference, you may have to sell the idea to your boss. If you want to buy that new big screen TV, you have to sell the idea to your significant other. If you want to go on a weekend fishing trip with the boys you might be called in to help sell the idea to your buddies wife. We all sell, but we don’t all sell very well. So enter The New Strategic Selling, a book based on the sales course put on by the Miller-Heiman group. In fact, this isn’t really a “New” strategy to selling as its been around for a number of years. But the concepts they present, the ideas about selling, these are still very radical based on what most of us have experienced. Gone are the high pressure, win at all cost, GlenGarry-GlenRoss style of sales…instead the book presents a framework to switch to need-based selling. It’s the idea that instead of going in raving about a product or service, you build a relationship where the buyer expresses what their needs are and your response is to present a solution that best fits that need. Instead of focussing on the amount of money you can squeeze out of a client, you focus on whether everyone wins, that they receive win-results from the engagement, that repeat business is developed over time delivering value over and over again. The great thing about the book is that what it teaches…things like how to identify different buying influencers, how to prepare for meetings, techniques to solicit information about what the buyer is really thinking/feeling…these things are entirely applicable in *any* situation that you need to sell to someone…and remember: selling is convincing people to see your point of view and act on it. So that new big screen TV you want to buy but need to convince your wife on? This book can help you. That training opportunity you want your company to send you on? This book can help you. The upgrade to your community park that you want to lobby the local civic authorities for? This book can help you. The book is a bit wordy. I found that the length could have been reduced and the points still have gotten across. That’s really the only knock that I have though; the insight that it provides is so worthwhile that having to chew through extra words is well worth it. You definitely don’t have to be a professional salesperson to benefit from this book. Rating: 4/5

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• NHibernate: Mapping different dynamic components based on a discriminator

  - by George Mauer

  My domain entities each have a set of "fixed" properties and a set of "dynamic" properties which can be added at runtime. I handle this by using NHibernate's dynamic-component functionality. public class Product { public virtual Guid Id { get; } public virtual string Name { get; set;} public virtual IDictionary DynamicComponents { get; } } Now I have the following situation public class Customer { public virtual Guid Id { get; } public virtual string Type { get; set;} public virtual IDictionary DynamicProperties { get; } } Where a CustomerType is something like "Online" or "InPerson". Furthermore an Online customer has dynamic properties "Name" and "IPAddress" and an InPerson Customer has dynamic properties "Name" and "Salesman". Which customer types are available and the extra properties on them are configured in meta-data which is used to generate hbm files on application start. I could figure out some way to knock this together using an intermediate DTO layer, but is there any support in NHibernate for this scenario? The only difficulty seems to be that all the different "types" of customer map to the same Customer class.

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• How to edit the XSL for RSS Viewer Webpart

  - by Nagendra

  I am using a blog site as a source for my RSS Feed. As I see the RSS feed, its showing up as the following :: Blog: Posts Test Thursday, March 04, 2010 - Body: With 25 four's and 3 sixers Sachin crosses 200 (147 balls) runs in an single ODI innings. Creates another world record. Watch the final over where he got it double hundred with MSD on the other end. This is what he had to say after getting the MOM (man of the match): I dedicate this knock to all the people of India, who have supported me throughout over the last 20 years. I was timing the ball well, and I felt that anywhere between 340 to 350 was a good target. I thought Karthik, Yusuf and Dhoni supported me well. I thought that a 200 would be possible once I crossed 175 in the 42nd over. I am enjoying my cricket at the moment. There have been a few bad decisions I have made as a batsman, but as long as the passion is there I will carry on. It feels good that I lasted the 50 overs, it was a good test of my fitness and I would like to do this once again. Well!!! Wait for more. Published: 3/4/2010 3:18 PM More... I actually wanted to remove the Body, Published parameters. I just want my XSLT to be able to show only the Description of the blog. No need to have this meta data. Can anyone help me in specifying tthe XSL changes?

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• Java Random Slowdowns on Mac OS cont'd

  - by javajustice

  I asked this question a few weeks ago, but I'm still having the problem and I have some new hints. The original question is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1651887/java-random-slowdowns-on-mac-os Basically, I have a java application that splits a job into independent pieces and runs them in separate threads. The threads have no synchronization or shared memory items. The only resources they do share are data files on the hard disk, with each thread having an open file channel. Most of the time it runs very fast, but occasionally it will run very slow for no apparent reason. If I attach a CPU profiler to it, then it will start running quickly again. If I take a CPU snapshot, it says its spending most of its time in "self time" in a function that doesn't do anything except check a few (unshared unsynchronized) booleans. I don't know how this could be accurate because 1, it makes no sense, and 2, attaching the profiler seems to knock the threads out of whatever mode they're in and fix the problem. Also, regardless of whether it runs fast or slow, it always finishes and gives the same output, and it never dips in total cpu usage (in this case ~1500%), implying that the threads aren't getting blocked. I have tried different garbage collectors, different sizings the parts of the memory space, writing data output to non-raid drives, and putting all data output in threads separate the main worker threads. Does anyone have any idea what kind of problem this could be? Could it be the operating system (OS X 10.6.2) ? I have not been able to duplicate it on a windows machine, but I don't have one with a similar hardware configuration.

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• Change classes instantiated with loadNibNamed

  - by Nick H247

  I am trying to change the class of objects created with a nib with the iPhone SDK. The reason for this is; i dont know until runtime what the class is that i want the nib object to be (though they will have the same UIView based super class), and i dont want to create a different nib for every eventuality - as the .nib will be the same for each, apart from the class of one object. I have been successful, with a couple of methods, but either have some knock on effects or am unsure of how safe the methods I have used are: Method 1: Override alloc, on the super class and set a c variable to the class I require: + (id) alloc { if (theClassIWant) { id object = [theClassIWant allocWithZone:NSDefaultMallocZone()]; theClassIWant = nil; return object; } return [BaseClass allocWithZone:NSDefaultMallocZone()]; } this works well, and i assume is 'reasonably' safe, though if I alloc a subclass myself (without setting 'theClassIWant') - an object of the base class is created. I also dont really like the idea of overriding alloc... Method 2: use object_setClass(self,theClassIWant) in initWithCoder (before calling initWithCoder on the super class): - (id) initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)aDecoder { if (theClassIWant) { // the framework doesn't like this: //[self release]; //self = [theClassIWant alloc]; // whoa now! object_setClass(self,theClassIWant); theClassIWant = nil; return [self initWithCoder:aDecoder]; } if (self = [super initWithCoder:aDecoder]) { ... this also works well, but not all the subclasses are necessarily going to be the same size as the super class, so this could be very unsafe! To combat this i tried releasing and re-allocing to the correct type within initWithCoder, but i got the following error from the framework: "This coder requires that replaced objects be returned from initWithCoder:" dont quite get what this means! i am replacing an object in initWithCoder... Any comments on the validity of these methods, or suggestions of improvements or alternatives welcome!

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• Destroy process-less console windows left by Visual Studio debug sessions

  - by jon hanson

  A known bug with security update KB978037 can occur with Visual Studio 2003 (and 2008) where sometimes if you restart a debugging session on a console app then the console window doesn't get closed even though the owner process no longer exists. The problem is discussed further here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2402875/visual-studio-debug-console-sometimes-stays-open-and-is-impossible-to-close These zombie windows then can not be closed via the Taskbar or via the TaskManager, and typically require a power off/on to get rid of them. Over the period of even a single day you can accumulate quite a few of them, which clog up your TaskBar and are generally annoying. I thought I would knock up a simple C++ Win32 utility to attempt to call DestroyWindow() on these windows by passing the windows handle as a cmd-line argument and converting it to a HWND. I'm converting the handle from a string by parsing it as a DWORD then casting the DWORD to a HWND. This appears to be working as if I call GetWindowInfo() on the handle it succeeds. However calling DestroyWindow() on the handle fails with error 5 (access denied), presumably because the caller process (i.e. my app) doesn't own the window in question. Any ideas as to how I might get rid of the zombie windows, either via the above approach or any other alternative short of rebooting? I'm in a corporate environment so installing/uninstalling updates/service-packs etc isn't an option.

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• User Friendly Video Review with Locking

  - by James Cori

  We have a jquery/php/mysql system that allows a user to log in and review videos built by a system for online viewing. When a user begins reviewing a video, the video is marked as such. But now we've cornered ourselves into the classic browser-based application problem of the user navigating away or closing the browser without completing review. That video would then enter a state of limbo of constantly being reviewed, but never completed, and never re-entering the queue. Options we have are: Build a service (which we already have others) to find review sessions that are outside a duration boundary and reset them back into the queue. Reset review sessions outside a duration boundary when that user logs in. Essentially, if a user locks out a video for review, it'll be unlocked the next time they log in. A suggestion made to me was to use the php/apache session length and on expiration, reset any pending review jobs. I don't even know where to look to implement this as this is one project on a shared server, so it shouldn't be an apache config, but the reset mechanism would need to know the database credentials to be able to reset it... The worst solution everyone hates is preventing the user from navigating away with javascript, asking "Are you sure?!" This system is used by a few hired reviewers, so I'm not exactly dealing with the public here, but I can't prevent users from sharing logins for speedier review, which would knock out the 2nd option above because it would unlock a video being reviewed by someone else using the same login.

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• Nmock2 and Event Expectations

  - by Kildareflare

  Im in the process of writing a test for a small application that follows the MVP pattern. Technically, I know I should have written the test before the code, but I needed to knock up a demo app quick smart and so im now going back to the test before moving on to the real development. In short I am attempting to test the presenter, however I cannot even get an empty test to run due to an Internal.ExpectationException. The exception is raised on a unexpected invocation of an event assignation. Here is the presenter class, public LBCPresenter(IView view, IModel model) { m_model = model; m_model.BatteryModifiedEvent += new EventHandler(m_model_BatteryModifiedEvent); } Model Interface public interface IModel { event EventHandler BatteryModifiedEvent; } And here is the test class, I can't see what im missing, ive told NMock to expect the event... [TestFixture] public class MVP_PresenterTester { private Mockery mocks; private IView _mockView; private IViewObserver _Presenter; private IModel _mockModel; [SetUp] public void SetUp() { mocks = new Mockery(); _mockView = mocks.NewMock<IView>(); _mockModel = mocks.NewMock<IModel>(); _Presenter = new LBCPresenter(_mockView, _mockModel); } [Test] public void TestClosingFormWhenNotDirty() { Expect.Once.On(_mockModel).EventAdd("BatteryModifiedEvent", NMock2.Is.Anything); //makes no difference if following line is commented out or not //mocks.VerifyAllExpectationsHaveBeenMet(); } } Every time I run the test I get the same expectation Exception. Any ideas?

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• Agile language for 2d game prototypes?

  - by instanceofTom

  Occasionally ( read: when my fiancé allows ) I like to prototype different game or game-like ideas I have. Usually I use Java or C# (not xna yet) because they are the languages I have the most practice with. However I would like to learn something more suited to agile development; a language in which it would be easier to knock out quick prototypes. At my job I have recently been working with looser (weak/dynamically typed) languages, specifically python and groovy, and I think something similar would fit what I am looking for. So, my question is: What languages (and framework/engine) would be good for rapidly developing prototypes of 2d game concepts? A few notes: I don't need blazing fast bitcrunching performance. In this case I would strongly prefer ease of development over performance. I'd like to use a language with a healthy community, which to me means a fair amount of maintained 3rd party, libraries. I'd like the language to be cross-platform friendly, I work on a variety of different operating systems and would like something that is portable with minimum effort. I can't imagine myself using a language with out decent options for debugging and editor syntax highlighting support. Note: If you are aware of a Java or C# library/framework that you think streamlines producing game prototypes I open to learning something new for those languages too

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• Findbugs and comparing

  - by Rob Goodwin

  I recently started using the findbugs static analysis tool in a java build I was doing. The first report came back with loads of High Priority warnings. Being the obsessive type of person, I was ready to go knock them all out. However, I must be missing something. I get most of the warnings when comparing things. Such as the following code: public void setSpacesPerLevel(int value) { if( value >= 0) { ... produces a high priority warning at the if statement that reads. File: Indenter.java, Line: 60, Type: BIT_AND_ZZ, Priority: High, Category: CORRECTNESS Check to see if ((...) & 0) == 0 in sample.Indenter.setSpacesPerLevel(int) I am comparing an int to an int, seems like a common thing. I get quite a few of that type of error with similar simple comparisons. I have alot of other high priority warnings on what appears to be simple code blocks. Am I missing something here? I realize that static analysis can produce false positives, but the errors I am seeing seem too trivial of a case to be a false positive. This one has me scratching my head as well. for(int spaces = 0;spaces < spacesPerLevel;spaces++){... Which gives the following findbugs warning: File: Indenter.java, Line: 160, Type: IL_INFINITE_LOOP, Priority: High, Category: CORRECTNESS There is an apparent infinite loop in sample.Indenter.indent() This loop doesn't seem to have a way to terminate (other than by perhaps throwing an exception). Any ideas? So basically I have a handful of files and 50-60 high priority warnings similar to the ones above. I am using findbugs 1.3.9 and calling it from the findbugs ant task

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• Where does the delete control go in my Cocoa user interface?

  - by Graham Lee

  Hi, I have a Cocoa application managing a collection of objects. The collection is presented in an NSCollectionView, with a "new object" button nearby so users can add to the collection. Of course, I know that having a "delete object" button next to that button would be dangerous, because people might accidentally knock it when they mean to create something. I don't like having "are you sure you want to..." dialogues, so I dispensed with the "delete object". There's a menu item under Edit for removing an object, and you can hit Cmd-backspace to do the same. The app supports undoing delete actions. Now I'm getting support emails ranging from "does it have to be so hard to delete things" to "why can't I delete objects?". That suggests I've made it a bit too hard, so what's the happy middle ground? I see applications from Apple that do it my way, or with the add/remove buttons next to each other, but I hate that latter option. Is there another good (and preferably common) convention for delete controls? I thought about an action menu but I don't think I have any other actions that would go in it, rendering the menu a bit thin.

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• Image Gurus: Optimize my Python PNG transparency function

  - by ozone

  I need to replace all the white(ish) pixels in a PNG image with alpha transparency. I'm using Python in AppEngine and so do not have access to libraries like PIL, imagemagick etc. AppEngine does have an image library, but is pitched mainly at image resizing. I found the excellent little pyPNG module and managed to knock up a little function that does what I need: make_transparent.py pseudo-code for the main loop would be something like: for each pixel: if pixel looks "quite white": set pixel values to transparent otherwise: keep existing pixel values and (assuming 8bit values) "quite white" would be: where each r,g,b value is greater than "240" AND each r,g,b value is within "20" of each other This is the first time I've worked with raw pixel data in this way, and although works, it also performs extremely poorly. It seems like there must be a more efficient way of processing the data without iterating over each pixel in this manner? (Matrices?) I was hoping someone with more experience in dealing with these things might be able to point out some of my more obvious mistakes/improvements in my algorithm. Thanks!

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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project?

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