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  • How to learn programming in Kindergarten?

    - by Kinder
    Last time I asked for peer review on a new language called KinderScript, which its Code Division Multiple Access succinct style looked like white noise that saturated two police reviewer's narrow band. The question has only 1 hour life with 38 views shortly after the shouting of shut-up-leave-now. Ok, That's totally off topic. That is not the question. I'm asking a peer review on the design of KinderScript [1], within the context of an intriguing: "How to learn programming in kindergarten?" [1] http://code.google.com/p/ac-me/downloads/detail?name=kinder.pdf&can=2&q= Thanks for any feedback. No police please. I choose this forum to ask because here has not only many professional but also many new leaners. Both views are appreciated.

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  • How do I use apt-get to update to the latest kernel?

    - by Bucic
    My current kernel is 3.2.0-26 (my main computer) while on another of my Ubuntu computers, with which I didn't fiddle with unofficial updates, it's 3.2.0-30. Yet the Update manager on my main computer doesn't show available kernel updates. It shows other updates though. I suspect is due to the fact that in the past I installed multiple mainline kernel versions (not recommended versions), up to 3.5* series. What I'm after: Either: Fix automatic kernel updates. Or: Learn about a way to check for the latest official ubuntu kernel version and get it manually (I know how to install kernels from debs) What I have already tried: Uninstalled unused kernels including "the generic one without a number" as per http://askubuntu.com/a/103875/29347 and then also https://ubuntugenius.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/ubuntu-cleanup-how-to-remove-all-unused-linux-kernel-headers-images-and-modules/

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  • Registration Open Now! Virtual Developer Day: Oracle ADF Development

    - by Greg Jensen
    Is your organization looking at developing Web or Mobile application based upon the Oracle platform?  Oracle is offering a virtual event for Developer Leads, Managers and Architects to learn more about developing Web, Mobile and beyond based on Oracle applications. This event will provide sessions that range from introductory to deep dive covering Oracle's strategic framework for developing multi-channel enterprise applications for the Oracle platforms. Multiple tracks cover every interest and every level and include live online Q&A chats with Oracle's technical staff.   For Registration and Information, please follow the link HERE Sign up for one of the following events below Americas - Tuesday - November 19th / 9am to 1pm PDT / 12pm to 4pm EDT / 1pm to 5pm BRT APAC - Thursday - November 21st / 10am - 1:30pm IST (India) / 12:30pm - 4pm SGT (Singapore) / 3:30pm -7pm AESDT EMEA - Tuesday - November 26th / 9am - 1pm GMT / 1pm - 5pm GST / 2:30pm -6:30pm IST

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  • What happened to .fx files in D3D11?

    - by bobobobo
    It seems they completely ruined .fx file loading / parsing in D3D11. In D3D9, loading an entire effect file was D3DXCreateEffectFromFile( .. ), and you got a ID3DXEffect9, which had great methods like SetTechnique and BeginPass, making it easy to load and execute a shader with multiple techniques. Is this completely manual now in D3D11? The highest level functionality I can find is loading a SINGLE shader from an FX file using D3DX11CompileFromFile. Does anyone know if there's an easier way to load FX files and choose a technique? With the level of functionality provided in D3D11 now, it seems like you're better off just writing .hlsl files and forgetting about the whole idea of Techniques.

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  • How does hreflang interact with geo targeting?

    - by zakgottlieb
    If I have multiple subfolders that I wish to target at different countries, I'm thinking the ideal set up would be to specify rel="alternative" hreflang with a language AND country code (e.g. en-AU) and ALSO to geotarget that subfolder to the particular country. That way, the pages would be showing up both in the country-specific results (accessed via Search Tools) because of hreflang, AND the more generic country results from regular searches, because of geotargeting. Is this correct? p.s. What would happen if you geotargeted a subfolder which had e.g. pt-BR hreflang value (i.e. Portuguese-Brazil) to just Portugal?

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  • Why isn't there a python compiler to native machine code?

    - by user2986898
    As I understand, the cause of the speed difference between compiled languages and python is, that the first compiles code all way to the native machine's code, whereas python compiles to python bytecode, to be interpreted by the PVM. I see that this way python codes can be used on multiple operation system (at least in most cases), however I do not understand, why is not there an additional (and optional) compiler for python, which compiles the same way as traditional compilers. This would leave to the programmer to chose, which is more important to them; multiplatform executability or performance on native machine. In general; why are not there any languages which could be behave both as compiled and interpreted?

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  • Why is using C++ libraries is so complicated?

    - by Pius
    First of all, I want to note I love C++ and I'm one of those people who thinks it is easier to code in C++ than Java. Except for one tiny thing: libraries. In Java you can simply add some jar to the build path and you're done. In C++ you usually have to set multiple paths for the header files and the library itself. In some cases, you even have to use special build flags. I have mainly used Visual Studio, Code Blocks and no IDE at all. All 3 options do not differ much when talking about using external libraries. I wonder why was there made no simpler alternative for this? Like having a special .zip file that has everything you need in one place so the IDE can do all the work for you setting up the build flags. Is there any technical barrier for this?

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  • Google I/O 2010 - Fluid social experiences across sites

    Google I/O 2010 - Fluid social experiences across sites Google I/O 2010 - Bridging the islands: Building fluid social experiences across websites Social Web 201 John Panzer, Joseph Smarr As more sites add social functionality, profiles, friends, and conversations are becoming increasingly fragmented. But an emerging collection of open technologies aim to help bridge these social islands, allowing users to seamlessly move between sites and have unified conversations that span multiple web sites. Learn how OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, ActivityStrea.ms, and Salmon can help you connect to the rest of the Social Web. For all I/O 2010 sessions, please go to code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 2 0 ratings Time: 01:01:42 More in Science & Technology

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  • iOS: Versioned static frameworks vs Git Submodules and included code

    - by drekka
    For the last couple of years I've been building static frameworks of common APIs for my iOS projects. I can build a universal binary containing all the architectures (i386, armv6, armv7) and wrap it up in a .framework directory structure. I then stored this in a directory based on the version of the framework. For example ..../myAPI/v0.1.0/myAPI.framework Once I have this framework I can then easily add it to a project and if I want to advance the version, merely change the framework search paths to the later version. This works, but the approach is very similar to what I would use in the Java world. Recently I've been reading about using Git submodules and static framework sub projects in XCode 4. Im wondering if my currently approach is something that I should consider retiring and what the pros/cons are of the new approach. I'm weary of just including code because I've already had issues in a work project which had (effectively) multiple versions of a third party API. Any opinions?

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  • jqGrid - dynamically load different drop down values for different rows depending on another column value

    - by Renso
    Goal: As we all know the jqGrid examples in the demo and the Wiki always refer to static values for drop down boxes. This of course is a personal preference but in dynamic design these values should be populated from the database/xml file, etc, ideally JSON formatted. Can you do this in jqGrid, yes, but with some custom coding which we will briefly show below (refer to some of my other blog entries for a more detailed discussion on this topic). What you CANNOT do in jqGrid, referrign here up and to version 3.8.x, is to load different drop down values for different rows in the jqGrid. Well, not without some trickery, which is what this discussion is about. Issue: Of course the issue is that jqGrid has been designed for high performance and thus I have no issue with them loading a  reference to a single drop down values list for every column. This way if you have 500 rows or one, each row only refers to a single list for that particuolar column. Nice! SO how easy would it be to simply traverse the grid once loaded on gridComplete or loadComplete and simply load the select tag's options from scratch, via ajax, from memory variable, hard coded etc? Impossible! Since their is no embedded SELECT tag within each cell containing the drop down values (remeber it only has a reference to that list in memory), all you will see when you inspect the cell prior to clicking on it, or even before and on beforeEditCell, is an empty <TD></TD>. When trying to load that list via a click event on that cell will temporarily load the list but jqGrid's last internal callback event will remove it and replace it with the old one, and you are back to square one. Solution: Yes, after spending a few hours on this found a solution to the problem that does not require any updates to jqGrid source code, thank GOD! Before we get into the coding details, the solution here can of course be customized to suite your specific needs, this one loads the entire drop down list that would be needed across all rows once into global variable. I then parse this object that contains all the properties I need to filter the rows depending on which ones I want the user to see based off of another cell value in that row. This only happens when clicking the cell, so no performance penalty. You may of course to load it via ajax when the user clicks the cell, but I found it more effecient to load the entire list as part of jqGrid's normal editoptions: { multiple: false, value: listingStatus } colModel options which again keeps only a reference to the sinlge list, no duplciation. Lets get into the meat and potatoes of it.         var acctId = $('#Id').val();         var data = $.ajax({ url: $('#ajaxGetAllMaterialsTrackingLookupDataUrl').val(), data: { accountId: acctId }, dataType: 'json', async: false, success: function(data, result) { if (!result) alert('Failure to retrieve the Alert related lookup data.'); } }).responseText;         var lookupData = eval('(' + data + ')');         var listingCategory = lookupData.ListingCategory;         var listingStatus = lookupData.ListingStatus;         var catList = '{';         $(lookupData.ListingCategory).each(function() {             catList += this.Id + ':"' + this.Name + '",';         });         catList += '}';         var lastsel;         var ignoreAlert = true;         $(item)         .jqGrid({             url: listURL,             postData: '',             datatype: "local",             colNames: ['Id', 'Name', 'Commission<br />Rep', 'Business<br />Group', 'Order<br />Date', 'Edit', 'TBD', 'Month', 'Year', 'Week', 'Product', 'Product<br />Type', 'Online/<br />Magazine', 'Materials', 'Special<br />Placement', 'Logo', 'Image', 'Text', 'Contact<br />Info', 'Everthing<br />In', 'Category', 'Status'],             colModel: [                 { name: 'Id', index: 'Id', hidden: true, hidedlg: true },                 { name: 'AccountName', index: 'AccountName', align: "left", resizable: true, search: true, width: 100 },                 { name: 'OnlineName', index: 'OnlineName', align: 'left', sortable: false, width: 80 },                 { name: 'ListingCategoryName', index: 'ListingCategoryName', width: 85, editable: true, hidden: false, edittype: "select", editoptions: { multiple: false, value: eval('(' + catList + ')') }, editrules: { required: false }, formatoptions: { disabled: false} }             ],             jsonReader: {                 root: "List",                 page: "CurrentPage",                 total: "TotalPages",                 records: "TotalRecords",                 userdata: "Errors",                 repeatitems: false,                 id: "0"             },             rowNum: $rows,             rowList: [10, 20, 50, 200, 500, 1000, 2000],             imgpath: jQueryImageRoot,             pager: $(item + 'Pager'),             shrinkToFit: true,             width: 1455,             recordtext: 'Traffic lines',             sortname: 'OrderDate',             viewrecords: true,             sortorder: "asc",             altRows: true,             cellEdit: true,             cellsubmit: "remote",             cellurl: editURL + '?rows=' + $rows + '&page=1',             loadComplete: function() {               },             gridComplete: function() {             },             loadError: function(xhr, st, err) {             },             afterEditCell: function(rowid, cellname, value, iRow, iCol) {                 var select = $(item).find('td.edit-cell select');                 $(item).find('td.edit-cell select option').each(function() {                     var option = $(this);                     var optionId = $(this).val();                     $(lookupData.ListingCategory).each(function() {                         if (this.Id == optionId) {                                                       if (this.OnlineName != $(item).getCell(rowid, 'OnlineName')) {                                 option.remove();                                 return false;                             }                         }                     });                 });             },             search: true,             searchdata: {},             caption: "List of all Traffic lines",             editurl: editURL + '?rows=' + $rows + '&page=1',             hiddengrid: hideGrid   Here is the JSON data returned via the ajax call during the jqGrid function call above (NOTE it must be { async: false}: {"ListingCategory":[{"Id":29,"Name":"Document Imaging & Management","OnlineName":"RF Globalnet"} ,{"Id":1,"Name":"Ancillary Department Hardware","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":2,"Name":"Asset Tracking","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":3,"Name":"Asset Tracking","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":4,"Name":"Asset Tracking","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":5,"Name":"Document Imaging & Management","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":6,"Name":"Document Imaging & Management","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"} ,{"Id":7,"Name":"EMR/EHR Software","OnlineName":"Healthcare Technology Online"}]} I only need the Id and Name for the drop down list, but the third column in the JSON object is important, it is the only that I match up with the OnlineName in the jqGrid column, and then in the loop during afterEditCell simply remove the ones I don't want the user to see. That's it!

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  • How do you force Ubuntu to unmount a disk when you press the eject button on an optical drive?

    - by Michael Curran
    When upgrading my hardware, I also upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10. On my previous system (with 10.04 and earlier) when I ejected a disk from the optical drive, the subfolder in the /media directory was automatically removed. In my new 10.10 system, if I don't eject the disk using the "eject" command within the system, the disk remains mounted, even after a new disk is installed. The new drive is a Blu Ray drive, but I haven't noticed any other problems from it. Normally, this isn't a problem, but it makes installing applications that are spread over multiple CDs more difficult in many cases (i.e. Wine). Any advice?

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  • Is there a Design Pattern for preventing dangling references?

    - by iFreilicht
    I was thinking about a design for custom handles. The thought is to prevent clients from copying around large objects. Now a regular handle class would probably suffice for that, but it doesn't solve the "dangling reference problem"; If a client has multiple handles of the same object and deletes the object via one of them, all the others would be invalid, but not know it, so the client could write or read parts of the memory he shouldn't have access to. Is there a design pattern to prevent this from happening? Two ideas: An observer-like pattern where the destructor of an object would notify all handles. "Handle handles" (does such a thing even exist?). All the handles don't really point to the object, but to another handle. When the object gets destroyed, this "master-handle" invalidates itself and therefore all that point to it.

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  • Asynchronous update design/interaction patterns

    - by Andy Waite
    These days many apps support asynchronous updates. For example, if you're looking at a list of widgets and you delete one of them then rather than wait for the roundtrip to the server, the app can hide the one you deleted, giving immediate feedback. The actual deletion on the server will happen in the background. This can be seen in web apps, desktop apps, iOS apps, etc. But what about when the background operation fails. How should you feed back to the user? Should you restore the UI to the pre-deletion state? What about when multiple background operations fail together? Does this behaviour/pattern have a name? Perhaps something based on the Command pattern?

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  • Architecture for subscription based application

    - by John
    This is about the architecture of my application I think. I have a Rails application where companies can administrate all things related to clients. Companies can buy a subscription and their users can access the application online. Hopefully I will get multiple companies subscribing to my appplication/service. Thing is, what should I do with my code and database? Seperate app code base and database per company One app code base but seperate database per company One app code base and one database The decision I am to make involves security (e.g. user from company X should not see any data from company Y) performance (let's suppose it becomes successful, it should have a good performance) and scalability (again, if successful, it should have a good performance but also easy for me to handle all the companies, code changes, etc) For sake of maintainability, I tend to opt for the one code base. For the database I really don't know at this moment. So what do you think is the best option?

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  • Moving AI in a multiplayer game

    - by Smallbro
    I've been programming a multiplayer game and its coming together very nicely. It uses both TCP and UDP (UDP for movement and TCP for just about everything else). What I was wondering was how I would go about sending multiple moving AI without much lag. At first I used TCP for everything and it was very slow when people moved. I'm currently using a butchered version of this http://corvstudios.com/tutorials/udpMultiplayer.php for my movement system and I'm wondering what the best method of sending AI movements is. By movements I mean the AI chooses left/right/up/down and the player can see this happening. Thanks.

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  • EclipseLink 2.4 Released: RESTful Persistence, Tenant Isolation, NoSQL, and JSON

    - by arungupta
    EclipseLink 2.4 is released as part of Eclipse Juno release train. In addition to providing the Reference Implementation for JPA 2.0, the key features in the release are: RESTful Persistence - Expose Java Persistence units over REST using either JSON or XML Tenant Isolation - Manage entities for multiple tenants in the same application NoSQL - NoSQL support for MongoDB and Oracle NoSQL JSON - Marshaling and unmarshaling of JSON object Here is the complete list of bugs fixed in this release. The landing page provide the complete list of documentation and examples. Read Doug Clarke's blog for a color commentary as well. This release is already integrated in the latest GlassFish 4.0 promoted build. Try the functionality and give us feedback at GlassFish Forum or EclipseLink Forum.

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  • What are good JS libraries for game dev?

    - by acidzombie24
    If I decide to write a simple game both text and graphical (2d) what libraries would I use? (Assume we are using a HTML5 compatible browser) The main things I can think of Rendering text on screen Animating sprites (using images/css) Input (capturing the arrow keys and getting relative mouse positions) Perhaps some preloading resource or dynamically loading resources and choosing order Sound (but I am unsure how important this will be to me at first). Perhaps with mixing and chaining sounds or looping forever until stop. Networking (low priority) to connect a user to another or to continuously GET data without multiple request (I know this exist but I don't know how easy it is to setup or use. But this isn't important to me. Its for the question).

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  • C#4: Why does this static field always get initialized over-eagerly?

    - by TheSilverBullet
    I am looking at this excellent article from Jon Skeet at this location: http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/General/Beforefieldinit.aspx While executing the demo code, Jon Skeet says that we can expect three different kinds of behaviours. To quote that article: The runtime could decide to run the type initializer on loading the assembly to start with... Or perhaps it will run it when the static method is first run... Or even wait until the field is first accessed... When I try this out (on framework 4), I always get the first result. That is, the static method is initialized before the assembly is loaded. I have tried running this multiple times and get the same result. (I tried both the debug and release versions) Why is this so? Am I missing something?

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  • Existential CAML - does an item exist?

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved More CAML and existence. In “SharePoint List Issues” and “Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL we saw how to use CAML to return a subset of a list and also how to check the existence of lists, fields, defaults, and values.   Here is a general function that may be used to get a subset of a list by comparing a “text” type field to a given value.  The function is pretty smart. It can be used to check existence or to return a collection of items that may be further processed. It handles non existing fields and replaces them with the ubiquitous “Title”, but only once!  /// Build an SPQuery that returns a selected set of columns from a List /// titleField must be a "Text" type field /// When the titleField parameter is empty ("") "Title" is assumed /// When the title parameter is empty ("") All is assumed /// When the columnNames parameter is null, the query returns all the fields /// When the rowLimit parameter is 0, the query return all the items. /// with a non-zero, the query returns at most rowLimits /// /// usage: to check if an item titled "Blah" exists in your list, do: /// colNames = {"Title"} /// col = GetListItemColumnByTitle(myList, "", "Blah", colNames, 1) /// Check the col.Count. if > 0 the item exists and is in the collection private static SPListItemCollection GetListItemColumnByTitle(SPList list, string titleField, string title, string[] columnNames, uint rowLimit) {   try   {     char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34);     SPQuery query = new SPQuery();     if (title != "")     {       string tf = titleField;       if (titleField == "") tf = "Title";       tf = CAMLThisName(list, tf, "Title");        StringBuilder titleQuery = new StringBuilder  ("<Where><Eq><FieldRef Name=");       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append(tf);       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append("/><Value Type=");       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append("Text");       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append(">");       titleQuery.Append(title);       titleQuery.Append("</Value></Eq></Where>");       query.Query = titleQuery.ToString();     }     if (columnNames.Length != 0)     {       StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("");       bool TitleAlreadyIncluded = false;       foreach (string columnName in columnNames)       {         string tst = CAMLThisName(list, columnName, "Title");         //Allow Title only once         if (tst != "Title" || !TitleAlreadyIncluded)         {           sb.Append("<FieldRef Name=");           sb.Append(QT);           sb.Append(tst);           sb.Append(QT);           sb.Append("/>");           if (tst == "Title") TitleAlreadyIncluded = true;         }       }       query.ViewFields = sb.ToString();     }     if (rowLimit > 0)     {        query.RowLimit = rowLimit;     }     SPListItemCollection col = list.GetItems(query);     return col;   }   catch (Exception ex)   {     //Console.WriteLine("GetListItemColumnByTitle" + ex.ToString());     //sw.WriteLine("GetListItemColumnByTitle" + ex.ToString());     return null;   } } Here I called it for a list in which “Author” (it is the internal name for “Created”) and “Blah” do not exist. The list of column names is:  string[] columnNames = {"Test Column1", "Title", "Author", "Allow Multiple Ratings", "Blah"};  So if I use this call, I get all the items for which “01-STD MIL_some” has the value of 1. the fields returned are: “Test Column1”, “Title”, and “Allow Multiple Ratings”. Because “Title” was already included and the default for non exixsting is “Title”, it was not replicated for the 2 non-existing fields.  SPListItemCollection col = GetListItemColumnByTitle(masterList, "01-STD MIL_some", "1", columnNames, 0); The following call checks if there are any items where “01-STD MIL_some” has the value of “1”. Note that I limited the number of returned items to 1.  SPListItemCollection col = GetListItemColumnByTitle(masterList, "01-STD MIL_some", "1", columnNames, 1); The code also uses the CAMLThisName function that checks for an existence of a field and returns its InternalName. This is yet another useful function that I use again and again.  /// <summary> /// return a fields internal name (CAMLName)  /// or the "default" name that you passed. /// To check existence pass "" or some funny name like "mud in your eye" /// </summary> public static string CAMLThisName(SPList list, string name, string def) {   String CAMLName = def;   SPField fld = GetFieldByName(list, name);   if (fld != null)   {      CAMLName = fld.InternalName;   }   return CAMLName; } That’s all folks?!

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  • Switching between levels, re-initialize existing structure or create new one?

    - by Martino Wullems
    This is something I've been wondering for quite a while. When building games that exist out of multiple levels (platformers, shmups etc) what is the prefered method to switch between the levels? Let's say we have a level class that does the following: Load data for the level design (tiles), enemies, graphics etc. Setup all these elements in their appriopate locations and display them Start physics and game logic I'm stuck between the following 2 methods: 1: Throw away everything in the level class and make a new one, we have to load an entirely new level anyway! 2: pause the game logic and physics, unload all currents assets, then re-initialize those components with the level data for the new level. They both have their pros and cons. Method 1 is alot easier and seems to make sense since we have to redo everything anyway. But method 2 allows you to re-use exisiting elements which might save resources and allows for a smoother transfer to the new level.

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  • Cannot mount Android phone and sync with Banshee

    - by Brett Alton
    I can't get my LG Optimus One to sync with Banshee. I read somewhere that the root needs to have an empty file called '.is_audio_player'. I did that and it still doesn't mount. I ran dmesg however and it appears that the card is unmounting before I even have a change to run Banshee. [ 7250.321359] usb 1-1.4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10 [ 7250.444795] scsi12 : usb-storage 1-1.4:1.0 [ 7251.567946] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access Multiple Card Reader 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 [ 7251.568839] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 [ 7252.232433] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] 15564800 512-byte logical blocks: (7.96 GB/7.42 GiB) [ 7252.233299] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off [ 7252.233306] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00 [ 7252.233309] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 7252.235658] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 7252.235666] sdc: sdc1 [ 7252.239132] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 7252.239140] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk [ 7272.573437] usb 1-1.4: USB disconnect, address 10 Suggestions?

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  • Finding it Hard to Deliver Right Customer Experience: Think BPM!

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Our relationship with our customers is not a just a single interaction and we should not treat it like one. A customer’s relationship with a vendor is like a journey which starts way before customer makes a purchase and lasts long after that. The journey may start with customer researching a product that may lead to the eventual purchase and may continue with support or service needs for the product. A typical customer journey can be represented as shown below: As you may notice, customers tend to use multiple channels to interact with a company throughout their journey.  They also expect that they should get consistent experience, no matter what interaction channel they may choose. Customers do not like to repeat the information they have already provided and expect companies to remember their preferences, and offer them relevant products and services. If the company fails to meet this expectation, customers not only will abandon the purchase and go to the competitor but may also influence others’ purchase decision. Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only medium, and the customer could influence “Six” others. This is the age of social media and customer’s good or bad experience, especially bad get highly amplified and may influence hundreds of others. Challenges that face B2C companies today include: Delivering consistent experience: The reason that delivering consistent experience is challenging is due to fragmented data, disjointed systems and siloed multichannel interactions. Customers tend to get different service quality if they use web vs. phone vs. store. They get different responses from different service agents or get inconsistent answers if they call sales vs. service group in the company. Such inconsistent experiences result in lower customer satisfaction or NPS (net promoter score) numbers. Increasing Revenue: To stay competitive companies frequently introduce new products and services. Delay in launching such offerings has a significant impact on revenue realization. In addition to new product revenue, there are multiple opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell that impact bottom line. If companies are not able to identify such opportunities, bring a product to market quickly, or not offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, significant loss of revenue may occur. Ensuring Compliance: Companies must be compliant to ever changing regulations, these could be about Know Your Customer (KYC), Export/Import regulations, or taxation policies. In addition to government agencies, companies also need to comply with the SLA that they have committed to their customers. Lapse in meeting any of these requirements may lead to serious fines, penalties and loss in business. Companies have to make sure that they are in compliance will all such regulations and SLA commitments, at any given time. With the advent of social networks and mobile technology, companies not only need to focus on process efficiency but also on customer engagement. Improving engagement means delivering the customer experience as the customer is expecting and interacting with the customer at right time using right channel. Customers expect to be able to contact you via any channel of their choice (web, email, chat, mobile, social media), purchase via any viable channel (web, phone, store, mobile). Customers expect companies to understand their particular needs and remember their preferences on repeated visits. To deliver such an integrated, consistent, and contextual experience, power of BPM in must. Your company may be organized in departments like Marketing, Sales, Service. You may hold prospect data in SFA, order information in ERP, customer issues in CRM. However, the experience delivered to the customer must not be constrained by your system legacy. BPM helps in designing the right experience for the right customer and integrates all the underlining channels, systems, applications to make sure right information will be delivered to the right knowledge worker or to the customer every single time.     Orchestrating information across all systems (MDM, CRM, ERP), departments (commerce, merchandising, marketing service) and channels (Email, phone, web, social)  is the key, and that’s what BPM delivers. In addition to orchestrating systems and channels for consistency, BPM also provides an ability for analysis and decision management. By using data from historical transactions, social media and from other systems, users can determine the customer preferences, customer value, and churn propensity. This information, in the context, is then used while making a decision at a process step. Working with real-time decision management system can also suggest right up-sell or cross-sell offers, discounts or next-best-action steps for a particular customer. Timely action on customer issues or request is also a key tenet of a good customer experience. BPM’s complex event processing capabilities help companies to take proactive actions before issues get escalated. BPM system can be designed to listen to a certain event patters then deduce from those customer situations (credit card stolen, baggage lost, change of address) and do a triage before situation goes out of control. If such a situation arises you can send alerts to right people or immediately invoke corrective actions. Last but not least one of BPM’s key values is to drive continuous improvement. Learning about customers past experiences, interactions and social conversations, provide valuable insight. Such insight can be used to improve products, customer facing processes, and customer experience. You may take these insights as an input to design better more efficient and customer friendly sales, contact center or self-service processes. If customer experience is important for your business, make sure you have incorporated BPM as a part of your strategy to design, orchestrate and improve your customer facing processes.

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  • How customers view and interact with a company

    The Harvard Business Review article written by Rayport and Jaworski is aptly titled “Best Face Forward” because it sheds light on how customers view and interact with a company. In the past most business interaction between customers was performed in a face to face meeting where one party would present an item for sale and then the other would decide whether to purchase the item. In addition, if there was a problem with a purchased item then they would bring the item back to the person who sold the item for resolution. One of my earliest examples of witnessing this was when I was around 6 or 7 years old and I was allowed to spend the summer in Tennessee with my Grandparents. My Grandfather had just written a book about the local history of his town and was selling them to his friends and local bookstores. I still remember he offered to pay me a small commission for every book I helped him sell because I was carrying the books around for him. Every sale he made was face to face with his customers which allowed him to share his excitement for the book with everyone. In today’s modern world there is less and less human interaction as the use of computers and other technologies allow us to communicate within seconds even though both parties may be across the globe or just next door. That being said, customers view a company through multiple access points called faces that represent the ability to interact without actually seeing a human face. As a software engineer this is a good and a bad thing because direct human interaction and technology based interaction have both good and bad attributes based on the customer. How organizations coordinate business and IT functions, to provide quality service varies based on each individual business and the goals and directives put in place by its management. According to Rayport and Jaworski, the type of interaction used through a particular access point may lend itself to be people-dominate, machine-dominate, or a combination of both. The method by which a company communicates information through an access point is a strategic choice that relates costs and customer outcomes. To simplify this, the choice is based on what can give the customer the best experience interacting with the company when the cost of the interaction is also a factor. I personally see examples of this every day at work. The company website is machine-dominate with people updating and maintaining information, our groups department is people dominate because most of the customer interaction is done at the customers location and is backed up by machine based data sources, and our sales/member service department is a hybrid because employees work in tandem with machines in order for them to assist customers with signing up or any other issue they may have. The positive and negative aspects of human and machine interfaces are a key aspect in deciding which interface to use when allowing customers to access a company or a combination of the two. Rayport and Jaworski also used MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson preliminary catalog of human and machine strengths. He stated that humans outperform machines in judgment, pattern recognition, exception processing, insight, and creativity. I have found this to be true based on the example of how sales and member service reps at my company handle a multitude of questions and various situations with a lot of unknown variables. A machine interface could never effectively be able to handle these scenarios because there are too many variables to consider and would not have the built-in logic to process each customer’s claims and needs. In addition, he also stated that machines outperform humans in collecting, storing, transmitting and routine processing. An example of this would be my employer’s website. Customers can simply go online and purchase a product without even talking to a sales or member services representative. The information is then stored in a database so that the customer can always go back and review there order, and access their selected services. A human, no matter how smart they are would never be able to keep track of hundreds of thousands of customers let alone know what they purchased or how much they paid. In today’s technology driven economy every company must offer their customers multiple methods of accessibly in order to survive. The more of an opportunity a company has to create a positive experience for their customers, in my opinion, they more likely the customer will return to that company again. I have noticed this with my personal shopping habits and experiences. References Rayport, J., & Jaworski, B. (2004). Best Face Forward. Harvard Business Review, 82(12), 47-58. Retrieved from Business Source Complete database.

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  • Is there a command-line utility app which can locate a specific block of lines in a text file?

    - by fred.bear
    The text "search and replace" utility programs I've seen, seem to only search on a line-by-line basis... Is there a command-line tool which can locate one block of lines (in a text file), and replace it with another block of lines.? For example: Does the test file file contain this exact group of lines: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!' I want this, so that I can replace multiple lines of text in a file and know I'm not overwriting the wrong lines. I would never replace "The Jabberwocky" (Lewis Carroll), but it makes a novel example :)

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  • Compilable modern alternatives to C/C++

    - by Jeremy French
    I am considering writing a new software product. Performance will be critical, so I am wary of using an interpreted or language or one that uses a emulation layer (read java). Which leads me to thinking of using C (or C++) however these are both rather long in the tooth. I haven't used either for a long time. I figure in the last 20 years someone should have created something which is reasonably popular and is nice to code in and is complied. What more modern alternatives are there to C for writing high performance code compiled code? edit in response to comments If C++ is a different beast than it was 15 years ago, I would consider it, I guess I had an assumption that it had some inherent problems. Parallelisation would be important, but probably not across multiple machines.

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