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  • Supporting users if they're not on your site

    - by Roger Hart
    Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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  • SQL group and order

    - by John Lambert
    I have multiple users with multiple entries recording times they arrive at destinations Somehow, with my select query I would like to only show the most recent entries for each unique user name. Here is the code that doesn't work: SELECT * FROM $dbTable GROUP BY xNAME ORDER BY xDATETIME DESC This does the name grouping fine, but as far as showing ONLY their most recent entry, is just shows the first entry it sees in the SQL table. I guess my question is, is this possible? Here is my data sample: john 7:00 chris 7:30 greg 8:00 john 8:15 greg 8:30 chris 9:00 and my desired result should only be john 8:15 chris 9:00 greg 8:30

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  • Kill a tree, save your website? Content strategy in action, part III

    - by Roger Hart
    A lot has been written about how driving content strategy from within an organisation is hard. And that's true. Red Gate is pretty receptive to new ideas, so although I've not had a total walk in the park, it's been a hike with charming scenery. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Lots of people are involved in content, and depending on your organisation some of those people might be the kind who'll gleefully call themselves "stakeholders". People holding a stake generally want to stick it through something's heart and bury it at a crossroads. Winning them over is not always easy. (Richard Ingram has made a nice visual summary of how this can feel - Content strategy Snakes & ladders - pdf ) So yes, a lot of content strategy advocates are having a hard time. And sure, we've got a nice opportunity to get together and have a hug and a cry, but in the interim we could use a hand. What to do? My preferred approach is, I'll confess, brutal. I'd like nothing so much as to take a scorched earth approach to our website. Burn it, salt the ground, and build the new one right: focusing on clearly delineated business and user content goals, and instrumented so we can tell if we're doing it right. I'm never getting buy-in for that, but a boy can dream. So how about just getting buy-in for some small, tenable improvements? Easier, but still non-trivial. I sat down for a chat with our marketing and design guys. It seemed like a good place to start, even if they weren't up for my "Ctrl-A + Delete"  solution. We talked through some of this stuff, and we pretty much agreed that our content is a bit more broken than we'd ideally like. But to get everybody on board, the problems needed visibility. Doing a visual content inventory Print out the internet. Make a Wall Of Content. Seriously. If you've already done a content inventory, you know your architecture, and you know the scale of the problem. But it's quite likely that very few other people do. So make it big and visual. I'm going to carbon hell, but it seems to be working. This morning, I printed out a tiny, tiny part of our website: the non-support content pertaining to SQL Compare I made big, visual, A3 blowups of each page, and covered a wall with them. A page per web page, spread over something like 6M x 2M, with metrics, right in front of people. Even if nobody reads it (and they are doing) the sheer scale is shocking. 53 pages, all told. Some are redundant, some outdated, some trivial, a few fantastic, and frighteningly many that are great ideas delivered not-quite-right. You have to stand quite far away to get it all in your field of vision. For a lot of today, a whole bunch of folks have been gawping in amazement, talking each other through it, peering at the details, and generally getting excited about content. Developers, sales guys, our CEO, the marketing folks - they're engaged. Will it last? I make no promises. But this sort of wave of interest is vital to getting a content strategy project kicked off. While the content strategist is a saucer-eyed orphan in the cupboard under the stairs, they're not getting a whole lot done. Of course, just printing the site won't necessarily cut it. You have to know your content, and be able to talk about it. Ideally, you'll also have page view and time-on-page metrics. One of the most powerful things you can do is, when people are staring at your wall of content, ask them what they think half of it is for. Pretty soon, you've made a case for content strategy. We're also going to get folks to mark it up - cover it with notes and post-its, let us know how they feel about our content. I'll be blogging about how that goes, but it's exciting. Different business functions have different needs from content, so the more exposure the content gets, and the more feedback, the more you know about those needs. Fingers crossed for awesome.

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  • C# - Determine if class initializaion causes infinite recursion?

    - by John M
    I am working on porting a VB6 application to C# (Winforms 3.5) and while doing so I'm trying to break up the functionality into various classes (ie database class, data validation class, string manipulation class). Right now when I attempt to run the program in Debug mode the program pauses and then crashes with a StackOverFlowException. VS 2008 suggests a infinite recursion cause. I have been trying to trace what might be causing this recursion and right now my only hypothesis is that class initializations (which I do in the header(?) of each class). My thought is this: mainForm initializes classA classA initializes classB classB initializes classA .... Does this make sense or should I be looking elsewhere? UPDATE1 (a code sample): mainForm namespace john { public partial class frmLogin : Form { stringCustom sc = new sc(); stringCustom namespace john { class stringCustom { retrieveValues rv = new retrieveValues(); retrieveValues namespace john { class retrieveValues { stringCustom sc = new stringCustom();

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  • Windows Phone 8, possible tablets and what the latest update might mean

    - by Roger Hart
    Microsoft have just announced an update to Windows Phone 8. As one of the five, maybe six people who actually bought a WP8 handset I found this interesting. Then I read the blog post about it, and rushed off to write somewhat less than a thousand words about a single picture. The blog post announces an extra column of tiles on the start screen, and support for higher resolutions. If we ignore all the usual flummery about how this will make your life better, that (and the rotation lock) sounds a little like stage setting for tablets. Looking at the preview screenshot, I started to wonder. What it’s called Phablet_5F00_StartScreenProductivity_5F00_01_5F00_072A1240.jpg Pretty conclusive. If you can brand something a “phablet” and sleep at night you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, but that’s beside the point. It’s explicit in the post that Microsoft are expecting a broader range of form factors for WP8, but they stop short of quite calling out tablet size. The extra columns and resolution definitely back that up, so why stop at a 6 inch “phablet”? Sadly, the string of numbers there don’t really look like a Lumia model number – that would be a bit tendentious even for a speculative blog post about a single screenshot. “Productivity” is interesting too. I get into this a bit more below, but this is a pretty clear pitch for a business device. What it looks like Something that would look quite decent on a 7 inch screen, but something a bit too vertical to go toe-to-toe with the Surface. Certainly, it would look a lot better on a large-factor phone than any of the current models. Those tiles are going to get cramped and a bit ugly if the handsets aren’t getting bigger. What’s on it You have a bunch of missed calls, you rarely text, use a stocks app, and your budget spreadsheet and meeting notes are a thumb-reach away. Outlook is your main form of email. You care enough about LinkedIn to not only install its app but give it a huge live tile. There’s no beating about the bush here, the implicit persona is a corporate exec. With Nokia in the bag and Blackberry pushing daisies, that may not be a stupid play. There’s almost certainly a niche there if they can parlay their corporate credentials into filling it before BYOD (which functionally means an iPhone) reaches the late adopters. The really quite slick WP8 Office implementation ought to help here. This is the face they’ve chosen to present, the cultural milieu they’re normalizing for Windows Phone. It’s an iPhone for Serious Business Grown-ups. Could work, I guess. Does it mean anything? Is the latest WP8 update a sign that we can expect to see tablets running Windows Phone rather than WinRT? Well, WinRT tablets haven’t exactly taken off but I’m not quite going to make a leap like that just from a file name and a column of icons. I feel pretty safe, however, conjecturing that Microsoft would like to squeeze a WP8 “phablet” into the palm of every exec who’s ever grumbled about their Blackberry, and this release might get them a bit closer. If it works well incrementing up to larger devices, then that could be a fair hedge against WinRt crashing and burning any harder in the marketplace.

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  • Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

    - by Roger Hart
    Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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  • Must-see sessions at TCUK11

    - by Roger Hart
    Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

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  • Pub banter - content strategy at the ballot box?

    - by Roger Hart
    Last night, I was challenged to explain (and defend) content strategy. Three sheets to the wind after a pub quiz, this is no simple task, but I hope I acquitted myself passably. I say "hope" because there was a really interesting question I couldn't answer to my own satisfaction. I wonder if any of you folks out there in the ethereal internet hive-mind can help me out? A friend - a rather concrete thinker who mathematically models complex biological systems for a living - pointed out that my examples were largely routed in business-to-business web sales and support. He challenged me with: Say you've got a political website, so your goal is to have somebody read it and vote for you - how do you measure the effectiveness of that content? Well, you would. umm. Oh dear. I guess what we're talking about here, to yank it back to my present comfort zone, is a sales process where your point of conversion is off the site. The political example is perhaps a little below the belt, since what you can and can't do, and what data you can and can't collect is so restricted. You can't throw up a "How did you hear about this election?" questionnaire in the polling booth. Exit polls don't pull in your browsing history and site session information. Not everyone fatuously tweets and geo-tags each moment of their lives. Oh, and folks lie. The business example might be easier to attack. You could have, say, a site for a farm shop that only did over the counter sales. Either way, it's tricky. I fell back on some of the work I've done usability testing and benchmarking documentation, and suggested similar, quick and dirty, small sample qualitative UX trials. I'm not wholly sure that was right. Any thoughts? How might we measure and curate for this kind of discontinuous conversion?

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  • Who writes the words? A rant with graphs.

    - by Roger Hart
    If you read my rant, you'll know that I'm getting a bit of a bee in my bonnet about user interface text. But rather than just yelling about the way the world should be (short version: no UI text would suck), it seemed prudent to actually gather some data. Rachel Potts has made an excellent first foray, by conducting a series of interviews across organizations about how they write user interface text. You can read Rachel's write up here. She presents the facts as she found them, and doesn't editorialise. The result is insightful, but impartial isn't really my style. So here's a rant with graphs. My method, and how it sucked I sent out a short survey. Survey design is one of my hobby-horses, and since some smartarse in the comments will mention it if I don't, I'll step up and confess: I did not design this one well. It was potentially ambiguous, implicitly excluded people, and since I only really advertised it on Twitter and a couple of mailing lists the sample will be chock full of biases. Regardless, these were the questions: What do you do? Select the option that best describes your role What kind of software does your organization make? (optional) In your organization, who writes the text on your software user interfaces? (for example: button names, static text, tooltips, and so on) Tick all that apply. In your organization who is responsible for user interface text? Who "owns" it? The most glaring issue (apart from question 3 being a bit broken) was that I didn't make it clear that I was asking about applications. Desktop, mobile, or web, I wouldn't have minded. In fact, it might have been interesting to categorize and compare. But a few respondents commented on the seeming lack of relevance, since they didn't really make software. There were some other issues too. It wasn't the best survey. So, you know, pinch of salt time with what follows. Despite this, there were 100 or so respondents. This post covers the overview, and you can look at the raw data in this spreadsheet What did people do? Boring graph number one: I wasn't expecting that. Given I pimped the survey on twitter and a couple of Tech Comms discussion lists, I was more banking on and even Content Strategy/Tech Comms split. What the "Others" specified: Three people chipped in with Technical Writer. Author, apparently, doesn't cut it. There's a "nobody reads the instructions" joke in there somewhere, I'm sure. There were a couple of hybrid roles, including Tech Comms and Testing, which sounds gruelling and thankless. There was also, an Intranet Manager, a Creative Director, a Consultant, a CTO, an Information Architect, and a Translator. That's a pretty healthy slice through the industry. Who wrote UI text? Boring graph number two: Annoyingly, I made this a "tick all that apply" question, so I can't make crude and inflammatory generalizations about percentages. This is more about who gets involved in user interface wording. So don't panic about the number of developers writing UI text. First off, it just means they're involved. Second, they might be good at it. What? It could happen. Ours are involved - they write a placeholder and flag it to me for changes. Sometimes I don't make any. It's also not surprising that there's so much UX in the mix. Some of that will be people taking care, and crafting an understandable interface. Some of it will be whatever text goes on the wireframe making it into production. I'm going to assume that's what happened at eBay, when their iPhone app purportedly shipped with the placeholder text "Some crappy content goes here". Ahem. Listing all 17 "other" responses would make this post lengthy indeed, but you can read them in the raw data spreadsheet. The award for the approach that sounds the most like a good idea yet carries the highest risk of ending badly goes to whoever offered up "External agencies using focus groups". If you're reading this, and that actually works, leave a comment. I'm fascinated. Who owned UI text Stop. Bar chart time: Wow. Let's cut to the chase, and by "chase", I mean those inflammatory generalizations I was talking about: In around 60% of cases the person responsible for user interface text probably lacks the relevant expertise. Even in the categories I count as being likely to have relevant skills (Marketing Copywriters, Content Strategists, Technical Authors, and User Experience Designers) there's a case for each role being unsuited, as you'll see in Rachel's blog post So it's not as simple as my headline. Does that mean that you personally, Mr Developer reading this, write bad button names? Of course not. I know nothing about you. It rather implies that as a category, the majority of people looking after UI text have neither communication nor user experience as their primary skill set, and as such will probably only be good at this by happy accident. I don't have a way of measuring those frequency of those accidents. What the Others specified: I don't know who owns it. I assume the project manager is responsible. "copywriters" when they wish to annoy me. the client's web maintenance person, often PR or MarComm That last one chills me to the bone. Still, at least nobody said "the work experience kid". You can see the rest in the spreadsheet. My overwhelming impression here is of user interface text as an unloved afterthought. There were fewer "nobody" responses than I expected, and a much broader split. But the relative predominance of developers owning and writing UI text suggests to me that organizations don't see it as something worth dedicating attention to. If true, that's bothersome. Because the words on the screen, particularly the names of things, are fundamental to the ability to understand an use software. It's also fascinating that Technical Authors and Content Strategists are neck and neck. For such a nascent discipline, Content Strategy appears to have made a mark on software development. Or my sample is skewed. But it feels like a bit of validation for my rant: Content Strategy is eating Tech Comms' lunch. That's not a bad thing. Well, not if the UI text is getting done well. And that's the caveat to this whole post. I couldn't care less who writes UI text, provided they consider the user and don't suck at it. I care that it may be falling by default to people poorly disposed to doing it right. And I care about that because so much user interface text sucks. The most interesting question Was one I forgot to ask. It's this: Does your organization have technical authors/writers? Like a lot of survey data, that doesn't tell you much on its own. But once we get a bit dimensional, it become more interesting. So taken with the other questions, this would have let me find out what I really want to know: What proportion of organizations have Tech Comms professionals but don't use them for UI text? Who writes UI text in their place? Why this happens? It's possible (feasible is another matter) that hundreds of companies have tech authors who don't work on user interfaces because they've empirically discovered that someone else, say the Marketing Copywriter, is better at it. And once we've all finished laughing, I'll point out that I've met plenty of tech authors who just aren't used to thinking about users at the point of need in the way UI text and embedded user assistance require. If you've got what I regard, perhaps unfairly, as the bad kind of tech author - the old-school kind with the thousand-page pdf and the grammar obsession - if you've got one of those then you probably are better off getting the UX folk or the copywriters to do your UI text. At the very least, they'll derive terminology from user research.

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  • Keep taking the tablets

    - by Roger Hart
    A guest editorial for the SimpleTalk newsletter. So why would Red Gate build an Ipad Game? Is it just because tablet devices are exciting and cool? Ok, maybe a little. Mostly, it was seeing that the best existing tablet and smartphone apps do simple, intuitive things, using simple intuitive interfaces to solve single problems. That's pretty close to what we call our own "intuitively simple" approach to software. Tablets and mobile could be fantastic for us, if we can identify those problems that a tablet device can solve. How do you create THE next tool for a completely new technology? We're glad we don't face that problem every day, but it's pretty exciting when we do. We figure we should learn by doing. We created "MobileFoo" (a Red Gate Company) , we picked up some shiny Apple tech, and got to grips with Objective C, and life in the App Store ecosystem. The result so far is an iPad game: Stacks and Heaps It's Rob and Marine's spin on Snakes and Ladders. Instead of snakes we have unhandled exceptions, a blue screen of death, and other hazards. We wanted something compellingly geeky on mobile, and we're pretty sure we've got it. It's trudging through App Store approval as we speak. but if you want to get an idea of what it is like to switch from .net to Objective C, take a look at Rob's post Android and iOS is quite a culture-change for Windows developers. So to give them a feel for the problems real users might have, we needed some real users - we offered our colleagues subsidised tablets. The only conditions were that they get used at work, and we get the feedback. Seeing tablets around the office is starting to give us some data points: Is typing the bottleneck? Will tablets ever cut it as text-entry devices, and could we fix it? Is mobile working held up by the pain of connecting to work LANs? How about security? Multi-tasking will let tablets do more. They're small, easy to use, almost instant to switch on, and connect by Wi Fi. There's plenty on that list to make a sysadmin twitchy. We'll find out as people spend more time working with these devices, and we'd love to hear what you think about tablet devices too. (comments are filtered, what with the spam)

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  • struct assignment operator on arrays

    - by Django fan
    Suppose I defined a structure like this: struct person { char name [10]; int age; }; and declared two person variables: person Bob; person John; where Bob.name = "Bob", Bob.age = 30 and John.name = "John",John.age = 25. and I called Bob = John; struct person would do a Memberwise assignment and assign Johns's member values to Bob's. But arrays can't assign to arrays, so how does the assignment of the "name" array work?

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  • How do I average the difference between specific values in TSQL?

    - by jvenema
    Hey folks, sorry this is a bit of a longer question... I have a table with the following columns: [ChatID] [User] [LogID] [CreatedOn] [Text] What I need to find is the average response time for a given user id, to another specific user id. So, if my data looks like: [1] [john] [20] [1/1/11 3:00:00] [Hello] [1] [john] [21] [1/1/11 3:00:23] [Anyone there?] [1] [susan] [22] [1/1/11 3:00:43] [Hello!] [1] [susan] [23] [1/1/11 3:00:53] [What's up?] [1] [john] [24] [1/1/11 3:01:02] [Not much] [1] [susan] [25] [1/1/11 3:01:08] [Cool] ...then I need to see that Susan has an average response time of (20 + 6) / 2 = 13 seconds to John, and John has an average of (9 / 1) = 9 seconds to Susan. I'm not even sure this can be done in set-based logic, but if anyone has any ideas, they'd be much appreciated!

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  • The spork/platypus average: shameless self promotion

    - by Roger Hart
    This is the video of presentation I gave at UA Europe and TCUK this year. The actual sub-title was "Content strategy at Red Gate Software", but this heading feels more honest. For anybody who missed it, or is just vaguely interested, here's a link to me talking about de-suckifying the web. You can find the slideshare deck here, too* Watching it back is more than a little embarrassing, and makes me really, really want to do a follow up, so I can do three things: explain the rest of the big web project, now we've done it give some data on the outcome of the content review make a grovelling apology to our marketing guys, who I've been unfairly mean to in a childish effort to look cool There are a whole bunch of other TCUK presentations online, too. You can find them all here: http://tiny.cc/tcuk10_videos I'd particularly recommend Chris Atherton's: "Everything you always wanted to know about psychology and technical communication" - it's full of cool stuff. You should probably also watch David Black's opening keynote, which managed to make my hour of precocious grandstanding look measured, meek, and helpful. He actually makes some interesting points, but you'd basically have to ship Richard Dawkins off to Utah, if you wanted to go further out of your way to aggravate your audience. It does give an engaging account of running a large tech comms project, and raise some questions about how we propose to understand a world where increasing amounts of our stuff gets done by increasingly many increasingly complicated tissues of APIs. Well, sort of. That's what all the notes I made were about, anyway.   *Slideshare ate my fonts. Just so we're clear on this: I'd never use badly-kerned Arial in a presentation. Don't worry.

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  • Should I ditch a creative pet project in lieu of one that would demonstrate skills more applicable to an employer?

    - by Hart Simha
    I am currently working on a project on github that I think would be a good demonstration of my initiative, creativity and enthusiasm. It is an educational game I am developing in pygame that enables the user to learn to improve their development productivity by using vim, specifically with python, though learning to code faster with vim should be transferable to any language. I think this is something that might have a mass appeal and benefit to a lot of people in a measurable way. -However- I am graduating from college in a month (my degree is computer science with a minor in english), with no experience that is relevant to helping me get any kind of job in the field, and a gpa that doesn't tout my merits. I could pursue a career in game development, but it's not necessarily what I'm most interested in, and see myself applying to startups around the country. To the places I am looking at applying, showing that I have experience with pygame is going to be largely irrelevant, except in demonstration of my ability to code, period. A lot of skills that ARE more marketable, such a data modeling, GIS, mobile development, javascript, .net framework, and various web development technologies, are not going to be showcased by this project (on the upside, employers do like to see familiarity with git and python). I'm wondering if I should sink all my free time in the next couple of months into this project, since I'm motivated and interested in it, and if the value of being able to demonstrate ambition and 'good ideas' (for lack of a better term, and in my own opinion) will compensate for the absence of demonstrating more sought-after skills. I am probably at a point where I should either commit fully to this project now, or put it on the backburner in favor of something else, and I am leaning towards continuing with what I am already working on, because I think it's a great idea, and something achievable to me with enough dedication over the next couple months. But the most important thing to me is being able to get a job out of college, which I am exceedingly concerned about as the professional landscape which I am navigating for the first time is a lot more intimidating than I could have anticipated, with almost every job (even short-term contract positions) requiring years of experience which I lack. Oh, and in case anyone is interested, my repository is here: www.github.com/hmsimha/vimagine

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  • Must I loop to search results for a specific value?

    - by tag
    I have a table in the database: name Opinion Tim Tim has an opinion John other random text Dan Dan's random text Al Al says something else I call this data and get it back in getRecords.lastResult To access John's opinion, I could use: getRecords.lastResult[1].opinion But that's only because I know that John is the second record (record 1), but this may change. So the right way is to search through the results to first find the record index for John, then access his opinion. My guess is I need some sort of a loop? Is there an easier way to search for John directly without a loop?

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  • New grad; To overcome complete lack of experience, should I ditch a creative pet project in lieu of one that would demonstrate more applicable skills?

    - by Hart Simha
    I am currently working on a project on github that I think would be a good demonstration of my initiative, creativity and enthusiasm. It is an educational game I am developing in pygame that enables the user to learn to improve their development productivity by using vim, specifically with python, though learning to code faster with vim should be transferable to any language. I think this is something that might have a mass appeal and benefit to a lot of people in a measurable way. -However- I am graduating from college in a month (my degree is computer science with a minor in English), with no experience that is relevant to helping me get any kind of job in the field, and a gpa that doesn't tout my merits. I could pursue a career in game development, but it's not necessarily what I'm most interested in, and see myself applying to startups around the country. To the places I am looking at applying, showing that I have experience with pygame is going to be largely irrelevant, except in demonstration of my ability to code, period. A lot of skills that ARE more marketable, such a data modeling, GIS, mobile application, development, javascript, .net framework, and various web development technologies, are not going to be showcased by this project (on the upside, employers do like to see familiarity with git and python). I'm wondering if I should sink all my free time in the next couple of months into this project, since I'm motivated and interested in it, and if the value of being able to demonstrate ambition and 'good ideas' (for lack of a better term, and in my own opinion) will compensate for the absence of demonstrating more sought-after skills. I am probably at a point where I should either commit fully to this project now, or put it on the backburner in favor of something else, and I am leaning towards continuing with what I am already working on, because I think it's a great idea, and something achievable to me with enough dedication over the next couple months. But the most important thing to me is being able to get a job out of college, which I am exceedingly concerned about as the professional landscape which I am navigating for the first time is a lot more intimidating than I could have anticipated, with almost every job (even short-term contract positions) requiring years of experience which I lack. So in brief, the common denominator to answering the question "How can I overcome experience requirements for a job" seems to be "Show off your own project." I want to know WHICH project I should work on to best increase my chances of getting a job out of college, keeping in mind that I have no experience. I believe this question is applicable to any new grad that lacks demonstrable experience.

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  • Installing CUDA on Ubuntu 12.04 with nvidia driver 295.59

    - by johnmcd
    I have been trying to get cuda to run on a nvidia gt 650m based laptop. I am running Ubuntu 12.04 with the nvidia 295.59 driver. Also, my laptop uses Optimus so I have install the driver via bumblebee. Bumblebee is not working correctly yet -- however I believe it is possible to install CUDA independently. To install CUDA I have followed the instructions detailed here: How can I get nVidia CUDA or OpenCL working on a laptop with nVidia discrete card/Intel Integrated Graphics? However I am still running into problem building the sdk. I made the changes specified at the above link in common.mk, but I got the following (snippet) from the build process: make[2]: Entering directory `/home/john/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C/src/fluidsGL' /usr/bin/ld: warning: libnvidia-tls.so.302.17, needed by /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so, not found (try using -rpath or -rpath-link) /usr/bin/ld: warning: libnvidia-glcore.so.302.17, needed by /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so, not found (try using -rpath or -rpath-link) /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv018tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv012glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv017glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv012tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv015tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv019tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv000glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv017tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv013tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv013glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv018glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv022tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv007tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv009tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv020tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv014glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv015glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv016tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv001glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv006tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv021tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv011tls' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv020glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv019glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv002glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv021glcore' /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so: undefined reference to `_nv014tls' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [../../bin/linux/release/fluidsGL] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/john/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C/src/fluidsGL' make[1]: *** [src/fluidsGL/Makefile.ph_build] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/john/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C' make: *** [all] Error 2 The libraries that ld warns about are on my system and are installed on the system: $ locate libnvidia-tls.so.302.17 libnvidia-glcore.so.302.17 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libnvidia-glcore.so.302.17 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libnvidia-tls.so.302.17 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.302.17 /usr/lib32/nvidia-current/libnvidia-glcore.so.302.17 /usr/lib32/nvidia-current/libnvidia-tls.so.302.17 /usr/lib32/nvidia-current/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.302.17 however /usr/lib/nvidia-current and /usr/lib32/nvidia-current are not being picked up by ldconfig. I have tried adding them by adding a file to /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ which gets past this error, however now I am getting the following error: make[2]: Entering directory `/home/john/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C/src/deviceQueryDrv' cc1plus: warning: command line option ‘-Wimplicit’ is valid for C/ObjC but not for C++ [enabled by default] obj/x86_64/release/deviceQueryDrv.cpp.o: In function `main': deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x5f): undefined reference to `cuInit' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x99): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetCount' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x10b): undefined reference to `cuDeviceComputeCapability' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x127): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetName' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x16a): undefined reference to `cuDriverGetVersion' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x1f0): undefined reference to `cuDeviceTotalMem_v2' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x262): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetAttribute' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x457): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetAttribute' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x4bc): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetAttribute' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x502): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetAttribute' deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x533): undefined reference to `cuDeviceGetAttribute' obj/x86_64/release/deviceQueryDrv.cpp.o:deviceQueryDrv.cpp:(.text.startup+0x55e): more undefined references to `cuDeviceGetAttribute' follow collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [../../bin/linux/release/deviceQueryDrv] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/john/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C/src/deviceQueryDrv' make[1]: *** [src/deviceQueryDrv/Makefile.ph_build] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/john/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C' make: *** [all] Error 2 I would appreciate any help that anyone can provide me with. If I can provide any further information please let me know. Thanks.

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  • Checking data of all same class elements

    - by Tiffani
    I need the code to check the data-name value of all instances of .account-select. Right now it just checks the first .account-select element and not any subsequent ones. The function right now is on click of an element such as John Smith, it checks the data-name of the .account-select lis. If the data-names are the same, it does not create a new li with the John Smith data. If no data-names are equal to John Smith, then it adds an li with John Smith. This is the JS-Fiddle I made for it so you can see what I am referring to: http://jsfiddle.net/rsxavior/vDCNy/22/ Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is the Jquery Code I am using right now. $('.account').click(function () { var acc = $(this).data("name"); var sel = $('.account-select').data("name"); if (acc === sel) { } else { $('.account-hidden-li').append('<li class="account-select" data-name="'+ $(this).data("name") +'">' + $(this).data("name") + '<a class="close bcn-close" data-dismiss="alert" href="#">&times;</a></li>'); } }); And the HTML: <ul> <li><a class="account" data-name="All" href="#">All</a></li> <li><a class="account" data-name="John Smith" href="#">John Smith</a></li> </ul> <ul class="account-hidden-li"> <ul>

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  • Pattern/Matcher in Java?

    - by user1007059
    I have a certain text in Java, and I want to use pattern and matcher to extract something from it. This is my program: public String getItemsByType(String text, String start, String end) { String patternHolder; StringBuffer itemLines = new StringBuffer(); patternHolder = start + ".*" + end; Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(patternHolder); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(text); while (matcher.find()) { itemLines.append(text.substring(matcher.start(), matcher.end()) + "\n"); } return itemLines.toString(); } This code works fully WHEN the searched text is on the same line, for instance: String text = "My name is John and I am 18 years Old"; getItemsByType(text, "My", "John"); immediately grabs the text "My name is John" out of the text. However, when my text looks like this: String text = "My name\nis John\nand I'm\n18 years\nold"; getItemsByType(text, "My", "John"); It doesn't grab anything, since "My" and "John" are on different lines. How do I solve this?

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  • Parsing back to 'messy' API strcuture

    - by Eric Fail
    I'm fetching data from an online database (REDcap) via API and the data gets delivered in as comma separated string like this, RAW.API <- structure("id,event_arm,name,dob,pushed_text,pushed_calc,complete\n\"01\",\"event_1_arm_1\",\"John\",\"1979-05-01\",\"\",\"\",2\n\"01\",\"event_2_arm_1\",\"John\",\"2012-09-02\",\"abc\",\"123\",1\n\"01\",\"event_3_arm_1\",\"John\",\"2012-09-10\",\"\",\"\",2\n\"02\",\"event_1_arm_1\",\"Mary\",\"1951-09-10\",\"def\",\"456\",2\n\"02\",\"event_2_arm_1\",\"Mary\",\"1978-09-12\",\"\",\"\",2\n", "`Content-Type`" = structure(c("text/html", "utf-8"), .Names = c("", "charset"))) I have this script that nicely parses it into a data frame, (df <- read.table(file = textConnection(RAW.API), header = TRUE, sep = ",", na.strings = "", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)) id event_arm name dob pushed_text pushed_calc complete 1 1 event_1_arm_1 John 1979-05-01 <NA> NA 2 2 1 event_2_arm_1 John 2012-09-02 abc 123 1 3 1 event_3_arm_1 John 2012-09-10 <NA> NA 2 4 2 event_1_arm_1 Mary 1951-09-10 def 456 2 5 2 event_2_arm_1 Mary 1978-09-12 <NA> NA 2 I then do some calculations and write them to pushed_text and pushed_calc whereafter I need to format the data back to the messy comma separated structure it came in. I imagine something like this, API.back <- `some magic command`(df, ...) identical(RAW.API, API.back) [1] TRUE Some command that can format my data from the data frame I made, df, back to the structure that the raw API-object came in, RAW.API. Any help would be very appreciated.

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  • Rewriting from headers in Postfix

    - by inxilpro
    I want to configure Postfix to replace the 'From' header in all forwarded/aliased messages with a custom email address, and the 'Reply-To' header with the original sender's address. Is that something that can be done with a simple configuration change, or am I looking at a more complex problem? For example: Original Message: From: "John Smith" <[email protected]> To: "Jane Rice" <[email protected]> Would get translated to: From: "My Email Forwarding Service" <[email protected]> Reply-To: "John Smith" <[email protected]> To: "Jane Rice" <[email protected]> Ideally, I would also have it rewrite the message body (adding something about how the message was forwarded for them), but I know that's much more difficult. We have a number of email aliases, and everytime someone reports spam they received through their alias, our server gets flagged. I'm trying to minimize that damage as much as possible. Any help is greatly appreciated!

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  • ubuntu apache subdomains pointing to main domain

    - by Suhail Thakur
    i have a ubuntu server with apache setup, the main domain on the server is a subdomain app.example.com, which is working fine, now if i setup john.app.example.com, then that also is displaying the web page of app.example.com, the DocumentRoot for john.app.example.com is different, still it shows the web page of app.example.com. how can i resolve this, so john.app.example.com displays the pages that are there in its DocumentRoot.

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  • Multiple contacts with shared information

    - by Keith Thompson
    Background: I currently have several hundred contacts, synchronized between a Microsoft Exchange server and several mobile devices. I also save exported copies of the contacts in .vcf format. Is there a good way (application, file format, whatever) to maintain contacts with shared information? A very common scenario is that I have contacts for two or more people who live in the same house, for example: John Doe 123 Main Street, Anytown USA Home: 555-555-1111 Work: 555-555-2222 Mobile: 555-555-3333 E-mail: John[email protected] Jane Doe 123 Main Street, Anytown USA Home: 555-555-1111 Work: 555-555-4444 Mobile: 555-555-5555 E-mail: [email protected] As you can see, both contacts have the same home address and phone number, but distinct names and work and mobile phone numbers. (Other information might also be either shared or distinct.) The applications and file formats I'm familiar with don't seem to have a good way to deal with this. If I use a single "John & Jane Doe" contact for both, it's difficult to distinguish the distinct information (if I want to call Jane's mobile phone rather than John's). If I use a separate contact for each, I have to remember to update both of them (or all of them for N 2) when they move or change their home phone number. An ideal solution would let me create a record containing information for their household, and have each of their contact records contain a reference to the household record, so that when I view John's contact record I see both shared and distinct information. Is there anything out there that has good support this kind of thing? (I would think there would be, since it's a very common scenario.) (I suppose I could roll my own system that generates merged .vcf files from some extended format, but that wouldn't play well with synchronizing across multiple devices.)

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