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• Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties on a Corporate/Franchise website

  - by heath

  My question is really an extension of a previous question that was ported from stackoverflow and closed so I cannot edit it. The basic gist is a regional franchise company has decided to force all independent stores into one website look; they currently all have their own domains and completely different websites. After reading the helpful answers and looking over some links provided, I think my solution is to put a 301 on each franchise store site (acme-store1.com, acme-store2.com, etc) back to the main corporate site (acme.com). All of the company history, product info, etc (about 90% of the entire site) applies to all stores. However, each store should have some exclusive content such as staff, location pictures, exclusive events and promotions, etc. I originally thought that I would simply do something like acme.com/store1/staff, acme.com/store2/staff, etc for the store exclusive content and then acme.com/our-company, for example, would cover all stores. However, I now see two issues that I don't know how to solve. They want to see site stats based on what store site they came from. If a user comes from acme-store1.com, is redirected to acme.com and hits several pages, don't I need to somehow keep that original site in the new url to track each page in that user's session and show they originally came from acme-store1.com? Each store is still independently owned and is essentially still in competition with the other stores, albeit, in less competition than they are with other brands. This is important because each store would like THEIR contact info, links to their social media pages, their mailing list sign-up and customer requests on EVERY page. So if a user originally goes to acme-store1.com and is redirected to acme.com, it still should look to the user that it's all about store 1, even though 90% of the content will be exactly the same as it is in the store 2, store 3 and corporate site. For example, acme.com/our-company would have the same company history, same header/footer/navigation, BUT depending on the original site the user came from, it would display contact and links to THAT store. If someone came directly to the corporate site, it would display their contact and links (they have their own as well). I was considering that all redirects would be to store1.acme.com, store2.acme.com, etc (or acme.com/store1) and then I can dynamically add the contact info and appropriate links based on the subdomain or subfolder. But, then I have to worry about duplicate content penalties because, again, about 90% of the text in these "subdomains" are all the same. For reference, this is a PHP5 site. I've already written a compact framework utilizing templates and mod-rewrite that I've used for other sites. Is this an easy fix that I'm just not grasping? Any suggestions?

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar’s Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a ‘perfect storm’ of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one’s work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven’t far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it’s a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it’s more important not to let such fears lead to writer’s block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what’s involved in getting an application that is ‘done’ ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we’d love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to ‘throw your hat into the ring’, drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• Throwing exception from a property when my object state is invalid

  - by Rumi P.

  Microsoft guidelines say: "Avoid throwing exceptions from property getters", and I normally follow that. But my application uses Linq2SQL, and there is the case where my object can be in invalid state because somebody or something wrote nonsense into the database. Consider this toy example: [Table(Name="Rectangle")] public class Rectangle { [Column(Name="ID", IsPrimaryKey = true, IsDbGenerated = true)] public int ID {get; set;} [Column(Name="firstSide")] public double firstSide {get; set;} [Column(Name="secondSide")] public double secondSide {get; set;} public double sideRatio { get { return firstSide/secondSide; } } } Here, I could write code which ensures that my application never writes a Rectangle with a zero-length side into the database. But no matter how bulletproof I make my own code, somebody could open the database with a different application and create an invalid Rectangle, especially one with a 0 for secondSide. (For this example, please forget that it is possible to design the database in a way such that writing a side length of zero into the rectangle table is impossible; my domain model is very complex and there are constraints on model state which cannot be expressed in a relational database). So, the solution I am gravitating to is to change the getter to: get { if(firstSide > 0 && secondSide > 0) return firstSide/secondSide; else throw new System.InvalidOperationException("All rectangle sides should have a positive length"); } The reasoning behind not throwing exceptions from properties is that programmers should be able to use them without having to make precautions about catching and handling them them. But in this case, I think that it is OK to continue to use this property without such precautions: if the exception is thrown because my application wrote a non-zero rectangle side into the database, then this is a serious bug. It cannot and shouldn't be handled in the application, but there should be code which prevents it. It is good that the exception is visibly thrown, because that way the bug is caught. if the exception is thrown because a different application changed the data in the database, then handling it is outside of the scope of my application. So I can't do anything about it if I catch it. Is this a good enough reasoning to get over the "avoid" part of the guideline and throw the exception? Or should I turn it into a method after all? Note that in the real code, the properties which can have an invalid state feel less like the result of a calculation, so they are "natural" properties, not methods.

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• Cheating on Technical Debt

  - by Tony Davis

  One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code debt, is a convenient term to cover all the compromises between the ideal solution and the actual solution, reflecting the reality of the pressures of commercial coding. The one time you’re guaranteed to hear one developer, or DBA, pass judgment on another is when he or she inherits their project, and is surprised by the amount of technical debt left lying around in the form of inelegant architecture, incomplete tests, confusing interface design, no documentation, and so on. It is often expedient for a Project Manager to ignore the build-up of technical debt, the cut corners, not-quite-finished features and rushed designs that mean progress is satisfyingly rapid in the short term. It’s far less satisfying for the poor person who inherits the code. Nothing sends a colder chill down the spine than the dawning realization that you’ve inherited a system crippled with performance and functional issues that will take months of pain to fix before you can even begin to make progress on any of the planned new features. It’s often hard to justify this ‘debt paying’ time to the project owners and managers. It just looks as if you are making no progress, in marked contrast to your predecessor. There can be many good reasons for allowing technical debt to build up, at least in the short term. Often, rapid prototyping is essential, there is a temporary shortfall in test resources, or the domain knowledge is incomplete. It may be necessary to hit a specific deadline with a prototype, or proof-of-concept, to explore a possible market opportunity, with planned iterations and refactoring to follow later. However, it is a crime for a developer to build up technical debt without making this clear to the project participants. He or she needs to record it explicitly. A design compromise made in to order to hit a deadline, be it an outright hack, or a decision made without time for rigorous investigation and testing, needs to be documented with the same rigor that one tracks a bug. What’s the best way to do this? Ideally, we’d have some kind of objective assessment of the level of technical debt in a software project, although that smacks of Science Fiction even as I write it. I’d be interested of hear of any methods you’ve used, but I’m sure most teams have to rely simply on the integrity of their colleagues and the clear perceptions of the project manager… Cheers, Tony.

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• cloud programming for OpenStack in C / C++

  - by Basile Starynkevitch

  (Sorry for such a fuzzy question, I am very newbie to cloud programming) I am interested in designing (and developing) a (free software) program in C or C++ (probably, most of it being meta-programmed, i.e. part of the C code code being generated). I am still in the thinking / designing phase. And I might perhaps give up. For reference, I am the main architect and implementor of GCC MELT, a domain specific language to extend the GCC compiler (the MELT language is translated to C/C++ and is bootstrapped: the MELT to C/C++ translator being written in MELT). And I am dreaming of extending it with some cloud computing abilities. But I am a newbie in cloud computing. (I am only interested in free-software, GPLv3 friendly, based cloud computing, which probably means openstack). I believe that "compiling on the cloud with some enhanced GCC" could make sense (for super-optimizations or static analysis of e.g. an entire Linux distribution, or at least a massive GCC compiled free software like Qt, GCC itself, or the Linux kernel). I'm dreaming of a MELT specific monitoring program which would store, communicate, and and enhance GCC compilation (extended by MELT). So the picture would be that each GCC process (actually the cc1 or cc1plus started by the gcc driver, suitably extended by some MELT extension) would communicate with some monitor. That "monitoring/persisting" program would run "on the cloud" (and probably manage some information produced by GCC e.g. on NoSQL bases). So, how should some (yet to be written) C program (some Linux daemon) be designed to be cloud-friendly? So far, I understood that it should provide some Web service, probably thru a RESTful service, so should use an HTTP server library like onion. And that OpenStack is able to start (e.g. a dozen of) such services. But I don't have a clear picture of what OpenStack brings. So far, I noticed the ability to manage (and distribute) virtual machines (with some Python API). It is less clear how can it distribute some ELF executable, how can it start it, etc. Do you have any references or examples of C / C++ programming on the cloud? How should a "cloud-friendly" (actually, OpenStack friendly) C/C++ server application be designed?

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• How to suggest using an ORM instead of stored procedures?

  - by Wayne M

  I work at a company that only uses stored procedures for all data access, which makes it very annoying to keep our local databases in sync as every commit we have to run new procs. I have used some basic ORMs in the past and I find the experience much better and cleaner. I'd like to suggest to the development manager and rest of the team that we look into using an ORM Of some kind for future development (the rest of the team are only familiar with stored procedures and have never used anything else). The current architecture is .NET 3.5 written like .NET 1.1, with "god classes" that use a strange implementation of ActiveRecord and return untyped DataSets which are looped over in code-behind files - the classes work something like this: class Foo { public bool LoadFoo() { bool blnResult = false; if (this.FooID == 0) { throw new Exception("FooID must be set before calling this method."); } DataSet ds = // ... call to Sproc if (ds.Tables[0].Rows.Count > 0) { foo.FooName = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0]["FooName"].ToString(); // other properties set blnResult = true; } return blnResult; } } // Consumer Foo foo = new Foo(); foo.FooID = 1234; foo.LoadFoo(); // do stuff with foo... There is pretty much no application of any design patterns. There are no tests whatsoever (nobody else knows how to write unit tests, and testing is done through manually loading up the website and poking around). Looking through our database we have: 199 tables, 13 views, a whopping 926 stored procedures and 93 functions. About 30 or so tables are used for batch jobs or external things, the remainder are used in our core application. Is it even worth pursuing a different approach in this scenario? I'm talking about moving forward only since we aren't allowed to refactor the existing code since "it works" so we cannot change the existing classes to use an ORM, but I don't know how often we add brand new modules instead of adding to/fixing current modules so I'm not sure if an ORM is the right approach (too much invested in stored procedures and DataSets). If it is the right choice, how should I present the case for using one? Off the top of my head the only benefits I can think of is having cleaner code (although it might not be, since the current architecture isn't built with ORMs in mind so we would basically be jury-rigging ORMs on to future modules but the old ones would still be using the DataSets) and less hassle to have to remember what procedure scripts have been run and which need to be run, etc. but that's it, and I don't know how compelling an argument that would be. Maintainability is another concern but one that nobody except me seems to be concerned about.

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Remove Clutter from the Opera Speed Dial Page

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you want to clean up the Speed Dial page in Opera so that only the thumbnails are visible? Today we show you a couple of tweaks that will make it happen. Speed Dial Page The search bar and text at the bottom take up room and add clutter to the look and feel of Opera’s Speed Dial page. Changing the Settings Two small tweaks to the config settings will clean it all up. To get started type opera:config into the address bar and press enter. Type “speed” into the quick find bar and look for the Speed Dial State entry. Change the 1 to 2 and click save. You will see the following message concerning the changes…click OK. Next type “search” into the quick find bar and look for the Speed Dial Search Type entry. Remove all of the text in the blank and click save. Once again you will see a message about the latest change that you have made. At this point you may need to restart Opera for both changes to take full effect. There will be a noticeable difference in how the Speed Dial page looks afterwards and is much cleaner without the Search bar and text field. You will also still be able to access the right click context menu just like before. Conclusion If you have been looking to get a cleaner and less cluttered Speed Dial page in Opera, then these two little hacks will get the job done! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Speed Dial as the Opera Startup PageReplace Google Chrome’s New Tab Page with Speed DialSpeed up Windows Vista Start Menu Search By Limiting ResultsBlank New Tab Quick-Fix for Google ChromeMonitor and Control Memory Usage in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone

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• As a tooling/automation developer, can I be making better use of OOP?

  - by Tom Pickles

  My time as a developer (~8 yrs) has been spent creating tooling/automation of one sort or another. The tools I develop usually interface with one or more API's. These API's could be win32, WMI, VMWare, a help-desk application, LDAP, you get the picture. The apps I develop could be just to pull back data and store/report. It could be to provision groups of VM's to create live like mock environments, update a trouble ticket etc. I've been developing in .Net and I'm currently reading into design patterns and trying to think about how I can improve my skills to make better use of and increase my understanding of OOP. For example, I've never used an interface of my own making in anger (which is probably not a good thing), because I honestly cannot identify where using one would benefit later on when modifying my code. My classes are usually very specific and I don't create similar classes with similar properties/methods which could use a common interface (like perhaps a car dealership or shop application might). I generally use an n-tier approach to my apps, having a presentation layer, a business logic/manager layer which interfaces with layer(s) that make calls to the API's I'm working with. My business entities are always just method-less container objects, which I populate with data and pass back and forth between my API interfacing layer using static methods to proxy/validate between the front and the back end. My code by nature of my work, has few common components, at least from what I can see. So I'm struggling to see how I can better make use of OOP design and perhaps reusable patterns. Am I right to be concerned that I could be being smarter about how I work, or is what I'm doing now right for my line of work? Or, am I missing something fundamental in OOP? EDIT: Here is some basic code to show how my mgr and api facing layers work. I use static classes as they do not persist any data, only facilitate moving it between layers. public static class MgrClass { public static bool PowerOnVM(string VMName) { // Perform logic to validate or apply biz logic // call APIClass to do the work return APIClass.PowerOnVM(VMName); } } public static class APIClass { public static bool PowerOnVM(string VMName) { // Calls to 3rd party API to power on a virtual machine // returns true or false if was successful for example } }

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• Writing or extending existing emacs packages: is it worth or should I move to Netbeans/Eclipse?

  - by Andrea

  I'm finishing my master degree course in CS and I've almost become addicted to Emacs. I've used it to write in C, Latex, Java, JSP,XML, CommonLisp, Ada and other languages no other editor supported, like AMPL. I'd like to improve the packages I've been using the most or create new ones, but, in practice, I find that the implementation of Emacs leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of poorly-featured/poorly-maintained packages with either overlapping functionalities or obscure incompatibilities, and Elisp just seems to foster the situation by lacking the common features modern lisps have. In contrast Eclipse and Netbeans are actively improved and it does seem they can be effective for non-mainstream languages. I tried Hibachi for Ada in Eclipse and it worked well, there's CUPS for Lisp in Eclipse and LambdaBeans built using NetBeans components. On the other hand those plugins seem to be less active than their Emacs' counterparts, for example Hibachi was archived last year. What's your opinion on this? Which editor should I write extension for? EDIT: To answer Larry Coleman (see comment below): I like Emacs as a user because it is efficient both for me and the computer I'm using. It's fast and the textual interface (i.e. minibuffer) allows for quick interaction. It's solid and packages are usually small and easy to manage. If I need to correct or remove something I usually just have to change a row in my .emacs or an elisp file, or delete a directory. Eclipse plugins rely on a more complicated process that screwed my Eclipse configuration a couple of times, forcing me to do a clean reinstall. Emacs works as long as I use the basic packages. If I need something more complicated the situation gets pretty hairy. As a "power user" I think that the best I can hope for is to write a severely crippled version of the extensions I'd actually like to have; in other words, that it's not worth the trouble. I'd like to write extensions for the things I'd like to have automated in Emacs, for example project support with automated tag-table update on file writing. There are a few projects on this that lack integration, documentation, extensibility and so forth. The best one is probably CEDET, for which I believe the Greenspun's 10th rule can be applied. EDIT: To comment Larry Coleman's answer I'm pretty sure I can pick elisp programming but the extensions I have in mind don't exist yet despite their relative simplicity and the effort more knowledgeable people poured into related projects.This makes me wonder whether it is so because of the way emacs is developed, i.e. people tend to write their own little extensions without coordination, or its implementation, its extension language not being able to keep up with the growing complexity.

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• Facebook Game database design

  - by facebook-100000781341887

  Hi, I'm currently develop a facebook mafia like PHP game(of course, a light weight version), here is a simplify database(MySQL) of the game id-a <int3> <for index> uid <chr15> <facebook uid> HP <int3> <health point> exp <int3> <experience> money <int3> <money> list_inventory <chr5> <the inventory user hold...some special here, talk next> ... and 20 other fields just like reputation, num of combat... *the number next to the type is the size(byte) of the type For the list_inventory, there have 40 inventorys in my game, (actually, I have 5 these kind of list in my database), and each user can only contain 1 qty of each inventory, therefore, I assign 5 char for this field and each bit of char as 1 item(5 char * 8 bit = 40 slot), and I will do some manipulation by PHP to extract the data from this 5 byte. OK, I was thinking on this, if this game contains 100,000 user, and only 10% are active, therefore, if use my method, for the space use, 5 byte * 100,000 = 500 KB if I use another method, create a table user_hold_inventory, if the user have the inventory, then insert a record into this table, so, for 10,000 active user, I assume they got all item, but for other, I assume they got no item, here is the fields of the new table id-b <int3> <for index> id-a <int3> <id of the user table> inv_no <int1> <inventory that user hold> for the space use, ([id] (3+3) byte + [inv_no] 1 byte ) * [active user] 10,000 * [all inventory] * 40 = 2.8 MB seems method 2 have use more space, but it consume less CPU power. Please comment these 2 method or please correct me if there have another better method rather than what I think. Another question is, my database contain 26 fields, but I counted 5 of them are not change frquently, should I need to separate it on the other table or not? So many words, thanks for reading :)

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• Visual studio Real Dark mode (2010,2012,2013)

  - by Anirudha

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/11/02/visual-studio-real-dark-mode-201020122013.aspxWhen Visual studio 2010 released back in 3 year ago I soon show a demo to some people that how Dark mode of Visual studio will be great idea. Soon we got some theme plugin  which make us able to modify the look of visual studio.   http://studiostyl.es/ already provide lots of wonderful color scheme that make you able to modify the theme. These themes are also work in webmatrix 2.  Webmatrix 2 have a plugin for themes that is made by Yishai Galatzer that is awesome for webmatrix 2.   In Visual studio 2012 we got a native dark mode. This means we can configure it without any plugin or requirement of anything. In this post I have a demo to show you how to use Dark mode that is part of Windows 7 (and windows 8 too).   Few months ago I show a problem that webmatrix 2 run slow. it’s run better in windows 7 dark mode. Windows 7 dark mode simply refer to right click > personalize > High contrast theme in bottom of windows. This setting make thing a little bit faster.   When you have set this you have seen that Visual studio doesn’t react good anymore because it’s color scheme is broken now. What you need now is import any theme from http://studiostyl.es/ When you import this this will look good as this.   This is the demo look of Windows 7 phone Express 2010. It will react same for future version as 2012, 2013. Now see your VS react look dark. Everything is dark now. Your Firefox and IE will not run totally in blackish mode but you can use chrome. Chrome have less effect of dark. Now if you benchmark it then you will feel that everything that take a long time in loading now run fast.   Note :- This is experiments. Remember to have settings backup before apply new theme. All thing I do is make my VS run faster. If you have any trouble or idea please comment it.   Thanks for read my post

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• It is CX a new concept?

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  The Marketing Industry and the Web Industry are talking about CX since some time. However it is only very recently that the concept has reached some common meaning accepted by the analysts’ and the IT community. The new CX model depends on two previous facts: the expansion of the social media, and the impact of the new advanced features of mobile devices regarding brand-customer interaction. CXsers vs UXers First there is some need of disambiguity between User Experience and Customer Experience. User Experience -UX, is a much well established concept related with the design of user interactions for particular devices. UX people are interested on multiple touch points of digital interfaces while CX people are interested on all kind of interfaces including physical ones. UX is an evolution of Web Usability, while CX is a marketing concept. UX is an instrument of User Experience. CX in fact is all about Connections and Interactions. Connections Dan Draper, the creative director Mad Men, understands very well that to market effectively means to connect with people, and the best way to connect to people is to use the connections people have with other people: understanding Social Media connections and taking the customer pulse of customers on those medias, and are strong facilitators of CX strategies.  Interactions We can very simply define CX as the relationship that a customer establishes with a brand through multiple touch points (interactions, channels) through the entire life cycle of his relationship- direct or indirect with the brand. Interactions can be grouped on Customer Journeys through multiple touch points defined as the path a customer follows to achieve a goal. Processes A customer journey today usually starts at the moment he surfs the Web, then he takes a purchase decision; purchases the product;  request a particular service and finally recommends or do not recommends the product.  Customer Journeys are processes, and to analyze customer journeys there exists today a broad offering of modern Customer Journey tools very similar actually to the use cases or UML activity diagrams for IT systems design. As a summary CX is nothing more and nothing less than applying process analysis methods for better understanding how to create value through customer interactions across the multiple user´s touch points with the brand.

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• Using HBase or Cassandra for a token server

  - by crippy

  I've been trying to figure out how to use HBase/Cassandra for a token system we're re-implementing. I can probably squeeze quite a lot more from MySQL, but it just seems it has come to clinging on to the wrong tool for the task just because we know it well. Eventually will hit a wall (like happened to us in other areas). Naturally I started looking into possible NoSQL solutions. The prominent ones (at least in terms of buzz) are HBase and Cassandra. The story is more or less like this: A user can send a gift other users. Each gift has a list of recipients or is public in which case limited by number or expiration date For each gift sent we generate some token that uniquely identifies that gift. For each gift we track the list of potential recipients and their current status relating to that gift (accepted, declinded etc). A user can request to see all his currently pending gifts A can request a list of users he has sent a gift to today (used to limit number of gifts sent) Required the ability to "dump" or "ignore" expired gifts (x day old gifts are considered expired) There are some other requirements but I believe the above covers the essentials. How would I go and model that using HBase or Cassandra? Well, the wall was performance. A few 10s of millions of records per day over 2 tables kept for 2 weeks (wish I could have kept it for more but there was no way). The response times kept getting slower and slower until eventually we had to start cutting down number of days we kept data. Caching helps here but it's not an ideal solution since a big part of the ops are updates. Also, as I hinted in my original post. We use MySQL extensively. We know exactly what it can and can't do both in naive implementations followed by native partitioning and finally by horizontally sharding our dataset on the application level to reside on multiple DB nodes. It can be done, but that's not really what I'm trying to get from this. I asked a very specific question about designing a solution using a NoSQL solution since it's very hard to find examples for designs out there. Brainlag, not trying to come off as rude. I actually appreciate it a lot that you are the only one who even bothered to respond. but I see it over and over again. People ask questions and others assume they have no idea what they're talking about and give an irrelevant answer. Ignore RDBMS please. The question is about nosql.

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• Can a 10-bit monitor connection preserve all tones in 8-bit sRGB gradients on a wide-gamut monitor?

  - by hjb981

  This question is about color management and the use of a higher color depth, 10 bits per channel (30 bits in total, resulting in 1.07 billion colors, or 1024 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "deep color") compared to the standard of 8 bits per channel (24 bits in total, 16.7 million colors, 256 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "true color"). Do not confuse with "32 bit color", which usually refers to standard 8 bit color with an extra channel ("alpha channel") for transparency (used to achieve effects like semi-transparent windows etc). The following can be assumed to be in place: 1: A wide-gamut monitor that supports 10-bit input. Further, it can be assumed that the monitor has been calibrated to its native gamut and that an ICC color profile has been created. 2: A graphics card that supports 10-bit output (and is connected to the monitor via DisplayPort). 3: Drivers for the graphics card that support 10-bit output. If applications that support 10-bit output and color profiles would be used, I would expect them to display images that were saved using different color spaces correctly. For example, both an sRGB and an adobeRGB image should be displayed correctly. If an sRGB image was saved using 8 bits per channel (almost always the case), then the 10-bit signal path would ensure that no tonal gradients were lost in the conversion from the sRGB of the image to the native color space of the monitor. For example: If the image contains a pixel that is pure red in 8 bits (255,0,0), the corresponding value in 10 bits would be (1023,0,0). However, since the monitor has a larger color space than sRGB, sending the signal (1023,0,0) to the monitor would result in a red that was too saturated. Therefore, according to the ICC color profile, the signal would be transformed into a different value with less red saturation, for example (987,0,0). Since there are still plenty of levels left between 0 and 987, all 256 values (0-255) for red in the sRGB color space of the file could be uniquely mapped to color-corrected 10-bit values in the monitor's native color space. However, if the conversion was done in 8 bits, (255,0,0) would be translated to (246,0,0), and there would now only be 247 available levels for the red channel instead of 256, degrading the displayed image quality. My question is: how does this work on Ubuntu? Let's say that I use Firefox (which is color-aware and uses ICC color profiles). Would I get 10-bit processing, thus preserving all levels of an 8-bit picture? What is the situation like for other applications, especially photo applications like Shotwell, Rawtherapee, Darktable, RawStudio, Photivo etc? Does Ubuntu differ from other operating systems (Linux and others) on this point?

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• What are the differences between abstract classes, interfaces, and when to use them

  - by user66662

  Recently I have started to wrap my head around OOP, and I am now to the point where the more I read about the differences between Abstract classes and Interfaces the more confused I become. So far, neither can be instantiated. Interfaces are more or less structural blueprints that determine the skeleton and abstracts are different by being able to partially develop code. I would like to learn more about these through my specific situation. Here is a link to my first question if you would like a little more background information: What is a good design model for my new class? Here are two classes I created: class Ad { $title; $description $price; function get_data($website){ } function validate_price(){ } } class calendar_event { $title; $description $start_date; function get_data($website){ //guts } function validate_dates(){ //guts } } So, as you can see these classes are almost identical. Not shown here, but there are other functions, like get_zip(), save_to_database() that are common across my classes. I have also added other classes Cars and Pets which have all the common methods and of course properties specific to those objects (mileage, weight, for example). Now I have violated the DRY principle and I am managing and changing the same code across multiple files. I intend on having more classes like boats, horses, or whatever. So is this where I would use an interface or abstract class? From what I understand about abstract classes I would use a super class as a template with all of the common elements built into the abstract class, and then add only the items specifically needed in future classes. For example: abstract class content { $title; $description function get_data($website){ } function common_function2() { } function common_function3() { } } class calendar_event extends content { $start_date; function validate_dates(){ } } Or would I use an interface and, because these are so similar, create a structure that each of the subclasses are forced to use for integrity reasons, and leave it up to the end developer who fleshes out that class to be responsible for each of the details of even the common functions. my thinking there is that some 'common' functions may need to be tweaked in the future for the needs of their specific class. Despite all that above, if you believe I am misunderstanding the what and why of abstracts and interfaces altogether, by all means let a valid answer to be stop thinking in this direction and suggest the proper way to move forward! Thanks!

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• Is there an API for determining congressional districts?

  - by ardavis

  I'm looking to determine the congressional district based on an address my user is providing. This will avoid having the user to look it up themselves. Does an API of this sort exist? Note Through my attempts to find one, I've only come across these: http://www.govtrack.us/developers/api (not sure how to submit an an address or zip code however) The following resources are available in the API ...Bills and resolutions in the U.S. Congress since 1973 (the 93rd Congress). ...A (bill, person) pair indicating cosponsorship, with join and withdrawn dates. ...Members of Congress and U.S. Presidents since the founding of the nation. ...Terms held in office by Members of Congress and U.S. Presidents. Each term corresponds with an election, meaning each term in the House covers two years (one 'Congress'), as President four years, and in the Senate six years (three 'Congresses'). ...Roll call votes in the U.S. Congress since 1789. How people voted is accessed through the Vote_voter API. ...How people voted on roll call votes in the U.S. Congress since 1789. See the Vote API. Filter on the vote field to get the results of a particular vote... http://www.opencongress.org/api (seems to be a way to find congress information, but not districts) This API provides programmers with structured access to all the data on OpenCongress, everything from official bill info to news and blog coverage to user-generated votes on bills and much more... This API defaults to returning XML. All queries can also return JSON... https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/opendems-discuss/CeKyi_aANaE (similar question, no resolution) I've been looking over Open Dems, and seeing what's exposed at this point and what isn't. I work with Democrats Abroad, and am interested in using stuff from the lab for their sites. I quickly looked over the Precinct API, which does both more and less than what I'd need. An ideal resource would be any way of translating addresses into CD at the very least (getting state district data would be good as well), since that would make it easier for DA's membership to make a difference in races like last month's NY26 race... Update I'm looking at the source for the govtrack.us website and the 'doGeoCode' function may be useful. view-source:http://www.govtrack.us/congress/members If no one has any suggestions, I will try to go off of what they are doing.

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• Stuff I learned at Innovate 2011

  - by David Dorf

  After returning from the NRF Innovate 2011 conference, I picked up few nuggets I thought I'd share here.  These thoughts are a bit random, but I hope they're useful nonetheless.Kevin Kelly opened the conference with six verbs that represent the future.  They were Screening, Interacting, Sharing, Accessing, Flowing, and Generating.  It struck me that these are all ways in which we merge the digital and physical worlds.  The internet of things continues to gain momentum.Some buzzwords:  deal economy, subscription commerce, discovery (instead of search), curationThat last one, curation, came up over and over.  Retailers, especially those in fashion, are finding value in helping their customers organize and present their own collections.  Social media has made sharing such collections easy, and mobile lets them take those ideas into the stores.  Mannequins are becoming less relevant.I heard from both HauteLook and Gilt Groupe (flash sale retailers) that a large percentage of their visits come from mobile devices, and most of those are iOS devices.  I find it interesting that even though Android has passed iPhone in units shipped (and will eventually pass iOS as a whole), its still the Apple crowd that leads the way.RadioShack mentioned their Holiday Heroes campaigned was very successful.  They asked their Foursquare users to check-in at a gym, coffee shop, and transportation hub as part of being a hero.  For this feat, customers were awarded a special badge that was worth 20% off at their next store visit. They claim a 3.5x increase in ticket size vs. regular check-in customers, and a 5x increase vs those that don't check-in at all.I also learned of RadioShack's #28 campaign, which is apparently one of the largest Twitter trends ever.  Their partnership with LIVESTRONG has gotten them followers, impressions, and credit for supporting the fight against cancer.The guys at Invodo showed the importance of video to e-commerce.  They gave compelling examples of how video can show customers the value of products better than just words.The highlight of the show was Guy Kawasaki's talk on innovation, which was not only informative but also peppered with humor and personality.  Back in the early days of the internet boom, Guy turned down the CEO position at Yahoo! because the commute was too long.  By his calculation, that was a $2B mistake.There are other good accounts of the conference at the NRF Blog.

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• Is it evil to model JSON responses to classes when they are mostly smilar?

  - by Aybe

  Here's the problem : While implementing a C# wrapper for an online API (Discogs) I've been faced to a dilemma : quite often the responses returned have mostly similar members and while modeling these responses to classes, some questions surfaces on which way to go would be the best. Example : Querying for a 'release' or a 'master' will return an object that contains an array of 'artist', however these 'artists' do not exactly have the same members. Currently I decided to represent these 'artists' as a single 'Artist' class, against having respective 'ReleaseArtist' and 'MasterArtist' classes which soon becomes very confusing even though another problem arises : when a category (master or release) does not return these members, they will be null. Though it might sound confusing as well I find it less confusing than the former situation as I've tackled the problem by simply not showing null members when visualizing these objects. Is this the right approach to follow ? An example of these differences : public class Artist { public List<Alias> Aliases { get; set; } public string DataQuality { get; set; } public List<Image> Images { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public List<string> NameVariations { get; set; } public string Profile { get; set; } public string Realname { get; set; } public string ReleasesUrl { get; set; } public string ResourceUrl { get; set; } public string Uri { get; set; } public List<string> Urls { get; set; } } public class ReleaseArtist { public string Join { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string Anv { get; set; } public string Tracks { get; set; } public string Role { get; set; } public string ResourceUrl { get; set; } public int Id { get; set; } }

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• Multiple country-specific domains or one global domain [closed]

  - by CJM

  Possible Duplicate: How should I structure my urls for both SEO and localization? My company currently has its main (English) site on a .com domain with a .co.uk alias. In addition, we have separate sites for certain other countries - these are also hosted in the UK but are distinct sites with a country-specific domain names (.de, .fr, .se, .es), and the sites have differing amounts of distinct but overlapping content, For example, the .es site is entirely in Spanish and has a page for every section of the UK site but little else. Whereas the .de site has much more content (but still less than the UK site), in German, and geared towards our business focus in that country. The main point is that the content in the additional sites is a subset of the UK, is translated into the local language, and although sometimes is simply only a translated version of UK content, it is usually 'tweaked' for the local market, and in certain areas, contains unique content. The other sites get a fraction of the traffic of the UK site. This is perfectly understandable since the biggest chunk of work comes from the UK, and we've been established here for over 30 years. However, we are wanting to build up our overseas business and part of that is building up our websites to support this. The Question: I posed a suggestion to the business that we might consider consolidating all our websites onto the .com domain but with /en/de/fr/se/etc sections, as plenty of other companies seem to do. The theory was that the non-english sites would benefit from the greater reputation of the parent .com domain, and that all the content would be mutually supporting - my fear is that the child domains on their own are too small to compete on their own compared to competitors who are established in these countries. Speaking to an SEO consultant from my hosting company, he feels that this move would have some benefit (for the reasons mentioned), but they would likely be significantly outweighed by the loss of the benefits of localised domains. Specifically, he said that since the Panda update, and particularly the two sets of changes this year, that we would lose more than we would gain. Having done some Panda research since, I've had my eyes opened on many issues, but curiously I haven't come across much that mentions localised domain names, though I do question whether Google would see it as duplicated content. It's not that I disagree with the consultant, I just want to know more before I make recommendations to my company. What is the prevailing opinion in this case? Would I gain anything from consolidating country-specific content onto one domain? Would Google see this as duplicate content? Would there be an even greater penalty from the loss of country-specific domains? And is there anything else I can do to help support the smaller, country-specific domains?

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• Dealing with coworkers when developing, need advice [closed]

  - by Yippie-Kai-Yay

  I developed our current project architecture and started developing it on my own (reaching something like, revision 40). We're developing a simple subway routing framework and my design seemed to be done extremely well - several main models, corresponding views, main logic and data structures were modeled "as they should be" and fully separated from rendering, algorithmic part was also implemented apart from the main models and had a minor number of intersection points. I would call that design scalable, customizable, easy-to-implement, interacting mostly based on the "black box interaction" and, well, very nice. Now, what was done: I started some implementations of the corresponding interfaces, ported some convenient libraries and wrote implementation stubs for some application parts. I had the document describing coding style and examples of that coding style usage (my own written code). I forced the usage of more or less modern C++ development techniques, including no-delete code (wrapped via smart pointers) and etc. I documented the purpose of concrete interface implementations and how they should be used. Unit tests (mostly, integration tests, because there wasn't a lot of "actual" code) and a set of mocks for all the core abstractions. I was absent for 12 days. What do we have now (the project was developed by 4 other members of the team): 3 different coding styles all over the project (I guess, two of them agreed to use the same style :), same applies to the naming of our abstractions (e.g CommonPathData.h, SubwaySchemeStructures.h), which are basically headers declaring some data structures. Absolute lack of documentation for the recently implemented parts. What I could recently call a single-purpose-abstraction now handles at least 2 different types of events, has tight coupling with other parts and so on. Half of the used interfaces now contain member variables (sic!). Raw pointer usage almost everywhere. Unit tests disabled, because "(Rev.57) They are unnecessary for this project". ... (that's probably not everything). Commit history shows that my design was interpreted as an overkill and people started combining it with personal bicycles and reimplemented wheels and then had problems integrating code chunks. Now - the project still does only a small amount of what it has to do, we have severe integration problems, I assume some memory leaks. Is there anything possible to do in this case? I do realize that all my efforts didn't have any benefit, but the deadline is pretty soon and we have to do something. Did someone have a similar situation? Basically I thought that a good (well, I did everything that I could) start for the project would probably lead to something nice, however, I understand that I'm wrong. Any advice would be appreciated, sorry for my bad english.

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• At $20/month Windows Azure host my website with 99.97% uptime

  - by Gopinath

  Couple of years ago a reliable and decent performing Windows hosting was not affordable to many enthusiastic developers who want to try a startup idea or build a hobby site. I tried to start an ASP.NET website few years ago to provide services like – Mobile Tracing, Vehicle Tracing. But due to high cost of Windows hosting I developed those services using PHP (not an easy task for .NET developer) and hosted on them Linux servers.  But with recent evolution of Windows Azure, hosting ASP.NET websites on highly reliable servers is affordable. Today anyone can host a high responsive and available ASP.NET website for just $20/month using Windows Azure. My website coziie.com is running on Windows Azure and serves close to quarter millions visitors a month with 99.97% of uptime and most of the page load times are less than 3 seconds. All I spend to run this website is just around $20, if you translate it to India rupees its roughly Rs.1000. The web sever of coziie.com is powered by a single Extra Small Web role instance and the backend is powered by a SQL Azure instance. Azure is quite impressive to provide 99.97% of uptime. Response times during peak are around 3 seconds and on nomarl loads it is around 1.5 seconds. Here is the report of uptime provided by Royal Pingdom over last one year For just $20/month Windows Azure takes care of the following apart from hosting Patches up Windows OS to the latest version Upgrades ASP.NET to the latest version – coziie.com is running on ASP.NET MVC 3 and soon I’ll upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosts data on latest and best version Sql Server database SQL Azure maintains 3 copies of database and automatically recovers in case of server failures and disasters. I never worry about database backups/restore. Provides staging environment for deploying applications for testing purpose and move them to production – I upgrade  twice a month on average With Windows Azure I no longer focus on server maintenance or data backups. They are taken up by Microsoft team and I just focus on building my website. Wish there is a low cost Linux version of Windows Azure so that I can stop worrying about server maintenance of this blog!! If you are looking for a Windows hosting, look no further than Windows Azure. If you find $20/month is a bit expensive to start with you may explore Azure Website (sort of shared hosted environment) which is free to start with and as your traffic grows you can move to paid hosting.

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• 3 Reasons You Need To Know Something About Every Technology

  - by Tim Murphy

  I make my living as a consultant and a general technologist.  I credit my success to the fact that I have never been afraid to pick up any product, language or platform needed to get the job done.  While Microsoft technologies I my mainstay, I have done work on mainframe and UNIX platforms and have worked with a wide variety of database engines.  Each one has it’s use and most times it is less expensive to find a way to communicate with an existing system than to replace it. So what are the main benefits of expending the effort to learn a new technology? New ways to solve problems Accelerate development Advise clients and get new business opportunities By new technology I mean ones that you haven’t had experience with before.  They don’t have to be the the one that just came out yesterday.  As they say, those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.  If you can learn something from an older technology it can be just as valuable as the shiny new one.  Either way, when you add another tool to your kit you get a new view on each problem you face.  This makes it easier to create a sound solution. The next thing you can learn from working with different products and techniques is how to more efficiently develop solve problems.  Many times if you are working with a new language you will find that there are specific design patterns that are used with it in normal use.  These can usually be applied with most languages.  You just needed to be exposed to them. The last point is about helping your clients and helping yourself.  If you can get in on technologies early you will have advantage over your competition in the market.  You will also be able to honestly advise you client on why they should or should not go with a new product.  Being able to compare products and their features is always an ability that stake holders appreciate. You don’t need to learn every detail of a product.  Learn enough to function and get an idea of how to use the technology.  Keep eating those technology Wheaties and you will be ready to go the distance in any project. del.icio.us Tags: Technology,technologists,technology generalist,Software Architecture

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  ORCLville: OOW 2012 - Crystal BallOracle ACE Director Floyd Teter cooks up some tongue-in-cheek predictions for news and announcements that might come out of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. What's your prediction? Oracle Optimized Solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 | Oracle Hardware Hardware matters, too! The people behind the Oracle Hardware blog have put together a list of Oracle Openworld 2012 sessions focused Oracle Optimized Solutions, "designed, pre-tested, tuned and fully documented architectures for optimal performance and availability." Just plug the session ID numbers into Schedule Builder and you're good to go. AIX Checklist for stable OBIEE deployment | Dick Dunbar "OBIEE is a complicated system with many moving parts and connection points," according to Oracle Business Inteligence escalation engineer Dick Dunbar. "The purpose of this article is to provide a checklist to discuss OBIEE deployment with your systems administrators." Demo for OPN: Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c Oracle Partner Network members can check out a new Coherence Management demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of Management Pack for Oracle Coherence and JVM Diagnostics. "The demo flow showcases the key enhancements made in Enterprise Manager 12c release which includes new customizable performance summary, cache data management and configuration management," according to the WebLogic Partner Community EMEA blog. The Pragmatic Architect: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before | Frank Buschmann "Many architects have technical knowledge that's both impressive and sound, which is indeed an inevitable basis for design success," says Frank Buschmann. "Yet, a lot of software projects fail or suffer due to severe challenges in their architecture. The key to mastery is how architects approach design, what they value, and where they focus their attention and work." As retail dies, whom will be the winners? | Peter Evans-Greenwood "The problem for many retailers is that how consumers shop has changed but the the retailers haven't adapted, " says Peter Evans-Greenwood. "Their sole virtue was to be the last step in a supply chain delivering somebody else's products to the consumer. However, being the last step in the supply chain is no longer a virtue when consumers skip across channels and can reach around the globe, no longer dependant on or limited to what they can find locally." Thought for the Day "Brains require stimulation. If you're locked into a pattern of work, work, and more work, your brain soon habituates - the same way that it lets you stop hearing a clock ticking. So, if you want to be more effective at work, you must, paradoxically, be less single-minded in your devotion to work. Anything you do—anything—that stimulates new segments of your brain will make you a more effective programmer or analyst. I promise, with a money-back guarantee." — Gerald M. Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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