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  • Getting Started Plugging into the "Find in Projects" Dialog

    - by Geertjan
    In case you missed it amidst all the code in yesterday's blog entry, the "Find in Projects" dialog is now pluggable. I think that's really cool. The code yesterday gives you a complete example, but let's break it down a bit and deconstruct down to a very simple hello world scenario. We'll end up with as many extra tabs in the "Find in Projects" dialog as we need, for example, three in this case:  And clicking on any of those extra tabs will, in this simple example, simply show us this: Once we have that, we'll be able to continue adding small bits of code over the next few blog entries until we have something more useful. So, in this blog entry, you'll literally be able to display "Hello World" within a new tab in the "Find in Projects" dialog: import javax.swing.JComponent; import javax.swing.JLabel; import org.netbeans.spi.search.provider.SearchComposition; import org.netbeans.spi.search.provider.SearchProvider; import org.netbeans.spi.search.provider.SearchProvider.Presenter; import org.openide.NotificationLineSupport; import org.openide.util.lookup.ServiceProvider; @ServiceProvider(service = SearchProvider.class) public class ExampleSearchProvider1 extends SearchProvider { @Override public Presenter createPresenter(boolean replaceMode) { return new ExampleSearchPresenter(this); } @Override public boolean isReplaceSupported() { return false; } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return true; } @Override public String getTitle() { return "Demo Extension 1"; } public class ExampleSearchPresenter extends SearchProvider.Presenter { private ExampleSearchPresenter(ExampleSearchProvider1 sp) { super(sp, true); } @Override public JComponent getForm() { return new JLabel("Hello World"); } @Override public SearchComposition composeSearch() { return null; } @Override public boolean isUsable(NotificationLineSupport nls) { return true; } } } That's it, not much code, works fine in NetBeans IDE 7.2 Beta, and is easier to digest than the big chunk from yesterday. If you make three classes like the above in a NetBeans module, and you install it, you'll have three new tabs in the "Find in Projects" dialog. The only required dependencies are Dialogs API, Lookup API, and Search in Projects API. Read the javadoc linked above and then in next blog entries we'll continue to build out something like the sample you saw in yesterday's blog entry.

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  • Driving Growth through Smarter Selling

    - by Samantha.Y. Ma
    With the proliferation of social media and mobile technologies, the world of selling and buying has drastically changed, as buyers now have access to more information than they did in the past. In fact, studies have shown that buyers complete 60 percent of the buying process before they even engage with a salesperson. The old models of selling no longer work effectively; and the new way of selling is driven by customer insights. To succeed, sales need to be proactive, not reactive. They need to engage with the customer early, sometimes even before the customer’s needs are fully understood. In fact, the best sales reps prescribe a solution that the customer doesn't even know they need, often by leveraging social media to listen, engage and collaborate with peers. And they fully tap into the power of analytics and data to drive results.  Let’s look at some stats regarding challenges facing sales today. According to recent studies, sales reps spend 78 percent of their time doing administrative things -- such as planning, searching for information, data entry -- and only 22 percent of the time actually selling. Furthermore, 40 percent of B2B sales reps miss their quota, and only 3 percent of companies can say with confidence that their forecasts are “always accurate.” How do you drive growth in this modern day and age? It's not just getting your sales teams to work harder; it's helping them work smarter and providing them with a solution they want to use, on the device(s) they already know, giving them critical insights and tools to be more productive, increase win rates, and close deals faster. Oracle Sales Cloud was designed to do exactly that. It enables smarter selling that allows reps to sell more, managers to know more, and companies to grow more.  Let’s face it—if all CRM solutions worked well, sales executives wouldn’t be having the same headaches as they had in the past. Join Oracle’s Thomas Kurian and Doug Clemmans on Tuesday, October 22 as they explain: • How today’s sales processes have rendered many CRM systems obsolete • The secrets to smarter selling, leveraging mobile, social, and big data • How Oracle Sales Cloud enables smarter selling—as proven by Oracle and its customers Take the first step down the path toward smarter selling. With Oracle Sales Cloud, reps sell more, managers know more, and companies grow more.

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  • How can I achieve a 3D-like effect with spritebatch's rotation and scale parameters

    - by Alic44
    I'm working on a 2d game with a top-down perspective similar to Secret of Mana and the 2D Final Fantasy games, with one big difference being that it's an action rpg using a 3-dimensional physics engine. I'm trying to draw an aimer graphic (basically an arrow) at my characters' feet when they're aiming a ranged weapon. At first I just converted the character's aim vector to radians and passed that into spritebatch, but there was a problem. The position of every object in my world is scaled for perspective when it's drawn to the screen. So if the physics engine coordinates are (1, 0, 1), the screen coords are actually (1, .707) -- the Y and Z axis are scaled by a perspective factor of .707 and then added together to get the screen coordinates. This meant that the direction the aimer graphic pointed (thanks to its rotation value passed into spritebatch) didn't match up with the direction the projectile actually traveled over time. Things looked fine when the characters fired left, right, up, or down, but if you fired on a diagonal the perspective of the physics engine didn't match with the simplistic way I was converting the character's aim direction to a screen rotation. Ok, fast forward to now: I've got the aimer's rotation matched up with the path the projectile will actually take, which I'm doing by decomposing a transform matrix which I build from two rotation matrices (one to represent the aimer's rotation, and one to represent the camera's 45 degree rotation on the x axis). My question is, is there a way to get not just rotation from a series of matrix transformations, but to also get a Vector2 scale which would give the aimer the appearance of being a 3d object, being warped by perspective? Orthographic perspective is what I'm going for, I think. So, the aimer arrow would get longer when facing sideways, and shorter when facing north and south because of the perspective. At the same time, it would get wider when facing north and south, and less wide when facing right or left. I'd like to avoid actually drawing the aimer texture in 3d because I'm still using spritebatch's layerdepth parameter at this point in my project, and I don't want to have to figure out how to draw a 3d object within the depth sorting system I already have. I can provide code and more details if this is too vague as a question... This is my first post on stack exchange. Thanks a lot for reading! Note: (I think) I realize it can't be a technically correct 3D perspective, because the spritebatch's vector2 scaling argument doesn't allow for an object to be skewed the way it actually should be. What I'm really interested in is, is there a good way to fake the effect, or should I just drop it and not scale at all? Edit to clarify without the help of a picture (apparently I can't post them yet): I want the aimer arrow to look like it has been painted on the ground at the character's feet, so it should appear to be drawn on the ground plane (in my case the XZ plane) which should be tilted at a 45 degree angle (around the X axis) from the viewing perspective. Alex

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  • Our Favorite Highlights from OpenWorld 2012

    - by Kathy.Miedema
    By Kathy Miedema and Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience The Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team’s activities around OpenWorld expand every year, but this year we certainly raised the bar.   Members of our team helped deliver three, separate, all-day training events in the week prior to OpenWorld. Our Fusion User Experience Advocates (FXA) and Applications UX Sales Ambassadors (SAMBA) have all-new material around the Oracle user experience to deliver at conferences in the coming year - Fusion Applications design patterns, mobile design patterns, and the new face of Fusion. We also delivered a hands-on workshop sharing user experience tools for our customers that is designed to answer this question: "If I have no UX staff, what do I do?" We also spent the weeks just before OpenWorld preparing to talk about the new face of Fusion Applications, a greatly simplified entry experience into Fusion Applications for self-service users, CRM users, and IT managers who want to change the look and feel quickly. Special thanks to Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter for the first mention of our project.Jeremy Ashley, VP, Oracle Applications User Experience Customers may have seen one of the many OpenWorld session demos of the new face of Fusion, which will be available with Fusion Applications soon. It was shown in sessions by Oracle's Chris Leone, Anthony Lye, and our own Vice President, Jeremy Ashley, among others.   Leone reinforced the importance of user experience as one of three main design principles for Fusion Applications, emphasizing that Fusion was designed from the beginning to be intelligent, social, and mobile. User experience highlights of the new face of Fusion, he said, included the need for "zero training," and he called the experience "easy to use." He added that deploying it for HCM self-service would be effortless.  Customers take part in a usability lab tour during OpenWorld 2012. Customers also may have seen the new face of Fusion on the demogrounds or during one of our teams' chartered lab tours at the end of the week. We tested other new designs at our on-site lab in the Intercontinental Hotel, next to Moscone West. Applications User Experience team members show eye-tracking and mobile demos at OOW. We were also excited to kick off new branches of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, which now has groups in Latin America and the Middle East, in addition to North America and EMEA.   And we were pleasantly surprised by the interest in one of our latest research projects, Oracle Voice, which is designed to enable faster data input for on-the-go users. We offer a big thank-you to the Nuance demopod for sharing the demo with OpenWorld attendees.  For more information on our program and products like the new face of Fusion, please comment below. 

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  • Obtaining the correct Client IP address when a Physical Load Balancer and a Web Server Configured With Proxy Plug-in Are Between The Client And Weblogic

    - by adejuanc
    Some Load Balancers like Big-IP have build in interoperability with Weblogic Cluster, this means they know how Weblogic understand a header named 'WL-Proxy-Client-IP' to identify the original client ip.The problem comes when you have a Web Server configured with weblogic plug-in between the Load Balancer and the back-end weblogic servers - WL-Proxy-Client-IP this is not designed to go to Web server proxy plug-in. The plug-in will not use a WL-Proxy-Client-IP header that came in from the previous hop (which is this case is the Physical Load Balancer but could be anything), in order to prevent IP spoofing, therefore the plug-in won't pass on what Load Balancer has set for it.So unfortunately under this Architecture the header will be useless. To get the client IP from Weblogic you need to configure extended log format and create a custom field that gets the appropriate header containing the IP of the client.On WLS versions prior to 10.3.3 use these instructions:You can also create user-defined fields for inclusion in an HTTP access log file that uses the extended log format. To create a custom field you identify the field in the ELF log file using the Fields directive and then you create a matching Java class that generates the desired output. You can create a separate Java class for each field, or the Java class can output multiple fields. For a sample of the Java source for such a class, seeJava Class for Creating a Custom ELF Field to import weblogic.servlet.logging.CustomELFLogger;import weblogic.servlet.logging.FormatStringBuffer;import weblogic.servlet.logging.HttpAccountingInfo;/* This example outputs the X-Forwarded-For field into a custom field called MyOriginalClientIPField */public class MyOriginalClientIPField implements CustomELFLogger{ public void logField(HttpAccountingInfo metrics,  FormatStringBuffer buff) {   buff.appendValueOrDash(metrics.getHeader("X-Forwarded-For");  }}In this case we are using 'X-Forwarded-For' but it could be changed for the header that contains the data you need to use.Compile the class, jar it, and prepend it to the classpath.In order to compile and package the class: 1. Navigate to <WLS_HOME>/user_projects/domains/<SOME_DOMAIN>/bin2. Set up an environment by executing: $ . ./setDomainEnv.sh This will include weblogic.jar into classpath, in order to use any of the libraries included under package weblogic.*3. Compile the class by copying the content of the code above and naming the file as:MyOriginalClientIPField.java4. Run javac to compile the class.$javac MyOriginalClientIPField.java5. Package the compiled class into a jar file by executing:$jar cvf0 MyOriginalClientIPField.jar MyOriginalClientIPField.classExpected output is:added manifestadding: MyOriginalClientIPField.class(in = 711) (out= 711)(stored 0%)6. This will produce a file called:MyOriginalClientIPField.jar This way you will be able to get the real client IP when the request is passing through a Load Balancer and a Web server before reaching WLS. Since 10.3.3 it is possible to configure a specific header that WLS will check when getRemoteAddr is called. That can be set on the WebServer Mbean. In this case, set that to be X-Forwarded-For header coming from Load Balancer as well.

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  • Will you share your SQL Server configuration?

    - by Bill Graziano
    I regularly visit client sites and review their SQL Server configurations.  I come across all kinds of strange settings.  I’ve been thinking about a way to aggregate people’s configurations and see what’s common and what’s unique.  I used to do that with polls on SQLTeam.com.  I think we can find out more interesting things if we look at combinations of settings in relation to size and volume. I’ve been working on an application for another project that is similar.  It will be fairly easy to use that code for this.  I can have something up and running in a few days – if people are interested in it.  I admit that I often come up with ideas that just don’t make sense.  This may be one of them.  One of your biggest concerns has be how secure your data is.  My solution is not to store anything identifying.  The instance name and database names can both be “anonymized” and I don’t store the machine name or IP address or anything to do with logins. Some of the questions I’m curious about are: At what size database does the Enterprise Edition become prevalent? Given the total size of the databases how much RAM is common? How many people have multiple data files?  At what size does that become prevalent? How common is database mirroring?  Replication?  Log shipping? How common is full recovery mode?  At what data size does it become prevalent? I think those are all questions that are easy to answer -- with the right data.  The big question is whether or not people will share their SQL Server configurations.  I understand that organizations in regulated or high security environments can’t participate.  But I think that leaves many, many people that can.  Are you willing to share your configuration and learn about others?  I have a simple sign up form here.  It’s actually a mailing list signup that also captures your edition, number of servers and largest database.  The list will only be used for this project.  Is your SQL Server is configured correctly?  Do you wonder what the next step is as your data grows?  Take a second and sign up.

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  • What to do when opensource project starts to tear apart? (or a manager tries to write code and than shouts at the team)

    - by Kabumbus
    Imagine there is an open source cross-platform project on Google code. It has lots of revisions (1000). It concentrates in itself lots technological stuff - rare stuff - it mixes top tech. It contains server, and more than one client. The project was created by a well-connected team of developers (friends) and a manager that was sponsoring project at its start up during its first few months (project now is more than a year old-sponsoring oss project is a big good deal- also gave the idea of project to developers). The project was growing in complexity and effort reqiered to continue development. Once upon a time a manager - team leader started trying to write code (he was a programmer in some other projects - not the best, but he felt like he was one). He started because one of the developers suggested an idea at the team meeting and he felt he just needed to do it on his own. He failed, and he told the dev team about it. The dev team did what he failed to do in a few days. After that, the manager feels that team codes with out him perfectly and gets the job done in short time. He felt sorry and lost and he started to crash like an old bad PC. Firstly, he started to scream (in forms of messages not in voice) he tried to tell developers that what they were doing was a bad, not-needed thing - developers kindly told him that his "beginnings" were not compilable while dev team product worked as needed. He told the developers that all work they do should be firstly discussed with him. Here is the part where we need to mention that all team members are "project owners" and logically have equal rights. The team leader suggested to the developers these options: change their dev process to go through him, or be moved from project owners to contributers. So what are our options as developers? What arguments we can provide to the team leader/manager for him to calm down? Is it possible to save the project or is it better to fork out now? An important issue is that lately we had no active ticket system, and I personally think that this was the reason the mess appeared. So... any ideas?

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  • Wrapping REST based Web Service

    - by PaulPerry
    I am designing a system that will be running online under Microsoft Windows Azure. One component is a REST based web service which will really be a wrapper (using proxy pattern) which calls the REST web services of a business partner, which has to do with BLOB storage (note: we are not using azure storage). The majority of the functionality will be taking a request, calling our partner web service, receiving the request and then passing that back to the client. There are a number of reasons for doing this, but one of the big ones is that we are going to support three clients: our desktop application (win and mac), mobile apps (iOS), and a web front end. Having a single API which we then send to our partner protects us if that partner ever changes. I want our service to support both JSON and XML for the data transfer format, JSON for web and probably XML for the desktop and mobile (we already have an XML parser in those products). Our partner also supports both of these formats. I was planning on using ASP.NET MVC 4 with the Web API. As I design this, the thing that concerns me is the static type checking of C#. What if the partner adds or removes elements from the data? We can probably defensively code for that, but I still feel some concern. Also, we have to do a fair amount of tedious coding, to setup our API and then to turn around and call our partner’s API. There probably is not much choice on it though. But, in the back of my mind I wonder if maybe a more dynamic language would be a better choice. I want to reach out and see if anybody has had to do this before, what technology solutions they have used to (I am not attached to this one, these days Azure can host other technologies), and if anybody who has done something like this can point out any issues that came up. Thanks! Researching the issue seems to only find solutions which focus on connecting a SOAP web service over a proxy server, and not what I am referring to here. Note: Cross posted (by suggestion) from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11906802/wrapping-rest-based-web-service Thank you!

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  • C# 5: At last, async without the pain

    - by Alex.Davies
    For me, the best feature in Visual Studio 11 is the async and await keywords that come with C# 5. I am a big fan of asynchronous programming: it frees up resources, in particular the thread that a piece of code needs to run in. That lets that thread run something else, while waiting for your long-running operation to complete. That's really important if that thread is the UI thread, or if it's holding a lock because it accesses some data structure. Before C# 5, I think I was about the only person in the world who really cared about asynchronous programming. The trouble was that you had to go to extreme lengths to make code asynchronous. I would forever be writing methods that, instead of returning a value, accepted an extra argument that is a "continuation". Then, when calling the method, I'd have to pass a lambda in to it, which contained all the stuff that needed to happen after the method finished. Here is a real snippet of code that is in .NET Demon: m_BuildControl.FilterEnabledForBuilding(     projects,     enabledProjects = m_OutOfDateProjectFinder.FilterNeedsBuilding(         enabledProjects,         newDirtyProjects =         {             // Mark any currently broken projects as dirty             newDirtyProjects.UnionWith(m_BrokenProjects);             // Copy what we found into the set of dirty things             m_DirtyProjects = newDirtyProjects;             RunSomeBuilds();         })); It's just obtuse. Who puts a lambda inside a lambda like that? Well, me obviously. But surely enabledProjects should just be the return value of FilterEnabledForBuilding? And newDirtyProjects should just be the return value of FilterNeedsBuilding? C# 5 async/await lets you write asynchronous code without it looking so stupid. Here's what I plan to change that code to, once we upgrade to VS 11: var enabledProjects = await m_BuildControl.FilterEnabledForBuilding(projects); var newDirtyProjects = await m_OutOfDateProjectFinder.FilterNeedsBuilding(enabledProjects); // Mark any currently broken projects as dirty newDirtyProjects.UnionWith(m_BrokenProjects); // Copy what we found into the set of dirty things m_DirtyProjects = newDirtyProjects; RunSomeBuilds(); Much easier to read! But how is this the same code? If we were on the UI thread, doesn't the UI thread have to block while FilterEnabledForBuilding runs? No, it doesn't, and that's the magic of the await keyword! It cuts your method up into its constituent pieces, much like I did manually with lambdas before. When you run it, only the piece up to the first await actually runs. The rest is passed to FilterEnabledForBuilding as a continuation, which will get called back whenever that method is finished. In the meantime, our thread returns, and can go back to making the UI responsive, or whatever else threads do in their spare time. This is actually a massive simplification, and if you're interested in all the gory details, and speed hacks that the await keyword actually does for you, I recommend Jon Skeet's blog posts about it.

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  • Small hiccup with VMware Player after upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04

    The upgrade process Finally, it was time to upgrade to a new LTS version of Ubuntu - 12.04 aka Precise Pangolin. I scheduled the weekend for this task and despite the nickname of Mauritius (Cyber Island) it took roughly 6 hours to download nearly 2.400 packages. No problem in general, as I have spare machines to work on, and it was weekend anyway. All went very smooth and only a few packages required manual attention due to local modifications in the configuration. With the new kernel 3.2.0-24 it was necessary to reboot the system and compared to the last upgrade, I got my graphical login as expected. Compilation of VMware Player 4.x fails A quick test on the installed applications, Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, Skype, CrossOver, etc. reveils that everything is fine in general. Firing up VMware Player displays the known kernel mod dialog that requires to compile the modules for the newly booted kernel. Usually, this isn't a big issue but this time I was confronted with the situation that vmnet didn't compile as expected ("Failed to compile module vmnet"). Luckily, this issue is already well-known, even though with "Failed to compile module vmmon" as general reason but nevertheless it was very easy and quick to find the solution to this problem. In VMware Communities there are several forum threads related to this topic and VMware provides the necessary patch file for Workstation 8.0.2 and Player 4.0.2. In case that you are still on Workstation 7.x or Player 3.x there is another patch file available. After download extract the file like so: tar -xzvf vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz and run the patch script as super-user: sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh This will alter the existing installation and source files of VMware Player on your machine. As last step, which isn't described in many other resources, you have to restart the vmware service, or for the heart-fainted, just reboot your system: sudo service vmware restart This will load the newly created kernel modules into your userspace, and after that VMware Player will start as usual. Summary Upgrading any derivate of Ubuntu, in my case Xubuntu, is quick and easy done but it might hold some surprises from time to time. Nonetheless, it is absolutely worthy to go for it. Currently, this patch for VMware is the only obstacle I had to face so far and my system feels and looks better than before. Happy upgrade! Resources I used the following links based on Google search results: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1902218#1902218http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/01/26/vmware-workstation-8-0-2-player-4-0-2-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-2-and-3-3/ Update on VMware Player 4.0.3 Please continue to read on my follow-up article in case that you upgraded either VMware Workstation 8.0.3 or VMware Player 4.0.3.

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  • Can working exclusively with niche apps or tech hurt your career in software development? How to get out of the cycle? [closed]

    - by Keoma
    I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle. I've been at a pretty comfortable IT group for almost a decade. I got my start here working on web development, mostly CRUD, but have demonstrated the ability to figure out more complex problems. I'm not a rock star, but I have received many compliments on my programming aptitude, and technologists and architects have commented on my ability to pick things up (for example, I recently learned a very popular web framework that shall remain nameless since I don’t want to be identified). My problem is that, over time, my responsibilities have been shifting towards work such as support or ‘development’ with some rather niche products (afraid to mention here due to potential for being identified). Some of this work, if it includes anything resembling coding, is very menial scripting in languages such as Powershell or VBScript. The vast majority of the time, however, a typical day consists of going back and forth with the product’s vendor support to send them logs and apply configuration changes or patches they recommend. I’m basically starved for some actual software development. However, even though I’m more than capable of doing that development work (and actually do a much better job at it than anything else), our boss is more interested in the kind of work I mentioned above, her reasoning being that since no one else in the organization wants to do it, it must mean job security. This has been going on for close to 3 years, and the only reason I have held on is on the promise that we would eventually get more development projects assigned to us. Well, that turned out not to be true at all. A recent talk with the boss has just made it more explicitly clear, as she told me in no uncertain terms that it’s very likely that development work (web or otherwise) would go to another group. The reason given to me is that our we don’t have enough resources in our group to handle that. So now I find myself in the position that I either have to stay in what has essentially become a dead end IT job that is tied to the fortunes of a niche stack of apps, or try to find a position that will be better for my long term career. My problem (is it a problem?), however, is that compared to others, my development projects in the last three years are very sparse in number. To compound things, projects using the latest and most popular frameworks, amount to the big fat number of just one—with no work of that kind in the foreseeable future. I am very concerned that this sparseness in my resume is a deficit, and that it will hurt my chances of landing a different job. I’m also wondering how much it will hurt me, and whether that can be ameliorated with hobby projects of my own. I guess I’m looking for opinions. Thank you very much for reading.

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  • CES 2011–Microsoft Keynote Impressions

    - by guybarrette
    Microsoft has been kicking off the CES for a number of years by doing a keynote the evening of the event first day.  This year, SteveB talked about Xbox, Kinect, Windows 7 new laptops, Surface 2 and Windows vNext running on the ARM architecture. Some of the design of the new laptops showed are quite amazing.  This one has a dual screen with no physical keyboard.  The image is split between both screens.  A software keyboard appears when you place your 10 fingers on the lower screen. This one from Samsung has a sliding keyboard somewhat like numerous cell phones have. What I found the most amazing is that Intel was able to miniaturized a full Intel architecture (CPU, motherboard, memory) in a tiny form factor.  Imagine having the power of a full PC running .NET apps in a Zune/iPod form factor! They also showed V2 of the Surface device.  This one is called the Samsung SUR40 for Surface PC.  It’s much sleeker and it will likely loose the BAT (Big Ass Table) moniker  More info here SteveB announced that Windows vNext will run on ARM chips.  I’m intrigued by this announcement (you can read about it here) and I have many questions: -In the past ARM devices were slow, what now makes the ARM architecture able to run Windows? -ARM is 32-bit only, I think. -Does this mean that Intel wasn't able to provide such a lightweight architecture or simply that they weren't interested? -From what I understand, apps would need to be recompiled for ARM. Will we need to do that from an ARM PC or could it be done natively on Intel or on an Intel PC running in an ARM VM?  VS 2012? Ahhhh, smells like a cool PDC is coming up    Clearly it looks like PC have enough power for most of us right now and that the race is now about miniaturization, power consumption and battery life. You can watch the Microsoft CES 2011 keynote here var addthis_pub="guybarrette";

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  • C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

    - by Jonathan Mitchem
    After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

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  • preview form using javascript in popup

    - by user1015309
    please I need some help in previewing a form in popup. I have a form, quite big, so I added the option of preview to show as popup. The lightbox form popup works well, but the problem I now have is function passform ()passing the inputs(textfield, select, checkbox, radio) into the popup page for preview on Click(). Below are my javascript and html codes. I left the css and some html out, because I think they're not needed. I will appreciate your help. Thank you The Javascript function gradient(id, level) { var box = document.getElementById(id); box.style.opacity = level; box.style.MozOpacity = level; box.style.KhtmlOpacity = level; box.style.filter = "alpha(opacity=" + level * 100 + ")"; box.style.display="block"; return; } function fadein(id) { var level = 0; while(level <= 1) { setTimeout( "gradient('" + id + "'," + level + ")", (level* 1000) + 10); level += 0.01; } } // Open the lightbox function openbox(formtitle, fadin) { var box = document.getElementById('box'); document.getElementById('shadowing').style.display='block'; var btitle = document.getElementById('boxtitle'); btitle.innerHTML = formtitle; if(fadin) { gradient("box", 0); fadein("box"); } else { box.style.display='block'; } } // Close the lightbox function closebox() { document.getElementById('box').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('shadowing').style.display='none'; } //pass form fields into variables var divexugsotherugsexams1 = document.getElementById('divexugsotherugsexams1'); var exugsotherugsexams1 = document.form4.exugsotherugsexams1.value; function passform() { divexugsotherugsexams1.innerHTML = document.form4.exugsotherugsexams1.value; } The HTML(with just one text field try): <p><input name="submit4" type="submit" class="button2" id="submit4" value="Preview Note" onClick="openbox('Preview Note', 1)"/> </p> <div id="shadowing"></div> <div id="box"> <span id="boxtitle"></span> <div id="divexugsotherugsexams1"></div> <script>document.write('<PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="'+exugsotherugsexams1+'">')</script> <a href="#" onClick="closebox()">Close</a> </div>

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  • SQL 2014 does data the way developers want

    - by Rob Farley
    A post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, good that it fits with this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Joey D’Antoni (@jdanton) Ever since I got into databases, I’ve been a fan. I studied Pure Maths at university (as well as Computer Science), and am very comfortable with Set Theory, which undergirds relational database concepts. But I’ve also spent a long time as a developer, and appreciate that that databases don’t exactly fit within the stuff I learned in my first year of uni, particularly the “Algorithms and Data Structures” subject, in which we studied concepts like linked lists. Writing in languages like C, we used pointers to quickly move around data, without a database in sight. Of course, if we had a power failure all this data was lost, as it was only persisted in RAM. Perhaps it’s why I’m a fan of database internals, of indexes, latches, execution plans, and so on – the developer in me wants to be reassured that we’re getting to the data as efficiently as possible. Back when SQL Server 2005 was approaching, one of the big stories was around CLR. Many were saying that T-SQL stored procedures would be a thing of the past because we now had CLR, and that obviously going to be much faster than using the abstracted T-SQL. Around the same time, we were seeing technologies like Linq-to-SQL produce poor T-SQL equivalents, and developers had had a gutful. They wanted to move away from T-SQL, having lost trust in it. I was never one of those developers, because I’d looked under the covers and knew that despite being abstracted, T-SQL was still a good way of getting to data. It worked for me, appealing to both my Set Theory side and my Developer side. CLR hasn’t exactly become the default option for stored procedures, although there are plenty of situations where it can be useful for getting faster performance. SQL Server 2014 is different though, through Hekaton – its In-Memory OLTP environment. When you create a table using Hekaton (that is, a memory-optimized one), the table you create is the kind of thing you’d’ve made as a developer. It creates code in C leveraging structs and pointers and arrays, which it compiles into fast code. When you insert data into it, it creates a new instance of a struct in memory, and adds it to an array. When the insert is committed, a small write is made to the transaction to make sure it’s durable, but none of the locking and latching behaviour that typifies transactional systems is needed. Indexes are done using hashes and using bw-trees (which avoid locking through the use of pointers) and by handling each updates as a delete-and-insert. This is data the way that developers do it when they’re coding for performance – the way I was taught at university before I learned about databases. Being done in C, it compiles to very quick code, and although these tables don’t support every feature that regular SQL tables do, this is still an excellent direction that has been taken. @rob_farley

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  • A solution for a PHP website without a framework

    - by lortabac
    One of our customers asked us to add some dynamic functionality to an existent website, made of several static HTML pages. We normally work with an MVC framework (mostly CodeIgniter), but in this case moving everything to a framework would require too much time. Since it is not a big project, not having the full functionality of a framework is not a problem. But the question is how to keep code clean. The solution I came up with is to divide code in libraries (the application's API) and models. So inside HTML there will only be API calls, and readability will not be sacrificed. I implemented this with a sort of static Registry (sorry if I'm wrong, I am not a design pattern expert): <?php class Custom_framework { //Global database instance private static $db; //Registered models private static $models = array(); //Registered libraries private static $libraries = array(); //Returns a database class instance static public function get_db(){ if(isset(self::$db)){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$db; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it self::$db = new DB; return self::$db; } } //Returns a model instance static public function get_model($model_name){ if(isset(self::$models[$model_name])){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$models[$model_name]; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it if(is_file(ROOT_DIR . 'application/models/' . $model_name . '.php')){ include_once ROOT_DIR . 'application/models/' . $model_name . '.php'; self::$models[$model_name] = new $model_name; return self::$models[$model_name]; } else { return FALSE; } } } //Returns a library instance static public function get_library($library_name){ if(isset(self::$libraries[$library_name])){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$libraries[$library_name]; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it if(is_file(ROOT_DIR . 'application/libraries/' . $library_name . '.php')){ include_once ROOT_DIR . 'application/libraries/' . $library_name . '.php'; self::$libraries[$library_name] = new $library_name; return self::$libraries[$library_name]; } else { return FALSE; } } } } Inside HTML, API methods are accessed like this: <?php echo Custom_framework::get_library('My_library')->my_method(); ?> It looks to me as a practical solution. But I wonder what its drawbacks are, and what the possible alternatives.

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  • Cheese won't start

    - by Anthony Hohenheim
    I can't start Cheese Webcam Booth. It starts loading and there is a brief moment when the window shows up but then it disappears, like it shuts itself down and it's not in system monitor. My webcam works perfectly in Skype video call. I installed and run Camorama and it gave me an error: Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0) Please check connection When I run the lsusb I get this line for my webcam: Bus 002 Device 002: ID 04f2:b210 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd And for my graphic card, running lspci: VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) It's not a pressing matter, but it bugs my nerves, if it works on Skype, why does Cheese and other programs refuse to run. As I said, it's not a big deal but any help would be appreciated. Running Cheese in terminal: (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkImage to a GtkToggleButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkToggleButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkImage to a GtkToggleButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkToggleButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkImage to a GtkToggleButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkToggleButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkHBox to a GtkButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkImage to a GtkButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkHBox to a GtkToggleButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkToggleButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkImage to a GtkButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel (cheese:11454): Gdk-WARNING **: The program 'cheese' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)'. (Details: serial 932 error_code 9 request_code 137 minor_code 9) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

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  • Help with Strategy-game AI

    - by f20k
    Hi, I am developing a strategy-game AI (think: Final Fantasy Tactics), and I am having trouble coming up for the design of the AI. My main problem is determining which is the optimal thing for it to do. First let me describe the priority of what action I would like the AI to take: Kill nearest player unit Fulfill primary directive (kill all player units, kill target unit, survive for x turns) Heal ally unit / cast buffer Now the AI can do the following in its turn: Move - {Attack / Ability / Item} (either attack or ability or item) {Attack / Ability / Item} - Move Move closer (if targets not in range) {Attack / Ability / Item} (if move not available) Notes Abilities have various ranges / effects / costs / effects. Each ai unit has maybe 5-10 abilities to choose from. The AI will prioritize killing over safety unless its directive is to survive for x turns. It also doesn't care about ability cost much. While a player may want to save a big spell for later, the AI will most likely use it asap. Movement is on a (hex) grid num of player units: 3-6 num of ai units: 3-7 or more. Probably max 10. AI and player take turns controlling ONE unit, instead of all at the same time. Platform is Android (if program doesnt respond after some time, there will be a popup saying to Force Quit or Wait - which looks really bad!). Now comes the questions: The best ability to use would obviously be the one that hits the most targets for the most damage. But since each ability has different ranges, I won't know if they are in range without exploring each possible place I can move to. One solution would be to go through each possible places to move to, determine the optimal attack at that location - which gives me a list of optimal moves for each location. Then choose the optimal out of the list and execute it. But this will take a lot of CPU time. Is there a better solution? My current idea is to move as close as possible towards the closest, largest group of people, and determine the optimal attack/ability from there. I think this would be a lot less work for the CPU and still allow for wide-range attacks. Its sub-optimal but the AI will still seem 'smart'. Other notes/questions: Am I over-thinking/over-complicating it? Better solution? I am open to all sorts of suggestions I have taken a look at the spell-casting question, but it doesn't take into account the movement - so perhaps use that algo for each possible move location? The top answer mentioned it wasn't great for area-of-effect and group fights - so maybe requires more tweaking? Please, if you mention a graph/tree, let me know basically how to use it. E.g. Node means ability, level corresponds to damage, then search for the deepest node.

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  • BIDS Helper 1.6 Beta Release (now with SQL 2012 support!)

    - by Darren Gosbell
    The beta for BIDS Helper 1.6 was just released. We have not updated the version notification just yet as we would like to get some feedback on people's experiences with the SQL 2012 version. So if you are using SQL 2012, go grab it and let us know how you go (you can post a comment on this blog post or on the BIDS Helper site itself). This is the first release that supports SQL 2012 and consequently also the first release that runs in Visual Studio 2010. A big thanks to Greg Galloway for doing the bulk of the work on this release. Please note that if you are doing an xcopy deploy that you will need to unblock the files you download or you will get a cryptic error message. This appears to be caused by a security update to either Visual Studio or the .Net framework – the xcopy deploy instructions have been updated to show you how to do this. Below are the notes from the release page. ====== This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build Fixes and Updates The Unused Datasets feature for Reporting Services now accounts for new features in Reporting Services 2008 R2 like Lookups and new features in Reporting Services 2012. SSIS: emit an informational message when a variable has an expression defined and EvaluateAsExpression = False SSAS: roles reports points to wrong server SSIS - Variable Copy / Move broken in v1.5 "Unused DataSets Report" not showing up in Context menu on VS2005 if Solution Folders used SSAS Tabular: Create a UI for managing actions SSAS Tabular: Smart Diff improvements for new schema and Tabular models SSIS: Copy/Move Variable Erroring due to custom Control Flow item Icon SSIS Performance Visualization Index out of range fixing bugs in AggManager when aggregation design IDs don't match names The exe downloads are a self extracting installer, the zip downloads allow for an xcopy deploy. Make sure to note the updated xcopy deploy instructions for SQL Server 2012.

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  • Designing a completly new database/gui solution for my compnay

    - by user1277304
    I'm no expert when it come to Everything Visual Studio 2010 and utilizing SQL server 2008. I'm sure some of my personal projects I've built for personal use would get laughed off the face of the planet, but SQLCe has been the solution I was looking for those home type of projects. And they work, flawlessly. Now I feel it's time to step up to the big league. I want to develop a complete, unified and module based solution for my compnay that I'm working for. We're still using stuff from the 80s for goodness sake! I use Excel and query the ancient database on my own because I can't stand the GUI. Nothing against people of age, but the IDE our programmers are using is from the stone age, and they use APL of all things with it. I've yet to see a radio buttton control anywhere in the GUI where it would make sense. Anyway, I want to do this right from the ground up. I'm by no means a newbie when it comes to programming in .NET 2010, however, I want the entire solution to be professionaly done. I want version control, test projects, project flow, SQL 2008 integration and all the bells and whistles that come with that. I know for a fact that if we had something like that runnning, not only would development costs and time be slashed four fold, but the possibilities for expansion and performance would sky rocket. (Between the GUI an our DB engine, it can only use ONE CORE! ONE! It's 2012 for goodness sake!) Our buisness is growing and our current ancient solution just can't keep up, and I'd hate to see our buisness go down in flames because our programmer is stuck in the 80's and refuses to use anything current. So I ask you guys, the experts and know-it-alls, where do I start? Are there any gems of good books out there in the haystack of all "This for dummies" type of deals? I already have several people backing me in this endevour, and while it may seem brash to just usurp the current programmers, I'm doing this for the company as a whole. Thank you guys for your time.

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  • Should accessible members of an internal class be internal too?

    - by Jeff Mercado
    I'm designing a set of APIs for some applications I'm working on. I want to keep the code style consistent in all the classes I write but I've found that there are a few inconsistencies that I'm introducing and I don't know what the best way to resolve them is. My example here is specific to C# but this would apply to any language with similar mechanisms. There are a few classes that I need for implementation purposes that I don't necessarily want to expose in the API so I make them internal whereever needed. Generally what I would do is design the class as I normally would (e.g., make members public/protected/private where necessary) and change the visibility level of the class itself to internal. So I might have a few classes that look like this: internal interface IMyItem { ItemSet AddTo(ItemSet set); } internal class _SmallItem : IMyItem { private readonly /* parameters */; public _SmallItem(/* small item parameters */) { /* ... */ } public ItemSet AddTo(ItemSet set) { /* ... */ } } internal abstract class _CompositeItem: IMyItem { private readonly /* parameters */; public _CompositeItem(/* composite item parameters */) { /* ... */ } public abstract object UsefulInformation { get; } protected void HelperMethod(/* parameters */) { /* ... */ } } internal class _BigItem : _CompositeItem { private readonly /* parameters */; public _BigItem(/* big item parameters */) { /* ... */ } public override object UsefulInformation { get { /* ... */ } } public ItemSet AddTo(ItemSet set) { /* ... */ } } In another generated class (part of a parser/scanner), there is a structure that contains fields for all possible values it can represent. The class generated is internal too but I have control over the visibility of the members and decided to make them internal as well. internal partial struct ValueType { internal string String; internal ItemSet ItemSet; internal IMyItem MyItem; } internal class TokenValue { internal static int EQ(ItemSetScanner scanner) { /* ... */ } internal static int NAME(ItemSetScanner scanner, string value) { /* ... */ } internal static int VALUE(ItemSetScanner scanner, string value) { /* ... */ } //... } To me, this feels odd because the first set of classes, I didn't necessarily have to make some members public, they very well could have been made internal. internal members of an internal type can only be accessed internally anyway so why make them public? I just don't like the idea that the way I write my classes has to change drastically (i.e., change all uses of public to internal) just because the class is internal. Any thoughts on what I should do here? It makes sense to me that I might want to make some members of a class declared public, internal. But it's less clear to me when the class is declared internal.

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  • (SOLVED) Problems Rendering Text in OpenGL Using FreeType

    - by Sean M.
    I've been following both the FreeType2 tutorial and the WikiBooks tuorial, trying to combine things from them both in order to load and render fonts using the FreeType library. I used the font loading code from the FreeType2 tutorial and tried to implement the rendering code from the wikibooks tutorial (tried being the keyword as I'm still trying to learn model OpenGL, I'm using 3.2). Everything loads correctly and I have the shader program to render the text with working, but I can't get the text to render. I'm 99% sure that it has something to do with how I cam passing data to the shader, or how I set up the screen. These are the code segments that handle OpenGL initialization, as well as Font initialization and rendering: //Init glfw if (!glfwInit()) { fprintf(stderr, "GLFW Initialization has failed!\n"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } printf("GLFW Initialized.\n"); //Process the command line arguments processCmdArgs(argc, argv); //Create the window glfwWindowHint(GLFW_SAMPLES, g_aaSamples); glfwWindowHint(GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MAJOR, 3); glfwWindowHint(GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MINOR, 2); g_mainWindow = glfwCreateWindow(g_screenWidth, g_screenHeight, "Voxel Shipyard", g_fullScreen ? glfwGetPrimaryMonitor() : nullptr, nullptr); if (!g_mainWindow) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not create GLFW window!\n"); closeOGL(); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } glfwMakeContextCurrent(g_mainWindow); printf("Window and OpenGL rendering context created.\n"); glClearColor(0.2f, 0.2f, 0.2f, 1.0f); //Are these necessary for Modern OpenGL (3.0+)? glViewport(0, 0, g_screenWidth, g_screenHeight); glOrtho(0, g_screenWidth, g_screenHeight, 0, -1, 1); //Init glew int err = glewInit(); if (err != GLEW_OK) { fprintf(stderr, "GLEW initialization failed!\n"); fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", glewGetErrorString(err)); closeOGL(); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } printf("GLEW initialized.\n"); Here is the font file (it's slightly too big to post): CFont.h/CFont.cpp Here is the solution zipped up: [solution] (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36062916/VoxelShipyard.zip), if anyone feels they need the entire solution. If anyone could take a look at the code, it would be greatly appreciated. Also if someone has a tutorial that is a little more user friendly, that would also be appreciated. Thanks.

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  • Determining cause of random latency/loading issues

    - by Sherwin Flight
    I'm not sure exactly what details to post in regards to my issue, because I'm not sure what is relevant. Prior to the end of September my websites all loaded quickly, in almost all cases. Loading time wasn't usually more than a few seconds. However, since the end of September I noticed a big increase in page loading times. In some cases pages were taking 30 seconds or more to load. I do have a remote monitoring service monitoring some of the sites as well, and the image below shows the response times over the past month. The response times shown at the beginning of this graph were what the usual response times were prior to this issue occurring. You can see that there has been a significant increase in response times from the beginning to the end of this graph. The thing is, the problem is not happening 100% of the time. If I click through the site, or even just keep refreshing the page, about 25% of the time the pages load quickly, the remaining 75% of the time they load slowly. Sometimes the pages take so long to load that they time out, and don't load at all. I have contacted my hosting provider, and they said things at their end was fine. I don't believe the problem is my home internet provider, because all other websites load without a problem. The server is located in Texas, USA. This also raises another interesting point. My remote monitor checks my site from two locations, California, USA, and London, England. As you can see in the chart below the response time is actually shorter when checked from London, which doesn't seem to make sense, since the server is physically closer to the California monitoring location. I would have expected the London monitoring location to have higher response times since they are physically farther away. I should also point out that in some traceroute test I've done it seem like the first connection to the server seems to take the longest, then after that the rest of the page loads quickly. Below is a little chart showing the times for the first connection to the server. So, what could be causing this problem, and what steps can I take to resolve it or at least narrow down the problem? Sending the request to the server was very quick, and receiving the reply back seems pretty quick, but the WAIT time is really long. So it connects, sends the request, but then waits close to 30 seconds before it starts receiving data back. I am also aware that there are things I can do to speed up page loading times, like reducing the number of css/js files used on a page, compressing images, etc. This is not really what the source of the problem is though, because nothing has really changed on the site since before the problem started, and other sites on the same server are loading slowly as well. Any help or advice is much appreciated.

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  • Traditional POS is Dead

    - by David Dorf
    Traditional POS is dead -- I've heard that one before. Here's an excerpt from Joe Skorupa's blog over at RIS where he relayed ten trends that were presented at NRF. 7. Mobile POS signals death of traditional POS. Shoppers don't love self-checkout, but they prefer it to long queues or dealing with associates. Fixed POS is expensive and bulky. Mobile POS frees floor space for other purposes and converts associates from being cashiers to being sales assistants that provide new levels of customer service and incremental basket sales. In addition to unplugging the POS, new alternatives are starting to take hold - thin client, POS as a service, and replacing POS software with e-commerce platforms. I'll grant that in some situations for some retailers there might be an opportunity to to ditch the traditional POS, but for the majority of retailers that's just not practical. Take it from a guy that had to wake up at 3am after every Thanksgiving to monitor POS systems across the US on Black Friday. If a retailer's website goes down on Black Friday, they will take a significant hit. If a retailer's chain-wide POS system goes down on Black Friday, that retailer will cease to exist. Mobile POS works great for Apple because the majority of purchases are one or two big-ticket items that don't involve cash. There's still a traditional POS in every store to fall back on (its just hidden). Try this at home: Choose your favorite e-commerce site and add an item to the cart while timing how long it takes. Now multiply that by 15 to represent the 15 items you might buy at store like Target. The user interface isn't optimized for bulk purchases, and that's how it should be. The webstore and POS are designed for different purposes. Self-checkout is a great addition to POS and so is mobile checkout. But they add capabilities to POS, not replace it. Centralized architectures, even those based in the cloud, are quite viable as long as there's resiliency in the registers. You cannot assume perfect access to the network, so a POS must always be able to sell regardless of connectivity. Clearly the different selling channels should be sharing common functionality. Things like calculating tax, accepting coupons, and processing electronic payments can be shared, usually through a service-oriented architecture. This lowers costs and providers greater consistency, both of which help retailers. On paper these technologies look really good and we should continue to push boundaries, but I'm not ready to call the patient dead just yet.

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  • Is Innovation Dead?

    - by wulfers
    My question is has innovation died?  For large businesses that do not have a vibrant, and fearless leadership (see Apple under Steve jobs), I think is has.  If you look at the organizational charts for many of the large corporate megaliths you will see a plethora of middle managers who are so risk averse that innovation (any change involves risk) is choked off since there are no innovation champions in the middle layers.  And innovation driven top down can only happen when you have a visionary in the top ranks, and that is also very rare.So where is actual innovation happening, at the bottom layer, the people who live in the trenches…   The people who live for a challenge. So how can big business leverage this innovation layer?  Remove the middle management layer.   Provide an innovation champion who has an R&D budget and is tasked with working with the bottom layer of a company, the engineers, developers  and business analysts that live on the edge (Where the corporate tires meet the road). Here are two innovation failures I will tell you about, and both have been impacted by a company so risk averse it is starting to fail in its primary business ventures: This company initiated an innovation process several years ago.  The process was driven companywide with team managers being the central points of collection of innovative ideas.  These managers were given no budget to do anything with these ideas.  There was no process or incentive for these managers to drive it about their team.  This lasted close to a year and the innovation program slowly slipped into oblivion…. A second example:  This same company failed an attempt to market a consumer product in a line where there was already a major market leader.  This product was under development for several years and needed to provide some major device differentiation form the current market leader.  This same company had a large Lead Technologist community made up of real innovators in all areas of technology.  Did this same company leverage the skills and experience of this internal community,   NO!!! So to wrap this up, if large companies really want to survive, then they need to start acting like a small company.  Support those innovators and risk takers!  Reward them by implementing their innovative ideas.  Champion (from the top down) innovation (found at the bottom) in your companies.  Remember if you stand still you are really falling behind.Do it now!  Take a risk!

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