Greenfield to the Cloud

23. January 2012 by admin.

Bought the RAD-XE suite today:

Offer extended to January 31, 2012! - Delphi XE2, C++Builder XE2 and RAD Studio XE2 are here with new capabilities you’ve been waiting for like 64-bit Delphi and the ability to target both Windows and Mac from a single source code base. For a limited time, all earlier version users qualify for upgrade pricing. You can save up to 45% off the regular, new user price if you upgrade by January 31st!

Embarcadero has a killer suite here.

Bonus: Buy One Tool, Get a Second Tool Free! - Combine two offers for the very best deal. Purchase by January 31 to get the upgrade price. Then when you register your new XE2 product, choose a second Embarcadero developer tool or database tool of equal or lesser value free. See the BOGO information page for complete details.

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Wicked Systems

16. January 2012 by admin.

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2007systems/Thursday/AM/Track8/UnderstandingSocialNetworks_BriefingFINAL.pdf

It is possible to correlate the product of the social interaction of

the individuals involved, with the properties of wicked problems.

• Relevant correlations:  Requirement articulation

– Property 1:  There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.

– Property 7: Every wicked problem is essentially unique

– Property 6:  Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively

describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of

permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan

“Social network analysis is based on an assumption of the importance of relationships

among interacting units.  The social network perspective encompasses theories,

models, and applications that are expressed in terms of relational concepts or

processes.”

[1]

• Social network analysis should not be outside the capability of a systems engineer,

but rather its benefits would fold nicely into mission engineering—a core component

of systems engineering.

– Mission engineering is that often overlooked aspect in which the system

developers ask the ‘big picture’ question: “why is this system being

developed?”

[2]

– Social network analysis makes the question more fundamental: “Why is this

system being developed and who is important to its sustained success?”

• “The purpose of social network analysis is to provide insightful information and

inferences on the organization and structural properties of a network, given its nodes

and relations.

– Property 8: Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another

problem

– Property 5: Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”;

because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts

significantly

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Metro style app samples- get ready for windows 8

10. January 2012 by admin.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps

Windows 8 Developer Preview Metro style app samples

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample pack includes all the Metro style app code examples developed for Windows 8 Developer Preview. The sample pack provides a convenient way to download all the samples at once.

XAML, DirectX, Direct3D

9/14/2011

61,935 Downloads

     (66)

App Bar Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to use the app bar to present navigation, commands, and tools to users. The app bar is hidden by default and appears when users swipe a finger from the top or bottom edge of the screen. It covers the content of the applic…

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

25,816 Downloads

C#, VB.NET, C++,JavaScript

     (18)

Splash screen sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample shows how to customize the transition from splash screen to app.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

9,930 Downloads

C#, C++, JavaScript

     (10)

File access sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample shows how to create, read, write to, copy or delete a file, how to retrieve file properties, and how to add a file to the most recently used (MRU) list and then retrieve the file from the list.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

8,982 Downloads

C#, C++, JavaScript

     (7)

Simple Direct3D 11.1 Game Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates a basic end-to-end model for a simple first person 3D game using DirectX (Direct3D 11.1, Direct2D, and DirectWrite) in a Metro style C++ app.

DirectX, Direct3D

9/14/2011

7,611 Downloads

C++

     (9)

FlipView Control

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to use the FlipView control.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

5,110 Downloads

C#, VB.NET, C++,JavaScript

     (3)

Basic Controls

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to use the basic controls.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

4,808 Downloads

C#, VB.NET

     (4)

Advanced Tiles Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates advanced functionality for creating and sending tile notifications.

Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

3,835 Downloads

C#, JavaScript

     (6)

Simple HTML5 Canvas Game Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

Demonstrates how to structure a basic casual game in HTML5, from end-to-end. The game included in the sample is deliberately simple to minimize distractions from game logic intended to be replaced.

HTML5, Windows Runtime

10/5/2011

1,171 Downloads

JavaScript

     (4)

Metro style Device App for Camera Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to create a Metro style device app for camera. A Metro style device app is provided by an IHV or OEM to differentiate the capture experience for a particular camera. It can be used to adjust camera settings or to provide …

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

3,530 Downloads

C#, C++, JavaScript

     (3)

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Facebook fundamentals

9. January 2012 by admin.

Anatomy of Facebook

by Lars Backstrom on Monday, November 21, 2011 at 5:04pm

Think back to the last time you were in a crowded airport or bus terminal far from home. Did you consider that the person sitting next to you probably knew a friend of a friend of a friend of yours? In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment” famously tested the idea that any two people in the world are separated by only a small number of intermediate connections, arguably the first experimental study to reveal the surprising structure of social networks.

With the rise of modern computing, social networks are now being mapped in digital form, giving researchers the ability to study them on a much grander, even global, scale. Continuing this tradition of social network research, Facebook, in collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, is today releasing two studies of the Facebook social graph.

First, we measured how many friends people have, and found that this distribution differs significantly from previous studies of large-scale social networks. Second, we found that the degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown. Finally, we observed that while the entire world is only a few degrees away, a user’s friends are most likely to be of a similar age and come from the same country.

In our studies, performed earlier this year, we examined all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them. To date, these are the largest social network studies ever released.

How many friends?

An important basic view of any social network is the cumulative degree distribution, which shows the percentage of individuals that have less than a given number of friends. As you can see above, only 10% of people have less than 10 friends, 20% have less than 25 friends, while 50% (the median) have over 100 friends. Meanwhile, because the distribution is highly skewed, the average friend count is 190. An important finding from our study, however, is that the distribution is not nearly as skewed as earlier studies of social networks have suggested.

At first glance, the median friend count on Facebook — 100 — may seem surprisingly low; a quick survey of my own friends reveals that they almost all have more than 100 friends. But no, your friends are not atypically social – a classic paradox regarding social networks dictates that, for most people, the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count. On Facebook, that’s the case for 84% of our users. Why? Scott Feld wrote about this phenomenon in his 1991 paper Why Your Friends Have More Friends than You Do, showing that the same phenomenon dictates that college students typically find that their classes to be larger than the average class size, and that when sitting on an airplane, it will typically be more crowded than the average occupancy. These effects all arise because for people, classes, and flights to be popular, you must be much more likely to choose them. So you shouldn’t feel bad if it seems like all your friends are more popular than you: it appears this way to most of us.

Four degrees of separation.

The idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ — that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections — was first proposed in 1929 in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, and made popular by the John Guare play and movie, Six Degrees of Separation. The idea was first put to the test by Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s. Milgram selected 296 volunteers and asked them to dispatch a message to a specific individual, a stockholder living in the Boston suburb of Sharon, Massachusetts. The volunteers were told that they couldn’t send the message directly to the target person (unless the sender knew them personally), but that they should route the message to a personal acquaintance that was more likely than the sender to know the target person. Milgram found that the average number of intermediate persons in these chains was 5.2 (representing about 6 hops). The experiment showed that not only are there few degrees of separation between any two people, but that individuals can successfully navigate these short paths, even though they have no way of seeing the entire network.

While we will never know if it was true in 1929, the scale and international reach of Facebook allows us to finally perform this study on a global scale. Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops). It is important to note that while Milgram was motivated by the same question (how many individuals separate any two people), these numbers are not directly comparable; his subjects only had limited knowledge of the social network, while we have a nearly complete representation of the entire thing. Our measurements essentially describe the shortest possible routes that his subjects could have found.

Your friends and you.

It’s easy for me to imagine that a path from me to a random person in Siberia goes first to one of my few Russian friends in California, and then hops around the globe to a friend of theirs living in Russia. But, while I can imagine these short paths connecting all pairs of people in the world, this notion stands in sharp contrast to my day-to-day experience. Most of my friends live in the US, and the ones I am closest to live within just a few miles of me.

This is what makes social networks somewhat unique: they are both well-connected in the sense that you can reach anyone from anyone else in a relatively short number of hops, but at the same time, they are very locally clustered, with the vast majority of connections spanning a short distance. In our study, we found that 84% of all connections are between users in the same country. But this isn’t the only dimension along which people tend to cluster. We also find that people tend to have a similar, albeit typically smaller, number of friends as their neighbors, and tend to be about the same age. Somewhat surprisingly, even for individuals aged 60, the distribution of their friends’ ages is sharply peaked at exactly 60.

Conclusions

To facilitate open access within the scientific community, the two works are available for download:

J. Ugander, B. Karrer, L. Backstrom, C. Marlow.

The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph,

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503

L. Backstrom, P. Boldi, M. Rosa, J. Ugander, S. Vigna.

Four Degrees of Separation,

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570

In these two works, we show how the Facebook social network is at once both global and local. It connects people who are far apart, but also has the dense local structure we see in small communities. We show that, as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become even more connected. In the years to come, we look forward to continuing to illuminate social trends and helping people understand how the world is becoming more connected.

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culled Siri commands

9. January 2012 by admin.

Siri commands iPhone URL Schemes:

Useless Commands: 

If you say “Smile Face” ———— Siri interprets it as “:-)”

If you say “Wink Face” ———— Siri interprets it as “;-)”

Useful Commands:

If you say “Period” ———— Siri interprets it as “.”

If you say “Coma” ———— Siri interprets it as “,”

If you say “Exclamation Point” ———— Siri interprets it as “!”

If you say “Question Mark” ———— Siri interprets it as “?”

If you say “New Paragraph” —- Siri creates a new line or new paragraph

Hard ones:

If you say “Open Parenthesis” ———— Siri interprets it as “(”

If you say “Close Parenthesis” ———— Siri interprets it as “)”

If you say “Open Quotation” ———— Siri interprets it as “”"

If you say “Close Quotation” ———— Siri interprets it as “”"

If you say “All Caps” before a “word” —- Siri interprets it as “WORD”

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Remember the milk - Siri commands

9. January 2012 by admin.

http://wiki.akosma.com/IPhone_URL_Schemes

These inventions are quite ingenious.  I have had an IPhone 4S, I hope to be able to stop typing and dictate. This is a nice hack as the inventor gathers a nice stream of “connectors”

Rememberthemilk.com

Open Settings on your iPhone 4

Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Tap Add Account…

Tap Other

Underneath Calendars, tap Add CalDav Account

In the ‘Server’ field enter: www.rememberthemilk.com

In the ‘User Name’ field and ‘Password’ fields, enter your Rememter The Milk details

Tap Next

You should be returned to Mail, contacts, Calendars, with the account added.  Scroll to the bottm of the screen, and tap Default List

Tap Remember The Milk

All your “remind me” commands in Siri should now go through Remember The Milk. Once you do this, you will get e-mail reminders from Remember the Milk instead of push Notifications from the default Reminders app.

Contact me if you can do the same for kewler.com

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Karma CRM free for 2 users, 300 contacts, 10 deals

2. December 2011 by admin.

I have installed and managed vTiger and SugarCRM installations and am fascinated by this free account

KarmaCRM

If you need a sales management tool in the cloud, give it a try!  I am evaluating it now…more later

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How do I market with social media

30. November 2011 by admin.

The more I read the more I have to share.  Marketing being my weakest area, others notice the same paradigms, so I can’t be far off.  See what Stacey Colon observes;

 

The only constant is people.

Today, industries advance, ideas expand, products morph and customers change at an alarming rate. However, people don’t change at their core.

What do people want?

1. Great insight
2. Access to great people
3. Recognition

Your customers want these things before your products and services. Therefore, in order to be successful, your spa business must stay focused on other people and their desires.

Remove the “give to get” mentality

In the social age, this old thought process simply doesn’t work. No one can predict when people are ready to buy. Marketing messages are coming from everywhere, all the time: television, billboards, email, the Internet and even in bathroom stalls. This marketing onslaught causes two problems. One, it’s overwhelming: people completely tune out and seek refuge from the marketing “rain.” Two, people by default don’t trust you or your business.

It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Do you trust every company selling to you? Traditional “in your face” marketing is friction for your spa’s growth. The more you sell, the more you repel. So, what’s your spa to do?

Focus on other people first

If people inherently want great insight, the solution is to provide quality, relevant content to your audience. Meet their core desires by helping them solve their problems at no cost. At first, this might sound crazy. But you must look deeper.  If you help people with the smaller issues, inevitably they will look to you for answers to their bigger problems.

Survey your customers, answer questions they want to know, then provide engaging “how to” information and insight using your social media channels. Regularly post content in your blog then spread the word via your newsletter, Facebook page, Google Plus page and Twitter. Engage with your audience and keep the conversation going.  Over time, your spa becomes a credible source of information and perceived as a thought leader in your niche. Content marketing keeps you moving, draws people to you and establishes trust. If you still doubt the evidence of opportunity for your spa in social media, read this.

The Elevation Principle

(Great content + other people) – marketing messages = Growth

The Elevation Principle requires that you do not focus on yourself and your business. Instead, shine the spotlight on others such as outside experts, successful peers and your client’s companies. Because when you lift people up, they lift you up and everyone can rise.

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How do I use Facebook to increase sales?

30. November 2011 by admin.

Are you ready to put your Spa’s Facebook Page to work? This year we are suggesting a 3 part strategy to make your Facebook presence effective and profitable. Are you ready?

1. Create a Facebook Deal. You can do this by editing your Page, bottom right under deals. Make this deal strategic, it must be claimed within a limited time period and reward the person checking in significantly. A Groupon deal would cost you 70%, be generous and make this a good deal. Focus on your core strengths and the holidays. This is a stressful time of the year for a lot of people, let your Spa make the deal so good they want to share it with their friends. Need ideas? How about buy one massage get one free (must be used within 4 weeks)? Complaints about not having a smartphone? Let your clients right a recommendation on your Page and give them the deal! Be Creative!
2. Promote the deal. You can’t expect people to know you have a deal. Tell people to Check-in when they arrive at the spa, share it on your personal Facebook page, get your staff sharing the deal with their clients (did you know if you check-in on Facebook you get a deal for buy one massage get one free?), tweet the deal and last but not least - ask your clients to tell people about the amazing Facebook check-in deal you are running.
3. Content is King. Share via pictures and text about your deal. Maybe even make a short video wishing your clients a happy holidays and tell them about your “gift” to them. You have to create some content and share it. Think about doing a holiday card as an image that you can share on Facebook, make sure the deal for your spa is clearly included. You have to leave your comfort zone and share content, yes the message is important, but the delivery is critical to the success of your campaign.

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SEO Basics

30. September 2011 by admin.

By now, most site owners realize the importance and value of SEO in the development and growth of their site. A properly optimized site is going to rank better in the search engines, see more targéted traffic being directed over, have a higher conversion rate and much more. However, SEO is incredibly long term and nothing can rush time. It takes time for a site to build a good trust factor with the search engines and until that happens, most of your off-site SEO efforts are going to produce minimal results.

If you recently launched your site and are already looking into SEO, here are 5 things you should focus your time and energy on.

Learn the Basics of SEO for Yourself

There is no shortage of blogs, whitepapers, articles, reports, e-books, webinars, videos and more that can teach you the basics of SEO. It is imperative that you as the site owner arm yourself with as much SEO knowledge as possible during the first year of your site’s life. The more you know about SEO, the less likely you are to be conned by a black hat SEO company and the less likely you are to make black hat SEO decisions by accident. A good place to start is with the Bing and Google Webmaster Guidelines. Consider those two sources as your SEO line in the sand; what they say goes. Look for other reputable blogs and sites that can help you learn more about SEO and how others in your industry are using it to their advantage.

By taking the time to teach yourself the basics of SEO (you could take an SEO course or spend time with a consultant as well), you’ll be better prepared to take your SEO to the next level after your site has aged a little and earned the trust of the search engines.

 

Start a Blog

Start blogging right away. Start with at least one blog post a week and see if you can work up to one a day within the first year of your blog’s life. That may seem like a huge ordeal now, but you’d be surprised at how easy it gets to write a 350-500 word blog post with practice. You’ll learn how to better formulate your thoughts, present a single idea and flush it out entirely with time. If you aren’t confident in your writing ability or are struggling to come up with topics, turn to your employees and co-workers for help. The worst thing you could do is launch a blog and then not routinely update it with fresh content. It takes a long time to hone your writing skills, find and develop your niche, build your reputation and attract loyal readers to your blog, so don’t expect to see major results fast. However, just like your site, as your blog ages it earns more trust from the search engines. Individual blog posts can start to rank for targeted keywords, increasing your online brand presence.

Build Your Social Network

If you are just getting onboard the social media marketing train, you’re in for a surprise! Social media marketing takes a lot more time than most companies realize, and it needs a solid strategy to run on. Don’t walk into social media blind and hope you’ll figure it out before something goes wrong. Take the first year of your site’s life to really develop your social profiles and connect with your target audience. What kind of content are they looking for from you? When is the best time to engage them? Which sites do they spend most of their time on? If you want your social media marketing efforts to be effective, you need to understand the behavior of your target audience so you can better reach them.

Focus on On-Site Optimization

The first year of your site’s life should really be spent focusing on the site itself. Don’t worry too much about developing a full blown link building strategy just yet; it’s more important to make sure your site is in the best shape it can be! Work on creating great webpage content, developing an internal linking structure that helps keep your visitor engaged, tweaking your landing pages to improve their conversion rate and so forth. Your website is going to be the hub of the rest of your Internet marketing. It doesn’t matter how great everything is off-site if your website doesn’t measure up. At the end of the day, it is your website that is going to convince visitors to act. Does it matter how many show up or how they got there if you website fails to convert?

Develop an Editorial Calendar

Content pretty much fuels all of your SEO and social media marketing. Without great content, you don’t give your target audience a real reason to check out your site, profile or blog. In addition to all the content you have to create for your sites, you also need to start looking into 3rd party sites where you can publish guest content. Take the first year of your site’s life to build relationships with industry bloggers and other site owners that allow guest articles to be published on their site. Identify which popular industry blogs cater to your target audience and start laying the groundwork to get one of your articles published there. If you can create an editorial calendar for you to follow, you’ll be able to get a jumpstart on your content marketing.

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