Friday, December 31, 2010

Mobile Economics Will Trend Toward Web Economics

I've been saying for a while now that I think mobile economics will trend toward web economics as the mobile web goes mainstream. In other words, the business models that work best on the web will ultimately work best in...

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The Australian Dollar Ends Year With a Flourish

Dr. Duru submits:

I thought it would be fitting to close out another year of blog posts to celebrate the performance of one of my favorite investments: the Australian dollar.

Despite beginning the week with another round of tightening by Chinese monetary authorities, the Australian dollar put on another stellar show. The “Aussie” closed the week up over 2% against the U.S. dollar. The currency made fresh all-time highs since it was freely floated against the dollar in 1983. The monthly view shows that the ride has been a wild one to get to this point (data available only to 1990).


Complete Story »

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Weekend Favs December Twenty Six

Weekend Favs December Twenty Six

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Weekend Favs December Twenty SixThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post [...]

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Freddie Mac: 90+ Day Delinquency Rate increases in November

Patricia Velásquez Jennifer Morrison Adrianne Palicki Amanda Righetti Michelle Branch

Weekend Favs December Twenty Six

Weekend Favs December Twenty Six

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Weekend Favs December Twenty SixThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post [...]

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Dallas Fed: Manufacturing Activity Continues to Grow

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Blog Post: ????? ?????????? ????? ??????? MSDN Magazine ?? ??????? ?????

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???? ??????????? ?????? ???? ? ?????????!

Jennifer Morrison Adrianne Palicki Amanda Righetti Michelle Branch Melissa Howard

The Smartphone Explosion

I've been dipping around the edges of this story with recent blog posts, but Seth Weintraub takes it a step further in this post in Fortune. Next year is likely to be the year that smartphones emerge as the default...

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A few for Graphs for 2010

Christina Milian Kelly Brook Robin Tunney Kate Groombridge Dania Ramirez

Blog Post: Professional Parallel Programming with C# - Master Parallel Extensions with .NET 4.0

0470495995

Gast�n Hillar, a fellow Intel Black Belt Developer, without a doubt knows what he is talking about when it comes to parallel programming. Professional Parallel Programming with C# is an excellent book for anyone looking to optimize their code for the latest generation of multi-core and many-core systems. As I write this blog post there are eight threads executing simultaneously and there are many more threads executing on the servers hosting this blog.

Anyone with even a modest amount of experience writing parallel code will tell you that parallel programming, done correctly, is hard. As Stephen Toub so eloquently states in his forward for the book, aParllel prgomrmnig s I ahrd. Without thread synchronization that simple sentence could be written to the screen just like that assuming that many threads were involved.

Whether you?re a seasoned developer with experience writing multi-threaded applications or someone new to programming, our collective futures are without a doubt many-core and the only way to embrace this many-core revolution is to also embrace parallel programming.

Gast�n Hillar begins by introducing the reader to task-based programming, imperative data parallelism, and imperative task parallelism. With that foundation the reader is then introduced to concurrent collections, coordination data structures, and declarative data parallelism using PLINQ. As Stephen Toub said earlier, parallel programming is hard and therefore there are also chapters on debugging code using task-based parallelism, testing and tuning parallel code.

Our futures are without a doubt parallel, the question is are you ready to embrace this future?

Professional Parallel Programming with C# will definitely help you, and your code, embrace parallel programming!

You can follow on twitter @GastonHillar or on the Dr. Dobb?s Go Parallel blog!

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Slowest States to Foreclose

> Here is a fascinating data point: The delay between the first late payment and a foreclosure referral varies widely from state-to-state. It used to be a good rule of thumb that by the time the 3rd payment was missed (90 days) foreclosure proceedings were likely to begin. But some states allow take 8, 10 [...]

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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Graphite: A Diamond in the Rough for Investors?

Jack Lifton submits:

Today I want to look at China's dominance of critical raw materials for clean-tech. Most people think that they left graphite behind when they graduated from pencils to pens early on in their school days, but the truth is that this slippery substance remains a crucial part of our daily lives. Consider the laptop computer, which has by and large replaced pens for most of us over the past decade — did you know that there is actually 10 times more graphite than lithium inside a lithium-ion battery?

Graphite has long been a key ingredient in steel, castings, lubricants, vehicle brakes, golf clubs, tennis rackets and — no surprise — pencils. But this polymer of carbon — a chemically identical sibling of both diamonds and coal — will become increasingly important in coming years due to its chemical, electrical and thermal properties. Its ability to remain stable in ordinary corrosive environments, conduct electricity and resist heat allow it to serve as a key component in applications like the storage batteries and nuclear electricity generation stations that will power us into the future.


Complete Story »

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D: Dive Into Mobile: The Full Interview Video of AT&T's Glenn Lurie

Here's the last of the onstage interviews--Emerging Devices head Glenn Lurie, also known as the man who brought the Apple iPhone to AT&T (for better and worse).

Maria Bello Jennifer Gareis

Developing a Dividend Value Portfolio for 2011 and Beyond

Craig Walendziak submits:

I am a firm believer in Buffett’s old adage that "there are no called strikes in investing." If an investor is patient the market will eventually err and they will be in a position to capitalize on the mistake. There is no need to chase stocks for the sole reason of owning them. For instance, I love Chevron (CVX) as a company. I feel it is the best integrated oil play on the market, but not at its current $90 cost basis. I will wait for Chevron’s price to come down, or allocate my capital elsewhere.

As a long term dividend investor, I have been twiddling my thumbs since July. Good entry points have been few and far between, with the market slowly, but steadily, grinding upwards. The economies seemingly renewed strength, pro-business Obama, QE2 and a Republican congress has changed my outlook for 2011. Barring any unforeseen macro events, the market wants to go higher and thus it will go higher. I have learned the hard way not to fight the fed.


Complete Story »

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Why These 7 Stocks Are Trending Now

Wall Street Cheat Sheet submits:

Amidst a slower-than-usual trading session, here is a group of stocks that are trending on our radar and the reasons why:

1) The AllState Corporation (NYSE:ALL): The company is suing Bank of American (NYSE:BAC) stating its Countrywide subsidiary sold Allstate more than $700 million in mortgage backed securities that Countrywide knew were probably going to default.


Complete Story »

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Blog Post: How To Create a Windows Live Writer Twitter Plugin That Supports bit.ly

Don?t get me wrong; I love the Twitter Notify plugin that you can download for Live Writer (which is itself the most amazing piece of software in existence today). However, I track almost all of my stuff through a bit.ly account and I tweet about every blog post. I want the option to use bit.ly instead of tinyurl. So, a new plugin must be created!

Looking for more tips on Writer plugin development? Check out the Top Tips for Writer Plug-in Developers at Scott Lovegrove?s blog.

Creating the solution

Right now, Writer supports plugins that run on the .NET Framework 1.1 or 2.0. You can still use VS2010, just target the project to the 2.0 framework to ensure that it will compile.

Before we start, make sure that you have Windows Live Writer installed. The API is installed by default in the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer.

Let?s go ahead and get started!

  1. Start by creating a new Class Library project. Make sure to target the project to .NET Framework 2.0.
    image
  2. Add a reference to the Windows Live Writer API using Browse on the Add Reference dialog. I?m on a 64-bit machine so this file is located at: 
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer\WindowsLive.Writer.Api.dll
  3. Add a reference to the .NET 2.0 System.Windows.Forms library.
  4. Rename your Class1.cs file to MyBitlyTweeterPlugin.cs
  5. Open MyBitlyTweeterPlugin.cs and add a using directive for System.Windows.Forms and WindowsLive.Writer.Api. This gives you access to the Writer API.

    using System.Windows.Forms;
    using WindowsLive.Writer.Api;

  6. Your main class should derive from the PublishNotificationHook base class. This gives your class the ability to execute just before or just after a post is published. Here?s the documentation for that class. Since we only want to tweet about something after the post has been published, we?ll override the OnPostPublish method of the base class. Here?s the code so far:

       1: using System;
       2: using System.Collections.Generic;
       3: using System.Text;
       4: using System.Windows.Forms;
       5: using WindowsLive.Writer.Api;
       6:  
       7: namespace MyBitlyTweeter
       8: {
       9:     public class MyBitlyTweeterPlugin : PublishNotificationHook
      10:     {
      11:         public override void OnPostPublish(IWin32Window dialogOwner, IProperties properties, IPublishingContext publishingContext, bool publish)
      12:         {
      13:             base.OnPostPublish(dialogOwner, properties, publishingContext, publish);
      14:         } 
      15:     }
      16: }
  7. Use the GUID Generator tool (you can find it by typing in GUID Generator in Windows Search) to generate a new GUID. You?ll need it to identify the plugin.

    image
  8. Adorn your class with the WriterPluginAttribute attribute using the GUID you generated.
    [WriterPlugin("CD0182F3-54DC-42FA-8330-469CA1E7EE58", "bit.ly + twitter plugin", Description="Allows you to send a tweet with a bit.ly url tied to your account.", PublisherUrl="http://www.danwaters.com")]
    public class MyBitlyTweeterPlugin : PublishNotificationHook
     ...


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Blog Post: WindowFromPoint, ChildWindowFromPoint, RealChildWindowFromPoint, when will it all end?

Oh wait, there's also ChildWindowFromPointEx.

There are many ways of identifying the window that appears beneath a point. The documentation for each one describes how they work, but I figured I'd do a little compare/contrast to help you decide which one you want for your particular programming problem.

The oldest functions are WindowFromPoint and ChildWindowFromPoint. The primary difference between them is that WindowFromPoint returns the deepest window beneath the point, whereas ChildWindowFromPoint returns the shallowest.

What do I mean by deep and shallow?

Suppose you have a top-level window P and a child window C. And suppose you ask one of the above functions, "What window is beneath this point?" when the point is squarely over window C. The WindowFromPoint function looks for the most heavily nested window that contains the point, which is window C. On the other hand ChildWindowFromPoint function looks for the least nested window that contains the point, which is window P, assuming you passed GetDesktopWindow as the starting point.

That's the most important difference between the two functions, but there are others, primarily with how the functions treat hidden, disabled, and transparent windows. Some functions will pay attention to hidden, disabled, and/or transparent windows; others will skip them. Note that when a window is skipped, the entire window hierarchy starting from that window is skipped. For example, if you call a function that skips disabled windows, then all children of disabled windows will also be skipped (even if the children are enabled).

Here we go in tabular form.

Function Search Hidden? Disabled? Transparent?¹
WindowFromPoint Deep Skip Skip It's Complicated²
ChildWindowFromPoint Shallow Include Include Include
ChildWindowFromPointEx Shallow Optional Optional Optional
RealChildWindowFromPoint Shallow Skip Include Include³

The return values for the various ...FromPoint... functions are the same:

  • Return the handle of the found window, if a window was found.
  • Return the handle of the parent window if the point is inside the parent window but not inside any of the children. (This rule obviously does not apply to WindowFromPoint since there is no parent window passed into the function.)
  • Otherwise, return NULL.

The entries for ChildWindowFromPointEx are marked Optional because you, the caller, get to specify whether you want them to be skipped or included based on the CWP_* flags that you pass in.

¹There is a lot hiding behind the word Transparent because there are multiple ways a window can be determined transparent. The ...ChildWindowFromPoint... functions define transparent as has the WS_EX_TRANSPARENT extended window style.

²On the other hand, WindowFromPoint defines transparent as returns HTTRANSPARENT in response to WM_NCHITTEST. Actually, that's still not true. If the window belongs to a process different from the one calling WindowFromPoint, then WindowFromPoint will not send the message and will simply treat the window as opaque (i.e., not transparent).

³The RealChildWindowFromPoint includes transparent windows in the search, but has a special case for group boxes: The RealChildWindowFromPoint function skips over group boxes, unless the return value would have been the parent window, in which case it returns the group box after all.

Why is RealChildWindowFromPoint so indecisive?

The RealChildWindowFromPoint function was added as part of the changes to Windows to support accessibility. The intended audience for RealChildWindowFromPoint is accessibility tools which want to return a "reasonable" window beneath a specific point. Since group boxes usually enclose other controls, RealChildWindowFromPoint prefers to return one of the enclosed controls, but if the point belongs to the group box frame, then it'll return the group box.

One place I see confusion over the various ...WindowFromPoint... functions is code which uses one of the functions, and then massages the result, unaware that there is already a function that returns the pre-massaged result for you. For example, I've seen code which calls WindowFromPoint followed by GetAncestor(GA_ROOT). This does a pointless down-and-up traversal of the window tree, searching for the deepest window that lies beneath the specified point, then walking back up the tree to convert it to a shallow window. This is the Rube Goldberg way of calling ChildWindowFromPointEx(GetDesktopWindow(), ...).

Next time, a look at the mysterious RealGetWindowClass function. What makes this function more real?

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Interview: Navigating the Small Business Social Web

Image: Luc Viatour/Flickr Social networking for small business took off about 6 years ago. If you're like me, and you didn't know that, then welcome to SaleSpider. This all-encompassing, small biz-specific social network touts its ability to... Read more

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Holidays by the Numbers

Even more holiday chart porn, via Daily Infographic: > click for ginormous infographic:

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How Colors Affect Purchases

Here's an interesting infographic from... Read more

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Blog Post: Reduced / Selective Test Data Execution to SAVE Time & Effort - Introduction

Context: Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence (ETL Execution)

Background:

If you have ever involved in DW/BI Testing, waiting for ETL execution to complete won't be an alien subject to you. Its not ONLY frustating to discover ETL fails at Step X after running for say 8 long hours but its ALSO a show stopper for you to continue with your functional testing and directly impacts your efficiency and effectiveness.

If there are performance lags (like low configuration h/w, network bandwidth etc), the ETL job is only going to take longer than expected and often times this adds to higher WAIT Time (a.k.a NON Productive time).


Root Cause:

If dev / test team wants to run the ETL with Production data, which can be really huge (in GBs or sometimes even TBs), due to the volume its obviously takes a long time.
Trade Off is REAL vs SIMULATED data. Testing with REAL data comes with a cost.

Is testing team the only victim?

Answer is NO. Even Dev team has to wait for entire ETL to run to see the changes made in the code while doing integration testing.


Why don't we create Smaller test data ALWAYS?


-> Due to the data integration and transformational complexities, the team has to have very deep domain knowledge of the business rules to create test data which satisfy the ETL conditions (often times lack of this results in ETL failure or ZERO o/p after the run)

-> If the complexity is high (consider data coming from multiple disparate sources) then creating data while maintainig logical relationship can turn out to be quite tedious and time consuming.

Why dont we SELECT REDUCED / SUBSET of Test data from Production?

This is the heart of this blog and we are going to emphasize on this in detail. Though the above sounds simple and the obvious solution but it has been observed that teams dont find it very popular time because of following important reasons:

1. Random sampling of data doesnt work. Many times it will result in ORPHAN RECORDS (where you might end up pulling child records without parents records from the source)

2. ETL might break if the keys are not found.

3. ETL might succeed but can result in ZERO output records as none of the business conditions got satisfied for the the sample data.

4. Business / Domain knowledge is required

What do we recommend to select SUBSET test data with success?

1. Select a pattern:

a) Master Data Driven

b) Transaction Data Driven:

2. Identify Business Conditions

3. Select Sampling Method

4. Copy the SELECTED test data to a test db

5. Modify Test Data to cover Boundary Value conditions

6. Run the ETL


What are the advantages?

1. Save Time

2. Save Effort

3. Save Hardware Cost (Less Data, Less Space and computational resources required)

4. Better Test Coverage (High Requirement Coverage)

5. Better Code Coverage

The subsequent post will focus on the above methods in detail....Please share your feedback and suggestions.

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Five Dividend Stocks to Consider for 2011

eChristian Investing submits:
As 2010 draws to a close, investors are once again breathing a sigh of relief. The year may not have produced the stellar market gains that some were hoping for, but the S&P 500 will finish with double digit gains nonetheless. Most importantly, investor fears of a double-dip recession appear to have subsided and we are becoming more confident that the worst is behind us.
While the overall market will close 2010 with a respectable 12-13% gain for the year, some dividend stocks have posted monster gains this year, like Caterpillar’s (CAT) 67% gain and DuPont’s (DD) 48% increase. Hopefully you were able to capture some of those nice gains in 2010. If not, there is always next year. Either way, now is the time that investors should start looking for the big stock winners of 2011 to add to their portfolio.
Here are five top dividend stocks for 2011 that we at eDividendStocks have highlighted for investors.
Cinemark Holdings (CNK)
Cinemark is the highest yielding stock on this list, a 4.4% dividend yield. However, there is more to this stock than just a nice yield. The theater operator is expected to grow earnings by 40% this year and Wall Street is looking for earnings to jump another 16% in 2011.
Despite the impressive growth rate, CNK trades at only 12x consensus 2011 earnings estimates. As a result Wall Street is bullish on the stock and analysts have an average $22 price target on the stock.
Merck (MRK)
Merck is going to end 2010 as one of the most disappointing stocks in the Dow Jones index. Despite the overall gains in the market, Merck will likely end 2010 in the red. Fortunately, investors can take solace in the stock’s impressive 4.2% dividend yield.
Wall Street analysts are expecting the pharmaceutical giant to get on track in 2011 with earnings climbing 13%. With the stock trading at less than 10x consensus 2011 estimates, the stock looks attractive at these prices. And of course investors get a 4.2% dividend yield as well.
Dr. Pepper Snapple (DPS)
Dr. Pepper has millions of die-hard fans, but no bigger fans than its investors this year. DPS shares soared 27% in 2010 and the beverage stock delivered an impressive 67% dividend increase in May.
We are looking for another strong year from Dr. Pepper Snapple in 2011 with earnings expected to increase by over 17%. Investors can likely expect another dividend increase next year on top of the stock’s current 2.5% dividend yield.
Hasbro (HAS)
The holiday shopping season has shown that consumers are once again opening their wallets to buy toys (both for their children and themselves). No one is more thrilled to see this than No. 1 toy maker Hasbro. The stock has been on a roll of late with the stock up 51% since the beginning of the year.
Wall Street expects Hasbro to continue its momentum into 2011 with earnings growth expected to accelerate to nearly 20% next year. Hasbro has been one of the best dividend stocks over the last 3 years and has the potential be a top dividend performer in 2011. We aren’t concerned about Hasbro’s 17x P/E multiple and expect to see the toy stock trading in the $50s next year.
International Paper (IP)
International Paper stock price will finish the year deceivingly flat. However, the real story is that the stock is up over 25% since September. That impressive performance was largely fueled by International Paper’s stellar third quarter results. In fact, last quarter’s earnings results were the best since 1995.
The company’s strong financial results have investors bullish on International Paper in 2011. The company is expected to raise its dividend next year and Wall Street is looking for 24% earnings growth. However, the stock is still attractively priced at only 10x consensus 2011 earnings estimates.
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

Complete Story »

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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Blog Post: Unity Lifetime Managers and WCF

This is a rehash/update of a post I had made on my personal blog.  I have made a couple of important updates to the code to fix the incorrect handling of Dispose() for a couple of the extensions.  I have also updated the project to VS2010 and Unity 2.0.

While the original post referenced a non-Microsoft ORM I used in a previous company, the concept/problem still applies to many problems, including the Entity Framework and it?s associated ObjectContext.

In a nutshell, the problem with the application surfaced because I was naively using the the per-thread lifetime manager included with Unity within my WCF service.  In the course of testing, I found that the objects using this lifetime manager seemed to occasionally persist across service calls.  After spending a couple of minutes looking at stack traces and general debugging, it finally dawned on me what was happening.  WCF's threading model, which was designed to make my services speedy, was actually causing the problem.

What was happening was that the same thread that was obtained in my first service call was being used to service my second service call.  Because I was using the per-thread lifetime manager in Unity, the object was not going to be removed from the container until the associated thread went away.  Well, in WCF, the threads don't ever really go away.  Uh oh!

After talking with Scott (who luckily used to work on Unity), we came up with the idea to build a Unity lifetime manager tied to WCF's OperationContext.  That way, our container objects would live only for the lifetime of the request, rather than the actual thread.

Starting with IExtension<OperationContext> and an implementation of IDispatchMessageInspector, I soon had an implementation of a UnityOperationContextLifetimeManager.  Once we used this lifetime manager instead of the per-thread lifetime manager, the problem disappeared.

Once that was done, I figured that since I did one of the extensible objects in WCF, I might as well do the rest.  The attached zip has lifetime managers to support all of the IExtensibleObject<T> implementations within WCF.

All of the lifetime managers are fairly straightforward, except for the UnityInstanceContextLifetimeManager.  This depends on the InstanceContext of a given service on which it is enabled.  PerSession is the default instancing mode for InstanceContext, but only when the transport supports sessions.  If the transport does not support sessions, the instancing mode is essentially PerCall.

I have included the Unity assemblies in the zip file for ease of compilation, but if you plan on using any of this code, I would point the references to wherever you have your Unity assemblies.

I?m working on getting these added to Unity Contrib, but for now, just download the code..

Please note that the testing application is not necessarily a best practice for self-hosting a service, but I wanted you to see how to use the lifetime managers without having to worry about IIS (since IIS 6 doesn't have WAS and doesn't support the net.tcp binding).  Make sure if you are on Windows 7/Vista, you run this sample application as admin.

Download - UnityWcfExtensions.zip

Zoe Saldana Rachel Perry

How to Get States Into the New Economy

Many think tanks produce dashboards of economic indicators to help government officials formulate public policy. While these tools are almost always well-intentioned, sometimes they aren?t well thought out, making them problematic to follow. One example is State New Economy Index, produced by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

This index is designed to provide policy makers with a set of 26 measures to guide efforts to move states to the ?new economy,?Read More

From Small Business Trends

How to Get States Into the New Economy

Kelly Brook Robin Tunney Kate Groombridge Dania Ramirez Lucy Liu

Are You Hiding From Your Customers on Social Media?

You?ve decided you?re going to be a company your customers love. To do it, you?ve dedicated real resources to social media, you?re listening before you speak, and you?re creating systems to help you manage what?s being said about you. Now you just have to stop hiding from customers.

Wait, what?

One of the most common mistakes small business owners make in social media is that they set up shop and then forget to tell anyone about it. Sometimes it’s fear,Read More

From Small Business Trends

Are You Hiding From Your Customers on Social Media?

Malin Akerman Melissa Joan Hart Bianca Kajlich Giulianna Ramirez Ashley Greene

D: Dive Into Mobile: The Full Interview Video of AT&T's Glenn Lurie

Here's the last of the onstage interviews--Emerging Devices head Glenn Lurie, also known as the man who brought the Apple iPhone to AT&T (for better and worse).

Hayden Panettiere Jules Asner Whitney Able Kelly Clarkson Natalie Portman

Top 15 Gold Mining Stocks With Bullish Options Sentiment

Kapitall submits:

The following is a list of the top 15 gold stocks in terms of the Put/Call ratio, which measures the number of open call option positions relative to the number of open put option positions.

Of all the gold stocks, these companies have the lowest Put/Call ratios, i.e. the highest level of bullish sentiment in the options market.


Complete Story »

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Misc: Europe, Consumer Sentiment, and more

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Home Sales: Distressing Gap

AnnaLynne McCord Emma Heming Vitamin C Scarlett Johansson Christina Ricci

Buying and Selling Assets

MBA Mondays are back after a week hiatus. We are several posts into a series on Merger and Acquisitions. In our last post, we talked about the key characteristics of mergers and acquisitions. And we touched on the two kinds...

Dania Ramirez Lucy Liu LeAnn Rimes Adrianne Curry Jennifer Gimenez

Demand Media's IPO?Which Won't Happen Until After the New Year Now?Depends on How It Accounts for Content

Demand Media's latest amended regulatory filing for its IPO--which will now be taking place in 2011--gives investors greater detail about how and for how long the company accounts for its content costs.

Apparently, pushing the envelope in content creation seems to also mean pushing it in accounting for it too.

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Home Sales: Distressing Gap

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Blog Post: UMBRACO en AZURE

Para Windows Azure existen unos artefactos de software pre construido llamados ACELERADORES.

Los aceleradores son en cierta forma plantillas de proyectos que nos permiten realizar tareas comunes con mucho trabajo ya adelantado para que nos podamos enfocar en hacer un par de cambios espec�ficos en nuestras aplicaciones y as� salir al aire pronto.

Encontramos por ejemplo aceleradores para PHP, aceleradores para JAVA y en este caso, aceleradores para UMBRACO.

Umbraco, es un CMS (manejador de contenido) basado en controles de usuario y escrito netamente en C#. Un manejador de contenido en pocas palabras es un portal web en el que personas sin conocimientos de programaci�n pueden agregar art�culos, noticias y en general cualquier tipo de contenido de una manera c�moda y constante en el tiempo.

Siempre han existido muchos manejadores de contenido por fuera de .NET. Hoy en d�a en el mundo .NET hay muy buenos manejadores como DotNetNuke (escrito en VB) Kentico (escrito en C# y en el cual por ejemplo est� basado el portal NuestroFramework.Net), MojoPortal (en C# y base de muchos portales de comunidad) y en este caso particular: Umbraco (C#). Lo mejor de todos estos CMS, es que aparte de ser muy buenos en lo que hacen, son todos Open Source, as� que se pueden usar y modificar de acuerdo a las necesidades.

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Hoy en d�a Umbraco tiene m�s de 85.000 instalaciones en todo el mundo, pasando desde importantes marcas como www.wired.co.uk; www.asp.net; www.peugot.com a sitios web de recetas, pasando por todos los intermedios. Esto gracias a que los CMS en general se instalan y ya quedan listos para empezar a ser usados. Encapsulan desarrollos repetitivos como seguridad, acceso a datos, presentaci�n, etc., ahorrando mucho tiempo y costo en los desarrollos.

Por esto mismo es que dese�bamos que el hecho de pasar la soluci�n a la nube de Windows Azure no significara mayores complicaciones para los desarrolladores que decidieran usar esta opci�n y de esta manera poder seguir aprovechando las ventajas de tiempo que ofrece el sistema.

As� pues la gente de Umbraco despu�s de evaluar numerosas plataformas de cloud para sus servicios opt� por Windows Azure, seg�n nos explica Paul Sterling; socio de Umbraco en este video; por lo cual decidieron generar el acelerador.

Este Umbraco Accelerator for Windows Azure permite al CMS correr sobre Windows Azure sin que se requieran cambios. Es un gran avance no solo en el campo de los CMS sino en el de los despliegues sobre Windows Azure que como ya es tradicional, nos ofrece grandes ventajas como el ahorro de casi todas las tareas de implementaci�n y un escalamiento que puede tender casi al infinito.

El acelerador puede ser usado con las versiones m�s actuales de Umbraco incluyendo la 4.5.2 y la 4.0.4.2. Solo es necesario un peque�o cambio en el esquema de la base de datos y absolutamente ning�n cambio al core de c�mputo de la plataforma. Otros cambios menores se deben hacer en los archivos de configuraci�n. En Codeplex se encuentra una completa gu�a para hacer la instalaci�n.

Umbraco soporta completamente la implementaci�n de SQL CE como repositorio de datos. Windows Azure tambi�n. Entonces un sitio peque�o podr�a correr sobre una de las nuevas instancias extra-small de Windows Azure por solo USD$0.05 la hora usando Umbraco y SQL CE que son gratuitos. Es decir, 36 d�lares al mes por un servidor dedicado.

Si lo que quiere es construir un sitio m�s grande igual puede usar los servicios del poderoso SQL Azure; es solo cuesti�n de configuraci�n. Y si adem�s quiere mantener m�s de un sitio al mismo tiempo en un mismo rol, ahora s� es posible con Windows Azure gracias a las caracter�sticas de full IIS que nos permiten manipularlo para poder tener varios sitios en la misma m�quina y as� disminuir a�n m�s los costos teniendo hosting para varios clientes cada uno con su propio sitio basado por ejemplo en Umbraco.

Seg�n Sterling, la raz�n por la que se escogi� Windows Azure, fue porque realmente era una plataforma de cloud en la que sencillamente se instalaba Umbraco y ya quedaba listo para funcionar. Cosa que no ofrec�an otros proveedores de Cloud que requer�an adem�s inicializar un sistema operativo y personalizar una gran cantidad de c�digo. De hecho, la versi�n 5 de Umbraco estar� basada nativamente en Azure aparte de que ya no ser� ASP.NET WebForms sino MVC 3.0. En este orden de ideas, el acelerador ser� para aplicaciones de legado y ASP.NET WebForms mientras las MVC ser�n nativas Azure. As� que Umbraco le apost� todo a Azure para su versi�n 5.0 que ser� liberada en 2011.

El acelerador fue creado por los talentosos Slalom Consulting con informaci�n tanto de Umbraco como de Microsoft. Sirvi� entonces para que Definition 6, partner certificado de Umbraco pudiera crear el primer sitio basado en Umbraco sobre Windows Azure: Cox conserves heroes.

La invitaci�n entonces es que prueben esta alternativa para empezar a ser productivos con sus sitios en solo minutos!

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Chinese stocks lower again

Responding for a 2nd day to its Christmas day interest rate hike, the Shanghai index fell for the 9th day in the past 10, lower by 1.7% and is now near a 3 month low. The Hang Seng index, closed on Monday, fell almost 1% and also is near a 3 month low. China faces [...]

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Blog Post: Phone 7 ????? #95?Windows Phone 7 Applist

Windows Phone 7 ??????????????????????????

wp7 applist BETA

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Marketplace Browser

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Microsoft ???????????????????????????????????????????

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Evening Reading

Sarah Silverman Larissa Meek Gina Carano Sanaa Lathan Ana Beatriz Barros

How to Get States Into the New Economy

Many think tanks produce dashboards of economic indicators to help government officials formulate public policy. While these tools are almost always well-intentioned, sometimes they aren?t well thought out, making them problematic to follow. One example is State New Economy Index, produced by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

This index is designed to provide policy makers with a set of 26 measures to guide efforts to move states to the ?new economy,?Read More

From Small Business Trends

How to Get States Into the New Economy

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BoomTown Talks About Smartphones and the Google Borg on ?Nightline?

The fine folks at ABC's "Nightline" news program were recently in Silicon Valley on a quest to find out whassup with this smartphone war going on between Google's Android operating system and the iPhone from Apple.

Here's the video.

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Sears, Kmart to Launch Netflix Competitor

TechCrunch submits:

By Leena Rao

It looks like Sears (SHLD) wants to get in the online movie market. The retail company, which also owns Kmart, has just announced that it is launching a Netflix-like movie download service, called Alphaline Entertainment.


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Real Estate Site Trulia Acquires Movity

San Francisco real estate site Trulia said it has acquired Movity, a buzzy stealth start-up that surfaces and aggregates geodata for home buyers and renters, such as noise, crime and pricing, from a variety of sources. Trulia declined to provide financial details of the transaction, but said the move was to provide better information for its users. Movity was founded this year with $1.3 million in funding.

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5 New Year?s Resolutions You Should Make at Work

This is a guest post by Sylvia Rosen. Whether you?re the CEO, department manager or new employee, making goals for the upcoming year is a great way to revamp your job efficiency. In addition to your personal New Year?s resolutions, you... Read more

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A Home Computer in 2004

Image:... Read more

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4 Traits to Look for When Assessing a Dividend Stock

Mark Riddix submits:

I was reading an interesting article about investing in the stock market by Gary Kaminsky on CNBC.com.

Kaminsky stated that


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Monday, December 27, 2010

The MBA Mondays Curriculum

I've gotten a number of suggestions about turning MBA Mondays (including the amazing comments from all of you) into a textbook. That's not going to happen. I don't want to publish these MBA posts in yesterday's technology. I want to...

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Freddie Mac: 90+ Day Delinquency Rate increases in November

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Happy Holidays!

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Will Angel Investment Slowdown Hamper Recovery?

Just as most sources of small business financing have slowed down in the recession, angel financing has gone through some changes, too.

Like all investors, angels became more cautious about their investments. But what long-term effect will this slowdown have? A recent study holds some useful news for small businesses that are seeking this type of financing.

Conducted by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, The Angel Investor Market In Q1q2 2010: WhereRead More

From Small Business Trends

Will Angel Investment Slowdown Hamper Recovery?

Shanna Moakler Portia de Rossi Jolene Blalock Nichole Robinson Monet Mazur

NYC Big Apps Version 2.0

Last year NYC ran a mobile and web app developer contest called NYC Big Apps. I posted about it and was one of a number of judges. The city and the participating developers thought it was a successful effort and...

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Commodities Show That Yes, The Global Economy Is Growing Again

prieur du plessis Prieur du Plessis submits:

The Recession Status Map below, courtesy of Moody’s Analytics Dismal Scientist, aggregates growth statistics from around the world and allows one to see at a glance which economies are in recession, at risk, recovering or expanding. Click here on the map to link to the interactive version. Following the “Great Recession”, it is clear that most countries are either recovering or expanding.


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Blog Post: Reflections on a Year of Change

2010 has been a game-changing year for technology. Slates, smartphones, 4G networks, user interfaces and cloud computing all captured headlines. We are living through an amazing period of disruption.

While slates and smartphones capture our imagination, cloud computing is having a more dramatic impact. Nearly all of us as consumers experience cloud technology in our daily lives: when we share photos, shop online, download and use applications for mobile phones, or use a search engine. This seemingly invisible technology has changed how we live and work, empowering us with new kinds of information and services, new ways of communicating and collaborating, and unparalleled convenience.

The ability to process and analyze petabytes of data in almost real time is transforming several industries and disciplines. In financial services this is likely to impact the way we manage many parts of our business from investment research to risk management.

Communications is getting a makeover. Instant messaging, presence, audio, video, web conferencing and voice have combined in a single platform to bring people and applications together as we move to a world beyond email.

What does 2011 have in store? Mobility is redefining our approach to technology. This means devices that are more powerful and portable, but also more connected. Social networking is making networks outside the firm as important if not more so than those inside.

We will see more fragmentation and increased competition in smartphones and slates. The huge leap in the technology of user interfaces will spread from the home to the workplace.  The demand for cloud computing will escalate, as smaller, more powerful portable devices leverage centralized processing. Cloud computing will revolutionize the desktop creating more thin clients than fat ones. We are moving closer to a world of continuous services - ubiquitous technology - revolutionizing how we work and play.

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This Week?s Links

Investing fads and themes by year (via Abnormal Returns). The top 10 trends of 2011, by Daily Reckoning. Steve Rubel on the stimulation economy. Immigrants to America are now seeking homes in smaller cities, from Miller-McCune.... Read more

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Blog Post: Setting Up A Wildcard Certificate in IIS 7, How to Avoid Those Certificate Mismatch Errors.

 

There are some articles that explain the need for a wildcard certificate, but not so many which discuss the steps to properly set this up in IIS 7 which was why I decided to write this article as it is a common situation we see here on the support team.

Background:

Imagine the following scenario. We have multiple sites (for example let us say site1.marei.com, site2.marei.com and site3.marei.com) which are bound to the same IP:PORT and are distinguished by their different host headers.  We have an SSL requirement for each and have requested and installed a unique certificate for each. Now upon browsing to the sites, users will see certificate mismatch errors. 

Why is this happening?

Well, we need to realize that an https request is handled through Kernel on IIS7 first.  What happens is that the host name is encrypted when the client sends the SSL blob.  Because the sites are using the same IP:PORT, IIS requires the host name as it is part of the binding to look up the correct certificate.  However since the hostname is encrypted in the SSL blob, IIS is not able to look up the correct site as the binding is incomplete.  In the end this means that IIS cannot decrypt the hostname which in turn will cause it bind to the first IP:PORT and will ignore the hostname giving certificate mismatch errors on the other sites.

What are the solutions?

There are three solutions to this issue:

1) We can keep the same IP for each site but change the SSL port to a unique value. This is not a very practical solution as users would now have to enter the port into the request as follows.

https://site.domain.com:444

2) A second option is to keep all sites on the default SSL 443 port and give each a unique IP. This is another option and is definitely more practical than the first. But what about the situation where there is a limitation on the number of available IPs or then why even use host headers?

3) The third option would be to use a wildcard certificate. Here you will have the wildcard certificate issued to *.domain.com or from our example, *.marei.com. So long as the domain remains the same, any host header will satisfy the certificate requirements and you will no longer receive those pesky certificate mismatch errors. Here are the steps to set this up.

Setting up a Wildcard Certificate in IIS 7:

We will start from where the wildcard certificate has been successfully installed.

1) In IIS manager, setup the 443 binding to site1.marei.com as with the host name as in the following example.

 

2) Open command prompt with administrator privileges and goto %systemdrive%\Windows\System32\inetsrv

Here we will use appcmd to create the bindings for the other sites.  You will know it was successful if you see "SITE object changed" after running the command.  The command syntax is as follows:

   appcmd set site /site.name:"<IISSiteName>" /+bindings.[protocol='https',bindingInformation='<IP>:443:<hostHeaderValue>']

        Please see the following screenshot for reference.

 

3) Now in IIS you can view the bindings but please note, you can not make any changes or else the binding settings will be reset. Any changes will need to be made via appcmd we used in step 2.

 

 

4) Now you can test the sites verifying we are using https:// and you can see there are no longer any certificate errors on any of the sites. I will show a screenshot of site2 for reference.

 

 

See you next time and I hope this was helpful!

Cheers,

Matthew Reid

 

 

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5 Ways To Reward Your Community

5 Ways To Reward Your Community

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

5 Ways To Reward Your CommunityThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing This time of year, in particular, people turn their thoughts towards saying thanks to their most important personal and business relationships. Traditional gifts such as gourmet food baskets, flowers and iPads go a long way towards this goal, but their as a few other [...]

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Lower Margins Pose Threat to Jones Apparel Group

Trefis submits:

Jones Apparel Group (NYSE: JNY) is a multi-brand company that designs and markets apparel, footwear, accessories, fragrances, and jewelry to women and children. The company’s primary brand was initially Jones New York, but over time it has acquired and established over 30 brands, including Nine West, Anne Klein and Easy Spirit. JNY’s brands cover a range of styles including sportswear, activewear, casual apparel, fashion, and formal attire.

Jones Apparel Group faces direct competition from comparable holding companies such as Liz Claiborne (NYSE: LIZ) and Phillips-Van Heusen (NYSE: PVH). In addition, many of JNY’s brands face competition from other department store mainstays such as Polo Ralph Lauren (NYSE: RL) and department store-owned private labels.


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Sunday, December 26, 2010

Global Debt Monitor in Three Pictures: Investors Won't Be Happy

prieur du plessis Prieur du Plessis submits:

Moody’s Analytics Dismal Scientist provides a handy set of charts (click to enlarge) for monitoring the global debt situation, as shown below. In short, not a set of pictures investors should become complacent about any time soon.

Deficits


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Misc: Ernst & Young accused of fraud, Banks accused of illegal break-ins

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Barron?s iPad App

I’ve been playing with the Barron’s iPad app, and I can tell you this: It is vastly superior way to consume the weekly magazine than either the print or web version. The app is free, but you need a subscription to access it, unless you buy single issues. I have been very critical of Rupert [...]

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