I remember I did this once around 2005, but since then a lot of things have changed and don't remember details. I basically want to stream a meeting between two places. Back then I needed a video camera, a software on my computer and a streaming server.
How is live streaming done these days? Is there an easy way to arrange a live video streaming? I can't afford hiring a professional, so I need to do this myself.
Another question is that at one end of the communication, I mean at one of the places, the Internet connection is not too much reliable. Do you think live streaming would be a bad option for this kind of environment?
If you just need 1:1 there are tons of sites that will do this for free. Start with google, maybe look at tinychat (ignore the scary people), or just search for 'free video chat'.
No need to install SW or setup a special server unless you have specific requirements that go beyond what you have described.
You have to know a little about networking to be able to do live streaming this days.
Fast Internet connection is needed.
check out this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=NG&hl=en-GB&v=Sm3DfJ2ISRc.
Hope you find it helpful. You can start from there.
Related
Intro:
I'm working for a contractor company. We're making SW for different corporate clients, each with their own rules, SW standards etc.
Problem:
The result is, that we are using several bug-tracking systems. The amount of tickets flow is relatively big and the SLA are deadly sometimes. The main problem is, that we are keeping track of these tickets in our own BT (currently Mantis) but we're also communicating with clients in theirs BT. But as it is, two many channels of communication are making too much information noise.
Solution, progress:
Actual solution is an employee having responsibility for synchronizing the streams and keeping track of the SLA and many other things. It's consuming quite a large part of his time (cca 70%) that can be spend on something more valuable. The other thing is, that he is not fast enough and sometimes the sync is not really synced. Some parts of the comments are left only on one system, some are lost completely. (And don't start me at holidays or sickness, that's where the fun begins)
Question:
How to automate this process: aggregating tasks, watching SLA, notifying the right people etc. partially or all together?
Thank you, for your answers.
You need something like Zapier. It can map different applications and synchronize data between them. It works simply:
You create zap (for example between redmine and teamwork).
You configure mapping (how items/attributes in redmine maps to items/attributes in teamwork)
You generate access tokens in both systems and write them to zap.
Zapier makes regular synchronization between redmine and teamwork.
But mantis is not yet supported by Zapier. If all/most of your clients BT are in Zapier's apps list, you may move your own BT to another platform or make a request to Zapier for mantis support.
Another way is develop your own synchronization service that will connect to all client's BTs as each employee using login/password/token and download updates to your own BT. It is hard way and this solution requires continious development to support actual virsions of client's BTs.
You can have a look a Slack : https://slack.com/
It's a great tools for group conversations
Talk, share, and make decisions in open channels across your team, in
private groups for sensitive matters, or use direct messages
one-to-one.
you can have a lot of integrations tools, and you can use Zapier https://zapier.com/ with it to programm triggers.
With differents channels you can notifying the right people partially or all together in group conversation :)
The obvious answer is to create integrations between all of the various BT's. Without knowing what those are, it's hard to say if that's entirely possible. Most modern BTs have an API and support integrations. Some, especially more desktop based ones, don't. For those you probably have to monitor a database directly.
Zapier, as someone already suggested, is a great tool for creating integrations and may already have some of the ones yo need available. I love Slack and it has an API, but messages are basically just text and unless you want to do some kind of delimiting when you post messages to its API, it probably isn't going to work.
I'm not sure what budget is, but it will cost resources to create the integrations. I'd suggest that you hire someone to simply manage these. Someone who's sole responsibility is to cross-populate the internal and the external bug tracking system and track the progress in each. All you really need is someone with good attention to detail for this, they don't have to be a developer. This should be more cost effective than using developer resources on this.
The other alternative is simply to stop. If your requirements dictate that you use your clients' bug tracking software for projects you do for them, just use their software and stop duplicating the effort. If you need some kind of central repository or something for managing work maybe just a simple table somewhere or spreadsheet with the client, the project, the issue number, the status and if possible a link to the issue in the client's BT. I understand the need and desire for centralizing this, but if it's stifling productivity, then the opportunity costs are too high IMO.
If you create an integration tool foe this, you will indeed have a very viable product. This is actually a pretty common problem.
Company I work for is currently preparing to expand and take on emergency support (after hours support).
We currently have a wiki setup with a lot of information.
However, due to the fact that bits and pieces are scattered across entire wiki (dependable on what department etc).
Whoever is on support that night/weekend needs to quickly be able to help customer with their problems. eg. if our server is being very slow there needs to be troubleshooting guide of some sort so that person can dig straight into it.
I have googled quite a bit but I was not able to find anything useful. So here is a question:
How would you structure your wiki (by topic, by symptoms, by solutions?) to minimize time person has to look for information?
Personally, I think using some sort of syntax such as
Symptom: large CPU utilization
Keywords: slow server, large cpu usage
That way when you search through wiki it would most likely come up in search. But what if issue is more software related - such as miss-configuration?
This is wiki API url
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
Also you need to have a Web Service which will accept the params on which search will be performed as well as UI page.
Web Service will have all the logics which ever needed.
Is there a Wikipedia API?
I'm looking to track how many people on the web have made my software program file available for download without my permission.
I've thought of searching for my product name and file size to catch possible thieves.
Do you think a web search API is the best way forward?
EDIT: I plan to use the detection data for survey purposes.
There are web analytics companies which could probably help you more than a roll-your-own solution. Consider the companies that big music and film vendors use, or check with the Business Software Alliance.
Ultimately, you are chasing your tail if you are looking to thwart piracy with the results of this kind of activity. However, if you are steadfast that you must try to understand what is going on, you need professional (web analytic) help. There are so many variations out there that you need someone experienced in tracking this kind of information, since you could easily get a false sense of security, or an inflated sense of activity.
No. This ultimately doesn't help you. What are you going to do? Send them emails tellings them to buy your software? Sounds like a spam filter will get it.
I would suggest in prevention rather than detection. A registration or activation process is pretty popular and reasonably successful, though if you have an amazing app it won't stop the really bad people from hacking it, however it will make it much more difficult.
I am thinking about using Gears in a project, but I have doubts about it.
Do you think that Gears will really be (or already were) accepted by the community as the state-of-art solution for what it purposes?
Although Gears seems to be awesome, I think that the community is kind of scared to use it.
What do you think about it?
The client side storage in HTML 5 will provide an upgrade path from Gears, should Google ever decide to deprecate Gears. There's an interesting article about Google using an abstraction layer so that Gears is not required on browsers supporting HTML 5 client-side storage.
Google Gears is not a long-term solution. On February 19, 2010, Google announced that Gears is being discontinued, and that they believe the correct solution is through standards-complaint options such as HTML5.
Gears have SQL engine (SQLite), with scripting (Javascript), and good internet support.
In fact, I don't see anything like it on the market.
And there is the potential to position Gears as serious client side framework, if Google manage to push Gears on small devices (on which both SQLite and javascrpt allready work).
They don't seem to hurry. Can't tell why.
Google has invested a lot of time in it and has also integrated it into some of their web apps. I imagine its here to stay for a while but then there is always risk involved with stuff like this.
Google is about to roll out "offline GMail", which is built on Gears. Given the market share of GMail, I'd expect that to be the killer app for Gears adoption.
But it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. You might want to wait, if you can afford to, and see how offline GMail catches on.
There is always risk with any platform, but at least with this one google are eating their own dog food. I.e. It is required for gmail offline, it is the way you'll take google docs offline.
I think you're probably as safe with Gears from a continued support perspective as you are with most other frameworks. If it meets your needs as it is in its current state, it sounds like a good fit.
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Okay, I will shortly be starting down the path of windows mobile development. I know nothing about the subject really and I am looking for people with experience to let me know of any gottchas you may know of.
Right now I dont even have a breif of what is requied but the assumption is that the application will be very little more than a bunch of CRUD forms for updating data. The only other requirment knowladge I have is that the application will need to support offline storage when there is no signal avaliable. This in turn will obviously require some kind of syncronization when signal returns.
My initial thoughts are that the application will primarily be a front end to interact with a web service layer. Im assuming that WCF will be an appropriate technology for building these services? I also thought that SQL Server CE would be a good route to go down with regards to the offline storage issues.
Any knowlage that you feel is useful within this domain would be appreciated. Advice, links, books anything appreciated.
EDIT: It has been noted that there are two ways to go with off-line synchronization. To either use some form of message queuing or to use SQL synchronization tools. Could anyone offer a good comparison and introduction to these?
EDIT 2: After a little more digging I get the impression that there are basically 3 different approaches I can use here:
Emmbeded Database to query against then syncronization online, when able
MSMQ along with .NET remoting
WCF with ExchangeWebServiceMailTransport bindings using Exchange Server.
Now, there has been a nice few points raised on the first issue, and I think I understand at some level the issues I would face. But I'd like to get a little more information regarding MSMQ implementations and using WCFs new bindings.
Here a few words from my experience so far (about 9 months) of .net Windows Mobile development.
Well you are occasionally connected. (Or more likely occasionally disconnected). You have to choose whether you are going to use messaging with queues (i.e. WCF/SOAP/XML or something like it) or database synchronisation. I choose the SQL synchronisation route so I can't really comment on messaging. The SQL synchronisation route is not hassle free!
If you go down the sync route with SQL compact like me you basically have two choices. SQL Server merge replication or the newer ADO.NET Synchronisation services. If you choose the former you need to be really careful with your DB design to ensure it can be easily partitioned between mobile subscribers and the publisher. You really need to think about conflicts, and splitting tables that wouldn't normally be split in a normalised DB design is one way of doing that. You have to consider situations where a device goes offline for some time and the publisher DB (i.e. main DB) and/or a subscriber alters the same data. What happens when the device comes back online? It might mean resolving conflicts even if you have partitioned things well. This is where I got burnt. But SQL Merge Replication can work well and reduces the amount of code you have to write.
Roll your own DAL. Don't attempt to use datareaders etc. directly from UI code and don't use typed datasets either. There may be third party DALs that work with Windows Mobile (i.e. I know LLBLGEN does, might be worth a look) but Linq-to-SQL is not supported and anyway you need something lightweight. The chances are the DAL won't be too big so roll it yourself.
If you are using .net you'll probably end up wanting some unimplemented platform features. I recommend using this inexpensive framework to give you what your missing (especially as related to connectivity and power management) - http://www.opennetcf.com/Products/SmartDeviceFramework/tabid/65/Default.aspx
Windows Mobile devices partially switch off to save power when not in use. If you are doing a polling type design you'll need to wake them up every x mins. A normal .net timer class won't do this. You'll need to use a platform feature which can be used from OpenNetCF (above). The timer class is called LargeIntervalTimer and is in the OpenNetCF.WindowsCE assembly/namespace (I think).
Good Luck!
SqlCE is only one of the options available for local data storage on a Windows Mobile device, and although it's an excellent database it has limitations. For one thing, SqlCE will not work (period) under encryption (in other words, if your user encrypts the location where your SDF file is, you will no longer be able to access the data).
The second (and most critical) weakness of SqlCE lies in the RDA/Merge Replication tools. SqlCE Merge Replication is not 100% reliable in situations where the network connection can drop during replication (obviously very common in Windows Mobile devices). If you enjoy trying to explain missing or corrupted data to your clients, go ahead and use SqlCE and merge replication.
Oracle Lite is a good alternative to SqlCE, although it too doesn't work properly under encryption. If encryption is a potential problem, you need to find a database engine that works under encryption (I don't know of one) or else write your own persistence component using XML or something.
Writing a WM application as a front end that primarily interacts with a web service in real time will only work in an always-connected environment. A better approach is to write your application as a front end that primarily interacts with local data (SqlCE, Oracle Lite, XML or whatever), and then create a separate Synchronization component that handles pushing and pulling data.
Again, SqlCE merge replication does this pushing and pulling beautifully and elegantly - it just doesn't work all the time. If you want a replication mechanism that works reliably, you'll have to write your own. Oracle Lite has something called a snapshot table that works very well for this purpose. A snapshot table in Olite tracks changes (like adds, updates and deletes) and allows you to query the changes separately and update the central database (through a web service) to match.
This thread I just posted on SO a few days ago has proven to be a great resource for me thus far.
Also the Windows Mobile MSDN WebCasts are a wealth of information on everything from just getting started up to advanced development.
I would suggest Sqlite for local storage. From the last benchmark I ran it was much better than SqlCe and you don't have to do stupid things like retain an open connection for performance improvements.
Trade-offs being that the toolset is less rich and the integration with other MSSql products is nil. :(
you might want to refer to this:
getting-started-with-windows-mobile-development
You shouldn't be intimidated for windows mobile development. It isn't much different from desktop development. I strongly recommend that you use .NET Compact Framework for development and not C++/MFC.
Some useful links:
Mobile section at the Code
Project. You would find a lot of
articles, a little digging is needed
to find the appropriate one.
Smart
Device Framework from OpenNetCF
offer valuable extensions to the
compact framework.
When you install
the Mobile SDK, you will find under the
Community folder links for the
Windows Mobile and CF framework
blogs. These are also valuable
resources.
Regarding your application, you are right about the WCF and the SQL Server CE. These are the proper ways for handling communication and storage.
Some hints for people coming from a desktop world:
You need to have some sort of power management. The device may automatically go to suspend state. Also, you shouldn't consume power when you don't have to.
Network connectivity is a difficult issue. You can register notifications for when a specific network (Wi-Fi, GPRS) becomes available or unavailable. You can also set the preferred means of communication.
Make the UI as simple as possible. The user uses his thumb and/or a pen and he is probably on the move.
Test in a real device as early as possible.
"24 Hours of Windows Mobile Application Development" from the Windows Mobile Team Blog has some good resources
If you can, try to start from the user use cases and work back to the code, rather than vice versa. It's really easy to spend a lot more time working on the tools than working on the business problem. And thinking through user requirements will help you consider alternate strategies, because a lot of the patterns you know from normal .NET don't apply.
I've done lots of intermittent application development of exactly the type you are describing, and an on-board database works just fine. The MSMQ/WCF stuff just adds conceptual overhead without adding much value. You need a logical datastore locally anyway, and replication at this level is a simple concept that you want to keep simple, so the audit trail is easily monitored and debugged. MSMQ and WCF tend to hide things in unfamiliar places.
I upvoted the SqlLite suggestion BTW. MS doesn't have their persistence story stabilized yet for CE.
For the database replication bit I highly recommend Sybase Ultralite. In terms of flexibility and performance it knocks the socks off SQL CE
I had to do this once. Weird setup with Macs for development, and we were all Java programmers. And a short deadline. PowerPC macs too, so no chance to install Windows for Visual Studio development, never mind that the money for this would never have appeared.
We ended up writing applications using Java, running on the IBM J9 virtual machine, with SWT for a user interface. Entirely free development stack. Easy to deploy. Code ran on any platform we desired, not just PocketPC/WinMob.
Most of the work was on the server side anyway - the database, the web service server. The logic. The reporting engine. The client side wasn't totally simple however - would get the form templates from the server (because they changed frequently), the site details (multi-site deployment), generate a UI from the form template (using some SWT GUI components that are wonderful for PocketPC development, like the ExpandBar), gather data with a point and click interface (minimising keyboard entry where possible), and then submit it back to the server.
For offline storage we used XML files on the device itself. More than enough for our needs, but yours may differ. Maybe consider SQLite?
There are a couple links you can check out to start with:
http://developer.windowsmobile.com
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/default.aspx
If you have a sticking point while developing, there are also Windows Mobile dedicated chats on MSDN that you can attend and ask your questions. The calendar hasn't been updated yet, but the next ones should be in January. You can find the schedule here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx
I am going to add an additional question to this post, as its been active enough and hopefully will be helpful to others as well as me. Ok, so after playing around I now realize that standard class libraries cannot be included in windows mobile applications.
Now the overwhelming advice here seems to be use an embedded database, though I now do have use cases and it appears that I will need to have document synchronization as well as relational data. With this in mind service layer interaction seems inevitable. So my question is how would I share common domain objects and interfaces between the layers?
"Document synchronization" - does that mean bidirectional? Or cumulative write-only? I can think of mobile architectures that would mainly collect and submit transactions for a shared document - if that's your requirement, then we should discuss offline - it's a long (and interesting) conversation.
Owen you can share code from Compact Framework -> Desktop, it's only Desktop -> Compact Framework that has compatability issues if you use certain objects that are not supported by the CF.
While a desktop lib doesn't work on CF a CF lib WILL work on the desktop, you can also run CF.exes on the desktop!
Just create a CF library as the project that defines your base objects / interfaces etc.
This book sshould e essential reading for all Windows Mobile developers: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/books/10294.aspx
For developing windows mobile applications you must have the basic tools like silverlight, visual studio, windows phone emulator and sqlite as your database storage.