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Closed 11 years ago.
Google Wallet In-App Payments, https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/, developer documentation and tools are at the present best broken, incomplete, and/or lacking relevant information. I feel I must write this in the hope that they take note and perhaps hear our concerns and improve upon this. Also because there isn't much developer information out there right now about this new payment system, I hope this will generate positive activity.
The support documentation points to a very quiet forum at https://groups.google.com/group/in-app-payments/topics. Ideally, it could just point here where things are alive! ;)
Server side examples are documented only in part, directions suggest to use one of around five or six different libraries, but directions completely end there.
One library link leads to a GitHub stored library written in Python which, apparently, you must somehow rewrite one of the main files in order to use. Again this has not been documented by the Google Wallet team anywhere in the documentation. It's also very bizarre that they would choose to only write a small bit of a PHP tutorial, which, by the way, is a very popular, familiar, and ultra-highly-leveraged language. Instead, they wrote a main example in Python when the first example on the page, https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/tutorial, is written in Ruby...
The other surprising lack of quality about the docs is the page where they list the various error codes that one may come across while debugging. Its truly amazing that it's missing.
The errors may look something like this:
Uh oh. There was a problem.
We couldn't complete your purchase because of a technical issue.
Details of the problem below:
Unfortunately, we could not confirm your purchase with the merchant's
server. Your order has been canceled. Please contact the merchant if
this problem continues.
Additionally, nothing is written about these errors:
Uh oh. There was a problem.
We couldn't start your purchase because of a technical issue.
Details of the problem below:
Looks like there is an error in the setup for your purchase. Please
contact the merchant with this error message: Expected 3 components in
jwt: W29iamVjdCBPYmplY3Rd
None of them exhibit any professional expectations and/or definitive information to assist anyone.
Going another step further, the tools for producing JWT are broken:
http://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/jwtdecoder
The decoder decodes the JWT header as this:
{"alg":"HS256","typ":"JWT"}
https://checkout.google.com/customer/gadget/inapp/demo.html
The encoder only encodes the JWT header as this:
{"alg":"HS256"}
At least the docs have taught me one very useful thing, "The In-App Payments API uses a JSON Web Token—or JWT, pronounced like the English word jot." "jot?" Always good to know how to pronounce these things when you're down at the pub. I wouldn't want to make a fool of myself chatting up a girl with incorrect pronunciation like that!
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Closed 11 years ago.
I have been working on an application from past 4 months and it's very much depends on Google Maps on iOS platform. Recently one of my friends raised a concern that what if Apple Inc. decides to use a different Map provider?
It turns out after few searching on internet that Apple is going to replace Google Maps with some new advance 3D maps build by company called C3. (One of the researched resource). Well now I am worried of my already written code,
Should I delay my development work until this new technology gets in? or just wait until Apple announces officially.
Thanks
This is a common dilemma in programming, and there's a common solution too. Develop your own primitives - whether you need to display overlays, show landmarks, draw polygons and lines, do everything through stubs in your own code. If the underlying platform has to change, you then have a few well-known places to update to the new API.
Be very strict about not accessing the underlying API anywhere that isn't in your wrapper layer, and it should be straight-forward to change to a different later. Not free, of course, but so long as it's possible to implement the primitives you need in the new layer, you just need to change those, and can leave the rest of your project untouched.
It's not worth losing months' of having a finished project to avoid this situation.
Edit: This approach has another benefit - if you end up writing multiple primitive layers for different APIs, you may be able to let the user pick between them: you may have a (more expensive) higher-quality map layer which you charge for, and a cheap/free one which you don't - allowing people free access to a lower-quality version, and letting them buy an upgrade to the better maps. Or ... there are lots of possibilities. It's the same pattern some applications take with data-persistence layers, letting people run the same application on top of differing data platforms. There are lots of examples of this patterm.
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Closed 10 years ago.
To start with, I am well aware of the security/usability trade-off associated with captchas and do not need any explanation on that.
I know that reCAPTCHA is the state-of-the-art in captcha technology but we just do not want to use it for our site because of the difficulty faced by users to read distorted words. Our site is a study portal for students offering live online classes, so the users will be students (leaving certificate level) and teachers.
I have been searching for different ideas and found some good ones like:-
The Sesame Street Solution as given in http://www.usereffect.com/topic/2009-07-13-captcha-is-there-a-better-way.
Asking questions which are very easy for humans like "which one tastes better or ". But how many such questions do I need to store to be safe?
My purpose of asking this question is to get as many ideas as possible. I think there are still a lot of user-friendly but secure ways I could analyse before finalizing.
Please highlight the pros and cons of the method you suggest with reference to the way spam bots work. I am not much aware of many of their strengths and weaknesses.
Thanks,
Sandeepan
Reading distorted words is one thing, but also asking legit users to enter things like this can get quite annoying. So it's important you don't burden the user with anti-spam measures.
Damien Katz has used a negative captcha to stop spam bots. This technique, also called honeypot field, is easy to implement and doesn't require the user to do anything.
A more complex honeypot implementation is described by Ned Batchelder. It involves randomized field names and hashed values to make sure bots haven't tampered with the form.
In his article he states the following:
Spammers don't make software that can post to any form, they make software that can post to many forms.
So it only takes a simple trick to confuse the majority of spam bots. A little bit more magic will take care of the remaining bots.
Regarding the Sesame Street solution, asking simple question or selecting the correct animal from a list: these are questions that are hard for spam bots to answer, but they can be difficult for users as well. Especially if your site has an international audience, people with a first language other than English may have trouble understanding the questions. It may not be an issue with your student audience, but it is something to keep in mind.
One a colleague of mine implemented was to present a series of random images of things like tea cups, boats, cats etc. with checkboxes and ask the user to tick all the cats (say), or perhaps the boat and the tree.
The images were fairly simple two colour icons really, though you could use real photos if necessary.
Just make sure that your image names aren't representative of their contents.
First, ASP.NET has a control that isn't truly a "captcha," but in fact quite the reverse - a very simple script which makes sure that the visiting program can evaluate JavaScript. This gets rid of all but the most complex scrapers, especially if the JavaScript test has a structure that changes (i.e. it isn't just var y = 2; var x=y+(random number from server); verify(x))
Google and Craigslist both use phone numbers, which mandate that a nasty bot at least have access to an SMS-capable number (or speech recognition + voice line)
My favorite captcha is clicking on something that a computer can't recognize, such as picking out a cat from a short list of animal pictures.
It's important to consider accessibility and ease of implementation, which reCAPTCHA does very well.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Are there any tools for finding if a page is SEO complaint and if it's not then suggest something to make that page SEO complaint?
Also note that I want to do this research on offline pages i.e. these pages are not on web yet.
The best all purpose services are:
WooRank
WebsiteGrader
Xinu
Google has their own tools which as close as you can get to official 'compliance':
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Website Optimizer
Google Adwords Keywords Tool
SEO is an entire industry, and the rules are always changing.
(See here for a great list of some of the more pronounced changes on Google this year.
And here for some of the more noticeable differences from Bing.)
Some of the better SEO targeted sites are:
Web-strategist
webanalyticsbook
SeoBook
Viget
A monitoring service you should look at:
http://conjection.net/
One of the better articles I would recommend is:
- http://community.seobook.com/45711-post172.html
You should also make sure your page is loading optimally, it will effect the SEO even though it is its own field:
Load and performance - Pingdom and Uptrends.
If you are technically minded, install Yslow or PageSpeed and look at the score.
You can try the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Tried it once and it works well.
Got broken links on your site? Is your HTML SEO optimized? This fantastic free tool answers all these questions and hundreds more as it chews your angle brackets for you, creating flexible reports and a full queryable database of your site. -- Scott Hanselman
It's a bit late but I made a presentation with great tools for SEO that I used.
You will find a lot of Firefox Add-ons and Google Chrome Extensions to analyze your page and get suggestion to respect main search engines recommendations.
These slides also present other tools usefull for SEO expert like : google products, online services, wordpress plugins, ...
If it could help someone else, it's here : http://slidesha.re/KOoDad
Hope this help.
I don't know if "compliant" is the best term to use. There isn't a standard.
Rather, there is a set of best practices that have been determined through observation of search engine behavior in reaction to certain aspects of page/url structure.
That being said, I would first take a look at article on About.com titled "White Hat Vs. Black Hat SEO" You definitely want to avoid the black-tactics while abiding by the white-hat tactics.
In a nutshell, the focus on white-hat tactics is on quality content relevant to the subject. Without that, your pages are pretty much dead in the water (assuming you don't subscribe to black-hat techniques).
Offline tools, I did not know which will do this.
You could upload it for a short time or protect it with a password if you do not want that other people see the webpages.
Online-Tool: http://www.linkvendor.com/
I have found the following site useful with Keyword Destiny and more content driven queries in the past... http://www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html
i use this tool quite often. it doesn't look very good but i found the data to be really useful
article underground keyword density tool
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Closed 10 years ago.
Can anyone point me to a cognos API document and some example code? The best for me is that the API can be access thru python. But examples in other languages are good also.
The Cognos SDK for .net is horrible; I know because I just spent 3+ days trying to get even basic functionality working. Its clear that the person who developed the sample applications has no idea how to work with Web Services or .net.
I managed to find a Cognos.WSDL file that you can try to use to generate your own proxy classes; but; its not WS-I compatible and thus won't work with wsdl.exe
The cognosdotnet.dll and cognosdotnetassembly's are overbloated. There are nearly 1000 classes defined in there. They basically wrapped up their entire API set into a single assembly.
Cognosdotnet.dll defines all the types; and many of them are confusing to work with; but all the raw materials you need are there.
Cognosdotnetassembly.dll defines the serializers. Why they even include them is beyond me. This file is huge (46MB) and provides zero value. The problem is that there is a dependency on this assembly with the type definitions (cognosdotnet.dll).
What I ended up doing was taking Refelector; and code generating the cognosdotnet.dll; then removed the dependency on the serializers. I then created my own wrappers around it to make the API more friendly.
I would recomend starting with the reportrunner example as a starting point; to at least try and get your connectivity working etc..
You haven't indicated which version of Cognos you're seeking assistance for, but if it's for Cognos 8, you should have the full API docs and sample code if you have the Cognos 8 SDK.
The SDK samples are provided mostly in Java, though some are .NET.
The SDK Developer Guide (again, Cognos 8) should contain enough information to help you get started on putting your own library together.
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Closed 11 years ago.
As best-behaved as I try to be about keeping my unit tests disconnected from the database, etc. etc, it still seems inevitable that my day will be interrupted by small regular enforced breaks while I wait for my machine to do something boring.
I personally find swordfighting makes me lose my train of thought. I'm often 'in the zone' when I run a build or suite of tests, and I'd prefer something that keeps me in the same focussed frame of mind, jumping me right back to hacking as soon as the build / test run / migration is done.
I used to fantasize about a Tetris plugin for Visual Studio that popped up during the build and then paused and disappeared automatically when the build completed, but I never actually did anything about it. Lately we were thinking about building something into autotest which helps you learn Spanish while you wait for the tests to run, or maybe feeds you relevant stack overflow questions to answer.
So. Suggestions please. Points for fun yet rewarding activities.
StackOverflow
Coffee
StackOverflow
Side project coding
See also How to keep concentrated and focused while waiting for your compiler?
I normally use this time to read blogs ant to check the bug list, to see if there is something pending that I forgot to do.
Ideally?
Write up notes on the fixes/feature added. (Notebooks are GREAT when two years from now you need to decipher something you did.)
Read something that pertains to your work.
Check for other small errata and bugs.
Document (for other people) your feature/code.
Realisticly:
Stackoverflow
Slashdot
Lifehacker
Blogs
Use the time for ordering a new, much faster developer machine / server.
Coffee, Chitchat, StackOverflow.
I usually read blogs, articles, mostly work related.
I have dedicated time to read everything not work related (30 minutes time-frame after lunch).
I also find myself going through our websites to see if I find a bug or something that can be improved.
And on a Friday (like today:) ) I read Freak Angels:) Warren Ellis on-line free comic. The man is on a rampage on that one:) Check it out:http://www.freakangels.com/?p=23