UNLOCK THE SECRETS OF THE GIANTS OF THE WEB

10 tips for improving your business

Since 2007, OCTO intervenes on problems involving User eXperience as a key element in helping its clients achieve innovative products and applications, useful and usable in tune with the complexity of their business challenges. After our first meeting during USI 2012, we are delighted to welcome the Adaptive Path team for a workshop which will walk you through UX from strategy to practice, promising intesity despite a playful approach.

Jesse James Garrett’s team, Adaptive Path, will give for this workshop UX Essentials ( Programm details – pdf version) entirely dedicated to UX, provided for the first time in France on April the 10th, 11th and 12th !

« After my keynote at USI, I looked forward to working with OCTO again. I am happy we have this opportunity to work together to bring UX thinking to France! »

Jesse James Garrett, Chief Creative Officer, Adaptive Path.

Each day includes fun, hands-on activities designed to build skills and provide a framework that participants can immediately put into practice.

This workshop is led by Adaptive Path practitioners and will examine the key elements that contribute to creating great experiences.

Participants will spend a day immersed in strategy, followed by a day focussed on research, then wrapping it all up with a day devoted to putting those insights into action.

I want to subscribe to the UX Essentials worskhop

Android offers a great tool to leverage the quality of apps : Lint. Lint can check missing translations, unused resources and other common mistakes in Android programming.

Nevertheless, up to now it was not possible to use Lint inside automated builds (i.e. on a Continuous Integration server like Jenkins). This situation just changed with release 3.5.1 of the Android Maven Plugin.
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Last year we created a system called « call for paper », which allows anyone to propose their session and be part of the official program! Its success was made apparent through over 50 proposed sessions and nearly 20 callbacks!

Once again this year, we invite you to propose your session, with the deadline set on the 4th of March, 2013:

• Do you have a biography, a session title and resume, and a high-definition picture?
• Are you an opinion leader, a referent on one or more IT subjects, a super geek, a manager, or part of IS department?

Then you’re ready! We need your contibutions, your ideas, and your knowledge to make the 5th yearly USI an event as great as the reputation that proceeds it. As many as 700 guests are expected this year!

The USI team will determine, after having studied your proposition, the length of your session (20 or 40 minutes). For a callback, the first criteria will be the quality of the proposed session’s resume (depth and form). Thus we count on you to send your best work, one that will astound members of the jury.
The USI team will study every proposition and select those that seem the most interesting. You may be invited to come present your session beforehand, and the final list of accepted candidates will be announced at the end of March 2013.

You can also see the list of proposed sessions online, and vote for the ones that you most want to see at USI 2013. The USI site has everything you need to post sessions on popular social networks, allowing you to easily share your session with those around you. So don’t hesitate!

Click here to submit a session for USI

A glass to your candidacy then, and thank you!
The USI team

You are reading this article, so it’s likely that you are a geek who loves to test software products and make complex infrastructure mocks like an OpenStack cloud.
Seeing four or five desktops stacked in your living room doesn’t make your wife happy. Right? Your dream is to have a very monolithic machine made of several motherboards, switch, disks, power supply, DVD reader and network cards. It was also my dream, and once I decided to turn it to reality. In fact it was a must to study cloud technologies in good conditions. OK, it took me some time and money but it was a good investment! Let’s have a look at my “cloud machine:

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The stress test is a very important step when you go live.

Good stress tests help us to:

• ensure that the software meets its performances requirements
• ensure that the service will deliver a fast response time even under a heavy load
• get to now the scalability limits which in turn is useful to plan the next steps of the development

Hadoop is not a web application, a database or a webservice. You don’t stress test a Hadoop job with a heavy load. Instead, you need to becnhmark the cluster which means assessing its performances by running a variety of jobs each focused on a specific field (indexing, querying, predictive statistics, machine learning, …).

Intel has released HiBench, a tool dedicated to run such benchmarks. In this article, we will talk about this tool.

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Ok, you have decided to setup a Hadoop cluster for your business.

Next step now, planning the cluster… But Hadoop is a complex stack and you might have many questions:

• HDFS deals with replication and Map Reduce create files… How can I plan my storage needs?
• How to plan my CPU needs?
• How to plan my memory needs? Should I consider different needs on some nodes of the cluster?
• I heard that Map Reduce moves its job code where the data to process is located… What does it involve in terms of network bandwidth?
• At which point and how far should I consider what the final users will actually process on the cluster during my planning?

That is what we are trying to make clearer in this article by providing explanations and formulas in order to help you to best estimate your needs.

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This is the END.

We created an iPad app for Keytrade Bank, and we just launched it!, You can download it here.

Please contact us if you what to talk with us about this reference & our expertise!
 

Mixed feelings: happiness because it’s really a major achievement, nostalgia because we really loved building this app and now we are just slightly nervous as we hope users will love to consult their accounts, transfer money and trade using the Keytrade app as much as we enjoyed creating it.

For the banking part, this app allows one to customize accounts (rename accounts, assign pictures to each account), to consult the list of transactions, to transfer money and to visualize the monthly In & Out of an account with clear charts.

With respect to trading, our app offers a heatmap updated in real time with all the markets and all companies (when available from provider) and, of course, buying and selling stocks is possible from within the app. One can also consult the personal portfolio containing an overview of all trades.

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This article is about testing private methods in android. This is a fairly common problem in android (even in Java at large) and can be solved easily. The technique proposed here provides the additionnal benefit of using a traditional way of solving the problem in the Java world. (suspense :) )

Using the android platform, you are used to divide your application into two projects :

• one for the main source code of your application,
• one for the tests

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I had the chance, with Alexis Flaurimont, to speak about the usefulness of parallel programming at Breizh C@mp this year. One of the goals was to demonstrate that parallel programming is a lot easier to code than a couple of years ago.

During the presentation, we used the Monte Carlo method. It is, I must confess, an embarrassingly parallel algorithm. Perfect to demonstrate that parallelization can greatly improve an application performances.

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