Pfew, I took me months to get him convinced, but finally it happened: another U2U colleague has started to blog: Kevin DeRudder! Kevin is working on ASP.NET, AJAX, … and recently was rehabilitated to the SharePoint religion as well!
Anyway let’s hope he keeps on posting some good stuff, I’m already subscribed!
I’m on the train thinking about this ticket buying system.
I mentioned today that the experience of buying tickets was the “worst” user experience which I’m sure leads to excess traffic which in turn leads to the web site falling over and a bunch of people being extremely unhappy.
The Problem:
More demand than supply, no ability to queue for tickets in the traditional sense. No indication of ticket volume or availability.
A Solution:
“I call it the lolly scramble approach.”
1. Get interested people to pre register at the ticket master website.
2. Work out the number of tickets & the number of registered users.
3. Put people in manageable groups. More people than tickets available.
4. Invite everyone into a “room” just before the tickets go on sale.
S. Drop the tickets in move them around the screen and have people “try” and click on a ticket. Hell even have more crowded rooms for people wanting to buy a bundle of multiple tickets.
6. Once the tickets have all been clicked game over and everyone would have had a shot of buying some.
This system would be easy to build in .Net with a WPF/E or flash UI.
Is no one thinking about this stuff?
If you’re interested in using RSS to do more than simply publishing your blog, like
taking advantage of it to integrate your applications, then you ought to take
a look at /n
software‘s RSSBus platform,
which recently reached Beta 4. It’s a really cool piece of technology with
lots of connectors and the best part is that extending it is incredibly easy.
Basically, RSSBus provides a way to create connectors that generate RSS feeds with
whatever you like (from bringing in a real RSS feed from another site, to keeping
track of the most recently updated customer contacts in your CRM), and then provides
a simple scripting language that allows you to manipulate those feeds in whatever
way you like. The introduction
whitepaper tells it best, so go check it out.
And speaking of BizTalk adapters, it’s worth noting as well that /n
software released back in October Version 2.0 of their BizTalk
Server Adapter Suite, which includes AS2, Secure FTP (SFTP and FTPS), RSS, SSH,
Secure SMTP/POP/IMAP, SMPP, SNPP, XMPP adapters and more. Lots of good stuff here.
Somehow I had missed on reporting this one!
Jes%u00fas
Rodriguez continues his excellent series of posts on the new features of the .NET
3.0 Adapter Framework (aka WCF adapter framework) included in BizTalk server 2006.
This time, he covers some of the facilities available for generating
metadata in Line of Business (LOB) adapters like SAP or SQL Server. Worth a look.
On a related note, Jes%u00fas also mentioned that
his employeer, Two
Connect, recently released their new SSIS
tasks for SalesForce.com, which complement their existing Salesforce
BizTalk Adapter. Cool Stuff.
The new metadata generation is one of the areas that present significant differences between the .NET 3.0 and BizTalk adapter frameworks. In a previous post I covered some of those differences from a conceptual standpoint. Ultimately, those differences…(read more)
I knew the visa pre-sale for Red Hot Chili Pepper tickets would be popular but this is ridiculous!
I started at http://www.visaentertainment.co.nz I got to the site http://www.ticketmaster.co.nz/promo/wbismv the site became unresponsive at 9am when tickets went on sale.
I got on at 9:01 am and got to the screen to choose my tickets… woot!
Problem #1
The form let you purchase upto 50 tickets in one go!
(I chose 2 tickets)
Problem #2
There was no indication of how many tickets were for sale and when they had sold out!
I select 2 general admission tickets seated anywhere…
After responding to the “cryptic code” to stop robots buying tickets I got this friendly message.
I proceeded to try every combination of tickets for every seating option to find the same result in all.
Good to see there were actually some tickets… they turned up on Trade Me at $600 each.
PATHETIC!
There are software tools for just about anything these days. One class of tools lets users like you and me convert a CHM into other formats including, not surprisingly, PDF. Sure, you could grab a copy of most of the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation…(read more)
Get it while it’s hot folks – some very nice tips in there.