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I am developing Shopptique in Monotouch, and when I was tasked with changing the navigation bar to the application logo, I too, was stuck. I could not find any solutions referencing Monotouch. This is a screenshot of the application with its standard iOS UINavigationBar.

In order to change the UINavigationBar background image, modify your ViewWillAppear() function. And if you are accessing the Navigation Bar that is inside your UINavigationController like I am, that too needs to be referenced.


using Monotouch.CoreGraphics;
CGImage navban = CGImage.FromPNG(new CGDataProvider("Images/yourimagehere.png"), null, false, CGColorRenderingIntent.Default);
NavigationController.NavigationBar.Layer.Contents = navban;


The key is to access the NavigationBar.Layer.Contents. By setting that to a CGImage, you can change the background image on the UINavigationBar in Monotouch. CGImage also offers a FromJPG function as well. It takes in as parameters, a new CGDataProvider which takes in the location of the image, and I left the other parameters as null or their defaults. Here is the result:

Thanks, and happy iPhone programming with Monotouch.

We implemented a plethora of robust e-commerce functionality. Specifically, chutney ships with custom shipping rules to include flat rate shipping and dynamic UPS calculated shipping. There is a full fledged WordPress blog attached to the site to boost SEO. The system supports gift certificates, one-time coupon codes, repeating coupons, newsletters.

We included a restricted wholesale portal as well as a publicly available retail store.

We take the business needs and logistical challenges of automated service (helping people without needing a human attendant) and use our most diligent programmers to develop code that just has to work – rain, shine, power outage!

The system works with the iMIS membership database to allow for a member directory and restricted access to certain pages.

We also implemented an event registration system to help manage attendance and revenue collection for their annual event.

For those without the patience to view the slides, HTML5 is an ever evolving standard. It constitutes of many features which are supported in part or whole by new devices and web browsers. Those features make life easier for the developer while making the web more engaging.

*We used Mark’s Amazon referrer id — so if you are going to buy the book use that link and he’ll make a few extra nickels!

The problem is this:

A movie theater made a total of 1 dollar (100 cents). The men cost 5 cents each, the women cost 2 cents each, and the children cost 1 cent for every 10 that were there. There were a total of 100 people in the movie theater. How many men were there? Women? Children?

Read the problem carefully. There is only one solution to this problem. Now if you want to try and solve it, go ahead, before continuing on with the rest of this blog post.

This problem has intrigued me ever since my grandfather challenged me many years ago. More specifically, I was curious to know if there is an algorithm that can solve this problem without trying every possible combination, or using some other brute force method. Regardless, I wrote a naive algorithm that solves it in O(n^3) time, which can be found here, written in Python. I then went to Reddit.com with my algorithm and question to see if anybody knows the answer.

There was, in fact, one person on Reddit who seems to know quite a bit about these problems. The member stated that this is a type of problem known as a Diophantine problem. His remarks:

In this case, your three independent lines of logic are:
1) 5*m + 2*w + 1*(c/10) = 100
2) m + w + c = 100
3) m, w, c are positive integers
This is a particular type of problem called a Diophantine problem because it requires the variables to be discrete integers. In school, you’re taught to solve for a three-variable system you need three algebraic equations… but this is not exactly true. What you really need are three independent lines of logic. It just happens that an linearly-independent algebraic equation is the easiest “line of logic” to be described mathematically.

That last line was pretty shocking. I’ve gone through life this whole time believing that if you have three unknowns, you need three algebraic equations to solve for each of the variables. The individual continues:

Check out section 5 of this paper. It has the solution to a problem very similar to yours (the only difference being that the women cost three cents instead of two).

I read the paper (only 10 pages), and it indeed describes, with much simplicity, how to solve these types of problems. I encourage you to check out section five. It is very interesting.

Now if we apply what we’ve learned to our problem above, we can solve it in O(n) time. Another Redditor took that advice and outlined the solution.

5m + 2w + .1c = 100
m + w + c = 100

Basically, since there is n-1 linear equations and n unknowns, that means there is one degree of freedom. That means that if we can find just one of the unknowns then we should be able to find the rest. I’m going to eliminate variables to find the line defining the search space.

Choosing to eliminate women, we have
5*m + 2*w+.1c=100
- 2(m+w+c=100)
____________________
3m-1.9c=-100

This line represents the ‘search space’ that we are trying to look for. Any solution on this line where c and m are both integers is our solution. Rearranging this line, we get

3m=1.9c-100
m=(1.9c-100.0)/3.0

Then, all you have to do is iterate over the possible range of the unknown variable c and find one that fits the contraint (e.g., provides a positive integer solution). Here’s my python solution.


for c in range(0,100, 10):
m=(1.9*c-100.0)/3.0
if(m.is_integer() && m > 0):
print m


this code printed out “11.0″. The next step is to plug in m=11.0 into our two equations, to get
55+2w+.1c=100
2w+.1c=45
and
11+w+c=100
w+c=89

Then, we are left with two linear equations in two unknowns, which is trivial to solve using 9th grade algebra. Our final solution is m=11,w=19,c=70

I hope you learned a little about Diophantine problems today and that it is possible to solve for three unknowns when you have three pieces of logic, but two equations.

A big thanks to the users of Reddit.com for their great help.

In a NoSQL environment, data is stored as a “Document”. Documents are independent of each other, and contain any kind of information so long as it contains a primary key. There are no restrictions from document to document. Documents map one-to-one with associative data structures such as PHP arrays, Python dictionaries, and Ruby hashes.

NoSQL scales “horizontally”, making it efficient and convenient to use in cloud and cluster environments. They are highly scalable and are apt for big data solutions. In MySQL, “Joins” are considered extremely slow, requiring the programmer to result in caching data. However, with NoSQL, there are no Joins since all the data you need is in your document. The disadvantage to NoSQL, however, , since NoSQL is quite new, there does not exist significant documentation, or as vast as a support community compared to SQL which has been around for decades.

NoSQL is most applicable when one needs to store continuous documents that are not dependent on data relationships. For example, CraigsList uses MongoDB, a popular NoSQL database. CraigsList is simply a list of postings where each post corresponds to one document in a MongoDB database. Twitter uses a complicated set of NoSQL databases for analytics and its people search functionality. Facebook developed an open-source NoSQL database known as Cassandra that powers their inbox search feature.

NoSQL is definitely not the be-all end-all solution for database needs, but it is a quite useful and powerful new method for storing data for a particular set of use cases. Real world systems often require a combination of both MySQL and NoSQL databases. As the NoSQL community grows, we will surely see more companies adopt schema-less solutions.

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/5545198613/mongodb-live-at-craigslist

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/01/how-twitter-uses-nosql.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra

With beautiful design inspiration by the world renown Pentagram, we integrated a multitude of features to include a custom event calendar, a lead capture system, and a jQuery based program finder.

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