In Servlets we have something called "Cookies". I know why Java got the name "Java" and why the Apple company got the name "Apple" and so on.
I would like to know why the name "Cookies" was chosen.
In the early 1970s a group of programmers working at Xerox came up with an idea for storing a bit of information on another computer. They appear to have called this little chunk of information a cookie after a character from the popular (at that time) Andy Williams Show. This "Cookie Bear" character would follow Andy around asking for a cookie. The action of tracing these little files back to their original source is also referred to as following a trail of cookie crumbs.
Source
Related
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/name/ID
Linking to my app product page gives "Not Available for bots to index"
What is the proper syntax to place a href link to the product so that users online can view it as html?
I don't have a final solution, just a workaround.
We've been seeing the same issue with our own app for the past few days and we've started seeing reports of people encountering this with all kinds of apps, including even Microsoft's own AppInstaller. It seems to be a server-side rate-limiting/caching issue at Microsoft as changing anything in the URL fixes the problem temporarily -- only to get back to the same issue a few hours later. We also found that VPN-ing to some locations (mostly to the US) helped as well, and this throttling seems to be specific to an app & an availability region (when it got blocked, it blocked across all Europe, but not in US for example). It seems to come & go as we have not seen a big drop in new install counts.
As a temporary solution we ended up adding a random string to the end of the URL. We used GCLID as we found it to be the least offensive way -- it could just as well be a legitimate tracking ID we pass over. So now the URL we link to looks like this:
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/[APPNAME]/[APPID]?gclid=f-3579a28842a7bcac7ba630d698829e9b
Where the "f-xxxx" value is generated using the md5() of the timestamp -- but it could be any ever-changing value, even a random number.
We've reached out to our MS contact about this but we haven't heard back yet.
I encountered the same issue half an hour ago, but it seems recovered now.
If you own an app, you can confirm Product identity in Partner Center:
You can share the direct link and Store ID to help customers find your app in the Store:
URL: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/*12CharsAppId*
Store ID: 12CharsAppId
Store protocol link: ms-windows-store://pdp/?productid=12CharsAppId
The above address would be recommended but the apps.microsoft.com URL should also work.
I work on apps.microsoft.com. I can confirm that there was an issue on our end that appeared on August 23. This issue has been resolved.
And the proper link, of course, is this:
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/[your product id here]
Background
I'm writing an Alexa Skill and looking to get pieces of information from the user.
The following conversation for example:
Alexa: What month were you born at?
User: April
Alexa: Good. And what was your favorite movie?
User: April
The problem
Given the following utterances:
GetMonthIntent {month}
GetMovieIntent {movie}
Once a user answers April for the second time, the GetMonthIntent might be triggered.
What I have tried
Asking the user to specify which piece of information is giving by using the following utterances:
GetMonthIntent Month {month}
GetMovieIntent Movie {movie}
The question
What is the right way to make Alexa wait for a single term answer based on the current context?
In the same vein as the other answers here, you should take a look at the newest Node.JS library here, which handles state out of the box:
https://github.com/alexa/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs#making-skill-state-management-simpler
You could define:
State_Launch
State_Month
State_Movie
And then return the proper error response if anything other than the GetMovieIntent or GetMonthIntent (etc.) intents are called in the wrong state.
You would have to do data validation on the server side to make sure the "month" is a valid one, and movies are even harder to validate unless you have a list of expected values. That is, if you care to parse them for use beyond repeating back.
Unfortunately, there is no solution. There is no way to specify the 'context' in which a user reply should be interpreted, so you have to tell the user "what was your favorite movie? Please say 'my favorite movie is' and then the name of the movie".
Here are two ASK feature requests that I think would address your issue:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/content/idea/41062/creating-something-to-help-with-more-structured-qu.html
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/content/idea/55525/allow-a-response-to-specify-a-set-of-expected-inte.html
Personally I think this is fairly important so I voted for those, but they are not near the top.
I ran into this same problem when I created the "Who's on First? Baseball Skit" skill. I handled this by:
Create a sequence number for each response given by Alexa
Write this number to the "session" in the response.
The session is then passed back to your skill by Alexa in the next request.
Read the sequence number from the request to know what the previous question was.
If a given intent could be the answer to multiple questions (eg. month and movie in your case) then use the sequence number to determine which it is.
This should give you ideas on how to deal with repeated answers. The session is quite easy to use. Other options include writing the userId and status to a database like DynamoDB, but I find that the session works in most cases.
I'm trying to create some skills for my Echo (for my own use, I'm not concerned about the invocation names not getting through review). I've set my invocation name as "the car" (I also tried "car"). I wanted to be able to ask what my battery status is and order Alexa to pre-heat the car (a Renault ZOE).
It seems no matter what I put in for my utterances, I always get the same responses:
Anything with "battery" in gets "I don't have a battery"
Anything with "heat" in gets "You have no smarthome devices, blah blah"
It seems like the words "battery" and "heat" result in things never matching my skill (even when I said the invocation name).
Is there anything I can do so that it will route actions along the lines of the above to my skill?
Edit: Today I get different results trying "preheat the car".. I just get a weird tone. It never calls my skill, nor shows anything in the Home section of the app. What does this tone mean?
Video here: https://twitter.com/DanTup/status/804615557605654528
With help from Reddit I managed to get this working reasonably well. the car was a bad invocation name and I wasn't following the documented way for invoking skills (joining words etc. are fairly restrictive).
I'm now using my car as the invocation name and can do the following:
Alexa tell my car to preheat
Alexa ask my car for battery
As of Dec 2017, it's still not possible to have completely custom phrases with Alexa. Google Assistant/Home does support this however, via shortcuts.
I've found related questions (like this one), but nothing that directly answers my question: I need a direct way to turn artist name and track name into a spotify link. Just like spotify does for the local file list (some are links, some are not, I assume because spotify doesn't have those tracks.
How can I turn something like artist:'Francolin' and track name:'Hospital Song' into a Spotify uri without searching for it (which will return multiple results, and I don't know which one to use). How does the Spotify local files list do it?
The local files list in the Spotify client makes URLs like this:
spotify:local:Coldplay:Mylo+Xyloto:Paradise:277 (spotify:local:ARTIST:ALBUM:TRACK:LENGTH_IN_SECONDS). You can verify this by right-clicking a local file in your list that hasn't been linked to a Spotify track and choosing "Copy Spotify URI".
When playing the track, the client resolves it without using the backend at all - it searches its own local list of known files and plays whichever matches it closest.
When linking to a "real" Spotify track, the client asks the backend to do the dirty work. There isn't a web API for this (it's in libSpotify though), but basically the backend does a few heuristics to the data* then chooses the track that matches the given data (including length) the closest.
*Basically, the track metadata is stripped to a simpler form when searching, and the album has less weighting since an artist may release the same track on multiple albums.
I ran into the same problem as you but I don't think there's a direct way to convert it. Instead I just run for a search with "artist:'$artist' title:'$title'", which should be very accurate, and just use the first result in the array of results.
Before I ask my question, let me just say that I know very little about RSS feeds. I tried using Google Reader a long time ago, but I just don't think RSS is my thing. Now, onto the question.
The company I work for uses a custom web-based help desk system. I have been asked to implement RSS feeds into it. Specifically, I have been asked to create an RSS feed for each support agent's tickets. This way, support agents that use RSS readers can be notified whenever a ticket gets assigned to them. The thing is I don't know if this is something that RSS would be good for. Tickets get reassigned frequently. So let's say that John Doe and Jane Doe both subscribe to their respective RSS feeds to be notified whenever a ticket gets assigned to them. A ticket gets assigned to John Doe. 30 minutes later, the manager changes his mind and reassigns the ticket to Jane Doe. How would this look in John Doe's RSS reader? Would there be a way to remove it from his feed or what?
Thank you very much.
It sounds like you are trying to use RSS as a notification system. When you do look at it completely from this perspective, it isn't a terrible idea. At worst, the support person would get notified of a new ticket and log in to be pleasantly surprised that the ticket is no longer there.
If you look at something like JIRA, it uses email notification to inform people that tickets have been assigned. If a ticket gets reassigned, the person it was assigned to and the person that it will be assigned to are both notified of the change. People have the option to "listen" to tickets and will get notified of any work done, status change, etc that happens on the ticket.
You might want to consider doing something like this. Maintaining lots and lots of RSS feeds might get quite cumbersome. What happens if a support person leaves? With email you could simply redirect the email to another person.
As far as deleting a message, I'm pretty sure that once it is sent to the client, it is there for good.
RSS feeds are generally available to public without restrictions (if they know the URL). You may decide to use .htaccess and provide clients with login credentials.
It would look just fine in John's Doe RSS reader after he refreshes it.