Search Results

Search found 8250 results on 330 pages for 'dunn less'.

Page 143/330 | < Previous Page | 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150  | Next Page >

• Star Trek inspired home automation visualisation

  - by Zak McKracken

  I’ve always been a more or less active fan of Star Trek. During the construction phase of my house I started coding a GUI for controlling the house which has an EIB. Just for fun I designed a version inspired by the LCARS design used in Star Trek TNG and showed this to my wife. I showed her several designs before but this was the only one, she really liked. So I decided to go on with this. I started a C# WinForms application. The software runs on a wall mounted Shuttle Barebone-PC. First plan was an industrial panel-pc but the processor was too slow. The now-used Atom is ok. I started with the LCARS-controls found on Codeproject. Since the classic LCARS design divides the screen into two parts this tended to be impracticable, so I used my own design For now the software is able to: Switch lights/wall outlets Show current temperatures for all room controllers Show outside temperature with a 24h trend chart Show the status of the two heat pumps Provide an alarm clock (e.g. for cooking) Play internet radio streams Control absence Mute the door bell Speak status messages via speech synthesis For now, I’m working on an integration of my electric meter. The main heat pump and the electric meter are connected to my LAN. I also tried some speech recognition, but I’ve problems with the microphone. I't’s working when you are right in front of the PC, but not far away, let’s say on the other side of the room. So this is the main view. The table displays raw values which are sent over the EIB – completely useless but looks great For each floor I have a different view. Here you can see the temperatures and check the status of the lights (the buttons are blinking when a light is switched on) This is the view for the heat pump:   Next step would be to integrate a control of my squeezebox server (I use different Squeezeboxes through the house as a multiroom audio solution)

  Read the article

• Why unhandled exceptions are useful

  - by Simon Cooper

  It’s the bane of most programmers’ lives – an unhandled exception causes your application or webapp to crash, an ugly dialog gets displayed to the user, and they come complaining to you. Then, somehow, you need to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully, you’ve got a log file, or some other way of reporting unhandled exceptions (obligatory employer plug: SmartAssembly reports an application’s unhandled exceptions straight to you, along with the entire state of the stack and variables at that point). If not, you have to try and replicate it yourself, or do some psychic debugging to try and figure out what’s wrong. However, it’s good that the program crashed. Or, more precisely, it is correct behaviour. An unhandled exception in your application means that, somewhere in your code, there is an assumption that you made that is actually invalid. Coding assumptions Let me explain a bit more. Every method, every line of code you write, depends on implicit assumptions that you have made. Take this following simple method, that copies a collection to an array and includes an item if it isn’t in the collection already, using a supplied IEqualityComparer: public static T[] ToArrayWithItem( ICollection<T> coll, T obj, IEqualityComparer<T> comparer) { // check if the object is in collection already // using the supplied comparer foreach (var item in coll) { if (comparer.Equals(item, obj)) { // it's in the collection already // simply copy the collection to an array // and return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); return array; } } // not in the collection // copy coll to an array, and add obj to it // then return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count+1]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); array[array.Length-1] = obj; return array; } What’s all the assumptions made by this fairly simple bit of code? coll is never null comparer is never null coll.CopyTo(array, 0) will copy all the items in the collection into the array, in the order defined for the collection, starting at the first item in the array. The enumerator for coll returns all the items in the collection, in the order defined for the collection comparer.Equals returns true if the items are equal (for whatever definition of ‘equal’ the comparer uses), false otherwise comparer.Equals, coll.CopyTo, and the coll enumerator will never throw an exception or hang for any possible input and any possible values of T coll will have less than 4 billion items in it (this is a built-in limit of the CLR) array won’t be more than 2GB, both on 32 and 64-bit systems, for any possible values of T (again, a limit of the CLR) There are no threads that will modify coll while this method is running and, more esoterically: The C# compiler will compile this code to IL according to the C# specification The CLR and JIT compiler will produce machine code to execute the IL on the user’s computer The computer will execute the machine code correctly That’s a lot of assumptions. Now, it could be that all these assumptions are valid for the situations this method is called. But if this does crash out with an exception, or crash later on, then that shows one of the assumptions has been invalidated somehow. An unhandled exception shows that your code is running in a situation which you did not anticipate, and there is something about how your code runs that you do not understand. Debugging the problem is the process of learning more about the new situation and how your code interacts with it. When you understand the problem, the solution is (usually) obvious. The solution may be a one-line fix, the rewrite of a method or class, or a large-scale refactoring of the codebase, but whatever it is, the fix for the crash will incorporate the new information you’ve gained about your own code, along with the modified assumptions. When code is running with an assumption or invariant it depended on broken, then the result is ‘undefined behaviour’. Anything can happen, up to and including formatting the entire disk or making the user’s computer sentient and start doing a good impression of Skynet. You might think that those can’t happen, but at Halting problem levels of generality, as soon as an assumption the code depended on is broken, the program can do anything. That is why it’s important to fail-fast and stop the program as soon as an invariant is broken, to minimise the damage that is done. What does this mean in practice? To start with, document and check your assumptions. As with most things, there is a level of judgement required. How you check and document your assumptions depends on how the code is used (that’s some more assumptions you’ve made), how likely it is a method will be passed invalid arguments or called in an invalid state, how likely it is the assumptions will be broken, how expensive it is to check the assumptions, and how bad things are likely to get if the assumptions are broken. Now, some assumptions you can assume unless proven otherwise. You can safely assume the C# compiler, CLR, and computer all run the method correctly, unless you have evidence of a compiler, CLR or processor bug. You can also assume that interface implementations work the way you expect them to; implementing an interface is more than simply declaring methods with certain signatures in your type. The behaviour of those methods, and how they work, is part of the interface contract as well. For example, for members of a public API, it is very important to document your assumptions and check your state before running the bulk of the method, throwing ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, InvalidOperationException, or another exception type as appropriate if the input or state is wrong. For internal and private methods, it is less important. If a private method expects collection items in a certain order, then you don’t necessarily need to explicitly check it in code, but you can add comments or documentation specifying what state you expect the collection to be in at a certain point. That way, anyone debugging your code can immediately see what’s wrong if this does ever become an issue. You can also use DEBUG preprocessor blocks and Debug.Assert to document and check your assumptions without incurring a performance hit in release builds. On my coding soapbox… A few pet peeves of mine around assumptions. Firstly, catch-all try blocks: try { ... } catch { } A catch-all hides exceptions generated by broken assumptions, and lets the program carry on in an unknown state. Later, an exception is likely to be generated due to further broken assumptions due to the unknown state, causing difficulties when debugging as the catch-all has hidden the original problem. It’s much better to let the program crash straight away, so you know where the problem is. You should only use a catch-all if you are sure that any exception generated in the try block is safe to ignore. That’s a pretty big ask! Secondly, using as when you should be casting. Doing this: (obj as IFoo).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = obj as IFoo; ... foo.Method(); when you should be doing this: ((IFoo)obj).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = (IFoo)obj; ... foo.Method(); There’s an assumption here that obj will always implement IFoo. If it doesn’t, then by using as instead of a cast you’ve turned an obvious InvalidCastException at the point of the cast that will probably tell you what type obj actually is, into a non-obvious NullReferenceException at some later point that gives you no information at all. If you believe obj is always an IFoo, then say so in code! Let it fail-fast if not, then it’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong. Thirdly, document your assumptions. If an algorithm depends on a non-trivial relationship between several objects or variables, then say so. A single-line comment will do. Don’t leave it up to whoever’s debugging your code after you to figure it out. Conclusion It’s better to crash out and fail-fast when an assumption is broken. If it doesn’t, then there’s likely to be further crashes along the way that hide the original problem. Or, even worse, your program will be running in an undefined state, where anything can happen. Unhandled exceptions aren’t good per-se, but they give you some very useful information about your code that you didn’t know before. And that can only be a good thing.

  Read the article

• DIY Homemade Hybrid Rocket Engine [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Remember the guy with the cool DIY astronaut ice cream build? He’s back with a mini hybrid rocket engine that runs off oxygen and acrylic. I built a small rocket engine for demonstration purposes. The engine is built from a 2″ diameter acrylic rod through which I drilled a 0.5″ hole. The oxygen at 80 psi or less is passed through the hole and then is forced through a convergent-divergent nozzle at the tail end. The nozzle’s throat is about 0.25″ and expands to 0.625″. I lit the engine by inserting a burning cotton swab (with wooden stick) while a small amount of oxygen was flowing. The acrylic catches fire very easily in a pure oxygen environment. The engine can be throttled and shut off completely, which is a major benefit to hybrid engine designs. Solid-fuel rockets cannot be throttled or shut off, which makes them difficult to control. [via Make] HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

  Read the article

• Why the recent shift to removing/omitting semicolons from Javascript?

  - by Jonathan

  It seems to be fashionable recently to omit semicolons from Javascript. There was a blog post a few years ago emphasising that in Javascript, semicolons are optional and the gist of the post seemed to be that you shouldn't bother with them because they're unnecessary. The post, widely cited, doesn't give any compelling reasons not to use them, just that leaving them out has few side-effects. Even GitHub has jumped on the no-semicolon bandwagon, requiring their omission in any internally-developed code, and a recent commit to the zepto.js project by its maintainer has removed all semicolons from the codebase. His chief justifications were: it's a matter of preference for his team; less typing Are there other good reasons to leave them out? Frankly I can see no reason to omit them, and certainly no reason to go back over code to erase them. It also goes against (years of) recommended practice, which I don't really buy the "cargo cult" argument for. So, why all the recent semicolon-hate? Is there a shortage looming? Or is this just the latest Javascript fad?

  Read the article

• Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?

  - by Cliff

  As a professional Java programmer, I've been trying to understand - why the hate toward Java for modern web applications? I've noticed a trend that out of modern day web startups, a relatively small percentage of them appears to be using Java (compared to Java's overall popularity). When I've asked a few about this, I've typically received a response like, "I hate Java with a passion." But no one really seems to be able to give a definitive answer. I've also heard this same web startup community refer negatively to Java developers - more or less implying that they are slow, not creative, old. As a result, I've spent time working to pick up Ruby/Rails, basically to find out what I'm missing. But I can't help thinking to myself, "I could do this much faster if I were using Java," primarily due to my relative experience levels. But also because I haven't seen anything critical "missing" from Java, preventing me from building the same application. Which brings me to my question(s): Why is Java not being used in modern web applications? Is it a weakness of the language? Is it an unfair stereotype of Java because it's been around so long (it's been unfairly associated with its older technologies, and doesn't receive recognition for its "modern" capabilities)? Is the negative stereotype of Java developers too strong? (Java is just no longer "cool") Are applications written in other languages really faster to build, easier to maintain, and do they perform better? Is Java only used by big companies who are too slow to adapt to a new language?

  Read the article

• Some fun with RadGridView for Silverlight literally !

  April Fools' Day is a great excuse for me to do something funny with RadGridView. So todays post will have less geekness and more fun than usually.   Silverlight being a great platform and RadGridView being enormously flexible control provoked me to do something that you can not exactly call the typical Line-Off-Business application.   So enjoy this small  Pexeso game clone created with the help of RadGridView for Silverlight and some standard Silverlight re-styling techniques. The rules are simple : Try to open two identical cards at the same time. The goal of the game try to open all cards this way. My best score was 3:43 !  Will be glad if you share yours :) .   For the sake of geekness I will keep the tradition to share the sources. Those of you who need an example of altering the behavior of the cells in ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• How should I deal with user agent parsing in logs?

  - by Mr. Jefferson

  My web app project includes logging functionality so we can see where visitors are coming from (referrer URL), what the popular user agents are, what pages are most popular, etc. The log is stored in SQL Server, and when I query the user agents I use a large (almost 100 lines) and growing CASE statement to separate the user agents using string matching (i.e. if the user agent contains the string "Firefox/9" then it's Firefox 9). Is there a better way to do this so I don't have to continually add to that CASE statement to deal with new browser releases? Also, how should I deal with less common, weird/unknown user agents? I've seen the following in the logs and been unable to find good information online about what they are: WordPress/3.3.1; http://www.facecolony.org Mozilla/4.0 ( http://www.hairirons.org redips; <a href=http://hairirons.org/>chi hair iron</a>) I'd guess they're bots/crawlers, but the sites they point to don't appear to reference web crawlers (or even be available sometimes). I've seen other user agents aren't familiar to me, but I know they're bots because they include "bot" or "spider" or something similar in them.

  Read the article

• How should developers handle subpar working conditions? [closed]

  - by ivar

  I have been working in my current job for less than a year and at the beginning didn't have the courage to say anything about the things that bothered me. Now I'm a bit fed up and need things to get better. The first problem is not random but I'll mention it anyway. We are running out of space so every new employee gets a smaller table. We are promised that the space problem will be fixed soon. Almost every employee has a different keyboard, mouse, headphones (if any). Mine are $10 keyboard, some random cheap mouse and some random crappy headphones with a mic. All these were used and dirty when I got them. The number of monitor is 1-3 and with different sizes. I have 2 nice monitors and can't complain but some are given 1 small monitor. When it's their first job they don't have the guts to ask for 2 even if most others have 2. Nobody seems to care too. Project manager asked if it's ok? He obviously said he can handle the 1 small one. Then the manager said you can go ask for 1 more. I'm watching this and think go and ask where? The company is trying to hire more people but is not doing much after the person has signed the contract. We are put in one room that is open to the hallway and it's super noisy. Almost like a zoo at times. Even if nobody is talking the crappy keyboards make too much noise. Is this normal? Am I too negative and should I just do my job with what I was given? Should I demand better things? Should the company have some system that everybody gets things in some price range?

  Read the article

• Building a Redundant / Distrubuted Application

  - by MattW

  This is more of a "point me in the right direction" question. I (and my team of 3) have built a hosted web app that queues and routes customer chat requests to available customer service agents (It does other things as well, but this is enough background to illustrate the issue). The basic dev architecture today is: a single page ajax web UI (ASP.NET MVC) with floating chat windows (think Gmail) a backend Windows service to queue and route the chat requests this service also logs the chats, calculates service levels, etc a Comet server product that routes data between the web frontend and the backend Windows service this also helps us detect which Agents are still connected (online) And our hardware architecture today is: 2 servers to host the web UI portion of the application a load balancer to route requests to the 2 different web app servers a third server to host the SQL Server DB and the backend Windows service responsible for queuing / delivering chats So as it stands today, one of the web app servers could go down and we would be ok. However, if something would happen to the SQL Server / Windows Service server we would be boned. My question - how can I make this backend Windows service logic be able to be spread across multiple machines (distributed)? The Windows service is written to accept requests from the Comet server, check for available Agents, and route the chat to those agents. How can I make this more distributed? How can I make it so that I can distribute the work of the backend Windows service can be spread across multiple machines for redundancy and uptime purposes? Will I need to re-write it with distributed computing in mind? I should also note that I am hosting all of this on Rackspace Cloud instances - so maybe it is something I should be less concerned about? Thanks in advance for any help!

  Read the article

• How broad should a computer science/engineering student go?

  - by AskQuestions

  I have less than 2 years of college left and I still don't know what to focus on. But this is not about me, this is about being a future developer. I realize that questions like "Which language should I learn next?" are not really popular, but I think my question is broader than that. I often see people write things like "You have to learn many different things. Being a developer is not about learning one programming language / technology and then doing that for the rest of your life". Well, sure, but it's impossible to really learn everything thoroughly. Does that mean that one should just learn the basics of everything and then learn some things more thoroughly AFTER getting a particular job? I mean, the best way to learn programming is by actually programming stuff... But projects take time. Does an average developer really switch between (for example) being a web developer, doing artificial intelligence and machine learning related stuff and programming close to the hardware? I mean, I know a lot of different things, but I don't feel proficient in any of those things. If I want to find a job as a web developer (that's just an example) after I finish college, shouldn't I do some web related project (maybe using something I still don't know) rather than try to learn functional programming? So, the question is: How broad should a computer science student's field of focus be? One programming language is surely far too narrow, but what is too broad?

  Read the article

• checking for collision detection

  - by bill

  I am trying to create a game where you have a player and you can move right,left, and jump. kind of like mario but its not a side scroller. also i want to use 2d array to make a tile map. my big problem is that i dont understand how to check for collision. i spend about 2 week thinking about this and i came up with 2 solution but they both have problems. let say my map is: 0 = sky 1 = player 2 = ground 00000 10002 22022 Solution 1: move the '1'(player) and update the map less say player wants to move right, then x+=grid[x+1][y] this make the collision easy bc you can just check if if(grid[x][y+1] == 2){ //player is standing on top of ground } problem with this when u hit right key player will move (x*Titlewidth) to right. and as you can see the animation wont look smooth. Solution 2: move player and dont update map player_x += 2 this will make the animation more smoother bc i am just moving 2 pixels. problem1: i cant update map bc if player some times will be middle of int(2d array). but thats ok sinces its not a side scroller so updating the map is not a big deal. problem2: only way to check for collision is to use java intersection method. but then player have to be atleast 1 or 2 pixel in ground in order to check for collision. and as you can see that wont look good too. plz note this is my first collision game in java. so plz try to explain alot otherwise i wont understand it.

  Read the article

• In the days of modern computing, in 'typical business apps' - why does performance matter?

  - by Prog

  This may seem like an odd question to some of you. I'm a hobbyist Java programmer. I have developed several games, an AI program that creates music, another program for painting, and similar stuff. This is to tell you that I have an experience in programming, but not in professional development of business applications. I see a lot of talk on this site about performance. People often debate what would be the most efficient algorithm in C# to perform a task, or why Python is slow and Java is faster, etc. What I'm trying to understand is: why does this matter? There are specific areas of computing where I see why performance matters: games, where tens of thousands of computations are happening every second in a constant-update loop, or low level systems which other programs rely on, such as OSs and VMs, etc. But for the normal, typical high-level business app, why does performance matter? I can understand why it used to matter, decades ago. Computers were much slower and had much less memory, so you had to think carefully about these things. But today, we have so much memory to spare and computers are so fast: does it actually matter if a particular Java algorithm is O(n^2)? Will it actually make a difference for the end users of this typical business app? When you press a GUI button in a typical business app, and behind the scenes it invokes an O(n^2) algorithm, in these days of modern computing - do you actually feel the inefficiency? My question is split in two: In practice, today does performance matter in a typical normal business program? If it does, please give me real-world examples of places in such an application, where performance and optimizations are important.

  Read the article

• RAM caching causes severe performance drops

  - by B T

  I have read plenty of threads on memory caching and the standard response of "large cache is good, it shouldn't effect performance", "the kernel knows best". I have recently upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 and changed from VirtualBox to VMware Workstation and the performance differences are severe (I suspect it is because of the latter). When I am running my virtual machine the system load monitor graph shows less than 50% memory usage generally. System load indicator is showing me that the rest of my RAM is used in the cache all the time. Plain and simple this is the comparison: BEFORE Cache was very sparingly used, pretty much none of my memory usage was the cache Swappiness was 0 (caused my memory to be used first, then swap only if needed) Performance was quite good and logical RAM was used fully first, caching was minimal. I could run enough software to utilize my full 4GB of RAM without any performance degradation whatsoever Swap space was then used as needed which was obviously slower (I am on a HDD) but was still usable when the current program was loaded into memory AFTER Cache is used to fill the full 4GB as soon as my virtual machine is run Swappiness is 0 (same behaviour as before but cache uses full memory straight away) Performance is terrible and unusable while running Ubuntu software Basic things like changing windows takes 2 minutes + Changing screens happens frame by frame over sometimes up to 5 minutes Cannot run an IDE and VM like I could with ease before So basically, any suggestions on how to take my performance back to how it was before while keeping my current setup? My suspicion is VMWare is the problem, but how do I see what is tied to the use of the cache? Surely there is a way to control this behaviour in software as polished as VMware? Thanks EDIT: Could also be important to note that the behaviour differs depending on whether VMware is open or closed. If VMware is open, then the ram will lock at like 50% and 50% cache and go into the complete lock up mentioned above. Contrastingly, if VMware is closed (after being open), then the RAM will continue to rise as it needs / cache will stay as the complete remaining memory and there is no noticeable performance degradation.

  Read the article

• Advantages and Disadvantages of the Waterfall Methodology

  In my personal opinion I believe the waterfall method is one of the worst methodologies to use when developing larger systems because it leaves is no room for mistakes. As the name implies the waterfall methodology does not allow  for projects to go back up stream to recover from design errors, missing and/or limited requirements. In addition, hidden bugs are not usually found until the testing phase. This can prove to be very costly and time consuming to the developer and the client. According to NCycles.com, the waterfall methodology structures a project into separate stages with defined deliverables from each phase. Define Design Code Test Implement Document and Maintain The advantages found by Ncycle.com to this methodology are: Ease in analyzing potential changes  Ability to coordinate larger teams, even if geographically distributed Can enable precise dollar budget Less total time required from Subject Matter Experts The disadvantages found by Ncycle.com to this methodology are: Lack of flexibility Hard to predict all needs in advance Intangible knowledge lost between hand-offs Lack of team cohesion Design flaws not discovered until the Testing phase References: NCycles.com  (2002). Retrieved from http://www.ncycles.com/e_whi_Methodologies.htmmethodology on April 17, 2009

  Read the article

• When does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

  - by Petr

  For the sake of argument here's a sample function that prints contents of a given file line-by-line. Version 1: void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); cout << line << endl; } } I know it is recommended that functions do one thing at one level of abstraction. To me, though code above does pretty much one thing and is fairly atomic. Some books (such as Robert C. Martin's Clean Code) seem to suggest breaking the above code into separate functions. Version 2: void printLine(const string & line) { cout << line << endl; } void printLines(fstream & file) { string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); printLine(line); } } void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); printLines(file); } I understand what they want to achieve (open file / read lines / print line), but isn't it a bit of overkill? The original version is simple and in some sense already does one thing - prints a file. The second version will lead to a large number of really small functions which may be far less legible than the first version. Wouldn't it be, in this case, better to have the code at one place? At which point does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

  Read the article

• The Oracle MDM Portfolio & Strategy Session - It All Comes Down to Master Data

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

   By Narayana Machiraju We are less than a week now from the start of Oracle Open World 2012 and I would like to introduce you all to one of the most awaited MDM strategy sessions this year titled “What’s there to Know about Oracle’s Master Data Management Portfolio and Roadmap?”. Manouj Tahiliani, Senior Director of MDM Product Strategy provides you a complete picture of the Oracle MDM Portfolio, the Product releases, the Strategy and the Roadmaps. Manoj will be discussing Oracle Fusion MDM applications, the first enterprise-grade SaaS MDM product suite. You’ll hear strategies for leveraging MDM and data quality in the enterprise and how you can derive business value by deploying an MDM foundation for strategic initiatives such as customer experience management, product innovation, and financial transformation. And as a bonus, he is also going to discuss the confluence of MDM with emerging technologies such as big data, social, and mobile. The session is co-presented by GEHC and Westpac. Tony Craddock from Westpac is going to share the insights of their MDM Implementation in the lines of Business drivers, data governance, ROI and other important implementation considerations. A reprsentative from GEHC is going to talk about their MDM journey and the multi-domain MDM story. I strongly recommend yo not miss this important session The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several Customer Panels, Conference sessions and Customer round table sessions featuring a lot of marquee Customers. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here. 

  Read the article

• Jagran Prakashan Increases Staff Productivity by 40%

  - by Michael Snow

  Jagran Prakashan Increases Staff Productivity by 40%, Launches New IT Projects up to 4x Faster, Enables Mobile Service, and Improves Business Agility Oracle Customer: JPL Location:  Uttar Pradesh, India Industry: Media and Entertainment Employees:  10,000 Annual Revenue:  $100 to $500 Million Jagran Prakashan Ltd. (JPL) is one of India's premier media and communications groups with interests spanning print, advertising, event management, and mobile services for weather, cricket scores, and educational activities. It is a major media enterprise, with 300 locations across 15 states. Its impressive stable of print publications includes Dainik Jagran, the world’s most widely read daily newspaper––with a readership of over 55 million––the country’s leading afternoon dailies, and a range of popular local, bilingual, and English language newspapers. JPL was using multiple systems to manage its business processes. Users were resistant to using multiple passwords for various applications, preferring to continue their less efficient, legacy work practices. In addition, there was no single repository for sharing documents across the organization, such as company announcements or project documents. The company relied on e-mail to disseminate up-to-date company information, often missing employees. It was also time-consuming and difficult for managers to track the status of ongoing assignments or projects because collaboration and document sharing was inefficient and ineffective.With diverse businesses and many geographic locations, JPL needed to implement a centralized and user-friendly enterprise portal to improve document sharing and collaboration and increase business agility. The company implemented Oracle WebCenter Portal to create a dynamic, secure, and intuitive self-service enterprise portal to improve the user experience and increase operating efficiency. It improved staff productivity by 40%, accelerated new IT projects by up to 4x, boosted staff morale, and increased business agility.   Increases Staff Productivity by 40%, Launches New Products up to 2x Faster A word from JPL "With Oracle WebCenter Portal, we gained a dynamic, secure, and intuitive self-service enterprise portal that provided an exceptional user experience and enabled us to engage employees in a collaborative environment. It increased IT staff productivity by 40%, delivered new projects up to 4x faster, and enabled mobile service to improve our business agility.” Sarbani Bhatia, Vice President IT, Jagran Prakashahn Ltd Before implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal, JPL stored project-critical information, such as page planning of daily newspaper editions and the launch of new editions or supplements on individual laptops or in the e-mail system. Collaboration between colleagues was limited to physical meetings, telephone discussions, and e-mail. It was difficult to trace and recover important project documents when a staff member resigned, which represented a significant risk to business continuity. Employees were also averse to multiple passwords and resisted using the systems, affecting staff productivity. With Oracle WebCenter Portal, JPL created a dynamic, secure, and intuitive self-service enterprise portal with business activity streams. The portal allowed users to navigate, discover, and access information, such as advertising rates, requisition approvals, ad-hoc queries, and employee surveys from a single entry point with a single password. Managers can also upload important documents, such as new pricing for advertisers or newspaper distributors, and share them through the information and instruction section in the portal. In addition, managers can now easily track and review timelines for projects online rather than gathering information from meetings and e-mails. The company gained the ability to centrally manage information, ensured business continuity, and improved staff productivity by 40%.“In the media industry, news has a very short shelf life, so speed is crucial. Information delayed is like information lost,” said Sarbani Bhatia, vice president IT, Jagran Prakashahn Ltd. “Thanks to Oracle WebCenter Portal’s contextual collaboration tools, we can provide and share feedback for new project launches, such as career or education supplements, up to 2x faster through discussion forums or knowledge groups. Tasks that previously required four months, we now complete in one month.”In addition, the company can broadcast announcements, flash employee birthdays, and promote important events through the message section on the webpage, instead of using the e-mail system. The company can also conduct opinion polls to gauge employee response to organizational issues and improve management decision-making.“With over 10,000 employees across 300 locations, it is critical for management to hear the voice of employees and develop a cohesive organizational culture. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables employees to engage with business processes and systems in a collaborative environment, providing users with an exceptional experience,” Bhatia said. Enables Mobility Access and Increases Business Agility Newspaper advertisements generate the majority of JPL’s revenue. With most sales staff on the move, the company needed to ensure timely approval of print advertisement discounts for specific clients and meet tight publication deadlines.  By integrating Oracle WebCenter Portal seamlessly with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and other applications, such as the organizational mass mailing system, business intelligence, and management information system, JPL embedded its approval workflow processes into the enterprise portal and provided users with an integrated and intuitive interface. About 30% of JPL’s sales staff members now have tablets and receive advertising discount approval from managers while in the field and no longer need to return to the office, which has significantly improved efficiency and increased business agility.“Application mobility was critical for sales representatives in the field to meet stringent auditing requirements for online accountability, particularly for our newspaper advertising business. Staff member satisfaction has improved significantly now that the sales team can use tablets to access the portal––a capability we will extend to smart phones in the second stage of the implementation,” Bhatia said. Accelerates Application Development by up to 4x and Cuts Costs by up to 60% With Oracle WebCenter Portal, users can easily create, modify, and upload information to their personalized webpages without IT assistance. By seamlessly integrating Oracle WebCenter Portal with the payroll database, managers can decide which members of their team can access the page and with whom they will share information, a decision based on role or geographical location. A sales representative selling advertising space for a local language daily newspaper, for example, can upload an updated advertising rate relevant only to that particular publication. Users can also easily adapt to the new platform, thanks to its intuitive design and look, reducing the need for training and lowering resistance to using the system.Using Oracle WebCenter Portal’s out-of-the-box reusable components, such as portal pages and templates, provided JPL’s developers with a comprehensive and flexible user experience platform and increased the speed of application development. In less than five months, JPL developed more than 55 workflows. The IT team accelerated deployment of new applications by up to 4x, as they do not need to install them on individual machines now that they have a web-based environment.   “Previously, we would have spent a whole day deploying a new application for each department or location. With a browser-based environment, we have cut costs by up to 60% by reducing deployment time to zero, because our IT team can roll out a new application from a single point, thanks to Oracle WebCenter Portal,” Bhatia said. Challenges Provide a dynamic, secure, and intuitive self-service enterprise portal to improve staff productivity and ensure business continuity Enable seamless integration with multiple enterprise applications to improve workflow efficiency—including approval of print advertisement discounts—and increase business agility Improve engagement with employees and enable collaboration to enhance management decision-making Accelerate time-to-market for new services, such as new advertising programs Solutions Oracle Product and ServicesOracle WebCenter Portal 11g Increased staff productivity by 40% and enhanced user satisfaction by enabling employees to easily navigate, discover, and access information from a single, self-service enterprise portal without IT assistance Launched new products, such as career or education supplements, up to 2x faster by enabling peer collaboration and incorporating feedback generated through discussion forums, thanks to Oracle WebCenter Portal’s out-of-the-box collaboration tools Accelerated application development up to 4x by enabling developers to optimize reusable components for managing and deploying new applications in a browser-based environment rather than spending one day to install applications for each department, cutting costs by up to 60% Ensured business continuity by enabling managers to easily track and review project timelines online rather than storing important documents on individual laptops or relying on the e-mail system Increased business agility and operational efficiency by seamlessly integrating with the in-house, ERP system and embedding business processes into a single portal Boosted company revenue by enabling sales team members to submit print-advertising discount requests through mobile devices instead of waiting to return to office, ensuring timely approval from managers to meet tight publication deadlines Improved management decision-making by enabling employees to easily share and access feedback through opinion polls or forums, boosting staff morale Introduced the single sign-on capability and enhanced security by enabling managers to decide access level for staff members based on role or geographical location Reduced the need for staff training and minimized user resistance to systems by providing a dynamic and intuitive user experience Why Oracle JPL did not consider other products because the company was already using Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters and had a positive experience with Oracle. JPL chose Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure no compatibility issues for integration with its existing Oracle products and to take advantage of the experience and support of a reputable vendor to ensure business continuity. “We chose Oracle because we knew we could rely on its support and experience. In addition, Oracle WebCenter Portal’s speed, agility, and mobile access features were a perfect fit for our business requirements,” Bhatia said. Implementation Process JPL launched the enterprise portal to 500 users in the first phase of the project, and plans to extend this to 2,000 users when the portal is fully launched. Oracle partner PricewaterhouseCoopers used Oracle Application Development Framework for the intial set-up, user training and to develop and design sample workflows. JPL’s internal IT staff then took charge of the implementation, bringing it to completion on budget. Partner Oracle PartnerPricewaterhouseCoopers (India)

  Read the article

• Spotlight on an ACE: Edwin Biemond

  - by jeckels

  Edwin Biemond is an active member of the ACE community, having worked with Oracle's development tooling and database technologies since 1997. Since then, Edwin has become an expert in many of Oracle's middleware technologies as well, including WebLogic and SOA. In fact, Edwin has become so prolfic that he was named the Java Developer of the Year in 2009. Edwin hails from the Netherlands, where he is an architect at the company Amis, and is also a co-author of the OSB Development Cookbook. He's a proven expert in ADF, JSF, messaging (Edifact / ebXML), Enterprise Service Bus, web services and tuning of application servers and databases. Recently, Edwin posted a blog on the road map of WebLogic 12c, going over salient features and what the future looks like for Fusion Middleware and the Application Server areas - it's well worth a read, so give it a look. A snippet: WebLogic 12.1.3 will be the first version for many FMW 12c products like Oracle SOA Suite 12c and probably come in one big jar. 12.1.3 & 12.1.4 will add extra features and improvements to Elastic JMS & Dynamic Clusters. Elastic JMS in 12.1.3 will support Server Migration so you can’t lose any JMS messages. In 12.1.4, Dynamic Clusters will have support for auto-scaling based on thresholds based on user-defined metrics. WebLogic 12.1.4 will also have an API to control the Dynamic Clusters, this way we can easily program when to stop, start or remove nodes from a dynamic cluster. Further, Edwin is hosting a session on getting your FMW environment up and running in less than 10 minutes using popular tooling to configure and manage the many FMW components you have in your technology stack. Register now for this virtual developer day to see more. We thank Edwin for his commitment to being an ACE, his work on his blog, his social media publishing and his overall commitment to helping other technologists be even more successful with Oracle products. Follow Edwin on his blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or read his ACE Profile

  Read the article

• Inconsistent accessibility error in xna.

  - by Tom

  Hey all, you may remember me asking a question regarding a snake game I was creating about two weeks ago. Well I'm quite far now into making the game (thanks to a brilliant tutorial I found). But I've come across the error described named above. So heres my problem; I have a SnakeFood class that has a method called "Reposition". In the game1 class I have a method called "UpdateInGame" which calls the reposition method to load an orange that spawns in a random place every second. My latest piece of code changed the reposition method to allow the snake I have on the screen to not be overlapped by the orange that randomly spawns. Now I get the error (in full): Error 1 Inconsistent accessibility: parameter type 'TheMathsSnakeGame.Snake' is less accessible than method 'TheMathsSnakeGame.SnakeFood.Reposition(TheMathsSnakeGame.Snake)' C:\Users\Tom\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\TheMathsSnakeGame\TheMathsSnakeGame\SnakeFood.cs 33 21 TheMathsSnakeGame I understand what the errors trying to tell me but having changed the accessiblity of the methods, I still can't get it to work. Sorry about the longwinded question. Thanks in advance :) Edit: Code I'm using (Game1 Class) private void UpdateInGame(GameTime gameTime) { //Calls the oranges "reposition" method every second if (gameTime.TotalGameTime.Milliseconds % 1000 == 0) orange.Reposition(sidney); sidney.Update(gameTime); } (SnakeFood Class) public void Reposition(Snake snake) { do { position = new Point(rand.Next(Grid.maxHeight), rand.Next(Grid.maxWidth)); } while (snake.IsBodyOnPoint(position)); }

  Read the article

• Why maven so slow compared to automake?

  - by ???'Lenik

  I have a Maven project consists of around 100 modules. I have reason to decompose the project to so many modules, and I don't think I should merge them in order to speed up the build process. I have read a lot of projects by other people, e.g., the Maven project itself, and Apache Archiva, and Hudson project, they all consists of a lot of modules, nearly 100 maybe, more or less. The problem is, to build them all need so much time, 3 hours for the first time build (this is acceptable because a lot of artifacts to download), and 15 minutes for the second build (this is not acceptable). For automake, things are similarly, the first time you need to configure the project, to prepare the magical config.h file, it's far more complex then what maven does. But it's still fast, maybe 10 seconds on my Debian box. After then, make install requires maybe 10 minutes for the first time build. However, when everything get prepared, the .o object files are generated, they don't have to be rebuild at all for the second time build. (In Maven, everything rebuild at everytime.) I'm very wondering, how guys working for Maven projects can bare this long time for each build, I'm just can't sit down calmly during each time Maven build, it took too long time, really.

  Read the article

• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

  Read the article

• Need Help With Conflicting Customer Support Goals?

  - by Tom Floodeen

  It seems that every OPS review Customer Support Executives are being asked to improve the customer KPIs while also improving gross margin. This is a tough road for even experienced leaders. You need to reduce your agents research time while increasing their answer accuracy. You want to spend less time training them while growing the number of products and systems being used. You have to deal with increasing service volumes but at the same time you need to focus on creating appropriate service insight. After all, to be a great support center you not only have to be good at answering questions, you also need to be good at preventing them.   Five Key Benefits of knowledge Management in Customer Service will help you start down the path meeting these, and other, objectives. With Oracle Knowledge Products, fully integrated with Oracle’s CRM solutions, you can accomplish both increased  service demand while driving your costs down. And you can handle both while positively impacting the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers.  Take advantage of Oracle to not only provide you with a great integrated tool suite, but also with the vision to drive you down the path of success.

  Read the article

• Ubuntu 12.04 MySQL 5.5 MyODBC 5.1 or 3.1 query hangs

  - by jorgearr

  I have been able to install Ubuntu 12.04 with LAMP MySQL version 5.5.x It works fine within linux, it allows me to connect from myodbc windows vista or windows 7 I have configured networking access and have been able to access from windows vista using putty and other tcp connections like mysql query browser. I have also configured or disabled ufw firewall and apparmor. The connection works fine until I query data from the tables. It lets me query small amounts of data like: SELECT name FROM users limit 20 but if I do a SELECT * FROM users, it goes on a never-ending loop. This happens even on tables with very few records like 5 or even less. The problems occur with windows because I tried ssh from linux mint and it worked fine. I need to be able to work using MyODBC either 3.51 or 5.1 since my client program is made in VB6 and connects to mysql server via tcp/ip. The server is an HP PROLIANT ML350G6 with Intel Xeon 64 bits. I tried several ubuntu server version (12.04 64bit, 10.10 64bit, 11.04 32bit) and none has worked I even tried CentOS 6.3 and the same. As a reference, it works fine with onother ubuntu server version 6.x on HP Proliant 150 and mysql 5.0.x that is like 7 years old and never updated. Help Please.

  Read the article

• JDK 7 Feature Complete Milestone Reached

  - by Henrik Ståhl

  The JDK 7 project has reached Feature Complete (FC). This means that development and QA have finished all planned feature and test development work in the release and are moving the focus to testing and bug fixing on all supported JDK 7 platforms. This is a major step towards JDK 7 General Availability (GA) and implies that we are tracking close to the plan published on openjdk.java.net. (The original plan was FC on 12/16. We hit this less than a week late, but verifying that everything was done in time took a couple of weeks due to the intervening holidays.) The definition of the FC milestone allows for exceptions to be integrated later. There are very few such exceptions in the project, the most prominent being updated JAXP/JAXB/JAX-WS and integration of the enhanced JMX agent from JRockit. Our project management does not expect the exceptions to have any negative impact on the release plan. The project may still be delayed if the Expert Groups for the JSRs included in Java SE 7 (203, 292, 334, 336) decide to introduce changes which cannot be accomodated within the existing schedule. Apart from that caveat, Oracle remains confident with the published plan.

  Read the article

• Clients with multiple proxy and multithreading callbacks

  - by enzom83

  I created a sessionful web service using WCF, and in particular I used the NetTcpBinding binding. In addition to methods to initiate and terminate a session, other methods allow the client to send to one or more tasks to be performed (the results are returned via callback, so the service is duplex), but they also allow you to know the status of the service. Assuming you activate the same service on multiple endpoints, and assuming that the client knows these endpoints (for example, it could maintain a List of endpoints), the client should connect with one or more replicas of the same service. The client periodically updates the status of the service, so when it needs to perform a new task (the task is submitted by the user via UI), it selects the service currently less loaded and sends the task to it. Periodically, the client also initiates a maintenance procedure in order to disconnect from one or more overloaded service and in order to connect with new services. I created a client proxy using the svcutil tool. I wish each proxy can be used simultaneously by different threads, for example, in addition to the thread that submits the tasks using a proxy, there are also the following two threads which act periodically: a thread that periodically sends a request to the service in order to obtain the updated state; a thread that periodically selects a proxy to close and instantiates a new proxy to replace the closed one. To achieve these objectives, is it sufficient to create an array of proxies and manage their opening and closing in separate threads? I think I read that the proxy method calls are thread safe, so I would not need to perform a lock before requesting updates to the service. However, when the maintenance procedure (which is activated on its own thread) decides to close a proxy, should I perform a lock? Finally, each proxy is also associated with an object that implements the callback interface for the service: are the callbacks (invoked on the client) executed on different threads on the client? I would like to wrap the management of the proxy in one or more classes so that it can then easily manage within a WPF application.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150  | Next Page >