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• Move Data into the grid for scalable, predictable response times

  - by JuergenKress

  CloudTran is pleased to introduce the availability of the CloudTran Transaction and Persistence Manager for creating scalable, reliable data services on the Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG). Use of IMDG architectures has been key to handling today’s web-scale loads because it eliminates database latency by storing important and frequently access data in memory instead of on disk. The CloudTran product lets developers easily use an IMDG for full ACID-compliant transactions without having to be concerned about the location or spread of data. The system has its own implementation of fast, scalable distributed transactions that does NOT depend on XA protocols but still guarantees all ACID properties. Plus, CloudTran asynchronously replicates data going into the IMDG to back-end datastores and back-up data centers, again ensuring ACID properties. CloudTran can be accessed through Java Persistence API (JPA via TopLink Grid) and now, through a new Low-Level API, or LLAPI. This is ideal for use in SOA applications that need data reliability, high availability, performance, and scalability. It is still in its limited beta release, the LLAPI gives developers the ability to use standard put/remove logic available in Coherence and then wrap logic with simple Spring annotations or XML+AspectJ to start transactions. An important feature of LLAPI is the ability to join transactions. This is a common outcome for SOA applications that need to reduce network traffic by aggregating data into single cache entries and then doing SOA service processing in the node holding the data. This results in the need to orchestrate transaction processing across multiple service calls. CloudTran has the capability to handle these “multi-client” transactions at speed with no loss in ACID properties. Developing software around an IMDG like Oracle Coherence is an important choice for today’s web-scale applications and services. But this introduces new architectural considerations to maintain scalability in light of increased network loads and data movement. Without using CloudTran, developers are faced with an incredibly difficult task to ensure data reliability, availability, performance, and scalability when working with an IMDG. Working with highly distributed data that is entirely volatile while stored in memory presents numerous edge cases where failures can result in data loss. The CloudTran product takes care of all of this, leaving developers with the confidence and peace of mind that all data is processed correctly. For those interested in evaluating the CloudTran product and IMDGs, take a look at this link for more information: http://www.CloudTran.com/downloadAPI.ph , or send your questions to [email protected]. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: CloudTran,data grid,M,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Difference between the terms Material & Effect

  - by codey

  I'm making an effect system right now (I think, because it may be a material system... or both!). The effects system follows the common (e.g. COLLADA, DirectX) effect framework abstraction of Effects have Techniques, Techniques have Passes, Passes have States & Shader Programs. An effect, according to COLLADA, defines the equations necessary for the visual appearance of geometry and screen-space image processing. Keeping with the abstraction, effects contain techniques. Each effect can contain one or many techniques (i.e. ways to generate the effect), each of which describes a different method for rendering that effect. The technique could be relate to quality (e.g. high precision, high LOD, etc.), or in-game-situation (e.g. night/day, power-up-mode, etc.). Techniques hold a description of the textures, samplers, shaders, parameters, & passes necessary for rendering this effect using one method. Some algorithms require several passes to render the effect. Pipeline descriptions are broken into an ordered collection of Pass objects. A pass provides a static declaration of all the render states, shaders, & settings for "one rendering pipeline" (i.e. one pass). Meshes usually contain a series of materials that define the model. According to the COLLADA spec (again), a material instantiates an effect, fills its parameters with values, & selects a technique. But I see material defined differently in other places, such as just the Lambert, Blinn, Phong "material types/shaded surfaces", or as Metal, Plastic, Wood, etc. In game dev forums, people often talk about implementing a "material/effect system". Is the material not an instance of an effect? Ergo, if I had effect objects, stored in a collection, & each effect instance object with there own parameter setting, then there is no need for the concept of a material... Or am I interpreting it wrong? Please help by contributing your interpretations as I want to be clear on a distinction (if any), & don't want to miss out on the concept of a material if it should be implemented to follow the abstraction of the DirectX FX framework & COLLADA definitions closely.

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• SQLAuthority News – Download Whitepaper – SQL Server Analysis Services to Hive

  - by pinaldave

  The SQL Server Analysis Service is a very interesting subject and I always have enjoyed learning about it. You can read my earlier article over here. Big Data is my new interest and I have been exploring it recently. During this weekend this blog post caught my attention and I enjoyed reading it. Big Data is the next big thing. The growth is predicted to be 60% per year till 2016. There is no single solution to the growing need of the big data available in the market right now as well there is no one solution in the business intelligence eco-system available as well. However, the need of the solution is ever increasing. I am personally Klout user. You can see my Klout profile over. I do understand what Klout is trying to achieve – a single place to measure the influence of the person. However, it works a bit mysteriously. There are plenty of social media available currently in the internet world. The biggest problem all the social media faces is that everybody opens an account but hardly people logs back in. To overcome this issue and have returned visitors Klout has come up with the system where visitors can give 5/10 K+ to other users in a particular area. Looking at all the activities Klout is doing it is indeed big consumer of the Big Data as well it is early adopter of the big data and Hadoop based system.  Klout has to 1 trillion rows of data to be analyzed as well have nearly thousand terabyte warehouse. Hive the language used for Big Data supports Ad-Hoc Queries using HiveQL there are always better solutions. The alternate solution would be using SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) along with HiveQL. As there is no direct method to achieve there are few common workarounds already in place. A new ODBC driver from Klout has broken through the limitation and SQL Server Relation Engine can be used as an intermediate stage before SSAS. In this white paper the same solutions have been discussed in the depth. The white paper discusses following important concepts. The Klout Big Data solution Big Data Analytics based on Analysis Services Hadoop/Hive and Analysis Services integration Limitations of direct connectivity Pass-through queries to linked servers Best practices and lessons learned This white paper discussed all the important concepts which have enabled Klout to go go to the next level with all the offerings as well helped efficiency by offering a few out of the box solutions. I personally enjoy reading this white paper and I encourage all of you to do so. SQL Server Analysis Services to Hive Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, T SQL, Technology

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• Library to fake intermittent failures according to tester-defined policy?

  - by crosstalk

  I'm looking for a library that I can use to help mock a program component that works only intermittently - usually, it works fine, but sometimes it fails. For example, suppose I need to read data from a file, and my program has to avoid crashing or hanging when a read fails due to a disk head crash. I'd like to model that by having a mock data reader function that returns mock data 90% of the time, but hangs or returns garbage otherwise. Or, if I'm stress-testing my full program, I could turn on debugging code in my real data reader module to make it return real data 90% of the time and hang otherwise. Now, obviously, in this particular example I could just code up my mock manually to test against a random() routine. However, I was looking for a system that allows implementing any failure policy I want, including: Fail randomly 10% of the time Succeed 10 times, fail 4 times, repeat Fail semi-randomly, such that one failure tends to be followed by a burst of more failures Any policy the tester wants to define Furthermore, I'd like to be able to change the failure policy at runtime, using either code internal to the program under test, or external knobs or switches (though the latter can be implemented with the former). In pig-Java, I'd envision a FailureFaker interface like so: interface FailureFaker { /** Return true if and only if the mocked operation succeeded. Implementors should override this method with versions consistent with their failure policy. */ public boolean attempt(); } And each failure policy would be a class implementing FailureFaker; for example there would be a PatternFailureFaker that would succeed N times, then fail M times, then repeat, and a AlwaysFailFailureFaker that I'd use temporarily when I need to simulate, say, someone removing the external hard drive my data was on. The policy could then be used (and changed) in my mock object code like so: class MyMockComponent { FailureFaker faker; public void doSomething() { if (faker.attempt()) { // ... } else { throw new RuntimeException(); } } void setFailurePolicy (FailureFaker policy) { this.faker = policy; } } Now, this seems like something that would be part of a mocking library, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's been done before. (In fact, I got the idea from Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code, where he discusses this exact idea on pages 228-231, saying that such facilities were common in Microsoft code of that early-90's era.) However, I'm only familiar with EasyMock and jMockit for Java, and neither AFAIK have this function, or something similar with different syntax. Hence, the question: Do such libraries as I've described above exist? If they do, where have you found them useful? If you haven't found them useful, why not?

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• SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow Email Link To Item

  - by Brian Jackett

  In this post I’ll walk you through the process of sending an email that contains a link to the current item from a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow.  This is a process that has been published on many other forums and blogs, but many that I have seen are more complex than seems necessary. Problem     A common request from SharePoint users is to get an email which contains a link to review/approve/edit the workflow item.  SharePoint list items contain an automatic property for Url Path, but unfortunately that Url is not properly formatted to retrieve the item if you include it directly on the message body.  I tried a few solutions suggested from other blogs or forums that took a substring of the Url Path property, concatenated the display form view Url, and mixed in some other strings.  While I was able to get this working in some scenarios I still had issues in general. Solution     My solution involved adding a hyperlink to the message body.  This ended up being far easier than I had expected and fairly intuitive once I found the correct property to use.  Follow these steps to see what I did.     First add a “Send an Email” action to your workflow.  Edit the action to pull up the email configuration dialog.  Click the “Add hyperlink” button seen below. When prompted for the address of the link click the fx button to perform a lookup.  Choose Workflow Context from the “data source” dropdown.  Choose Current Item URL from the “field from source” dropdown.  Click OK. Your Edit Hyperlink dialog should now look something like this. The end result will be a hyperlink added to your email pointing to the current workflow item.  Note: this link points to the non-modal dialog display form (display form similar to what you had in 2007). Conclusion     In this post I walked you through the steps to create a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow with an email that contains a link to the current item.  While there are many other options for accomplishing this out on the web I found this to be a more concise process and easy to understand.  Hopefully you found this helpful as well.  Feel free to leave any comments or feedback if you’ve found other ways that were helpful to you.         -Frog Out

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• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

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• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

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• Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how with the new release of Oracle WebCenter you can create composite applications and mashups.We recently talked with Sachin Agarwal, Director of Product Management of Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle around the topic of Composite Applications and Mashups. Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications. With the latest release of Oracle WebCenter one can develop highly productive tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped. The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can access all this information in one mashup.Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a comprehensive set of tooling that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR 286) that allow portlets  from other applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to bring in other web applications such as .Net Applications  as well as SharePoint webparts. The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.  Moreover, Business users can customize or personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page editing features. Users access and select different resource components available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available components or resources, and these components can include information from a variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems. Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how you can easily create Commposite Applications and Mashups with Oracle WebCenter .Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, applications, mashups, composite applications

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• New Oracles VM RAC template with support for oracle vm 3 built-in

  - by wcoekaer

  The RAC team did it again (thanks Saar!) - another awesome set of Oracle VM templates published and uploaded to My Oracle Support. You can find the main page here. What's special about the latest version of DeployCluster is that it integrates tightly with Oracle VM 3 manager. It basically is an Oracle VM frontend that helps start VMs, pass arguments down automatically and there is absolutely no need to log into the Oracle VM servers or the guests. Once it completes, you have an entire Oracle RAC database setup ready to go. Here's a short summary of the steps : Set up an Oracle VM 3 server pool Download the Oracle VM RAC template from oracle.com Import the template into Oracle VM using Oracle VM Manager repository - import Create a public and private network in Oracle VM Manager in the network tab Configure the template with the right public and private virtual networks Create a set of shared disks (physical or virtual) to assign to the VMs you want to create (for ASM/at least 5) Clone a set of VMs from the template (as many RAC nodes as you plan to configure) With Oracle VM 3.1 you can clone with a number so one clone command for, say 8 VMs is easy. Assign the shared devices/disks to the cloned VMs Create a netconfig.ini file on your manager node or a client where you plan to run DeployCluster This little text file just contains the IP addresses, hostnames etc for your cluster. It is a very simple small textfile. Run deploycluster.py with the VM names as argument Done. At this point, the tool will connect to Oracle VM Manager, start the VMs and configure each one, Configure the OS (Oracle Linux) Configure the disks with ASM Configure the clusterware (CRS) Configure ASM Create database instances on each node. Now you are ready to log in, and use your x node database cluster. x No need to download various products from various websites, click on trial licenses for the OS, go to a Virtual Machine store with sample and test versions only - this is production ready and supported. Software. Complete. example netconfig.ini : # Node specific information NODE1=racnode1 NODE1VIP=racnode1-vip NODE1PRIV=racnode1-priv NODE1IP=192.168.1.2 NODE1VIPIP=192.168.1.22 NODE1PRIVIP=10.0.0.22 NODE2=racnode2 NODE2VIP=racnode2-vip NODE2PRIV=racnode2-priv NODE2IP=192.168.1.3 NODE2VIPIP=192.168.1.23 NODE2PRIVIP=10.0.0.23 # Common data PUBADAP=eth0 PUBMASK=255.255.255.0 PUBGW=192.168.1.1 PRIVADAP=eth1 PRIVMASK=255.255.255.0 RACCLUSTERNAME=raccluster DOMAINNAME=mydomain.com DNSIP= # Device used to transfer network information to second node # in interview mode NETCONFIG_DEV=/dev/xvdc # 11gR2 specific data SCANNAME=racnode12-scan SCANIP=192.168.1.50

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• A Hot Topic - Profitability and Cost Management

  - by john.orourke(at)oracle.com

  Maybe it's due to the recent recession, or current economic recovery but a hot topic and area of focus for many organizations these days is profitability and cost management.  For most organizations, aggressive cost-cutting and cost management were critical to remaining profitable while top line revenue was flat or shrinking.  However, now we are seeing many organizations taking a more "surgical" approach to profitability and cost management, by accurately allocating revenue and costs to individual product lines, services, customer segments, locations, channels and other lines of business to understand which ones are truly profitable and which ones are not.  Based on these insights, managers can make more informed decisions about which products or services to invest in or retire, how to price their products or services for different customer segments, and where to focus their marketing and customer service resources. The most common industries where this product, service and customer-focused costing and profitability analysis is being adopted include financial services, consumer packaged goods, retail and manufacturing.  However we are seeing adoption of profitability and cost management applications in other industries and use cases.  Here are a few examples: Telecommunications Industry:  Network Costing and Management to identify the most cost effective and/or profitable network areas, to optimize existing resources, infrastructure and network capacity.  Regulatory Cost Accounting to perform more accurate allocations of revenue and costs across services and customer segments, improve ability to set billing rates for future periods, for various products and customer segments and more easily develop analysis needed for rate case proposals. Healthcare Insurance:  Visually, justifiable Medical Loss Ratio results, better knowledge of the cost to service healthcare plans and members, accurate understanding of member segment and plan profitability, improved marketing programs through better member segmentation. Public Sector:  Statutory / Regulatory Compliance:  A variety of statutory and regulatory documents state explicitly or implicitly that the use of government resources must be properly tracked and tied to performance goals.  Managerial costing methods implemented through Cost Management applications provide unparalleled visibility into costs and shared services usage throughout a Public Sector agency. Funding Support:  Regulations require public sector funding requests to be evaluated based upon the ability to achieve performance goals against the associated cost.   Improved visibility and understanding of costs of different programs/services means that organizations can demonstrably monitor performance and the associated resource costs improve the chances of having their funding requests granted. Profitability and Cost Management is one of the fastest-growing solution areas in Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management product line and we are seeing a growing number of customer successes across geographies and industries.  Listed below are just a few examples.  Here's a link to the replay from a recent webcast on this topic which featured Schroders Plc, a UK-based Financial Services company: http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=7011668&Act=168&pcode=WWMK10037859MPP043 Here's a link to a case study on Shenhua Guohua Power in China: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/shenhua-snapshot-159574.pdf Here's a link to information on Oracle's web site about our profitability and cost management solutions: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/performance-management/profitability-cost-mgmt/index.html

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• How to keep balance / Unlock items / achievement rules

  - by Mark Knol

  I'm working on an engine for a game, too learn javascript and just because its fun. I'm a flashdeveloper, I know how to build websites. Now making games is a different challenge, javascript is a challenge, but I'd love to learn how to structure code and what patterns are common. I dont mind if the game ever finish, I'm mostly interested in the programming part of it. I dont have a particular endresult in mind, so I'll see where it takes me. I currently have a system where you can buy items. The items cost a specified amount of gold, silver, diamonds etc. When you have selected and bought the item, it takes time before getting rewarded. When time is over, you are getting rewarded with other properties (gold, energy, diamonds). For example, you can buy an apple for 50gold, It takes a minute, you get rewarded with 75energy. Or if you take a run, it cost 50energy, it takes 5minutes, reward is 25gold and 25silver. These definitions is what i call actions. Currently I already have a system where this already works and I can define as much actions with as much properties as I want. The definitions I have kinda looks like this: {id:101, category:544, onInit:{gold:-75}, onComplete:{energy:75}, time:2000, name:"Apple", locked: false} {id:102, category:544, onInit:{gold:-135}, onComplete:{energy:145}, time:2000, name:"Banana", locked: false} {id:106, category:302, onInit:{energy:-50, power: -25}, onComplete:{gold:100, diamonds:2}, time:10000, name:"Run", locked: false} {id:107, category:302, onInit:{energy:-70, silver: -55}, onComplete:{gold:100}, time:10000, name:"Dance", locked: false} {id:108, category:302, onInit:{energy:-230, power: -355}, onComplete:{gold:70, silver:70}, time:10000, name:"Fitness", locked: false} Now, I would love to add a system where I can lock/unlock the actions using achievement rules. Lets say, if you buy 10 apples, you unlock a new action, like bananas which cost more, and reward more. In the future I maybe want to restrict achievements and actions to levels. I am kinda stuck how to structure this. I have 2 questions: Which patterns are used to define achievements? How/where are they defined? Should it be part of the action, or should it be a separate controller? Is it a good idea to register all completed actions to it? I think I want multiple types of achievement rules, Id love to hear some ideas how to develop it. How do you create/find a good balance, so the user does not get stuck or can cheat by repeat a pattern of actions to get too much rewards. I know there is not a simple answer and i'm lacking of a good game-concept, but I wonder if anyone created such a game and how you dealed and played with it.

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• OWB 11gR2 &ndash; OMB and File Editing

  - by David Allan

  Here we will see how we can use the IDE for editing OMB scripts. The 11gR2 release is based on the common Oracle platform IDE used also by JDeveloper. It comes with a bunch of standard behavior for editing and rendering code. One of the lesser known things is that if you drop a text file into OWB you can edit it. So you can drop your tcl scripts right into OWB and edit in-place, and don’t need another IDE like Eclipse just for this task. Cool, so you have the file here. There may be no line numbers, you can toggle line numbers on by right clicking in the gutter. If we edit the file within the OWB IDE, the save is a little different from normal. OWB doesn’t normally manipulate files so things like ctrl-s to save, saves the OWB objects, but if you edit a file the closing of the file will ask if you want to save it – check it out. Now we enter the realm of ‘he who dares’…. Note the IDE doesn’t know about tcl files out of the box, so you see above there is no syntax highlighting. The code is identified by the extension… .java is java, .html is HTML etc. With OWB, the OMB scripts are tcl, we usually have .tcl extension on these files. One of the things we can do to trick up the syntax highlighting is to simply rename the file to have a .java suffix, then all of a sudden we get syntax highlighting, see the illustration here where side by side we see a the file with a .java extension and a .tcl extension. Not ideal pretending to be .java but gets us a way to having something more useful than notepad. We can then change the syntax highlighting such that we get Eclipse like highlighting within the IDE from the Tools Preferences option; You then get the Eclipse like rendering albeit using a little tweak on the file names… Might be useful if you are doing any kind of heavy duty OMB script development and just want a single IDE. The OMBPlus panel is then at hand for executing and testing it out.

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• Windows Phone 7 Development Updates &ndash; March 8th 2011

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  Here are the latest update from the Windows Phone 7 Developer Worlds that went live this month. Here are some of the latest numbers: Windows Phone Marketplace currently offers more than 9,000 quality apps and games and enjoys a base of over 32,000 registered developers, delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. There have been over 1 million downloads of the developers tools for Windows Phone 7. Trial version help you sell more Trials result in higher sales by the numbers: Users like trials  - paid apps with trial functionality are downloaded 70 times more than paid apps that don’t Nearly 1 out of 10 trial apps downloaded convert to a purchase and generate 10 times more revenue on average than paid apps that don’t include trial functionality. Trial downloads convert to paid downloads quickly. More than half of trial downloads that convert to a sale do so within the 1st 24 hours of trial download, and mostly within 2 hours of trial download. Microsoft Ad Control is gaining traction By the numbers - ad supported Windows Phone 7 apps are: Roughly ¼ of all registered U.S. WP7 developers have downloaded the free Ad SDK for Silverlight and XNA Of ad funded apps, over 95 percent use the free Microsoft Advertising Ad Control Monthly impressions from our Ad Exchange has continued to grow by double digits – impressions increased by 376 percent since January Ad Control, the first wave of “How Do I” videos are now available on MSDN: Create an Ad in a Windows Phone 7 XNA Game App Register Ad-Enabled Windows Phone 7 Apps Measure Ad Performance of Windows Phone 7 Apps Boarder International App submission for Free Apps through Yalla Apps As of today you can start submitting your free applications in developer markets that are currently not covered by Microsoft. To submit your Free application if you DO NOT belong to one of the Marketplace supported countries, go to: Yalla Apps Marketplace Policy Updates: Free App Marketplace Submission upped to 100 and other news Microsoft has been revisiting a few of our Marketplace policies based on feedback from developers to reduce friction and cost, word for word: 1. We have raised the limit on the number of certifications that can be performed for FREE apps at no cost to the registered developer from five to 100. This was a common request from developers which we are glad to implement after building alternate methods to ensure that users can find and download high quality apps. 2. We have converted policy 5.6 - related to the inclusion of contact information for support - from a mandatory to an optional policy. This is still a strongly recommended best practice, but we recognized and responded to developer feedback that this policy was creating excessive drag on the certification process for developers without commensurate user benefit for all apps. 3. We also understand the desire for clarification with regard to our policy on applications distributed under open source licenses.  The Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (APA) already permits applications under the BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0 and Microsoft Public License.  We plan to update the APA shortly to clarify that we also permit applications under the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and other, similar licenses and we continue to explore the possibility of accommodating additional OSS licenses. Enjoy and happy coding! Official Blog Post for reference.

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• CAM v2.0 ships – all new foundation version

  - by drrwebber

  The latest release of the CAM editor toolset is now available on Sourceforge.net – search NIEM. In this all new version the support from Oracle has enabled a transformation of the editor underpinning Java framework and results in 3x performance improvement and 50% better memory utilization. The result of nearly six months of improvements are catalogued in the release notes. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor/files/CAM%20Editor/Releases/2.0/CAM_Editor_2-0_Release_Notes.pdf/download However here I’d like to talk about the strategic vision and highlight specific new go to features that make a difference for exchange schema designers and with a focus on the NIEM community. So why is this a foundation version? Basically the new drag and drop designer tool allows you to tailor your own dictionary collection of components and then simply select and position those into your resulting exchange structure. This is true global reuse enabled from a canonical domain dictionary collection. So instead of grappling with XSD Schema syntax, or UML model nuances – this is straightforward direct WYSIWYG visual engineering – using familiar sets of business components. Then the toolkit writes the complex XSD Schema for you, along with test samples, documentation, XMI/UML models, Mindmaps and more. So how do you get a set of business components? The toolkit allows you to harvest these from existing schema collections or enterprise data models, or as in the case of NIEM, existing domain dictionary collections. I’ve been using this for the latest IEEE/OASIS/NIST initiative on a Common Data Format (CDF) for elections management systems. So you can download those from OASIS and see how this can transform how you build actual business exchanges – improving the quality, consistency and usability – and dramatically allowing automated generation of artifacts you only dreamed of before – such as a model of your entire major exchange collection components. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=election So what we have here is a foundation version – setting the scene and the basis for changing how people can generate and manage information exchanges. A foundation built using the OASIS CAM standard combined with aspects of the NIEM Naming and Design Rules and the UN/CEFACT Core Components specifications and emerging work on OASIS CIQ name and address and ANSI/ISO code list schema. We still have a raft of work to do to integrate this into SOA best practices and extend the dictionary capabilities to assist true community development. Answering questions such as: - How good is my canonical component collection? - How much reuse is really occurring? - What inconsistencies and extensions are there in the dictionary components? Expect us to begin tackling these areas now that the foundation is in place. The immediate need is to develop training and self-start materials – so we will be focusing there for the next couple of months and especially leading up to the IJIS industry event in July in New Jersey, and the NIEM NTE event in August in Philadelphia. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor

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• Where can I hire local programmers with very specific skillsets?

  - by Lostsoul

  I have been browsing the site and haven't found a exact fit to this question so I'll post it but if its already answered(since I'm sure its a common problem, then let me know). I have a business and want to create a totally different product in a different industry than I'm currently in, so I learned how to program and created a working prototype. I have a bit of savings and am getting some cash flow from my current business so I can go out and hire a developer(in the future hopefully it can be permenant but right now I just need a person willing to work on contract and code on weekends or their spare time and I just want to pay in cash instead of equity or future promises). At first I wasn't sure what kind of developer to hire but this question helped me understand I should target specific skills I need as opposed to general programmers. This poses a problem for me since general programmers are everywhere but if I want specific skills I'm unsure how to get them. I thought about a list of approaches but it doesn't feel complete or effective since it seems to be assuming good developers are actively looking. If it helps I want someone local(since this is my first developer hire) and looking for skills like cuda, hadoop, hbase, java and c. Any suggestions? As a FYI, I have been thinking of approaching it as: Go to meet ups for one or more skills I need. Use LinkedIn to find people with the skills I need Search for job postings that contain skills I need and then use linkedIn to reach out to that firms employees since many profiles on linkedin are not very updated or detailed but job postings generally are. Send postings to universities and maybe find a student who loves technology so much they learned these tools on their own. Post on job board. Not sure how successful it will be to post to monster. Use Craigslist, not sure if a highly skilled developer would go here for work. What am I missing? I could be wrong but it seems like good/smart/able developers aren't hunting for work non-stop(especially in this tech job market). Plus most successful people I know have work/life balance so I'm not sure if the best ones really care about code after work. Lastly, most of the skills I need aren't used in big corporations so not sure how aggressively smart developers at small shops look for work. I don’t really know any developers personally, so but should I be using the above plan or if they live balanced lives should I be looking outside of the regular resources(and instead focus on asking around my gym or my accountant or something)? Sorry, I'm making huge assumptions here, I guess because developers are a total mystery to me. I kind of wish Jane Goodall wrote a book on understanding developers social behaviour better :-p

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• Configuring keyboard input to eliminate unused diacritics

  - by David Cesarino

  I'd like to change the way diacritics work under Xubuntu. My problem My native language is pt-BR and my notebook has an american keyboard. Thus, I use ' and " followed by keys like u and c to achieve things like ú, ç and ü. It all works well. However, in the case of apostrophes and quotes, that creates a problem when I use ' followed by: letters that won't accept the acute accent ( ´ , ACUTE ACCENT -- 0x00B4) at all, like t; and letters that won't accept the acute in pt-BR, like r. In 1, ' with t does absolutely nothing. In 2, ' with r creates r (LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH ACUTE -- 0x0155), which is used, afaik, for some eastern european languages like slovak. It isn't used in portuguese, just like ?, s, z, ?, ?, ?, n and all consonants (portuguese do not take diacritics in consonants). Question That said, is there a way to better support the portuguese-brazilian language using an american keyboard? It is very common here --- I actually prefer the american keyboard to our own, known as “ABNT”. Desired solution I'd like to deactivate unused diacritics, so case 2 would behave just like case 1. Additionally, if possible, I'd like case 1 to behave like it does under Windows. As an example, typing ' followed by t should write 't (acute followed by T) instead of doing nothing. About 2, in my humble opinion, doing nothing is counterproductive. I realize the behavior is reasonable according to logic ("there isn't t-acute, so please tell the computer to typeset apostrophe --- ', SPACE --- instead of acute). But from a human, practical point of view, I think it makes more sense (to me, at least). Additional comments I believe this also applies to spanish, french, italian and other western european latin languages. On the console (Ctrl+Alt+F?), case 1 is not a problem. I don't need to press space as apostrophes are automatically added. However, there, I'm unable to access cedilla (ç). Two completely different behaviors. If it's just a matter of customizing text config files (possibly creating a custom layout or whatever), I'd be glad to share my efforts. I just need guide on the "howto" part. Somehow Google only points me to the "enough" people (those who cope with the situation and think that it works "well enough"). And since I have definitely migrated to Linux/Xubuntu after years, I'd like to leave just as I like it (and I'm sure others as well). For example, if there is some kind of scripting or definition to tell the computer to do what I described, so be it.

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• It's All In The Cloud

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  People turned out in droves for Steve Miranda's Apps Cloud General Session. Steve, as engaging as ever, covered our Apps strategy in the cloud and reinforced that Oracle has a complete set of cloud services including: •    Human Capital Management•    Talent Management•    Sales and Marketing•    Customer Service and Support•    Financial Management•    Procurement, Sourcing, and Inventory•    Project Portfolio Management•    Governance, Risk, and Compliance... all delivered on top of the Social, Platform, and Common Infrastructure.Steve talked about Fusion being the centerpiece of our Cloud Services. The fact that Fusion is 100 percent standards based is a big, big deal! In addition, our ERP Cloud Service is the most complete cloud service on the market. And email marketing is dead -- social marketing is where the action is. It's also where Oracle is investing heavily from a Sales & Marketing Cloud perspective. Steve covered the strategic acquisitions Oracle has made to enhance our organic Cloud offering. Specifically, Oracle bought RightNow to make our Customer Service and Support Cloud service complete. We also bought Taleo to add Recruiting and Learning capabilities to our Talent Management Cloud. Steve talked about our customers and how they are benefiting from the use of a variety of our Cloud Services. Red Robin is driving lower labor and food costs with Oracle ERP Cloud Service. He used Elizabeth Arden as the profile customer for HCM and Talent Management Service, UBS for HCM and Talent Management Service, and Brocade for Talent Management. All these customers are benefiting from a comprehensive and fully integrated HR platform that aligns compensation with performance and enhances workforce motivation and retention. At the same time, Hitachi Data Systems is using Oracle Taleo Performance Management Cloud to recruit the right competencies, pinpoint areas of improvement, and develop and monitor employee goals to support the global account organization. KLM and Overstock.com are gaining the benefits of Oracle's Customer Service and Support Service from RightNow by better engaging and serving customer needs online and through call centers. And last but not least, Graco and Key Energy are leveraging mobility features and sales forecasting and territory management capabilities within the Oracle Sales and Marketing Service. They expect to gain better visibility to sales information and drive more efficient sales campaigns and empower their sales force with data they need to make sales. Overall, Oracle Apps Cloud Services are enjoying a significant momentum in the marketplace. Steve projected an air of confidence and enthusiasm highlighting Oracle's latest successes with Cloud services.

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• Installed LibreOffice 4 with ppa, how do I remove it and go back to LibreOffice 3?

  - by MMA

  EDIT This question is not at all a duplicate of How to downgrade from LibreOffice 4.0 to 3.6? The above mentioned question talks about downgrading from a specific version of LibreOffice, namely from 4.0 to 3.6. The solutions mentioned are not the ones I am looking for. They will work but I wanted a general solution without using PPA or downloading .deb files for from a higher version to a lower version. The above solutions suggest either downloading .deb files for LibreOffice 3.6 or adding repository for it. Furthermore, some of the answers put out-of-proportion~(applicable for the solution, however) stress on use of synaptic, not general command-line-solution. That made me wonder, at this very moment, if I take a fresh computer, and install Ubuntu 12.04, LibreOffice installation will work without a hitch. Then why I can not install LibreOffice in my 12.04 machine today from simple command line? This answer to my question, clarified everything. I need to use ppa-purge so that this resets all packages from a PPA to the standard versions released for my distribution. Basically it is like a way to restore my system back to the way it was before my installed packages from a PPA. This article further elaborates the idea. The above mentioned answer worked perfectly for me. Actually, this was an education for me since it taught me how do downgrade a package that was added via PPA. I had upgraded from LibreOffice 3 to LibreOffice 4 using the PPA. Now since I found that LibreOffice 4 has some issues, including handling my native language, I want to move back to LibreOffice 3. In order to accomplish this, I removed the LibreOffice config directory from my home and then purged LibreOffice from my machine. sudo apt-get purge libreoffice-* Then I removed the relevant PPA's using the sudo apt-add-repository --remove command. And then ran sudo apt-get update. Now, when I try to install LibreOffice using the command sudo apt-get install libreoffice I get an avalanche of output about unmet dependencies, something like, The following packages have unmet dependencies: libreoffice : Depends: libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.7-0ubuntu4) but it is not going to be installed (snipped) If I dig the issue further, by using the command, sudo apt-get install libreoffice-core I get The following packages have unmet dependencies: libreoffice-core : Depends: libreoffice-common (> 1:3.5.7) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libexttextcat0 (>= 2.2-8) but it is not going to be installed Depends: ure (>= 3.5.7~) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Could you please tell me how do I install LibreOffice 3 in my machine? I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

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• Play or Lift: which one is more explicit?

  - by Andrea

  I am going to investigate web development with Scala, and the choice is between learning Lift or Play: probably I will not have enough time to try both, at least at first. Now, many comparisons between the two are available on the internet, but I would like to know how do they compare with respect to being explicit and involving less magic. Let me explain what I mean by example. I have used, to various degrees, CakePHP, symfony2, Django and Grails. I feel a very clear distinction between Django and symfony2, which are very explicit about what you are doing, and Grails and CakePHP, which try to do their best to guess what you are trying to achieve and often feel "magical". Let me give some examples comparing Django and Grails. In Django, views are functions that take a request as input and return a response. You can instantiate explicitly an instance of HttpResponse and populate its body with a string, or you can use shortcut functions to leverage the template system. In any case the return value from your view always has the same type. In contrast, the render method from Grails is highly polymorphic. You can throw a context at it and it will try to render a template which is found by convention using that context. Or you can pass it a pair of a template path and a context and that will work too. Or a string. Or XML. Grails tries hard to make sense of whatever you return from your controller. In the Django ORM, each model class has a static attribute representing the manager for that class. That manager exposes a fluent interface to build querysets. In Grails, you can have a similar functionality by composing detached criteria. Still, the most common way to query objects seems to be the use of runtime-generated methods like FindUserByEmailNotNull or FindPostByDateGreaterThan. I will not go further, but my point is that in Django-like frameworks you have control over the whole flow of the request/response process, while in Grails-like ones I feel I only have to feel the blanks and the framework will manage the rest of the flow for me. This is not to criticize Grails or CakePHP; which type you prefer is mainly a matter of preference. In fact, I happen to like some aspects of Grails, but I feel more comfortable with a framework which does less for me. Back to the point of the question: which one among Play and Lift is more explicit about what you do and which one tries to simplify more what you have to do with a layer of "magic"?

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• Need help fixing DPKG errors after update from 12.04 to 12.10

  - by James Wulfe

  So I was doing fine then i upgraded my system to 12.10 and now i cant get my system to update all of its packages properly. no matter what i do, what is happening here and how do i fix this. if i would have thought 12.10 would be this much of a hassle i would have never upgraded..... here is a sampling of the code that returns from "apt-get -f install" It should also be noted that it is just these 6 packages only. no other packages have given me this kind of trouble. well i should say as of now. It was just 5, but them i got an update for unity, and now unity-common is added to the trouble makers. which prevents me from further upgrading the actual unity package as this package is a dependancy. Preparing to replace usb-modeswitch-data 20120120-0ubuntu1 (using .../usb-modeswitch-data_20120815-1_all.deb) ... /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.prerm: 4: /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.prerm: dpkg-maintscript-helper: Input/output error dpkg: warning: subprocess old pre-removal script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: trying script from the new package instead ... /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/prerm: 4: /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/prerm: dpkg-maintscript-helper: Input/output error dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/usb-modeswitch-data_20120815-1_all.deb (--unpack): subprocess new pre-removal script returned error exit status 2 /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.postinst: 7: /var/lib/dpkg/info/usb-modeswitch-data.postinst: dpkg-maintscript-helper: Input/output error dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/network-manager_0.9.6.0-0ubuntu7_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/pcmciautils_018-8_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/unity-common_6.10.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/whoopsie_0.2.7_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/usb-modeswitch_1.2.3+repack0-1ubuntu3_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/usb-modeswitch-data_20120815-1_all.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I would also like to note i have cleaned apt cashe both through the terminal and manualy, i have tried installing them manually through dpkg from both the /var/cache/apt/archives/ location and from my own manually downloaded .deb files. i have tried using dpkg-reconfigure and i have used bleachbit to clean my system. I have also tested both my HDD and memory and found no significant errors to lead to the input/output errors. Quite frankly i am just out of options and have grown tired of trying to google a solution to this mess but still do not wish to pursue backing up settings and reinstalling the system. Any help would be appreciated. I am only interested in answers, please leave your feeling towards grammar, punctuation, and bias towards how a "post should look" at the door. If you dont have something to contribute towards solving my problem then you are just doing nothing but contributing to it. Thank you.

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• What layer to introduce human readable error messages?

  - by MrLane

  One of the things that I have never been happy with on any project I have worked on over the years and have really not been able to resolve myself is exactly at what tier in an application should human readable error information be retrieved for display to a user. A common approach that has worked well has been to return strongly typed/concrete "result objects" from the methods on the public surface of the business tier/API. A method on the interface may be: public ClearUserAccountsResult ClearUserAccounts(ClearUserAccountsParam param); And the result class implementation: public class ClearUserAccountsResult : IResult { public readonly List<Account> ClearedAccounts{get; set;} public readonly bool Success {get; set;} // Implements IResult public readonly string Message{get; set;} // Implements IResult, human readable // Constructor implemented here to set readonly properties... } This works great when the API needs to be exposed over WCF as the result object can be serialized. Again this is only done on the public surface of the API/business tier. The error message can also be looked up from the database, which means it can be changed and localized. However, it has always been suspect to me, this idea of returning human readable information from the business tier like this, partly because what constitutes the public surface of the API may change over time...and it may be the case that the API will need to be reused by other API components in the future that do not need the human readable string messages (and looking them up from a database would be an expensive waste). I am thinking a better approach is to keep the business objects free from such result objects and keep them simple and then retrieve human readable error strings somewhere closer to the UI layer or only in the UI itself, but I have two problems here: 1) The UI may be a remote client (Winforms/WPF/Silverlight) or an ASP.NET web application hosted on another server. In these cases the UI will have to fetch the error strings from the server. 2) Often there are multiple legitimate modes of failure. If the business tier becomes so vague and generic in the way it returns errors there may not be enough information exposed publicly to tell what the error actually was: i.e: if a method has 3 modes of legitimate failure but returns a boolean to indicate failure, you cannot work out what the appropriate message to display to the user should be. I have thought about using failure enums as a substitute, they can indicate a specific error that can be tested for and coded against. This is sometimes useful within the business tier itself as a way of passing via method returns the specifics of a failure rather than just a boolean, but it is not so good for serialization scenarios. Is there a well worn pattern for this? What do people think? Thanks.

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• Various issues linked to my CD drive, when it has a disc in it

  - by Voyagerfan5761

  When I go to the Desktop and click on a media icon (for my flash drive, a CD, whatever it is), the following problems occur, in this approximate sequence: Nautilus will close if it's open. the desktop icons disappear my Window List shows a button that says "Starting File Manager" the icons reappear the button in Window List disappears Because of this problem, I can no longer drag and drop media, nor can I right-click to perform actions such as "Eject" and "Safely Remove Drive". The same symptoms occur if I click a media icon (that is also present on the desktop) in Nautilus' Computer view, though notably not if I click in the places list on the left. I have confirmed that this problem happens only if there is a CD in the drive (Matshita UJDA360). Also, inserting a disc into the CD drive appears to kill all running programs and restart Nautilus (or X; I'm not sure). Applications like Brasero and Rhythmbox will not start while there is a disc in the drive. Removing the disc doesn't result in the list of media updating; it must be forced to update by clicking on one of the desktop icons and going through one of the above-described cycles. It doesn't seem to matter what type of disc is in the drive. This has happened with CD-RWs I burned years ago using Roxio on Windows XP, the Ubuntu disc I installed from (burned with InfraRecorder Portable under Windows XP), and the retail game disc for Star Trek Armada II. The first indication of a problem was Brasero dying when I tried to insert a disc for erasure and rewriting. Since then, I've drafted several different questions on various issues, finally combining them into this one when I realized that having a CD in the drive was the common link. Could this be a simple driver issue? If Ubuntu is dynamically detecting my hardware on boot, can I specify drivers for devices that I know will be a problem if the default files are used? I'm beginning to think that my laptop, an old Dell Inspiron 2650, is just too old or proprietary-driver-hungry (or something, maybe RAM-starved) for Ubuntu and Windows XP to play nicely alongside each other. Or maybe I just need to carefully take my wall-wart machine to a coffee shop for an afternoon so I can download updates and such from the Internet, as I lack a home connection.

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• What is the difference between development and R&D?

  - by MainMa

  I was asked by a colleague to explain clearly the difference between ordinary development and research and development (R&D) and was unable to do it. After reading Wikipedia, I still don't have the precise answer. According to Wikipedia (slightly modified): There are two primary models: In one model, the primary function is to develop new products; in the other model, the primary function is to discover and create new knowledge about scientific and technological topics for the purpose of uncovering and enabling development of valuable new products, processes, and services. The first model is confusing. Does it mean that development (not R&D) consists exclusively in adding new features to a product, solving bugs and doing maintenance? What if something which was previously developed as a new feature becomes a separate product? The second model is less confusing, but still, how to qualify whether something is new knowledge or existent knowledge which is just rediscovered? Later, Wikipedia adds that ordinary development is different from R&D because of its: nearly immediate profit or immediate improvement. It's still not clear enough. How to qualify "nearly immediate profit"? What if a task has an immediate profit but requires heavy research? Or if it is basic but has uncertain profit, like the enforcement of a common style over the codebase? For example, does it belong to development or R&D to: Develop an engine which abstracts the access to the database, simplifying and shortening enormously the code of other applications (existent or ones which will be written in future) which should access to the database? Establish a new service-oriented architecture for the entire organization of company resources, in order to move from a bunch of separate and autonomous applications to a set of well-organized, interconnected web services, like what is used by Amazon? Design a new communication protocol to allow faster replication of data between two data centers of the company? Conceive a new type of software testing while working on a specific product, knowing that this type of testing will improve/simplify the testing process? Prove that Functional programming is more appropriate than OOP for a specific application, based on evidence, logic and previous experience? Enhance the existent application by adding gestures on tactile screens, after doing studies and testing that shows that those gestures improve the productivity of the users by a ratio of at least 1.4 for a precise set of tasks? Find a way to strongly enhance the Power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a data center? Create a Domain-Specific Language (DSL)? In short, how could I determine whether I'm doing R&D while working on something?

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• Ubuntu 12.04.3 Graphics Issues: Broken Pipes, Reinstalled Xorg and Bumblebee

  - by user190488

  It seems I have a problem, and am only making it worse by following what I find online. I have a new Asus N550JV-D71 (not sure about the part after the dash, though I definitely know it includes 71). I decided to downgrade Windows 8 to 7, then dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 with it (there were issues with Windows 8, and I had a Windows 7 disk handy). It did work and, after installing Bumblebee in tty (because it wouldn't boot when it was first installed), it worked marvelously for a little less than a week. However, I restarted it last night and got the Could not write bytes: Broken pipes error. (I see it's a very common error, but I've looked at the majority of the suggested Similar Questions already.) I followed what I could find online, followed those instructions (making sure to not install any sort of graphics drivers other than what Bumblebee provides), and it just seems to go further and further downhill. I'm afraid I didn't write the exact steps to get to this point (it was late by the time I gave up the night before), but it involved reinstalling lightdm, xorg (and xserver?), and Bumblebee. I then changed the Bumblebee.conf file so that Device=nvidia. I'm pretty new to Linux in general (I've used it since 10.04, but I hadn't had issues up until this computer, so it let me stay a newbie), so I'm not exactly sure what log files to look at to find the errors to look up. However, I did look at lshw and noticed that displays was marked as unassigned. Also, if I try to start lightdm using the command line, it always stops at Stopping Mount network filesystems. I should note that there isn't an xorg.conf file, and no .Xauthority. I would really, really prefer not to reinstall 12.04 if possible. I managed to get grub to display only a short time ago, and I can't boot to the dvd drive unless I go into the BIOS settings and manually change the boot order (that was an issue from the beginning, before the Ubuntu install), and getting into those settings often means rebooting several times due to the fact that the window to get to it is extremely small. I have most of what I need backed up, however, in case it does get to that point. If I really have to, I can just use the latest Ubuntu version instead of the LTS, but the reason I chose 12.04 in the first place is because I need something stable-ish, and Windows isn't suitable to what I need to do. I should note that the reason I restarted last night in the first place was that it wasn't charging the battery, and the wifi kept on going out. Hardware: Nvidia GeForce GT 750M Intel HD graphics 4600

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• Business Insight, IT Execution: 9 Project Management Tips

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from Profit Magazine - by David Rosenbaum When Marcos Baccetto was first asked to be the business-side project lead on Eaton Corporation’s Vehicle Group South America (VGSA) Oracle project, the operations services manager responsible for running manufacturing was, he confesses, “a little afraid” because of his lack of IT experience. Today, Baccetto calls the project “a fantastic experience,” and he is a true believer in the benefits of a close relationship between IT implementers and their line-of-business peers. Through his partnership with Jesiele Lima, then VGSA IT manager, Baccetto and Eaton’s South American operations team came to understand several important principles of business and IT. Here he shares nine tips managers should consider when working on an enterprise technology project. 1. Make it a business project, not an IT project. All levels of functional management must have ownership, responsibility, and accountability for the success of the implementation. 2. Share responsibility. Business owners should sign off on tests and data conversion. 3. Clean your data. Dedicating a team to improve core data quality prior to project launch can be a significant time-saver. 4. Select resources properly. Have functional people who can translate business needs to IT and can influence organizational change. 5. Manage scope. Follow project management methodologies and disciplines. 6. Adopt common processes, global solutions. Avoid customized, local solutions. The big-picture business goals can get lost in the details. 7. Implement processes prior to the go-live date. Change management can be key. Keep the workforce informed and train users in advance. 8. Define metrics milestones. Assume there will be a crisis during deployment. Having baseline metrics to compare against will help implementers keep their cool—and the project moving forward. 9. The sponsor’s commitment is critical. It is needed to support the truly difficult decisions.

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