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• Spotlight on RIVA: CRM integration for Oracle CRM on Demand and Microsoft Exchange

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Introducing Riva from Omni - an Oracle ISV partner specializing in Enterprise Management and Integration Solutions Riva delivers advanced, server-side integration for Oracle CRM On Demand and Microsoft Exchange or even Novell GroupWise. Riva allows Oracle customers to go beyond the standard Outlook plug-in to deliver additional value for the end user as they interact between Outlook and CRM On Demand. Riva syncs CRM On Demand to ALL Exchange mail apps, not just Windows Outlook.  So, whether customers are using Outlook 2010, Outlook Web Access (web client), Outlook 2011 for Mac, Apple Mail, Outlook on Citrix  or a mobile device, Riva's got them covered. There are no plug-ins to be installed, configured, managed and maintained on users' desktops, laptops as Riva delivers Server-side synchronisation for CRMOD and Exchange. The automation of CRM and Outlook integration will remove the reliance upon users to synchronise between the two with Riva handling this process. Riva allows administrators to define sync policies and apply them to individuals or groups of users depending on their sync requirements. Administrators will be able to determine and manage the exposure of the most pertinent detail to be synchronised between Outlook and CRM On Demand. Custom and organic contact filtering for large deployments i.e. Based on ownership, groupings and contact frequency, filters can be applied on what contact records are shared with the users. Riva provides the capability to synchronise CRM and Outlook beyond Contacts, Calendar entries and Email. The synchronisation can be extended to cater for  opportunities, quotes and custom objects for example within the Outlook interface. Riva SmartConvert Folders can automate the creation of opportunities and associated contacts for example if they don't already exist. This can facilitate a reduction in manual detail entry through quick association whilst also benefiting user adoption. From a mobile perspective, Riva allows users to view and manage their CRM On Demand contacts, calendar, tasks, opportunities and cases from iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices.  Again, there are no mobile apps or additional plugins to install, configure or manage. We sync CRM On Demand to Exchange.  Because the mobile device is connected to an Exchange mailbox, the information automatically syncs down to the native address book, calendar and mail apps on the smartphone or tablet. Riva Datasheet for CRM On Demand Riva Brochure – Oracle CRM On Demand  Technical Knowledgebase & Riva Trial  http://kb.omni-ts.com/47/ Comparison to Outlook Plug-ins Riva Diagram – Riva Comparison with Outlook Plug-ins Contact: Wolfgang Berger - [email protected]

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 8, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Webcast: Meeting Customer Expectations in the New Age of Retail Keep your eye on this live webcast as Sanjeev Sharma (Principal Product Director, Oracle Exalogic), Kelly Goetsch (Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Commerce), and Dan Conway (Senior Product Manager, Oracle Retail) offer real-world examples of business value derived by running customer-facing applications on Oracle Engineered Systems. Live, Thursday Nov 8, 10am PT/ 1pm ET. Solving Big Problems in Our 21st Century Information Society | Irving Wladawsky-Berger "I believe that the kind of extensive collaboration between the private sector, academia and government represented by the Internet revolution will be the way we will generally tackle big problems in the 21st century. Just as with the Internet, governments have a major role to play as the catalyst for many of the big projects that the private sector will then take forward and exploit. The need for high bandwidth, robust national broadband infrastructures is but one such example." — Irving Wladawsky-Berger SOA Still Not Dead: Ratification of Governance Standard Highlights SOA’s Continued Relevance So just about the time I dig into Google Trends to learn that the conversation about governance peaked in 2004, along comes all this InfoQ article by Richard Seroter. And of course you've already listened to the OTN Archbeat Podcast about governance, right? Right? Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for Oracle E-Business Suite Users | Steven Chan The short version is: "Nothing will change for EBS users after February 2013." According to Steven Chan, "EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6." You'll find additional information on Steven's blog. ADF Mobile Custom Javascript – iFrame Injection | John Brunswick The ADF Mobile Framework provides a range of out of the box components to add within your AMX pages, according to John Brunswick. But what happens when "an out of the box component does not directly fulfill your development need? What options are available to extend your application interface?" John has an answer. How Data and BPM are married to get the right information to the right people at the right time | Leon Smiers "Business Process Management…supports a large group of stakeholders within an organization, all with different needs," says Oracle ACE Leon Smiers. "End-to-end processes typically run across departments, stakeholders and applications, and can often have a long life-span. So how do organizations provide all stakeholders with the information they need?" Leon provides answers in this post. Thought for the Day "(When) asking skilled architects…what they do when confronted with highly complex problems…(they) would most likely answer, 'Just use Common Sense.' (A) better expression than 'common sense' is 'contextual sense' — a knowledge of what is reasonable within a given content. Practicing architects through eduction, experience and examples accumulate a considerable body of contextual sense by the time they're entrusted with solving a system-level problem…" — Eberhardt Rechtin (January 16, 1926 – April 14, 2006) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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• How can I convert a 2D bitmap (Used for terrain) to a 2D polygon mesh for collision?

  - by Megadanxzero

  So I'm making an artillery type game, sort of similar to Worms with all the usual stuff like destructible terrain etc... and while I could use per-pixel collision that doesn't give me collision normals or anything like that. Converting it all to a mesh would also mean I could use an existing physics library, which would be better than anything I can make by myself. I've seen people mention doing this by using Marching Squares to get contours in the bitmap, but I can't find anything which mentions how to turn these into a mesh (Unless it refers to a 3D mesh with contour lines defining different heights, which is NOT what I want). At the moment I can get a basic Marching Squares contour which looks something like this (Where the grid-like lines in the background would be the Marching Squares 'cells'): That needs to be interpolated to get a smoother, more accurate result but that's the general idea. I had a couple ideas for how to turn this into a mesh, but many of them wouldn't work in certain cases, and the one which I thought would work perfectly has turned out to be very slow and I've not even finished it yet! Ideally I'd like whatever I end up using to be fast enough to do every frame for cases such as rapidly-firing weapons, or digging tools. I'm thinking there must be some kind of existing algorithm/technique for turning something like this into a mesh, but I can't seem to find anything. I've looked at some things like Delaunay Triangulation, but as far as I can tell that won't correctly handle concave shapes like the above example, and also wouldn't account for holes within the terrain. I'll go through the technique I came up with for comparison and I guess I'll see if anyone has a better idea. First of all interpolate the Marching Squares contour lines, creating vertices from the line ends, and getting vertices where lines cross cell edges (Important). Then, for each cell containing vertices create polygons by using 2 vertices, and a cell corner as the 3rd vertex (Probably the closest corner). Do this for each cell and I think you should have a mesh which accurately represents the original bitmap (Though there will only be polygons at the edges of the bitmap, and large filled in areas in between will be empty). The only problem with this is that it involves lopping through every pixel once for the initial Marching Squares, then looping through every cell (image height + 1 x image width + 1) at least twice, which ends up being really slow for any decently sized image...

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• "Well, Swing took a bit of a beating this week..."

  - by Geertjan

  One unique aspect of the NetBeans community presence at JavaOne 2012 was its usage of large panels to highlight and discuss various aspects (e.g., Java EE, JavaFX, etc) of NetBeans IDE usage and tools. For example, here's a pic of one of the panels, taken by Markus Eisele: Above you see me, Sean Comerford from ESPN.com, Gerrick Bivins from Halliburton, Angelo D'Agnano and Ioannis Kostaras from the NATO Programming Center, and Çagatay Çivici from PrimeFaces. (And Tinu Awopetu was also on the panel but not in the picture!) On one of those panels a remark was made which has kind of stuck with me. Henry Arousell, a member of the "NetBeans Platform Discussion Panel", who works on accounting software in Sweden, together with Thomas Boqvist, who was also at JavaOne, said, a bit despondently, I thought, the following words at the start of the demo of his very professional looking accounting software: "Well, Swing took a bit of a beating this week..." That remark comes in the light of several JavaFX sessions held at JavaOne, together with many sessions from the web and mobile worlds making the argument that the browser, tablet, and mobile platforms are the future of all applications everywhere. However, then I had another look at the list of Duke's Choice Award winners: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1854931 OK, there are 10 winners of the Duke's Choice Award this year. Three of them (JDuchess, London Java Community, Student Nokia Developer Group) are not awards for software, but for people or groups. So, that leaves seven awards. Three of them (Hadoop, Jelastic, and Parleys) are, in one way or another, some kind of web-oriented solution, though both Hadoop and Jelastic are broader than that, but are service-oriented solutions, relating to cloud technologies. That leaves four others: NATO air defense software, Liquid Robotics software, AgroSense software, and UNHCR Refugee Registration software. All these are, on the software level, Java desktop solutions that, on the UI layer, make use of Java Swing, together with LuciadMaps (NATO), GeoToolkit (AgroSense), and WorldWind (Liquid Robotics). (And, it went even further than that, i.e., this is not passive usage of Swing but active and motivated: Timon Veenstra, during his AgroSense demo, said "There are far more Swing applications out there than we seem to think. Web developers just make more noise." And, during his Liquid Robotics demo, James Gosling said: "Not everything can be done in HTML.") Seems to me that Java Swing was the enabler of more Duke's Choice Award winners this year than any other UI-oriented Java technology. Now, I'm not going to interpret that one way or another, since I've noticed that interpretations of facts tend to validate some underlying agenda. Take any fact anywhere and you can interpret it to prove whatever opinion you're already holding to be true. Therefore, no interpretation from me. Simply stating the fact that Swing, far from taking a beating during JavaOne 2012, was a more significant user interface enabler of Duke's Choice Award winners than any other Java user interface technology. That's not an interpretation, but a fact.

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• What is new in Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 PS6? by Shanny Anoep

  - by JuergenKress

  Oracle has released a new version 11.1.1.7.0 for their Oracle Fusion Middleware product line. This version includes Patch Set #6 (PS6) for Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1, with a big list of improvements and fixes for each component in that suite. In this post we will highlight some of the interesting updates with regards to troubleshooting, performance, reliability and scalability. Infrastructure/Purging scripts Database growth is a common problem for large-scale Oracle SOA Suite deployments. Oracle already provides multiple purging strategies for the SOA Suite runtime database. This patch set includes two new scripts for purging most of the runtime data: Table Recreation Script (TRS): This script can be used to reclaim as much database space as possible, while still retaining the open instances. It can be used as a corrective action for databases that grew excessively, for example when purging was not performed at all. This should be used as a single corrective action only; the script does not replace the normal purging scripts. Truncate script: Remove all records from the SOA Suite runtime tables without dropping the tables. This script can be used for cloning SOA Suite environments without copying the instance data, or for recreating test scenarios by cleaning all the runtime data. The Oracle SOA Suite Administrator's guide contains a table with the available purging strategies. Diagnostic dumps Using WLST you could already dump diagnostic information about various components of the SOA Suite. This version adds support to retrieve more information on BPEL and Adapters from the command-line. Diagnostic dumps for BPEL New diagnostic dumps are available for BPEL to get information on thread pools, average processing time for BPEL components, and average waiting times for asynchronous instances. This information can be very useful for performance analysis or troubleshooting. With WLST this information can be retrieved from the command-line and included for monitoring or reporting. Read the full article here. 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 Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Suite PS6,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• SQL SERVER – Free eBook Download – EPUB, MOBI, PDF Format

  - by pinaldave

  Microsoft has released recently free eBooks on various Microsoft Technology. The best part is that all these books are available in ePub, Mobi and PDF. You can download them to your local machine or eBook reader and read them. This is a great start as many important subjects are now covered and converted into an eBook. I personally read through a few of the books and found they are very comprehensive and and detailed. The goal is not to cover complete technology in a single book but rather pick a single topic and discuss it in detail. The source of the book is white paper, Technet wiki as well book online and it is clearly listed right bellow the book title. Following are the books available for SQL Server Technology and I encourage all of you to have a look at them as they are great resources. Master Data Services Capacity Guidelines Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Solutions Guide for High Availability and Disaster Recovery Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional Performance and Operations Guide QuickStart: Learn DAX Basics in 30 Minutes SQL Server 2012 Transact-SQL DML Reference You can download above eBooks from here. This is indeed a great attempt as each book talks about the a single subject in depth keeping author focus on the single and simple subject. I have previously written two books by focusing on the same subject and I had great pleasure writing it as well. Writing on focus subjects gives complete freedom to author to explore the a single subject without having burden to cover everything which is associated with that technology at large. Just like eBooks mentioned earlier my SQL Server Wait Stats was inspired from my article series on SQL Wait Stats. The latest book SQL Server Interview Question and Answers was derived from my article series on SQL Interview Q and A. Writing book is an absolutely different concept than writing blog posts. When I was converting my blog posts to books, I ended up writing 50% new material and end up removing many repetitive content which shows up in blog series. It was indeed fun to focused book at the same time it was a great learning experience as an individual. Reference: TechNet Wiki, Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – Why I am Going to Attend #SQLPASS Summit 2012 – Seattle

  - by pinaldave

  I am going to Seattle I once again attend SQLPASS this year. This will be my fourth SQLPASS. Lots of people ask me why I am going to SQLPASS every year. Well there are so many different reasons for that. I go to SQLPASS because – I love it!  Here are few of the reasons I go to SQLPASS. Meet friends whom I have never met before Meet community at large – it is fun to hang around with like minded people Meet Rick Morelan – my book co-author and friend Attend various SQL Parties – there are so many parties around – see the list below Explore various new tools from various third party vendors Meet fellow Chapter Leaders and Regional Mentors And of course attend SQL Server Learning Sessions from industry known experts. The three-day event will be marked by a lot of learning, sharing, and networking, which will help me increase both my knowledge and contacts. PASS Summit provides me a golden opportunity to build my network as well as to identify and meet potential customers or employees. If I am a consultant or vendor who is looking for better career opportunities, PASS Summit is the perfect platform to meet and show my skills to my new potential customers and employers. Further, breakfasts, lunches, and evening receptions, which are included with registration, are meant to provide more and more networking opportunities. At PASS Summit, I gain not only new ideas but also inspire myself from top professionals and experts. Learning new things about SQL Server, interacting with different kinds of professionals, and sharing issues and solutions will definitely improve my understanding and turn me into a better SQL Server professional who can leverage and optimize SQL Server to improve business. I am going – are you joining? Note: This is re-blogged with modification from my 2 years old blog posts on a similar subject. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Get your TFS 2012 task board demo ready in under 1 minute

  - by Tarun Arora

  Release Notes – http://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/  | Download | Source Code | Report a Bug | Ideas In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use the ‘TfsDemoSetup’ application to configure and setup the TFS 2012 task board for a demo in well less than 1 minute Step 1 – Note what you get with a newly created Team Project Create a new Team Project on TFS Preview         2. Click Create Project         3. The project creation has completed        4. Open the team web access and have a look at the home page Note – Since I created the project I am the only Team Member       A default Team by the name AdventureWorks Team has been created       A few sprints have been assigned to the default team but no dates for sprint start and end have been specified        A default Area Path for the team is missing       Step 2. Download the TFS Demo Setup Console application from Codeplex 1. Navigate to the TFS Demo Setup project on codeplex https://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/       2. Download Instructions and TFSDemo_<version>      3. Follow the steps in the Instructions.txt file      4. Unzip TFSDemo_<version> and open the target folder. Two important files in this folder, DemoDictionary.xml – This file contains the settings using which the demo environment will be setup SetupTfsDemo.exe – This will run the TFS demo environment setup application       Step 3 – Configure the setup (i.e. team name, members, sprint dates, etc) 1. Open up DemoDictionary.xml      2. Walkthrough DemoDictionary.xml             a. Basic Team Details         <Name> – Specify the name of the team         <Description> – Specify a description to go with the team         <SetAsDefaultTeam> – This accepts a value “true/false” when set to true, the newly created team will be set as the default team in the project         <BacklogIterationPath> – Specify a backlog iteration path for the team     b. Iterations – The iterations you specify here will be set as the Teams iterations        <Iterations> – Accepts multiple <Iteration> nodes.        <Iteration> – This is the most granular level of an Iteration        <Path> – The path to the sprint, sample values, Release 1\Sprint 1 or Release 2\Sprint 2        <StartDate> – The sprint start date, this accepts the format yyyy-MM-dd        <FinishDate> – The sprint finish date, this accepts the format yyyy-MM-dd     c. Team Members – Team Members that need to be added to the newly created team will be added under this section         <TeamMembers> – Accepts multiple <TeamMember> nodes.         <TeamMember> – This is the most granular level of a Team Member         <User> – This accepts the username, if you are running this against TFSPreview then the live id of the user will need to be passed. If you are running this against TFS Server then the user id i.e. Domain\UserName will need to be passed          <Team> – Specify the name of the team that you want the user to be assigned to.     d. WorkItems – This section will allow you to add work items (product backlog Items and linked tasks) to the current sprint of the team         <WorkItems> – Accepts multiple <WorkItem> nodes.         <WorkItem> – Accepts one <ProductBacklogItem> and multiple <Task> nodes         <ProductBacklogItem> – Used to create a Product Backlog Item type work item               <Title> – The title of the Product Backlog Item               <Description> – The description of the Product Backlog Type Work Item               <AssignedTo> – Used to assign the work item to a team member. The team member name or email address can be passed.               <Effort> – The total effort required to complete the Product Backlog Item         <Task> – Used to create a linked task to the Product Backlog type work item               <Title> – The title of the task type work item               <Description> – The description of the Task Type Work Item               <AssignedTo> – Used to assign the work item to a team member. The team member name or email address can be passed.               <RemainingWork> – The remaining effort to complete the task type work item Step 4 – Setup the demo environment against the newly created Team Project 1. Run SetupTfsDemo.exe    2. Enter Y or y on the prompt to continue setting up TFS Demo setup.     3. Select the newly created Team project, for this blogpost I had created the Team Project – AdventureWorks, so that is what I’ll select in the Connect to TFS Server pop up    3. Click Connect and follow the messages that are written to the console application       Step 5 – Validate that the Demo environment is set up as per the configuration 1. The team web access is all lit up You have a Sprint, a burn down chart, team members…    2. The team Demo has been added and has been set up as the default team    3. The Sprint Backlog Iteration path, Sprints and Sprint start and finish dates have been set    4. The default area path has been setup    5. Taskboard – Backlog items view    6. Taskboard – Team members view      Step 6 – Exception Handling! 1. This solution has been tested against TFS 2012 Service/Server for the Scrum 2.1 process template. 2. You are likely to run into an exception if you mess up the config file 3. If the team already exists and you run the console app to set up the team (with the same name) you will run into exceptions. Please remember this is just an alpha release, if you have any feedback please leave a comment! Didn’t I say that it would just take 1 minute, Enjoy!

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• Exadata at Oracle Openworld - A guide to sessions

  - by Javier Puerta

  A large number of sessions focusing on Exadata will be taking place during the week of Oracle Openworld in San Francisco. To help you organize your schedule I am including below a list of sessions and events around Exadata that you will find of interest. PARTNER SPECIFIC SESSIONS Date/Time/Location  Session Sunday, Sep 30, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Moscone South - 301 Building a Winning Services Practice with Oracle’s Engineered Systems.- This session kicks off a week-long session on Oracle’s engineered systems, from Oracle Database Appliance to Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exalytics, Oracle Big Data Appliance, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. Hear about what is to come in the week ahead in terms of engineered systems. As an ideal consolidation platform for database workloads, Oracle Exadata generates significant services opportunities. This session reviews the range of partner-led services that support Oracle Exadata deployments.   Monday, October 1st, 2011 at 15:30 - 18:00 PST Grand Hyatt San Francisco 345 Stockton Street, San Francisco (Conference Theater) (It is a 15 minute walk from OOW Moscone Center. See directions here) Exadata & Manageability EMEA Partner Community Forum.- Listen to other partners share their experiences in selling and implementing Exadata and Manageability projects, and have a direct dialogue with some of the Oracle executives that are driving the strategy of the company in these areas. Agenda Welcome - Hans-Peter Kipfer, VP, Engineered Systems Oracle EMEA Next challenges in building and managing clouds - Javier Cabrerizo, VP, Business Development for Exadata, Oracle Corp. Partner Experiences: IT modernization, simplification and cost reduction: The case of a customer in Transportation & Logistics with custom applications and SAP. - Francisco Bermudez, Country Leader Infrastructure Services, Capgemini, Spain Nvision cloud project - Dmitry Krasilov, Head of Oracle Competence Center, Nvision Group, Russia From Exadata Ready to Exadata Optimized: An ISV Experience - Miguel Alves, Product Business Solutions Manager, WeDo Technologies, Portugal To confirm your participation send an email to [email protected]  Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate B  Building a Practice with Exadata Database Machine.- As an ideal consolidation platform for database workloads, Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine generates significant services opportunities. In this session, learn about the range of partner-led services that support Exadata Database Machine deployments.  Other Engineered Systems sessions for Partners at the Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange  Click here.-   OOW CUSTOMER SESSIONS   Download the Focus On Exadata guide for a full list of Exadata OOW sessions.  

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• Any reliable polygon normal calculation code?

  - by Jenko

  I'm currently calculating the normal vector of a polygon using this code, but for some faces here and there it calculates a wrong normal. I don't really know what's going on or where it fails but its not reliable. Do you have any polygon normal calculation that's tested and found to be reliable? // calculate normal of a polygon using all points var n:int = points.length; var x:Number = 0; var y:Number = 0; var z:Number = 0 // ensure all points above 0 var minx:Number = 0, miny:Number = 0, minz:Number = 0; for (var p:int = 0, pl:int = points.length; p < pl; p++) { var po:_Point3D = points[p] = points[p].clone(); if (po.x < minx) { minx = po.x; } if (po.y < miny) { miny = po.y; } if (po.z < minz) { minz = po.z; } } for (p = 0; p < pl; p++) { po = points[p]; po.x -= minx; po.y -= miny; po.z -= minz; } var cur:int = 1, prev:int = 0, next:int = 2; for (var i:int = 1; i <= n; i++) { // using Newell method x += points[cur].y * (points[next].z - points[prev].z); y += points[cur].z * (points[next].x - points[prev].x); z += points[cur].x * (points[next].y - points[prev].y); cur = (cur+1) % n; next = (next+1) % n; prev = (prev+1) % n; } // length of the normal var length:Number = Math.sqrt(x * x + y * y + z * z); // turn large values into a unit vector if (length != 0){ x = x / length; y = y / length; z = z / length; }else { throw new Error("Cannot calculate normal since triangle has an area of 0"); }

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• PMI South Florida Job Fair 2010

  - by Sam Abraham

  The South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute is planning a Job Fair slated for September 2010. This year has seen a significant improvement in the job market with many surveyed companies indicating their intention to add temporary or permanent staff to their workforce in the near future.   The Job Fair Initiative fits well within the chapter's message and goal for this year: "Exercising Social Responsibility" - Our responsibility as PMI volunteers at all levels towards our members and surrounding community.   Our Free-to-members Annual Job Fair will play an important role in connecting Recruiters, Exhibitors and Job Seekers together thereby helping hiring companies gain access to a large talent pool at an affordable cost (Totally free in certain cases, details to be revealed once finalized) while giving job seekers centralized access to many reputable hiring companies in the South Florida area.   My involvement in the 2010 Job Fair started with a good conversation I had with Bernie Saenz, President and CEO of the South Florida PMI Chapter, in a networking event a few months ago. I had approached him with a few ideas in line with his goal to serve the community and our members given today's difficult economic climate. Bernie indicated that the Project Manager for the 2010 Job Fair had just been appointed and invited me to participate in this important initiative as a member of her team. I simply couldn't resist and gladly accepted the invitation.   I chose an initial role as Recruiter Relations Lead which entails developing documentation and timelines for our project plan with regards to Recruiter Engagement as well as reaching out to recruiting companies to meet target representation at the Job Fair.   Being heavily involved in the local Technical community has afforded me the privilege of coming in contact with many reputable Technology Recruiting companies. (As a matter of fact, I already have 2 interested very reputable IT recruiting firms willing to join us at the fair)   The excitement for me however will be finding and reaching out to recruiters in areas of Project Management and Leadership that I might not have been exposed to before including Finance, Healthcare and Marketing, to name a few.   Keep an eye in the upcoming few weeks for official announcements on the PMI South Florida Job Fair 2010.   Environment.Exit(0);   -Sam Abraham Site Director - West Palm Beach .Net User Group Recruiter Relations Lead - PMI South Florida Job Fair 2010 Project Lead - Mentoring Programs- PMI South Florida

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• New Slides - and a discussion about Dictionary Statistics

  - by Mike Dietrich

  First of all we have just upoaded a new version of the Upgrade and Migration Workshop slides with some added information. So please feel free to download them from here.The slides have one new interesting information which lead to a discussion I've had in the past days with a very large customer regarding their upgrades - and internally on the mailing list targeting an EBS database upgrade from Oracle 10.2 to Oracle 11.2. Why are we creating dictionary statistics during upgrade? I'd believe this forced dictionary statistics creation got introduced with the desupport of the Rule Based Optimizer in Oracle 10g. The goal: as RBO is not supported anymore we have to make sure that the data dictionary has fresh and non-stale statistics. Actually that would have led in Oracle 9i to strange behaviour in some databases - so in Oracle 9i this was strongly disrecommended. The upgrade scripts got hardcoded to create these stats. But during tests we had the following findings: It's important to create dictionary statistics the night before the upgrade. Not two weeks before, not 60 minutes before your downtime begins. But very close to the upgrade. From Oracle 10g onwards you'd just say: $ execute DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS; This is important to make sure you have fresh dictionary statistics during upgrade for performance reasons. Tests have shown that running an upgrade without valid dictionary statistics might slow down the whole upgrade by factors of 2x-3x. And it would be also a great idea post upgrade to create again fresh dictionary statistics when you've did suppress the stats creation during the upgrade process. Suppress? Yes, you could set this underscore parameter in the init.ora: _optim_dict_stats_at_db_cr_upg=FALSE to suppress the forced dictionary statistics collection during an upgrade. We believe strongly that (a) people using the default statistics creation process which will create dictionary statistics by default and (b) create fresh stats before upgrade on the dictionary. Therefore we find it save once you have followed our advice to use the underscore during upgrade. And we've taken out that forced statistics collection during upgrade in the next release of the database. Please note: If you are using the DBUA for the upgrade it will remove underscore parameters for the upgrade run to improve performance - which is generally a good idea. So you'll have to start the DBUA with that call: $ dbua -initParam "_optim_dict_stats_at_cb_cr_upg"=FALSE -Mike

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• Largest sphere inside a frustum

  - by Will

  How do you find the largest sphere that you can draw in perspective? Viewed from the top, it'd be this: Added: on the frustum on the right, I've marked four points I think we know something about. We can unproject all eight corners of the frusum, and the centres of the near and far ends. So we know point 1, 3 and 4. We also know that point 2 is the same distance from 3 as 4 is from 3. So then we can compute the nearest point on the line 1 to 4 to point 2 in order to get the centre? But the actual math and code escapes me. I want to draw models (which are approximately spherical and which I have a miniball bounding sphere for) as large as possible. Update: I've tried to implement the incircle-on-two-planes approach as suggested by bobobobo and Nathan Reed : function getFrustumsInsphere(viewport,invMvpMatrix) { var midX = viewport[0]+viewport[2]/2, midY = viewport[1]+viewport[3]/2, centre = unproject(midX,midY,null,null,viewport,invMvpMatrix), incircle = function(a,b) { var c = ray_ray_closest_point_3(a,b); a = a[1]; // far clip plane b = b[1]; // far clip plane c = c[1]; // camera var A = vec3_length(vec3_sub(b,c)), B = vec3_length(vec3_sub(a,c)), C = vec3_length(vec3_sub(a,b)), P = 1/(A+B+C), x = ((A*a[0])+(B*a[1])+(C*a[2]))*P, y = ((A*b[0])+(B*b[1])+(C*b[2]))*P, z = ((A*c[0])+(B*c[1])+(C*c[2]))*P; c = [x,y,z]; // now the centre of the incircle c.push(vec3_length(vec3_sub(centre[1],c))); // add its radius return c; }, left = unproject(viewport[0],midY,null,null,viewport,invMvpMatrix), right = unproject(viewport[2],midY,null,null,viewport,invMvpMatrix), horiz = incircle(left,right), top = unproject(midX,viewport[1],null,null,viewport,invMvpMatrix), bottom = unproject(midX,viewport[3],null,null,viewport,invMvpMatrix), vert = incircle(top,bottom); return horiz[3]<vert[3]? horiz: vert; } I admit I'm winging it; I'm trying to adapt 2D code by extending it into 3 dimensions. It doesn't compute the insphere correctly; the centre-point of the sphere seems to be on the line between the camera and the top-left each time, and its too big (or too close). Is there any obvious mistakes in my code? Does the approach, if fixed, work?

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• Suggestions for getting an open source electron beam tracking code going

  - by Boaz

  I work in the field of accelerator physics and synchrotron radiation. High energy electrons circulating in large rings of magnets produce x-rays that are used for a variety of different kinds of science. Running and improving these facilities requires controlling and modelling the electron beam as it circulates in the ring. A code to model this basically requires trackers to follow the electrons through the elements (something called a symplectic integrator), and then the computation of different parameters associated with this motion. The problem with these codes is that every facility has there own. In principle the code is not so complex. And as a modelling project, one might think it has some general interest. Who doesn't want to be able to create a track in space out of magnets and watch the electrons circulate? There is a Matlab based code to do this called Accelerator Toolbox, but the creator of the code is no longer in the field. I put the code in Sourceforge under the name atcollab. The basic resource is in C- it is the set of symplectic integrators. These are available in the atcollab code here. It has been useful to put the code on Sourceforge in order to exchange code, but the community of users is quite small and most are too busy to put that much time into collaboration. So in terms of really improving the code, I don't think it has been so successful. Any piece of this picture could be recreated without that much difficulty, but overall it is a bit complex, and because each lab has their own installation with lots of add-on Matlab code, people find it hard to really work together and share code. Somehow I think we need to involve a wider community in our development, or just use some standard tools. But for that, I suppose it needs to be of some general interest. I think symplectic integrators may have some general interest. And the part about a plug-in architecture to build up the ring ought to fit other patterns. Or the other option is to just accept that this is not a problem of general interest, and work harder within our small community. Suggestions, or anecdotes of analogous experience would be appreciated.

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• XAML RadControls Q1 2010 Official

  Q1 2010 release focuses on strengthening 3 main aspects of RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF: Ensuring first-class performance for all data-centric controls through various techniques, Enhancing and polishing RadControls themes Providing highly advanced, enterprise-level features, especially for the data visualization controls  We know that performance is crucial for line-of-business applications. Therefore, we always make sure that RadControls can help you achieve unmatched performance and this has always been our number one priority. RadControls achieve unbeatable performance through UI and Data Virtualization, Data Sampling and built-in Load On Demand features. Several of the major controls in the bundles have been enhanced with UI virtualization support Scheduler, CoverFlow and Book. As a part of Q1 2010 we also want to bring an unparalleled visual richness to your applications. To achieve that we have done a major rework of all our themes. We used a uniform templating approach across all controls, streamlined naming conventions for resources and delivered a much more consistent look of the controls along the way. RadControls for WPF bundle has been enriched with two new controls Map and Book.   Another new control has been included in the Q1 2010 release. However, it continues to be in a CTP stage. This is the Transition control. We decided that this is the better way to proceed as we will need some more input from our community on how exactly to develop this control further. Therefore, we will be regularly blogging on the development progress so that we can clearly indicate the direction, in which the control is evolving and gather your feedback on whether this is the best direction. Our Charting controls for Silverilght and WPF have been advanced with major new features such as Data Sampling, Zooming and Scrolling, Automatic SmartLables positioning, Sorting and Filtering and many more. The new built-in paging of the GridView control now allows you to page through your data, thus resulting in an event faster and more responsive grid that can easily handle enormously large datasets. 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.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

  - by Tanu Sood

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mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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• Virtual Lab part 2&ndash;Templates, Patterns, Baselines

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Once you have a good virtualization platform chosen, whether it is a desktop, server or laptop environment, the temptation is to build “X”.  “X” may be a SharePoint lab, a Virtual Cluster, an AD test environment or some other cool project that you really need RIGHT NOW.  That would be doing it wrong. My grandfather taught woodworking and cabinetmaking for twenty-seven years at a trade school in Alabama.  He was the first instructor hired at that school and the only teacher for the first two years.  His students built tables, chairs, and workbenches so the school could start its HVAC courses.   Visiting as a child, I also noticed many extra “helper” stands, benches, holders, and gadgets all built from wood.  What does that have to do with a virtual lab, you ask?  Well, that is the same approach you should take.  Build stuff that you will use.  Not for solving a particular problem, but to let the Virtual Lab be part of your normal troubleshooting toolkit. Start with basic copies of various Operating Systems.  Load and patch server and desktop OS environments.  This also helps build your collection of ISO files, another essential element of a virtual Lab.  Once you have these “baseline” images, you can use your Virtualization software’s snapshot capability to freeze the image.  Clone the snapshot and you have a brand new fully patched machine in mere moments.  You may have to sysprep some of the Microsoft OS environments if you are going to create a domain environment or experiment with clustering.  That is still much faster than loading and patching from scratch. So once you have a stock of raw materials (baseline images in this case) where should you start.  Again, my grandfather’s workshop gives us the answer.  In the shop it was workbenches and tables to hold large workpieces that made the equipment more useful.  In a Windows environment the same role falls to the fundamental network services:  DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Routing, File Services, and Storage services.  Plan your internal network setup.  Build out an AD controller with all the features listed.  Make the actual domain an isolated domain so it will not care about where you take it.  Add the Microsoft iSCSI target.  Once you have this single system, you can leverage it for almost any network environment beyond a simple stand-alone system. Having these templates and fundamental infrastructure elements ready to run means I can build a quick lab in minutes instead of hours.  My solutions are well-tested, my processes fully documented with screenshots, and my plans validated well before I have to make any changes to client systems.  the work I put in is easily returned in increased value and client satisfaction.

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• How do you manage extensibility in your multi-tenant systems?

  - by Brian MacKay

  I've got a few big web based multi-tenant products now, and very soon I can see that there will be a lot of customizations that are tenant specific. An extra field here or there, maybe an extra page or some extra logic in the middle of a workflow - that sort of thing. Some of these customizations can be rolled into the core product, and that's great. Some of them are highly specific and would get in everyone else's way. I have a few ideas in mind for managing this, but none of them seem to scale well. The obvious solution is to introduce a ton of client-level settings, allowing various 'features' to be enabled on per-client basis. The downside with that, of course, is massive complexity and clutter. You could introduce a truly huge number of settings, and over time various types of logic (presentation, business) could get way out of hand. Then there's the problem of client-specific fields, which begs for something cleaner than just adding a bunch of nullable fields to the existing tables. So what are people doing to manage this? Force.com seems to be the master of extensibility; obviously they've created a platform from the ground up that is super extensible. You can add on to almost anything with their web-based UI. FogBugz did something similiar where they created a robust plugin model that, come to think of it, might have actually been inspired by Force. I know they spent a lot of time and money on it and if I'm not mistaken the intention was to actually use it internally for future product development. Sounds like the kind of thing I could be tempted to build but probably shouldn't. :) Is a massive investment in pluggable architecture the only way to go? How are you managing these problems, and what kind of results are you seeing? EDIT: It does look as though FogBugz handled the problem by building a fairly robust platform and then using that to put together their screens. To extend it you create a DLL containing classes that implement interfaces like ISearchScreenGridColumn, and that becomes a module. I'm sure it was tremendously expensive to build considering that they have a large of devs and they worked on it for months, plus their surface area is perhaps 5% of the size of my application. Right now I am seriously wondering if Force.com is the right way to handle this. And I am a hard core ASP.Net guy, so this is a strange position to find myself in.

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• How to get tens of millions of pages indexed by Google bot?

  - by Chris Adragna

  We are currently developing a site that currently has 8 million unique pages that will grow to about 20 million right away, and eventually to about 50 million or more. Before you criticize... Yes, it provides unique, useful content. We continually process raw data from public records and by doing some data scrubbing, entity rollups, and relationship mapping, we've been able to generate quality content, developing a site that's quite useful and also unique, in part due to the breadth of the data. It's PR is 0 (new domain, no links), and we're getting spidered at a rate of about 500 pages per day, putting us at about 30,000 pages indexed thus far. At this rate, it would take over 400 years to index all of our data. I have two questions: Is the rate of the indexing directly correlated to PR, and by that I mean is it correlated enough that by purchasing an old domain with good PR will get us to a workable indexing rate (in the neighborhood of 100,000 pages per day). Are there any SEO consultants who specialize in aiding the indexing process itself. We're otherwise doing very well with SEO, on-page especially, besides, the competition for our "long-tail" keyword phrases is pretty low, so our success hinges mostly on the number of pages indexed. Our main competitor has achieved approx 20MM pages indexed in just over one year's time, along with an Alexa 2000-ish ranking. Noteworthy qualities we have in place: page download speed is pretty good (250-500 ms) no errors (no 404 or 500 errors when getting spidered) we use Google webmaster tools and login daily friendly URLs in place I'm afraid to submit sitemaps. Some SEO community postings suggest a new site with millions of pages and no PR is suspicious. There is a Google video of Matt Cutts speaking of a staged on-boarding of large sites, too, in order to avoid increased scrutiny (at approx 2:30 in the video). Clickable site links deliver all pages, no more than four pages deep and typically no more than 250(-ish) internal links on a page. Anchor text for internal links is logical and adds relevance hierarchically to the data on the detail pages. We had previously set the crawl rate to the highest on webmaster tools (only about a page every two seconds, max). I recently turned it back to "let Google decide" which is what is advised.

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• Developing for 2005 using VS2008!

  - by Vincent Grondin

  I joined a fairly large project recently and it has a particularity… Once finished, everything has to be sent to the client under VS2005 using VB.Net and can target either framework 2.0 or 3.0… A long time ago, the decision to use VS2008 and to target framework 3.0 was taken but people knew they would need to establish a few rules to ensure that each dev would use VS2008 as if it was VS2005… Why is that so? Well simply because the compiler in VS2005 is different from the compiler inside VS2008…  I thought it might be a good idea to note the things that you cannot use in VS2008 if you plan on going back to VS2005. Who knows, this might save someone the headache of going over all their code to fix errors… -        Do not use LinQ keywords (from, in, select, orderby…).   -        Do not use LinQ standard operators under the form of extension methods.   -        Do not use type inference (in VB.Net you can switch it OFF in each project properties). o   This means you cannot use XML Literals.   -        Do not use nullable types under the following declarative form:    Dim myInt as Integer? But using:   Dim myInt as Nullable(Of Integer)     is perfectly fine.   -        Do not test nullable types with     Is Nothing    use    myInt.HasValue     instead.   -        Do not use Lambda expressions (there is no Lambda statements in VB9) so you cannot use the keyword “Function”.   -        Pay attention not to use relaxed delegates because this one is easy to miss in VS2008   -        Do not use Object Initializers   -        Do not use the “ternary If operator” … not the IIf method but this one     If(confition, truepart, falsepart).   As a side note, I talked about not using LinQ keyword nor the extension methods but, this doesn’t mean not to use LinQ in this scenario. LinQ is perfectly accessible from inside VS2005. All you need to do is reference System.Core, use namespace System.Linq and use class “Enumerable” as a helper class… This is one of the many classes containing various methods that VS2008 sees as extensions. The trick is you can use them too! Simply remember that the first parameter of the method is the object you want to query on and then pass in the other parameters needed… That’s pretty much all I see but I could have missed a few… If you know other things that are specific to the VS2008 compiler and which do not work under VS2005, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll modify my list accordingly (and notify our team here…) ! Happy coding all!

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism

  - by Daniel Moth

  At AMD's Fusion conference Herb Sutter announced in his keynote session a technology that our team has been working on that we call C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) and during the keynote I showed a brief demo of an app built with our technology. After the keynote, I go deeper into the technology in my breakout session. If you read both those abstracts, you'll get some information about what C++ AMP is, without being too explicit since we published the abstracts before the technology was announced. You can find the official online announcement at Soma's blog post. Here, I just wanted to capture the key points about C++ AMP that can serve as an introduction and an FAQ. So, in no particular order… C++ AMP lowers the barrier to entry for heterogeneous hardware programmability and brings performance to the mainstream, without sacrificing developer productivity or solution portability. is designed not only to help you address today's massively parallel hardware (i.e. GPUs and APUs), but it also future proofs your code investments with a forward looking design. is part of Visual C++. You don't need to use a different compiler or learn different syntax. is modern C++. Not C or some other derivative. is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP. provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file. makes it extremely easy to work with large multi-dimensional data on heterogeneous hardware; in a manner that exposes parallelization. introduces only one core C++ language extension. builds on DirectX (and DirectCompute in particular) which offers a great hardware abstraction layer that is ubiquitous and reliable. The architecture is such, that this point can be thought of as an implementation detail that does not surface to the API layer. Stay tuned on my blog for more over the coming months where I will switch from just talking about C++ AMP to showing you how to use the API with code examples… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• CMS vs Admin Panel?

  - by Bob

  Okay, so this probably seems like an unusual, more grammar related question, but I was unsure of what to call it. If you use a software such as vBulletin or MyBB or even Blogger and you're the administrator (or other, lesser position such as moderator) of the forum, or publisher/author of the blog, you generally have access to something of an "admin panel". For example, vBulletin's admin panel looks like this and Blogger's admin panel looks something like this. While they both look different and do different things, the goal is fundamentally the same: to provide the user with a method for adding, modifying, or deleting content... to let them control and administrate their forum or blog. Also, they're both made specifically by the company for use in a specific product. Now, there's also options like Drupal. It seems to offer quite a bit more and be quite a bit more generalized. How does something like this work? If you were freelancing, would you deploy a website with Drupal, or would it be something the client might already have installed on their own server? I've never really used Drupal, only heard about it, so please let me know. Also, there seems to be other options like cPanel, a sort of global CMS that allows you to administrate over your entire website. How do those work in comparison to Drupal, or the administrative panels with vBulletin? They seem to serve related, but different purposes. Basically, what is the norm? If I'm developing a web application for a group that needs to be able to edit their website without the need to go into the code or the database (or rather, wants to act in a graphical, easy-to-use content-management/admin panel), would it also be necessary to write my own miniature admin panel? Or would I be able to send them off knowing that they have cPanel? Or could something like Drupal fill this void? Again, I'm a little new to web development, and I'm working on planning out my first, real, large website. So I need a little advice on the standards and expectations for web development - security and coding practices aside, what should I be looking for as far as usability and administration for the client (who will be running the site once I'm done creating the website)? Any extra tips would also be appreciated! Oh, and just a little bit: I'm writing the website using Ruby on the Sinatra framework (both Ruby and Sinatra are things I'm fairly comfortable with) and I'm not being paid to make the website (and I will also be a user, and one of the three administrators of the website) - it's being built for a club I'm in.

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