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• PASS Summit 2013 Review

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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• what differs a computer scientist/software engineer to regular people who learn programming language and APIs?

  - by Amumu

  In University, we learn and reinvent the wheel a lot to truly learn the programming concepts. For example, we may learn assembly language to understand, what happens inside the box, and how the system operates, when we execute our code. This helps understanding higher level concepts deeper. For example, memory management like in C is just an abstraction of manually managed memory contents and addresses. The problem is, when we're going to work, usually productivity is required more. I could program my own containers, or string class, or date/time (using POSIX with C system call) to do the job, but then, it would take much longer time to use existing STL or Boost library, which abstract all of those thing and very easy to use. This leads to an issue, that a regular person doesn't need to get through all the low level/under the hood stuffs, who learns only one programming language and using language-related APIs. These people may eventually compete with the mainstream graduates from computer science or software engineer and call themselves programmers. At first, I don't think it's valid to call them programmers. I used to think, a real programmer needs to understand the computer deeply (but not at the electronic level). But then I changed my mind. After all, they get the job done and satisfy all the test criteria (logic, performance, security...), and in business environment, who cares if you're an expert and understand how computer works or not. You may get behind the "amateurs" if you spend to much time learning about how things work inside. It is totally valid for those people to call themselves programmers. This makes me confuse. So, after all, programming should be considered an universal skill? Does programming language and concepts matter or the problems we solve matter? For example, many C/C++ vs Java and other high level language, one of the main reason is because C/C++ features performance, as well as accessing low level facility. One of the main reason (in my opinion), is coding in C/C++ seems complex, so people feel good about it (not trolling anyone, just my observation, and my experience as well. Try to google "C hacker syndrome"). While Java on the other hand, made for simplifying programming tasks to help developers concentrate on solving their problems. Based on Java rationale, if the programing language keeps evolve, one day everyone can map their logic directly with natural language. Everyone can program. On that day, maybe real programmers are mathematicians, who could perform most complex logic (including business logic and academic logic) without worrying about installing/configuring compiler, IDEs? What's our job as a computer scientist/software engineer? To solve computer specific problems or to solve problems in general? For example, take a look at this exame: http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/attach/Problem%20Resources/2010WorldFinalProblemSet.pdf . The example requires only basic knowledge about the programming language, but focus more on problem solving with the language. In sum, what differs a computer scientist/software engineer to regular people who learn programming language and APIs? A mathematician can be considered a programmer, if he is good enough to use programming language to implement his formula. Can we programmer do this? Probably not for most of us, since we specialize about computer, not math. An electronic engineer, who learns how to use C to program for his devices, can be considered a programmer. If the programming languages keep being simplified, may one day the software engineers, who implements business logic and create softwares, be obsolete? (Not for computer scientist though, since many of the CS topics are scientific, and science won't change, but technology will).

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• Blink-Data vs Instinct?

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  In his landmark bestseller Blink, well-known author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell explores how human beings everyday make seemingly instantaneous choices --in the blink of an eye--and how we “think without thinking.”  These situations actually aren’t as simple as they seem, he postulates; and throughout the book, Gladwell seeks answers to questions such as: 1.    What makes some people good at thinking on their feet and making quick spontaneous decisions?2.    Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others consistently seem to stumble into error?3.    Why are some of the best decisions often those that are difficult to explain to others?In Blink, Gladwell introduces us to the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Ultimately, Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who spend the most time deliberating or analyzing information, but those who focus on key factors among an overwhelming number of variables-- i.e., those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing.” In Data vs. Instinct: Perfecting Global Sales Performance, a new report sponsored by Oracle, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) explores the roles data and instinct play in decision-making by sales managers and discusses how sales executives can increase sales performance through more effective  territory planning and incentive/compensation strategies.If you are a sales executive, ask yourself this:  “Do you rely on knowledge (data) when you plan out your sales strategy?  If you rely on data, how do you ensure that your data sources are reliable, up-to-date, and complete?  With the emergence of social media and the proliferation of both structured and unstructured data, how do you know that you are applying your information/data correctly and in-context?  Three key findings in the report are:•    Six out of ten executives say they rely more on data than instinct to drive decisions. •    Nearly one half (48 percent) of incentive compensation plans do not achieve the desired results. •    Senior sales executives rely more on current and historical data than on forecast data. Strikingly similar to what Gladwell concludes in Blink, the report’s authors succinctly sum up their findings: "The best outcome is a combination of timely information, insightful predictions, and support data."Applying this insight is crucial to creating a sound sales plan that drives alignment and results.  In the area of sales performance management, “territory programs and incentive compensation continue to present particularly complex challenges in an increasingly globalized market," say the report’s authors. "It behooves companies to get a better handle on translating that data into actionable and effective plans." To help solve this challenge, CRM Oracle Fusion integrates forecasting, quotas, compensation, and territories into a single system.   For example, Oracle Fusion CRM provides a natural integration between territories, which define the sales targets (e.g., collection of accounts) for the sales force, and quotas, which quantify the sales targets. In fact, territory hierarchy is a core analytic dimension to slice and dice sales results, using sales analytics and alerts to help you identify where problems are occurring. This makes territoriesStart tapping into both data and instinct effectively today with Oracle Fusion CRM.   Here is a short video to provide you with a snapshot of how it can help you optimize your sales performance.  

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• RPG Monster-Area, Spawn, Loot table Design

  - by daemonfire300

  I currently struggle with creating the database structure for my RPG. I got so far: tables: area (id) monster (id, area.id, monster.id, hp, attack, defense, name) item (id, some other values) loot (id = monster.id, item = item.id, chance) spawn (id = area.id, monster = monster.id, count) It is a browser-based game like e.g. Castle Age. The player can move from area to area. If a player enters an area the system spawns, based on the area.id and using the spawn table data, new monsters into the monster table. If a player kills a monster, the system picks the monster.id looks up the items via the the loot table and adds those items to the player's inventory. First, is this smart? Second, I need some kind of "monster_instance"-table and "area_instance"-table, since each player enters his very own "area" and does damage to his very own "monsters". Another approach would be adding the / a player.id to the monster table, so each monster spawned, has it's own "player", but I still need to assign them to an area, and I think this would overload the monster table if I put in the player.id and the area.id into the monster table. What are your thoughts? Temporary Solution monster (id, attackDamage, defense, hp, exp, etc.) monster_instance (id, player.id, area_instance.id, hp, attackDamage, defense, monster.id, etc.) area (id, name, area.id access, restriction) area_instance (id, area.id, last_visited) spawn (id, area.id, monster.id) loot (id, monster.id, chance, amount, ?area.id?) An example system-flow would be: Player enters area 1: system creates area_instance of type area.id = 1 and sets player.location to area.id = 1 If Player wants to battle monsters in the current area: system fetches all spawn entries matching area.id == player.location and creates a new monster_instance for each spawn by fetching the according monster-base data from table monster. If a monster is fetched more than once it may be cached. If Player actually attacks a monster: system updates the according monster_instance, if monster dies the instance if removed after creating the loot If Player leaves the area: area_instance.last_visited is set to NOW(), if player doesn't return to data area within a certain amount of time area_instance including all its monster_instances are deleted.

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• Business School graduate joins Oracle

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  My name is Mathias, I work as an Applications Inside Sales Rep for the French market, and I’d like to give you a brief snapshot of my experience at Oracle. First things first, how did you hear about Oracle? Where have you seen the sharp and recognizable red logo? Was it in Charles de Gaulle Airport when your eyes crossed the 20-metre banner with a picture of a strange big machine in the middle? Was it through reading the Forbes 10 top IT companies worldwide ranking? Or is it because IT is your thing and you cannot but know one of the “big four”? Meeting with a Grenoble Alumnus My story is a little different. My plan was to work in sales, in the IT industry. I had heard about Oracle, but my opinion at the time was that this kind of multinational company was way out of reach for a young graduate, even with high enthusiasm and great excitement to be (finally) on the job market. So, I was really surprised when I had an interesting conversation with a top alumnus of my business school. We were at the Grenoble Ecole de Management graduation ceremony (our graduation!), and before the party got really started, I got to chat with her. She told me of the great experience she was getting by living and working in Dublin. She had already figured it all out: “you work with another 100 young people from 10 different nationalities across Europe, you can be based in Dublin, but then once you work really hard you can move to Malaga Spain or other BUs around the world, you can work with different lines of business and learn about new “techy” and business oriented products, move to the field in your home country or elsewhere, etc.” What, what, what? Moving around Europe, trained by the best sales coaches in the world, acquiring strong IT knowledge and getting on board with one of fastest-growing and most watched companies in the world? Well, I was in. The next day (OK, 3 days after, the time to recover), I sent her my CV, and 3 months later I started as a Business Development Consultant at Oracle in Dublin, representing the latest cloud based CRM across the French market. That was 15 months ago. Since then, I moved line of business twice, I’m always learning new things and working with different and senior stakeholders; I have attended hundreds of hours of sales and product training (priceless when you come from a business background); I passed the Dublin Institute of Technology Sales Certification through different trainings given onsite within Oracle; I’ve led projects based around social media and I’ve gotten involved within various sales deals going on my market. Despite all of these great things, two will remain in my spirit: the multiculturalism that I experience every day in the office, and the American style of management - more direct and open than what you can find in “regular French companies”. Sales Progression Board In May 2012, I passed what we call a ‘Sales Progression Board’ to be promoted to an Inside Sales position. I am now in charge of generating revenue through the sale of Oracle applications on my specific territory. Always keeping in my mind my personal ambition: going to the field one day. Interested to join Oracle in the same role as Mathias? Visit http://campus.oracle.com.

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• why are my players drawn to the side of my viewport

  - by Jetbuster

  Following this admittedly brilliant and clean 2d camera class I have a camera on each player, and it works for multiplayer and i've divided the screen into two sections for split screen by giving each camera a viewport. However in the game it looks like this I'm not sure if thats their position relative to the screen or what The relevant gameScreen code, the makePlayers is setup so it could theoretically work for up to 4 players private void makePlayers() { int rowCount = 1; if (NumberOfPlayers > 2) rowCount = 2; players = new Player[NumberOfPlayers]; for (int i = 0; i < players.Length; i++) { int xSize = GameRef.Window.ClientBounds.Width / 2; int ySize = GameRef.Window.ClientBounds.Height / rowCount; int col = i % rowCount; int row = i / rowCount; int xPoint = 0 + xSize * row; int yPoint = 0 + ySize * col; Viewport viewport = new Viewport(xPoint, yPoint, xSize, ySize); Vector2 playerPosition = new Vector2(viewport.TitleSafeArea.X + viewport.TitleSafeArea.Width / 2, viewport.TitleSafeArea.Y + viewport.TitleSafeArea.Height / 2); players[i] = new Player(playerPosition, playerSprites[i], GameRef, viewport); } //players[1].Keyboard = true; } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { base.Draw(gameTime); foreach (Player player in players) { GraphicsDevice.Viewport = player.PlayerCamera.ViewPort; GameRef.spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.PointClamp, null, null, null, player.PlayerCamera.Transform); map.Draw(GameRef.spriteBatch); // Draw the Player player.Draw(GameRef.spriteBatch); // Draw UI screen elements GraphicsDevice.Viewport = Viewport; ControlManager.Draw(GameRef.spriteBatch); GameRef.spriteBatch.End(); } } the player's initialize and draw methods are like so internal void Initialize() { this.score = 0; this.angle = (float)(Math.PI * 0 / 180);//Start sprite at it's default rotation int width = utils.scaleInt(picture.Width, imageScale); int height = utils.scaleInt(picture.Height, imageScale); this.hitBox = new HitBox(new Vector2(centerPos.X - width / 2, centerPos.Y - height / 2), width, height, Color.Black, game.Window.ClientBounds); playerCamera.Initialize(); } #region Methods public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { //Console.WriteLine("Hitbox: X({0}),Y({1})", hitBox.Points[0].X, hitBox.Points[0].Y); //Console.WriteLine("Image: X({0}),Y({1})", centerPos.X, centerPos.Y); Vector2 orgin = new Vector2(picture.Width / 2, picture.Height / 2); hitBox.Draw(spriteBatch); utils.DrawCrosshair(spriteBatch, Position, game.Window.ClientBounds, Color.Red); spriteBatch.Draw(picture, Position, null, Color.White, angle, orgin, imageScale, SpriteEffects.None, 0.1f); } as I said I think I'm gonna need to do something with the render position but I'm to entirely sure what or how it would be elegant to say the least

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• When row estimation goes wrong

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Whilst working at a client site, I hit upon one of those issues that you are not sure if that this is something entirely new or a bug or a gap in your knowledge. The client had a large query that needed optimizing.  The query itself looked pretty good, no udfs, UNION ALL were used rather than UNION, most of the predicates were sargable other than one or two minor ones.  There were a few extra joins that could be eradicated and having fixed up the query I then started to dive into the plan. I could see all manor of spills in the hash joins and the sort operations,  these are caused when SQL Server has not reserved enough memory and has to write to tempdb.  A VERY expensive operation that is generally avoidable.  These, however, are a symptom of a bad row estimation somewhere else, and when that bad estimation is combined with other estimation errors, chaos can ensue. Working my way back down the plan, I found the cause, and the more I thought about it the more i came convinced that the optimizer could be making a much more intelligent choice. First step is to reproduce and I was able to simplify the query down a single join between two tables, Product and ProductStatus,  from a business point of view, quite fundamental, find the status of particular products to show if ‘active’ ,’inactive’ or whatever. The query itself couldn’t be any simpler The estimated plan looked like this: Ignore the “!” warning which is a missing index, but notice that Products has 27,984 rows and the join outputs 14,000. The actual plan shows how bad that estimation of 14,000 is : So every row in Products has a corresponding row in ProductStatus.  This is unsurprising, in fact it is guaranteed,  there is a trusted FK relationship between the two columns.  There is no way that the actual output of the join can be different from the input. The optimizer is already partly aware of the foreign key meta data, and that can be seen in the simplifiction stage. If we drop the Description column from the query: the join to ProductStatus is optimized out. It serves no purpose to the query, there is no data required from the table and the optimizer knows that the FK will guarantee that a matching row will exist so it has been removed. Surely the same should be applied to the row estimations in the initial example, right ?  If you think so, please upvote this connect item. So what are our options in fixing this error ? Simply changing the join to a left join will cause the optimizer to think that we could allow the rows not to exist. or a subselect would also work However, this is a client site, Im not able to change each and every query where this join takes place but there is a more global switch that will fix this error,  TraceFlag 2301. This is described as, perhaps loosely, “Enable advanced decision support optimizations”. We can test this on the original query in isolation by using the “QueryTraceOn” option and lo and behold our estimated plan now has the ‘correct’ estimation. Many thanks goes to Paul White (b|t) for his help and keeping me sane through this

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• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

  Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted.  I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example.  A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.  As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They obviously offshore all development and have little oversight over that offshore development, and they probably have a small team at that.  Evidenced by the poor grammar throughout the game. They're seeking to maximize revenue and pushing to do as little development as possible, which would mean a small team. They're horribly understaffed in the customer support department as evidenced by never replying to this forum and never responding to bug reports or help requests (I've had one open with no response AT ALL for over a month . . .) They have way inadequate testing, no CI, and probably no automated unit tests.  You can see this by the poor grammar throughout the game and the type of bugs that show up. They aren't following a formal development process (no Agile, Waterfall, or anything else) as evidenced by their lack of predictable release cycle and lack of visibility. I'm guessing that the internal code base is terrible, otherwise, there wouldn't be an "Age II" that had nothing more than a new visual interface and a few rule tweaks.  This is also evidenced by the itty bitty scope of bug fixes and their inability to really fix bugs. Their Architect sucks.  Really, 42k user is all you can handle on a single server?  Could you REALLY not come up with a better way to scale to handle users?  They've built isolated worlds, instead of a single continuous world. Back to milking people for money--to really progress, you have to spend money. All of this adds up to knowing, deliberate actions on the part of management.  They CHOOSE to do this (like AOL choosing to send more discs instead of improve quality). So, what can we learn? This game will never really improve, since the bosses don't care, they're only in it for the money. The game will never have good support.  Again, the owners don't care. Giving them money only perpetuates this scam (and yes, I've given them money, way too much money. :() They don't care if you quit.  There's a new sucker born every day. Don't EVER go to work for them.  I've worked both with and for people like this and the culture is NEVER good. Ah well. Technorati Tags: Evony

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• Will HTML5 make Silverlight redundant?

  - by Laila

  One of the great features of Adobe AIR v2 that was launched this month was its support for some of the 2008 draft of HTML5. The HTML5 specification was started in 2004, but the full spec will probably not be approved by W3C until around 2022. One might have thought that it would take years yet from now to reach the point where any browsers were remotely HTML5-compliant, but enough of HTML5 is published and agreed to make a lot of it possible, and Safari and Adobe have got there thanks to Apple's open-source WebKit. The race for HTML 5 has been fuelled by the demand by Apple and Google for advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without having to rely on third party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Silverlight. There is good reason for this haste: Flash doesn't support touch-devices and has been slow in supporting hardware video decoders such as H.264. There is a strong requirement to do all that Flash can do in an open-standards way. Those with proprietary solutions remain sniffy. In AIR 2, Adobe pointedly disables the HTML5 and tags that allow basic playing of media content, saying that the specification is not final and there is still no standard for the supported formats, and adding that Safari implements a 'disjoint set' of codecs. Microsoft also has little interest in HTML 5 as it has so much invested in Silverlight. Google stands to gain by the Adobe AIR for Android as it will allow a lot of applications to be migrated easily to the platform, so sees Apple's war on Flash as a way of gaining market share. Why do we care? It is because HTML5/CSS3 provides facilities much far beyond HTML4, bring the reality of browser-based applications a lot closer. Probably most generally useful is the advanced typography: Safari and AIR already both support a way of reflowing text in a container across an arbitrary number of columns; Page-specific fonts can also be specified. Then there is 2D drawing, video, transitions, local storage, AJAX navigation and mutable DOM prototypes. HTML5 is likely to provide base functionality that is required but it is too early to be certain that it will render Flash, Silverlight or JavaFX obsolete. In the meantime, Adobe Air provides the best vehicle for developing HTML5/CSS3 applications without a twinge of worry about browser incompatibilities. Cheers, Laila

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• OpenWorld: Our (Road) Maps are Looking Good!

  - by Tony Berk

  Wow, only one (or two) days down at Oracle OpenWorld! Are you on overload yet? I'm still trying to figure out how to be in 3 sessions at the same time... I guess everyone needs to prioritize! There was a lot to see in Monday's sessions, especially some great forward-looking roadmap sessions. In case you aren't here or you decided to go to other sessions, this is my quick summary of what I could capture from a couple of the roadmaps: In the Fusion CRM Strategy and Roadmap session, Anthony Lye provided an overview of the Fusion CRM strategy including the key design principles of 3 E's: Easy, Effective and Efficient. After an overview of how Oracle has deployed Fusion CRM internally to 25,000 users worldwide, Anthony discussed the features coming in the next release, the releases in the next 12 months and beyond. I can't detail too much since you haven't read Oracle's Safe Harbor statement, but check out Fusion Tap and look for new features and added functionality for sales prediction, marketing, social and integration with a number of the key Customer Experience products.  In the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap session, Chris Hamilton presented the focus areas for the RightNow product. As a result of the large increase in development resources after the acquisition, the RightNow CX team is planning a lot of enhancements to the functionality, infrastructure and integrations. As a key piece of the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) strategy, RightNow will be integrated with Oracle Social Network, Oracle Commerce (ATG and Endeca), Oracle Knowledge, Oracle Policy Automation and, of course, further integration with Fusion Sales and Marketing. Look forward to seeing more on the Virtual Assistant, Smart Interaction Hub and Mobility. In addition to the roadmaps, I was looking forward to hearing from Oracle CRM customers. So, I sat in on two great Siebel customer panels: The Maximizing User Adoption Rates for Siebel Sales and Siebel Partner Relationship Management panel consisted of speakers from CSL Behring, McKesson and Intuit. It was great to get an overview of implementations for both B2B and B2C companies. It was great hearing that all of these companies have more than 1,000 sales users (Intuit has 4,000) and how the 360 degree view of the customer in Siebel is helping these customers improve their customers' experience (CX). They are all great examples of centralized implementations which have standardized processes across the globe and across business units.  Waste Management, Farmers Insurance and the US Citizenship & Immigration Services presented in the Driving Great Customer Experiences with Siebel Service Applications session. Talk about serving large customer bases! Is it possible that Farmers with only 10 million households is the smallest of these 3? All of them provided great examples of how they are improving the customer experience (CX) including 60-70% improvements in efficiency or reducing the number of applications the customer service reps (CSRs) need to use from 10 to 1 (Waste Management) and context aware call transfers to avoid the caller explaining their issue 3 times (USCIS). So that's my wrap up of only 4 sessions from Monday. In between sessions, I stopped by the Oracle DEMOgrounds and CRM Pavilion to visit with a group of great partners and see the products and partner integrations in action. Don't miss a recap of Mark Hurd's Keynote. I can't believe there were another 40+ sessions covering CRM, Fusion, Cloud, etc. that I missed today! Anyone else see any great sessions?

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• Why does my 3D model not translate the way I expect? [closed]

  - by ChocoMan

  In my first image, my model displays correctly: But when I move the model's position along the Z-axis (forward) I get this, yet the Y-axis doesnt change. An if I keep going, the model disappears into the ground: Any suggestions as to how I can get the model to translate properly visually? Here is how Im calling the model and the terrain in draw(): cameraPosition = new Vector3(camX, camY, camZ); // Copy any parent transforms. Matrix[] transforms = new Matrix[mShockwave.Bones.Count]; mShockwave.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(transforms); Matrix[] ttransforms = new Matrix[terrain.Bones.Count]; terrain.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(ttransforms); // Draw the model. A model can have multiple meshes, so loop. foreach (ModelMesh mesh in mShockwave.Meshes) { // This is where the mesh orientation is set, as well // as our camera and projection. foreach (BasicEffect effect in mesh.Effects) { effect.EnableDefaultLighting(); effect.PreferPerPixelLighting = true; effect.World = transforms[mesh.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateRotationY(modelRotation) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(modelPosition); // Looking at the model (picture shouldnt change other than rotation) effect.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(cameraPosition, modelPosition, Vector3.Up); effect.Projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView( MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), aspectRatio, 1.0f, 10000.0f); effect.TextureEnabled = true; } // Draw the mesh, using the effects set above. prepare3d(); mesh.Draw(); } //Terrain test foreach (ModelMesh meshT in terrain.Meshes) { foreach (BasicEffect effect in meshT.Effects) { effect.EnableDefaultLighting(); effect.PreferPerPixelLighting = true; effect.World = ttransforms[meshT.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateRotationY(0) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(terrainPosition); // Looking at the model (picture shouldnt change other than rotation) effect.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(cameraPosition, terrainPosition, Vector3.Up); effect.Projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView( MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), aspectRatio, 1.0f, 10000.0f); effect.TextureEnabled = true; } // Draw the mesh, using the effects set above. prepare3d(); meshT.Draw(); DrawText(); } base.Draw(gameTime); } I'm suspecting that there may be something wrong with how I'm handling my camera. The model rotates fine on its Y-axis.

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• Administer, manage, monitor, and fine tune the performance of your Oracle SOA Suite 11g Service Infrastructure and SOA composite applications.

  - by JuergenKress

  Key Features of the book If you are an Oracle SOA suite administrator, then this book is your bible. It gives you everything you need to know about all your tasks and help you to apply what you learn in your everyday life right from the first chapter. The book walks through promoting code across environments, performance tuning the service infrastructure, monitoring the environment, configuring security policies, managing the dehydration store, backing and restoring environments and so on. Packed with real-world examples from authors' own experiences, this books offers a unique insight into Oracle SOA Suite Administration. Detailed description The book begins with an introduction of SOA and quickly moves on to management of SOA composite applications. Readers will learn how to manage composite applications, their deployments and lifecycles. Equipped with this knowledge, readers will be introduced to monitoring and performance tuning SOA Suite, monitoring instances, messages, and composite applications, managing faults and exceptions, configuring audit levels of composite applications to include end-to-end monitoring through the use of extended logging as well as administering and configuring all SOA Suite components. A very important aspect of administration is tuning and optimizing the infrastructure for performance and book offers real work recommendations to monitor and performance tune service engines, the underlying WebLogic server, threads and timeouts, files systems, and composite applications. It also covers detailed administration of individual service components, configuring the infrastructure MBeans using both Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control and WLST based scripts, migrating worklist preferences and BAM data across environments, setting up Email, LDAP and custom XPath. An administrator is always trusted with troubleshooting and root causing problems in the infrastructure and this book will help you through the troubleshooting approaches as how to identify faults and exception through extended logging and thread dumps and find solutions to common startup problems and deployment issues. The advanced contents of this book explains OWSM security framework and how to secure components deployed to the infrastructure along with the details of all groundwork needed to ready the environment. Last few chapters help you to understand and deal with managing the metadata services repository and dehydration store, backup and recovery and concluding with advanced topics such as silent/scripted installations, cloning, upgrading, patching and high availability installations. Packed with real-world examples, and tips straight from the trench; this book offers insights into SOA Suite administration that you will not find elsewhere. Part of our writing style in this book draws heavily on the philosophy of reuse and as such the book provide an ample of executable SQL queries and WLST scripts that administrators can reuse and extend to perform most of the administration tasks such as monitoring instances, processing times, instance states and perform automatic deployments, tuning, migration, and installation. These scripts are spread over each of the chapters in the book and can also be downloaded from here. The book is available in different formats at the following websites: Paperback and eBook versions & Kindle version. It is available for order and signed copies are available through our web site. 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: SOA book,SOA Suite Adminsitration,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• PARTNER WEBCAST- INNOVATIONS IN PRODUCTS PROGRAM (FORMERLY KNOWN AS COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  PARTNER WEBCAST- INNOVATIONS IN PRODUCTS PROGRAM (FORMERLY KNOWN AS COMPETENCE VIRTUAL) JULY 2ND, 2012 AT 04:00 PM CET (03:00 PM GMT)I am pleased to invite you to join the Innovations in Products –webcast. Innovations in Products will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Innovations in Products will be presented on the 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Innovations in Products is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. What are the Benefits for partners? Find out how Innovations in Products helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customers's solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleague alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Application portfolio – for your and your customer’s benefit. Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Note: At the latter part of this email you have also 17 links into the recent Applications Products presentations and 6 links into the Public Sector Value Proposition presentations that were presented in Innovations in Industries -program. Product breakout sessions: Fusion Applications Technology and Extensibility Fusion Applications - Transforming your Back-Office Accounting Function Fusion HCM & Talent Overview & Extensibility Fusion HCM Compensation Planning Enterprise PLM for the Product Value Chain Oracle's Asset Management and Maintenance Solution For more details please visit Innovations in Products and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery Format Innovations in Products –program is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the web cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Innovations in Products consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. You can also see Innovations in Products afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Innovations in Products web casts will be presented as follows: July 2nd 2012 October 1st 2012 January 14th 2013 April 8th 2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me Markku Rouhiainen.

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• PARTNER WEBCAST- INNOVATIONS IN PRODUCTS PROGRAM (FORMERLY KNOWN AS COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  PARTNER WEBCAST- INNOVATIONS IN PRODUCTS PROGRAM (FORMERLY KNOWN AS COMPETENCE VIRTUAL) JULY 2ND, 2012 AT 04:00 PM CET (03:00 PM GMT)I am pleased to invite you to join the Innovations in Products –webcast. Innovations in Products will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Innovations in Products will be presented on the 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Innovations in Products is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. What are the Benefits for partners? Find out how Innovations in Products helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customers's solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleague alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Application portfolio – for your and your customer’s benefit. Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Note: At the latter part of this email you have also 17 links into the recent Applications Products presentations and 6 links into the Public Sector Value Proposition presentations that were presented in Innovations in Industries -program. Product breakout sessions: Fusion Applications Technology and Extensibility Fusion Applications - Transforming your Back-Office Accounting Function Fusion HCM & Talent Overview & Extensibility Fusion HCM Compensation Planning Enterprise PLM for the Product Value Chain Oracle's Asset Management and Maintenance Solution For more details please visit Innovations in Products and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery Format Innovations in Products –program is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the web cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Innovations in Products consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. You can also see Innovations in Products afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Innovations in Products web casts will be presented as follows: July 2nd 2012 October 1st 2012 January 14th 2013 April 8th 2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me Markku Rouhiainen.

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• Drawing a texture at the end of a trace (crosshair?) UDK

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm trying to draw a crosshair at the end of my trace. If my crosshair does not hit a pawn or static mesh (ex, just a skybox) then the crosshair stays locked on a certain point at that actor - I want to say its origin. Ex: Run across a pawn, then it turns yellow and stays on that pawn. If it runs across the skybox, then it stays at one point on the box. Weird? How can I get my crosshair to stay consistent? I've included two images for reference, to help illustrate. Note: The wrench is actually my crosshair. The "X" is just a debug crosshair. Ignore that. /// Image 1 /// /// Image 2 /// /*************************************************************************** * Draws the crosshair ***************************************************************************/ function bool CheckCrosshairOnFriendly() { local float CrosshairSize; local vector HitLocation, HitNormal, StartTrace, EndTrace, ScreenPos; local actor HitActor; local MyWeapon W; local Pawn MyPawnOwner; /** Sets the PawnOwner */ MyPawnOwner = Pawn(PlayerOwner.ViewTarget); /** Sets the Weapon */ W = MyWeapon(MyPawnOwner.Weapon); /** If we don't have an owner, then get out of the function */ if ( MyPawnOwner == None ) { return false; } /** If we have a weapon... */ if ( W != None) { /** Values for the trace */ StartTrace = W.InstantFireStartTrace(); EndTrace = StartTrace + W.MaxRange() * vector(PlayerOwner.Rotation); HitActor = MyPawnOwner.Trace(HitLocation, HitNormal, EndTrace, StartTrace, true, vect(0,0,0),, TRACEFLAG_Bullet); DrawDebugLine(StartTrace, EndTrace, 100,100,100,); /** Projection for the crosshair to convert 3d coords into 2d */ ScreenPos = Canvas.Project(HitLocation); /** If we haven't hit any actors... */ if ( Pawn(HitActor) == None ) { HitActor = (HitActor == None) ? None : Pawn(HitActor.Base); } } /** If our trace hits a pawn... */ if ((Pawn(HitActor) == None)) { /** Draws the crosshair for no one - Grey*/ CrosshairSize = 28 * (Canvas.ClipY / 768) * (Canvas.ClipX /1024); Canvas.SetDrawColor(100,100,128,255); Canvas.SetPos(ScreenPos.X - (CrosshairSize * 0.5f), ScreenPos.Y -(CrosshairSize * 0.5f)); Canvas.DrawTile(class'UTHUD'.default.AltHudTexture, CrosshairSize, CrosshairSize, 600, 262, 28, 27); return false; } /** Draws the crosshair for friendlies - Yellow */ CrosshairSize = 28 * (Canvas.ClipY / 768) * (Canvas.ClipX /1024); Canvas.SetDrawColor(255,255,128,255); Canvas.SetPos(ScreenPos.X - (CrosshairSize * 0.5f), ScreenPos.Y -(CrosshairSize * 0.5f)); Canvas.DrawTile(class'UTHUD'.default.AltHudTexture, CrosshairSize, CrosshairSize, 600, 262, 28, 27); return true; }

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• Oracle At QCon SF 2012

  - by Cassandra Clark - OTN

  Oracle Technology Network is a Platinum sponsor at QCon San Francisco.  (qconsf.com).  Don’t miss these great developer focused sessions: Shay ShmeltzerHow we simplified Web, Mobile and Cloud development for our own developers? - the Oracle StoryOver the past several years, Oracle has beendeveloping a new set of enterprise applications in what is probably one of thelargest Java based development project in the world. How do you take 3000 developers and make them productive? How do you insure the delivery of cutting edge UIs for both Mobile and Web channels? How do you enable Cloud baseddevelopment and deployment?  Come and learn how we did it at Oracle, and see how the same technologies and methodologies can apply to your development efforts. Dan SmithProject Lambda in Java 8Java SE 8 will include major enhancements to the Java Programming Language and its core libraries.  This suite of new features, known as Project Lambda in the OpenJDK community, includes lambda expressions, default methods, and parallel collections (and much more!).  The result will be a next-generation Java programming experience with more flexibility and better abstractions.   This talk will introduce the new Java features and offer a behind-the-scenes view of how they evolved and why they work the way that they do. Arun GuptaJSR 356: Building HTML5 WebSocket Applications in JavaThe family of HTML5 technologies has pushed the pendulum away from rich client technologies and toward ever-more-capable Web clients running on today’s browsers. In particular, WebSocket brings new opportunities for efficient peer-to-peer communication, providing the basis for a new generation of interactive and “live” Web applications. This session examines the efforts under way to support WebSocket in the Java programming model, from its base-level integration in the Java Servlet and Java EE containers to a new, easy-to-use API and toolset that are destined to become part of the standard Java platform. The full conference schedule is here: http://qconsf.com/sf2012/schedule/wednesday.jsp But wait, there’s more!  At the Oracle booth, we’ll also be covering: ·         Oracle ADF Mobile·         Oracle Developer Cloud Service·         Oracle ADF Essentials·         NetBeans Project Easel Lastly we’ll share the results of a short cloud survey at QConSF ater this week.  If you attended this year's Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences, it would be hard not to notice that Oracle is clearly "all-in" when it comes to the Cloud.  With Cloud computing being such a hot topic on many OTN members' minds, we'd like to know what you're doing in the cloud and invite you to take this short cloud survey.

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• NHibernate Session Load vs Get when using Table per Hierarchy. Always use ISession.Get&lt;T&gt; for TPH to work.

  - by Rohit Gupta

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/rgupta/archive/2014/06/01/nhibernate-session-load-vs-get-when-using-table-per-hierarchy.aspxNHibernate ISession has two methods on it : Load and Get. Load allows the entity to be loaded lazily, meaning the actual call to the database is made only when properties on the entity being loaded is first accessed. Additionally, if the entity has already been loaded into NHibernate Cache, then the entity is loaded directly from the cache instead of querying the underlying database. ISession.Get<T> instead makes the call to the database, every time it is invoked. With this background, it is obvious that we would prefer ISession.Load<T> over ISession.Get<T> most of the times for performance reasons to avoid making the expensive call to the database. let us consider the impact of using ISession.Load<T> when we are using the Table per Hierarchy implementation of NHibernate. Thus we have base class/ table Animal, there is a derived class named Snake with the Discriminator column being Type which in this case is “Snake”. If we load This Snake entity using the Repository for Animal, we would have a entity loaded, as shown below: public T GetByKey(object key, bool lazy = false) { if (lazy) return CurrentSession.Load<T>(key); return CurrentSession.Get<T>(key); } var tRepo = new NHibernateReadWriteRepository<TPHAnimal>(); var animal = tRepo.GetByKey(new Guid("602DAB56-D1BD-4ECC-B4BB-1C14BF87F47B"), true); var snake = animal as Snake; snake is null As you can see that the animal entity retrieved from the database cannot be cast to Snake even though the entity is actually a snake. The reason being ISession.Load prevents the entity to be cast to Snake and will throw the following exception: System.InvalidCastException :  Message=Unable to cast object of type 'TPHAnimalProxy' to type 'NHibernateChecker.Model.Snake'. Thus we can see that if we lazy load the entity using ISession.Load<TPHAnimal> then we get a TPHAnimalProxy and not a snake. =============================================================== However if do not lazy load the same cast works perfectly fine, this is since we are loading the entity from database and the entity being loaded is not a proxy. Thus the following code does not throw any exceptions, infact the snake variable is not null: var tRepo = new NHibernateReadWriteRepository<TPHAnimal>(); var animal = tRepo.GetByKey(new Guid("602DAB56-D1BD-4ECC-B4BB-1C14BF87F47B"), false); var snake = animal as Snake; if (snake == null) { var snake22 = (Snake) animal; }

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• Bullet Physics - Casting a ray straight down from a rigid body (first person camera)

  - by Hydrocity

  I've implemented a first person camera using Bullet--it's a rigid body with a capsule shape. I've only been using Bullet for a few days and physics engines are new to me. I use btRigidBody::setLinearVelocity() to move it and it collides perfectly with the world. The only problem is the Y-value moves freely, which I temporarily solved by setting the Y-value of the translation vector to zero before the body is moved. This works for all cases except when falling from a height. When the body drops off a tall object, you can still glide around since the translate vector's Y-value is being set to zero, until you stop moving and fall to the ground (the velocity is only set when moving). So to solve this I would like to try casting a ray down from the body to determine the Y-value of the world, and checking the difference between that value and the Y-value of the camera body, and disable or slow down movement if the difference is large enough. I'm a bit stuck on simply casting a ray and determining the Y-value of the world where it struck. I've implemented this callback: struct AllRayResultCallback : public btCollisionWorld::RayResultCallback{ AllRayResultCallback(const btVector3& rayFromWorld, const btVector3& rayToWorld) : m_rayFromWorld(rayFromWorld), m_rayToWorld(rayToWorld), m_closestHitFraction(1.0){} btVector3 m_rayFromWorld; btVector3 m_rayToWorld; btVector3 m_hitNormalWorld; btVector3 m_hitPointWorld; float m_closestHitFraction; virtual btScalar addSingleResult(btCollisionWorld::LocalRayResult& rayResult, bool normalInWorldSpace) { if(rayResult.m_hitFraction < m_closestHitFraction) m_closestHitFraction = rayResult.m_hitFraction; m_collisionObject = rayResult.m_collisionObject; if(normalInWorldSpace){ m_hitNormalWorld = rayResult.m_hitNormalLocal; } else{ m_hitNormalWorld = m_collisionObject->getWorldTransform().getBasis() * rayResult.m_hitNormalLocal; } m_hitPointWorld.setInterpolate3(m_rayFromWorld, m_rayToWorld, m_closestHitFraction); return 1.0f; } }; And in the movement function, I have this code: btVector3 from(pos.x, pos.y + 1000, pos.z); // pos is the camera's rigid body position btVector3 to(pos.x, 0, pos.z); // not sure if 0 is correct for Y AllRayResultCallback callback(from, to); Base::getSingletonPtr()->m_btWorld->rayTest(from, to, callback); So I have the callback.m_hitPointWorld vector, which seems to just show the position of the camera each frame. I've searched Google for examples of casting rays, as well as the Bullet documentation, and it's been hard to just find an example. An example is really all I need. Or perhaps there is some method in Bullet to keep the rigid body on the ground? I'm using Ogre3D as a rendering engine, and casting a ray down is quite straightforward with that, however I want to keep all the ray casting within Bullet for simplicity. Could anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

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• OPN Specialized Latest News (15th November)

  - by swalker

  HELPING YOU TO SPECIALIZE WebCenter Implementation Specialist Exam Preparation Webcasts: WebCenter Content And WebCenter Portal Oracle Partner Network would like to invite you to Refresh Courses for WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal, to help partners to prepare for the WebCenter Implementation Specialist EXAMS. This is a 3 hours intensive refresher partner-only training session, providing attendees with an overview of WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal functions and related topics. After the refresher part you will be able to take the relevant Implementation Specialist EXAM depending on your personal focus. NOTE: This is only suitable for experienced WebCenter Content or WebCenter Portal practitioners Who should attend? Partner Consultants who want to become an Oracle WebCenter Content or a WebCenter Portal Certified Implementation Specialist or both, that will help them to differentiate themselves in front of customers and support their Companies to become Specialized. Webcast Details: Click here to read more... Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events The Partner Event Publisher has just been made available to all specialized partners in EMEA.  Partners now have the opportunity to publish their events to the Oracle.com/events site and spread the word on their upcoming live in-person and/or live webcast events. Click here to read more information and watch a short video demo. VADs Get Specialized Effective November 1, 2011 , VADs, with a valid Value Added Distributor Agreement will no longer be required to meet customer reference requirements outlined in the business criteria section in order to become specialized. VADs must continue meet all other business and competency criteria set forth in the applicable Knowledge Zone prior to specialization approval. New Certification Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Your opportunity to take the Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Essentials (1Z0-581) Exam is vailable now in beta. Pass the exam so you can become a Pillar Axiom 600 Storage Systems Implementation Specialist! Free vouchers are available for Oracle Partners! If you would like to receive a free Beta exam voucher, please send your request to [email protected] and include your name, business email address, company, and the Exam name Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Essentials Beta exam. New Certification Available: Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Essentials (1Z0-562) is a solution designed to help you meet market windows and regulatory deadlines while enjoying a low total cost of ownership and a high return on investment. Take the exam now to become an  Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Essentials Implementation Specialists. MEASURING YOUR SUCCESS We had 1674 Specialized Partners covering 5364 Specializations. Please note that due to OPN contract renewals at any given point in time there are valid Specialized Partners and Specializations which are temporarily not captured in the total statistics. An incremental 1961 individuals were accredited as Implementation Specialists giving an EMEA cumulative total of 9598 Implementation Specialists 26 ISVs obtained one or more Ready's, for a total of 53 Ready's Don't forget! You can submit your own press releases to Oracle! Every time you achieve specialization we'd like to support you getting the message out! Press guidelines and a submission link can be found on the OPN Portal here.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for October 2012. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning | @FusionSecExpert Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. 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 Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Vennster) discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what's truly valuable. 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. Oracle Solaris 11.1 update focuses on database integration, cloud | Mark Fontecchio TechTarget editor Mark Fontecchio reports on the recent Oracle Solaris 11.1 release, with comments from IDC's Al Gillen. Architects Matter: Making sense of the people who make sense of enterprise IT Why do architects matter? Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens suggests that you ask yourself this question the next time you take the elevator to the Oracle offices on the 45th floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois (or any other skyscraper, for that matter). If you had to take the stairs to get to those offices, who would you blame? "You get the picture," he says. "Architecture is essential for any necessarily complex structure, be it a building or an enterprise." (Read the article) Thought for the Day "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• The Connected Company: WebCenter Portal - Feedback - Analytics and Polls

  - by Michael Snow

  Evernote Export body, td { }Guest Post by: Mitchell Palski, Staff Sales Consultant The importance of connecting peers has been widely recognized and socialized as a critical component of employee intranets. Organizations are striving to provide mediums for sharing knowledge and improving awareness across their enterprise. Indirectly, the socialization of your enterprise should lead to cost savings and improved product/service quality. However, many times the direct effects of connecting an organization’s leadership with its employees are overlooked. Oracle WebCenter Portal can help you bridge that gap by gathering implicit and explicit feedback. Implicit Feedback Through Usage Analytics Analytics allows administrators to track and analyze WebCenter Portal traffic and usage. Analytics provides the following basic functionality: Usage Tracking Metrics: Analytics collects and reports metrics of common WebCenter Portal functions, including community and portlet traffic. Behavior Tracking: Analytics can be used to analyze WebCenter Portal metrics to determine usage patterns, such as page visit duration and usage over time. User Profile Correlation: Analytics can be used to correlate metric information with user profile information. Usage tracking reports can be viewed and filtered by user profile data such as country, company or title. Usage analytics help measure how users interact with website content – allowing your IT staff and business analysts to make informed decisions when planning development for your next intranet enhancement. For example: If users are not accessing your Announcements page and missing critical information that they need to be aware of, you may elect to use graphical links on the home page to direct more users to that page. As a result, the number of employee help-requests to HR decreases. If users are not accessing your News page to read recent articles, you may elect to stop spending as much time updating the page with new stories and cut costs in your communications department. You notice that there is a high volume of users accessing the Employee Dashboard page so your organization decides to continue making personalization enhancements to the page and investing in the Portal tool that most users are accessing. Usage analytics aren’t necessarily a new concept in the IT industry. What sets WebCenter Portal Analytics apart is: Reports are tailored for WebCenter specific tools Report can be easily added to a page as simple as a drag-and-drop Explicit Feedback Through Polls WebCenter Portal users can create, edit, take, and analyze online polls. With polls, you can survey your audience (such as their opinions and their experience level), check whether they can recall important information, and gather feedback and metrics. How many times have you been involved in a requirements discussion and someone has asked a question similar to “Well how do you know that no one likes our home page?” and the response is “Everyone says they hate it! That’s all anyone complains about.” No one has any measurable, quantifiable metric to gauge user satisfaction. Analytics measure usage, but your organization also needs to measure the quality of your portal as defined by the actual people that use it. With that information, your leadership can make informed decisions that will not only match usage patterns but also relate to employees on a personal level. The end result is a connection between employees and leadership that gives everyone in the organization a sense of ownership of their Portal rather than the feeling of development decisions being segregated to leadership only. Polls can be created and edited through the Poll Manager: Polls and View Poll Results can easily be added to a page through drag-and-drop. What did we learn? Being a “connected” company doesn’t just mean helping employees connect with each other horizontally across your enterprise. It also means connecting those employees to the decisions that affect their everyday activities. Through WebCenter Portal Usage Analytics and Polls, any decision that is made to remove a Portal page, update a Portal page, or develop new Portal functionality, can be justified by quantifiable metrics. Instead of fielding complaints and hearing that your employees don’t have a voice, give those employees a voice and listen!

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• Have you used the ExecutionValue and ExecValueVariable properties?

  The ExecutionValue execution value property and it’s friend ExecValueVariable are a much undervalued feature of SSIS, and many people I talk to are not even aware of their existence, so I thought I’d try and raise their profile a bit. The ExecutionValue property is defined on the base object Task, so all tasks have it available, but it is up to the task developer to do something useful with it. The basic idea behind it is that it allows the task to return something useful and interesting about what it has performed, in addition to the standard success or failure result. The best example perhaps is the Execute SQL Task which uses the ExecutionValue property to return the number of rows affected by the SQL statement(s). This is a very useful feature, something people often want to capture into a variable, and start using the result set options to do. Unfortunately we cannot read the value of a task property at runtime from within a SSIS package, so the ExecutionValue property on its own is a bit of a let down, but enter the ExecValueVariable and we have the perfect marriage. The ExecValueVariable is another property exposed through the task (TaskHost), which lets us select a SSIS package variable. What happens now is that when the task sets the ExecutionValue, the interesting value is copied into the variable we set on the ExecValueVariable property, and a variable is something we can access and do something with. So put simply if the ExecutionValue property value is of interest, make sure you create yourself a package variable and set the name as the ExecValueVariable. Have  look at the 3 step guide below: 1 Configure your task as normal, for example the Execute SQL Task, which here calls a stored procedure to do some updates. 2 Create variable of a suitable type to match the ExecutionValue, an integer is used to match the result we want to capture, the number of rows. 3 Set the ExecValueVariable for the task, just select the variable we created in step 2. You need to do this in Properties grid for the task (Short-cut key, select the task and press F4) Now when we execute the sample task above, our variable UpdateQueueRowCount will get the number of rows we updated in our Execute SQL Task. I’ve tried to collate a list of tasks that return something useful via the ExecutionValue and ExecValueVariable mechanism, but the documentation isn’t always great. Task ExecutionValue Description Execute SQL Task Returns the number of rows affected by the SQL statement or statements. File System Task Returns the number of successful operations performed by the task. File Watcher Task Returns the full path of the file found Transfer Error Messages Task Returns the number of error messages that have been transferred Transfer Jobs Task Returns the number of jobs that are transferred Transfer Logins Task Returns the number of logins transferred Transfer Master Stored Procedures Task Returns the number of stored procedures transferred Transfer SQL Server Objects Task Returns the number of objects transferred WMI Data Reader Task Returns an object that contains the results of the task. Not exactly clear, but I assume it depends on the WMI query used.

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• Visual WebGui's XAML based programming for web developers

  - by Webgui

  While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk. Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives. "When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui , I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui. Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability. The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production. VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side. Short demo video of VWG Sites markup. There is also a live sample available here.

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• NetBeans IDE 7.3 Knows Null

  - by Geertjan

  What's the difference between these two methods, "test1" and "test2"? public int test1(String str) {     return str.length(); } public int test2(String str) {     if (str == null) {         System.err.println("Passed null!.");         //forgotten return;     }     return str.length(); } The difference, or at least, the difference that is relevant for this blog entry, is that whoever wrote "test2" apparently thinks that the variable "str" may be null, though did not provide a null check. In NetBeans IDE 7.3, you see this hint for "test2", but no hint for "test1", since in that case we don't know anything about the developer's intention for the variable and providing a hint in that case would flood the source code with too many false positives:  Annotations are supported in understanding how a piece of code is intended to be used. If method return types use @Nullable, @NullAllowed, @CheckForNull, the value is considered to be "strongly possible to be null", as well as if the variable is tested to be null, as shown above. When using @NotNull, @NonNull, @Nonnull, the value is considered to be non-null. (The exact FQNs of the annotations are ignored, only simple names are checked.) Here are examples showing where the hints are displayed for the non-null hints (the "strongly possible to be null" hints are not shown below, though you can see one of them in the screenshot above), together with a comment showing what is shown when you hover over the hint: There isn't a "one size fits all" refactoring for these various instances relating to null checks, hence you can't do an automated refactoring across your code base via tools in NetBeans IDE, as shown yesterday for class member reordering across code bases. However, you can, instead, go to Source | Inspect and then do a scan throughout a scope (e.g., current file/package/project or combinations of these or all open projects) for class elements that the IDE identifies as potentially having a problem in this area: Thanks to Jan Lahoda, who reports that this currently also works in NetBeans IDE 7.3 dev builds for fields but that may need to be disabled since right now too many false positives are returned, for help with the info above and any misunderstandings are my own fault!

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• Get Fanatical About Your Followers

  - by Mike Stiles

  In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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