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• SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 1

  Today I had a little spare time during the morning hours and I decided that after checking MVA that I'm going to query the available course material over at Pluralsight. Wow, thanks to fantastic corporations and acquisitions there are lots of courses available. Nicely split by SharePoint version as well as particular interest group. Additionally, I found a couple of online blogs and community sites that I'm going to visit regularly during the next couple of weeks. Today's resource(s) Of course, I'm "all in" for the latest developer resources: SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 1 - Understanding the Platform and Developer Experience SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 2 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 3 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 4 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 5 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 6 I guess, I'm going to stick to the Pluralsight library until the end of this week. We'll see... Anyway, apart from the video material I came across a couple of other websites which I'd like to list here, too. That's mainly for personal reference instead of bookmarking in the browser, I'll use my own blog for that purpose. Atkinson's SharePoint Blog Düsseldorfer Jung Doerflers SharePoint Blog SharePoint Community Absolute SharePoint The links are in no preferential order and I added them as soon as I found them. Most probably, I'm going to report about specific articles from those resources during this challenge. So, stay tuned and I try to provide more details on certain topics. Takeaway First contact with the 'real stuff' in order to get an idea about software development in Microsoft SharePoint and beyond. Unfortunately and as already expected, the marketing department over at Microsoft seemed to have nothing better to do than to invent new names and baptise literally the same product with every release. Luckily, the release cycles between versions have been three years (roughly) - 2007, 2010, and 2013. Nonetheless, there will be a lot of version-specfic issues to tackle during this learning phase. Especially, when it's about historical expressions like 'WSS'* like I had it yesterday... It's going to be exciting and demanding to catch up with roughly 6-7 years of development and changes. Okay, let's face it. * WSS stands for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 which forms the 'core engine' of SharePoint 2007. Part 1 of Andrew Connell's series on SharePoint 2013 for developers provides a brief history and overview of the various product names and their relation to the actual SharePoint version. I guess, I might create a cheat-sheet or something comparable in order to reduce the level of confusion while reading through other material: SharePoint 2007 (aka SharePoint v3 aka SharePoint 12) Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 .NET Framework 3.0, 32-bit or 64-bit OS SharePoint 2010 (aka SharePoint v4 aka SharePoint 14) Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (SPF) 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Server (SPS) 2010 .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, 64-bit OS only SharePoint 2013 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (SPF) 2013 Microsoft SharePoint Server (SPS) 2013 .NET Framework 4.5, 64-bit OS only After this quick excursion it is getting more interesting. SharePoint 2013 has a number of Development Practices and Techniques under the hood, and it will be quite a decision process depending on the task requirements to choose the correct path to go. At the moment, the following two options seem to be my future fields of operation: Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) REST API and OData syntax As part of my job assignment, I see myself developing within Visual Studio 2012/2013. Most probably the client development in C# will be using CSOM but of course I'll keep an eye on the REST API, too. JavaScript has quite a momentum since a while and it would a shame to ignore this type of opportunity and possibilities.

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• How do I get FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3 to work with shaders in Direct3D11?

  - by Dominic

  Currently I'm going through some tutorials and learning DX11 on a DX10 machine (though I just ordered a new DX11 compatible computer) by means of setting the D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_ setting to 10_0 and switching the vertex and pixel shader versions in D3DX11CompileFromFile to "vs_4_0" and "ps_4_0" respectively. This works fine as I'm not using any DX11-only features yet. I'd like to make it compatible with DX9.0c, which naively I thought I could do by changing the feature level setting to 9_3 or something and taking the vertex/pixel shader versions down to 3 or 2. However, no matter what I change the vertex/pixel shader versions to, it always fails when I try to call D3DX11CompileFromFile to compile the vertex/pixel shader files when I have D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3 enabled. Maybe this is due to the the vertex/pixel shader files themselves being incompatible for the lower vertex/pixel shader versions, but I'm not expert enough to say. My shader files are listed below: Vertex shader: cbuffer MatrixBuffer { matrix worldMatrix; matrix viewMatrix; matrix projectionMatrix; }; struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; }; PixelInputType LightVertexShader(VertexInputType input) { PixelInputType output; // Change the position vector to be 4 units for proper matrix calculations. input.position.w = 1.0f; // Calculate the position of the vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. output.position = mul(input.position, worldMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, viewMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, projectionMatrix); // Store the texture coordinates for the pixel shader. output.tex = input.tex; // Calculate the normal vector against the world matrix only. output.normal = mul(input.normal, (float3x3)worldMatrix); // Normalize the normal vector. output.normal = normalize(output.normal); return output; } Pixel Shader: Texture2D shaderTexture; SamplerState SampleType; cbuffer LightBuffer { float4 ambientColor; float4 diffuseColor; float3 lightDirection; float padding; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; }; float4 LightPixelShader(PixelInputType input) : SV_TARGET { float4 textureColor; float3 lightDir; float lightIntensity; float4 color; // Sample the pixel color from the texture using the sampler at this texture coordinate location. textureColor = shaderTexture.Sample(SampleType, input.tex); // Set the default output color to the ambient light value for all pixels. color = ambientColor; // Invert the light direction for calculations. lightDir = -lightDirection; // Calculate the amount of light on this pixel. lightIntensity = saturate(dot(input.normal, lightDir)); if(lightIntensity > 0.0f) { // Determine the final diffuse color based on the diffuse color and the amount of light intensity. color += (diffuseColor * lightIntensity); } // Saturate the final light color. color = saturate(color); // Multiply the texture pixel and the final diffuse color to get the final pixel color result. color = color * textureColor; return color; }

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• Is there an IDE that can simplify the process of creating a game matchmaking website?

  - by Scott

  Yes, I'm an old guy. And I'm well versed in "C" and have written several games which I have been selling on the web for a number of years. And now, I would like to adapt one of my games to be "online". Sounds simple. I'm sure I can use the thousands of lines of "C" code that I've already written. Right? So my initial investigation begins. First, I think I'll need a server program that lives on a dedicated server (or a VPS probably) that talks to a bunch of client applications that live on individual devices around the world. I can certainly handle that! (I think to myself). I'll break up my existing game into two pieces, a client piece that is just the game displays and buttons, and a server piece that does everything else. Piece of cake, right? But that means that the "server piece" must be executed on a remote machine somewhere and run 24/7. Can I do that? [apparently, that question is so basic, so uneducated, and so lame, that nobody has ever posed it before. Because hours of Googling does not yield an answer. Fine. I'll assume I can do that and move on.] I'll need a "game room", which to me means a website where you log in and then go to a lobby of some kind where you can setup your preferences, see if any of your friends are connected, and create or join games. Should be easy, but it's not. No way. Can I do all this with my local website builder? (which happens to be 90 Second Website Builder, a nice product, btw). It turns out, I can not. I can start with that, but must modify each page, so I can interact with my sql database. So I begin making each page a "PHP" page and dynamically modifying the HTML code with PHP code. I'm already starting to get a headache. Because the resulting web pages looked terrible, I began looking at using JQuery. I want to user a JQuery dialog on my website to display a list of friends and allow the user to select one to invite to the game. [google search for "how to populate a JQuery dialog from a sql database" yields nothing but more confusion.] Javascript? Java? HTML? XML? HTML5? PHP? JQuery? Flash? Sockets? Forms? CSS? Learning about each one of these, and how they interact with each other and/or depend on each other is too much for my feeble old brain. Can anyone simplify this process for me? Is there an IDE that will help me do all this without having to go back to college for a few years? Thanks, Scott

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• Windows Phone 7 Series - Tools and Resources

  - by TechTwaddle

  Unless you've been living in the caves of Lascaux for the past couple of days, you probably know what's happening in the world of Windows Phone. Microsoft unveiled the developer tools required to develop applications and games for Windows Phone 7 at MIX10 a couple of days back. Silverlight and XNA being the major frameworks, no big surprise there. And the best news of all is that all the development tools are free! So if you are planning to develop apps for Windows Phone 7, read on. The first place, or more appropriately hub, for you is the Windows Phone Developer Portal. It has most of the information you need to get you started. Now there is a ton of information available at other places too. In this post, I take time to put all the information that I found useful at one place, and I'll keep updating this as and when I find new stuff.   Setting up the development environment 1. Install Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (Community Technology Preview) This will install Visual Studio 2010 Express, Silverlight, XNA framework and emulator for Windows Phone 7. It also installs a few support tools. 2. Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone:     - Install Expression Blend 4 beta     - Install Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone     - Install Expression Blend SDK Preview for Windows Phone Installing the above tools should set your machine up for development. I installed the tools on my Windows Vista SP1 machine and the process went smoothly without running into any major hitch. Note that the tools won't install on Windows XP, read the release notes of the CTP. Resources and Documentation 1. Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit 2. Programming Windows Phone 7 Series by Charles Petzold. Contains few chapters only. Gives a good preview. 3. MSDN documentation for Windows Phone 7 Development 4. A sample chapter from Learning Windows Phone Programming [PDF] by Yochay Kiriaty and Jaime Rodriguez. Complete book will be available at a later time. 5. Windows Phone 7 Developer Forum - where you can ask questions and problems you run into and the experts are there to help you. 6. For Silverlight visit silverlight.net and for XNA game development, the XNA Creators Club is the place to go, also make sure you follow Michael Klutcher's and Shawn Hargreaves' blog. 7. And finally the MIX'10 website. Most of the sessions will be available for download later (some are already available). Click on the Windows Phone tag to get all the session details and downloads.   If you are completely new to Silverlight and XNA (like me), and C# makes some sense to you then I suggest you go through the Developer Training Kit. It gives a good start and ramps you up pretty quickly.

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• Easy Profiling Point Insertion

  - by Geertjan

  One really excellent feature of NetBeans IDE is its Profiler. What's especially cool is that you can analyze code fragments, that is, you can right-click in a Java file and then choose Profiling | Insert Profiling Point. When you do that, you're able to analyze code fragments, i.e., from one statement to another statement, e.g., how long a particular piece of code takes to execute: https://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/profiler-profilingpoints.html However, right-clicking a Java file and then going all the way down a longish list of menu items, to find "Profiling", and then "Insert Profiling Point" is a lot less easy than right-clicking in the sidebar (known as the glyphgutter) and then setting a profiling point in exactly the same way as a breakpoint: That's much easier and more intuitive and makes it far more likely that I'll use the Profiler at all. Once profiling points have been set then, as always, another menu item is added for managing the profiling point: To achieve this, I added the following to the "layer.xml" file: <folder name="Editors"> <folder name="AnnotationTypes"> <file name="profiler.xml" url="profiler.xml"/> <folder name="ProfilerActions"> <file name="org-netbeans-modules-profiler-ppoints-ui-InsertProfilingPointAction.shadow"> <attr name="originalFile" stringvalue="Actions/Profile/org-netbeans-modules-profiler-ppoints-ui-InsertProfilingPointAction.instance"/> <attr name="position" intvalue="300"/> </file> </folder> </folder> </folder> Notice that a "profiler.xml" file is referred to in the above, in the same location as where the "layer.xml" file is found. Here is the content: <!DOCTYPE type PUBLIC '-//NetBeans//DTD annotation type 1.1//EN' 'http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/annotation-type-1_1.dtd'> <type name='editor-profiler' description_key='HINT_PROFILER' localizing_bundle='org.netbeans.eppi.Bundle' visible='true' type='line' actions='ProfilerActions' severity='ok' browseable='false'/> Only disadvantage is that this registers the profiling point insertion in the glyphgutter for all file types. But that's true for the debugger too, i.e., there's no MIME type specific glyphgutter, instead, it is shared by all MIME types. Little bit confusing that the profiler point insertion can now, in theory, be set for all MIME types, but that's also true for the debugger, even though it doesn't apply to all MIME types. That probably explains why the profiling point insertion can only be done, officially, from the right-click popup menu of Java files, i.e., the developers wanted to avoid confusion and make it available to Java files only. However, I think that, since I'm already aware that I can't set the Java debugger in an HTML file, I'm also aware that the Java profiler can't be set that way as well. If you find this useful too, you can download and install the NBM from here: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/55002

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• Join our Marketing Intelligence Team in Dublin!

  - by jessica.ebbelaar

  Do you want to work with the brightest minds in the industry? Want to be part of a global team that’s changing the way the world does business? Then Oracle is the place for YOU. Join now as a Marketing Intelligence Representative. You will have the opportunity to develop within the role through working alongside the Business Development, Sales and Marketing teams within Oracle. The Marketing Intelligence Group is viewed as a true talent pool for the Business Development and Sales Teams. Oracle offers a structured training programme for Marketing Intelligence Representatives and Business Development Consultants including our approved sales certified training methodology along with regular product training. Miriam started her career as a Marketing Intelligence Representative six years ago, and shares what she has learned and how her career is progressing. My Career Path at Oracle: June 2005 – October 2005: Profiler in the Marketing Intelligence Team November 2005 - October 2006: Team Leader for MIT November 2006 - February 2008: Business Development Consultant Iberia March 2008 - December 2010: Lead Management Specialist Currently: Sales Program Manager for Iberia & Benelux What did you learn from your role in the Market Intelligence Team Being a Profiler helped me to understand how an organisation works, from the beginning to the end. It is like being in University but being paid! The three key things I learnt in this role are: Knowledge of customers: You are on the phone with over 70 customers daily. Not only does this give you an overview of the IT infrastructure of the customers companies but also how to manage their questions and rejections. Essentially you are learning how to convert their pain and complaints into business opportunities. Knowledge of Oracle: As a Profiler you get an excellent overview of how Oracle works internally, from Marketing to Sales, without forgetting the Operations Team. Knowledge about yourself: As a Profiler I learnt how to work outside of my comfort zone, there is a new challenge almost every day but Oracle are there to support you every step of the way. Oracle really invests in developing the MIT Team and as a Profiler you can expect product and sales training on a monthly basis. How did you progress from MIT to Business Development Group (BDG)? I made sure that my manager knew from the very beginning that I was keen to progress at Oracle and I was set very clear objectives to help me reach my goal.  My manager was very supportive and ensured I received all the training I needed. After I became a Team Leader of Profiling, I moved to an Iberia BDG position. How you feel your experience in MI has helped you in your current role? I truly believe that the MI position gives you a great overview of Oracle and this has really helped me in my current position.  I am the Sales Program Manager for IBERIA & Benelux and in my campaigns I need to target the right companies and the right job specs.  My time in the Market Intelligence team really helped me to understand how to focus and target my campaigns so I know I don’t miss any business opportunities! How would you sum up your Oracle experience? Oracle is a big organisation with big opportunities. With the right skills and with the great training programs that Oracle offer, the only limit is you! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact [email protected] You can find all our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Tags van Technorati: Marketing Intelligence,Benelux,Iberia,Profiler,Business Development,Sales Representatives,BDG,Business Development Group,opportunities,Oracle

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• What Am I doing for my 5 months 1 week old baby for his first cold?

  - by Rekha

  With my limited friends circle with babies, I heard that babies in their fifth month usually gets affected by cold all of a sudden. This is unavoidable and I feel it is good for the babies as they start developing their immune system right on. We usually take our son for a small walk so that he is able to explore the world out there. We have been taking him for a stroll almost everyday since we was 3 months old. But only now he is getting his first cold. So things happen only now I think. Till that day I had somehow brought some routine for him for his feed and naps during day time. Night time is still sleepless ones anyway. So when he first got his cold, that night it went on as usual getting up every few hours. From the next day on, he stopped feeding at the usual time. In the night he goes for 8-10 hours between feeds but still wakes up every two hours and cries for about 10 minutes and when we lift him for sometime, he goes back to sleep. Now to the point what all to expect: * Babies starts feeding frequently * Babies spit up increases * They dislike the food they liked before (we have just started solid foods as per our pediatricians advice) * Since they cannot breathe properly, they cannot sleep for a long time *Pees and poops less frequently. What all we did for our baby to make him comfortable during this time: * Feed the baby less quantity and more frequently whenever they expect to feed (Do not follow the schedule) * When the quantity is less, spit ups is also less * If the baby does not like the food (vegetable or fruit), avoid them till they get back to normal * Try to elevate their head while sleeping ( we used the cradle – sitting position, bouncer, car seat and finally all four sides we placed firm pillows so that he does not roll and kept a pillow for his head till his hip – this one is recommended usually but we have an eye on him always) * No need for any medicines – it will take a week for them to get back to normal whether or not we gives medicines * We applied home made Cold Reliever (heat 2 teaspoons of coconut oil with a small camphor piece till the camphor disappears – then cool the mixture) on his chest, back, neck and feet and covered the feet with socks in the nights * Bathe him everyday – hot (that your baby can withstand) *  Whenever possible give him a steam bath (open the hot showers for sometime in the bathroom and close the doors. When the steam is bearable, close the shower and take the baby inside the bathroom for sometime) * Also use a bulb syringe provided in the hospital to clear the nose (use some saline water drops for ease) * Cuddle him when he cries But please do take him to his doctor if he has fever and other symptoms other than cold or the cold persists for more than 5 – 7 days. Image Credit : MiriamBJDolls

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• Strengthening code with possibly useless exception handling

  - by rdurand

  Is it a good practice to implement useless exception handling, just in case another part of the code is not coded correctly? Basic example A simple one, so I don't loose everybody :). Let's say I'm writing an app that will display a person's information (name, address, etc.), the data being extracted from a database. Let's say I'm the one coding the UI part, and someone else is writing the DB query code. Now imagine that the specifications of your app say that if the person's information is incomplete (let's say, the name is missing in the database), the person coding the query should handle this by returning "NA" for the missing field. What if the query is poorly coded and doesn't handle this case? What if the guy who wrote the query handles you an incomplete result, and when you try to display the informations, everything crashes, because your code isn't prepared to display empty stuff? This example is very basic. I believe most of you will say "it's not your problem, you're not responsible for this crash". But, it's still your part of the code which is crashing. Another example Let's say now I'm the one writing the query. The specifications don't say the same as above, but that the guy writing the "insert" query should make sure all the fields are complete when adding a person to the database to avoid inserting incomplete information. Should I protect my "select" query to make sure I give the UI guy complete informations? The questions What if the specifications don't explicitly say "this guy is the one in charge of handling this situation"? What if a third person implements another query (similar to the first one, but on another DB) and uses your UI code to display it, but doesn't handle this case in his code? Should I do what's necessary to prevent a possible crash, even if I'm not the one supposed to handle the bad case? I'm not looking for an answer like "(s)he's the one responsible for the crash", as I'm not solving a conflict here, I'd like to know, should I protect my code against situations it's not my responsibility to handle? Here, a simple "if empty do something" would suffice. In general, this question tackles redundant exception handling. I'm asking it because when I work alone on a project, I may code 2-3 times a similar exception handling in successive functions, "just in case" I did something wrong and let a bad case come through.

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• Where would my different development rhythm be suitable for the work?

  - by DarenW

  Over the years I have worked on many projects, with some successful and a great benefit to the company, and some total failures with me getting fired or otherwise leaving. What is the difference? Naturally I prefer the former and wish to avoid the latter, so I'm pondering this issue. The key seems to be that my personal approach differs from the norm. I write code first, letting it be all spaghetti and chaos, using whatever tools "fit my hand" that I'm fluent in. I try to organize it, then give up and start over with a better design. I go through cycles, from thinking-design to coding-testing. This may seem to be the same as any other development process, Agile or whatever, cycling between design and coding, but there does seem to be a subtle difference: The methods (ideally) followed by most teams goes design, code; design, code; ... while I'm going code, design; code, design; (if that makes any sense.) Music analogy: some types of music have a strong downbeat while others have prominent syncopation. In practice, I just can't think in terms of UML, specifications and so on, but grok things only by attempting to code and debug and refactor ad-hoc. I need the grounding provided by coding in order to think constructively, then to offer any opinions, advice or solutions to the team and get real work done. In positions where I can initially hack up cowboy code without constraints of tool or language choices, I easily gain a "feel" for the data, requirements etc and eventually do good work. In formalized positions where paperwork and pure "design" comes first and only later any coding (even for small proof-of-concept projects), I am lost at sea and drown. Therefore, I'd like to know how to either 1) change my rhythm to match the more formalized methodology-oriented team ways of doing things, or 2) find positions at organizations where my sense of development rhythm is perfect for the work. It's probably unrealistic for a person to change their fundamental approach to things. So option 2) is preferred. So where I can I find such positions? How common is my approach and where is it seen as viable but different, and not dismissed as undisciplined or cowboy coder ways?

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for September 9-15, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most-viewed items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of September 9-15, 2017. 15 Lessons from 15 Years as a Software Architect | Ingo Rammer In this presentation from the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen, Ingo Rammer shares 15 tips regarding people, complexity and technology that he learned doing software architecture for 15 years. Attend OTN Architect Day – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 You won't need 3D glasses to take in these live presentations (8 sessions, two tracks) on Cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems. And the ticket price is: Zero. Nothing. Absolutely free. Register now for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles , 8555 Beverly Boulevard , Los Angeles, CA 90048. Cloud API and service designers, stop thinking small | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld "The focus must shift away from fine-grained APIs that provide some type of primitive service, such as pushing data to a block of storage or perhaps making a request to a cloud-rooted database," says InfoWorld's David Linthicum. "To go beyond primitives, you must understand how these services should be used in a much larger architectural context. In other words, you need to understand how businesses will employ these services to form real workplace solutions—inside and outside the enterprise." Adding a runtime picker to a taskflow parameter in WebCenter | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena shows how to create an Oracle WebCenter popup to allow users to "select items or do more complex things." Oracle IAM 11g R2 docs are now available "One of the great things about the new doc set is the inclusion of ePub files," says Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Chris Johnson. "This means that if you have an iPad you can load up the doc library onto that and read the docs on the couch." Setting up a local Yum Server using the Exalogic ZFS Storage Appliance | Donald A concise technical post from the man named Donald. What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2? | The Fat Bloke Sings "One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's," says The Fat Bloke. "Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends." The new VirtualBox release, a year in the making, addresses the needs of these users, he explains. Configuring Oracle Business Intelligence 11g MDS XML Source Control Management with Git Version Control | Christian Screen Oracle ACE Christian Screen developed this tutorial for those interested in learning how to configure the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (11.1.1.6) metadata repository for development using the new MDS XML source control management functionality. Identity and Access Management at Oracle Open World 2012 | Brian Eidelman Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Brian Eideleman highlights three Oracle Openworld sessions that will put Identity and Access Management in the spotlight, and shares a link to the "Focus On: Identity Management" document, a comprehensive listing of Openworld activities also dealing with IM. Starting and stopping WebLogic automatically using Upstart | Chris Johnson "In Ubuntu, RedHat and Oracle Linux there's a new flavor of init called Upstart that all the kids are using," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Chris Johnson. "It's the new hotness when it comes to making programs into daemons and wiring them to start and stop at appropriate times." Thought for the Day "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it." — Pamela Zave Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Have you ever wondered...?

  - by diana.gray

  I've often wondered why folks do the same thing over and over. For some of us, it's because we "don't get it" and there's an abundance of TV talk shows that will help us analyze the why of it. Dr. Phil is all too eager to ask "...and how's that working for you?". But I'm not referring to being stuck in a destructive pattern or denial. I'm really talking about doing something over and over because you have found a joy, a comfort, a boost of energy from an activity or event. For example, how many times have I planted bulbs in November or December only to be amazed by their reach, colors, and fragrance in early spring? Or baked fresh cookies and allowed the aroma to fill the house? Or kissed a sleeping baby held gently in my arms and being reminded of how tiny and fragile we all are. I've often wondered why it is that I get so much out of something I've done so many times. I think it's because I've changed. The activity may be the same but in the preceding days, months and years I've had new experiences, challenges, joys and sorrows that have shaped me. I'm different. The same is true about attending the Professional Businesswomen of California (PBWC) conference. Although the conference is an annual event held at San Francisco's Moscone Center, I still enjoy being with 3,000 other women like me. Yes, we work at different companies and in different industries, have different lifestyles and are at different stages in our professional careers and personal lives; but we are all alike in that we bring the NEW me each year that we attend. This year I can cheer when Safra Catz, President of Oracle, encourages us to trust our intuition; that "if something doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense". And I can warmly introduce myself to Lisa Askins, Cheryl Melching's business partner at Center Stage Group, when I would have been too intimated to do so last year. This year I can commit to new challenges such as "no whining, no excuses and no gossip" as suggested by Roxanne Emmerich, a goal that I would have wavered on last year. I can also embrace the suggestion given by Dr. Ian Smith to "spend one hour each day" on me - giving myself time to rejuvenate. A friend, when asked if she was attending PBWC this year, said "I've attended the conference several times and there's nothing new!" My perspective is that WE are what makes PBWC's annual conference new. We are far different in 2010 than we were in 2009. We are learning, growing, developing and shedding and that's what makes the conference fresh, vibrant, rewarding, and lasting. It is the diversity of women coming together that makes it new. By sharing our experiences, we discover. By meeting with one another professionally and personally, we connect. And by applying the wisdom learned, we shine. We are reNEW-ed. It shows in our fresh ideas, confident interactions, strategic decisions and successful businesses. This refreshed approach is what our companies want and need, our families depend on, our communities and nation look to for creative solutions to pressing concerns. Thanks Oracle for your continued support and thanks PBWC for providing an annual day to be reNEW-ed.

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• Developer Training – 6 Online Courses to Learn SQL Server, MySQL and Technology

  - by Pinal Dave

  Video courses are the next big thing and I am so happy that I have so far authored 6 different video courses with Pluralsight. Here is the list of the courses. I have listed all of my video courses over here. Note: If you click on the courses and it does not open, you need to login to Pluralsight with a valid username and password or sign up for a FREE trial. Please leave a comment with your favorite course in the comment section. Random 10 winners will get surprise gift via email. Bonus: If you list your favorite module from the course site. SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL Server performance tuning is an in-depth topic, and an art to master. A key component of overall application performance tuning is query tuning. Writing queries in an efficient manner, and making sure they execute in the most optimal way possible, is always a challenge. The basics revolve around the details of how SQL Server carries out query execution, so the optimizations explored in this course follow along the same lines. Click to View Course SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics Indexes are the most crucial objects of the database. They are the first stop for any DBA and Developer when it is about performance tuning. There is a good side as well evil side of the indexes. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of the indexes and the best practices associated with the same. This course is for every DBA and Developer who deals with performance tuning and wants to use indexes to improve the performance of the server. Click to View Course SQL Server Questions and Answers This course is designed to help you better understand how to use SQL Server effectively. The course presents many of the common misconceptions about SQL Server, and then carefully debunks those misconceptions with clear explanations and short but compelling demos, showing you how SQL Server really works. This course is for anyone working with SQL Server databases who wants to improve her knowledge and understanding of this complex platform. Click to View Course MySQL Fundamentals MySQL is a popular choice of database for use in web applications, and is a central component of the widely used LAMP open source web application software stack. This course covers the fundamentals of MySQL, including how to install MySQL as well as written basic data retrieval and data modification queries. Click to View Course Building a Successful Blog Expressing yourself is the most common behavior of humans. Blogging has made easy to express yourself. Just like a letter or book has a structure and formula, blogging also has structure and formula. In this introductory course on blogging we will go over a few of the basics of blogging and show the way to get started with blogging immediately. If you already have a blog, this course will be even more relevant as this will discuss many of the common questions and issue you face in your blogging routine. Click to View Course Introduction to ColdFusion ColdFusion is rapid web application development platform. In this course you will learn the basics of how to use ColdFusion platform and rapidly develop web sites. The course begins with learning basics of ColdFusion Markup Language and moves to common development language practices. From there we move to frequent database operations and advanced concepts of Forms, Sessions and Cookies. The last module sums up all the concepts covered in the course with sample application. Click to View Course Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• Professional Developers, may I join you?

  - by Ben

  I currently work in technical support for a software/hardware company and for the most part it's a good job, but it's feeling more and more like I'm getting 'stuck' here. No raises in the 5 years I've been here, and lately there seems to be more hiring from the outside than promotion from within. The work I do is more technical than end-user support, as we deal primarily with our field technicians who have a little more technical skill than the general user base. As a result I get into much more technical support issues... often tracking down bugs in our software, finding performance bottlenecks in our database schema, etc. The work I'm most proud of are the development projects I've come up with on my own, and worked on during lunch breaks and slow periods in Support. Over the years I've written a number of useful utilities for the company. Diagnostic type applications that several departments use and appreciate. These include apps that simulate our various hardware devices, log file analysis, time-saving utilities for our work processes, etc. My best projects have been the hardware simulation programs, which are the type of thing we probably wouldn't have put a full-time developer on had anyone thought to do it, but they've ended up being popular and useful enough to be used by development, QA, R&D, and Support. They allow us to interface our software with simulated hardware, rather than clutter up our work areas with bulky, hard to acquire equipment. Since starting here my life has moved forward (married, kid, one more on the way), but it feels like my career has not. I still earn what I earned walking in the door my first day. Company budget is tight, bonuses have gone down, and no raises or cost of living / inflation adjustments either. As the sole source of income for my family I feel I need to do more, and I'd like to have a more active role in creating something at work, not just cleaning up other people's mistakes. I enjoy technical work, and I think development is the next logical step in my career. I'd like to bring some "legitimacy" to my part-time development work, and make myself a more skilled and valuable employee. Ultimately if this can help me better support my family, that would be ideal. Can I make the jump to professional developer? I have an engineering degree, but no formal education in computer science. I write WinForms apps using the .NET framework, do some freelance web development, have volunteered to write software for a nonprofit, and have started experimenting with programming microcontrollers. I enjoy learning new things in the limited free time I have available. I think I have the aptitude to take on a development role, even in an 'apprentice' capacity if such an option is possible. Have any of you moved into development like this? Do any of you developers have any advice or cautionary tales? Are there better career options I haven't thought of? I welcome any and all related comments and thank you in advance for posting them.

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• ray collision with rectangle and floating point accuracy

  - by phq

  I'm trying to solve a problem with a ray bouncing on a box. Actually it is a sphere but for simplicity the box dimensions are expanded by the sphere radius when doing the collision test making the sphere a single ray. It is done by projecting the ray onto all faces of the box and pick the one that is closest. However because I'm using floating point variables I fear that the projected point onto the surface might be interpreted as being below in the next iteration, also I will later allow the sphere to move which might make that scenario more likely. Also the bounce coefficient might be as low as zero, making the sphere continue along the surface. So my naive solution is to project not only forwards but backwards to catch those cases. That is where I got into problems shown in the figure: In the first iteration the first black arrow is calculated and we end up at a point on the surface of the box. In the second iteration the "back projection" hits the other surface making the second black arrow bounce on the wrong surface. If there are several boxes close to each other this has further consequences making the sphere fall through them all. So my main question is how to handle possible floating point accuracy when placing the sphere on the box surface so it does not fall through. In writing this question I got the idea to have a threshold to only accept back projections a certain amount much smaller than the box but larger than the possible accuracy limitation, this would only cause the "false" back projection when the sphere hit the box on an edge which would appear naturally. To clarify my original approach, the arrows shown in the image is not only the path the sphere travels but is also representing a single time step in the simulation. In reality the time step is much smaller about 0.05 of the box size. The path traveled is projected onto possible sides to avoid traveling past a thinner object at higher speeds. In normal situations the floating point accuracy is not an issue but there are two situations where I have the concern. When the new position at the end of the time step is located very close to the surface, very unlikely though. When using a bounce factor of 0, here it happens every time the sphere hit a box. To add some loss of accuracy, the motivation for my concern, is that the sphere and box are in different coordinate systems and thus the sphere location is transformed for every test. This last one is why I'm not willing to stand on luck that one floating point value lying on top of the box always will be interpreted the same. I did not know voronoi regions by name, but looking at it I'm not sure how it would be used in a projection scenario that I'm using here.

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• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

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• Happy New Year! Upcoming Events in January 2011

  - by mandy.ho

  Oracle Database kicks off the New Year at the following events during the month of January. Hope to see you there and please send in your pictures and feedback! Jan 20, 2011 - San Francisco, CA LinkShare Symposium West 2011 Oracle is a proud Gold Sponsor at the LinkShare Symposium West 2011 January 20 in San Francisco, California. Year after year LinkShare has been bringing their network the opportunity to come to life. At the LinkShare Symposium online performance marketing leaders meet to optimize face-to-face during a full day of networking. Learn more by attending Oracle Breakout Session, "Omni - Channel Retailing, What is possible now?" on Thursday, January 20, 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Grand Ballroom. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=128306&src=6954634&src=6954634&Act=397 Jan 24, 2011 - Cincinnati, OH Greater Cincinnati Oracle User Group Meeting "Tom Kyte Day" - Featuring a day of sessions presented by Senior Technical Architect, Tom Kyte. Sessions include "Top 10, no 11, new features of Oracle Database 11g Release 2" and "What do I really need to know when upgrading", plus more. http://www.gcoug.org/ Jan 25, 2011 - Vancouver, British Columbia Oracle Security Solutions Forum Featuring a Special Keynote Presentation from Tom Kyte - Complete Database Security Join us at this half-day event; Oracle Database Security Solutions: Complete Information Security. Learn how Oracle Database Security solutions help you: • Prevent external threats like SQL injection attacks from reaching your databases • Transparently encrypt application data without application changes • Prevent privileged database users and administrators from accessing data • Use native database auditing to monitor and report on database activity • Mask production data for safe use in nonproduction environments http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=126974&src=6958351&src=6958351&Act=97 Jan 26, 2011 - Halifax, Nova Scotia Oracle Database Security Technology Day Exclusive Seminar on Complete Information Security with Oracle Database 11g The amount of digital data within organizations is growing at unprecedented rates, as is the value of that data and the challenges of safeguarding it. Yet most IT security programs fail to address database security--specifically, insecure applications and privileged users. So how can you protect your mission-critical information? Avoid risky third-party solutions? Defend against security breaches and compliance violations? And resist costly new infrastructure investments? Join us at this half-day seminar, Oracle Database Security Solutions: Complete Information Security, to find out http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=126269&src=6958351&src=6958351&Act=93

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• Development-led security vs administration-led security in a software product?

  - by haylem

  There are cases where you have the opportunity, as a developer, to enforce stricter security features and protections on a software, though they could very well be managed at an environmental level (ie, the operating system would take care of it). Where would you say you draw the line, and what elements do you factor in your decision? Concrete Examples User Management is the OS's responsibility Not exactly meant as a security feature, but in a similar case Google Chrome used to not allow separate profiles. The invoked reason (though it now supports multiple profiles for a same OS user) used to be that user management was the operating system's responsibility. Disabling Web-Form Fields A recurrent request I see addressed online is to have auto-completion be disabled on form fields. Auto-completion didn't exist in old browsers, and was a welcome feature at the time it was introduced for people who needed to fill in forms often. But it also brought in some security concerns, and so some browsers started to implement, on top of the (obviously needed) setting in their own preference/customization panel, an autocomplete attribute for form or input fields. And this has now been introduced into the upcoming HTML5 standard. For browsers that do not listen to this attribute, strange hacks* are offered, like generating unique IDs and names for fields to avoid them from being suggested in future forms (which comes with another herd of issues, like polluting your local auto-fill cache and not preventing a password from being stored in it, but instead probably duplicating its occurences). In this particular case, and others, I'd argue that this is a user setting and that it's the user's desire and the user's responsibility to enable or disable auto-fill (by disabling the feature altogether). And if it is based on an internal policy and security requirement in a corporate environment, then substitute the user for the administrator in the above. I assume it could be counter-argued that the user may want to access non-critical applications (or sites) with this handy feature enabled, and critical applications with this feature disabled. But then I'd think that's what security zones are for (in some browsers), or the sign that you need a more secure (and dedicated) environment / account to use these applications. * I obviously don't deny the ingeniosity of the people who were forced to find workarounds, just the necessity of said workarounds. Questions That was a tad long-winded, so I guess my questions are: Would you in general consider it to be the application's (hence, the developer's) responsiblity? Where do you draw the line, if not in the "general" case?

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• How do I prevent having to log in on 3 separate prompts every time I start my machine?

  - by JC

  Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu Classic desktop Each time I start my machine, I have to log in 3 times. I spent a week in IRCFreenode#ubuntu and got nothing but condescension. I've searched on the official Ubuntu fora for similar problems, tried every recommendation, and still get 3 login screens. As a workaround, I have reset login such that I get a login screen at startup, which I'd prefer not to get since this machine is accessible by no one but me, physically. I have gone into System Preferences Passwords and Encryption Keys, set first 'Passwords: default' to 'Default' and unlocked it, and unlocked the 'Passwords: login' key, too. Next, since that changed nothing, I set 'Passwords: login' to 'Default', and checked to make sure it was still unlocked. Again, no change, still get 3 login prompts at startup. I've checked twice to insure that I am the owner of the files; I am. At the suggestion of several people in #ubuntu, I've deleted first one, then the other password key in 'Passwords and Encryption Keys'. Still get 3 login prompts. I changed from the Unity desktop to Ubuntu Classic. While that didn't fix the above problem, it is a much more elegant desktop than Unity, and I'll keep it. From what I've read, this seems to be a Seahorse issue, but beyond that, no one seems to have a solution that works. I'm lost. This shouldn't be this difficult or annoying. I'm trying to help our local Old Time music collective get their machines switched over to Ubuntu in order to save them some money which they can use to promote their DRM-free music. But from what I've seen of Ubuntu so far on my own machine, I can't really recommend that they make this switch. I hope to be proved wrong on that point. But as it stands, if I was out of town or out of country and they ran into a problem, they'd have no way of fixing it as they're all less experienced than even I am. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on Ubuntu or Linux, but it seems pretty clear that KNOWLEDGEABLE, HELPFUL support for Ubuntu is lacking barring any desire on the problem-experiencing-user's part to avoid condescension. Having worked with, and run, several non-profits over the past 20 years, I know that getting volunteers to act professionally can be like herding cats. But an organization's reputation can be denigrated by sarcastic behaviors on the part of those who serve, effectively, as its public face. Thank you all for your help and support. Now...does anyone have a solution to my problem?

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• How to do geometric projection shadows?

  - by John Murdoch

  I have decided that since my game world is mostly flat I don't need better shadows than geometric projections - at least for now. The only problem is I don't even know how to do those properly - that is to produce a 4x4 matrix which would render shadows for my objects (that is, I guess, project them on a horizontal XZ plane). I would like a light source at infinity (e.g., the sun at some point in the sky) and thus parallel projection. My current code does something that looks almost right for small flying objects, but actually is a very rude approximation, as it doesn't project the objects onto the ground, but simply moves them there (I think). Also it always wrongly assumes the sun is always on the zenith (projecting straight down). Gdx.gl20.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); Gdx.gl20.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); //shells shellTexture.bind(); shader.begin(); for (ShellState state : shellStates.values()) { transform.set(camera.combined); transform.mul(state.transform); shader.setUniformMatrix("u_worldView", transform); shader.setUniformi("u_texture", 0); shellMesh.render(shader, GL10.GL_TRIANGLES); } shader.end(); // shadows shader.begin(); for (ShellState state : shellStates.values()) { transform.set(camera.combined); m4.set(state.transform); state.transform.getTranslation(v3); m4.translate(0, -v3.y + 0.5f, 0); // TODO HACK: + 0.5f is a hack to ensure the shadow appears above the ground; this is overall a hack as we are just moving the shell to the surface instead of projecting it on the surface! transform.mul(m4); shader.setUniformMatrix("u_worldView", transform); shader.setUniformi("u_texture", 0); // TODO: make shadow black somehow shellMesh.render(shader, GL10.GL_TRIANGLES); } shader.end(); Gdx.gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_BLEND); So my questions are: a) What is the proper way to produce a Matrix4 to pass to openGL which would render the shadows for my objects? b) I am supposed to use another fragment shader for the shadows which would paint them in semi-transparent grey, correct? c) The limitation of this simplistic approach is that whenever there is some object on the ground (it is not flat) the shadows will not be drawn, correct? d) Do I need to add something very small to the y (up) coordinate to avoid z-fighting with ground textures? Or is the fact they will be semi-transparent enough to resolve that problem?

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• How to Mentor a Junior Developer

  - by Josh Johnson

  This title is a little broad but I may need to give a little background before I can ask my question properly. I know that similar questions have been asked here already. But in my case I'm not asking if I should be mentoring someone or if the person is a good fit for being a software developer. That is not my place to judge. I have not been asked outright, but it is apparent that myself and other fellow senior developers are to mentor the new developers that start here. I have no problem with this whatsoever and, in many cases, it lends me a fresh perspective on things and I end up learning in the process. Also, I remember how beneficial it was in the beginning of my career when someone would take some time to teach me something. When I say "new developer" they could be anywhere from fresh out of college to having a year or two of experience. Recently and in the past we've had people start here who seem to have an attitude toward development/programming which is different from mine and hard for me to reconcile; they seem to extract just enough information to get the task done but not really learn from it. I find myself going over and over the same issues with them. I understand that part of this could be a personality thing, but I feel it's my job to do my best and sort of push them out of the nest while they're under my wing, so to speak. How can I impart just enough information so that they will learn but not give so much as to solve the problem for them? Or perhaps: What's the proper response to questions that are designed to take the path of least resistance and, in essence, force them to learn instead of take the easy way out? These questions are probably more general teaching questions and don't have that much to do specifically with software development. Note: I do not get a say in what tasks they are working on. Management doles the task out and it could be anything from a very simple bug fix to starting an entire application by themselves. While this is not ideal by any means and obviously presents its own gauntlet of challenges, I feel it's a topic best left for another question. So the best I can do is help them with the problem at hand and try to help them break it down into simpler problems and also check their commit logs and point out mistakes that they made. My main objectives are to: Help them out and give them the tools they need to start becoming more self-reliant. Steer them in the right direction and break bad development habits early on. Lessen the amount of time I spend with them (the personality type described above seems to need much more one-on-one time and does not do well over IM or email. While that's generally fine, I can't always stop what I'm working on, break my stride, and help them debug an error on a moments notice; I have my own projects that need to get done).

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• SQL SERVER – Fix: Error: 10920 Cannot drop user-defined function. It is being used as a resource governor classifier

  - by pinaldave

  If you have not read my SQL SERVER – Simple Example to Configure Resource Governor – Introduction to Resource Governor yesterday’s detailed primer on Resource Governor, I suggest you go ahead and read it before continuing this article. After reading the article the very first email I received was as follows: “Pinal, I configured resource governor on my development server and it worked fine with tests I ran. After doing some tests, I decided to remove the resource governor and as a first step I disabled it however, I was not able to drop the classification function during the process of the clean up. It was continuously giving me following error. Msg 10920, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot drop user-defined function myudfname. It is being used as a resource governor classifier. Would you please give me solution?” The original email was really this short and there is no other information. I am glad he has done experiments on development server and not on the production server. Production server must not be the playground of the experiments. I think I have covered the answer of this error in an earlier blog post. If the user disables the Resource Governor it is still not possible to drop the function because it can be enabled again and when enabled it can still use the same function. Here is the simple resolution of the how one can drop the classifier function (do this only if you are not going to use the function). The reason the classifier function can’t be dropped because it is associated with resource governor. Create a new classified function for your resource governor or just assign NULL as described in the following T-SQL Script and you will be able to drop the function without error. ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR WITH (CLASSIFIER_FUNCTION = NULL) GO ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR DISABLE GO DROP FUNCTION dbo.UDFClassifier GO I am glad that user asked me question instead of doing something radically different, which can leave the server in the unusable state. I am aware of this only method to avoid this error. Is there any better way to achieve the same? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Persevering & Friday Night Big Ideas

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs Every successful company, personal accomplishment, and philanthropic endeavor starts with one good idea. I have my best ideas on Friday evenings. The creative side of my brain is stimulated by end of week endorphins. Free thinking. Anything is possible. But, as my kids love to remind me, most of Dad's Friday Night Big Ideas (FNBIs) fizzle on the drawing board. Usually there's one barrier blocking the way that seems insurmountable by noon on Monday. For example, trekking the 486 mile Colorado Trail is on my bucket list. Since I have a job, I'll have to do it in bits and pieces--day hikes, weekends, and a vacation week here and there. With my trick neck, backpacking is not an option. How to survive equip myself for overnight backcountry travel was that one seemingly insurmountable barrier.  Persevering Lewis and Clark wouldn't have given up so I explored options and, as I blogged about back in December, I had an FNBI to hire llamas to carry my load. Last weekend, that idea came to fruition. Early Saturday morning, I met up with Bill, the owner of Antero Llamas, for an overnight training expedition along segment 14 of the Colorado Trail with a string of twelve llamas. It was a crash course on learning how to saddle, load, pasture, and mediate squabbles. Amazingly, we left the trailhead with me, the complete novice, at the lead. Instead of trying to impart three decades of knowledge on me in two days, Bill taught me two things: "Go With the Flow" and "Plan B". It worked. There were times I would be lost in thought for long stretches of time until one snort would remind me that I had a string of twelve llamas trailing behind. A funny thing happened along the trail... Up until last Saturday, my plan had been to trek all 28 segments of the trail east to west and sequentially. Out of some self-imposed sense of decorum. That plan presented myriad logistical challenges such as impassable snow pack on the Continental Divide when segment 6 is up next. On Sunday, as we trekked along the base of 14,000 ft peaks, I applied Bill's llama handling philosophy to my quest and came up with a much more realistic and enjoyable strategy for achieving my goal.  Seize opportunities to hike regardless of order. Define my own segments. Go west to east for awhile if it makes more sense. Let the llamas carry more creature comforts. Chill out.  I will still set foot on all 486 miles of the trail. Technically, the end result will be the same.And I and my traveling companions--human and camelid--will enjoy the journey more. Much more. Got Big Ideas of Your Own? Check out Tongal. This growing Oracle customer works with brands to crowd source fantastic ideas for promoting products and services. Your great idea could earn you cash.  Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

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• Oracle Tutor: XPDL conversion (and why you should care)

  - by mary.keane

  You may have noticed that the Oracle Business Process Converter feature in Tutor 14 supports "XPDL" conversion to Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite (BPA), Oracle Business Process Management Suite (BPM), and Oracle Tutor, and you may have briefly wondered "what is XPDL?" before you moved on to the Visio import feature (a very popular feature in Tutor 14). This posting is for those who do not yet understand (or care) about XPDL and process modeling. Many of us (and I'm including myself) have spent years working in the process definition arena: we've written procedures, designed systems and software to help others write procedures, and have been responsible for embedding policies and procedures into training material for employees. We've worked with tools such as Oracle Tutor, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Word, and UPK. Most of us have never worked with "modeling tools" before, and we certainly never had to understand BPMN. It's a brave new world in this arena, and companies desperately need people with policy and procedural system expertise to be able to work with system analysts so there is a seamless transfer of knowledge from IT to employees. When working with applications, a picture is worth a thousand words, so eventually you're going to need to understand and be able to work with business process models. XPDL is an acronym for XML Process Definition Language, and it is an interchange format for business process models. It allows you to take a BPMN model that was developed in one workflow application such as BizAgi and import it into another workflow application or a true BPMN management system such as Oracle BPM. Specifically, the XPDL format contains the graphical information of a model as well as any executable information. By using a common format, models can be moved from a basic modeling application used by business owners to applications used by system architects. Over 80 applications support the XPDL format, including MetaStorm ProVision, BEA ALBPM, BizAgi, and Tibco. I mention these applications because we have provided XSLT mapping files specifically for these vendors. Oracle Business Process Converter was designed with user extensibility in mind, and thus users can add their own XML files so that additional XPDL models from other vendors can be converted to BPM, BPA, and Oracle Tutor. Instructions on how to add your own files can be found in Appendix 4 of the Oracle Business Converter manual. Let's take a visual look at how this works. Here is an example of a model devloped in BizAgi: This model can be created by the average business user without a large learning curve, and it's a good start for the system analyst who will be adding web services as well as for the business manager who manages the process described in the model. By exporting this model as XPDL, the information can be converted into Oracle BPA and Oracle BPM as well as converted to Oracle Tutor to become the framework for a procedure. Through this conversion feature, one graphic illustration of a business process can be used by a system analyst, business analyst, business manager, and employee, as seen below. Model Converted to Tutor Procedure Below is the task section of the procedure after conversion from an XPDL file. Model converted to BPA Model converted to BPM End users still want step by step instructions on how to perform their jobs, so procedures (Oracle Tutor) and application simulations (UPK) are still a critical piece of the solution. But IT professionals need graphic descriptions of how the applications work, regardless of whether there are any tasks involving humans. Now there is a way to convert procedures (Oracle Tutor docx files) and basic models (XPDL files) so that business managers and system analysts can share process information. References Wikipedia XPDL. Workflow Management Coalition, XPDL Support and Resources Oracle Business Process Converter manual, Oracle Tutor 14 Oracle Business Process Management 11g If you have any XPDL conversion stories to share, we'd love to hear from you. Best wishes for the coming new year, Mary Keane, Senior Development Manager, Oracle Tutor and BPM

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• New Working Environment Starting November

  - by Jenson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is actually a post dated update. After I’ve been working in the private sectors for so many years (the 2 years when I was working as IT trainer in a secondary school is not counted, as I was working under a contract with a private IT training agency), I’ve decided to try my luck into public sector. And fortunately, I passed the interview and I was offered a position of Web Administrator in a government statutory board, that’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (of Singapore). During my previous employment with a Japanese MNC (multinational company), it was a totally new environment for me, as I had never worked for a Japanese company before, but the first time I work for Japanese company also gave me the very first nightmare I have with them, and vowed not to work for them anymore, and any other Japanese companies. No doubt I have freedom of choosing the tools and methods I wish to use for the projects, but the project management is simply too messy and out of order. And a lot of time, I don’t find that everyone is working as a team, more like achieving their own goals. Accountability for project is not shared, all lumped onto the shoulders of the developer in charge (they called it Software Engineer). I was working on a windows based .NET project, which I already voiced out that it’s not manageable by just 1 software engineer, but it seems like nobody cares, even the one who propose the solution to customer doesn’t care much. What he cares is whether you deliver the project on time so that he can please his customer and the senior management of his good work. Too many stories to tell, and I just simple doesn’t want to talk too much on this as it has already became the past to me. With my new title with the government agency, I hope to contribute my best to them, while learning as much as I can. I will share whatever I can on technologies, methodologies, and etc whichever I’m allowed and permitted to (of course, for those non-work-related stuff, I would be glad to share with you without much hesitation). Thank you! /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• ATI (fglrx) Dual monitor / laptop hot-plugging

  - by Brendan Piater

  I feel like I've gone back 5 years on my desktop today. I'll try not dump to much frustration here... I been running 12.04 since alpha with the ATI open source drivers and the gnome 3 desktop. I been generally very happy with them with only small issues along the way. Now of course it does not support 3D acceleration 100%, so games like my newly purchased Amnesia from the Humble bundle would not play. OK, no worries, the ATI driver is in the repos so let me have a go I thought. With all this testing that's been done with multi-monitor support, what could go wrong...? How I use my computer: It's laptop, with a HD 3670 card in it. I spend about 50% of the time working directly on the laptop (at home) and about 50% of the time working with an additional display connected (at work), multi desktop environment. What happening now: installed drivers things seemed to working, save some small other bugs (not critical) this morning I take my machine and plug the additional monitor into it, and nothing happens... ok fine. open "displays" try configure dual display, won't work open ati config "thing" (cause it is a thing, a crap thing) and set-up monitors there reboot it says (oh ffs, really.... ok) reboot, login and wow, I got a gnome 2 desktop (presume gnome 3 fall back) and no multi-monitor...great. (screenshot: http://ubuntuone.com/5tFe3QNFsTSIGvUSVLsyL7 ) after getting into a situation where I had to Ctrl + Alt + Del to get out of a frozen display, I eventually manage to set-up a single display desktop on the "main" monitor ok.. time to go home... unplug monitor... nothing happens.. oh boy here we go... try displays again, nothing, just hangs the display.. great. crash all the apps and reboot... So it's been a trying day... What I really hope is that someone else has figured out how to avoid this PAIN. Please help with a solution that: allows me run fglrx (so I can run the games I want) allows me to hot-plug a monitor to my laptop and remove it again allows me to change the display so include the hot-plugged monitor (preferable automatically like it did with the open drivers) Next best if that's not possible: switch between laptop only display and monitor only display easily (i.e. not having to reboot/logout/suspened etc) Really appreciate the time of anyone that has a solution. Thanks in advance. Regards Brendan PS: I guess I should file a bug about this too, so some direction as to the best place to file this would be appreciated too.

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