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  • How to write a product definition?

    - by Skarab
    I would like to learn how to write a software product definition. Therefore I am looking for online materials or books, which would help me to learn more about this topic. I would like to learn: what must be in what must not to be in how to make a product definition to sell internally the product finding balance between use case descriptions (the why), and feature descriptions (the how). ... I am aware that it is not something that can learn in 15 minutes but I think such a discussion could help me to have a good start.

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  • 3d environments and managing them on iOS

    - by alJaree
    I would like to start learning 3d game development and currently only develop 2d games. A few basic questions I am interested in are: What is used to create the 3d environments? Are they all done in e.g. Maya, Lightwave, 3d modeling software? What is the output format for these models and how are they manipulated in iOS? Is it all done using openGL(GL ES on iOS)? e.g a monster needs to be spawned in the game world. What coordinates are used? Are the concepts the same as 2d in terms of collision on the coordinates and movement on the coordinates of the game world? How are 3d games managed in iOS on the low available memory. (e.g. FPS games) Lastly, Can someone please recommend a good book that is up to date and can be applied to todays techniques. Thanks

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  • Can not print after upgrading from 12.x to 14.04

    - by user318889
    After upgrading from V12.04 to V14.04 I am not able to print. I am using an HP LaserJet 400 M451dn. The printer troubleshooter told me that there is no solution to the problem. This is the output of the advanced diagnositc output. (Due to limited space I cut the output!) Can anybody tell me what is going wrong. I am using the printer via USB ? Page 1 (Scheduler not running?): {'cups_connection_failure': False} Page 2 (Is local server publishing?): {'local_server_exporting_printers': False} Page 3 (Choose printer): {'cups_dest': , 'cups_instance': None, 'cups_queue': u'HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn', 'cups_queue_listed': True} Page 4 (Check printer sanity): {'cups_device_uri_scheme': u'hp', 'cups_printer_dict': {'device-uri': u'hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670', 'printer-info': u'Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 400 color M451dn', 'printer-is-shared': True, 'printer-location': u'Pinatubo', 'printer-make-and-model': u'HP LJ 300-400 color M351-M451 Postscript (recommended)', 'printer-state': 4, 'printer-state-message': u'', 'printer-state-reasons': [u'none'], 'printer-type': 8556636, 'printer-uri-supported': u'ipp://localhost:631/printers/HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn'}, 'cups_printer_remote': False, 'hplip_output': (['', '\x1b[01mHP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.14.6)\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01mDevice Information Utility ver. 5.2\x1b[0m', '', 'Copyright (c) 2001-13 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP', 'This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.', 'This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it', 'under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.', '', '', '\x1b[01mhp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670\x1b[0m', '', '\x1b[01mDevice Parameters (dynamic data):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Parameter Value(s) \x1b[0m', ' ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------', ' back-end hp ', " cups-printers ['HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn'] ", ' cups-uri hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670 ', ' dev-file ', ' device-state -1 ', ' device-uri hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670 ', ' deviceid ', ' error-state 101 ', ' host ', ' is-hp True ', ' panel 0 ', ' panel-line1 ', ' panel-line2 ', ' port 1 ', ' serial CNFF308670 ', ' status-code 5002 ', ' status-desc ', '\x1b[01m', 'Model Parameters (static data):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Parameter Value(s) \x1b[0m', ' ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------', ' align-type 0 ', ' clean-type 0 ', ' color-cal-type 0 ', ' copy-type 0 ', ' embedded-server-type 0 ', ' fax-type 0 ', ' fw-download False ', ' icon hp_color_laserjet_cp2025.png ', ' io-mfp-mode 1 ', ' io-mode 1 ', ' io-support 6 ', ' job-storage 0 ', ' linefeed-cal-type 0 ', ' model HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn ', ' model-ui HP LaserJet 400 Color m451dn ', ' model1 HP LaserJet 400 Color M451dn ', ' monitor-type 0 ', ' panel-check-type 0 ', ' pcard-type 0 ', ' plugin 0 ', ' plugin-reason 0 ', ' power-settings 0 ', ' ppd-name lj_300_400_color_m351_m451 ', ' pq-diag-type 0 ', ' r-type 0 ', ' r0-agent1-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent1-sku CE410A/CE410X ', ' r0-agent1-type 1 ', ' r0-agent2-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent2-sku CE411A ', ' r0-agent2-type 4 ', ' r0-agent3-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent3-sku CE413A ', ' r0-agent3-type 5 ', ' r0-agent4-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent4-sku CE412A ', ' r0-agent4-type 6 ', ' scan-src 0 ', ' scan-type 0 ', ' status-battery-check 0 ', ' status-dynamic-counters 0 ', ' status-type 3 ', ' support-released True ', ' support-subtype 2202411 ', ' support-type 2 ', ' support-ver 3.12.2 ', " tech-class ['Postscript'] ", " tech-subclass ['Normal'] ", ' tech-type 4 ', ' usb-pid 3882 ', ' usb-vid 1008 ', ' wifi-config 0 ', '\x1b[01m', 'Status History (most recent first):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Date/Time Code Status Description User Job ID \x1b[0m', ' -------------------- ----- ---------------------------------------- -------- --------', ' 08/21/14 00:07:25 5012 Device communication error richard 0 ', ' 08/20/14 13:42:44 500 Started a print job richard 4214 ', '', '', 'Done.', ''], ['\x1b[35;01mwarning: No display found.\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: hp-info -u/--gui requires Qt4 GUI support. Entering interactive mode.\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: Unable to communicate with device (code=12): hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: Error opening device (Device not found).\x1b[0m', ''], 0), 'is_cups_class': False, 'local_cups_queue_attributes': {'charset-configured': u'utf-8', 'charset-supported': [u'us-ascii', u'utf-8'], 'color-supported': True, 'compression-supported': [u'none', u'gzip'], 'copies-default': 1, 'copies-supported': (1, 9999), 'cups-version': u'1.7.2', 'device-uri': u'hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670', 'document-format-default': u'application/octet-stream', 'document-format-supported': [u'application/octet-stream', u'application/pdf', u'application/postscript', u'application/vnd.adobe-reader-postscript', u'application/vnd.cups-command', u'application/vnd.cups-pdf', u'application/vnd.cups-pdf-banner', u'application/vnd.cups-postscript', u'application/vnd.cups-raw', u'application/vnd.samsung-ps', u'application/x-cshell', u'application/x-csource', u'application/x-perl', u'application/x-shell', u'image/gif', u'image/jpeg', u'image/png', u'image/tiff', u'image/urf', u'image/x-bitmap', u'image/x-photocd', u'image/x-portable-anymap', u'image/x-portable-bitmap', u'image/x-portable-graymap', u'image/x-portable-pixmap', u'image/x-sgi-rgb', u'image/x-sun-raster', u'image/x-xbitmap', u'image/x-xpixmap', u'image/x-xwindowdump', u'text/css', u'text/html', u'text/plain'], 'finishings-default': 3, 'finishings-supported': [3], 'generated-natural-language-supported': [u'en-us'], 'ipp-versions-supported': [u'1.0', u'1.1', u'2.0', u'2.1'], 'ippget-event-life': 15, 'job-creation-attributes-supported': [u'copies', u'finishings', u'ipp-attribute-fidelity', u'job-hold-until', u'job-name', u'job-priority', u'job-sheets', u'media', u'media-col', u'multiple-document-handling', u'number-up', u'output-bin', u'orientation-requested', u'page-ranges', u'print-color-mode', u'print-quality', u'printer-resolution', u'sides'], 'job-hold-until-default': u'no-hold', 'job-hold-until-supported': [u'no-hold', u'indefinite', u'day-time', u'evening', u'night', u'second-shift', u'third-shift', u'weekend'], 'job-ids-supported': True, 'job-k-limit': 0, 'job-k-octets-supported': (0, 470914416), 'job-page-limit': 0, 'job-priority-default': 50, 'job-priority-supported': [100], 'job-quota-period': 0, 'job-settable-attributes-supported': [u'copies', u'finishings', u'job-hold-until', u'job-name', u'job-priority', u'media', u'media-col', u'multiple-document-handling', u'number-up', u'output-bin', u'orientation-requested', u'page-ranges', u'print-color-mode', u'print-quality', u'printer-resolution', u'sides'], 'job-sheets-default': (u'none', u'none'), 'job-sheets-supported': [u'none', u'classified', u'confidential', u'form', u'secret', u'standard', u'topsecret', u'unclassified'], 'jpeg-k-octets-supported': (0, 470914416), 'jpeg-x-dimension-supported': (0, 65535), 'jpeg-y-dimension-supported': (1, 65535), 'marker-change-time': 0, 'media-bottom-margin-supported': [423], 'media-col-default': u'(unknown IPP value tag 0x34)', 'media-col-supported': [u'media-bottom-margin', u'media-left-margin', u'media-right-margin', u'media-size', u'media-source', u'media-top-margin', u'media-type'], 'media-default': u'iso_a4_210x297mm', 'media-left-margin-supported': [423], 'media-right-margin-supported': [423],

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  • Upgrade fails because of blcr-dkms

    - by Peter Smit
    When I try to update my Ubuntu 10.04 installation to 10.10 I get the following error. Could not calculate the upgrade An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade: Trying to install blacklisted version 'blcr-dkms_0.8.2-13' This can be caused by: * Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu * Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu * Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu If none of this applies, then please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bug report. None of the three applies to me (I think). Now I found that this also affects someone else: https://bugs.launchpad.net/update-manager/+bug/657662 Is there here someone who knows what could be wrong? Or a workaround so that I can install Maverick Meerkat?

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  • How should I manage a team with different skill levels?

    - by Jon Purdy
    I'll be working on a software project with some friends of mine, and I've been appointed technical lead. None of these guys is a bad programmer at all, but I do have significantly more experience than them. I need to be able to distribute the work among everyone on the team, while also making sure that we don't tread on one another's toes; that they meet the relatively high standards of quality and scalability that we need to make this project successful, without requiring me to review everything they commit. How should I maintain standards while avoiding micromanagement? Is it enough to make some diagrams, schedule some code reviews, and trust that I'll be able to fix anything that they might break, or should I go the TDD route and write explicit tests for the team to satisfy?

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  • 64 bit Ubuntu sees half my RAM

    - by koehn
    This is on my AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor (according to /proc/cpuinfo) on a machine with two 4GB RAM DIMMs. BIOS shows 8GB RAM installed. Any help would be appreciated. RAM: Extreme Performance Sector 5 G Series 8GB DDR3-1333 (PC3-1066) Enhanced Latency Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit (Two 4GB Memory Modules) MB: GA-78LMT-S2P Socket AM3+ 760G mATX AMD Motherboard CPU: FX 4100 Black Edition 3.6GHz Quad-Core Socket AM3+ Boxed Processor Here's what the software says: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3515100 3293656 221444 0 19260 2670352 -/+ buffers/cache: 604044 2911056 Swap: 3650556 90916 3559640 $ uname -a Linux mythbuntu 3.2.0-30-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 24 16:52:48 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux From lshw: *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 20 slot: System board or motherboard size: 4GiB *-bank:0 description: DIMM 1066 MHz (0.9 ns) product: None vendor: None physical id: 0 serial: None slot: A0 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1066MHz (0.9ns) *-bank:1 description: DIMM 1066 MHz (0.9 ns) product: None vendor: None physical id: 1 serial: None slot: A1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1066MHz (0.9ns)

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  • My first development job working at a company, what things to look out for?

    - by Kim Jong Woo
    So I've worked on my own all this time, selling software, creating a few web applications on my own. I had an Arts background I was self taught. It was a bit difficult to find a development position after endless trying, I finally landed a LAMP position. What I realized was it was all confidence issue. Before when I didn't know a few things I panicked but after spending such a long time working on my own projects and solving various problems, I felt confident enough that I could fulfill requirements on my own. I hope this helps other people applying for jobs This is the first time I will be developing with other team members in an office, are there anything I should prepare for my first day at work next week? Any tips and pointers while working as a developer at a company? I'm kinda nervous but excited.

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  • What is missing and should be added to Code Complete 3rd Edition? [closed]

    - by Peter Turner
    It's been quite a few years since Code Complete was published. I really love the book, I keep it in the bathroom at the office and read a little out of it once or twice a day. What developments in computer software... development need to be added to Code Complete 3e, and for the sake of reductionism, what should be removed to make room for them? Is it necessary even possible to call Code Complete Code Complete if it doesn't have language features that even Delphi has like anonymous methods and generics? Also, what languages would be more appropriate than C++ to use for a majority of code examples?

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  • Is reference to bug/issue in commit message considered good practice?

    - by Christian P
    I'm working on a project where we have the source control set up to automatically write notes in the bug tracker. We simply write the bug issue ID in the commit message and the commit message is added as a note to the bug tracker. I can see only a few downsides for this practice. If sometime in the future the source code gets separated from the bug tracking software (or the reported bugs/issues are somehow lost). Or when someone is looking in the history of commits but doesn't have access to our bug tracker. My question is if having a bug/issue reference in the commit message is considered good practice? Are there some other downsides?

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  • Preparing for interview questions involving scale

    - by Chaitanya
    I have over 6 years of software development experience. I have worked on multiple platforms, including mobile. However, I have not had a chance of working on scale-related issues. As a consequence, whenever someone asks a question involving a million inputs in an interview, I find myself out of depth. How do I prepare for such questions? Any books/resources to refer to? There are books for Java and Data Structures and Concurrency, but I don't know about any definitive ones to learn about scaling.

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  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can't add Cheese widget

    - by Burke Hodgson
    Command-line 12.04 Cheese (cheese:4144): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkImage to a GtkToggleButton, but as a GtkBin subclass a GtkToggleButton can only contain one widget at a time; it already contains a widget of type GtkLabel Is there a fix so that Cheese will work in Ubuntu 12.04? The program comes up but the webcam area is black. I am running Unity 2D on a T42 Thinkpad. All programs similar to Cheese recognize my webcam as does Skype, but I really like Cheese and the error message may be ominous for other software failures.

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  • Developing A Shopping Cart

    - by Eddy Freeman
    I posted a question earlier about creating shopping cart from scratch(they've closed the question) but i think i must reframe the question because i left something important in the question. I know shopping carts like "Magento Community Edition(very big software)", "OpenCart", "Prestashop", etc, are opensource and maybe huge to develop by one programmer. What about hosted shopping carts like "shopify", "BigCommerce", "3dCart", etc.. are these carts too huge for a one programmer to develop them within 0-2yrs? Are there huge differences between the opensource carts and the hosted carts? Thanks for your answer.

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  • Source Control and SQL Development &ndash; Part 3

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    In parts one and two of this series, I have been specifically focusing on the latest version of SQL Source Control by Red Gate Software.  But I have been doing source-controlled SQL development for years, long before this product was available, and well before Microsoft came out with Database Projects for Visual Studio.  “So, how does that work?” you may wonder.  Well, let me share some of the details of how we do it where I work… The key to this approach is that everything is done via Transact-SQL script files; either natively written T-SQL, or generated.  My preference is to write all my code by hand, which forces you to become better at your SQL syntax.  But if you really prefer to use the Management Studio GUI to make database changes, you can still do that, and then you use the Generate Scripts feature of the GUI to produce T-SQL scripts afterwards, and store those in your source control system.  You can generate scripts for things like stored procedures and views by right-clicking on the database in the Object Explorer, and Choosing Tasks, Generate Scripts (see figure 1 to the left).  You can also do that for the CREATE scripts for tables, but that does not work when you have a table that is already in production, and you need to make just a simple change, such as adding a new column or index.  In this case, you can use the GUI to make the table changes, and then instead of clicking the Save button, click the Generate Change Script button (). Then, once you have saved the change script, go ahead and execute it on your development database to actually make the change.  I believe that it is important to actually execute the script rather than just click the Save button because this is your first test that your change script is working and you didn’t somehow lose a portion of the change. As you can imagine, all this generating of scripts can get tedious and tempting to skip entirely, so again, I would encourage you to just get in the habit of writing your own Transact-SQL code, and then it is just a matter of remembering to save your work, just like you are in the habit of saving changes to a Word or Excel document before you exit the program. So, now that you have all of these script files, what do you do with them?  Well, we organize ours into folders labeled ChangeScripts, Functions, Views, and StoredProcedures, and those folders are loaded into our source control system.  ChangeScripts contains all of the table and index changes, and anything else that is basically a one-time-only execution.  Of course you want to write your scripts with qualifying logic so that if a script were accidentally run more than once in a database, it would not crash nor corrupt anything; but these scripts are really intended to be run only once in a database. Once you have your initial set of scripts loaded into source control, then making changes, such as altering a stored procedure becomes a simple matter of checking out your CREATE PROCEDURE* script, editing it in SSMS, saving the change, executing the script in order to effect the change in your database, and then checking the script back in to source control.  Of course, this is where the lack of integration for source control systems within SSMS becomes an irritation, because this means that in addition to SSMS, I also have my source control client application running to do the check-out and check-in.  And when you have 800+ procedures like we do, that can be quite tedious to locate the procedure I want to change in source control, check it out, then locate the script file in my working folder, open it in SSMS, do the change, save it, and the go back to source control to check in.  Granted, it is not nearly as burdensome as, say, losing your source code and having to rebuild it from memory, or losing the audit trail that good source control systems provide.  It is worth the effort, and this is how I have been doing development for the last several years. Remember that everything that the SQL Server Management Studio does in modifying your database can also be done in plain Transact-SQL code, and this is what you are storing.  And now I have shown you how you can do it all without spending any extra money.  You already have source control, or can get free, open-source source control systems (almost seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it) and of course Management Studio is free with your SQL Server database engine software. So, whether you spend the money on tools to make it easier, or not, you now have no excuse for not using source control with your SQL development. * In our current model, the scripts for stored procedures and similar database objects are written with an IF EXISTS…DROP… at the top, followed by the CREATE PROCEDURE… section, and that followed by a section that assigns permissions.  This allows me to run the same script regardless of whether the procedure previously existed in the database.  If the script was only an ALTER PROCEDURE, then it would fail the first time that procedure was deployed to a database, unless you wrote other code to stub it if it did not exist.  There are a few different ways you could organize your scripts for deployment, each with its own trade-offs, but I think it is absolutely critical that whichever way you organize things, you ensure that the same script is run throughout the deployment cycle, and do not allow customizations to creep in between TEST and PROD.  If you do, then you have broken the integrity of your deployment process because what you deployed to PROD was not exactly the same as what was tested in TEST, so you effectively have now released untested code into PROD.

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  • Broadcom STA driver doesn't work well with BCM4313

    - by Oli
    Following on from my other question about our new Samsung Q330, I've noticed that the wireless is incredibly flakey. It can connect but after a little use, especially if it does a lot of downloading at once (read: install something from the Software Centre), the connection stops working. Network Manager still see the connection, there's just no network throughput. I've simple tests like pinging other local network hosts and they just fail. The Samsung Q330 has a Broadcom BCM4313 wifi card (it's proper ID: 14e4:4727) and it's running on the Broadcom STA drivers that Jockey suggests (it didn't work at all without this). I did try installing b43-fwcutter but this just didn't do anything. I was expecting a configuration screen to come up (to select a firmware) but it never did. This page suggests the newer brcm80211 driver might be able to help, but I don't know how to install that. If you think this is the right route, please let me know how one goes about installing it.

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  • Upgrade Ubuntu Server from 11.04 to 11.10 without internet connection

    - by Tony Marciano
    We have application software that really likes Ubuntu Server 11.10. I need to upgrade several 11.04 servers to this version. Two questions: The servers that need to be upgraded do not have Internet access in our datacenter due to security reasons. I need to download the updates/upgrades to a secure system and then transfer them to the datacenter servers for installation. Is anyone aware of the steps involved? How/where do I get the 11.10 updates from? I don't see an option on the Ubuntu site for downloading specific versions of the OS and/or upgrades.

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  • Cloudera Hadoop Certification Value in IT Industry for freshers

    - by Saumitra
    I am a software developer with 8 months of experience in IT industry working on development of tools for BIG DATA analytics. I have learned Hadoop basics on my own and I am pretty comfortable with writing MapReduce Jobs, PIG, HIVE, Flume and other related projects. I am thinking of appearing for Cloudera Hadoop Certification. My question is whether it will benefit me in any way, considering that I am a fresher with not even 1 year of experience. Most of the jobs posting which I have seen related to Hadoop requires at least 3 years of experience. I currently work in India but I can relocate. Please help me in deciding whether I should invest my time in perfecting my Hadoop skills for certification?

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  • Experience Oracle Database 12 c

    - by Breanne Cooley
    Written by Diana Gray, Principal Curriculum Product Manager, Oracle University Developing your skills with Oracle Database 12c may not be as hard as you think. Oracle’s expert curriculum developers designed curriculum offerings that can help you determine where you are and where you want to go. By looking at our Oracle Database 12c Solution page, you can quickly identify what you’ve taken in the past and what you still might require. Getting up to speed on this new technology is key to being able to access a platform that totally embraces the cloud. These new enhancements will make your job easier as you begin to understand how the new features work together. Get started with Oracle Database 12c by taking the newly released  Oracle Database 12c: New Features for Administrators Self-Study Course After you download the software, see which training and certifications are available. Add well-respected credentials of expertise to your portfolio of learning through Oracle University.

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  • New Exam Score Report Process Coming Soon

    - by Paul Sorensen
    Hi Everyone! I want to give you a preview of a process change that will be coming in the next few weeks. We will soon announce a change in the way that Oracle certification candidates receive their exam scores and score reports (after they take an exam). Once the change occurs you will need to have an Oracle Web Account (in order to access your exam score). This is the account that is used to log into the Oracle website for things such as OTN access, software downloads and other Oracle services. If you already have an Oracle Web Account then you are already in good shape! If you do not have an Oracle Web Account the you should create one now (in preparation for this change)!  Look for additional announcements and detailed information in the coming weeks. Thanks,

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  • How Estimates Became Quotes

    - by Lee Brandt
    It’s our fault. Well, not completely, but we haven’t helped the situation any. All of what follows comes from my own experiences which, from talking to lots of other developers about it, seems to be pretty much par for the course. Where We Started When we first started estimating, we estimated pretty clearly. We would try to imagine something we’d done that was similar to the project being estimated and we’d toss it about in our heads a bit and see how much bigger or smaller we thought this new thing was, and add or subtract accordingly. We wouldn’t spend too much time on it, because we wanted to get to writing the software. Eventually, we’d come across some huge problem that there was now way we could’ve known about ahead of time. Either we didn’t see this thing or, we didn’t realize that this particular version of a problem would be so… problematic. We usually call this “not knowing what we don’t know”. It’s unavoidable. We just can’t know. Until we wade in and start putting some code together, there are just some things we won’t know… and some things we don’t even know that we don’t know. Y’know? So what happens? We go over budget. Project managers scream and dance the dance of the stressed-out project manager, and there is nothing we can do (or could’ve done) about it. We didn’t know. We thought about it for a bit and we didn’t see this herculean task sitting in the middle of our nice quiet project, and it has bitten us in the rear end. We now know how to handle this in the future, though. We will take some more time to pick around the requirements and discover all those things we don’t know. We’ll do some prototyping, we’ll read some blogs about similar projects, we’ll really grill the customer with questions during the requirements gathering phase. We’ll keeping asking “what else?” until the shove us down the stairs. We’ll take our time and uncover it all. We Learned, But Good The next time comes, and you know what happens? We do it. We grill the customer for weeks and prototype and read and research and we estimate everything down to the last button on the last form. Know what that gets us? It gets us three months of wasted time, and our estimate will still be off. Possibly off by a factor of four. WTF, mate? No way we could be surprised by something! We uncovered every particle. We turned every stone. How is it we still came across unknowns? Because we STILL didn’t know what we didn’t know. How could we? We didn’t know to ask. The worst part is, we’ve now convinced the product that this is NOT an estimate. It is a solid number based on massive research and an endless number of questions that they answered. There is absolutely now way you don’t know everything there is to know about this project now. No way there is anything you haven’t uncovered. And their faith in that “Esti-Quote” goes through the roof. When the project goes over this time, they might even begin to question whether or not you know what you’re doing. Who could blame them? You drilled them for weeks about every little thing, and when they complained about all the questions, you told them you wanted to uncover everything so there would be no surprises. SO we set them up to faile Guess, Then Plan We had a chance. At the beginning we could have just said, “That’s just a gut-feeling estimate, based on my past experience with similar projects. There could still be surprises.” If we spend SOME time doing SOME discovery and then bounce that against our own past experiences, we can come up with a fairly healthy estimate. We can then help the product owner understand that an estimate is a guess. Sure, it’s an educated guess, but it is still a guess. If we get it right it will be almost completely luck. Then, we help them to plan the development by taking that guess (yes, they still need the guess for planning purposes) and start measuring early and often to see if we still think we are right. We should adjust the estimate and alert the product owner as soon as we see problems (bad news does not age well) and we should be able to see any problems immediately if we are constantly measuring our pace. In lean software, we start with that guess and begin measuring cycle times immediately. Then we can make projections based on those cycle times and compare them to our estimate. This constant feedback is the best way to ensure that there are no surprises at the END of the project. There sill still be surprises, but we’ll see them sooner and have a better understanding of how they will affect our overall timeline. What do you think?

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  • Associating your MentionNotifier subscriptions with OAuth

    - by Tim Hibbard
    We recently added OAuth to MentionNotifier so that users can quickly view and edit their subscriptions without needed an additional login.  This is enabled by default for new users, but existing users will need to do the following steps to associate their subscriptions with OAuth: 1)  Go to http://software.engraph.com/ManageMentionNotifier 2)  Click “Sign in with Twitter” 3)  Verify that your twittername and email are correct 4)  Click "Associate with OAuth" This will also allow you to reply to notification emails and MentionNotifier will tweet on your behalf.  This is made possible by @sidePop written by @ferventcoder Note that the reply by email is new and buggy, so make sure that what was tweeted is correct and as expected. If you run into any issues, sent me a reply to @timhibbard. You can also join the MentionNotifier fan page on facebook, or follow @MentionNotifier on twitter.

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  • How do I copy an existing hard disc to a new one so I can boot off the new disc?

    - by Brian Hooper
    I currently have a failing hard drive which is the only hard drive in the machine. I have just bought a new hard drive to replace it, and my plan is to copy the contents of the old drive onto the new one, and then replace the old drive in the machine with the new one. I presumably can't just copy the whole directory structure (or can I)? What do I need to do to manage this, assuming it is possible? Is there a utility to do this for me? (The old drive is hopefully good for a few more hours.) (I hope by this means to keep all the software and configuration files as they are, to avoid having to re-install everything. Can that be done?)

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  • Should I be paid for time spent learning a framework?

    - by nate-bit
    To give light to the situation: I am currently one of two programmers working in a small startup software company. Part of my job requires me to learn a Web development framework that I am not currently familiar with. I get paid by the hour. So the question is: Is it wholly ethical to spend multiple hours of the day reading through documentation and tutorials and be paid for this time where I am not actively developing for our product? Or should the bulk of this learning be done at home, or otherwise off hours, to allow for more full-on development of our application during the work day?

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  • Is it possible to power up ports on a USB hub from Ubuntu?

    - by James Henstridge
    I have a D-Link DUB-H7 powered USB 2.0 hub connected to my computer. Occasionally when I reboot the system, I've noticed that some of the ports on the hub get powered down: the green light next to the port is turned off, and the device attached to that port is not visible to lsusb or similar commands. Devices attached to the other ports on the hub function as normal. I am able to restore the ports by disconnecting power to the hub temporarily (from the computer, AC adapter and any devices that might provide any power such as my phone), but this is a bit of a hassle. It seems like something that might be related to power management, so is there some way you can tell the USB hub to power up through software?

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  • Unity bar and Menu bar Gone

    - by user121134
    I have a bootable usb stick that has Ubuntu 12.10 on it, so I loaded it onto my computer which is semi old because it was really full and ubuntu is nice software when it works. And all went well until I booted it up the first time and it said that the Compiz thing was missing and I looked that up on the internet and I must have typed 20 different codes into terminal, and nothing seemed to work. Can you please help? I dont know what to do anymore and the only thing I can do it open up terminal because nothing pops up on the screen. Thanks :)

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  • Gamification at OOW

    - by erikanollwebb
    Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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