Search Results

Search found 29841 results on 1194 pages for 'random number generator'.

Page 468/1194 | < Previous Page | 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475  | Next Page >

• Desktop Customization: Sci-Fi Icon Packs

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you a sci-fi fan who has been looking for some great custom icons for your desktop or favorite app launcher? Then you will want to have a look through our sci-fi icon packs collection. Over the past few months we’ve been showing you collections of cool desktop wallpapers you can use to liven up your computer. Today we extend the customization collections with a series of cool icon packs for you to use for folders and shortcut icons. Star Wars 1.0 Download Star Wars the Icons Download Star Wars Vehicles Download Star Wars Icons Download Star Trek Download Trek Tech Note: Contains “.png files” for use in Linux. Download Refresh Trek Download Star Trek Folders Download Battlestar Galactica Vol. 1 Download Battlestar Galactica Vol. 2 Download Battlestar Galactica Vol. 3 Download Battlestar Galactica Vol. 4 Download Baby Spaceships Download Space: 1999 Download War of the Worlds   Download Conclusion Now that you have some of these cool icons downloaded, be sure to check out our tutorial on how to customize your icons in Vista and Windows 7. If you’re still using XP check out our article on customizing icons in Windows XP. Also, be you might want to visit our new Desktop Fun section for more customization goodness! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Missing Desktop Icons in Windows 7 or VistaWindows 7 Welcome Screen Taking Forever? Here’s the Fix (Maybe)Add Home Directory Icon to the Desktop in Windows 7 or VistaQuick Help: Downloadable Show Desktop Icon for XPDisplay My Computer Icon on the Desktop in Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper

  Read the article

• Manipulating Human Tasks (for testing) by Mark Nelson

  - by JuergenKress

  A few months ago, while working on a BPM migration, I had the need to look at the status of human tasks, and to manipulate them – essentially to just have a single user take random actions on them at some interval, to help drive a set of processes that were being tested. To do this, I wrote a little utility called httool.  It reuses some of the core domain classes from my custom worklist sample (with minimal changes to make it a remote client instead of a local one). I have not got around to documenting it yet, but it is pretty simple and fairly self explanatory.  So I thought I would go ahead and share it with folks, in case anyone is interested in playing with it. You can get the code from my ci-samples repository on java.net: git clone git://java.net/ci4fmw~ci-samples It is in the httool directory. I do plan to get back to this “one day” and enhance it to be more intelligent – target particular task types, update the payload, follow a set of “rules” about what action to take – so that I can use it for more driving more interesting test scenarios.  If anyone is feeling generous with their time, and interested, please feel free to join the java.net project and hack away to your heart’s content. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Mark Nelson,Human Task,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• The new Auto Scaling Service in Windows Azure

  - by shiju

  One of the key features of the Cloud is the on-demand scalability, which lets the cloud application developers to scale up or scale down the number of compute resources hosted on the Cloud. Auto Scaling provides the capability to dynamically scale up and scale down your compute resources based on user-defined policies, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), health status checks, and schedules, without any manual intervention. Auto Scaling is an important feature to consider when designing and architecting cloud based solutions, which can unleash the real power of Cloud to the apps for providing truly on-demand scalability and can also guard the organizational budget for cloud based application deployment. In the past, you have had to leverage the the Microsoft Enterprise Library Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) or a services like  MetricsHub for implementing Automatic Scaling for your cloud apps hosted on the Windows Azure. The WASABi required to host your auto scaling block in a Windows Azure Worker Role for effectively implementing the auto scaling behaviour to your Windows Azure apps. The newly announced Auto Scaling service in Windows Azure lets you add automatic scaling capability to your Windows Azure Compute Services such as Cloud Services, Web Sites and Virtual Machine. Unlike WASABi hosted on a Worker Role, you don’t need to host any monitoring service for using the new Auto Scaling service and the Auto Scaling service will be available to individual Windows Azure Compute Services as part of the Scaling. Configure Auto Scaling for a Windows Azure Cloud Service Currently the Auto Scaling service supports Cloud Services, Web Sites and Virtual Machine. In this demo, I will be used a Cloud Services app with a Web Role and a Worker Role. To enable the Auto Scaling, select t your Windows Azure app in the Windows Azure management portal, and choose “SCLALE” tab. The Scale tab will show the all information regards with Auto Scaling. The below image shows that we have currently disabled the AutoScale service. To enable Auto Scaling, you need to choose either CPU or QUEUE. The QUEUE option is not available for Web Sites. The image below demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling for a Web Role based on the utilization of CPU. We have configured the web role app for running with 1 to 5 Virtual Machine instances based on the CPU utilization with a range of 50 to 80%. If the aggregate utilization is becoming above above 80%, it will scale up instances and it will scale down instances when utilization is becoming below 50%. The image below demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling for a Worker Role app based on the messages added into the Windows Azure storage Queue. We configured the worker role app for running with 1 to 3 Virtual Machine instances based on the Queue messages added into the Windows Azure storage Queue. Here we have specified the number of messages target per machine is 2000. The image below shows the summary of the Auto Scaling for the Cloud Service after configuring auto scaling service. Summary Auto Scaling is an extremely important behaviour of the Cloud applications for providing on-demand scalability without any manual intervention. Windows Azure provides greater support for enabling Auto Scaling for the apps deployed on the Windows Azure cloud platform. The new Auto Scaling service in Windows Azure lets you add automatic scaling capability to your Windows Azure Compute Services such as Cloud Services, Web Sites and Virtual Machine. In the new Auto Scaling service, you don’t have to host any monitor service like you have had in WASABi block. The Auto Scaling service is an excellent alternative to the manually hosting WASABi block in a Worker Role app.

  Read the article

• How to Find Your IP Address in Ubuntu Linux

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  In Windows, we use the command-line program ipconfig to find out our IP address. How do you find it in Ubuntu? We will show you two locations easily accessible through the GUI and, of course, a terminal command that will get your IP address in no time. The first location, and the easiest in most cases, is found by right clicking the network icon in the notification area and clicking Connection Information. This brings up a window which has a bunch of information, including your IP address. The second location, which shows you more detail than this first method, is at System > Administration > Network Tools. Select the right network device, and you’ve got a ton of information at your fingertips. Finally, if you can’t tear yourself away from a terminal window, the command to type in is: ifconfig Yes, it’s only one character different than ipconfig. Who would have guessed? As it turns out, you’re always a few clicks or keystrokes away from finding your IP address in Ubuntu. Isn’t choice great? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change Ubuntu Desktop from DHCP to a Static IP AddressAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuClear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookMake Firefox Display Large Images Full SizeChange Ubuntu Server from DHCP to a Static IP Address TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics

  Read the article

• Display a Text Message During Bootup of Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  Sometimes you might want to leave a text message for a user before they log into a Windows 7 computer. Today we show you a neat trick that allows you to leave a message they can read before logging in. Add a Text Message To add a message, click on Start and enter regedit into the Search box and hit Enter. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System and double-click on legalnoticecaption. In the Value data field enter in the header you want…for instance your company name or the name of your computer…whatever you want it to be, then click OK. Then double-click on legalnoticetext … And in the Value data field enter in the message you want to display and click OK. Close out of Registry Editor and reboot the computer.   After the machine reboots you’ll see the text message you just created at the Welcome screen.   You can include whatever text message you want to be included for the user to read before they log in. This is a neat trick if you have a company or school and want to show a particular message to the user before they log into the machine. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Start Your Computer More Quickly by Delaying the Startup of a Service in VistaCopy Windows Error Messages to the ClipboardHide the Recycle Bin Icon Text on Windows VistaHow To Disable Annoying Blinking Text in FirefoxStupid Geek Tricks: Using the Quick Zoom Feature in Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista

  Read the article

• Ask the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and Malware

  - by Mysticgeek

  We’ve shared some of our best tips for dealing with malware over the years, and now it’s your turn! Share your favorite tips for protecting against, or getting rid of viruses and other types of malicious software. Unfortunately, if you’re a PC user it’s a given that you have to play defense against various forms of Malware. We’ve written several articles showing how to get rid of viruses and other forms of malware over the years using various strategies. We have some excellent articles explaining how to get rid of Advanced Virus Remover, Antivirus Live, Internet Security 2010, and Security Tool – all of which disguise themselves as legit antivirus apps. Now we turn it over to you to share your favorite tips and tricks for defending against malicious infections. If your computer has been infected, what steps did you take to get rid of it and clean up your machine? Leave a comment below and join in the discussion! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Remove Security Tool and other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareNorton Antivirus 2010 [Review]How To Remove Internet Security 2010 and other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareHow To Remove Antivirus Live and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareHow-To Geek Comment Policy TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Bingbot seems to be adding "ForceRecrawl: 0" to URLs when crawling my sites

  - by Louis Somers

  I'm seeing this in the iis-logs of two websites that I maintain: GET /an/existing/page/on/my/site+ForceRecrawl:+0 - 80 - 207.46.195.105 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+bingbot/2.0;++http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) I get about one or two of these per day from these IP addresses: 207.46.195.105, 65.52.110.190.. an more, all belonging to msnbot-ip.search.msn.com Probably Microsoft has a bug in their crawler? Any way, doing a search on "ForceRecrawl: 0" in major search engines comes up with a bunch of random sites. Doing the search on StackOverflow or here gave no results (to my amazement). Am I the only one seeing this? I first noticed these on the 9th of this month, and I'm seeing them pass almost daily since... Another thing that I think is crazy, is that the URL http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm redirects to mail.live.com (hotmail). Currently I'm returning 404's but I'm considering to catch these, strip the trailing " ForceRecrawl: 0" and process as if it were a legitimate url. Could anyone shed some light on this? Could it have to do with some configuration or so in Bing's Webmaster Tools?

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 12, 2012Popular ReleasesKanboxAPI: KanboxAPI beta: ????? Token Info List DownloadMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected using the TV Show Selector for a single show. General Will no longer prompt for ...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.5.2012.0508、XCoder v4.7.2012.0320: X????： 1，????For .Net 4.0?? XCoder????： 1，???????，????X????，?????? XCode????： 1，Insert/Update/Delete???????????????，???SQL???? 2，IEntityOperate?????? 3，????????IEntityTree 4，????????????????? 5，?????????? 6，??????????????dycom: v1.0: DYCom ????????：Silverlight, Windows phone 7.5.NETMF_for_STM32: Beta 1 Release: First public beta release.Google Book Downloader: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports Cpython, IronPython, Jython and Pypy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0 RC1 Refresh 1: JayData 1.0.0 RC1 Refresh 1 JayData is a unified data access API to webSQL, indexedDB, OData, Facebook and YQL. Overview The major feature of this release is related to OData provider, FunctionImport is now generally supported. Now you can consume OData service operations (WebMethods). We extended the JaySvcUtil to generate the necessary metadata. We included many fixes, such as the Visual Studio 2010 IntelliSense optimalization (RC1 was optimized only to VS11). It's recommended to upgrade...AD Gallery: AD Gallery 1.2.7: NewsFixed a bug which caused the current thumbnail not to be highlighted Added a hook to take complete control over how descriptions are handled, take a look under Documentation for more info Added removeAllImages()51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.8: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.81. The IsFirstTime method of the RedirectModule will now return the same value when called multiple times for the same request. This was prevent...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection ver 2.2 (WinRT supported): Added NamedParameterAttribute, OptionalParameterAttribute. Added behaviors ICycleDependencyBehavior, IResolveUnregisteredTypeBehavior. Added WinRT support. Added support for NET 4.5. Added support for MVC 4.NShape - .Net Diagramming Framework for Industrial Applications: NShape 2.0.1: Changes in 2.0.1:Bugfixes: IRepository.Insert(Shape shape) and IRepository.Insert(IEnumerable<Shape> shapes) no longer insert shape connections. Several context menu items did display although the required permission was not granted Display did not reset the visible and active layers when changing the diagram NullReferenceException when pressing Del key and no shape was selected Changed Behavior: LayerCollection.Find("") no longer throws an exception. Improvements: Display does not rese...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.11.6: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...sb0t: sb0t 4.64: New commands added: #scribble <url> #adminscribble on #adminscribble offDocument.Editor: 2012.4: Whats new for Document.Editor 2012.4: Improved Template support Improved Options Dialog Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5: New feature - Added ItemIsReference, ItemReferenceLoopHandling, ItemTypeNameHandling, ItemConverterType to JsonPropertyAttribute New feature - Added ItemRequired to JsonObjectAttribute New feature - Added Path to JsonWriterException Change - Improved deserializer call stack memory usage Change - Moved the PDB files out of the NuGet package into a symbols package Fix - Fixed infinite loop from an input error when reading an array and error handling is enabled Fix - Fixed base objec...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.1: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.1 (1)????????????????(Ver5.6.0??)??? (2)HTTP?????SSL????????????（Ver5.6.0??）??? (3)HTTP?????2G??????????????????????????? (4)HTP????　?????????ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.5: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-05-06 v3.1.5 -????????：grid/grid_twogrid.aspx。 +?...SharpDevelop: SharpDevelop 4.2: Please see http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/t/15772.aspx for the release announcement.Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.4: Taskbar icon overlay (number of unread items) can now be switched off in preferences (Windows Vista / 7 only) Maximize button now can be toggled to be fullscreen (as befor) or only normal maximize (taskbar stays visible) in preferences List of feeds is now sorted by alphabetNew Projects3D Scene Editor: A generic 3d level editor built using XNA to speed up designing and building game levels.Attribute Based Cache using Unity Interception: Unity interception handler attribute for Caching which allows to apply boiler plate caching pattern to classes, and class members directly, without configuring them in the application configuration file. Configure your choice of Cache Provider (ObjectCache, Azure included) in the Unity IoC Container and apply the attribute to the method which you want to cache AutoCompleteBox for WinRT: None yetBAC2 Bachelor's Thesis Source Code: The source code of my Bachelor's ThesisBAMabase: It's a bamabase.BBSProject: BBSProjectBrain 2 - Game Engine: Brain 2 is a Game Engine that runs on multiple platforms.cobra-winldtp: Cobra - Windows version of Linux Desktop Testing Project (WinLDTP) - http://ldtp.freedesktop.org LDTP is a GUI test automation tool works on both Windows and Linux platform Windows GUI test automation tool written in C# and test scripts can be written in Python for now. Ruby API will be added soon.CS322: C# Programski jezikDoxBotPlugin: The DoxBotPlugin is a Plug-In for Ice-Chat9 that allows a user to use Icechat9 as both a normal IRC client and to switch on bot mode in certain channels to have DoxBotPlugin act on their behalf.dycom: DYCom??(DY Communication)???????????,?????????????????.????????????????. ??????????????????????,?????????????????。Eyes Protector: PL: Program pomagajacy w ochronie oczu przed przemeczeniem zwiazanym ze zbyt dluga praca przy komputerze. EN: ---kshell: ????Linux??????Lumia: This is Lumia project.MacroDoc: MacroDoc is an engine written in C# for composing documents from reusable pieces of structure and content.Mssql: This is Sql Server project.NETMF_for_STM32: This is the Codeplex project for NETMF for STM32 (F4 Edition). Ocular - a free, open source WYSIWYG editor for HTML: Ocular is a free C# WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Adobe Dreamweaver. We are always looking for contributors, so please help us!PeopleCredit: Prototype web service to maintain all employee credits.Project Server workflow: This workflow creates the project site for Basic project plan EPT when workflow task is approved.(This is the correction done over the Branching workflow provided with Project Server 2010 SDK). Workflow task is created using PSWApprovalTask Content type in Project Server Workflow Task List. Quick Reminder: PL: Program pomagajacy zapisac szybkie przypomnienia podczas pracy przy komputerze. EN: ---Random Projects: My random projects...Recommendation Engine Demo: How does the Amazon recommendation works? This is about visualizing the item to item collaborations filtering mechanism using a item-to-item matrix table. The item-to-item matrix, the vectors and the calculated data values are displayed. There are n different items and the item recommendation can display up to m items. There are implemented different item-to-item neighborhood functions. A simple max count of seen neighbor items, the Cosine Similarity and the Jaccard Index. A t...SaveSeaTurtle: Sea TurtleSharpGpx: SharpGpx implements an object model for reading and writing GPX (GPS eXchange Format).SlimDo: SlimDo is a scripting language coded in C#Spring: This is Spring.Net projectSQL Server Quick Tools Pack: SQL Server Quick Tools Pack for your sql server SuLD framework: Supported Link Discovery framework (SuLD) is a tool to discover links to multiple Linked Data datasets. Finding is supported by various features like synonym module or autocomplete.TQuery.Net: .Net??????WAAP - World of warcraft Auction house Analysis Project: A project in which we try to analyse prices and auctioneers on the various World of Warcraft Auction housesxhttp.net: The Xhttp.Net framework is a dotnet implementation of the Extended Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://www.xhttp.org), with simple service integration, full arguments support including Base64 and DateTime, single and multiple asynchronous requests, data streaming, remote API creation from XHTTP service schemas, and a runtime plugin architecture.

  Read the article

• Last GUID used up - new ScottGuID unique ID to replace it

  - by Eilon

  You might have heard in recent news that the last ever GUID was used up. The GUID {FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF} was just consumed by a soon to be released project at Microsoft. Immediately after the GUID's creation the word spread around the Microsoft campuses around the globe. Microsoft's approximately 100,000 worldwide employees then started blogging, tweeting, and facebooking about the dubious "achievement." The following screenshot shows GUIDGEN (the Windows tool for creating GUIDs) with the last ever GUID. All GUIDs created by projects at Microsoft must be registered in a central repository for record keeping. This allows quick-fix engineers, security engineers, anti-malware developers, and testers to do a quick look up of an unknown GUID and find out if it belongs to Microsoft. The following screenshot shows the Microsoft GUID Tracker internal application and the last few GUIDs being used up by various Microsoft projects. What is perhaps more interesting than the news about the GUID is the project that used that last GUID. The recent announcements regarding the development experience for the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) all involve free editions of Visual Studio 2010. One of the lesser known developer tools is based on a resurrected project that many of you are probably familiar with, but have never used. The tool is in fact Microsoft Bob 7 Series (MB7S). MB7S is an agent-based approach for mobile phone app development. The UI incorporates both natural language interfaces and motion gesture behaviors, similar to the Windows Phone 7 Series “Metro” interface. If it works, it will help to expand the breadth of mobile app developers. After the GUID: The ScottGuID It came as no big surprise that eventually the last GUID would be used up. Knowing this, a group of engineers at Microsoft has designed, implemented, and tested a replacement to the GUID: The ScottGuID. There are several core principles of the ScottGuID: 1. The concepts used in ScottGuIDs must be easily understood by a developer who is already familiar with GUIDs 2. There must exist a compatibility layer between ScottGuIDs and GUIDs 3. A ScottGuID must be usable in a practical manner in non-computing environments 4. There must exist ScottGuID APIs for all common platforms: Win32/Win64/WinCE, .NET (incl. Silverlight), Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS (incl. iPhone OS), Symbian, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android, etc. 5. ScottGuIDs must never run out ScottGuID use cases One of the more subtle principles of the ScottGuID is principle #3. While technically a GUID could be used in any environment, it was not practical to do so in terms of data entry and error detection. In order to have the ScottGuID be a true universal ID it must be usable in non-computing environments. Prior to the announcement of the ScottGuID there have been a number of until-now confidential projects. One of the tools that will soon become public is ScottGuIDGen, which is in essence an updated version of GUIDGEN that can create ScottGuIDs. The following screenshot shows a sample ScottGuID. To demonstrate the various applications of the ScottGuID there were test deployments around the globe. The following examples are a small showcase of the applications that have already been prototyped. Log in to Hotmail: Pay for gas: Sign in to Twitter: Dispense cat food: Conclusion I hope that this brief introduction to the ScottGuID shows how technology can continue to move forward, even when it appears there is a point that cannot be passed. With a small number of principles, a team of smart engineers, and a passion for "getting it right" the ScottGuID should last well past our lifetimes. In the coming months expect further announcements regarding additional developer tools, samples, whitepapers, podcasts, and videos. Please leave a comment on this post if you have any questions about the ScottGuID or what you would like to see us do with it. With ScottGuID, the possibilities are nearly endless and we want to stretch their reach as far as possible.

  Read the article

• Oracle Fusion Procurement Designed for User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Procurement Design Goals In Oracle Fusion Procurement, we set out to create a streamlined user experience based on the way users do their jobs. Oracle has spent hundreds of hours with customers to get to the heart of what users need to do their jobs. By designing a procurement application around user needs, Oracle has crafted a user experience that puts the tools that people need at their fingertips. In Oracle Fusion Procurement, the user experience is designed to provide the user with information that will drive navigation rather than requiring the user to find information. One of our design goals for Oracle Fusion Procurement was to reduce the number of screens and clicks that a user must go through to complete frequently performed tasks. The requisition process in Oracle Fusion Procurement (Figure 1) illustrates how we have streamlined workflows. Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement brings together billing metrics, descriptions of the order, justification for the order, a breakdown of the components of the order, and the amount—all in one place. Previous generations of procurement software required the user to navigate to several different pages to gather all of this information. With Oracle Fusion, everything is presented on one page. The result is that users can complete their tasks in less time. The focus is on completing the work, not finding the work. Figure 1. Creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement is a consumer-like shopping experience. Will Oracle Fusion Procurement Increase Productivity? To answer this question, Oracle sought to model how two experts working head to head—one in an existing enterprise application and another in Oracle Fusion Procurement—would perform the same task. We compared Oracle Fusion designs to corresponding existing applications using the keystroke-level modeling (KLM) method. This method is based on years of research at universities such as Carnegie Mellon and research labs like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The KLM method breaks tasks into a sequence of operations and uses standardized models to evaluate all of the physical and cognitive actions that a person must take to complete a task: what a user would have to click, how long each click would take (not only the physical action of the click or typing of a letter, but also how long someone would have to think about the page when taking the action), and user interface changes that result from the click. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time is calculated. Task times from the model enable researchers to predict end-user productivity. For the study, we focused on modeling procurement business process task flows that were considered business or mission critical: high-frequency tasks and high-value tasks. The designs evaluated encompassed tasks that are currently performed by employees, professional buyers, suppliers, and sourcing professionals in advanced procurement applications. For each of these flows, we created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task, conducted task walk-throughs in both the Oracle Fusion design and the existing application, analyzed and documented the steps and actions required to complete each task, and applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate overall task completion times. The Results The KLM method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Procurement designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 13 percent to 38 percent, with an overall productivity gain of 22.5 percent. These performance gains can be attributed to a reduction in the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. For example, creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Procurement takes a user through only two screens, while ordering the same item in a previous version requires six screens to complete the task. Modeling user productivity has resulted not only in advances in Oracle Fusion applications, but also in advances in other areas. We leveraged lessons learned from the KLM studies to establish products like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). New user experience features in EBS 12.1.3, such as navigational improvements to the main menu, a Google-type search using auto-suggest, embedded analytics, and an in-context list of values tool help to reduce clicks and improve efficiency. For more information about KLM, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.

  Read the article

• Move Firefox’s Tab Bar to the Top

  - by Asian Angel

  Would you prefer to have Firefox’s Tab Bar located at the top of the browser instead of its’ default location? See how easy it is to move the Tab Bar back and forth between the top and current positions “flip switch style” with the Tabs On Top extension. Note: Tabs On Top extension supports multi-row feature in TabMixPlus. Before You can see the “Tab Bar” in its’ default location here in our test browser…not bad but what if you prefer having it located at the top of the browser? After As soon as you have installed the extension and restarted Firefox the “Tab Bar” will have automatically moved to the top of the browser. You will most likely notice a slight decrease in tab height as well (which occurred during our tests). To move the “Tab Bar” back and forth between the top and default locations just select/deselect “Tab Bar on top” in the “Toolbars Context Menu”. You can quickly reduce the size of the upper UI after hiding some of the other toolbars and go even further if you like using extensions that will hide the “Title Bar”. This is definitely a good UI matching extension for anyone using a Chrome based theme in Firefox. Conclusion If you are unhappy with default location for Firefox’s “Tab Bar” then this extension will certainly provide an alternative option for you. Links Download the Tabs On Top extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use the Keyboard to Move Items Up or Down in Microsoft WordAdd Copy To / Move To on Windows 7 or Vista Right-Click MenuBring Misplaced Off-Screen Windows Back to Your Desktop (Keyboard Trick)Moving Your Personal Data Folders in Windows Vista the Easy WayAdd Copy To / Move To to the Windows Explorer Right Click Menu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Live PDF Searches PDF Files and Ebooks Converting Mp4 to Mp3 Easily Use Quick Translator to Translate Text in 50 Languages (Firefox) Get Better Windows Search With UltraSearch Scan News With NY Times Article Skimmer SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox

  Read the article

• Add Properties Back to the Context Menu in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Have you noticed that the Properties Command has been removed from the Context Menu in Firefox 3.6? If you have been missing it here is how to get it back. Before With the newest version of Firefox you may have noticed a very useful command missing from the “Context Menu”. Here you can see that when we right clicked on the article link we were unable to “access” the properties for it… Same article and the same problem when trying to “access” the properties for one of the images. After Once you have installed the extension you can once again “access” the properties for those links… And those images… Looking very good… Conclusion If you have been frustrated with the removal of the “Properties Command” from the “Context Menu” in Firefox 3.6, you can now add it back in just a few moments. Links Download the Element Properties extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Prevent Annoying Websites From Messing With the Right-Click Menu in FirefoxAccess Your Bookmarks in the Context Menu with Context BookmarksAdd Print & Print Preview Commands to Firefox’s Context MenuRestore the "Search…" Item to the Folder Context Menu in Windows Vista SP1Create Permanent Tabs in Firefox with PermaTabs Mod TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam

  Read the article

• How to install SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

  - by ybbest

  The Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 Preview is announced yesterday and as a SharePoint Developer, I am really excited to learn all the new features and capabilities. Today I will show you how to install the preview. 1. Create a service account called SP2013Install and give this account Dbcreator and SecurityAdmin in SQL Server 2012 2. You need to run the following script to set the ‘maxdegree of parellism’ setting to the required value of 1 in SQL Server 2012(using sysadmin privilege) before configure the SharePoint Farm. Otherwise , you might get the error ‘This SQL Server Instance does not have the required maxdegree of parellism setting of 1’ sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO 3. Download the SharePoint preview from here and I am going to install it on Windows Server 2008R2 with SQL2012. 4. Click the Install software prerequisites, this works fine with the internet connection. (However, if you do not have internet connection, it is a bit tricky to install window azure AppFabric as it has to be installed using the prerequisite installer. Your computer might reboot a few times in the process.) 5.After the prerequisites are installed `completely, you can then install the Preview. Click the Install SharePoint Server and Enter the Product key you get from the Preview download page. 6. Accept the License terms and Click Next. 7. Leave the default path for the file location. 8. You can now start the installation process 9. After binary files are installed, you then can configure your farm using the farm configuration wizard. 10.Specify the Database server and the install account 11. Specify SharePoint farm passphrase. 12 Specify the port number , you should choose your own favorite port number. 13. Choose Create a New Server Farm and click next. 14. Double-check with the settings and click Next to Configure the farm install. 15. Finally, your farm is configured successfully and you now are able to go to your Central Admin site http://sp2010:6666/ 16. You should configure the services manually or automate using PowerShell (If you like to understand why,you can read the blog post here) ,however I will use the wizard to configure automatically here  as  this is a test machine. After the configuration is complete, you now be able to see your SharePoint Site. 17.To start the evaluate the Preview , you need to install Visual Studio 2012 RC , Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012,SharePoint 2013 Designer Preview , Office 2013 Preview. References: Download SharePoint2013 Server 2013 Download Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 Preview Install SharePoint 2013 Preview Hardware and software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview SharePoint 2013 IT Pro and Developer training materials released Plan for SharePoint 2013 Preview Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint 2013 Preview Office365 for the SharePoint 2013 preview SharePoint Designer 2013 Download: Microsoft Office 2013 Preview Language Pack Try Office

  Read the article

• Solving Kaggle’s Bike Sharing Demand Machine Learning Problem

  - by Gopinath

  Kaggle.com hosts a lot of interesting machine learning problems online and thousands of its members compete to solve them for a bounty. Problems hosted on Kaggle has varying complexity to accomodate newbies to rock star developers – few problems are good enough for  newbies to learn basics of machine learning and few of them challenge the best of machine learning developers. I’m learning basics of machine learning for the past few weeks and had an opportunity to solve Kaggel’s Bike Sharing Demand problem. Bike Sharing systems allows customers to rent a bike (or a cycle as it is called in many part of the world) for several hours and return them back . The problem provides historical information about the demand for bike sharing business and we need to forecast the demand. For more information on the problem, visit Kaggle.com website. Here is the solution I written using random forests algorithm using R programming language and you can download the source code from github.  With this solution I was able to score RMSLE of 0.70117, which placed me somewhere in the mid of the leader board.  This is the best score I could get by spending 4 hours of my time. Please feel free to fork the code and improve it.   Get Kaggle Bike Sharing Demand solution code from GitHub

  Read the article

• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

  - by Ben Griswold

  You’re familiar with O’Reilly’s brilliant Head First Series, right?  Great.  Then you know how every book begins with an explanation of the Head First teaching style and you know the teaching format which Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates developed is based on research in cognitive science, neurobiology and educational psychology and it’s all about making learning visual and conversational and attractive and emotional and it’s highly effective.  Anyway, it’s a great series and you should read every last one of the books. Moving on… I’ve been wanting to learn more about Ruby and Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby has been on my reading list for a while and there was talk about cartoon foxes and other silliness and I figured Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby probably takes the same unorthodox teaching style as the Head First books – and that’s great – so I read the book, in piecemeal, over the last couple of weeks and, well, I figured wrong. Now having read the book, here’s my take on Why’s (Poignant) Guide – it’s very creative and clever and it does a darn good job of introducing one to Ruby.  If you’re interested in Ruby or simply interested, the online book is worth your time.  If you’re thinking (like me) that cartoon foxes will be doing the teaching, that’s simple not the case.  However, the cartoons and the random stories in the sidebar may serve a purpose. Unlike the Head First books where images and captions are used to further explain the teachings, the cartoons and stories in Why’s Guide serve as intermission and offer your brain a brief moment of rest before the next Ruby concept is explained.  It’s not a bad strategy, but definitely not as effective as the Head First techniques.  

  Read the article

• Render rivers in a grid.

  - by Gabriel A. Zorrilla

  I have created a random height map and now i want to create rivers. I've made an algorithm based on a* to make rivers flow from peaks to sea and now i'm in the quest of figuring out an elegant algorithm to render them. It's a 2D, square, mapgrid. The cells which the river pases has a simple integer value with this form :rivernumber && pointOrder. Ie: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16...1+N for the first river, 20,21,22,23...2+N for the second, etc. This is created in the map grid generation time and it's executed just once, when the world is generated. I wanted to treat each river as a vector, but there is a problem, if the same river has branches (because i put some noise to generate branches), i can not just connect the points in order. The second alternative is to generate a complex algorithm where analizes each point, checks if the next is not a branch, if so trigger another algorithm that take care of the branch then returns to the main river, etc. Very complex and inelegant. Perhaps there is a solution in the world generation algorithm or in the river rendering algorithm that is commonly used in these cases and i'm not aware of. Any tips? Thanks!!

  Read the article

• Best of "The Moth" 2012

  - by Daniel Moth

  As with previous years (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) I’d like to wish you a Happy New Year and share a quick review of my blog posts from 2012 (plus speculate on my 2013 blog focus). 1. Like 2011, my professional energy in 2012 was dominated by C++ AMP including articles, blog posts, demos, slides, and screencasts. I summarized that over two posts on the official team blog that I linked to from my blog post here titled: “The last word on C++ AMP”, which also subtly hinted at my change of role which I confirmed in my other post titled “Visual Studio Continued Excitement”. 2. Even before I moved to the Visual Studio Diagnostics team in September, earlier in the year I had started sharing blog posts with my thoughts on that space, something I expect to continue in the new year. You can read some of that in these posts: The way I think about Diagnostic tools, Live Debugging, Attach to Process in Visual Studio, Start Debugging in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Exceptions dialogs. 3. What you should also expect to see more of is thoughts, tips, checklists, etc around Professional Communication and on how to be more efficient and effective with that, e.g. Link instead of Attaching, Sending Outlook Invites, Responding to Invites, and OOF checklist. 4. As always, I sometimes share random information, and noteworthy from 2012 is the one where I outlined the Visual Studio versioning story (“Visual Studio 11 not 2011”, and after that post VS 11 was officially baptized VS2012) and the one on “How I Record Screencasts”. Looking back, unlike 2011 there were no posts in 2012 related to device development, e.g. for Windows Phone. Expect that to be rectified in 2013 as I hope to find more time for such coding… stay tuned by subscribing using the link on the left. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• GoodFil.ms Suggests New Movies Based on Friends’ Picks

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Goodfil.ms is a movie suggestion engine that doesn’t suggest movies based on what the critics say or how many anonymous internet points a movie has received, but instead takes into account your personal tastes and the tastes of your friends. From the Goodfil.ms FAQ: Films are social. The best way to find movies is through the people you know. We’ve designed Goodfilms from the ground up to show you what your existing friends are watching and rating, and to focus on showing you what the people around you think about films instead of a random grab bag of “internet voters” or highly specialised critics. Their FAQ file is filled with links to detailed posts about the specifics of the process, so if you’re the curious type we strongly suggest checking it out. In addition to the social-ranking side of Goodfil.ms there’s an excellent “Recent Releases” section for major streaming services like iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon Prime–even if you don’t sign up for the social side of the site you can still keep an eye on the best new releases across the board. What To Do If You Get a Virus on Your Computer Why Enabling “Do Not Track” Doesn’t Stop You From Being Tracked HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It?

  Read the article

• Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

  Read the article

• Review: ComponentOne Studio for Entity Framework

  - by Tim Murphy

  While I have always been a fan of libraries that improve coding efficiency and reduce code redundancy I have mostly been using ones that were in the public domain.  As part of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program a got my hands on ComponentOne’s Studio for Entity Framework.  Below are my thought after working with the product for several weeks. My coding preference has always been maintainable code that is reusable across an enterprises protfolio.  Because of this my focus in reviewing this product is less on the RAD components and more on its benefits for layered applications using code first Entity Framework. Before we get into the pros and cons here is a summary of the main feature listed for SEF. Unified Data Context Virtual Data Access More Powerful Data Binding Pros The first thing that I found to my liking is the C1DataSource. It basically manages a cache for your Entity Model context.  Under RAD conditions this is setup automatically when you drop the object on a your design surface.  If you are like me and want to abstract you data management into a library it takes a little more work, but it is still acceptable and gains the same benefits. The second feature that I found beneficial is the definition of views with improved sorting and filtering.  Again the ease of use of these features is greater on the RAD side but no capabilities are missing when manipulating object in code. Linq has become my friend over the last couple of years and it was great to see that ComponentOne had ensured that it remained a first class citizen in their design.  When you look into this product yourself I would suggest taking a dive into LiveLinq which allow the joining of different data source types. As I went through discovering the features of this framework I appreciated the number of examples that they supplied for different uses.  Besides showing how to use SEF with WinForms, WPF and Silverlight they also showed how to accomplish tasks both RAD, code only and MVVM approaches. Cons The only area that I would really like to see improvement is in there level of detail in their documentation.  Specifically I would like to have seen some of the supporting code explained, such as what some supporting object did, in the examples instead of having to go to the programmer’s reference. I did find some times where currently existing projects had some trouble determining scope that the RAD controls were allowed, but I expect this is something that is in part end user related. Summary Overall I found the Studio for Entity Framework capable and well thought out.  If you are already using the Entity Framework this product will fit into your environment with little effort in return for greater flexibility and greater robustness in your solutions. Whether the $895 list price for a standard version works for you will depend on your return on investment. Smaller companies with only a small number of projects may not be able to stomach it, you get a full featured product that is supported by a well established company.  The more projects and the more code you have the greater your return on investment will be. Personally I intend to apply this product to some production systems and will probably have some tips and tricks in the future. del.icio.us Tags: ComponentOne,Studio for Entity Framework,Geeks With Blogs,Influencers,Product Reviews

  Read the article

• links for 2010-04-12

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Andy Mulholland: We need innovation! What does that mean? "The most common response would seem to be ‘I will know it when I see it’, which suggests business success is based on ‘getting lucky’. As you might expect business schools don’t agree with this and as A G Lafley, author of several works on the topic comments: 'Innovation is risky, but it’s not random. Innovators have a disciplined invention process.'" Capgemini CTO blogger Andy Mulholland. (tags: entarch enterprisearchitecture innovation) @eelzinga: lEAI/Oracle Service Bus testing with Citrus Framework, part2 IT-Eye's Eric Elzinga continues his series with a test of a scenario that is part of a customer's middleware architecture. (tags: oracle otn ESB soa citrus) @fteter: Collaborate 10 - What Looks Good To Me Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter from NASA's JPL shares quick previews of his Collaborate 10 presentations, along with a list of some sessions he plans to attend. (tags: oracle otn oracleace collaborate2010) Mark Rittman: OWB11gR2 for Windows Now Available Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman of Rittman Mead shares insight on the recent Oracle Warehouse Builder release, along with a list of articles on the new features in Oracle Database 11gR2. (tags: oracle otn datewarehousing businessintelligence 11gr2)

  Read the article

• [MINI HOW-TO] Create Keyboard Shortcuts to Applications in Windows

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you need just one or a few special keyboard shortcuts for your favorite program(s)? A quick modification to program shortcuts will get you up and running without installing additional software. Creating New Keyboard Shortcuts Go to the start menu shortcut for the program, right-click on it, and select properties. When the properties window opens click in the shortcut key text area. All that you need to do is choose an appropriate letter for the program (i.e. O for Opera, E for Editra, etc.) and type it in the blank. You will not need to type any other keys or combination in…the “Ctrl + Alt +” will be automatically entered for you as soon as you type the letter in. Click OK to finish creating the new keyboard shortcut. Those new keyboard shortcuts will speed up access to your favorite software. Another example from our system using “I” for Iron Browser. Certainly much quicker than using the start menu. Conclusion If you only need one or just a few special keyboard shortcuts then this method provides a quick and simple solution. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show Keyboard Shortcut Access Keys in Windows VistaUse the Windows Key for the "Start" Menu in Ubuntu LinuxCreate Custom Windows Key Keyboard Shortcuts in WindowsHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupKeyboard Ninja: 21 Keyboard Shortcut Articles TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010

  Read the article

• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

  Read the article

• Friday Fun: Vehicles

  - by Mysticgeek

  Friday has finally arrived and it’s time to ignore spreadsheets and TPS reports and waste time playing a flash game. Today we take a look at the fun puzzle game called Vehicles. Vehicles This is a fun game with cartoon style graphics where you navigate vehicles to solve different puzzles. You navigate the vehicles through different puzzle situations by clicking on them with your mouse. You’re given basic instructions on how to complete each level. You’ll need to strategically place the vehicles so you can knock the black vehicles off the screen. As you progress up the levels, they become more challenging and if you need to, you can restart it at any time. Since it’s Friday, and you’re sick of your job, Vehicles is a fun puzzle game to keep your mind of the boringness of work until it’s time for weekend freedom. Play Vehicles at FreeWebArcade Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Relieve Workweek Frustration Playing Mad MondayFriday Fun: Uphill RushFriday Fun: Battlefield HeroesFriday Fun: Portal, the Flash VersionFriday Fun: Play 3D Rally Racing in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475  | Next Page >