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• What have my fellow Delphi programmers done to make Eclipse/Java more like Delphi?

  - by Robert Oschler

  I am a veteran Delphi programmer working on my first real Android app. I am using Eclipse and Java as my development environment. The thing I miss the most of course is Delphi's VCL components and the associated IDE tools for design-time editing and code creation. Fortunately I am finding Eclipse to be one hell of an IDE with it's lush context sensitive help, deep auto-complete and code wizard facilities, and other niceties. This is a huge double treat since it is free. However, here is an example of something in the Eclipse/Java environment that will give a Delphi programmer pause. I will use the simple case of adding an "on-click" code stub for an OK button. DELPHI Drop button on a form Double-click button on form and fill in the code that will fire when the button is clicked ECLIPSE Drop button on layout in the graphical XML file editor Add the View.OnClickListener interface to the containing class's "implements" list if not there already. (Command+1 on Macs, Ctrl + 1 on PCs I believe). Use Eclipse to automatically add the code stub for unimplemented methods needed to support the View.OnClickListener interface, thus creating the event handler function stub. Find the stub and fill it in. However, if you have more than one possible click event source then you will need to inspect the View parameter to see which View element triggered the OnClick() event, thus requiring a case statement to handle multiple click event sources. NOTE: I am relatively new to Eclipse/Java so if there is a much easier way of doing this please let me know. Now that work flow isn't all that terrible, but again, that's just the simplest of use cases. Ratchet up the amount of extra work and thinking for a more complex component (aka widget) and the large number of properties/events it might have. It won't be long before you miss dearly the Delphi intelligent property editor and other designers. Eclipse tries to cover this ground by having an extensive list of properties in the menu that pops up when you right-click over a component/widget in the XML graphical layout editor. That's a huge and welcome assist but it's just not even close to the convenience of the Delphi IDE. Let me be very clear. I absolutely am not ranting nor do I want to start a Delphi vs. Java ideology discussion. Android/Eclipse/Java is what it is and there is a lot that impresses me. What I want to know is what other Delphi programmers that made the switch to the Eclipse/Java IDE have done to make things more Delphi like, and not just to make component/widget event code creation easier but any programming task. For example: Clever tips/tricks Eclipse plugins you found other ideas? Any great blog posts or web resources on the topic are appreciated too. -- roschler

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• How To Approach 360 Degree Snake

  - by Austin Brunkhorst

  I've recently gotten into XNA and must say I love it. As sort of a hello world game I decided to create the classic game "Snake". The 90 degree version was very simple and easy to implement. But as I try to make a version of it that allows 360 degree rotation using left and right arrows, I've come into sort of a problem. What i'm doing now stems from the 90 degree version: Iterating through each snake body part beginning at the tail, and ending right before the head. This works great when moving every 100 milliseconds. The problem with this is that it makes for a choppy style of gameplay as technically the game progresses at only 6 fps rather than it's potential 60. I would like to move the snake every game loop. But unfortunately because the snake moves at the rate of it's head's size it goes way too fast. This would mean that the head would need to move at a much smaller increment such as (2, 2) in it's direction rather than what I have now (32, 32). Because I've been working on this game off and on for a couple of weeks while managing school I think that I've been thinking too hard on how to accomplish this. It's probably a simple solution, i'm just not catching it. Here's some pseudo code for what I've tried based off of what makes sense to me. I can't really think of another way to do it. for(int i = SnakeLength - 1; i > 0; i--){ current = SnakePart[i], next = SnakePart[i - 1]; current.x = next.x - (current.width * cos(next.angle)); current.y = next.y - (current.height * sin(next.angle)); current.angle = next.angle; } SnakeHead.x += cos(SnakeAngle) * SnakeSpeed; SnakeHead.y += sin(SnakeAngle) * SnakeSpeed; This produces something like this: Code in Action. As you can see each part always stays behind the head and doesn't make a "Trail" effect. A perfect example of what i'm going for can be found here: Data Worm. Not the viewport rotation but the trailing effect of the triangles. Thanks for any help!

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• Oracle Coherence 3.5 : Create Internet-scale applications using Oracle's high-performance data grid

  - by frederic.michiara

  Oracle Coherence Coherence provides replicated and distributed (partitioned) data management and caching services on top of a reliable, highly scalable peer-to-peer clustering protocol. Coherence has no single points of failure; it automatically and transparently fails over and redistributes its clustered data management services when a server becomes inoperative or is disconnected from the network. When a new server is added, or when a failed server is restarted, it automatically joins the cluster and Coherence fails back services to it, transparently redistributing the cluster load. Coherence includes network-level fault tolerance features and transparent soft re-start capability to enable servers to self-heal. For the ones looking at an easy reading and first good approach to Oracle Coherence, I would recommend reading the following book : Overview of Oracle Coherence 3.5 Build scalable web sites and Enterprise applications using a market-leading data grid product Design and implement your domain objects to work most effectively with Coherence and apply Domain Driven Designs (DDD) to Coherence applications Leverage Coherence events and continuous queries to provide real-time updates to client applications Successfully integrate various persistence technologies, such as JDBC, Hibernate, or TopLink, with Coherence Filled with numerous examples that provide best practice guidance, and a number of classes you can readily reuse within your own applications This book is targeted to Architects and developers, and as in our team we're more about Solutions Architects than developers I found interest in this book as it help to understand better Oracle Coherence and its value. The only point I may not agree with the authors is that Oracle Coherence is not an alternative to Oracle RAC in providing High Availability, but combining both Oracle RAC and Oracle Coherence will help Architects and Customers to reach higher level of service and high-availability. This book is available on https://www.packtpub.com/oracle-coherence-3-5/book Need to find out about Table of contents : https://www.packtpub.com/toc/oracle-coherence-35-table-contents Discover a sample chapter : https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/6125_Oracle%20Coherence_SampleChapter.pdf Read also articles from the Authors on http://www.packtpub.com/ : Working with Aggregators in Oracle Coherence 3.5 Working with Value Extractors and Simplifying Queries in Oracle Coherence 3.5 Querying the Data Grid in Coherence 3.5: Obtaining Query Results and Using Indexes Installing Coherence 3.5 and Accessing the Data Grid: Part 1 Installing Coherence 3.5 and Accessing the Data Grid: Part 2 For more information on Oracle Coherence : What Oracle Coherence Can Do for You... : http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/coherence/coherencedatagrid/coherence_solutions.html Oracle Coherence on OTN : http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/coherence/index.html Oracle Coherence Knowledge Base : http://coherence.oracle.com/display/COH/Oracle+Coherence+Knowledge+Base+Home

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• FREE Windows Azure evening in London on April 15th including FREE access to Windows Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  [Did I overdo the use of FREE in the title? :-)] April 12th to 16th is Microsoft Tech Days – 5 days of sessions on Visual Studio 2010 through to Windows 7 Phone Series. Many of these days are now full (Tip - Thursday still has room if rich client applications is your thing) but the good news is the development community in the UK has pulled together an awesome series of “fringe events” during April in London and elsewhere in the UK. There are sessions on Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010 and … the Windows Azure Platform. The UK AzureNET user group is planning to put on a great evening and AzureNET will be giving away hundreds of free subscriptions to the Windows Azure Platform during the evening. The subscription includes up to 20 Windows Azure Compute nodes and 3 SQL Azure databases for you to play with over the 2 weeks following the event. This is a great opportunity to really explore the Windows Azure Platform in detail – without a credit card! Register now! (and you might also want to join the UK Fans of Azure Community while I have your attention) FYI The Thursday day time event includes an introduction to Windows Azure session delivered by my colleague David – which would be an ideal session to attend if you are new to Azure and want to get the most out of the evening session. 7:00pm: See the difference: How Windows Azure helped build a new way of giving Simon Evans and James Broome (@broomej) They will cover the business context for Azure and then go into patterns used and lessons learnt from the project....as well as showing off the app of course! 8:00pm: UK AzureNET update 8:15pm: NoSQL databases or: How I learned to love the hash table Mark Rendle (@markrendle) In this session Mark will look at how Azure Table Service works and how to use it. We’ll look briefly at the high-level Data Services SDK, talk about its limitations, and then quickly move on to the REST API and how to use it to improve performance and reduce costs. We’ll make-up some pretend real-world problems and solve them in new and interesting ways. We’ll denormalise data (for fun and profit). We’ll talk about how certain social networking sites can deal with huge volumes of data so quickly, and why it sometimes goes wrong. Check out the complete list of fringe events which covers the UK fairly well:

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• Plan Operator Tuesday round-up

  - by Rob Farley

  Eighteen posts for T-SQL Tuesday #43 this month, discussing Plan Operators. I put them together and made the following clickable plan. It’s 1000px wide, so I hope you have a monitor wide enough. Let me explain this plan for you (people’s names are the links to the articles on their blogs – the same links as in the plan above). It was clearly a SELECT statement. Wayne Sheffield (@dbawayne) wrote about that, so we start with a SELECT physical operator, leveraging the logical operator Wayne Sheffield. The SELECT operator calls the Paul White operator, discussed by Jason Brimhall (@sqlrnnr) in his post. The Paul White operator is quite remarkable, and can consume three streams of data. Let’s look at those streams. The first pulls data from a Table Scan – Boris Hristov (@borishristov)’s post – using parallel threads (Bradley Ball – @sqlballs) that pull the data eagerly through a Table Spool (Oliver Asmus – @oliverasmus). A scalar operation is also performed on it, thanks to Jeffrey Verheul (@devjef)’s Compute Scalar operator. The second stream of data applies Evil (I figured that must mean a procedural TVF, but could’ve been anything), courtesy of Jason Strate (@stratesql). It performs this Evil on the merging of parallel streams (Steve Jones – @way0utwest), which suck data out of a Switch (Paul White – @sql_kiwi). This Switch operator is consuming data from up to four lookups, thanks to Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen), Rick Krueger (@dataogre), Mickey Stuewe (@sqlmickey) and Kathi Kellenberger (@auntkathi). Unfortunately Kathi’s name is a bit long and has been truncated, just like in real plans. The last stream performs a join of two others via a Nested Loop (Matan Yungman – @matanyungman). One pulls data from a Spool (my post – @rob_farley) populated from a Table Scan (Jon Morisi). The other applies a catchall operator (the catchall is because Tamera Clark (@tameraclark) didn’t specify any particular operator, and a catchall is what gets shown when SSMS doesn’t know what to show. Surprisingly, it’s showing the yellow one, which is about cursors. Hopefully that’s not what Tamera planned, but anyway...) to the output from an Index Seek operator (Sebastian Meine – @sqlity). Lastly, I think everyone put in 110% effort, so that’s what all the operators cost. That didn’t leave anything for me, unfortunately, but that’s okay. Also, because he decided to use the Paul White operator, Jason Brimhall gets 0%, and his 110% was given to Paul’s Switch operator post. I hope you’ve enjoyed this T-SQL Tuesday, and have learned something extra about Plan Operators. Keep your eye out for next month’s one by watching the Twitter Hashtag #tsql2sday, and why not contribute a post to the party? Big thanks to Adam Machanic as usual for starting all this. @rob_farley

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 11/15/2011

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Java Magazine - November/December 2011 - by and for the Java Community Java Magazine is an essential source of knowledge about Java technology, the Java programming language, and Java-based applications for people who rely on them in their professional careers, or who aspire to. Enterprise 2.0 Conference: November 14-17 | Kellsey Ruppel "Oracle is proud to be a Gold sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 West Conference, November 14-17, 2011 in Santa Clara, CA. You will see the latest collaboration tools and technologies, and learn from thought leaders in Enterprise 2.0's comprehensive conference." The Return of Oracle Wikis: Bigger and Better | @oracletechnet The Oracle Wikis are back - this time, with Oracle SSO on top and powered by Atlassian's Confluence technology. These wikis offer quite a bit more functionality than the old platform. Cloud Migration Lifecycle | Tom Laszewski Laszewski breaks down the four steps in the Set Up Phase of the Cloud Migration lifecycle. Architecture all day. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Phoenix, AZ - Dec14 Spend the day with your peers learning from Oracle experts in engineered systems, cloud computing, Oracle Coherence, Oracle WebLogic, and more. Registration is free, but seating is limited. SOA all the Time; Architects in AZ; Clearing Info Integration Hurdles This week on the Architect Home Page on OTN. Live Webcast: New Innovations in Oracle Linux Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 Time: 9:00 AM PT / Noon ET Speakers: Chris Mason, Elena Zannoni. People in glass futures should throw stones | Nicholas Carr "Remember that Microsoft video on our glassy future? Or that one from Corning? Or that one from Toyota?" asks Carr. "What they all suggest, and assume, is that our rich natural 'interface' with the world will steadily wither away as we become more reliant on software mediation." Integration of SABSA Security Architecture Approaches with TOGAF ADM | Jeevak Kasarkod Jeevak Kasarkod's overview of a new paper from the OpenGroup and the SABSA institute "which delves into the incorporatation of risk management and security architecture approaches into a well established enterprise architecture methodology - TOGAF." Cloud Computing at the Tactical Edge | Grace Lewis - SEI Lewis describes the SEI's work with Cloudlets, " lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines (VMs), [that] allow soldiers in the field to offload resource-consumptive and battery-draining computations from their handheld devices to nearby cloudlets." Simplicity Is Good | James Morle "When designing cluster and storage networking for database platforms, keep the architecture simple and avoid the complexities of multi-tier topologies," says Morle. "Complexity is the enemy of availability." Mainframe as the cloud? Tom Laszewski There's nothing new about using the mainframe in the cloud, says Laszewski. Let Devoxx 2011 begin! | The Aquarium The Aquarium marks the kick-off of Devoxx 2011 with "a quick rundown of the Java EE and GlassFish side of things."

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• Is inline SQL still classed as bad practice now that we have Micro ORMs?

  - by Grofit

  This is a bit of an open ended question but I wanted some opinions, as I grew up in a world where inline SQL scripts were the norm, then we were all made very aware of SQL injection based issues, and how fragile the sql was when doing string manipulations all over the place. Then came the dawn of the ORM where you were explaining the query to the ORM and letting it generate its own SQL, which in a lot of cases was not optimal but was safe and easy. Another good thing about ORMs or database abstraction layers were that the SQL was generated with its database engine in mind, so I could use Hibernate/Nhibernate with MSSQL, MYSQL and my code never changed it was just a configuration detail. Now fast forward to current day, where Micro ORMs seem to be winning over more developers I was wondering why we have seemingly taken a U-Turn on the whole in-line sql subject. I must admit I do like the idea of no ORM config files and being able to write my query in a more optimal manner but it feels like I am opening myself back up to the old vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and I am also tying myself to one database engine so if I want my software to support multiple database engines I would need to do some more string hackery which seems to then start to make code unreadable and more fragile. (Just before someone mentions it I know you can use parameter based arguments with most micro orms which offers protection in most cases from sql injection) So what are peoples opinions on this sort of thing? I am using Dapper as my Micro ORM in this instance and NHibernate as my regular ORM in this scenario, however most in each field are quite similar. What I term as inline sql is SQL strings within source code. There used to be design debates over SQL strings in source code detracting from the fundamental intent of the logic, which is why statically typed linq style queries became so popular its still just 1 language, but with lets say C# and Sql in one page you have 2 languages intermingled in your raw source code now. Just to clarify, the SQL injection is just one of the known issues with using sql strings, I already mention you can stop this from happening with parameter based queries, however I highlight other issues with having SQL queries ingrained in your source code, such as the lack of DB Vendor abstraction as well as losing any level of compile time error capturing on string based queries, these are all issues which we managed to side step with the dawn of ORMs with their higher level querying functionality, such as HQL or LINQ etc (not all of the issues but most of them). So I am less focused on the individual highlighted issues and more the bigger picture of is it now becoming more acceptable to have SQL strings directly in your source code again, as most Micro ORMs use this mechanism. Here is a similar question which has a few different view points, although is more about the inline sql without the micro orm context: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5303746/is-inline-sql-hard-coding

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• Development processes, the use of version control, and unit-testing

  - by ct01

  Preface I've worked at quite a few "flat" organizations in my time. Most of the version control policy/process has been "only commit after it's been tested". We were constantly committing at each place to "trunk" (cvs/svn). The same was true with unit-testing - it's always been a "we need to do this" mentality but it never really materializes in a substantive form b/c there is no institutional knowledge base to do it - no mentorship. Version Control The emphasis for version control management at one place was a very strict protocol for commit messages (format & content). The other places let employees just do "whatever". The branching, tagging, committing, rolling back, and merging aspect of things was always ill defined and almost never used. This sort of seems to leave the version control system in the position of being a fancy file-storage mechanism with a meta-data component that never really gets accessed/utilized. (The same was true for unit testing and committing code to the source tree) Unit tests It seems there's a prevailing "we must/should do this" mentality in most places I've worked. As a policy or standard operating procedure it never gets implemented because there seems to be a very ill-defined understanding about what that means, what is going to be tested, and how to do it. Summary It seems most places I've been to think version control and unit testing is "important" b/c the trendy trade journals say it is but, if there's very little mentorship to use these tools or any real business policies, then the full power of version control/unit testing is never really expressed. So grunts, like myself, never really have a complete understanding of the point beyond that "it's a good thing" and "we should do it". Question I was wondering if there are blogs, books, white-papers, or online journals about what one could call the business process or "standard operating procedures" or uses cases for version control and unit testing? I want to know more than the trade journals tell me and get serious about doing these things. PS: @Henrik Hansen had a great comment about the lack of definition for the question. I'm not interested in a specific unit-testing/versioning product or methodology (like, XP) - my interest is more about work-flow at the individual team/developer level than evangelism. This is more-or-less a by product of the management situation I've operated under more than a lack of reading software engineering books or magazines about development processes. A lot of what I've seen/read is more marketing oriented material than any specifically enumerated description of "well, this is how our shop operates".

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• Cloud Computing : publication du volet 3 du Syntec Numérique

  - by Eric Bezille

  Une vision client/fournisseur réunie autour d'une ébauche de cadre contractuel Lors de la Cloud Computing World Expo qui se tenait au CNIT la semaine dernière, j'ai assisté à la présentation du nouveau volet du Syntec numérique sur le Cloud Computing et les "nouveaux modèles" induits : modèles économiques, contrats, relations clients-fournisseurs, organisation de la DSI. L'originalité de ce livre blanc vis à vis de ceux déjà existants dans le domaine est de s'être attaché à regrouper l'ensemble des acteurs clients (au travers du CRIP) et fournisseurs, autour d'un cadre de formalisation contractuel, en s'appuyant sur le modèle e-SCM. Accélération du passage en fournisseur de Services et fin d'une IT en silos ? Si le Cloud Computing permet d'accélérer le passage de l'IT en fournisseur de services (dans la suite d'ITIL v3), il met également en exergue le challenge pour les DSI d'un modèle en rupture nécessitant des compétences transverses permettant de garantir les qualités attendues d'un service de Cloud Computing : déploiement en mode "self-service" à la demande, accès standardisé au travers du réseau,  gestion de groupes de ressources partagées,  service "élastique" : que l'on peut faire croitre ou diminuer rapidement en fonction de la demande mesurable On comprendra bien ici, que le Cloud Computing va bien au delà de la simple virtualisation de serveurs. Comme le décrit fort justement Constantin Gonzales dans son blog ("Three Enterprise Principles for Building Clouds"), l'important réside dans le respect du standard de l'interface d'accès au service. Ensuite, la façon dont il est réalisé (dans le nuage), est de la charge et de la responsabilité du fournisseur. A lui d'optimiser au mieux pour être compétitif, tout en garantissant les niveaux de services attendus. Pour le fournisseur de service, bien entendu, il faut maîtriser cette implémentation qui repose essentiellement sur l'intégration et l'automatisation des couches et composants nécessaires... dans la durée... avec la prise en charge des évolutions de chacun des éléments. Pour le client, il faut toujours s'assurer de la réversibilité de la solution au travers du respect des standards... Point également abordé dans le livre blanc du Syntec, qui rappelle les points d'attention et fait un état des lieux de l'avancement des standards autour du Cloud Computing. En vous souhaitant une bonne lecture...

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• formula for replicating glTexGen in opengl es 2.0 glsl

  - by visualjc

  I also posted this on the main StackExchange, but this seems like a better place, but for give me for the double post if it shows up twice. I have been trying for several hours to implement a GLSL replacement for glTexGen with GL_OBJECT_LINEAR. For OpenGL ES 2.0. In Ogl GLSL there is the gl_TextureMatrix that makes this easier, but thats not available on OpenGL ES 2.0 / OpenGL ES Shader Language 1.0 Several sites have mentioned that this should be "easy" to do in a GLSL vert shader. But I just can not get it to work. My hunch is that I'm not setting the planes up correctly, or I'm missing something in my understanding. I've pored over the web. But most sites are talking about projected textures, I'm just looking to create UV's based on planar projection. The models are being built in Maya, have 50k polygons and the modeler is using planer mapping, but Maya will not export the UV's. So I'm trying to figure this out. I've looked at the glTexGen manpage information: g = p1xo + p2yo + p3zo + p4wo What is g? Is g the value of s in the texture2d call? I've looked at the site: http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_glTexGen Another size explains the same function: coord = P1*X + P2*Y + P3*Z + P4*W I don't get how coord (an UV vec2 in my mind) is equal to the dot product (a scalar value)? Same problem I had before with "g". What do I set the plane to be? In my opengl c++ 3.0 code, I set it to [0, 0, 1, 0] (basically unit z) and glTexGen works great. I'm still missing something. My vert shader looks basically like this: WVPMatrix = World View Project Matrix. POSITION is the model vertex position. varying vec4 kOutBaseTCoord; void main() { gl_Position = WVPMatrix * vec4(POSITION, 1.0); vec4 sPlane = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec4 tPlane = vec4(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec4 rPlane = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec4 qPlane = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); kOutBaseTCoord.s = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), sPlane); kOutBaseTCoord.t = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), tPlane); //kOutBaseTCoord.r = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), rPlane); //kOutBaseTCoord.q = dot(vec4(POSITION, 1.0), qPlane); } The frag shader precision mediump float; uniform sampler2D BaseSampler; varying mediump vec4 kOutBaseTCoord; void main() { //gl_FragColor = vec4(kOutBaseTCoord.st, 0.0, 1.0); gl_FragColor = texture2D(BaseSampler, kOutBaseTCoord.st); } I've tried texture2DProj in frag shader Here are some of the other links I've looked up http://www.gamedev.net/topic/407961-texgen-not-working-with-glsl-with-fixed-pipeline-is-ok/ Thank you in advance.

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• INETA Community Leadership Summit

  - by Scott Spradlin

  INETA Community Leadership Summit will be taking place on Sunday June 6th at 1PM at Tech·Ed North America in New Orleans. INETA is hosting a free Community Leadership Summit in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Sunday June 6th at 1:00 PM prior to the start of Tech·Ed 2010. The summit is open to Community Leaders from the area, as well as those attending Tech·Ed from across the country and around the world. It is an excellent opportunity for exchanging information and ideas. If you are a user group leader, or are involved in the leadership, planning, promotion, or day-to-day operations of a user group community, this event is for YOU! The summit is an open forum to share ideas, discuss common challenges, and gain from the experience of other leaders. INETA Community Leadership summits are part of an ongoing effort by INETA to create, improve and share resources designed to strengthen individual user groups and the community. This meeting will be the perfect opportunity to meet leaders from other groups, benefit from their success stories, and expand your network of contacts.   Quick FAQs Who can attend? Any leader or volunteer of any INETA User Group. Do I need to be attending Tech·Ed? No, you do NOT need to purchase a pass for Tech·Ed to attend the Leadership Summit. What does it cost to attend? There is NO cost to attend summit, but the knowledge that will be available about User Groups will be priceless. I want to help out, who do I contact? Send an email to [email protected] if you are interested. I want to attend, where do I register? We are putting together a registration link now, it will be published in a future newsletter and on the website. What will the format of the summit be? The summit will be like our Birds of a Feather Sessions but focused on User Group topics. Moderators will be armed with some broad topics to kick off the conversation, however the real value of these sessions is getting the chance to learn from each other. What topics will be covered? We are thinking of focusing on 4 areas: Running a User Group, Effective Content and Presenters, User Group Promotion and Developing Partnerships. However the agenda is yours! If there is a topic you want to see covered, or a topic that you would like to lead then email  [email protected]. Technorati Tags: conference

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• Microsoft Technical Computing

  - by Daniel Moth

  In the past I have described the team I belong to here at Microsoft (Parallel Computing Platform) in terms of contributing to Visual Studio and related products, e.g. .NET Framework. To be more precise, our team is part of the Technical Computing group, which is still part of the Developer Division. This was officially announced externally earlier this month in an exec email (from Bob Muglia, the president of STB, to which DevDiv belongs). Here is an extract: "… As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: 1. Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable ‘just-in-time’ processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed—reliably, consistently and quickly. 2. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today’s modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop… to the cluster… to the cloud. 3. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. …" Our Parallel Computing Platform team is directly responsible for item #2, and we work very closely with the teams delivering items #1 and #3. At the same time as the exec email, our marketing team unveiled a website with interviews that I invite you to check out: Modeling the World. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Ranking Part III

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved   Ranking Part III In a previous blogs “Ranking an Introduction” and  “Ranking Part II” , you have already praised me in “Rank the Author” and learned how to create a new element on a page and how to place it where you need it. For this installment, I just added code to keep the number of votes (you vote by clicking one of the stars) and the total vote. Using these two, we can compute the average rating. It’s a small step, but its purpose is to show that we do not need a detailed history in order to compute the average. A running total is sufficient. Please note that once you close the game, you will lose your previous total. In real life, we persist the totals in the list itself. We also keep a list of actual votes, but its purpose is to prevent double votes. If a person has already voted, his user id is already on the list and our program will check for it and bar the person from voting again. This is coded in an event receiver, which is a SharePoint server piece of code. I will show you how to do this part in a subsequent blog. Again, go to the page and look at the code. The gist of it is here. avg, votes, and stars are global variables that I defined before. function sendRate(sel){//I hate long line so I created pieces of the message in their own vars            var s1 = "Your Rating Was: ";            var s2 = ".. ";            var s3 = "\nVotes = ";            var s4 = "\nTotal Stars = ";            var s5 = "\nAverage = ";            var s;            s = parseInt(sel.id.replace("_", '')); // Get the selected star number            votes = parseInt(votes) + 1;            stars = parseInt(stars) + s;            avg = parseFloat(stars) / parseFloat(votes);            alert(s1 + sel.id + s2 +sel.title + s3 + votes + s4 + stars + s5 + avg);} Click on the link to play and examine “Ranking with Stats” That’s all folks!

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• How Microsoft listens

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  This being my freshman year as an MVP, I had a realization that I perhaps should be embarrassed hasn’t happened sooner. The realization comes much like the iconic M&Ms commercial where the M&Ms run into Santa and exclaim, “He does exist!” My personal realization arguably has a greater implication: Microsoft does listen. This is the most important lesson that I received this year attending the MVP Summit. My hope is that I can convince you that we are empowered to make a difference. Instead of using “Man I hate how this works / doesn’t work!” as cooler conversation, we can use it as true interaction with Microsoft. We as customers to Microsoft need to stop asking the question “Will this work for me?” and instead ask “How can this work for me?” There are three quick resources that the average developer has access to today that they can use to be heard by the product teams, and by no means should you think twice if you have a concern that you’d like a real response on. MVPs MVPs are members of your community who have a deep relationship with Microsoft and will have connections to their associated product group. Don’t think of them as just a resource for answers, but also as your ambassador for getting your experiences heard. You can find your local MVPs by browsing the directory at: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx Evangelists Evangelists are employees of Microsoft who work to foster and grow communities in their assigned region. They are first-class citizens of Microsoft and are often deeply involved with the product groups. As a result, they will be more than glad to direct your questions or concerns to those who can answer them most expertly. With that said, evangelists are also very busy people (who do amazing things for the community) and might not be able to get you that conversation as quickly as a local MVP. You can find your local evangelist at the following website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb905078.aspx Microsoft Connect This is one of the resources that I haven’t used enough, but it cannot be understated. Connect is the starting point of the social conversation that happens between Microsoft and the community daily. Connect acts as a portal where you can provide new feedback as well as comment and rate the feedback provided by others. Power is in numbers when it comes to Connect, so the exposure that your feedback can get not only lets you know that you aren’t the only one who wants change, but also lets Microsoft know the same. https://connect.microsoft.com   Technorati Tags: Microsoft,MVP,Feedback,Connect

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• Oracle SOA Security for OUAF Web Services

  - by Anthony Shorten

  With the ability to use Oracle SOA Suite 11g with the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products, an additional consideration needs to be configured to ensure correct integration. That additional consideration is security. By default, SOA Suite propagates any credentials from the calling application through to the interfacing applications. In most cases, this behavior is not appropriate as the calling application may use different credential stores and also some interfaces are “disconnected” from a calling application (for example, a file based load using the File Adapter). These situations require that the Web Service calls to the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products have their own valid credentials. To do this the credentials must be attached at design time or at run time to provide the necessary credentials for the call. There are a number of techniques that can be used to do this: At design time, when integrating a Web Service from an Oracle Utilities Application Framework based product you can attach the security policy “oracle/wss_username_token_client_policy” in the composite.xml view. In this view select the Web Service you want to attach the policy to and right click to display the context menu and select “Configure WS Policies” and select the above policy from the list. If you are using SSL then you can use “oracle/wss_username_token_over_ssl_client_policy” instead. At design time, you can also specify the credential key (csf-key) associated with the above policy by selecting the policy and clicking “Edit Config Override Properties”. You name the key appropriately. Everytime the SOA components are deployed the credential configuration is also sent. You can also do this after deployment, or what I call at “runtime”, by specifying the policy and credential key in the Fusion Middleware Control. Refer to the Fusion Middleware Control documentation on how to do this. To complete the configuration you need to add a map and the key specified earlier to the credential store in the Oracle WebLogic instance used for Oracle SOA Suite. From Fusion Middleware Control, you do this by selecting the domain the SOA Suite is installed in a select “Credentials” from the context menu. You now need to add the credentials by adding the map “oracle.wsm.security” (the name is IMPORTANT) and creating a key with the necessary valid credentials. The example below added a key called “mdm.key”. The name I used is for example only. You can name the key anything you like as long as it corresponds to the key you specified in the design time component. Note: I used SYSUSER as an example credentials in the example, in real life you would use another credential as SYSUSER is not appropriate for production use. This key can be reused for other Oracle Utilities Application Framework Web Service integrations or you can use other keys for individual Web Service calls. Once the key is created and the SOA Suite components deployed the transactions should be able to be called as necessary. If you need to change the password for the credentials it can be done using the Fusion Middleware Control functionality.

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• BAM design pointers

  - by Kavitha Srinivasan

  In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discovered that some BAM best practices are not quite well known as I had always assumed ! There is a doc bug out to formally incorporate those learnings but here are a few notes..  EMS-DO parity When using EMS (Enterprise Message Source) as a BAM feed, the best practice is to use one EMS to write to one Data Object. There is a possibility of collisions and duplicates when multiple EMS write to the same row of a DO at the same time. This customer had 17 EMS writing to one DO at the same time. Every sensor in their BPEL process writes to one topic but the Topic was read by 1 EMS corresponding to one sensor. They then used XSL within BAM to transform the payload into the BAM DO format. And hence for a given BPEL instance, 17 sensors fired, populated 1 JMS topic, was consumed by 17 EMS which in turn wrote to 1 DataObject.(You can image what would happen for later versions of the application that needs to send more information to BAM !).  We modified their design to use one Master XSL based on sensorname for all sensors relating to a DO- say Data Object 'Orders' and were able to thus reduce the 17 EMS to 1 with a master XSL. For those of you wondering about how squeaky clean this design is, you are right ! This is indeed not squeaky clean and that brings us to yet another 'inferred' best practice. (I try very hard not to state the obvious in my blogs with the hope that everytime I blog, it is very useful but this one is an exception.) Transformations and Calculations It is optimal to do transformations within an engine like BPEL. Not only does this provide modelling ease with a nice GUI XSL mapper in JDeveloper, the XSL engine in BPEL is quite efficient at runtime as well. And so, doing XSL transformations in BAM is not quite prudent.  The same is true for any non-trivial calculations as well. It is best to do all transformations,calcuations and sanitize the data in a BPEL or like layer and then send this to BAM (via JMS, WS etc.) This then delegates simply the function of report rendering and mechanics of real-time reporting to the Oracle BAM reporting tool which it is most suited to do. All nulls are not created equal Here is yet another possibly known fact but reiterated here. For an EMS with an Upsert operation: a) If Empty tags or tags with no value are sent like <Tag1/> or <Tag1></Tag1>, the DO will be overwritten with --null-- b) If Empty tags are suppressed ie not generated at all, the corresponding DO field will NOT be overwritten. The field will have whatever value existed previously.  For an EMS with an Insert operation, both tags with an empty value and no tags result in –null-- being written to the DO. Hope this helps .. Happy 4th!

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• BI&EPM in Focus June 2013

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Analyst Report from Ovum: BI bites into a bigger slice of Oracle’s Red Stack Customers INC Research Ensures 24/7 Enterprise Application Availability and Supports Rapid Expansion in Asia with Managed Cloud Services – Hyperion Planning, PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, SOA Suite PL Developments Improves Quality and Demand Planning Accuracy, Streamlines Compliance as It Moves into Manufacturing – Hyperion Planning, OBIEE, E-Business Suite Release 12.1, Agile, Demantra Kiabi Provides Store Managers with Monthly Earnings Statements in Four Business Days to Support Continued Retail Growth – Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Reporting, Hyperion Smart View for Office Speedy Cash Improves Global Financial Budgeting and Forecasting to Support Continued Company Growth - Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Hyperion Smart View for Office, Hyperion Financial Management Grupo Sports World Automates and Reduces Budget Consolidation Time by 33% for 30 Fitness Centers – Hyperion Planning Jupiter Shop Channel Automates Budgeting Processes, Enhances Visibility of Project Investments to Support Strategic Decision-Making – Hyperion Planning GENBAND Saves US$1.25 Million Annually with Automated Global Trade Management, Gains Compliance Assurance – Hyperion Financial Management, E-Business Suite Aldar Properties Consolidates and Simplifies Group Planning and Reporting for Business and Finance Structures with Integrated ERP and Business Intelligence – Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Data Integrator, OBIEE, E-Business Suite, SUN Link to Complete Archive Enterprise Performance Management Hyperion EPM 11.1.2.3 Webcast Tutorials EPM Blog: Three Technologies CFOs Need to Know About The CFO as Catalyst for Change - Part 1 The CFO as Catalyst for Change - Part 2 Actions Speak Louder in Scorecards Unlocking Business Potential with Enterprise Performance Management Business Intelligence Oracle Database 12c is launched Analysis: How to Take Big Data Advantage of Oracle Database 12c by Data-informed.com Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• ODUG lands DotNetNuke guru Nik Kalyani as a speaker

  - by Brian Scarbeau

  If you are in the Orlando, FL area during the first week of May then you should head over to the Orlando DotNetNuke user group meeting. Nik Kalyani will be the speaker and you will learn a great deal from him. DotNetNuke Module Development with the MVP Pattern This session focuses on introducing attendees to the Model-View-Presenter pattern, support for which was recently introduced in the DotNetNuke Core. We'll start with a quick overview of the pattern, compare it to MVC, and then dive right into code. We will start with fundamentals and then develop a full-featured module using this pattern. In order to do justice to the pattern, we will use ASP.NET WebForms controls minimally and implement most of the UI using jQuery plug-ins. Finally, to increase audience participation (both present at the meeting and remote), we will use a hackathon-style model and allow anybody, anywhere to follow along with the presentation and code their own MVP-based solution that they can share online during or after the session. A URL with full instructions for the hackathon will be posted online a few days prior to the meeting. About Our Speaker Nik Kalyani is Co-founder and Strategic Advisor for DotNetNuke Corp., the company that manages the DotNetNuke Open Source project. Kalyani is also Founder and CEO of HyperCrunch. He is a technology entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience in the software industry. He is irrationally exuberant about technology, especially if it has anything to do with the Internet. HyperCrunch is his latest startup business that builds on his knowledge and experience from prior startups, two of them venture-funded. Kalyani is a creative tinkerer perpetually interested in looking around the corner and figuring out new and interesting ways to make the world a better place. An experienced web developer, he finds the business strategy and marketing aspects of the software business more exciting than writing code. When he does create software, his primary expertise is in creating products with compelling user experiences. Kalyani is most proficient with Microsoft technologies, but has no religious fanaticism about them. Kalyani has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Western Michigan University. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences and user group meetings. He lives in Mountain View, California with his wife and daughters. He blogs at http://www.kalyani.com and is @techbubble on Twitter.

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• A* navigational mesh path finding

  - by theguywholikeslinux

  So I've been making this top down 2D java game in this framework called Greenfoot [1] and I've been working on the AI for the guys you are gonna fight. I want them to be able to move around the world realistically so I soon realized, amongst a couple of other things, I would need some kind of pathfinding. I have made two A* prototypes. One is grid based and then I made one that works with waypoints so now I need to work out a way to get from a 2d "map" of the obstacles/buildings to a graph of nodes that I can make a path from. The actual pathfinding seems fine, just my open and closed lists could use a more efficient data structure, but I'll get to that if and when I need to. I intend to use a navigational mesh for all the reasons out lined in this post on ai-blog.net [2]. However, the problem I have faced is that what A* thinks is the shortest path from the polygon centres/edges is not necessarily the shortest path if you travel through any part of the node. To get a better idea you can see the question I asked on stackoverflow [3]. I got a good answer concerning a visibility graph. I have since purchased the book (Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications [4]) and read further into the topic, however I am still in favour of a navigational mesh (See "Managing Complexity" [5] from Amit’s Notes about Path-Finding [6]). (As a side note, maybe I could possibly use Theta* to convert multiple waypoints into one straight line if the first and last are not obscured. Or each time I move back check to the waypoint before last to see if I can go straight from that to this) So basically what I want is a navigational mesh where once I have put it through a funnel algorithm (e.g. this one from Digesting Duck [7]) I will get the true shortest path, rather than get one that is the shortest path following node to node only, but not the actual shortest given that you can go through some polygons and skip nodes/edges. Oh and I also want to know how you suggest storing the information concerning the polygons. For the waypoint prototype example I made I just had each node as an object and stored a list of all the other nodes you could travel to from that node, I'm guessing that won't work with polygons? and how to I tell if a polygon is open/traversable or if it is a solid object? How do I store which nodes make up the polygon? Finally, for the record: I do want to programme this by myself from scratch even though there are already other solutions available and I don't intend to be (re) using this code in anything other than this game so it does not matter that it will inevitably be poor quality. http://greenfoot.org http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html http://stackoverflow.com/q/7585515/ http://www.cs.uu.nl/geobook/ http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/MapRepresentations.html http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/ http://digestingduck.blogspot.com/2010/03/simple-stupid-funnel-algorithm.html

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• Overview of getting and setting the URL and parts of the URL using angularjs and/or Javascript

  - by Sandy Good

  Getting and Setting the URL, and different parts of the URL are a basic part of Application Design. For Page Navigation Deep Linking Providing a link to the user Querying Data Passing information to other pages Both angularjs and javascript provide ways to get/set the URL and parts of the URL. I'm looking for the following information: Situation: Show a simple URL in the browser address bar to the user Provide a more detailed URL with string parameters to the page that the user will not see. In other words, two different URLs will be used, one simple one that the user sees in the browser, a more detailed one available to the page on load. Get URL info with PHP when then page intially loads, both don't reload the PHP page when the user needs more detailed info that is already loaded but not displayed yet. Set the URL with a more detailed URL for deep linking as the user drills down to more specific information. Get URL info in a controller or JavaSript when angularjs detects a change in the URL with routing. Hash or Query String or Both? Should I use a hash # in the URL, a string ?= or both? Here is what I currently know and what I want: A Query String HTTP:\\www.name.com?mykey=itemID will prevent angularjs from reloading the page. So, I can change the URL by adding/changing the string at the end, thereby providing new info to the page, and keep the page from reloading. I can change the URL and force a page reload with: window.location.href = "#Store/" + argUserPubId + "?itemID=home"; If home is the itemID string, I want code to simply load the page, and not display more detailed information. If there is a real itemID in the URL query string, I want the code to display the more detailed information. Code from angularjs will run either from the controller specified in the routing, or a controller specified in the HTML, or both. The angularjs code specified in the routing seems to run first, before the code specified in the HTML. A different URL for the page can be used in angularjs templateURL: than the URL that was sent to the browser address bar. when('/Store/:StoreId', { templateUrl: function(params){return 'Client_Pages/Stores.php?storeID=' + params.StoreId;}, controller: 'storeParseData' }). The above code detects http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID in the browser, but SENDS http:\\www.name.com\Client_Pages/Stores.php?storeID=StoreID to the page. In the above code, a function is used for the angularjs routing templateURL: to dynamically set the templateURL. So, when the user clicks something to see details of an item, how should I configure the URL? Should I use angularjs $location or window.location.href ? Should I use a longer URL with more parameters, a hash bang, or a query string? Should I use: http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID\ItemID or http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID#ItemID or http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID?ItemID or http:\\www.name.com\Store#StoreID?ItemID or Something else?

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• Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Exaskeleton with Extreme Scale

  - by J Swaroop

  Re-posting Bruce Tierney's original post - albeit a day late: I reckon this is Oracle's most interesting launch this year. Enjoy! The World’s First Human Scale Body Surface (HSBS) Designed to Toughen Spineless Wimps April 1, 2012 Building on the success of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Exalytics, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Exaskeleton, toughening up spineless wimps across the globe through the introduction of extreme scalability over the human body leveraging a revolutionary new technology called Human Scale Body Surface (HSBS). First Customer Ship (FCS) was received by the little known and mostly unsuccessful superhero Awkwardman. After applying Oracle Exaskeleton with extreme scale, he has since rebranded himself as Aquaman. Said Aquaman, “I used to feel so helpless in my skin…now I feel like…well…a highly scaled Engineered System thanks to Oracle!” Thousand of meek and mild individuals eagerly lined up outside Oracle Corporation’s Redwood Shores office to purchase the new Oracle Exaskeleton, with the hope of finally gaining the spine they never had. Unfortunately for the individuals, a bully was spotted allegedly kicking the sand covering the beaches of Redwood Shores into the still spineless Exaskeleton hopefuls. Supporting Quotes “Industry analysts are inquiring if Oracle Exaskeleton is a radical departure from Oracle’s traditional enterprise focus into new markets”, said Oracle representative Sabrina Twich, “Oracle has extensive expertise in unified backbone solutions for application infrastructures…this is simply a new port to the human body combining our Business Intelligence (BI) and RDBC (Remote Direct Brain Cell) technologies.” “With this release of Oracle Exaskeleton, Oracle has redefined scalability. Software and hardware vendors had it all wrong” said the Director of Oracle Exaskeleton, “Scalability for hardware is like…um…you know…so scale-ful. No, wait…can I say that again? I didn’t get that right…Scalability is hardware-on-demand with public and private…hybrid clouds, no…<long pause>…Scalability for… nevermind, I don’t want to be in this stupid press release anyway” Releases An upcoming Oracle Exaskeleton service pack release will include a new datasheet with an extensive library of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as well as the introduction of more four-letter acronyms (FLAs) since technologies vendors have used up almost all of the 17,576 TLA permutations (TLAPs). About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. It would be an amazing coincidence if any of this is true in some secret Oracle lab, but I doubt it. Trademarks Really…you’re still reading this? Cool! Aquaman - First Customer Ship (FCS) - Oracle Exaskeleton

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• American Modern Insurance Group recognized at 2010 INN VIP Best Practices Awards

  - by [email protected]

  Below: Helen Pitts (right), Oracle Insurance, congratulates Bruce Weisgerber, Munich Re, as he accepts a VIP Best Practices Award on behalf of American Modern Insurance Group.     Oracle Insurance Senior Product Marketing Manager Helen Pitts is attending the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will be providing updates from the show floor. This is one of my favorite seasons of the year--insurance trade show season. It is a time to reconnect with peers, visit with partners, make new industry connections, and celebrate our customers' achievements. It's especially meaningful when we can share the experience of having one of our Oracle Insurance customers recognized for being an innovator in its business and in the industry. Congratulations to American Modern Insurance Group, part of the Munich Re Group. American Modern earned an Insurance Networking News (INN) 2010 VIP Best Practice Award yesterday evening during the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum. The award recognizes an insurer's best practice for use of a specific technology and the role, if feasible, that ACORD data standards played as a part of their business and technology. American Modern received an Honorable Mention for leveraging the Oracle Documaker enterprise document automation solution to: Improve the quality of communications with customers in high value, high-touch lines of business Convert thousands of page elements or "forms" from their previous system, with near pixel-perfect accuracy Increase efficiency and reusability by storing all document elements (fonts, logos, approved wording, etc.) in one place Issue on-demand documents, such as address changes or policy transactions to multiple recipients at once Consolidate all customer communications onto a single platform Gain the ability to send documents to multiple recipients at once, further improving efficiency Empower agents to produce documents in real time via the Web, such as quotes, applications and policy documents, improving carrier-agent relationships Munich Re's Bruce Weisgerber accepted the award on behalf of American Modern from Lloyd Chumbly, vice president of standards at ACORD. In a press release issued after the ceremony Chumbly noted, "This award embodies a philosophy of efficiency--working smarter with standards, these insurers represent the 'best of the best' as chosen by a body of seasoned insurance industry professionals." We couldn't agree with you more, Lloyd. Congratulations again to American Modern on your continued innovation and success. You're definitely a VIP in our book! To learn more about how American Modern is putting its enterprise document automation strategy into practice, click here to read a case study. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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• Architecture strategies for a complex competition scoring system

  - by mikewassmer

  Competition description: There are about 10 teams competing against each other over a 6-week period. Each team's total score (out of a 1000 total available points) is based on the total of its scores in about 25,000 different scoring elements. Most scoring elements are worth a small fraction of a point and there will about 10 X 25,000 = 250,000 total raw input data points. The points for some scoring elements are awarded at frequent regular time intervals during the competition. The points for other scoring elements are awarded at either irregular time intervals or at just one moment in time. There are about 20 different types of scoring elements. Each of the 20 types of scoring elements has a different set of inputs, a different algorithm for calculating the earned score from the raw inputs, and a different number of total available points. The simplest algorithms require one input and one simple calculation. The most complex algorithms consist of hundreds or thousands of raw inputs and a more complicated calculation. Some types of raw inputs are automatically generated. Other types of raw inputs are manually entered. All raw inputs are subject to possible manual retroactive adjustments by competition officials. Primary requirements: The scoring system UI for competitors and other competition followers will show current and historical total team scores, team standings, team scores by scoring element, raw input data (at several levels of aggregation, e.g. daily, weekly, etc.), and other metrics. There will be charts, tables, and other widgets for displaying historical raw data inputs and scores. There will be a quasi-real-time dashboard that will show current scores and raw data inputs. Aggregate scores should be updated/refreshed whenever new raw data inputs arrive or existing raw data inputs are adjusted. There will be a "scorekeeper UI" for manually entering new inputs, manually adjusting existing inputs, and manually adjusting calculated scores. Decisions: Should the scoring calculations be performed on the database layer (T-SQL/SQL Server, in my case) or on the application layer (C#/ASP.NET MVC, in my case)? What are some recommended approaches for calculating updated total team scores whenever new raw inputs arrives? Calculating each of the teams' total scores from scratch every time a new input arrives will probably slow the system to a crawl. I've considered some kind of "diff" approach, but that approach may pose problems for ad-hoc queries and some aggegates. I'm trying draw some sports analogies, but it's tough because most games consist of no more than 20 or 30 scoring elements per game (I'm thinking of a high-scoring baseball game; football and soccer have fewer scoring events per game). Perhaps a financial balance sheet analogy makes more sense because financial "bottom line" calcs may be calculated from 250,000 or more transactions. Should I be making heavy use of caching for this application? Are there any obvious approaches or similar case studies that I may be overlooking?

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• Antenna Aligner Part 10: Updates and emails…

  - by Chris George

  Since my last post back in July, I’ve not done huge amounts of work on my app for two reasons. Firstly, no time! Secondly, I wanted to leave it out in the wild for a while and see what happened. Well, what happened?  over 1,300 users, that’s what’s happened!  This uptake is beyond my wildest expectations, and apart from a couple of issues that I’ll mention in a minute, most of the feedback has been very positive indeed! I’ve had several emails giving me feedback and reporting issues, all of which I have made a point of replying to immediately. This act alone has met with favourable replies! One of the main issues was with iPad. So it turns out that my app is only accurate in portrait mode. Turning it into landscape will offset the direction by +-90degrees! Whoops! I think I’ve fixed this by disabling the orientation switching, but I have not yet had an iPad to test this on. I had several emails from iPod Touch users claiming the app did not work for them. Specifically, the compass view did not work. On investigation, it turns out that the iPod Touch does not have the compass hardware required to do this. Unfortunately there is no way to exclude iPod Touch’s from the list of supported devices, so I’ve just had to make it very clear in the itunes description that the device is not fully supported.  You can still get the list of transmitters, but you then have to use a real compass to get the bearing. But that’s not the end of the world. Several customers have requested the aerial polarisation to be displayed in the app. I was already working on this, and the data was already there, it was just a case of displaying this in the UI. I have a solution now, and this will be in the next release. Of course, with the Digital switchover in full swing across the UK, there have been one set of data updates (in 1.0.3), and another is due shortly. This reflects the transmitters as they switch over the digital fully and their power output increased. So all in all I’m very pleased with the feedback I’ve had, and I’m looking to get the next release out there by early December (allowing for the 2-3 week Apple approval lag!)  

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• Who Are the BI Users in Your Neighborhood?

  - by Brian Dayton

  Forrester's Boris Evelson recently wrote a blog titled "Who are the BI Personas?" that I enjoyed for a number of reasons. It's a quick read, easy to grasp and (refreshingly) focuses on the users of technology VS the technology. As Evelson admits, he meant to keep the reference chart at a high-level because there are too many different permutations and additional sub-categories to make such a chart useful. For me, I wouldn't head into the technical permutations but more the contextual use of BI and the issues that users experience.  My thoughts brought up more questions than answers such as: Context: -          HOW: With the exception of the "Power User" persona--likely some sort of business or operations analyst? -          WHEN: Are they using the information to make real-time decisions on the front lines (a customer service manager or shipping/logistics VP) or are they using this information for cumulative analysis and business planning? Or both? -          WHERE: What areas of the business are more or less likely to rely on BI across an organization? Human Resources, Operations, Facilities, Finance--- and why are some more prone to use data-driven analysis than others? Issues: -          DELAYS & DRAG ON IT?: One of the persona characteristics Evelson calls out is a reliance on IT. Every persona except for the "Power User" has a heavy reliance on IT for support. What business issues or delays does that cause to users? What is the drag on IT resources who could potentially be creating instead of reporting? -          HOW MANY CLICKS: If BI is being used within the context of a transaction (sales manager looking for upsell opportunities as an example) is that person getting the information within the context of that action or transaction? Or are they minimizing screens, logging into another application or reporting tool, running queries, etc.?   Who are the BI Users in your neighborhood or line of business? Do Evelson's personas resonate--and do the tools that he calls out (he refers to it as "BI Style") resonate with what your personas have or need? Finally, I'm very interested if BI use is viewed as  a bolt-on...or an integrated part of your daily enterprise processes?

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