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  • Bad Data is Really the Monster

    - by Dain C. Hansen
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Bad Data is really the monster – is an article written by Bikram Sinha who I borrowed the title and the inspiration for this blog. Sinha writes: “Bad or missing data makes application systems fail when they process order-level data. One of the key items in the supply-chain industry is the product (aka SKU). Therefore, it becomes the most important data element to tie up multiple merchandising processes including purchase order allocation, stock movement, shipping notifications, and inventory details… Bad data can cause huge operational failures and cost millions of dollars in terms of time, resources, and money to clean up and validate data across multiple participating systems. Yes bad data really is the monster, so what do we do about it? Close our eyes and hope it stays in the closet? We’ve tacked this problem for some years now at Oracle, and with our latest introduction of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality along with our integrated Oracle Master Data Management products provides a complete, best-in-class answer to the bad data monster. What’s unique about it? Oracle Enterprise Data Quality also combines powerful data profiling, cleansing, matching, and monitoring capabilities while offering unparalleled ease of use. What makes it unique is that it has dedicated capabilities to address the distinct challenges of both customer and product data quality – [different monsters have different needs of course!]. And the ability to profile data is just as important to identify and measure poor quality data and identify new rules and requirements. Included are semantic and pattern-based recognition to accurately parse and standardize data that is poorly structured. Finally all of the data quality components are integrated with Oracle Master Data Management, including Oracle Customer Hub and Oracle Product Hub, as well as Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition and Oracle CRM. Want to learn more? On Tuesday Nov 15th, I invite you to listen to our webcast on Reduce ERP consolidation risks with Oracle Master Data Management I’ll be joined by our partner iGate Patni and be talking about one specific way to deal with the bad data monster specifically around ERP consolidation. Look forward to seeing you there!

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  • ATG Live Webcast: Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to 12.1 and Beyond

    - by BillSawyer
    I am pleased to announce the next ATG Live Webcast event on December 1, 2011. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to 12.1 and Beyond Are you still on 11i and wondering about your next steps in the E-Business Suite lifecycle? Are you wondering what the upgrade considerations are going to be for 12.2? Do you want to know the best practices for upgrading E-Business Suite regardless of your version? If so, this is the webcast for you. Join Anne Carlson, Senior Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product Strategy for this one-hour webcast with Q&A. This session will give you a framework to make informed upgrade decisions for your E-Business Suite environment. This event is targeted to functional managers, EBS project planners, and implementers. The agenda for the Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to 12.1 and Beyond includes the following topics: Business Value of the Upgrade Starting Your Upgrade Project Planning Your Upgrade Approach Preparing for Your Upgrade Execution Extended Support for 11i Additional Resources Date:            Thursday, December 1, 2011Time:           8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Standard TimePresenter:  Anne Carlson, Senior Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product StrategyWebcast Registration Link (Preregistration is optional but encouraged)To hear the audio feed:    Domestic Participant Dial-In Number:           877-697-8128    International Participant Dial-In Number:      706-634-9568    Additional International Dial-In Numbers Link:    Dial-In Passcode:                                              98515To see the presentation:    The Direct Access Web Conference details are:    Website URL: https://ouweb.webex.com    Meeting Number:  271378459 If you miss the webcast, or you have missed any webcast, don't worry -- we'll post links to the recording as soon as it's available from Oracle University.  You can monitor this blog for pointers to the replay. And, you can find our archive of our past webcasts and training at http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/e_business_suite_technology_learningIf you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Bill Sawyer (Senior Manager, Applications Technology Curriculum) at BilldotSawyer-AT-Oracle-DOT-com.

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  • Character Stats and Power

    - by Stephen Furlani
    I'm making an RPG game system and I'm having a hard time deciding on doing detailed or abstract character statistics. These statistics define the character's natural - not learned - abilities. For example: Mass Effect: 0 (None that I can see) X20 (Xtreme Dungeon Mastery): 1 "STAT" Diablo: 4 "Strength, Magic, Dexterity, Vitality" Pendragon: 5 "SIZ, STR, DEX, CON, APP" Dungeons & Dragons (3.x, 4e): 6 "Str, Dex, Con, Wis, Int, Cha" Fallout 3: 7 "S.P.E.C.I.A.L." RIFTS: 8 "IQ, ME, MA, PS, PP, PE, PB, Spd" Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st ed?): 12-ish "WS, BS, S, T, Ag, Int, WP, Fel, A, Mag, IP, FP" HERO (5th ed): 14 "Str, Dex, Con, Body, Int, Ego, Pre, Com, PD, ED, Spd, Rec, END, STUN" The more stats, the more complex and detailed your character becomes. This comes with a trade-off however, because you usually only have limited resources to describe your character. D&D made this infamous with the whole min/max-ing thing where strong characters were typically not also smart. But also, a character with a high Str typically also has high Con, Defenses, Hit Points/Health. Without high numbers in all those other stats, they might as well not be strong since they wouldn't hold up well in hand-to-hand combat. So things like that force trade-offs within the category of strength. So my original (now rejected) idea was to force players into deciding between offensive and defensive stats: Might / Body Dexterity / Speed Wit / Wisdom Heart Soul But this left some stat's without "opposites" (or opposites that were easily defined). I'm leaning more towards the following: Body (Physical Prowess) Mind (Mental Prowess) Heart (Social Prowess) Soul (Spiritual Prowess) This will define a character with just 4 numbers. Everything else gets based off of these numbers, which means they're pretty important. There won't, however, be ways of describing characters who are fast, but not strong or smart, but absent minded. Instead of defining the character with these numbers, they'll be detailing their character by buying skills and powers like these: Quickness Add a +2 Bonus to Body Rolls when Dodging. for a character that wants to be faster, or the following for a big, tough character Body Building Add a +2 Bonus to Body Rolls when Lifting, Pushing, or Throwing objects. [EDIT - removed subjectiveness] So my actual questions is what are some pitfalls with a small stat list and a large amount of descriptive powers? Is this more difficult to port cross-platform (pen&paper, PC) for example? Are there examples of this being done well/poorly? Thanks,

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  • Back-sliding into Unmanaged Code

    - by Laila
    It is difficult to write about Microsoft's ambivalence to .NET without mentioning clichés about dog food.  In case you've been away a long time, you'll remember that Microsoft surprised everyone with the speed and energy with which it introduced and evangelised the .NET Framework for managed code. There was good reason for this. Once it became obvious to all that it had sleepwalked into third place as a provider of development languages, behind Borland and Sun, it reacted quickly to attract the best talent in the industry to produce a windows version of the Java runtime, with Bounds-checking, Automatic Garbage collection, structures exception handling and common data types. To develop applications for this managed runtime, it produced several excellent languages, and more are being provided. The only thing Microsoft ever got wrong was to give it a stupid name. The logical step for Microsoft would be to base the entire operating system on the .NET framework, and to re-engineer its own applications. In 2002, Bill Gates, then Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect said about their plans for .NET, "This is a long-term approach. These things don't happen overnight." Now, eight years later, we're still waiting for signs of the 'long-term approach'. Microsoft's vision of an entirely managed operating system has subsided since the Vista fiasco, but stays alive yet dormant as Midori, still being developed by Microsoft Research. This is an Internet-centric fork of the singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Midori is predicated on the prevalence of connected systems, with provisions for distributed concurrency where application components exist 'in the cloud', and supports a programming model that can tolerate cancellation, intermittent connectivity and latency. It features an entirely new security model that sandboxes applications for increased security. So have Microsoft converted its existing applications to the .NET framework? It seems not. What Windows applications can run on Mono? Very few, it seems. We all thought that .NET spelt the end of DLL Hell and the need for COM interop, but it looks as if Bill Gates' idea of 'not overnight' might stretch to a decade or more. The Operating System has shown only minimal signs of migrating to .NET. Even where the use of .NET has come to dominate, when used for server applications with IIS, IIS itself is still entirely developed in unmanaged code. This is an irritation to Microsoft's greatest supporters who committed themselves fully to the NET framework, only to find parts of the Ambivalent Microsoft Empire quietly backsliding into unmanaged code and the awful C++. It is a strategic mistake that the invigorated Apple didn't make with the Mac OS X Architecture. Cheers, Laila

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  • Commit Review Questions

    - by Wes McClure
    Note: in this article when I refer to a commit, I mean the commit you plan to share with the rest of the team, if you have local commits that you plan to amend/combine, I am referring to the final result. In time you will find these easier to do as you develop, however, all of these are valuable before checking in!  The pre commit review is a nice time to polish what might have been several hours of intense work, during which these things were the last things on your mind!  If you are concerned about losing your work in the process of responding to these questions, first do a check-in and amend it as you go (assuming you are using a tool such as git that supports this), rolling the result into one nice commit for everyone else.  Did you review your commit, change by change, with a diff utility? If not, this is a list of reasons why you might want to start! Did you test your changes? If the test is valuable to be automated, is it? If it’s a manual testing scenario, did you at least try the basics manually? Are the additions/changes formatted consistently with the rest of the project? Lots of automated tools can help here, don’t try to manually format the code, that’s a waste of time and as a human you will fail repeatedly. Are these consistent: tabs versus spaces, indentation, spacing, braces, line breaks, etc Resharper is a great example of a tool that can automate this for you (.net) Are naming conventions respected? Did you accidently use abbreviations, unless you have a good reason to use them? Does capitalization match the conventions in the project/language? Are files partitioned? Sometimes we add new code in existing files in a pinch, it’s a good idea to split these out if they don’t belong ie: are new classes defined in new files, if this is something your project values? Is there commented out code? If you are removing an existing feature, get rid of it, that is why we have VCS If it’s not done yet, then why are you checking it in? Perhaps a stash commit (git)? Did you leave debug or unnecessary changes? Do you understand all of the changes? http://geekswithblogs.net/wesm/archive/2012/04/11/programming-doesnrsquot-have-to-be-magic.aspx Are there spelling mistakes? Including your commit message! Is your commit message concise? Is there follow up work? Are there tasks you didn’t write down that you need to follow up with? Are readability or reorganization changes needed? This might be amended into the final commit, or it might be future work that needs added to the backlog. Are there other things your team values that you should review?

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  • Building a Flash Platformer

    - by Jonathan O
    I am basically making a game where the whole game is run in the onEnterFrame method. This is causing a delay in my code that makes debugging and testing difficult. Should programming an entire platformer in this method be efficient enough for me to run hundreds of lines of code? Also, do variables in flash get updated immediately? Are there just lots of threads listening at the same time? Here is the code... stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnter); function onEnter(e:Event):void { //Jumping if (Yoshi.y > groundBaseLevel) { dy = 0; canJump = true; onGround = true; //This line is not updated in time } if (Key.isDown(Key.UP) && canJump) { dy = -10; canJump = false; onGround = false; //This line is not updated in time } if(!onGround) { dy += gravity; Yoshi.y += dy; } //limit screen boundaries //character movement if (! Yoshi.hitTestObject(Platform)) //no collision detected { if (Key.isDown(Key.RIGHT)) { speed += 4; speed *= friction; Yoshi.x = Yoshi.x + movementIncrement + speed; Yoshi.scaleX = 1; Yoshi.gotoAndStop('Walking'); } else if (Key.isDown(Key.LEFT)) { speed -= 4; speed *= friction; Yoshi.x = Yoshi.x - movementIncrement + speed; Yoshi.scaleX = -1; Yoshi.gotoAndStop('Walking'); } else { speed *= friction; Yoshi.x = Yoshi.x + speed; Yoshi.gotoAndStop('Still'); } } else //bounce back collision detected { if(Yoshi.hitTestPoint(Platform.x - Platform.width/2, Platform.y - Platform.height/2, false)) { trace('collision left'); Yoshi.x -=20; } if(Yoshi.hitTestPoint(Platform.x, Platform.y - Platform.height/2, false)) { trace('collision top'); onGround=true; //This update is not happening in time speed = 0; } } }

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  • Should I be put off a junior role that uses an online development test?

    - by Ninefingers
    I've applied for a junior development role, or rather been found by a recruiter looking for a developer. In order to get to a telephone interview stage I've been asked to sit one of those online coding assessments. This wasn't quite what I expected. I consider myself a fairly good developer for my age and experience, but I've no illusions about being Don Knuth or anything. The test was a series of incredibly obtuse questions asking about the results of various obscure evaluations. About 30 minutes in I was thinking to myself I hadn't intended to enter an obfuscated code contest/code golf exercise. After my last telephone interview I was asked to build something. I did. That seemed fair. Go away and work this out is more my in office experience of programming than "please evaluate this combination of lambdas, filters, maps, lists, tuples etc". So I'm a little put off, to be honest. I never claimed to know the language inside out or all the little corner cases. My questions, then: Should I be put off? Why? Why not? Are these kinds of tests what I should be expecting for junior roles? Should I learn stuff exam style? That seems to be the objective of these tests, for which you are timed and not supposed to use references or books? Normally, in the course of development I have a fairly good idea of basic types, rules, flow control and whatever. Occasionally I'll come up on something I need to use a regex for and have to go and remind myself of the exact piece of syntax I need if trying what I think should work doesn't. Or I'll come up against a module I've not used before and go and look it up. For example, if I wanted to write a server using sockets in C right now, I'd probably check the last piece of code I wrote doing that (and or the various books I have) and work from there. Chances are I probably couldn't do it exactly from scratch and from memory, although I can tell you you'd need a socket(), bind(), listen() and accept() call and you might also want select() depending on whether you intend to pthread_create or not. So I know what the calls are, but not their specific parameter list. What are your experiences if you are a recruiting manager? Are you after programmers who can quote you the API or do you not mind if your programmers have a few books on their desk and google function calls every so often?

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • The environment that is uniquely Oracle by Phillip Yi

    - by Nadiya
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In the past month, I have been given the exclusive opportunity to hire a Legal graduate/intern for Oracle’s in-house Legal Counsel based here in North Ryde, Sydney. Whilst talking to various applicants, I am asked the same, broad question – what are we looking for? Time and time I have spoken about targeting the best, or targeting the best fit. I am an advocate of the latter, hence when approaching this question I answer very simply – ‘we are looking for the individual, that will fit into the culture and environment that is uniquely Oracle’. So, what is the environment/culture like here at Oracle? What makes Oracle so unique and a great place to work, especially as a graduate? Much like our business model, we are forward and innovative thinkers – we are not afraid to try new things, whether it is a success or failure. We are all highly driven, motivated and successful individuals – Oracle is a firm believer that in order to be driven, motivated and successful, you need to be surrounded by like minded people. And last, we are all autonomous and independent, self starters – at Oracle you are treated as an adult. We are not in the business of continually micro managing, nor constantly spoon feeding or holding your hand. Oracle has an amazing support, resource and training network – if you need support, extra training or resources it is there for your taking. And of course, if you do it on your own accord, you will learn it much quicker. For those reasons, Oracle is unique in its environment – we ensure and set up everyone for success. With such a great working environment/culture, why wouldn’t you choose Oracle? /* 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Advice on designing a robust program to handle a large library of meta-information & programs

    - by Sam Bryant
    So this might be overly vague, but here it is anyway I'm not really looking for a specific answer, but rather general design principles or direction towards resources that deal with problems like this. It's one of my first large-scale applications, and I would like to do it right. Brief Explanation My basic problem is that I have to write an application that handles a large library of meta-data, can easily modify the meta-data on-the-fly, is robust with respect to crashing, and is very efficient. (Sorta like the design parameters of iTunes, although sometimes iTunes performs more poorly than I would like). If you don't want to read the details, you can skip the rest Long Explanation Specifically I am writing a program that creates a library of image files and meta-data about these files. There is a list of tags that may or may not apply to each image. The program needs to be able to add new images, new tags, assign tags to images, and detect duplicate images, all while operating. The program contains an image Viewer which has tagging operations. The idea is that if a given image A is viewed while the library has tags T1, T2, and T3, then that image will have boolean flags for each of those tags (depending on whether the user tagged that image while it was open in the Viewer). However, prior to being viewed in the Viewer, image A would have no value for tags T1, T2, and T3. Instead it would have a "dirty" flag indicating that it is unknown whether or not A has these tags or not. The program can introduce new tags at any time (which would automatically set all images to "dirty" with respect to this new tag) This program must be fast. It must be easily able to pull up a list of images with or without a certain tag as well as images which are "dirty" with respect to a tag. It has to be crash-safe, in that if it suddenly crashes, all of the tagging information done in that session is not lost (though perhaps it's okay to loose some of it) Finally, it has to work with a lot of images (10,000) I am a fairly experienced programmer, but I have never tried to write a program with such demanding needs and I have never worked with databases. With respect to the meta-data storage, there seem to be a few design choices: Choice 1: Invidual meta-data vs centralized meta-data Individual Meta-Data: have a separate meta-data file for each image. This way, as soon as you change the meta-data for an image, it can be written to the hard disk, without having to rewrite the information for all of the other images. Centralized Meta-Data: Have a single file to hold the meta-data for every file. This would probably require meta-data writes in intervals as opposed to after every change. The benefit here is that you could keep a centralized list of all images with a given tag, ect, making the task of pulling up all images with a given tag very efficient

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  • The Oracle Cash Management Secret Very Few Customers Know About

    - by Theresa Hickman
    Did you know that Oracle Cash Management has a robust positioning feature? I had no idea. I was under the mistaken impression that Oracle Cash Management only did bank statement reconciliations. It seems I am not alone. In fact, many Oracle Financials customers are also not aware of this even though it is delivered for free with the Oracle Financials license. Even better, last week, Oracle released an enhancement to Oracle Cash Management for Release 12 that will greatly help customers with their cash positioning needs. As we all know, credit is tight these days. Companies need better visibility of their cash and other liquidity positions to make better use of their cash resources. Today, many customers are managing their cash positions manually using spreadsheets. We also hear how many of them are maintaining larger than normal balances in numerous bank accounts because they just do not have the visibility, and therefore the comfort they need. Although spreadsheets may work in the short-term, they are not the best way to manage your cash positions for the long-term especially if you have dozens, or even hundreds of bank and brokerage accounts. Also, spreadsheets are a lot more risky because they can be overwritten, deleted, difficult to audit, etc. With the newly enhanced positioning feature in Oracle Cash Management, customers can manage their daily cash positions using an excel-like interface that is very flexible and user-configurable. You can link the worksheet to an unlimited number of bank accounts to automatically retrieve your opening balances, the current/intra-day cash inflows and outflows, as well as your expected cash flows from your Fx, Investment and Debt positions if you have Oracle's Treasury module . Oracle Cash Management also has direct integration with Oracle Receivables, Oracle Payables, and Payroll, which adds to the comprehensive picture of what's happening with your organizations' cash in real-time. Here's a screen shot of what the cash positioning page looks like: View image As you can see, your Treasurers can obtain a holistic view of all cash positions across any number of bank accounts as well as other sources of cash flow movements. Depending on how they manage their accounts, they can also use this feature to initiate or monitor bank account sweeps or transfers between their zero balance accounts (ZBA) or cash pools. The cash position worksheet provide drill down for more detail and the ability to manually enter items directly into the worksheet for even greater flexibility and control. The enhancements to this feature were released last week. The following list the patches for Release 12.0.6 and 12.1.1: For more information, visit the following website. http://launch.oracle.com. PIN: yes2try

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  • WinAPI window taking 50% of CPU when idle

    - by henryprescott
    I'm currently working on a game that creates a window using WindowsAPI. However, at the moment the process is taking up 50% of my CPU. All I am doing is creating the window and looping using the code found below: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nShowCmd) { MSG message = {0}; WNDCLASSEX wcl = {0}; wcl.cbSize = sizeof(wcl); wcl.style = CS_OWNDC | CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW; wcl.lpfnWndProc = WindowProc; wcl.cbClsExtra = 0; wcl.cbWndExtra = 0; wcl.hInstance = hInstance = hInstance; wcl.hIcon = LoadIcon(0, IDI_APPLICATION); wcl.hCursor = LoadCursor(0, IDC_ARROW); wcl.hbrBackground = 0; wcl.lpszMenuName = 0; wcl.lpszClassName = "GL2WindowClass"; wcl.hIconSm = 0; if (!RegisterClassEx(&wcl)) return 0; hWnd = CreateAppWindow(wcl, "Application"); if (hWnd) { if (Init()) { ShowWindow(hWnd, nShowCmd); UpdateWindow(hWnd); while (true) { while (PeekMessage(&message, 0, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { if (message.message == WM_QUIT) break; TranslateMessage(&message); DispatchMessage(&message); } if (message.message == WM_QUIT) break; if (hasFocus) { elapsedTime = GetElapsedTimeInSeconds(); lastEarth += elapsedTime; lastUpdate += elapsedTime; lastFrame += elapsedTime; lastParticle += elapsedTime; if(lastUpdate >= (1.0f / 100.0f)) { Update(lastUpdate); lastUpdate = 0; } if(lastFrame >= (1.0f / 60.0f)) { UpdateFrameRate(lastFrame); lastFrame = 0; Render(); SwapBuffers(hDC); } if(lastEarth >= (1.0f / 10.0f)) { UpdateEarthAnimation(); lastEarth = 0; } if(lastParticle >= (1.0f / 30.0f)) { particleManager->rightBooster->Update(); particleManager->rightBoosterSmoke->Update(); particleManager->leftBooster->Update(); particleManager->leftBoosterSmoke->Update(); particleManager->breakUp->Update(); lastParticle = 0; } } else { WaitMessage(); } } } Cleanup(); UnregisterClass(wcl.lpszClassName, hInstance); } return static_cast<int>(message.wParam); } So even when I am not drawing anything when the window has focus it still takes up 50%. I don't understand how this is taking up so much system resources. Am I doing something wrong? Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!

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  • Review: Backbone.js Testing

    - by george_v_reilly
    Title: Backbone.js Testing Author: Ryan Roemer Rating: $stars(4.5) Publisher: Packt Copyright: 2013 ISBN: 178216524X Pages: 168 Keywords: programming, testing, javascript, backbone, mocha, chai, sinon Reading period: October 2013 Backbone.js Testing is a short, dense introduction to testing JavaScript applications with three testing libraries, Mocha, Chai, and Sinon.JS. Although the author uses a sample application of a personal note manager written with Backbone.js throughout the book, much of the material would apply to any JavaScript client or server framework. Mocha is a test framework that can be executed in the browser or by Node.js, which runs your tests. Chai is a framework-agnostic TDD/BDD assertion library. Sinon.JS provides standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. They complement each other and the author does a good job of explaining when and how to use each. I've written a lot of tests in Python (unittest and mock, primarily) and C# (NUnit), but my experience with JavaScript unit testing was both limited and years out of date. The JavaScript ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, with new browser frameworks and Node packages springing up everywhere. JavaScript has some particular challenges in testing—notably, asynchrony and callbacks. Mocha, Chai, and Sinon meet those challenges, though they can't take away all the pain. The author describes how to test Backbone models, views, and collections; dealing with asynchrony; provides useful testing heuristics, including isolating components to reduce dependencies; when to use stubs and mocks and fake servers; and test automation with PhantomJS. He does not, however, teach you Backbone.js itself; for that, you'll need another book. There are a few areas which I thought were dealt with too lightly. There's no real discussion of Test-driven_development or Behavior-driven_development, which provide the intellectual foundations of much of the book. Nor does he have much to say about testability and how to make legacy code more testable. The sample Notes app has plenty of testing seams (much of this falls naturally out of the architecture of Backbone); other apps are not so lucky. The chapter on automation is extremely terse—it could be expanded into a very large book!—but it does provide useful indicators to many areas for exploration. I learned a lot from this book and I have no hesitation in recommending it. Disclosure: Thanks to Ryan Roemer and Packt for a review copy of this book.

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  • SQL SERVER – BI Quiz Hint – Performance Tuning Cubes – Hints

    - by pinaldave
    I earlier wrote about SQL BI Quiz over here and here. The details of the quiz is here: Working with huge data is very common when it is about Data Warehousing. It is necessary to create Cubes on the data to make it meaningful and consumable. There are cases when retrieving the data from cube takes lots of the time. Let us assume that your cube is returning you data very quickly. Suddenly on one day it is returning the data very slowly. What are the three things will you to diagnose this. After diagnose what you will do to resolve performance issue. Participate in my question over here I required BI Expert Jason Thomas to help with few hints to blog readers. He is one of the leading SSAS expert and writes a complicated subject in simple words. If queries were executing properly before but now take a long time to return the data, it means that there has been a change in the environment in which it is running. Some possible changes are listed below:-  1) Data factors:- Compare the data size then and now. Increase in data can result in different execution times. Poorly written queries as well as poor design will not start showing issues till the data grows. How to find it out? (Ans : SQL Server profiler and Perfmon Counters can be used for identifying the issues and performance  tuning the MDX queries)  2) Internal Factors:- Is some slow MDX query / multiple mdx queries running at the same time, which was not running when you had tested it before? Is there any locking happening due to proactive caching or processing operations? Are the measure group caches being cleared by processing operations? (Ans : Again, profiler and perfmon counters will help in finding it out. Load testing can be done using AS Performance Workbench (http://asperfwb.codeplex.com/) by running multiple queries at once)  3) External factors:- Is some other application competing for the same resources?  HINT : Read “Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services” (http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2007/12/16/identifying-and-resolving-mdx-query-performance-bottlenecks-in-sql-server-2005-analysis-services.aspx) Well, these are great tips. Now win big prizes by participate in my question over here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Breakfast Keynote, More at Gartner IAM Summit This Week

    - by Tanu Sood
    Gartner Identity and Access Management Conference We look forward to seeing you at the.... Gartner Identity and Access Management Conference Oracle is proud to be a Silver Sponsor of the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit happening December 3 - 5 in Las Vegas, NV. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Oracle Senior VP of Identity Management, Amit Jasuja, present Trends in Identity Management at our keynote presentation and breakfast on Tuesday, December 4th at 7:30 a.m. Everyone that attends is entered into a raffle to win a free JAWBONE JAMBOX wireless speaker system. Also, don’t forget to visit the Oracle Booth to mingle with your peers and speak to Oracle experts. Learn how Oracle Identity Management solutions are enabling the Social, Mobile, and Cloud (SoMoClo) environments. Visit Oracle Booth #S15 to: View a demonstration of our latest release - Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 Visit our virtual collateral rack and download useful resources Enter to win a JAWBONE JAMBOX Wireless Speaker System Exhibit Hall Hours Monday, December 3 — 11:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. – 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, December 4 — 11:45 a.m. – 2:45 p.m. To schedule a meeting with Oracle Identity Management executives and experts at Gartner IAM, please email us or speak to your account representative. We look forward to seeing you at the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit! Visit Oracle at Booth #S15 Gartner IAM SummitDecember 3 - 5, 2012 Caesars Palace Attend our Keynote Breakfast Trends in Identity Management Tuesday, December 4, 2012 7:15 a.m. - 8:00 a.m., Octavius 16 Speakers: Amit Jasuja, Senior Vice President, Identity Management Oracle Ranjan Jain, Enterprise Architect, Cisco As enterprises embrace mobile and social applications, security and audit have moved into the foreground. The way we work and connect with our customers is changing dramatically and this means re-thinking how we secure the interaction and enable the experience. Work is an activity not a place - mobile access enables employees to work from any device anywhere and anytime. Organizations are utilizing "flash teams" - instead of a dedicated group to solve problems, organizations utilize more cross-functional teams. Work is now social - email collaboration will be replaced by dynamic social media style interaction. In this session, we will examine these three secular trends and discuss how organizations can secure the work experience and adapt audit controls to address the "new work order". Stay Connected: For more information, please visit www.oracle.com/identity. Copyright © 2012, Oracle. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement SEO100120175 Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States Your privacy is important to us. You can login to your account to update your e-mail subscriptions or you can opt-out of all Oracle Marketing e-mails at any time.Please note that opting-out of Marketing communications does not affect your receipt of important business communications related to your current relationship with Oracle such as Security Updates, Event Registration notices, Account Management and Support/Service communications.

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  • Source of (programmer) inefficiency

    - by Daniel
    I am interested to gain a better insight about the possible reasons of personal inefficiency as programmers (and only in programming) due to – simply - our own errors (because we are humans – well, almost all of us). I am not interested in how much we are productive or in how many adjustements the customer asks for when the work is done, but where and how each of us spend that part of its time in tasks that are unproductive and there is no one to blame except ourselves. Excluding ego - feeding and / or self – gratification, what I am trying to get (for all of us) is: what are the common issues eating our time; insight on reasons for that issues; identify simple way for us, personally (not delegating actions to other or our organizations), to correct our own problems. Please, do not think in academic terms but aim at the opportunity to compare our daily experiences and understand what are and how we try to fix our personal deficiencies. If you are interested to respond to this post, please: integrate the list if you see something important (or obvious) missing; highlight or name honestly your first issue tellng the way you try to address and solve your issue acting on yourself and yourself only in a sort of "continuous quality improving" My criteria for accepting the answer is: choose the best solution (feasibility and utility) to fix one (or more) of the problems of the list. Of course, selecting an error is not a vote on our skills: maybe we are hyper professional programmers and we lose ten minutes only every year or we are terribly inefficient, losing a couple of days a week: reasons for inefficiency could be really the same - but in a different scale. A possible list: Plain error in the names (variables, functions). Inability to see the obvious in your code. Misreading. Lack of concentration. Trying to use a technology you have not mastered. Errors with data types. Time required to understand your previous code or your documentation. Trying to do something more than requested because you enjoy it Using solutions more complicated than required because you enjoy it. Plain logical errors. Errors due to your fault in communications. Distraction My first personal issue: "Trying to use a technology you do not master." I have to use daily several technologies and I often need to spend significant time correcting code because my assumptions were plainly wrong. Reasons for this: production needs put high pressure and make difficult to find the time to learn. I try to address this reading technical books - as many as I can - even if this actually consumes a lot of time.

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  • SQL SERVER – Concurrancy Problems and their Relationship with Isolation Level

    - by pinaldave
    Concurrency is simply put capability of the machine to support two or more transactions working with the same data at the same time. This usually comes up with data is being modified, as during the retrieval of the data this is not the issue. Most of the concurrency problems can be avoided by SQL Locks. There are four types of concurrency problems visible in the normal programming. 1)      Lost Update – This problem occurs when there are two transactions involved and both are unaware of each other. The transaction which occurs later overwrites the transactions created by the earlier update. 2)      Dirty Reads – This problem occurs when a transactions selects data that isn’t committed by another transaction leading to read the data which may not exists when transactions are over. Example: Transaction 1 changes the row. Transaction 2 changes the row. Transaction 1 rolls back the changes. Transaction 2 has selected the row which does not exist. 3)      Nonrepeatable Reads – This problem occurs when two SELECT statements of the same data results in different values because another transactions has updated the data between the two SELECT statements. Example: Transaction 1 selects a row, which is later on updated by Transaction 2. When Transaction A later on selects the row it gets different value. 4)      Phantom Reads – This problem occurs when UPDATE/DELETE is happening on one set of data and INSERT/UPDATE is happening on the same set of data leading inconsistent data in earlier transaction when both the transactions are over. Example: Transaction 1 is deleting 10 rows which are marked as deleting rows, during the same time Transaction 2 inserts row marked as deleted. When Transaction 1 is done deleting rows, there will be still rows marked to be deleted. When two or more transactions are updating the data, concurrency is the biggest issue. I commonly see people toying around with isolation level or locking hints (e.g. NOLOCK) etc, which can very well compromise your data integrity leading to much larger issue in future. Here is the quick mapping of the isolation level with concurrency problems: Isolation Dirty Reads Lost Update Nonrepeatable Reads Phantom Reads Read Uncommitted Yes Yes Yes Yes Read Committed No Yes Yes Yes Repeatable Read No No No Yes Snapshot No No No No Serializable No No No No I hope this 400 word small article gives some quick understanding on concurrency issues and their relation to isolation level. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • How much freedom should a programmer have in choosing a language and framework?

    - by Spencer
    I started working at a company that is primarily a C# oriented. We have a few people who like Java and JRuby, but a majority of programmers here like C#. I was hired because I have a lot of experience building web applications and because I lean towards newer technologies like JRuby on Rails or nodejs. I have recently started on a project building a web application with a focus on getting a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time. The software lead has dictated that I use mvc4 instead of rails. That might be OK, except I don't know mvc4, I don't know C# and I am the only one responsible for creating the web application server and front-end UI. Wouldn't it make sense to use a framework that I already know extremely well (Rails) instead of using mvc4? The two reasons behind the decision was that the tech lead doesn't know Jruby/rails and there would be no way to reuse the code. Counter arguments: He won't be contributing to the code and is frankly, not needed on this project. So, it doesn't really matter if he knows JRuby/rails or not. We actually can reuse the code since we have a lot of java apps that JRuby can pull code from and vice-versa. In fact, he has dedicated some resources to convert a Java library to C#, instead of just running the Java library on the JRuby on Rails app. All because he doesn't like Java or JRuby I have built many web applications, but using something unfamiliar is causing some spin-up and I am unable to build an awesome application in as short of a time that I'm used to. This would be fine, learning new technologies is important in this field. The problem is, for this project, we need to get a lot done in a short period of time. At what point should a developer be allowed to choose his tools? Is this dependent on the company? Does my company suck or is this considered normal? Do greener pastures exist? Am I looking at this the wrong way? Bonus: Should I just keep my head down and move along at a snails pace, or defy orders and go with what I know in order to make this project more successful? Edit: I had actually created a fully function rails application (on my own time) and showed it to the team and it did not seem to matter. I am currently porting it to mvc4 (slowly).

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  • SOA &amp; Application Grid Specialization step 2 of 6 &ndash; References &amp; Marketing Kits

    - by Jürgen Kress
    In our fist step to become SOA Specialized & Application Grid Specialized we highlighted our OMM to register your opportunities. We continue our path to specialization with our marketing offerings to create your reference cases and run joint marketing campaigns. References: Be Recognized Through Partner Success Stories Oracle delivers a wide variety of services and solutions through our partners and we believe that those successes should be recognized and promoted. References are also required to become specialized. We showcase our partners’ capabilities in Oracle products and industries through partner success stories that are published on Oracle.com. For significant implementations, we may invite partners to participate in a press release or be interviewed in a podcast. To participate and take a further step to become specialized, please take a minute to complete the form and tell us about the successful project you have implemented. If your story is selected, we will contact you for an interview. Create your references The partner reference program Enables partners to be recognized by both Oracle and our customers Provides an opportunity for partners to showcase successes with their customers on Oracle solutions Helps raise awareness of our partners’ capabilities, elevating them above their competition Time to submit a SOA and Application Grid reference request today To learn more about partner references, check out the following resources: Judson Althoff’s YouTube Video: Be Recognized with OPN Specialized Reference Program OPN PartnerCast: Be Recognized…Your Reference Matters!!! (MP3) Partner/Customer Reference Brochure (PDF) Marketing Kits We have created OFM 11g marketing kit http://tinyurl.com/soamarketing (OPN account required) The marketing kit includes all the ppts and demos from our launch event. Oracle package includes: • Event templates like invitation, agenda ,confirmation follow up templates • OFM 11g presentations • Free usage of the Oracle Customer Visit Center • Condition: mandatory lead registration in the Oracle Open Market Model (OMM) To download the material, please make sure that you select the campaign “Enterprise: Fusion Middleware 11g”: OFM 11g Oracle Marketing 4 Partners Package http://tinyurl.com/soamarketing (OPN account required)   For more information on Specialization please visit our OPN Specialized Webcast Series And become a member in our SOA Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/ema/soa Jürgen Kress, SOA Partner Adoption EMEA SOA Specialized Application Grid Specialized Proof 2 transactions with OMM Proof 2 transactions with OMM Create your 2 references Create your 2 references SOA Sales assessment 3, Oracle Application Grid Sales Specialist  SOA Pre-Sales assessment 3 Oracle Application Grid PreSales Specialist Support assessment 1 Support assessment 2 SOA Implementation assessment 4 Application Gridplementation assessment 4

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for November 1, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Hurricane Sandy Edition Power outages in the Cleveland area made it impossible to publish posts on Tuesday and Wednesday. In my neighborhood most are still without power. The sound of howling winds that dominated on Monday and Tuesday has been replaced by the sound of of portable generators. My internet connection was restored only after AT&T U-Verse crewmen hooked up a portable generator to power the relay station up the street. Bear in mind that Cleveland is 500 miles from the Atlantic coast. Mobile Development Platform Strategy Chart: ADF Mobile, WebCenter Sites, Portal, Content and Social "Unlike desktop web focused efforts, the world of mobile has undergone change at a feverish pace," says social enterprise expert John Brunswick. His extensive post charts various resources that will help you keep up. ADF Essentials - The Bare Necessities | Floyd Teter The experiment is over... And now Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter shares his impressions after spending some time with Oracle ADF Essentials, the free version of Oracle ADF. Expanding the Oracle Enterprise Repository with functional documentation Capgemini middleware specialist Marc Kuijpers shares information on how Oracle Enterprise Repository can be configured "to contain functional assets, i.e. functional designs, use cases and a logical data model" to aid in SOA governance efforts. A review of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook | RedStack "More so than any other single piece of content that I have seen on the topic, it provides the information that a SOA administrator needs to know in order to successfully configure, manage, monitor, troubleshoot and backup an Oracle SOA environment." So says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team solution architect Mark Nelson of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook, by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek. Eating our own dog food – Oracle’s internal deployment of Oracle IDM Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Brian Eidelman recommends the recent podcast on Oracle’s internal deployment of Oracle OAM and OID. "This was a big project that involved migrating a bunch of critical, high volume applications to leverage OAM and OID," says Eidelman. "So I suggest you tune in to see and hear more about how we deploy our own software." Thought for the Day "Anyone who says they're not afraid at the time of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a little bit of both." — Anderson Cooper Source: BrainyQuote

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  • Hype and LINQ

    - by Tony Davis
    "Tired of querying in antiquated SQL?" I blinked in astonishment when I saw this headline on the LinqPad site. Warming to its theme, the site suggests that what we need is to "kiss goodbye to SSMS", and instead use LINQ, a modern query language! Elsewhere, there is an article entitled "Why LINQ beats SQL". The designers of LINQ, along with many DBAs, would, I'm sure, cringe with embarrassment at the suggestion that LINQ and SQL are, in any sense, competitive ways of doing the same thing. In fact what LINQ really is, at last, is an efficient, declarative language for C# and VB programmers to access or manipulate data in objects, local data stores, ORMs, web services, data repositories, and, yes, even relational databases. The fact is that LINQ is essentially declarative programming in a .NET language, and so in many ways encourages developers into a "SQL-like" mindset, even though they are not directly writing SQL. In place of imperative logic and loops, it uses various expressions, operators and declarative logic to build up an "expression tree" describing only what data is required, not the operations to be performed to get it. This expression tree is then parsed by the language compiler, and the result, when used against a relational database, is a SQL string that, while perhaps not always perfect, is often correctly parameterized and certainly no less "optimal" than what is achieved when a developer applies blunt, imperative logic to the SQL language. From a developer standpoint, it is a mistake to consider LINQ simply as a substitute means of querying SQL Server. The strength of LINQ is that that can be used to access any data source, for which a LINQ provider exists. Microsoft supplies built-in providers to access not just SQL Server, but also XML documents, .NET objects, ADO.NET datasets, and Entity Framework elements. LINQ-to-Objects is particularly interesting in that it allows a declarative means to access and manipulate arrays, collections and so on. Furthermore, as Michael Sorens points out in his excellent article on LINQ, there a whole host of third-party LINQ providers, that offers a simple way to get at data in Excel, Google, Flickr and much more, without having to learn a new interface or language. Of course, the need to be generic enough to deal with a range of data sources, from something as mundane as a text file to as esoteric as a relational database, means that LINQ is a compromise and so has inherent limitations. However, it is a powerful and beautifully compact language and one that, at least in its "query syntax" guise, is accessible to developers and DBAs alike. Perhaps there is still hope that LINQ can fulfill Phil Factor's lobster-induced fantasy of a language that will allow us to "treat all data objects, whether Word files, Excel files, XML, relational databases, text files, HTML files, registry files, LDAPs, Outlook and so on, in the same logical way, as linked databases, and extract the metadata, create the entities and relationships in the same way, and use the same SQL syntax to interrogate, create, read, write and update them." Cheers, Tony.

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  • New Wine in New Bottles

    - by Tony Davis
    How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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  • Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

    - by John Murphy
    Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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  • The Spotlight is on You

    - by Claudia McDonald
    On the field or off the field, in ballet slippers or singing your heart out on stage, offering a stellar performance every time is key to holding the attention of your audience and having them come back hungry for more. Similarly, showing up to a new business meeting wearing pink tights and a tutu might be one way to holding the attention of your customer, but offering them an unmatched and ground-breaking software solution certainly will get their attention! Simply put, the Oracle Exastack program enables both ISV's and OEM's to rapidly build and deliver faster, more reliable applications. It comes as no surprise that the success of the Oracle Exastack program is centered on establishing Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud as the highest performance, lowest cost platforms available in the industry today.  But here is where the real standing-ovation-worthy facts come in. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto private clouds. Whereas the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an engineered hardware and software system tested and tuned by Oracle to provide the best foundation for cloud computing, while allowing Java applications, Oracle Applications and other enterprise applications to run with extreme performance. – And the crowd goes wild, ladies and gentlemen! In just four months alone, our partners have already achieved over 150 Oracle Exastack Ready milestones for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server.  As Judson has said, “With the Oracle Exastack program, Oracle is helping partners test, tune and optimize their applications to deliver optimal performance and reliability, accelerating innovation and delivering superior value to customers." And get this, not only are their applications running faster and more efficiently, they are actually being delivered at a lower cost to customers than ever before – extreme performance well deserving of 3 consecutive arabesques! If you haven’t already, check out what some of our partners are saying about the Oracle Exastack program in this video, and find out all that is available to you today. By participating in the Oracle Exastack program, partners now have the ability to achieve Oracle Exadata Optimized, Oracle Exalogic Optimized, Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Exalogic Ready status for their solutions. New Oracle Exastack labs, provide OPN members with access to Oracle technical resources, on-premise facilities and remote lab environments. With Oracle Exastack Optimized, partners experience faster and more reliable applications to run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, as well as the long awaited Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Savvy OPN members are leveraging the Oracle Exastack Optimized program toward their advancement to Platinum or Diamond level in OPN. Partners are achieving Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Exalogic Ready giving them a competitive advantage and signaling to customers that their applications readily support Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud to deliver extreme performance. Get your dancing shoes on, The OPN Communications Team

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  • Informed TDD &ndash; Kata &ldquo;To Roman Numerals&rdquo;

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/28/informed-tdd-ndash-kata-ldquoto-roman-numeralsrdquo.aspxIn a comment on my article on what I call Informed TDD (ITDD) reader gustav asked how this approach would apply to the kata “To Roman Numerals”. And whether ITDD wasn´t a violation of TDD´s principle of leaving out “advanced topics like mocks”. I like to respond with this article to his questions. There´s more to say than fits into a commentary. Mocks and TDD I don´t see in how far TDD is avoiding or opposed to mocks. TDD and mocks are orthogonal. TDD is about pocess, mocks are about structure and costs. Maybe by moving forward in tiny red+green+refactor steps less need arises for mocks. But then… if the functionality you need to implement requires “expensive” resource access you can´t avoid using mocks. Because you don´t want to constantly run all your tests against the real resource. True, in ITDD mocks seem to be in almost inflationary use. That´s not what you usually see in TDD demonstrations. However, there´s a reason for that as I tried to explain. I don´t use mocks as proxies for “expensive” resource. Rather they are stand-ins for functionality not yet implemented. They allow me to get a test green on a high level of abstraction. That way I can move forward in a top-down fashion. But if you think of mocks as “advanced” or if you don´t want to use a tool like JustMock, then you don´t need to use mocks. You just need to stand the sight of red tests for a little longer ;-) Let me show you what I mean by that by doing a kata. ITDD for “To Roman Numerals” gustav asked for the kata “To Roman Numerals”. I won´t explain the requirements again. You can find descriptions and TDD demonstrations all over the internet, like this one from Corey Haines. Now here is, how I would do this kata differently. 1. Analyse A demonstration of TDD should never skip the analysis phase. It should be made explicit. The requirements should be formalized and acceptance test cases should be compiled. “Formalization” in this case to me means describing the API of the required functionality. “[D]esign a program to work with Roman numerals” like written in this “requirement document” is not enough to start software development. Coding should only begin, if the interface between the “system under development” and its context is clear. If this interface is not readily recognizable from the requirements, it has to be developed first. Exploration of interface alternatives might be in order. It might be necessary to show several interface mock-ups to the customer – even if that´s you fellow developer. Designing the interface is a task of it´s own. It should not be mixed with implementing the required functionality behind the interface. Unfortunately, though, this happens quite often in TDD demonstrations. TDD is used to explore the API and implement it at the same time. To me that´s a violation of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) which not only should hold for software functional units but also for tasks or activities. In the case of this kata the API fortunately is obvious. Just one function is needed: string ToRoman(int arabic). And it lives in a class ArabicRomanConversions. Now what about acceptance test cases? There are hardly any stated in the kata descriptions. Roman numerals are explained, but no specific test cases from the point of view of a customer. So I just “invent” some acceptance test cases by picking roman numerals from a wikipedia article. They are supposed to be just “typical examples” without special meaning. Given the acceptance test cases I then try to develop an understanding of the problem domain. I´ll spare you that. The domain is trivial and is explain in almost all kata descriptions. How roman numerals are built is not difficult to understand. What´s more difficult, though, might be to find an efficient solution to convert into them automatically. 2. Solve The usual TDD demonstration skips a solution finding phase. Like the interface exploration it´s mixed in with the implementation. But I don´t think this is how it should be done. I even think this is not how it really works for the people demonstrating TDD. They´re simplifying their true software development process because they want to show a streamlined TDD process. I doubt this is helping anybody. Before you code you better have a plan what to code. This does not mean you have to do “Big Design Up-Front”. It just means: Have a clear picture of the logical solution in your head before you start to build a physical solution (code). Evidently such a solution can only be as good as your understanding of the problem. If that´s limited your solution will be limited, too. Fortunately, in the case of this kata your understanding does not need to be limited. Thus the logical solution does not need to be limited or preliminary or tentative. That does not mean you need to know every line of code in advance. It just means you know the rough structure of your implementation beforehand. Because it should mirror the process described by the logical or conceptual solution. Here´s my solution approach: The arabic “encoding” of numbers represents them as an ordered set of powers of 10. Each digit is a factor to multiply a power of ten with. The “encoding” 123 is the short form for a set like this: {1*10^2, 2*10^1, 3*10^0}. And the number is the sum of the set members. The roman “encoding” is different. There is no base (like 10 for arabic numbers), there are just digits of different value, and they have to be written in descending order. The “encoding” XVI is short for [10, 5, 1]. And the number is still the sum of the members of this list. The roman “encoding” thus is simpler than the arabic. Each “digit” can be taken at face value. No multiplication with a base required. But what about IV which looks like a contradiction to the above rule? It is not – if you accept roman “digits” not to be limited to be single characters only. Usually I, V, X, L, C, D, M are viewed as “digits”, and IV, IX etc. are viewed as nuisances preventing a simple solution. All looks different, though, once IV, IX etc. are taken as “digits”. Then MCMLIV is just a sum: M+CM+L+IV which is 1000+900+50+4. Whereas before it would have been understood as M-C+M+L-I+V – which is more difficult because here some “digits” get subtracted. Here´s the list of roman “digits” with their values: {1, I}, {4, IV}, {5, V}, {9, IX}, {10, X}, {40, XL}, {50, L}, {90, XC}, {100, C}, {400, CD}, {500, D}, {900, CM}, {1000, M} Since I take IV, IX etc. as “digits” translating an arabic number becomes trivial. I just need to find the values of the roman “digits” making up the number, e.g. 1954 is made up of 1000, 900, 50, and 4. I call those “digits” factors. If I move from the highest factor (M=1000) to the lowest (I=1) then translation is a two phase process: Find all the factors Translate the factors found Compile the roman representation Translation is just a look-up. Finding, though, needs some calculation: Find the highest remaining factor fitting in the value Remember and subtract it from the value Repeat with remaining value and remaining factors Please note: This is just an algorithm. It´s not code, even though it might be close. Being so close to code in my solution approach is due to the triviality of the problem. In more realistic examples the conceptual solution would be on a higher level of abstraction. With this solution in hand I finally can do what TDD advocates: find and prioritize test cases. As I can see from the small process description above, there are two aspects to test: Test the translation Test the compilation Test finding the factors Testing the translation primarily means to check if the map of factors and digits is comprehensive. That´s simple, even though it might be tedious. Testing the compilation is trivial. Testing factor finding, though, is a tad more complicated. I can think of several steps: First check, if an arabic number equal to a factor is processed correctly (e.g. 1000=M). Then check if an arabic number consisting of two consecutive factors (e.g. 1900=[M,CM]) is processed correctly. Then check, if a number consisting of the same factor twice is processed correctly (e.g. 2000=[M,M]). Finally check, if an arabic number consisting of non-consecutive factors (e.g. 1400=[M,CD]) is processed correctly. I feel I can start an implementation now. If something becomes more complicated than expected I can slow down and repeat this process. 3. Implement First I write a test for the acceptance test cases. It´s red because there´s no implementation even of the API. That´s in conformance with “TDD lore”, I´d say: Next I implement the API: The acceptance test now is formally correct, but still red of course. This will not change even now that I zoom in. Because my goal is not to most quickly satisfy these tests, but to implement my solution in a stepwise manner. That I do by “faking” it: I just “assume” three functions to represent the transformation process of my solution: My hypothesis is that those three functions in conjunction produce correct results on the API-level. I just have to implement them correctly. That´s what I´m trying now – one by one. I start with a simple “detail function”: Translate(). And I start with all the test cases in the obvious equivalence partition: As you can see I dare to test a private method. Yes. That´s a white box test. But as you´ll see it won´t make my tests brittle. It serves a purpose right here and now: it lets me focus on getting one aspect of my solution right. Here´s the implementation to satisfy the test: It´s as simple as possible. Right how TDD wants me to do it: KISS. Now for the second equivalence partition: translating multiple factors. (It´a pattern: if you need to do something repeatedly separate the tests for doing it once and doing it multiple times.) In this partition I just need a single test case, I guess. Stepping up from a single translation to multiple translations is no rocket science: Usually I would have implemented the final code right away. Splitting it in two steps is just for “educational purposes” here. How small your implementation steps are is a matter of your programming competency. Some “see” the final code right away before their mental eye – others need to work their way towards it. Having two tests I find more important. Now for the next low hanging fruit: compilation. It´s even simpler than translation. A single test is enough, I guess. And normally I would not even have bothered to write that one, because the implementation is so simple. I don´t need to test .NET framework functionality. But again: if it serves the educational purpose… Finally the most complicated part of the solution: finding the factors. There are several equivalence partitions. But still I decide to write just a single test, since the structure of the test data is the same for all partitions: Again, I´m faking the implementation first: I focus on just the first test case. No looping yet. Faking lets me stay on a high level of abstraction. I can write down the implementation of the solution without bothering myself with details of how to actually accomplish the feat. That´s left for a drill down with a test of the fake function: There are two main equivalence partitions, I guess: either the first factor is appropriate or some next. The implementation seems easy. Both test cases are green. (Of course this only works on the premise that there´s always a matching factor. Which is the case since the smallest factor is 1.) And the first of the equivalence partitions on the higher level also is satisfied: Great, I can move on. Now for more than a single factor: Interestingly not just one test becomes green now, but all of them. Great! You might say, then I must have done not the simplest thing possible. And I would reply: I don´t care. I did the most obvious thing. But I also find this loop very simple. Even simpler than a recursion of which I had thought briefly during the problem solving phase. And by the way: Also the acceptance tests went green: Mission accomplished. At least functionality wise. Now I´ve to tidy up things a bit. TDD calls for refactoring. Not uch refactoring is needed, because I wrote the code in top-down fashion. I faked it until I made it. I endured red tests on higher levels while lower levels weren´t perfected yet. But this way I saved myself from refactoring tediousness. At the end, though, some refactoring is required. But maybe in a different way than you would expect. That´s why I rather call it “cleanup”. First I remove duplication. There are two places where factors are defined: in Translate() and in Find_factors(). So I factor the map out into a class constant. Which leads to a small conversion in Find_factors(): And now for the big cleanup: I remove all tests of private methods. They are scaffolding tests to me. They only have temporary value. They are brittle. Only acceptance tests need to remain. However, I carry over the single “digit” tests from Translate() to the acceptance test. I find them valuable to keep, since the other acceptance tests only exercise a subset of all roman “digits”. This then is my final test class: And this is the final production code: Test coverage as reported by NCrunch is 100%: Reflexion Is this the smallest possible code base for this kata? Sure not. You´ll find more concise solutions on the internet. But LOC are of relatively little concern – as long as I can understand the code quickly. So called “elegant” code, however, often is not easy to understand. The same goes for KISS code – especially if left unrefactored, as it is often the case. That´s why I progressed from requirements to final code the way I did. I first understood and solved the problem on a conceptual level. Then I implemented it top down according to my design. I also could have implemented it bottom-up, since I knew some bottom of the solution. That´s the leaves of the functional decomposition tree. Where things became fuzzy, since the design did not cover any more details as with Find_factors(), I repeated the process in the small, so to speak: fake some top level, endure red high level tests, while first solving a simpler problem. Using scaffolding tests (to be thrown away at the end) brought two advantages: Encapsulation of the implementation details was not compromised. Naturally private methods could stay private. I did not need to make them internal or public just to be able to test them. I was able to write focused tests for small aspects of the solution. No need to test everything through the solution root, the API. The bottom line thus for me is: Informed TDD produces cleaner code in a systematic way. It conforms to core principles of programming: Single Responsibility Principle and/or Separation of Concerns. Distinct roles in development – being a researcher, being an engineer, being a craftsman – are represented as different phases. First find what, what there is. Then devise a solution. Then code the solution, manifest the solution in code. Writing tests first is a good practice. But it should not be taken dogmatic. And above all it should not be overloaded with purposes. And finally: moving from top to bottom through a design produces refactored code right away. Clean code thus almost is inevitable – and not left to a refactoring step at the end which is skipped often for different reasons.   PS: Yes, I have done this kata several times. But that has only an impact on the time needed for phases 1 and 2. I won´t skip them because of that. And there are no shortcuts during implementation because of that.

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