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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

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

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• Java Spotlight Episode 103: 2012 Duke Choice Award Winners

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Our annual interview with the 2012 Duke Choice Award Winners recorded live at the JavaOne 2012. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes Events Oct 13, Devoxx 4 Kids Nederlands Oct 15-17, JAX London Oct 20, Devoxx 4 Kids Français Oct 22-23, Freescale Technology Forum - Japan, Tokyo Oct 30-Nov 1, Arm TechCon, Santa Clara Oct 31, JFall, Netherlands Nov 2-3, JMagreb, Morocco Nov 13-17, Devoxx, Belgium Feature Interview Duke Choice Award Winners 2012 - Show Presentation London Java CommunityThe second user group receiving a Duke’s Choice Award this year, the London Java Community (LJC) and its users have been active in the OpenJDK, the Java Community Process (JCP) and other efforts within the global Java community. Student Nokia Developer GroupThis year’s student winner, Ram Kashyap, is the founder and president of the Nokia Student Network, and was profiled in the “The New Java Developers” feature in the March/April 2012 issue of Java Magazine. Since then, Ram has maintained a hectic pace, graduating from the People’s Education Society Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India, while working on a Java mobile startup and training students on Java ME. Jelastic, Inc.Moving existing Java applications to the cloud can be a daunting task, but startup Jelastic, Inc. offers the first all-Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables existing Java applications to be deployed in the cloud without code changes or lock-in. NATOThe first-ever Community Choice Award goes to the MASE Integrated Console Environment (MICE) in use at NATO. Built in Java on the NetBeans platform, MICE provides a high-performance visualization environment for conducting air defense and battle-space operations. DuchessRather than focus on a specific geographic area like most Java User Groups (JUGs), Duchess fosters the participation of women in the Java community worldwide. The group has more than 500 members in 60 countries, and provides a platform through which women can connect with each other and get involved in all aspects of the Java community. AgroSense ProjectImproving farming methods to feed a hungry world is the goal of AgroSense, an open source farm information management system built in Java and the NetBeans platform. AgroSense enables farmers, agribusinesses, suppliers and others to develop modular applications that will easily exchange information through a common underlying NetBeans framework. Apache Software Foundation Hadoop ProjectThe Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop project, written in Java, provides a framework for distributed processing of big data sets across clusters of computers, ranging from a few servers to thousands of machines. This harnessing of large data pools allows organizations to better understand and improve their business. Parleys.comE-learning specialist Parleys.com, based in Brussels, Belgium, uses Java technologies to bring online classes and full IT conferences to desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. Parleys.com has hosted more than 1,700 conferences—including Devoxx and JavaOne—for more than 800,000 unique visitors. Winners not presenting at JavaOne 2012 Duke Choice Awards BOF Liquid RoboticsRobotics – Liquid Robotics is an ocean data services provider whose Wave Glider technology collects information from the world’s oceans for application in government, science and commercial applications. The organization features the “father of Java” James Gosling as its chief software architect.United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesThe United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is on the front lines of crises around the world, from civil wars to natural disasters. To help facilitate its mission of humanitarian relief, the UNHCR has developed a light-client Java application on the NetBeans platform. The Level One registration tool enables the UNHCR to collect information on the number of refugees and their water, food, housing, health, and other needs in the field, and combines that with geocoding information from various sources. This enables the UNHCR to deliver the appropriate kind and amount of assistance where it is needed.

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• Installation problem Ubuntu 12.04 Crashing hardware error

  - by user93640

  I am running on Ubuntu 8.04 for quite some time without many problems. About almost a year ago or so I have been trying to upgrade to 10.04 LTS, but without any success. Each time when trying to upgrade or even newly install the installation process crashed after about an hour or so (I forgot exactly how long). Now I wanted to try Ubuntu 12.04 (not even installing, but I only selected "Try Ubuntu without installing") and I got similar errors. I did not try to install it, because of earlier experience with 10.04 when after I also lost 8.04 and had to install from scratch again (after which it worked). I get the following screen (as I am not allowed to upload photos here the text): 26.767262] [Hardware Error]: CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0 Bank 5: b200001804000e0f 26.767279] [Hardware Error]: TSC 0 26.767287] [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:6f6 TIME 1349017924 SOCKET 0 APIC 0 microcode 44 26.767297] [Hardware Error]: Run the above through 'mcelog --ascii' 26.767307] [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check Exception: 0 Bank 1: b200000000000175 26.767316] [Hardware Error]: TSC 0 26.767323] [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:6f6 TIME 1349017924 SOCKET 0 APIC 1 microcode 44 26.767331] [Hardware Error]: Run the above through 'mcelog --ascii' 26.767339] [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check Exception: 0 Bank 5: b200003000000e0f 26.767348] [Hardware Error]: TSC 0 26.767354] [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:6f6 TIME 1349017924 SOCKET 0 APIC 1 microcode 44 26.767363] [Hardware Error]: Run the above through 'mcelog --ascii' 26.767371] [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check Exception: 4 Bank 1: b200000000000175 26.767379] [Hardware Error]: TSC 1bf231e65f 26.767386] [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:6f6 TIME 1349017951 SOCKET 0 APIC 1 microcode 44 26.767395] [Hardware Error]: Run the above through 'mcelog --ascii' 26.767403] [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check Exception: 4 Bank 5: b200003008000e0f 26.767413] [Hardware Error]: TSC 1bf231e65f 26.767421] [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:6f6 TIME 1349017951 SOCKET 0 APIC 1 microcode 44 26.767429] [Hardware Error]: Run the above through 'mcelog --ascii' 26.767437] [Hardware Error]: CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 5 Bank 5: b200001806000e0f 26.767447] [Hardware Error]: RIP |INEXACT| 60:<00000000c1018b5c> {mwait_idle+0x7c/0x1d0} 26.767464] [Hardware Error]: TSC 1bf231e674 26.767471] [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:6f6 TIME 1349017951 SOCKET 0 APIC 0 microcode 44 26.767480] [Hardware Error]: Run the above through 'mcelog --ascii' 26.767487] [Hardware Error]: Machine check: Processor context corrupt 26.767495] Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal Machine check 26.767505] Pid: 579, comm: debconf-communi Tainted: G M 3.2.0.29-generic-pae #46-Ubuntu 26.767515] Call Trace: 26.767525] [<c158f812>] ? printk+0x2d/0x2f 26.767534] [<c158f6e0>] panic+0x5c/0x161 26.767542] [<c10247ef>] mce_panic.part.14+0x13f/0x170 26.767551] [<c1024872>] mce_panic+0x52/0x90 26.767558] [<c1024a18>] mce_reign+0x168/0x170 26.767565] [<c1024bb5>] mce_end+0x105/0x110 26.767572] [<c10252db>] do_machine_check+0x32b/0x4f0 26.767581] [<c1024fb0>] ? mce_log+0x120/0x120 26.767590] [<c15a5e47>] error_code+0x67/0x6c 26.767602] panic occurred, switching back to text console 26.768498] Rebooting in 30 seconds.. For information, I have also tried earlier Arch Linux. I can install it, but when I try to install a window manager (LXDE) again I got similar errors. Fedora also crashes when installing and also Mandriva did not work for me. Therefore I think something deep in the machine might be wrong. But as stated above I can (clean) install 8.04 and also 9.10 can be installed without problems. Also updates for 8.04 can be installed. My machine is dual boot with XP next to it on a different partition. My HW: Memory : 2.0 GiB; Processor 0: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6320 @ 1.86GHz; Processor 1: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6320 @ 1.86GHz; How can I install Ubuntu 12.04? Last option would be to completely format my machine and install everything from scratch, but even I am not sure if that would solve it in the end. Can anybody help me out?

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• Preview Before You Paste with Live Preview in Office 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Do you often find yourself frustrated that content you just copied and pasted didn’t turn out the way you expected? With the new Live Preview in Office 2010, you can preview how copied content will look when it’s pasted even between Office applications. Not every paste preview option will be available in every circumstance. The available options will be based on the applications being used and what content is copied. Copy your content like normal by right-clicking and selecting Copy, pressing Crtl + C, or selecting Copy from the Home tab. Next, select your location to paste the content. Now you can access the Paste Preview buttons either by selecting the Paste dropdown list from the Home tab…   …Or by right-clicking. As you hover your cursor over each of the Paste Options buttons, you will see a preview of what it will look like if you paste using that option. Click the corresponding button when you find the paste option you like. The “Paste” will paste all the content and formatting as you can see below. Values will paste values only, no formatting.   Formatting will paste only the formatting, no values. Hover over Paste Special to reveal any additional paste options. The process is similar in other Office applications. As you can see in the Word document below, Keep Text Only will paste the text, but not the orange color format from the original text.   Even after you’ve pasted, there is still time to change your mind. After you paste content you’ll see a Paste Option button near your content. If you don’t, you can pull it up by pressing the Ctrl key. Note: This is also available after using Ctrl + V to paste. Click to enable the dropdown and select one of the available options.   Using Live Paste Preview between multiple applications is just as easy. If we preview pasting the content from our Word document into PowerPoint by using the Keep Source Formatting option, we’ll see that the outcome looks awful. Selecting the Use Destination Theme will merge the text into the theme of the PowerPoint document and looks a lot better on our slide.   Live Paste Preview is a nice addition to Office 2010 and is sure to save time spent undoing the unexpected consequences of pasting content. Looking for more Office 2010 tips? Check out some of our other Office 2010 posts like how to create a customized tab on the Office 2010 ribbon, and how to use the streamlined printing features in Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Microsoft Word 2007 Documents in Print PreviewPreview Documents Without Opening Them In Word 2007How to See Where a TinyUrl Is Really Linking ToHow To Upload Office 2010 Documents to Web Apps Technical PreviewPreview Links and Images in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor

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• SQL 2005 Transaction Rollback Hung–unresolved deadlock

  - by steveh99999

  Encountered an interesting issue recently with a SQL 2005 sp3 Enterprise Edition system. Every weekend, a full database reindex was being run on this system – normally this took around one and a half hours. Then, one weekend, the job ran for over 17 hours  - and had yet to complete... At this point, DBA cancelled the job. Job status is now cancelled – issue over…   However, cancelling the job had not killed the reindex transaction – DBCC OPENTRAN was still showing the transaction being open. The oldest open transaction in the database was now over 17 hours old.  Consequently, transaction log % used growing dramatically and locks still being held in the database... Further attempts to kill the transaction did nothing. ie we had a transaction which could not be killed. In sysprocesses, it was apparent the SPID was in rollback status, but the spid was not accumulating CPU or IO. Was the SPID stuck ? On examination of the SQL errorlog – shortly after the reindex had started, a whole bunch of deadlock output had been produced by trace flag 1222. Then this :- spid5s      ***Stack Dump being sent to   xxxxxxx\SQLDump0042.txt spid5s      * ******************************************************************************* spid5s      * spid5s      * BEGIN STACK DUMP: spid5s      *   12/05/10 01:04:47 spid 5 spid5s      * spid5s      * Unresolved deadlock spid5s      * spid5s      *   spid5s      * ******************************************************************************* spid5s      * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- spid5s      * Short Stack Dump spid5s      Stack Signature for the dump is 0x000001D7 spid5s      External dump process return code 0x20000001. Unresolved deadlock – don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these before…. A quick call to Microsoft support confirmed the following bug had been hit :- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961479 So, only option to get rid of the hung spid – to restart SQL Server… Fortunately SQL Server restarted without any issues. I was pleasantly surprised to see that recovery on this particular database was fast. However, restarting SQL Server to fix an issue is not something I would normally rush to do... Short term fix – the reindex was changed to use MAXDOP of 1. Longer term fix will be to apply the correct CU, or wait for SQL 2005 sp 4 ?? This should be released any day soon I hope..

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• Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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• To sample or not to sample...

  - by [email protected]

  Ideally, we would know the exact answer to every question. How many people support presidential candidate A vs. B? How many people suffer from H1N1 in a given state? Does this batch of manufactured widgets have any defective parts? Knowing exact answers is expensive in terms of time and money and, in most cases, is impractical if not impossible. Consider asking every person in a region for their candidate preference, testing every person with flu symptoms for H1N1 (assuming every person reported when they had flu symptoms), or destructively testing widgets to determine if they are "good" (leaving no product to sell). Knowing exact answers, fortunately, isn't necessary or even useful in many situations. Understanding the direction of a trend or statistically significant results may be sufficient to answer the underlying question: who is likely to win the election, have we likely reached a critical threshold for flu, or is this batch of widgets good enough to ship? Statistics help us to answer these questions with a certain degree of confidence. This focuses on how we collect data. In data mining, we focus on the use of data, that is data that has already been collected. In some cases, we may have all the data (all purchases made by all customers), in others the data may have been collected using sampling (voters, their demographics and candidate choice). Building data mining models on all of your data can be expensive in terms of time and hardware resources. Consider a company with 40 million customers. Do we need to mine all 40 million customers to get useful data mining models? The quality of models built on all data may be no better than models built on a relatively small sample. Determining how much is a reasonable amount of data involves experimentation. When starting the model building process on large datasets, it is often more efficient to begin with a small sample, perhaps 1000 - 10,000 cases (records) depending on the algorithm, source data, and hardware. This allows you to see quickly what issues might arise with choice of algorithm, algorithm settings, data quality, and need for further data preparation. Instead of waiting for a model on a large dataset to build only to find that the results don't meet expectations, once you are satisfied with the results on the initial sample, you can  take a larger sample to see if model quality improves, and to get a sense of how the algorithm scales to the particular dataset. If model accuracy or quality continues to improve, consider increasing the sample size. Sampling in data mining is also used to produce a held-aside or test dataset for assessing classification and regression model accuracy. Here, we reserve some of the build data (data that includes known target values) to be used for an honest estimate of model error using data the model has not seen before. This sampling transformation is often called a split because the build data is split into two randomly selected sets, often with 60% of the records being used for model building and 40% for testing. Sampling must be performed with care, as it can adversely affect model quality and usability. Even a truly random sample doesn't guarantee that all values are represented in a given attribute. This is particularly troublesome when the attribute with omitted values is the target. A predictive model that has not seen any examples for a particular target value can never predict that target value! For other attributes, values may consist of a single value (a constant attribute) or all unique values (an identifier attribute), each of which may be excluded during mining. Values from categorical predictor attributes that didn't appear in the training data are not used when testing or scoring datasets. In subsequent posts, we'll talk about three sampling techniques using Oracle Database: simple random sampling without replacement, stratified sampling, and simple random sampling with replacement.

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• Validating Petabytes of Data with Regularity and Thoroughness

  - by rickramsey

  by Brian Zents When former Intel CEO Andy Grove said “only the paranoid survive,” he wasn’t necessarily talking about tape storage administrators, but it’s a lesson they’ve learned well. After all, tape storage is the last line of defense to prevent data loss, so tape administrators are extra cautious in making sure their data is secure. Not surprisingly, we are often asked for ways to validate tape media and the files on them. In the past, an administrator could validate the media, but doing so was often tedious or disruptive or both. The debut of the Data Integrity Validation (DIV) and Library Media Validation (LMV) features in the Oracle T10000C drive helped eliminate many of these pains. Also available with the Oracle T10000D drive, these features use hardware-assisted CRC checks that not only ensure the data is written correctly the first time, but also do so much more efficiently. Traditionally, a CRC check takes at least 25 seconds per 4GB file with a 2:1 compression ratio, but the T10000C/D drives can reduce the check to a maximum of nine seconds because the entire check is contained within the drive. No data needs to be sent to a host application. A time savings of at least 64 percent is extremely beneficial over the course of checking an entire 8.5TB T10000D tape. While the DIV and LMV features are better than anything else out there, what storage administrators really need is a way to check petabytes of data with regularity and thoroughness. With the launch of Oracle StorageTek Tape Analytics (STA) 2.0 in April, there is finally a solution that addresses this longstanding need. STA bundles these features into one interface to automate all media validation activities across all Oracle SL3000 and SL8500 tape libraries in an environment. And best of all, the validation process can be associated with the health checks an administrator would be doing already through STA. In fact, STA validates the media based on any of the following policies: Random Selection – Randomly selects media for validation whenever a validation drive in the standalone library or library complex is available. Media Health = Action – Selects media that have had a specified number of successive exchanges resulting in an Exchange Media Health of “Action.” You can specify from one to five exchanges. Media Health = Evaluate – Selects media that have had a specified number of successive exchanges resulting in an Exchange Media Health of “Evaluate.” You can specify from one to five exchanges. Media Health = Monitor – Selects media that have had a specified number of successive exchanges resulting in an Exchange Media Health of “Monitor.” You can specify from one to five exchanges. Extended Period of Non-Use – Selects media that have not had an exchange for a specified number of days. You can specify from 365 to 1,095 days (one to three years). Newly Entered – Selects media that have recently been entered into the library. Bad MIR Detected – Selects media with an exchange resulting in a “Bad MIR Detected” error. A bad media information record (MIR) indicates degraded high-speed access on the media. To avoid disrupting host operations, an administrator designates certain drives for media validation operations. If a host requests a file from media currently being validated, the host’s request takes priority. To ensure that the administrator really knows it is the media that is bad, as opposed to the drive, STA includes drive calibration and qualification features. In addition, validation requests can be re-prioritized or cancelled as needed. To ensure that a specific tape isn’t validated too often, STA prevents a tape from being validated twice within 24 hours via one of the policies described above. A tape can be validated more often if the administrator manually initiates the validation. When the validations are complete, STA reports the results. STA does not report simply a “good” or “bad” status. It also reports if media is even degraded so the administrator can migrate the data before there is a true failure. From that point, the administrators’ paranoia is relieved, as they have the necessary information to make a sound decision about the health of the tapes in their environment. About the Photograph Photograph taken by Rick Ramsey in Death Valley, California, May 2014 - Brian Follow OTN Garage on: Web | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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• wcf http 504: Working on a mystery

  - by James Fleming

  Ok,  So you're here because you've been trying to solve the mystery of why you're getting a 504 error. If you've made it to this lonely corner of the Internet, then the advice you're getting from other bloggers isn't the answer you are after. It wasn't the answer I needed either, so once I did solve my problem, I thought I'd share the answer with you. For starters, if by some miracle, you landed here first you may not already know that the 504 error is NOT coming from IIS or Casini, that response code is coming from Fiddler. HTTP/1.1 504 Fiddler - Receive Failure Content-Type: text/html Connection: close Timestamp: 09:43:05.193 ReadResponse() failed: The server did not return a response for this request.       The take away here is Fiddler won't help you with the diagnosis and any further digging in that direction is a red herring. Assuming you've dug around a bit, you may have arrived at posts which suggest you may be getting the error because you're trying to hump too much data over the wire, and have an urgent need to employ an anti-pattern: due to a special case: http://delphimike.blogspot.com/2010/01/error-504-in-wcfnet-35.html Or perhaps you're experiencing wonky behavior using WCF-CustomIsolated Adapter on Windows Server 2008 64bit environment, in which case the rather fly MVP Dwight Goins' advice is what you need. http://dgoins.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/64bit-wcf-custom-isolated-%E2%80%93-rest-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9C504%E2%80%9D-response/ For me, none of that was helpful. I could perform a get on a single record  http://localhost:8783/Criterion/Skip(0)/Take(1) but I couldn't get more than one record in my collection as in:  http://localhost:8783/Criterion/Skip(0)/Take(2) I didn't have a big payload, or a large number of objects (as you can see by the size of one record below) - - A-1B f5abd850-ec52-401a-8bac-bcea22c74138 .biological/legal mother This item refers to the supervisor’s evaluation of the caseworker’s ability to involve the biological/legal mother in the permanency planning process. 75d8ecb7-91df-475f-aa17-26367aeb8b21 false true Admin account 2010-01-06T17:58:24.88 1.20 764a2333-f445-4793-b54d-1c3084116daa So while I was able to retrieve one record without a hitch (thus the record above) I wasn't able to return multiple records. I confirmed I could get each record individually, (Skip(1)/Take(1))so it stood to reason the problem wasn't with the data at all, so I suspected a serialization error. The first step to resolving this was to enable WCF Tracing. Instructions on how to set it up are here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733025.aspx. The tracing log led me to the solution. The use of type 'Application.Survey.Model.Criterion' as a get-only collection is not supported with NetDataContractSerializer.  Consider marking the type with the CollectionDataContractAttribute attribute or the SerializableAttribute attribute or adding a setter to the property. So I was wrong (but close!). The problem was a deserializing issue in trying to recreate my read only collection. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347850.aspx#Y1455 So looking at my underlying model, I saw I did have a read only collection. Adding a setter was all it took.         public virtual ICollection<string> GoverningResponses         {             get             {                 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(GoverningResponse))                 {                     return GoverningResponse.Split(';');                 }                 else                     return null;             }                  } Hope this helps. If it does, post a comment.

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• Code is not the best way to draw

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It should be quite obvious: drawing requires constant visual feedback. Why is it then that we still draw with code in so many situations? Of course it’s because the low-level APIs always come first, and design tools are built after and on top of those. Existing design tools also don’t typically include complex UI elements such as buttons. When we launched our Touch Display module for Netduino Go!, we naturally built APIs that made it easy to draw on the screen from code, but very soon, we felt the limitations and tedium of drawing in code. In particular, any modification requires a modification of the code, followed by compilation and deployment. When trying to set-up buttons at pixel precision, the process is not optimal. On the other hand, code is irreplaceable as a way to automate repetitive tasks. While tools like Illustrator have ways to repeat graphical elements, they do so in a way that is a little alien and counter-intuitive to my developer mind. From these reflections, I knew that I wanted a design tool that would be structurally code-centric but that would still enable immediate feedback and mouse adjustments. While thinking about the best way to achieve this goal, I saw this fantastic video by Bret Victor: The key to the magic in all these demos is permanent execution of the code being edited. Whenever a parameter is being modified, everything is re-executed immediately so that the impact of the modification is instantaneously visible. If you do this all the time, the code and the result of its execution fuse in the mind of the user into dual representations of a single object. All mental barriers disappear. It’s like magic. The tool I built, Nutshell, is just another implementation of this principle. It manipulates a list of graphical operations on the screen. Each operation has a nice editor, and translates into a bit of code. Any modification to the parameters of the operation will modify the bit of generated code and trigger a re-execution of the whole program. This happens so fast that it feels like the drawing reacts instantaneously to all changes. The order of the operations is also the order in which the code gets executed. So if you want to bring objects to the front, move them down in the list, and up if you want to move them to the back: But where it gets really fun is when you start applying code constructs such as loops to the design tool. The elements that you put inside of a loop can use the loop counter in expressions, enabling crazy scenarios while retaining the real-time edition features. When you’re done building, you can just deploy the code to the device and see it run in its native environment: This works thanks to two code generators. The first code generator is building JavaScript that is executed in the browser to build the canvas view in the web page hosting the tool. The second code generator is building the C# code that will run on the Netduino Go! microcontroller and that will drive the display module. The possibilities are fascinating, even if you don’t care about driving small touch screens from microcontrollers: it is now possible, within a reasonable budget, to build specialized design tools for very vertical applications. Direct feedback is a powerful ally in many domains. Code generation driven by visual designers has become more approachable than ever thanks to extraordinary JavaScript libraries and to the powerful development platform that modern browsers provide. I encourage you to tinker with Nutshell and let it open your eyes to new possibilities that you may not have considered before. It’s open source. And of course, my company, Nwazet, can help you develop your own custom browser-based direct feedback design tools. This is real visual programming…

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• Bind a Wijmo Grid to Salesforce.com Through the Salesforce OData Connector

  - by dataintegration

  This article will explain how to connect to any RSSBus OData Connector with Wijmo's data grid using JSONP. While the example will use the Salesforce Connector, the same process can be followed for any of the RSSBus OData Connectors. Step 1: Download and install both the Salesforce Connector from RSSBus and the Wijmo javascript library. Step 2: Next you will want to configure the Salesforce Connector to connect with your Salesforce account. If you browse to the Help tab in the Salesforce Connector application, there is a link to the Getting Started Guide which will walk you through setting up the Salesforce Connector. Step 3: Once you have successfully configured the Salesforce Connector application, you will want to open a Wijmo sample grid file to edit. This example will use the overview.html grid found in the Samples folder. Step 4: First, we will wrap the jQuery document ready function in a callback function for the JSONP service. In this example, we will wrap this in function called fnCallback which will take a single object args. <script id="scriptInit" type="text/javascript"> function fnCallback(args) { $(document).ready(function () { $("#demo").wijgrid({ ... }); }); }; </script> Step 5: Next, we need to format the columns object in a format that Wijmo's data grid expects. This is done by adding the headerText: element for each column. <script id="scriptInit" type="text/javascript"> function fnCallback(args) { var columns = []; for (var i = 0; i < args.columnnames.length; i++){ var col = { headerText: args.columnnames[i]}; columns.push(col); } $(document).ready(function () { $("#demo").wijgrid({ ... }); }); }; </script> Step 6: Now the wijgrid parameters are ready to be set. In this example, we will set the data input parameter to the args.data object and the columns input parameter to our newly created columns object. The resulting javascript function should look like this: <script id="scriptInit" type="text/javascript"> function fnCallback(args) { var columns = []; for (var i = 0; i < args.columnnames.length; i++){ var col = { headerText: args.columnnames[i]}; columns.push(col); } $(document).ready(function () { $("#demo").wijgrid({ allowSorting: true, allowPaging: true, pageSize: 10, data: args.data, columns: columns }); }); }; </script> Step 7: Finally, we need to add the JSONP reference to our Salesforce Connector's data table. You can find this by clicking on the Settings tab of the Salesforce Connector. Once you have found the JSONP URL, you will need to supply a valid table name that you want to connect with Wijmo. In this example, we will connect to the Lead table. You will also need to add authentication options in this step. In the example we will append the authtoken of the user who has access to the Salesforce Connector using the @authtoken query string parameter. IMPORTANT: This is not secure and will expose the authtoken of the user whose authtoken you supply in this step. There are other ways to secure the user's authtoken, but this example uses a query string parameter for simplicity. <script src="http://localhost:8181/sfconnector/data/conn/Lead.rsd?@jsonp=fnCallback&sql:query=SELECT%20*%20FROM%20Lead&@authtoken=<myAuthToken>" type="text/javascript"></script> Step 8: Now, we are done. If you point your browser to the URL of the sample, you should see your Salesforce.com leads in a Wijmo data grid.

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• Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• How to Watch NCAA March Madness Online

  - by DigitalGeekery

  You’ve filled out your brackets and now you are ready for one of America’s most popular sporting events. But what if you are you stuck at work or away from your TV?  Or your local affiliate is showing a different game? Today we show how to catch all the March Madness online. March Madness on Demand You’ll need a broadband connection, 512 MB RAM or higher, with cookies and Javascript enabled in your browser. March Madness on Demand offers two viewing options, a Standard Player and a High Quality player. The High Quality player is not, unfortunately, high definition. Standard Player Requirements Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X IE 6+ (We also successfully tested it in Firefox, Chrome, & Opera) Adobe Flash Player 9 or higher High Quality Player Requirements 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 or Intel-based Macintosh Mac OS 10.4.8+ (Intel-based) Windows: XP SP2, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, Windows 7 Firefox 1.5+ or IE 6/7/8 Silverlight 3 browser plug-in Watching March Madness on Demand Go to the March Madness on Demand website. (Link below) Check the “Watch in High Quality” section to see if your browser is ready and compatible for the High Quality viewer. If not, you’ll see a message indicating either your browser and system are incompatible… Or that you need to install Silverlight. To install Silverlight, click on the “Get HQ” button and follow the prompts to download and install Silverlight. To launch the player, click the large red “Launch Player” button. At the top of the screen, you’ll see the current and upcoming games. Click on “Watch Now” below to begin watching. At the bottom left, is where you click to watch with the High Quality player. If to many people are watching the High Quality player, you’ll see the following message and have to go back to the Standard Player. At the lower right are volume controls, a “Full Screen” button, and a “Share” button which allows you to share the game you are watching on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps most importantly for those who want to steal a bit of viewing time while at work is the “Boss Button” at the top right. Clicking on the “Boss Button” will open a fake Office document so it may appear at first glance like you’re actually doing legitimate work. To return to the game, click anywhere on the screen with your mouse. You’ll be able to catch every single game of the tournament from the first round all the way through the championship with March Madness on Demand. If your computer and Internet connection can handle it, you can even watch multiple games at the same time by opening March Madness on Demand in multiple browser windows. Watch March Madness online Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Weekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTVWatch NFL Sunday Night Football On Your PCWatch TV On Your PC with FreeZ Online TVGeek Fun: Download Favorite NBC Programs for FreeDitch the RealPlayer Bloat with Real Alternative TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet

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• Getting UPK data into Excel

  - by maria.cozzolino(at)oracle.com

  Did you ever want someone to review your UPK outline outside of the Developer? You can send your outline to an Excel report, which can be distributed through email. Depending on how much additional data you want with your outline, there are two ways you can do this task. Basic data: • You can print a listing of all the items in the outline. • With your outline open, choose File/Print... • Choose the "Save document as" command on the right, and choose Excel (or xlsx). • HINT: If you have not expanded your entire outline, it's faster to use the commands in Developer to expand the entire outline. However, you can expand specific sections by clicking on them in the print preview. • NOTE: If you have the Details view displayed rather than the Player view, you can print all the data that appears in that view. Advanced data: If you desire a more detailed report, you can use the HP Quality Center publishing style, which also creates an Excel file. This style contains a default set of fields for use with Quality Center, but any of the metadata fields can be added to the report, and it can be used for more than just importing into HP Quality Center. To add additional columns to the HP Quality Center publishing style: 1. Make a copy of the publishing style. This process ensures that you have a good copy to revert to if something goes wrong with your customizations, and also allows you to keep your modifications when the software is upgraded. 2. Open the copy of the columnspec.xml file in your favorite XML editor - I use notepad. (This file is located in a language-specific folder in the HP Quality Center publishing style.) 3. Scroll down the columnspec file until you find the column to include. All the metadata fields that can be added to the report are listed in the columnspec file - you just need to tell the system to include the columns. 4. You will see a series of sections like this: 5. Change the value for "col export" to "yes". This will include the column in the Excel file. 6. If desired, change the value for "Play_ModesColHeader" to be whatever name you wish to appear in the Excel column heading. 7. Save the columnspec file. 8. Save the publishing style package. Now, when you publish for HP Quality Center, you will see your newly added columns. You can refer to the section on Customizing HP Quality Center Output in the Content Deployment Guide for additional customization details. Happy customization! I'd be interested in hearing what other uses you have for Excel reporting. Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy New Year! ~~Maria Cozzolino, Manager of Software Requirements and UI

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• Extend Your Applications Your Way: Oracle OpenWorld Live Poll Results

  - by Applications User Experience

  Lydia Naylor, Oracle Applications User Experience Manager At OpenWorld 2012, I attended one of our team’s very exciting sessions: “Extend Your Applications, Your Way”. It was clear that customers were engaged by the topics presented. Not only did we see many heads enthusiastically nodding in agreement during the presentation, and witness a large crowd surround our speakers Killian Evers, Kristin Desmond and Greg Nerpouni afterwards, but we can prove it…with data! Figure 1. Killian Evers, Kristin Desmond, and Greg Nerpouni of Oracle at the OOW 2012 session. At the beginning of our OOW 2012 journey, Greg Nerpouni, Fusion HCM Principal Product Manager, told me he really wanted to get feedback from the audience on our extensibility direction. Initially, we were thinking of doing a group activity at the OOW UX labs events that we hold every year, but Greg was adamant- he wanted “real-time” feedback. So, after a little tinkering, we came up with a way to use an online survey tool, a simple QR code (Quick Response code: a matrix barcode that can include information like URLs and can be read by mobile device cameras), and the audience’s mobile devices to do just that. Figure 2. Actual QR Code for survey Prior to the session, we developed a short survey in Vovici (an online survey tool), with questions to gather feedback on certain points in the presentation, as well as demographic data from our participants. We used Vovici’s feature to generate a mobile HTML version of the survey. At the session, attendees accessed the survey by simply scanning a QR code or typing in a TinyURL (a shorthand web address that is easily accessible through mobile devices). Killian, Kristin and Greg paused at certain points during the session and asked participants to answer a few survey questions about what they just presented. Figure 3. Session survey deployed on a mobile phone The nice thing about Vovici’s survey tool is that you can see the data real-time as participants are responding to questions - so we knew during the session that not only was our direction on track but we were hitting the mark and fulfilling Greg’s request. We planned on showing the live polling results to the audience at the end of the presentation but it ran just a little over time, and we were gently nudged out of the room by the session attendants. We’ve included a quick summary below and this link to the full results for your enjoyment. Figure 4. Most important extensions to Fusion Applications So what did participants think of our direction for extensibility? A total of 94% agreed that it was an improvement upon their current process. The vast majority, 80%, concurred that the extensibility model accounts for the major roles involved: end user, business systems analyst and programmer. Attendees suggested a few supporting roles such as systems administrator, data architect and integrator. Customers and partners in the audience verified that Oracle‘s Fusion Composers allow them to make changes in the most common areas they need to: user interface, business processes, reporting and analytics. Integrations were also suggested. All top 10 things customers can do on a page rated highly in importance, with all but two getting an average rating above 4.4 on a 5 point scale. The kinds of layout changes our composers allow customers to make align well with customers’ needs. The most common were adding columns to a table (94%) and resizing regions and drag and drop content (both selected by 88% of participants). We want to thank the attendees of the session for allowing us another great opportunity to gather valuable feedback from our customers! If you didn’t have a chance to attend the session, we will provide a link to the OOW presentation when it becomes available.

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• Improving performance of a particle system (OpenGL ES)

  - by Jason

  I'm in the process of implementing a simple particle system for a 2D mobile game (using OpenGL ES 2.0). It's working, but it's pretty slow. I start getting frame rate battering after about 400 particles, which I think is pretty low. Here's a summary of my approach: I start with point sprites (GL_POINTS) rendered in a batch just using a native float buffer (I'm in Java-land on Android, so that translates as a java.nio.FloatBuffer). On GL context init, the following are set: GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); GLES20.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_CULL_FACE); GLES20.glDisable(GLES20.GL_DEPTH_TEST); Each draw frame sets the following: GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_BLEND); GLES20.glBlendFunc(GLES20.GL_ONE, GLES20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); And I bind a single texture: GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureHandle); GLES20.glUniform1i(mUniformTextureHandle, 0); Which is just a simple circle with some blur (and hence some transparency) http://cl.ly/image/0K2V2p2L1H2x Then there are a bunch of glVertexAttribPointer calls: mBuffer.position(position); mGlEs20.glVertexAttribPointer(mAttributeRGBHandle, valsPerRGB, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, stride, mBuffer); ...4 more of these Then I'm drawing: GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mUniformProjectionMatrixHandle, 1, false, Camera.mProjectionMatrix, 0); GLES20.glDrawArrays(GLES20.GL_POINTS, 0, drawCalls); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); My vertex shader does have some computation in it, but given that they're point sprites (with only 2 coordinate values) I'm not sure this is the problem: #ifdef GL_ES // Set the default precision to low. precision lowp float; #endif uniform mat4 u_ProjectionMatrix; attribute vec4 a_Position; attribute float a_PointSize; attribute vec3 a_RGB; attribute float a_Alpha; attribute float a_Burn; varying vec4 v_Color; void main() { vec3 v_FGC = a_RGB * a_Alpha; v_Color = vec4(v_FGC.x, v_FGC.y, v_FGC.z, a_Alpha * (1.0 - a_Burn)); gl_PointSize = a_PointSize; gl_Position = u_ProjectionMatrix * a_Position; } My fragment shader couldn't really be simpler: #ifdef GL_ES // Set the default precision to low. precision lowp float; #endif uniform sampler2D u_Texture; varying vec4 v_Color; void main() { gl_FragColor = texture2D(u_Texture, gl_PointCoord) * v_Color; } That's about it. I had read that transparent pixels in point sprites can cause issues, but surely not at only 400 points? I'm running on a fairly new device (12 month old Galaxy Nexus). My question is less about my approach (although I'm open to suggestion) but more about whether there are any specific OpenGL "no no's" that have leaked into my code. I'm sure there's GL master out there facepalming right now... I'd love to hear any critique.

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• SQL SERVER – Another lesser known feature of SQL Server Management Studio 2012 – Guest Post by Balmukund Lakhani

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself. In one of my previous guest blog on SQL Authority, I wrote about “Additional Connection Parameter” tab of login screen in SQL Server Management Studio (a.k.a. SSMS). On the similar lines, this blog is going to show little less known new feature of login main screen (“Connect to Server”) of SSMS 2012. You might have seen below screen countless times and you might wonder what is there is blog about in this simple screen. Well, continue reading and you would get the answer. Many times, DBA have to login to production server from non-regular machine, may be a developer’s workstation. Once you login to SQL, do your work and close the management studio. Do you know that your server name is saved in management studio? Of course, very useful feature because you may not like to type server name/IP address every time. Whatever servers you have connected, it would be stored by management studio. But sometime, it’s annoying! What you would do if you want SQL Server Management Studio to forget “all” the servers listed in drop down of Server name? To do that, you need to know how and where it’s stored. You can use one of my favorite tool from sysinternals called Process Monitor (also known as ProcMon) and easily figure out that this is stored in a file under your windows user profile. Below is the file in SQL 2008 R2 Management Studio. %appdata%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell\SqlStudio.bin For SQL Server 2012, here is what we can see in ProcMon So, the path is %appdata%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Shell\SqlStudio.bin So far, you might wonder, where is the new feature? I have been asked by many users to delete entries from SSMS “Connect to Server” server name list. Well, unofficially, you can delete the file directly which we found via ProcMon. Note that delete file to get rid of server list is not officially supported by Microsoft. Better way to achieve this is provided in SSMS 2012. To delete the servers from the list, highlight the name we want to delete (via keyboard or mouse) and then press delete key via keyboard. We can’t be multi-select and has to be done one by one. We can delete as many entries we want. I have delete few from first screenshot taken and here is the modified version. This is not available in SQL 2008 R2 and its previous version. This came from feedback given to SQL Server Product group. Hope you have learned something new today! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Tuning Red Gate: #3 of Lots

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I'm drilling down into the metrics about SQL Server itself available to me in the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor to see what's up with our two problematic servers. In the previous post I'd noticed that rg-sql01 had quite a few CPU spikes. So one of the first things I want to check there is how much CPU is getting used by SQL Server itself. It's possible we're looking at some other process using up all the CPU Nope, It's SQL Server. I compared this to the rg-sql02 server: You can see that there is a more, consistently low set of CPU counters there. I clearly need to look at rg-sql01 and capture more specific data around the queries running on it to identify which ones are causing these CPU spikes. I always like to look at the Batch Requests/sec on a server, not because it's an indication of a problem, but because it gives you some idea of the load. Just how much is this server getting hit? Here are rg-sql01 and rg-sql02: Of the two, clearly rg-sql01 has a lot of activity. Remember though, that's all this is a measure of, activity. It doesn't suggest anything other than what it says, the number of requests coming in. But it's the kind of thing you want to know in order to understand how the system is used. Are you seeing a correlation between the number of requests and the CPU usage, or a reverse correlation, the number of requests drops as the CPU spikes? See, it's useful. Some of the details you can look at are Compilations/sec, Compilations/Batch and Recompilations/sec. These give you some idea of how the cache is getting used within the system. None of these showed anything interesting on either server. One metric that I like (even though I know it can be controversial) is the Page Life Expectancy. On the average server I expect see a series of mountains as the PLE climbs then drops due to a data load or something along those lines. That's not the case here: Those spikes back in January suggest that the servers weren't really being used much. The PLE on the rg-sql01 seems to be somewhat consistent growing to 3 hours or so then dropping, but the rg-sql02 PLE looks like it might be all over the map. Instead of continuing to look at this high level gathering data view, I'm going to drill down on rg-sql02 and see what it's done for the last week: And now we begin to see where we might have an issue. Memory on this system is getting flushed every 1/2 hour or so. I'm going to check another metric, scans: Whoa! I'm going back to the system real quick to look at some disk information again for rg-sql02. Here is the average disk queue length on the server: and the transfers Right, I think I have a guess as to what's up here. We're seeing memory get flushed constantly and we're seeing lots of scans. The disks are queuing, especially that F drive, and there are lots of requests that correspond to the scans and the memory flushes. In short, we've got queries that are scanning the data, a lot, so we either have bad queries or bad indexes. I'm going back to the server overview for rg-sql02 and check the Top 10 expensive queries. I'm modifying it to show me the last 3 days and the totals, so I'm not looking at some maintenance routine that ran 10 minutes ago and is skewing the results: OK. I need to look into these queries that are getting executed this much. They're generating a lot of reads, but which queries are generating the most reads: Ow, all still going against the same database. This is where I'm going to temporarily leave SQL Monitor. What I want to do is connect up to the server, validate that the Warehouse database is using the F:\ drive (which I'll put money down it is) and then start seeing what's up with these queries. Part 1 of the Series Part 2 of the Series

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• Using the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In From Excel Macros (VBA)

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In makes it easy to retrieve and update data from Salesforce from within Microsoft Excel. In addition to the built-in wizards that make data manipulation possible without code, the full functionality of the RSSBus Excel Add-Ins is available programmatically with Excel Macros (VBA) and Excel Functions. This article shows how to write an Excel macro that can be used to perform bulk inserts into Salesforce. Although this article uses the Salesforce Excel Add-In as an example, the same process can be applied to any of the Excel Add-Ins available on our website. Step 1: Download and install the RSSBus Excel Add-In available on our website. Step 2: Open Excel and create place holder cells for the connection details that are needed from the macro. In this article, a spreadsheet will be created for batch inserts, and these cells will store the connection details, and will be used to report the job Id, the batch Id, and the batch status. Step 3: Switch to the Developer tab in Excel. Add a new button on the spreadsheet, and create a new macro associated with it. This macro will contain the code needed to insert a batch of rows into Salesforce. Step 4: Add a reference to the Excel Add-In by selecting Tools --> References --> RSSBus Excel Add-In. The macro functions of the Excel Add-In will be available once the reference has been added. The following code shows how to call a Stored Procedure. In this example, a job is created to insert Leads by calling the CreateJob stored procedure. CreateJob returns a jobId that can be used to upload a large number of Leads in one transaction. Note the use of cells B1, B2, B3, and B4 that were created in Step 2 to read the connection settings from the Excel SpreadSheet and to write out the status of the procedure. methodName = "CreateJob" module.SetProviderName ("Salesforce") nameArray = Array("ObjectName", "Action", "ConcurrencyMode") valueArray = Array("Lead", "insert", "Serial") user = Range("B1").value pass = Range("B2").value atoken = Range("B3").value If (Not user = "" And Not pass = "" And Not atoken = "") Then module.SetConnectionString ("User=" + user + ";Password=" + pass + ";Access Token=" + atoken + ";") If module.CallSP(methodName, nameArray, valueArray) Then Dim ColumnCount As Integer ColumnCount = module.GetColumnCount Dim idIndex As Integer For Count = 0 To ColumnCount - 1 Dim colName As String colName = module.GetColumnName(Count) If module.GetColumnName(Count) = "id" Then idIndex = Count End If Next While (Not module.EOF) Range("B4").value = module.GetValue(idIndex) module.MoveNext Wend Else MsgBox "The CreateJob query failed." End If Exit Sub Else MsgBox "Please specify the connection details." Exit Sub End If Error: MsgBox "ERROR: " & Err.Description Step 5: Add the code to your macro. If you use the code above, you can check the results at Salesforce.com. They can be seen at Administration Setup -> Monitoring -> Bulk Data Load Jobs. Download the attached sample file for a more complete demo. Distributing an Excel File With Macros An Excel file with macros is saved using the .xlms extension. The code for the macro remains in the Excel file, and you can distribute your Excel file to any machine where the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In is already installed. Macro Sample File Please download the fully functional sample excel file that includes the code referenced here. You will also need the RSSBus Excel Add-In to make the connection. You can download a free trial here. Note: You may get an error message stating: "Can't find project or library." in Excel 2007, since this example is made using Excel 2010. To resolve this, navigate to Tools -> References and uncheck the "MISSING: RSSBus Excel Add-In", then scroll down and check the "RSSBus Excel Add-In" listed below it.

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• GCC 4.2.1 Compiling on Cygwin(Win7 64bit) for iPhone [closed]

  - by Kenneth Noland

  Hey This is going to take a long while to explain, but the short version is that I am currently attempting to compile the LLVM GCC frontend for ARMv7 to compile apps for the Cortex-A8(iPhone 3GS). I'm running into an error from LD when compiling libgcc(part of the gcc compilation process) that has been driving me mad! The command is this: /usr/llvm-gcc-4.2-2.8.source/build/./gcc/xgcc \ -B/usr/llvm-gcc-4.2_2.8.source/build/./gcc \ -B/usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/bin \ -B/usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib \ -isystem /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/include \ -isystem /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/sys-include \ -O2 -g -W -Wall -Wwrite-strings -wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wold-style-definition -fno-inline -dynamiclib -nodefaultlibs -W1,-dead_strip \ -marm \ -install_name /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib \ -single_module -o ./libgcc_s.1.dylib.tmp \ -W1,-exported_symbols_list,libgcc/./libgcc.map -compatibility_version 1 -current_version 1.0 -DIN_GCC -DCROSS_DIRECTORY_STRUCTURE -DHAVE_GTHR_DEFAULT -DIN_LIBGCC2 -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -Dinhibit_libc \ ... long list of .o files ... \ -lc And the result is typically a lot of undefined references to malloc, free, exit, etc. which typically indicate that libc is not getting compiled in. After going through the list of errors that ld is throwing, I see at the top that it is attempting to pull in /usr/lib/libc.a and complains that it is not the correct platform. Okay, that makes sense, so I spent 5 minutes on google and found an answer. Turns out that if I copy the libSystem.dylib and rename it to libc.dylib, that should solve the problem, but it doesn't. I couldn't find a copy of that file on my phone, so I pulled it directly from the SDK. I then get this strange error: ld64: in /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib/libc.dylib, can't re-map file, errno=22 At this point, I did everything I could think of. I grabbed a fresh copy of my /usr/lib folder from my iphone and confirmed that libSystem.dylib(and libSystem.B.dylib) wasn't there. I unpacked the raw .ipsw package for iOS 4.2.1 and once again, I could not find a copy of libSystem.dylib there either. I unpacked the iPhoneSDK and MacOS SDK and I managed to find a copy of it in both, but that error just kept persisting. I copied libSystem.dylib, libSystem.B.dylib, tried all sorts of combinations of renaming to libc.dylib and still nothing but errors. I can't find a way to get it to recognize the file and link against it. I also tried linking against the libc.a located in the iphone SDK and that didn't work either. I checked what ./xgcc was firing off, and it was my freshly built copy of arm-apple-darwin-ld64 which should be fine. A little bit of background here. I built LLVM+Clang 2.8 with no errors, and I rebuilt the ODCCTools with some light modifications to get it to compile on Cygwin(I'll post my changes in a patch along with a tutorial if I can get this to work). I also grabbed the iphone-dev "includes" and "csu" project and those completed successfully, although there really is no point to them since I can't get it to link against crt0.a. I'm running out of ideas here. Can anyone help me out on this?

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• SOA Community Newsletter June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear SOA partner community member Thanks for showing us your interest to rerun the Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! After knowing your suggestions we are happy to announce the 3rd edition of our advanced Fusion Middleware training. The camps will take place from August 26th - 30th 2013 in Lisbon Portugal. Topics will include Adaptive Case Management (ACM) as part of BPM Suite, b2b, Advanced SOA and SOA Governance. Please make sure you plan and book your seat in advance - (Booking is on the basis of first come first seat!). Thanks for all your efforts to become certified and Specialized. For all the experts who achieved the SOA Suite 11g Essentials or BPM Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist, you can download a logo for your blog or business card at the Competence Center. For all the companies who achieved a SOA or BPM specialization you can request a nice Plaques for your office. As part of our Industrial SOA article services we published “Canonizing a Language for Architecture” in the Service Technology Magazine and on Oracle Technology Network. If you write books or a blog - make sure you share it with us! Cloud Computing is the hottest topic in IT, specially as an architect you should be aware of the concepts and technology, therefore I highly recommend you Thomas Erl’s latest book named “Cloud Computing”. In the BPM space, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is the hottest topic, with BPM PS6 the backend ACM functionality and an ACM sample application are available. You can even combine this hype with Customer Experience. The BPM section in this newsletter reflects the high importance of the topic and includes BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle,BPM Resource Kit, Functional Testing, Introduction to Web Forms, Customized Workspace Application and Instance Patching Demo. B2B also become more and more popular in the Oracle SOA Suite. If you could not attend the training organized in the month May, we offer you an additional B2B training as a part of the Summer Camps or you can download the B2B training material from our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). Thanks to all for sharing the valuable SOA content with our community! Special thanks to ec4u for the new reference of SOA Suite and AIA Foundation Pack at a Swiss insurance company. It is time to submit a SOA and BPM  reference request today! In this edition of the newsletter you will see Guido and Ronald's second part of OSB article series and Kathiravan Udayakumar's published an exclusive article on SOA Suite best practice. If you want to submit your content for the next edition of the Newsletter then please feel free to submit it to myself. The A-Team is an excellent contributor to the best practice - make sure you visit the new A-Team page and read their articles such as Getting to know Maven. Also on the SOA side, we have published many new articles from the community Oracle SOA Suite for the Busy IT Professional by Frank Munz, SOA Suite Knowledge - Polyglot Service Implementation with Groovy by Alexander Suchier, QA82 Analyzer - Automated Quality Assurance for Oracle SOA Suite Projects, Verifying the Target by Anthony Reynolds and a new book called Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation book by Luis Augusto Weir. Two new SOA on-demand training courses NEW - Oracle Business Rules Self-Study Course & Introduction Human Workflow online course are available now! Make use of the Summer Time and get trained - hope to see you in Lisbon for the Summer Camps! Jürgen Kress Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsJune2013 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress,SOA,BPM

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Mobile Computing

  - by Clint Edmonson

  A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications. Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet connected smartphone. Nothing is more available, useful, or personal than our smartphones. The current generation of cloud connected mobile computing mashups allow our mobilized workforces to receive, process, and react to information from disparate sources faster than ever before. Drivers Integration Reach Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of a prototypical mobile computing solution using Windows Azure: Ingredients Web Role – with the phone running a dedicated client application, the web role is responsible for serving up backend web services that implement the solution’s core connected functionality. Database – used to store core operational and workflow data for the solution’s web services. Access Control – this service is used to authenticate and manage users identity, roles, and groups, possibly in conjunction with 3rd identity providers such as Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. Worker Role – this role is used to handle the orchestration of long-running, complex, asynchronous operations. While much of the integration and interaction with other services can be handled directly by the mobile client application, it’s possible that the backend may need to integrate with 3rd party services as well. Offloading this work to a worker role better distributes computing resources and keeps the web roles focused on direct client interaction. Queues – these provide reliable, persistent messaging between applications and processes. They are an absolute necessity once asynchronous processing is involved. Queues facilitate the flow of distributed events and allow a solution to send push notifications back to mobile devices at appropriate times. Training & Resources These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and resources where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS The Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to access Windows Azure storage services from native iOS applications. The toolkit can be used for both iPhone and iPad applications, developed using Objective-C and XCode. Windows Azure Toolkit for Android The Windows Azure Toolkit for Android is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to work with Windows Azure from native Android applications. The toolkit can be used for native Android applications developed using Eclipse and the Android SDK. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Failure Sucks, But Does It Have To?

  - by steve.diamond

  Hey Folks--It's "elephant in the room" time. Imagine a representative from a CRM VENDOR discussing CRM FAILURES. Well. I recently saw this blog post from Michael Krigsman on "six ways CRM projects go wrong." Now, I know this may come off defensive, but my comments apply to ALL CRM vendors, not just Oracle. As I perused the list, I couldn't find any failures related to technology. They all seemed related to people or process. Now, this isn't about finger pointing, or impugning customers. I love customers! And when they fail, WE fail. Although I sit in the cheap seats, i.e., I haven't funded any multi-million dollar CRM initiatives lately, I kept wondering how to convert the perception of failure as something that ends and is never to be mentioned again (see Michael's reason #4), to something that one learns from and builds upon. So to continue my tradition of speaking in platitudes, let me propose the following three tenets: 1) Try and get ahead of your failures while they're very very small. 2) Immediately assess what you can learn from those failures. 3) With more than 15 years of CRM deployments, seek out those vendors that have a track record both in learning from "misses" and in supporting MANY THOUSANDS of CRM successes at companies of all types and sizes. Now let me digress briefly with an unpleasant (for me, anyway) analogy. I really don't like flying. Call it 'fear of dying' or 'fear of no control.' Whatever! I've spoken with quite a few commercial pilots over the years, and they reassure me that there are multiple failures on most every flight. We as passengers just don't know about them. Most of them are too miniscule to make a difference, and most of them are "caught" before they become LARGER failures. It's typically the mid-sized to colossal failures we hear about, and a significant percentage of those are due to human error. What's the point? I'd propose that organizations consider the topic of FAILURE in five grades. On one end, FAILURE Grade 1 is a minor/miniscule failure. On the other end, FAILURE Grade 5 is a colossal failure A Grade 1 CRM FAILURE could be that a particular interim milestone was missed. Why? What can we learn from that? How can we prevent that from happening as we proceed through the project? Individual organizations will need to define their own Grade 2 and Grade 3 failures. The opportunity is to keep those Grade 3 failures from escalating any further. Because honestly, a GRADE 5 failure may not be recoverable. It could result in a project being pulled, countless amounts of hours and dollars lost, and jobs lost. We don't want to go there. In closing, I want to thank Michael for opening my eyes up to the world of "color," versus thinking of failure as both "black and white" and a dead end road that organizations can't learn from and avoid discussing like the plague.

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• Oracle Announces Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity 9.4

  - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Today's global insurers require the ability to provide higher levels of service and quickly bring to market life insurance and annuity products that not only help them stand out from the competition, but also stay current with local legislation. To succeed, they require agile and flexible core systems that enable them to meet the unique localization requirements of the markets in which they operate, whether in North America, Asia Pacific or the Pan-European Region. The release of Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity 9.4, announced today, helps insurers meet this need with expanded international market capabilities that enable them to reduce risk and profitably compete wherever their business takes them. It offers expanded multi-language along with unit-linked product and fund processing capabilities that enable regional and global insurers to rapidly configure and deliver localized products – along with providing better service for end users through a single policy admin solution. Key enhancements include: Kanji/Kana language support, pre-defined content, and imperial date processing for the Japanese market New localization flexibility for configuring and managing international mailing addresses along with regional variations for client information Enhanced capability to calculate unit-linked pricing and valuation, in addition to market-based processing and pre-configured unit linked content Expanded role-based security and masking capability to further protect sensitive customer data Enhanced capability to restrict processing specified activities based on time of day and user role, reducing exposure to market timing risks Further capability to eliminate duplicate client records, helping to reduce underwriting risks and enhance servicing through a single view of the client "The ability to leverage a single, rules-driven policy administration system for multiple global operation centers can help insurers realize significant improvements in speed to market, customer service, compliance with regional regulations, and consolidation efforts,” noted Celent's Craig Weber, senior vice president, Insurance. “We believe such initiatives are necessary to help the industry address service and distribution imperatives." Helping our customers meet these mission-critical business imperatives is a key objective for Oracle Insurance. Active, ongoing dialogue with our customers is an important part of the process to help understand how our solutions are and can continue to help them achieve success in the marketplace. I had the opportunity to meet with several of our insurance customers at the Oracle Insurance Policy Administration Client Advisory Board meeting last week in Philadelphia, Penn. (View photos on the Oracle Insurance Facebook page.)   It was a great forum for Oracle Insurance and our clients. Discussion centered on the latest business and IT trends, with opportunities to learn more about the latest release of Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity and other Oracle Insurance solutions such as data warehousing / business intelligence, while exchanging best practices for product innovation and servicing customers and sales channels. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance's life and annuities solutions.

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• SQLAuthority News – Book Signing Event – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log

  - by pinaldave

  I have been dreaming of writing book for really long time, and I finally got the chance – in fact, two chances!  I recently wrote two books: SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros: Programming and Development for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 [Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle] and SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros: SQL Performance Tuning Techniques Using Wait Statistics, Types & Queues [Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle].  I had a lot of fun writing these two books, even though sometimes I had to sacrifice some family time and time for other personal development to write the books. The good side of writing book is that when the efforts put in writing books are recognize by books readers and kind organizations like expressor studio. Book Signing Event Book writing is a complex process.  Even after you spend months, maybe years, writing the material you still have to go through the editing and fact checking processes.  And, once the book is out there, there is no way to take back all the copies to change mistakes or add something you forgot.  Most of the time it is a one-way street. Book Signing Event Just like every author, I had a dream that after the books were written, they would be loved by people and gain acceptance by an audience. My first book, SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros: Programming and Development for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, is extremely popular because it helps lots of people learn various fundamental topics. My second book covers beginning to learn SQL Server Wait Stats, which is a relatively new subject. This book has had very good acceptance in the community. Book Signing Event Helping my community is my primary focus, so I was happy to see this year’s SQLPASS tag line: ‘This is a Community.‘ At the event, the expressor studio guys came up with a very novel idea. They had previously used my books and they had found them very useful. They got 100 copies of the book and decided to give it away to community folks. They invited me and my co-author Rick Morelan to hold a book signing event. We did a book signing on Thursday between 1 pm and 2 pm. Book Signing Event This event was one of the best events for me. This was my first book signing event outside of India. I reached the book signing location around 20 minutes before the scheduled time and what I saw was a big line for the book signing event. I felt very honored looking at the crowd and all the people around the event location. I felt very humbled when I saw some of my very close friends standing in the line to get my signature. It was really heartwarming to see so many enthusiasts waiting for more than an hour to get my signature. While standing in line I had the chance to have a conversation with every single person who showed up for the signature. I made sure that I repeated every single name and wrote it in every book with my signature. There is saying that if we write a name once we will remember it forever. I want to remember all of you who saw me at the book signing. Your comments were wonderful, your feedback was amazing and you were all very supportive. Book Signing Event I have made a note of every conversation I had with all of you when I was signing the books. Once again, I just want to express my thanks for coming to my book signing event. The whole experience was very humbling. On the top of it, I want to thank the expressor studio people who made it possible, who organized the whole signing event. I am so thankful to them for facilitating the whole experience, which is going to be hard to beat by any future experience. My books Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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