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• Developer – Cross-Platform: Fact or Fiction?

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a guest blog post by Jeff McVeigh. Jeff McVeigh is the general manager of Performance Client and Visual Computing within Intel’s Developer Products Division. His team is responsible for the development and delivery of leading software products for performance-centric application developers spanning Android*, Windows*, and OS* X operating systems. During his 17-year career at Intel, Jeff has held various technical and management positions in the fields of media, graphics, and validation. He also served as the technical assistant to Intel’s CTO. He holds 20 patents and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s not a homogenous world. We all know it. I have a Windows* desktop, a MacBook Air*, an Android phone, and my kids are 100% Apple. We used to have 2.5 kids, now we have 2.5 devices. And we all agree that diversity is great, unless you’re a developer trying to prioritize the limited hours in the day. Then it’s a series of trade-offs. Do we become brand loyalists for Google or Apple or Microsoft? Do we specialize on phones and tablets or still consider the 300M+ PC shipments a year when we make our decisions on where to spend our time and resources? We weigh the platform options, monetization opportunities, APIs, and distribution models. Too often, I see developers choose one platform, or write to the lowest common denominator, which limits their reach and market success. But who wants to be ?me too”? Cross-platform coding is possible in some environments, for some applications, for some level of innovation—but it’s not all-inclusive, yet. There are some tricks of the trade to develop cross-platform, including using languages and environments that ?run everywhere.” HTML5 is today’s answer for web-enabled platforms. However, it’s not a panacea, especially if your app requires the ultimate performance or native UI look and feel. There are other cross-platform frameworks that address the presentation layer of your application. But for those apps that have a preponderance of native code (e.g., highly-tuned C/C++ loops), there aren’t tons of solutions today to help with code reuse across these platforms using consistent tools and libraries. As we move forward with interim solutions, they’ll improve and become more robust, based, in no small part, on our input. What’s your answer to the cross-platform challenge? Are you fully invested in HTML5 now? What are your barriers? What’s your vision to navigate the cross-platform landscape?  Here is the link where you can head next and learn more about how to answer the questions I have asked: https://software.intel.com/en-us Republished with permission from here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Intel

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• Development-led security vs administration-led security in a software product?

  - by haylem

  There are cases where you have the opportunity, as a developer, to enforce stricter security features and protections on a software, though they could very well be managed at an environmental level (ie, the operating system would take care of it). Where would you say you draw the line, and what elements do you factor in your decision? Concrete Examples User Management is the OS's responsibility Not exactly meant as a security feature, but in a similar case Google Chrome used to not allow separate profiles. The invoked reason (though it now supports multiple profiles for a same OS user) used to be that user management was the operating system's responsibility. Disabling Web-Form Fields A recurrent request I see addressed online is to have auto-completion be disabled on form fields. Auto-completion didn't exist in old browsers, and was a welcome feature at the time it was introduced for people who needed to fill in forms often. But it also brought in some security concerns, and so some browsers started to implement, on top of the (obviously needed) setting in their own preference/customization panel, an autocomplete attribute for form or input fields. And this has now been introduced into the upcoming HTML5 standard. For browsers that do not listen to this attribute, strange hacks* are offered, like generating unique IDs and names for fields to avoid them from being suggested in future forms (which comes with another herd of issues, like polluting your local auto-fill cache and not preventing a password from being stored in it, but instead probably duplicating its occurences). In this particular case, and others, I'd argue that this is a user setting and that it's the user's desire and the user's responsibility to enable or disable auto-fill (by disabling the feature altogether). And if it is based on an internal policy and security requirement in a corporate environment, then substitute the user for the administrator in the above. I assume it could be counter-argued that the user may want to access non-critical applications (or sites) with this handy feature enabled, and critical applications with this feature disabled. But then I'd think that's what security zones are for (in some browsers), or the sign that you need a more secure (and dedicated) environment / account to use these applications. * I obviously don't deny the ingeniosity of the people who were forced to find workarounds, just the necessity of said workarounds. Questions That was a tad long-winded, so I guess my questions are: Would you in general consider it to be the application's (hence, the developer's) responsiblity? Where do you draw the line, if not in the "general" case?

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• What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

  - by Daniel Moth

  Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Configuring Touchpad Multi-Tap on Ubuntu 11.10

  - by nunos

  I am having a hard time configuring my notebook's touchpad. I can do everything I can in Windows with the exception of three-finger tap, which doesn't work, and the action of two-finger tap which is giving me the equivalent to a right-mouse click, when I wanted a middle-mouse click. I read on a forum to use this as a guide. The problem is that I can't even find the configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf. I tried running pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics but I don't have the pacman program installed. When I try to install it by sudo apt-get install I get a pacman game instead! I know the guide is for archlinux, so maybe that's why it doesn't work with me. I am running Ubuntu 11.10 on an Asus N82JV. Any help on this is appreciated. Here's the output of xinput list: nuno@mozart:~$ xinput list ? Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ? ? Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=12 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=13 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=16 [slave pointer (2)] ? Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)] ? Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Sleep Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)] ? USB2.0 2.0M UVC WebCam id=10 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=11 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Asus Laptop extra buttons id=14 [slave keyboard (3)] ? AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=15 [slave keyboard (3)]

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• How do I configure sound with PulseAudio and Multiseat?

  - by Anthony

  In the spirit of full disclosure, i just posted this question to the ubuntu forums, but i figure more heads working on it couldn't hurt. I have a multi-seat setup working quite well. Hot plugging input devices works as expected and such. The only issue I am still not able to resolve is getting the audio for each seat. Here is a summary of my attempts at getting audio to work: Make ~/.pulse/default.pa dynamically configured based on which $DISPLAY the user logs in at. See this pastebin for the details. Load pulseaudio as a system-wide instance. Couldn't get this to work. None of the audio hardware was accessible to the users. Use udev rules to mark seats in ConsoleKit. Following udev guidelines found here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat I didn't think this would work, although it was "guaranteed" to work by someone in irc.freenode #pulseaudio None of those attempts yielded success, which is why I now turn to the community for help. It is quite possible that the suggested methods work and I just messed some aspect of it up, idk. This is the last piece of the puzzle which is needed before I can go and update the MultiseatX page to include instructions for Ubuntu 12.04. My understandings on the situation: Access to pulseaudio is restricted to the active session as marked by ConsoleKit (something about an ACL). CK can only mark one session as active at a time. This simple little fact of life leads me to believe that the solution should involve pulseaudio being run as a system-wide instance. Each user should connect to the pulse server and be limited to a subset of all the hardware. Maybe each user connects to the pulse server via localhost, idk. I do know that regardless of my attempts and their failed results, I was always able to use sudo aplay -D plughw:0,0 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav to play something to any of the hardware. I'm grasping at straws and am now down to the last few hairs i can pull out of my head. Please, help me figure this out so we can share the wealth. Any additional information needed will be provided at your request.

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• HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration.

  - by darrenm

  Since we released hardware crypto acceleration for SPARC T4 and Intel AES-NI support we have had a common question come up: 'How do I test without the hardware crypto acceleration?'. Initially this came up just for development use so developers can do unit testing on a machine that has hardware offload but still cover the code paths for a machine that doesn't (our integration and release testing would run on all supported types of hardware anyway).  I've also seen it asked in a customer context too so that we can show that there is a performance gain from the hardware crypto acceleration, (not just the fact that SPARC T4 much faster performing processor than T3) and measure what it is for their application. With SPARC T2/T3 we could easily disable the hardware crypto offload by running 'cryptoadm disable provider=n2cp/0'.  We can't do that with SPARC T4 or with Intel AES-NI because in both of those classes of processor the encryption doesn't require a device driver instead it is unprivileged user land callable instructions. Turns out there is away to do this by using features of the Solaris runtime loader (ld.so.1). First I need to expose a little bit of implementation detail about how the Solaris Cryptographic Framework is implemented in Solaris 11.  One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.  The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax() and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so, and the unfortunately misnamed due to historical reasons libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  For SPARC T4 that would be: export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" and for Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes" This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  It also works for the Oracle DB and Java JCE.  However does not work for the default enabled OpenSSL "t4" or "aes-ni" engines (unfortunately) because they do explicit calls to getisax() themselves rather than using multiple ELF cap sections. However we can still use OpenSSL to demonstrate this by explicitly selecting "pkcs11" engine  using only a single process and thread.  $ openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 54170.81k 187416.00k 489725.70k 805445.63k 1018880.00k $ LD_HWCAP="-aes" openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 29376.37k 58328.13k 79031.55k 86738.26k 89191.77k We can clearly see the difference this makes in the case where AES offload to the SPARC T4 was disabled. The "t4" engine is faster than the pkcs11 one because there is less overhead (again on a SPARC T4-1 using only a single process/thread - using -multi you will get even bigger numbers). $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 85526.61k 89298.84k 91970.30k 92662.78k 92842.67k Yet another cool feature of the Solaris linker/loader, thanks Rod and Ali. Note these above openssl speed output is not intended to show the actual performance of any particular benchmark just that there is a significant improvement from using hardware acceleration on SPARC T4. For cryptographic performance benchmarks see the http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/ postings.

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• How does interpolation actually work to smooth out an object's movement?

  - by user22241

  I've asked a few similar questions over the past 8 months or so with no real joy, so I am going make the question more general. I have an Android game which is OpenGL ES 2.0. within it I have the following Game Loop: My loop works on a fixed time step principle (dt = 1 / ticksPerSecond) loops=0; while(System.currentTimeMillis() > nextGameTick && loops < maxFrameskip){ updateLogic(dt); nextGameTick+=skipTicks; timeCorrection += (1000d/ticksPerSecond) % 1; nextGameTick+=timeCorrection; timeCorrection %=1; loops++; } render(); My intergration works like this: sprite.posX+=sprite.xVel*dt; sprite.posXDrawAt=sprite.posX*width; Now, everything works pretty much as I would like. I can specify that I would like an object to move across a certain distance (screen width say) in 2.5 seconds and it will do just that. Also because of the frame skipping that I allow in my game loop, I can do this on pretty much any device and it will always take 2.5 seconds. Problem However, the problem is that when a render frame skips, the graphic stutter. It's extremely annoying. If I remove the ability to skip frames, then everything is smooth as you like, but will run at different speeds on different devices. So it's not an option. I'm still not sure why the frame skips, but I would like to point out that this is Nothing to do with poor performance, I've taken the code right back to 1 tiny sprite and no logic (apart from the logic required to move the sprite) and I still get skipped frames. And this is on a Google Nexus 10 tablet (and as mentioned above, I need frame skipping to keep the speed consistent across devices anyway). So, the only other option I have is to use interpolation (or extrapolation), I've read every article there is out there but none have really helped me to understand how it works and all of my attempted implementations have failed. Using one method I was able to get things moving smoothly but it was unworkable because it messed up my collision. I can foresee the same issue with any similar method because the interpolation is passed to (and acted upon within) the rendering method - at render time. So if Collision corrects position (character now standing right next to wall), then the renderer can alter it's position and draw it in the wall. So I'm really confused. People have said that you should never alter an object's position from within the rendering method, but all of the examples online show this. So I'm asking for a push in the right direction, please do not link to the popular game loop articles (deWitters, Fix your timestep, etc) as I've read these multiple times. I'm not asking anyone to write my code for me. Just explain please in simple terms how Interpolation actually works with some examples. I will then go and try to integrate any ideas into my code and will ask more specific questions if need-be further down the line. (I'm sure this is a problem many people struggle with).

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• Moving Character in C# XNA Not working

  - by Matthew Stenquist

  I'm having trouble trying to get my character to move for a game I'm making in my sparetime for the Xbox. However, I can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong , and I'm not even sure if I'm doing it right. I've tried googling tutorials on this but I haven't found any helpful ones. Mainly, ones on 3d rotation on the XNA creators club website. My question is : How can I get the character to walk towards the right in the MoveInput() function? What am I doing wrong? Did I code it wrong? The problem is : The player isn't moving. I think the MoveInput() class isn't working. Here's my code from my character class : using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; namespace Jumping { class Character { Texture2D texture; Vector2 position; Vector2 velocity; int velocityXspeed = 2; bool jumping; public Character(Texture2D newTexture, Vector2 newPosition) { texture = newTexture; position = newPosition; jumping = true; } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { JumpInput(); MoveInput(); } private void MoveInput() { //Move Character right GamePadState gamePad1 = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One); velocity.X = velocity.X + (velocityXspeed * gamePad1.ThumbSticks.Right.X); } private void JumpInput() { position += velocity; if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.A == ButtonState.Pressed && jumping == false) { position.Y -= 1f; velocity.Y = -5f; jumping = true; } if (jumping == true) { float i = 1.6f; velocity.Y += 0.15f * i; } if (position.Y + texture.Height >= 1000) jumping = false; if (jumping == false) velocity.Y = 0f; } public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { spriteBatch.Draw(texture, position, Color.White); } } }

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• GLM Velocity Vectors - Basic Maths to Simulate Steering

  - by Reanimation

  UPDATE - Code updated below but still need help adjusting my math. I have a cube rendered on the screen which represents a car (or similar). Using Projection/Model matrices and Glm I am able to move it back and fourth along the axes and rotate it left or right. I'm having trouble with the vector mathematics to make the cube move forwards no matter which direction it's current orientation is. (ie. if I would like, if it's rotated right 30degrees, when it's move forwards, it travels along the 30degree angle on a new axes). I hope I've explained that correctly. This is what I've managed to do so far in terms of using glm to move the cube: glm::vec3 vel; //velocity vector void renderMovingCube(){ glUseProgram(movingCubeShader.handle()); GLuint matrixLoc4MovingCube = glGetUniformLocation(movingCubeShader.handle(), "ProjectionMatrix"); glUniformMatrix4fv(matrixLoc4MovingCube, 1, GL_FALSE, &ProjectionMatrix[0][0]); glm::mat4 viewMatrixMovingCube; viewMatrixMovingCube = glm::lookAt(camOrigin, camLookingAt, camNormalXYZ); vel.x = cos(rotX); vel.y=sin(rotX); vel*=moveCube; //move cube ModelViewMatrix = glm::translate(viewMatrixMovingCube,globalPos*vel); //bring ground and cube to bottom of screen ModelViewMatrix = glm::translate(ModelViewMatrix, glm::vec3(0,-48,0)); ModelViewMatrix = glm::rotate(ModelViewMatrix, rotX, glm::vec3(0,1,0)); //manually turn glUniformMatrix4fv(glGetUniformLocation(movingCubeShader.handle(), "ModelViewMatrix"), 1, GL_FALSE, &ModelViewMatrix[0][0]); //pass matrix to shader movingCube.render(); //draw glUseProgram(0); } keyboard input: void keyboard() { char BACKWARD = keys['S']; char FORWARD = keys['W']; char ROT_LEFT = keys['A']; char ROT_RIGHT = keys['D']; if (FORWARD) //W - move forwards { globalPos += vel; //globalPos.z -= moveCube; BACKWARD = false; } if (BACKWARD)//S - move backwards { globalPos.z += moveCube; FORWARD = false; } if (ROT_LEFT)//A - turn left { rotX +=0.01f; ROT_LEFT = false; } if (ROT_RIGHT)//D - turn right { rotX -=0.01f; ROT_RIGHT = false; } Where am I going wrong with my vectors? I would like change the direction of the cube (which it does) but then move forwards in that direction.

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• Get Your Enterprise Working With Oracle On Track Communication 1.0

  - by Josh Lannin

  The On Track Development team is very pleased to announce that today On Track is available for our customers to download and evaluate.  To learn more about what On Track does start with our whitepaper and datasheet.   If you are a developer, take a look at our documentation and samples posted to our OTN page. For this first blog post, I’ll be speaking to several notable points about our product. Graceful Escalation via Conversations: On Track addresses the “Collaboration Problem” through a single guiding principle – graceful escalation – within the construct of a Conversation. In On Track, collaboration is based on a context (called a “Conversation”) that gracefully escalates in form, structure, and content, as dictated by the particular needs of a given collaboration.  Within that context, On Track provides a rich set of tools to choose from.  These tools provide for communication, coordination, content management, organization, decision making, and analysis -- all essential aspects of collaboration, but not all of them are essential all of the time.  Every collaborative interaction will evolve differently.  Some will evolve to represent work spreading over the course of years and involving a large, distributed team, while others may involve few people and not evolve at all.  Regardless, all collaborative contexts are built from the same parts, utilize the same concepts, and start the same way.  The principle of graceful escalation is that you only use the tools and structure you need; so you only incur the complexity you need. Purposeful Collaboration: Through application integration, On Track Conversations bring enterprise application users the communication and collaboration capabilities required to complete business process.  By association with specific processes or business objects conversations extend the possible interactions and broaden participation to internal or external non-application users and provide a sophisticated interaction experience, all the while enhancing the data set within the owning application.  Purposeful collaboration not only needs to happen in the context of applications, it must support a full range of real-time and long-running interactions to provide the greatest value. Multi Client, Multi Modal: This On Track 1.0 product release includes the same day availability of  multiple clients, including iPhone and iPad applications which are now available on the Apple Store, a fully capable and accessible Outlook Add-In, along with our browser web client.  With each client we have sought to leverage the strengths of each unique device- our iPhone client supports picture and voice posts, the iPad is optimized for meeting room situations and document viewing, and our Outlook add-in allows you to take emails in context and bring them into On Track.  In addition to supporting a diverse array of clients, On Track provides a unified multi modal experience support starting with basic messages moving through to integrated documents with live annotations, snapshots, application sharing, and voice. Next Generation Web Architecture: We believe On Track will help move the bar higher for what users can expect from all web applications, most notably ones that involve real-time activity.  On Track is built from the ground up with an innovative, real-time architecture that leverages the extensive push capabilities of our server.  Whether you are receiving a new message, viewing where crowds of people are collaborating, or doing live annotation on a document with a set of people, that information comes to you immediately without refreshes or moving back and forth between pages.  We’ve leveraged this core architecture across the product experience and raised the user experience bar for this type of application.  As well these capabilities are based on open standards and protocols, and are fully extensible by anyone- enabling sophisticated integrations to be created with a wide variety of both legacy and next-generation applications. Agile Product Development: As a product team we operate using continuous feedback and modified agile development methodologies.  We have thousands of active internal Oracle users who have helped pilot our product for critical business functions, and the On Track product development team uses our product as our primary vehicle for all our collaboration.  Additionally we been working with early access customers who are adopting our technology and providing us valuable feedback - which our process has rapidly realized in improvements to our software.  On Track agility extends to our server as well, which is built to scale, and is very simple to install and configure. We are pleased to make this product announcement and encourage you to join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, as well as checking back here for the latest product information.

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• Review&ndash;Build Android and iOS apps in Visual Studio with Nomad

  - by Bill Osuch

  Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions (such as camera and GPS) through the PhoneGap library, UI libraries such as jQuery mobile allow you to create an impressive UI with minimal work. Nomad is still in an early access beta stage, so the documentation is a bit sparse. In fact, the only documentation is a simple series of steps on how to install the plug-in, set up a project, build and deploy it. You're going to want to be a least a little familiar with the PhoneGap library and jQuery mobile to really tap into the power of this. The sample project included with the download shows you just how simple it is to create projects in Visual Studio. The sample solution comes with an index.html file containing the HTML5 code, the Cordova (PhoneGap) library, jQuery libraries, and a JQuery style sheet: The html file is pretty straightforward. If you haven't experimented with JQuery mobile before, some of the attributes (such as data-role) might be new to you, but some quick Googling will fill in everything you need to know. The first part of the file builds a simple (but attractive) list with some links in it: The second part of the file is where things get interesting and it taps into the PhoneGap library. For instance, it gets the geolocation position by calling position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude: ...and then displays it in a simple span: Building is pretty simple, at least for Android (I'm not an iOS developer so I didn't look at that feature) - just configure the display name, version number, and package ID. There's no need to specify Android version; Nomad supports 2.2 and later. Enter these bits of information, click the new "Build for Android" button (not the regular Visual Studio Build link...) and you get a dialog box saying that your code is being built by their cloud build service (so no building while away from a WiFi signal apparently). After a couple minutes you wind up with a .apk file that can be copied over to your device. Applications built with Nomad for Android currently use a temporary certificate, so you can test the app on your devices but you cannot publish them in the Google Play Store (yet). And I love the "success" dialog box: Since Nomad is still in Beta, no pricing plans have been announced yet, so I'll be curious to see if this becomes a cost-effective solution to mobile app development. If it is, I may even be tempted to spring for the $99 iOS membership fee! In the meantime, I plan to work on porting some of my apps over to it and seeing how they work. My only quibble at this time is the lack of a centralized documentation location - I'd like to at least see which (if any) features of JQuery and PhoneGap are limited or not supported. Also, some notes on targeting different Android screen sizes would be nice, but it's relatively easy to find jQuery examples out on the InterWebs. Oh well, trial and error! You can download the Nomad extension for Visual Studio by going to their web site: www.vsnomad.com. Technorati Tags: Android, Nomad

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• Ubuntu Dual Screen Using Virtual Machine - AMD GPU

  - by Chris

  I've been searching online and reading tutorials and etc about how to make my ubuntu VM dual screen(x86_64). I have first tried to run these commands: sudo aticonfig --initial -f which gave me the ouput of: sudo: aitconfig: command not found I then googled the output and followed these instructions that I tells me to install my ATI drivers onto my ubuntu. wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-5-x86.x86_64.run sudo sh ati-driver-installer-11-5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/natty sudo dpkg -i *.deb sudo apt-get -f install sudo aticonfig -f --initial --adapter=all sudo reboot It all works well until I input sudo apt-get -f install which gives me the following output: sudo apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 25 not upgraded. 3 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up fglrx (2:8.850-0ubuntu1) ... update-alternatives: error: alternative link /usr/bin/aticonfig is already managed by x86_64-linux-gnu_gl_conf. dpkg: error processing fglrx (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-amdcccle: fglrx-amdcccle depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-amdcccle (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-dev: fglrx-dev depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-dev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) At this point, I don't know what to do since running: gksudo amdcccle For the record, I have 3D acceleration turned on. The following is my GPU for my VM lspci | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Graphics Adapter Any Help on how I can make my VM dual screen with Ubuntu would be great. Thank you in advance.

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• CAPTCHA blocking for my scraping script?

  - by Surabhil Sergy

  I am working on a scraping project which involves getting web data and parsing them for further use. I have been working using PHP and CURL to make scraping scripts which crawls web data and I make use of either PHP Dom or Simple HTML DOM Parser library for these kinds of projects. On a recent project I encountered some challenges; initially I found the target website blocked my server IP such that the server could not make any successful requests to the site. Understanding these issues as common I bought a set of private proxies and tried to make request calls using them. Though this could get successful response, I noticed the script is getting some kind of blocks after 2-3 continuous requests. On printing and checking the response I could see a pop-up asking for CAPTCHA validation. I could not see any captcha characters to be entered and it also shows an error “input error: invalid referrer”. On examining the source I could see some Google recaptcha scripts within. I’m stuck at this point and I m not able to execute my script. My script is used for gathering data and it needs to go through a large number of pages periodically over the site. But in the current scenario I am not able to proceed with my script. I could see there are some options to overcome these captcha issues and scraping these kinds of sites too are common. I have been checking my script performance and responses over last two months. I could see during first month I was able to execute very large number of requests from a single IP and I was able to get results. Later I get an IP block and used private proxies which could get me some results. Later I am facing now with the captcha trouble. I would appreciate any help or suggestions in this regard. (Often in this kind of questions I used to get a first comment as, ‘Have you asked for prior permission from the target?’ .I haven’t ,but I know there are many sites doing so to get the details out of sites and target sites may not often give access to them. I respect the legality and scraping etiquettes but I would like to know at what point I stuck and how could I overcome that! ) I could provide any supporting information if needed.

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• Composite-like pattern and SRP violation

  - by jimmy_keen

  Recently I've noticed myself implementing pattern similar to the one described below. Starting with interface: public interface IUserProvider { User GetUser(UserData data); } GetUser method's pure job is to somehow return user (that would be an operation speaking in composite terms). There might be many implementations of IUserProvider, which all do the same thing - return user basing on input data. It doesn't really matter, as they are only leaves in composite terms and that's fairly simple. Now, my leaves are used by one own them all composite class, which at the moment follows this implementation: public interface IUserProviderComposite : IUserProvider { void RegisterProvider(Predicate<UserData> predicate, IUserProvider provider); } public class UserProviderComposite : IUserProviderComposite { public User GetUser(SomeUserData data) ... public void RegisterProvider(Predicate<UserData> predicate, IUserProvider provider) ... } Idea behind UserProviderComposite is simple. You register providers, and this class acts as a reusable entry-point. When calling GetUser, it will use whatever registered provider matches predicate for requested user data (if that helps, it stores key-value map of predicates and providers internally). Now, what confuses me is whether RegisterProvider method (brings to mind composite's add operation) should be a part of that class. It kind of expands its responsibilities from providing user to also managing providers collection. As far as my understanding goes, this violates Single Responsibility Principle... or am I wrong here? I thought about extracting register part into separate entity and inject it to the composite. As long as it looks decent on paper (in terms of SRP), it feels bit awkward because: I would be essentially injecting Dictionary (or other key-value map) ...or silly wrapper around it, doing nothing more than adding entires This won't be following composite anymore (as add won't be part of composite) What exactly is the presented pattern called? Composite felt natural to compare it with, but I realize it's not exactly the one however nothing else rings any bells. Which approach would you take - stick with SRP or stick with "composite"/pattern? Or is the design here flawed and given the problem this can be done in a better way?

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• Why is my class worse than the hierarchy of classes in the book (beginner OOP)?

  - by aditya menon

  I am reading this book. The author is trying to model a lesson in a college. The goal is to output the Lesson Type (Lecture or Seminar), and the Charges for the lesson depending on whether it is a hourly or fixed price lesson. So the output should be: lesson charge 20. Charge type: hourly rate. lesson type seminar. lesson charge 30. Charge type: fixed rate. lesson type lecture. When the input is as follows: $lessons[] = new Lesson('hourly rate', 4, 'seminar'); $lessons[] = new Lesson('fixed rate', null, 'lecture'); I wrote this: class Lesson { private $chargeType; private $duration; private $lessonType; public function __construct($chargeType, $duration, $lessonType) { $this->chargeType = $chargeType; $this->duration = $duration; $this->lessonType = $lessonType; } public function getChargeType() { return $this->getChargeType; } public function getLessonType() { return $this->getLessonType; } public function cost() { if($this->chargeType == 'fixed rate') { return "30"; } else { return $this->duration * 5; } } } $lessons[] = new Lesson('hourly rate', 4, 'seminar'); $lessons[] = new Lesson('fixed rate', null, 'lecture'); foreach($lessons as $lesson) { print "lesson charge {$lesson->cost()}."; print " Charge type: {$lesson->getChargeType()}."; print " lesson type {$lesson->getLessonType()}."; print "<br />"; } But according to the book, I am wrong (I am pretty sure I am, too). The author gave a large hierarchy of classes as the solution instead. In a previous chapter, the author stated the following 'four signposts' as the time when I should consider changing my class structure: Code Duplication The Class Who Knew Too Much About His Context The Jack of All Trades - Classes that try to do many things Conditional Statements The only problem I can see is Conditional Statements, and that too in a vague manner - so why refactor this? What problems do you think might arise in the future that I have not foreseen?

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• Becoming a "maintenance developer"

  - by anon

  So I've kind of been getting angry about the current position I'm in, and I'd love to get other developers' input on this. I've been at my current place of employment for about 11 months now. When I began, I was working on all new features. I basically worked on an entire new web project for the first 5-6 months I was here. After this, I was moved to more of a service oriented role (which was still great, all new stuff for me), and I was in this role for about the past 5-6 months. Here's where the problem comes in. Basically, a couple of days ago I was made the support/maintenance guy. Now, we have an IT support team, so I'm not talking that kind of support, I'm talking more of a second level support guy (when the guys on the surface can't really get to the root of the issue), coupled with working on maintenance issues that have been lingering in the backlog for a while. To me, a developer with about 3 years of experience, this is kind of disheartening. With the type of work place this is, I wouldn't be surprised if these support issues take up most of my days, and I barely make it to working on maintenance issues. Also, most of these support issues aren't even related to code, they are more or less just knowing the system architecture, working with making sure services are running/getting started properly, handling/fixing bad data, etc. I'm a developer, so this part sucks. Also, even when I do have time to work maintenance, these are basically just bug fixes/improving bad code, so this sucks as well, however at least it's related to coding. Am I wrong for getting angry here? I don't want to really complain about it, but to be honest, I wasn't spoken to about this or anything, I was kind of just sent an e-mail letting me know I'm the guy for this type of thing, and that was that. The entire team took a few minutes to give me their "that sucks" talk, because they know how annoying it is to be on support for the type of work we do, so I know I'm not the only guy that knows it's not that great of an opportunity. I'm just kind of on the fence about how to move forward. Obviously I'm just going to continue working for the time being, no point making a bad impression on anybody, but I'd like to know how you guys would approach this situation, or how you think I should be feeling about it/how you guys would feel. Thanks guys.

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• Hey Retailers, Are You Ready For The Holiday Season?

  - by Jeri Kelley

  With online holiday spending reaching $35.3 billion in 2011 and American shoppers spending just under $750 on average on their holiday purchases this year, how ready is your business for the 2012 holiday season?   ?? Today’s shoppers do not take their purchases lightly.  They are more connected, interact with more resources to make decisions, diligently compare products and services, seek out the best deals, and ask for input from friends and family.   This holiday season, as consumers browse for apparel, tablets, toys, and much more, they will be bombarded with retailer communication - from emails and commercials to countless search engine results and social recommendations.  With a flurry of activity coming at consumers from every channel and competitor, your success this year will rely on communicating a consistent, personalized message no matter where your customers are shopping.  Here are a few ideas to help with your commerce strategy this holiday season: CONSISTENCY COUNTS FOR MULTICHANNEL SHOPPERS??According to a November 2011 study commissioned by Oracle, “Channel Commerce 2011: The Consumer View,” 54% of consumers in the U.S. and Canada regularly employ two or more channels before they make a purchase.  While each channel has its own unique benefit, user profile, and purpose, it’s critical that your shoppers have a consistent core experience wherever they’re looking for information or making a purchase.  Be sure consumers can consistently search and browse the same product information and receive the same promotions online, on their mobile devices, and in-store.? USE YOUR CUSTOMER’S CONTEXT TO SURFACE RELEVANT CONTENTYour Web site is likely the hub of your holiday activity.  According to a Monetate infographic, 39% of shoppers will visit your Web site directly to find out about the best holiday deals.   Use everything you know about your customers from past purchase data to browsing history to provide a relevant experience at every click, and assemble content in a context that entices shoppers to buy online, or influences an offline purchase.? TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MOBILE BEHAVIOR?Having a mobile program is no longer a choice.   Armed with smartphones and tablets, consumers now have access to more and more product information and can compare products and prices from anywhere.  In fact, approximately 52% of smartphone users will use their device to research products, redeem coupons and use apps to assist in their holiday gift purchase.  At a minimum, be sure your mobile environment has store information, consistent pricing and promotions, and simple checkout capabilities. ARM IN-STORE ASSOCIATES WITH TABLETS?According to RISNews.com, 31% of retailers plan to begin testing tablets in stores in 2012, 22% have already begun such testing and 6% had fully deployed tablets within stores.   Take advantage of this compelling sales tool to get shoppers interacting with videos, user reviews, how-to guides, side-by-side product comparisons, and specs.  Automatically trigger upsell and cross sell suggestions for store associates to recommend for each product or category, build in alerts for promotions, and allow associates to place orders and check inventory from their tablet.  ? WISDOM OF THE CROWDS IS GOOD, BUT WISDOM FROM FRIENDS IS BETTER?Shoppers who grapple with options are looking for recommendations; they’d rather get advice from friends, and they’re more likely to spend more while doing so.    In fact, according to an infographic by Mr. Youth, 66% of social media users made a purchase on Black Friday or Cyber Monday as a direct result of social media interactions with brands or family.   This holiday season, be sure you are leveraging your social channels from Facebook to Pinterest to drive consistent promotions and help your brand to become part of the conversation. So, are you ready for the holidays this year?  

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• Comparing Isis, Google, and Paypal

  - by David Dorf

  Back in 2010 I was sure NFC would make great strides, but here we are two years later and NFC doesn't seem to be sticking. The obvious reason being the chicken-and-egg problem.  Retailers don't want to install the terminals until the phones support NFC, and vice-versa. So consumers continue to sit on the sidelines waiting for either side to blink and make the necessary investment.  In the meantime, EMV is looking for a way to sneak into the US with the help of the card brands. There are currently three major solutions that are battling in the marketplace.  All three know that replacing mag-stripe alone is not sufficient to move consumers.  Long-term it's the offers and loyalty programs combined with tendering that make NFC attractive. NFC solutions cross lots of barriers, so a strong partner system is required.  The solutions need to include the carriers, card brands, banks, handset manufacturers, POS terminals, and most of all lots of merchants.  Lots of coordination is necessary to make the solution seamless to the consumer. Google Wallet Google's problem has always been that only the Nexus phone has an NFC chip that supports their wallet.  There are a couple of additional phones out there now, but adoption is still slow.  They acquired Zavers a while back to incorporate digital coupons, but the the bulk of their users continue to be non-NFC.  They have taken an open approach by not specifying particular payment brands.  Google is piloting in San Francisco and New York, supporting both MasterCard PayPass and stored value. I suppose the other card brands may eventually follow.  There's no cost for consumers or merchants -- Google will make money via targeted ads. Isis Not long after Google announced its wallet, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile announced a joint venture called Isis.  They are in the unique position of owning the SIM in the phones they issue.  At first it seemed Isis was a vehicle for the carriers to compete with the existing card brands, but Isis later switched to a generic wallet that supports the major card brands.  Isis reportedly charges issuers a $5 fee per customer per year.  Isis will pilot this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. PayPal PayPal, the clear winner in the online payment space beyond traditional credit cards, is trying to move into physical stores.  After negotiations with Google to provide a wallet broke off, PayPal decided to avoid NFC altogether, at least for now, and focus on payments without any physical card or phone.  By avoiding NFC, consumers don't need an NFC-enabled phone and merchants don't need a new reader.  Consumers must enter their phone number and PIN in the merchant's existing device, or they can enter their PIN in the PayPal inStore app running on their phone, then show the merchant a unique barcode which authorizes payment. Paypal is free for consumers and charges a fee for merchants.  Its not clear, at least to me, how PayPal handles fraudulent transactions and whether the consumer is protected. The wildcard is, of course, Apple.  Their mobile technologies set the standard, so incorporating NFC chips would certainly accelerate adoption of many payment solutions.  Their announcement today of the iOS Passbook is a step in the right direction, but stops short of handling payments. For those retailers that have invested in modern terminals, it seems the best strategy is to support all the emerging solutions and let the consumers choose the winner.

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• Setting up a Carousel Component in ADF Mobile

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  The Carousel component is one of the slickier ways of showing collections of data, and on a mobile device it works really great with the finger swipe gesture. Using the Carousel component in ADF Mobile is similar to using it in regular web ADF applications, with one major change - right now you can't drag a collection from the data control palette and drop it as a carousel. So here is a quick work around for that, and details about setting up carousels in your application. First thing you'll need is a data control that returns an array of records. In my demo I'm using the Emps collection that you can get from following this tutorial. Then you drag the emps and drop it in your amx page as an ADF mobile iterator. We are doing this as a short cut to getting the right binding needed for a carousel in our page. If you look now in your page's binding you'll see something like this: You can now remark the whole iterator code in your page's source. Next let's add the carousel From the component palette drag the carousel (from the data view category) to the page. Next drag a carousel item and drop it in the nodestamp facet of the carousel. Now we'll hook up the carousel to the binding we got from the iterator - this is quite simple just copy the var and value attributes from the iterator tag to the carousel tag: var="row" value="#{bindings.emps.collectionModel}" Next drop a panelForm, or another layout panel in to the carousel item. Into that panelForm you can now drop items and bind their value property to row.attributeNames - basically copying the way it is in the fields in the iterator for example: value="#{row.hireDate}". By the way you can also copy other attributes like the label. And that's it. Your code should end up looking something like this:     <amx:carousel id="c1" var="row" value="#{bindings.emps.collectionModel}">      <amx:facet name="nodeStamp">        <amx:carouselItem id="ci1">          <amx:panelFormLayout id="pfl1">            <amx:inputText label="#{bindings.emps.hints.salary.label}" value="#{row.salary}" id="it1"/>            <amx:inputText label="#{bindings.emps.hints.name.label}" value="#{row.name}" id="it2"/>          </amx:panelFormLayout>        </amx:carouselItem>      </amx:facet>    </amx:carousel> And when you run your application it will look like this:

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• WPF: Reloading app parts to handle persistence as well as memory management.

  - by Ingó Vals

  I created a app using Microsoft's WPF. It mostly handles data reading and input as well as associating relations between data within specific parameters. As a total beginner I made some bad design decision ( not so much decisions as using the first thing I got to work ) but now understanding WPF better I'm getting the urge to refactor my code with better design principles. I had several problems but I guess each deserves it's own question for clarity. Here I'm asking for proper ways to handle the data itself. In the original I wrapped each row in a object when fetched from database ( using LINQ to SQL ) somewhat like Active Record just not active or persistence (each app instance had it's own data handling part). The app has subunits handling different aspects. However as it was setup it loaded everything when started. This creates several problems, for example often it wouldn't be neccesary to load a part unless we were specifically going to work with that part so I wan't some form of lazy loading. Also there was problem with inner persistance because you might create a new object/row in one aspect and perhaps set relation between it and different object but the new object wouldn't appear until the program was restarted. Persistance between instances of the app won't be huge problem because of the small amount of people using the program. While I could solve this now using dirty tricks I would rather refactor the program and do it elegantly, Now the question is how. I know there are several ways and a few come to mind: 1) Each aspect of the program is it's own UserControl that get's reloaded/instanced everytime you navigate to it. This ensures you only load up the data you need and you get some persistancy. DB server located on same LAN and tables are small so that shouldn't be a big problem. Minor drawback is that you would have to remember the state of each aspect so you wouldn't always start at beginners square. 2) Having a ViewModel type object at the base level of the app with lazy loading and some kind of timeout. I would then propegate this object down the visual tree to ensure every aspect is getting it's data from the same instance 3) Semi active record data layer with static load methods. 4) Some other idea What in your opinion is the most practical way in WPF, what does MVVM assume?

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• ODI 11g - Cleaning control characters and User Functions

  - by David Allan

  In ODI user functions have a poor name really, they should be user expressions - a way of wrapping common expressions that you may wish to reuse many times - across many different technologies is an added bonus. To illustrate look at the problem of how to remove control characters from text. Users ask these types of questions over all technologies - Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and for many years - how do I clean a string, how do I tokenize a string and so on. After some searching around you will find a few ways of doing this, in Oracle there is a convenient way of using the TRANSLATE and REPLACE functions. So you can convert some text using the following SQL; replace( translate('This is my string'||chr(9)||' which has a control character', chr(3)||chr(4)||chr(5)||chr(9), chr(3) ), chr(3), '' ) If you had many columns to perform this kind of transformation on, in the Oracle database the natural solution you'd go to would be to code this as a PLSQL function since you don't want the code splattered everywhere. Someone tells you that there is another control character that needs added equals a maintenance headache. Coding it as a PLSQL function will incur a context switch between SQL and PLSQL which could prove costly. In ODI user functions let you capture this expression text and reference it many times across your mappings. This will protect the expression from being copy-pasted by developers and make maintenance much simpler - change the expression definition in one place. Firstly define a name and a syntax for the user function, I am calling it UF_STRIP_BAD_CHARACTERS and it has one parameter an input string;  We then can define an implementation for each technology we will use it, I will define Oracle's using the inputString parameter and the TRANSLATE and REPLACE functions with whatever control characters I want to replace; I can then use this inside mapping expressions in ODI, below I am cleaning the ENAME column - a fabricated example but you get the gist.  Note when I use the user function the function name remains in the text of the mapping, the actual expression is not substituted until I generate the scenario. If you generate the scenario and export the scenario you can have a peak at the code that is processed in the runtime - below you can see a snippet of my export scenario;  That's all for now, hopefully a useful snippet of info.

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• Using machine learning to aim mirrors in a solar array?

  - by Buttons840

  I've been thinking about solar collectors where several independent mirrors to focus the light on a solar collector, similar to the following design from Energy Innovations. Because there will be flaws in the assembly of this solar array, I am proceeding with the following assumptions (or lack thereof): The software knows the "position" of each mirror, but doesn't know how this position relates to the real world or to other mirrors. This will account for poor mirror calibration or other environmental factors which may effect one mirror but not the others. If a mirror moves 10 units in one direction, and then 10 units in the opposite direction, it will end up where it originally started. I would like to use machine learning to position the mirrors correctly and focus the light on the collector. I expect I would approach this as an optimization problem, optimizing the mirror positions to maximize the heat inside the collector and the power output. The problem is finding a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space (considering each mirror has 2 axis of rotation). Some of the problems I anticipate are: cloudy days, even if you stumble upon the perfect mirror alignment, it might be cloudy at the time noisy sensor data the sun is a moving target, it moves along a path, and follows a different path every day - although you could calculate the exact position of the sun at any time, you wouldn't know how that position relates to your mirrors My question isn't about the solar array, but possible machine learning techniques that would help in this "small target in a noisy high dimensional-space" problem. I mentioned the solar array because it was the catalyst for this question and a good example. What machine learning techniques can find such a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space? EDIT: A few additional thoughts: Yes, you can calculate the suns position in the real world, but you don't know how the mirrors position is related to the real world (unless you've learned it somehow). You might know the suns azimuth is 220 degrees, and the suns elevation is 60 degrees, and you might know a mirror is at position (-20, 42); now tell me, is that mirror correctly aligned with the sun? You don't know. Lets assume you have some very sophisticated heat measurements, and you know "with this heat level, there must be 2 mirrors correctly aligned". Now the question is, which two mirrors (out of 25 or more) are correctly aligned? One solution I considered was to approximate the correct "alignment function" using a neural network which would take the suns azimuth and elevation as input and output a large array with 2 values for each mirror which correspond to the 2 axis of each mirror. I'm not sure what the best training method is though.

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• apt-get upgrade stuck at the same package (openjdk-6-jre-headless)

  - by decibyte

  I'm stuck, can't upgrade my system. Running sudo apt-get upgrade gives me the following: mmm@alalunga:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages have been kept back: ginn libgrip0 linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic-pae linux-image-generic-pae The following packages will be upgraded: apport apport-gtk bind9-host build-essential dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dnsutils eog evince evince-common firefox firefox-branding firefox-dbg firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support firefox-locale-en gimp gimp-data gir1.2-totem-1.0 glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services gnupg gpgv icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm icedtea-6-plugin icedtea-netx icedtea-netx-common icedtea-plugin isc-dhcp-client isc-dhcp-common libapache2-mod-php5 libart-2.0-2 libbind9-80 libdns81 libevince3-3 libgimp2.0 libisc83 libisccc80 libisccfg82 liblwres80 libssl-dev libssl-doc libssl1.0.0 libtotem0 linux-firmware linux-libc-dev openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib openssl php-pear php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-mysql php5-xsl policykit-1-gnome python-apport python-django python-gst0.10 python-problem-report resolvconf thunderbird thunderbird-globalmenu thunderbird-gnome-support totem totem-common totem-mozilla totem-plugins xserver-xorg-input-synaptics 74 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded. Need to get 317 MB/327 MB of archives. After this operation, 1.481 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:5 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:6 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:7 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] 9% [7 openjdk-6-jre-headless 27,3 MB/27,3 MB 100%] It keeps downloading the package openjdk-6-jre-headless, then does nothing for a while (hanging on what's the last line above), then download the package again. It's at its 13th download attempt at the moment of writing. The actual downloads seem to be done just fine, but whatever it does after downloading seems to be failing. I tried removing openjdk-6, but then it wanted to install openjdk-7 instead, with the same result, hanging at openjdk-7-jre-headless instead. I also tried changing servers from my local (Danish) to the main server. No luck. It's also keeping me from upgrading alle the other packages. What to do?

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• What can a Service do on Windows?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  If you open up Task Manager or Process Explorer on your system, you will see many services running. But how much of an impact can a service have on your system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Forivin wants to know how much impact a service can have on a Windows system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware: What kind malware/spyware could someone put into a service that does not have its own process on Windows? I mean services that use svchost.exe for example, like this: Could a service spy on my keyboard input? Take screenshots? Send and/or receive data over the internet? Infect other processes or files? Delete files? Kill processes? How much impact could a service have on a Windows installation? Are there any limits to what a malware ‘corrupted’ service could do? The Answer SuperUser contributor Keltari has the answer for us: What is a service? A service is an application, no more, no less. The advantage is that a service can run without a user session. This allows things like databases, backups, the ability to login, etc. to run when needed and without a user logged in. What is svchost? According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”. Could we have that in English please? Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective, this makes more sense for reusability…but the problem is that you can not launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born. So, essentially a service which uses svchost is just calling a .dll and can do pretty much anything with the right credentials and/or permissions. If I remember correctly, there are viruses and other malware that do hide behind the svchost process, or name the executable svchost.exe to avoid detection. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• Splitting an MP4 file

  - by Asaf Chertkoff

  what is the fastest and less resource consuming method for splitting an MP4 file? @Alex: it didn't work, i don't know why. see the out put here: asafche@asafche-laptop:~$ ffmpeg -vcodec copy -ss 0 -t 00:10:00 -i /home/asafche/Videos/myVideos/MAH00124.MP4 /home/asafche/Videos/myVideos/eh.mp4 FFmpeg version SVN-r0.5.1-4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --extra-version=4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1.1 --prefix=/usr --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-vdpau --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-zlib --disable-stripping --disable-vhook --enable-runtime-cpudetect --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-x11grab --enable-libdc1394 --enable-shared --disable-static libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0 libavcodec 52.20. 1 / 52.20. 1 libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0 libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0 libavfilter 0. 4. 0 / 0. 4. 0 libswscale 0. 7. 1 / 0. 7. 1 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 built on Mar 31 2011 18:53:20, gcc: 4.4.3 Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 119.88 (120000/1001) -> 59.94 (60000/1001) Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/home/asafche/Videos/myVideos/MAH00124.MP4': Duration: 00:15:35.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 5664 kb/s Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720, 59.94 tbr, 59.94 tbn, 119.88 tbc Stream #0.1(und): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16 Output #0, mp4, to '/home/asafche/Videos/myVideos/eh.mp4': Stream #0.0(und): Video: libx264, yuv420p, 1280x720, q=2-31, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc Stream #0.1(und): Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 64 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Unsupported codec for output stream #0.1 it says something about different frame rate...

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