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  • Switching my collision detection to array lists caused it to stop working

    - by Charlton Santana
    I have made a collision detection system which worked when I did not use array list and block generation. It is weird why it's not working but here's the code, and if anyone could help I would be very grateful :) The first code if the block generation. private static final List<Block> BLOCKS = new ArrayList<Block>(); Random rnd = new Random(System.currentTimeMillis()); int randomx = 400; int randomy = 400; int blocknum = 100; String Title = "blocktitle" + blocknum; private Block block; public void generateBlocks(){ if(blocknum > 0){ int offset = rnd.nextInt(250) + 100; //500 is the maximum offset, this is a constant randomx += offset;//ofset will be between 100 and 400 int randomyoff = rnd.nextInt(80); //500 is the maximum offset, this is a constant randomy = platformheighttwo - 6 - randomyoff;//ofset will be between 100 and 400 block = new Block(BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.block2), randomx, randomy); BLOCKS.add(block); blocknum -= 1; } The second is where the collision detection takes place note: the block.draw(canvas); works perfectly. It's the blocks that don't work. for(Block block : BLOCKS) { block.draw(canvas); if (sprite.bottomrx < block.bottomrx && sprite.bottomrx > block.bottomlx && sprite.bottomry < block.bottommy && sprite.bottomry > block.topry ){ Log.d(TAG, "Collided!!!!!!!!!!!!1"); } // bottom left touching block? if (sprite.bottomlx < block.bottomrx && sprite.bottomlx > block.bottomlx && sprite.bottomly < block.bottommy && sprite.bottomly > block.topry ){ Log.d(TAG, "Collided!!!!!!!!!!!!1"); } // top right touching block? if (sprite.toprx < block.bottomrx && sprite.toprx > block.bottomlx && sprite.topry < block.bottommy && sprite.topry > block.topry ){ Log.d(TAG, "Collided!!!!!!!!!!!!1"); } //top left touching block? if (sprite.toprx < block.bottomrx && sprite.toprx > block.bottomlx && sprite.topry < block.bottommy && sprite.topry > block.topry ){ Log.d(TAG, "Collided!!!!!!!!!!!!1"); } } The values eg bottomrx are in the block.java file..

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  • Does your analytic solution tell you what questions to ask?

    - by Manan Goel
    Analytic solutions exist to answer business questions. Conventional wisdom holds that if you can answer business questions quickly and accurately, you can take better business decisions and therefore achieve better business results and outperform the competition. Most business questions are well understood (read structured) so they are relatively easy to ask and answer. Questions like what were the revenues, cost of goods sold, margins, which regions and products outperformed/underperformed are relatively well understood and as a result most analytics solutions are well equipped to answer such questions. Things get really interesting when you are looking for answers but you don’t know what questions to ask in the first place? That’s like an explorer looking to make new discoveries by exploration. An example of this scenario is the Center of Disease Control (CDC) in United States trying to find the vaccine for the latest strand of the swine flu virus. The researchers at CDC may try hundreds of options before finally discovering the vaccine. The exploration process is inherently messy and complex. The process is fraught with false starts, one question or a hunch leading to another and the final result may look entirely different from what was envisioned in the beginning. Speed and flexibility is the key; speed so the hundreds of possible options can be explored quickly and flexibility because almost everything about the problem, solutions and the process is unknown.  Come to think of it, most organizations operate in an increasingly unknown or uncertain environment. Business Leaders have to take decisions based on a largely unknown view of the future. And since the value proposition of analytic solutions is to help the business leaders take better business decisions, for best results, consider adding information exploration and discovery capabilities to your analytic solution. Such exploratory analysis capabilities will help the business leaders perform even better by empowering them to refine their hunches, ask better questions and take better decisions. That’s your analytic system not only answering the questions but also suggesting what questions to ask in the first place. Today, most leading analytic software vendors offer exploratory analysis products as part of their analytic solutions offerings. So, what characteristics should be top of mind while evaluating the various solutions? The answer is quite simply the same characteristics that are essential for exploration and analysis – speed & flexibility. Speed is required because the system inherently has to be agile to handle hundreds of different scenarios with large volumes of data across large user populations. Exploration happens at the speed of thought so make sure that you system is capable of operating at speed of thought. Flexibility is required because the exploration process from start to finish is full of unknowns; unknown questions, answers and hunches. So, make sure that the system is capable of managing and exploring all relevant data – structured or unstructured like databases, enterprise applications, tweets, social media updates, documents, texts, emails etc. and provides flexible Google like user interface to quickly explore all relevant data. Getting Started You can help business leaders become “Decision Masters” by augmenting your analytic solution with information discovery capabilities. For best results make sure that the solution you choose is enterprise class and allows advanced, yet intuitive, exploration and analysis of complex and varied data including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.  You can learn more about Oracle’s exploratory analysis solutions by clicking here.

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  • Restrict number of characters to be typed for af:autoSuggestBehavior

    - by Arunkumar Ramamoorthy
    When using AutoSuggestBehavior for a UI Component, the auto suggest list is displayed as soon as the user starts typing in the field. In this article, we will find how to restrict the autosuggest list to be displayed till the user types in couple of characters. This would be more useful in the low latency networks and also the autosuggest list is bigger. We could display a static message to let the user know that they need to type in more characters to get a list for picking a value from. Final output we would expect is like the below image Lets see how we can implement this. Assuming we have an input text for the users to enter the country name and an autosuggest behavior is added to it. <af:inputText label="Country" id="it1"> <af:autoSuggestBehavior /> </af:inputText> Also, assuming we have a VO (we'll name it as CountryView for this example), with a view criteria to filter out the VO based on the bind variable passed. Now, we would generate View Impl class from the java node (including bind variables) and then expose the setter method of the bind variable to client interface. In the View layer, we would create a tree binding for the VO and the method binding for the setter method of the bind variable exposed above, in the pagedef file As we've already added an input text and an autosuggestbehavior for the test, we would not need to build the suggested items for the autosuggest list.Let us add a method in the backing bean to return us List of select items to be bound to the autosuggest list. padding: 5px; background-color: #fbfbfb; min-height: 40px; width: 544px; height: 168px; overflow: auto;"> public List onSuggest(String searchTerm) { ArrayList<SelectItem> selectItems = new ArrayList<SelectItem>(); if(searchTerm.length()>1) { //get access to the binding context and binding container at runtime BindingContext bctx = BindingContext.getCurrent(); BindingContainer bindings = bctx.getCurrentBindingsEntry(); //set the bind variable value that is used to filter the View Object //query of the suggest list. The View Object instance has a View //Criteria assigned OperationBinding setVariable = (OperationBinding) bindings.get("setBind_CountryName"); setVariable.getParamsMap().put("value", searchTerm); setVariable.execute(); //the data in the suggest list is queried by a tree binding. JUCtrlHierBinding hierBinding = (JUCtrlHierBinding) bindings.get("CountryView1"); //re-query the list based on the new bind variable values hierBinding.executeQuery(); //The rangeSet, the list of queries entries, is of type //JUCtrlValueBndingRef. List<JUCtrlValueBindingRef> displayDataList = hierBinding.getRangeSet(); for (JUCtrlValueBindingRef displayData : displayDataList){ Row rw = displayData.getRow(); //populate the SelectItem list selectItems.add(new SelectItem( (String)rw.getAttribute("Name"), (String)rw.getAttribute("Name"))); } } else{ SelectItem a = new SelectItem("","Type in two or more characters..","",true); selectItems.add(a); } return selectItems; } So, what we are doing in the above method is, to check the length of the search term and if it is more than 1 (i.e 2 or more characters), the return the actual suggest list. Otherwise, create a read only select item new SelectItem("","Type in two or more characters..","",true); and add it to the list of suggested items to be displayed. The last parameter for the SelectItem (boolean) is to make it as readOnly, so that users would not be able to select this static message from the displayed list. Finally, bind this method to the input text's autosuggestbehavior's suggestedItems property. <af:inputText label="Country" id="it1"> <af:autoSuggestBehavior suggestedItems="#{AutoSuggestBean.onSuggest}"/> </af:inputText>

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  • Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 now Live!

    - by Tarun Arora
    Today was the formal launch event for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, a state-of-the-art development solution for building modern applications that span connected devices and continuous services, from the client to the cloud. The event was streamed live from http://visualstudiolaunch.com, S.Somasegar corporate vice president of the Developer Division opened the key note, Jason Zander dived deeper into how to leverage Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 to build modern application. Brian Harry all the awesome features in Visual Studio 2012 to improve the application lifecycle management.   I. Summary of the announcements made today 1. Visual Studio Updates coming this fall –  VS Update will better support agile teams, enable continuous quality, elevate SharePoint development with application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, and expand Visual Studio 2012 Windows development capabilities. It will be available as a community technology preview (CTP) later this month and in final release later this calendar year. A comprehensive list of what will be on offer can be found here. 2. Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop – Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop brings the newest desktop development capabilities in Visual Studio 2012 to Express users, too. You would be excited to know that the express SKU will support Integration with TFS among some of the other cool features I would like to mention Unit Testing, Unit Testing, Code Analysis, dependency management with NuGet a full list and download links can be found here. 3. F# tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for web –  This F# Tools release adds in F# 3.0 components, such as the F# 3.0 compiler, F# Interactive, IDE support, and new F# features such as type providers and query expressions to your Visual Studio 2012 express for web. More details and download links can be found here. 4. Visual Studio TFS 2012 Power Tools – The TFS 2012 Power tools brings the goodness of Best Practice Analyzer, Process Template Editor, Storyboard Shapes, Team Explorer enhancements, TFPT command line, TFS Server Backups, etc via to your TFS 2012 installation. It can be downloaded right away from here. II. Road shows There will be many more community road shows this month packaged with hours of demos and discussions. The Visual Studio UK Team has just announced that there will be four UK launch events, face to face session including a product group speaker and partner sessions: Edinburgh, 1st October Manchester, 3rd October London, 4th October Reading, 5th October III. Get Started Download Visual Studio 2012 and the additional supporting software's from here. The Visual Studio development team has put together over 60 videos to help you learn about the new Visual Studio 2012 capabilities in more detail, and all of these will be available for watching here. IV. What’s Next A lot more exciting stuff lined up… Windows 8 Anticipated release: Oct. 26 (UPDATED 9/12) Windows Server 2012 Released (UPDATED 9/4) System Center 2012 Released (UPDATED 9/11) SQL Server 2012 Released (UPDATED 4/2) Internet Explorer 10 Anticipated release: Between Q3 2012 and early 2013 (UPDATED 5/3   Office 2013 Anticipated release: Q4 2012 or Q1 2013(UPDATED 9/12) Exchange 2013 Anticipated release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 7/26) Visual Studio 2012 Released (UPDATED 9/12) Kinect for Windows Released (UPDATED 9/4) Windows Phone "Tango" and 8 "Tango": Released; Anticipated "Windows Phone 8" release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 9/5) Dynamics ERP Online Anticipated release: September or October 2012 (UPDATED 7/20) Office 365 Anticipated update schedule: "Almost weekly"(UPDATED 9/12) Windows Azure Rumored CTP release: Spring 2012 (UPDATED 9/7) SharePoint 2013 Anticipated release: Q4 2012 (UPDATED 8/21) Enjoy

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  • Algorithm for tracking progress of controller method running in background

    - by SilentAssassin
    I am using Codeigniter framework for PHP on Windows platform. My problem is I am trying to track progress of a controller method running in background. The controller extracts data from the database(MySQL) then does some processing and then stores the results again in the database. The complete aforesaid process can be considered as a single task. A new task can be assigned while another task is running. The newly assigned task will be added in a queue. So if I can track progress of the controller, I can show status for each of these tasks. Like I can show "Pending" status for tasks in the queue, "In Progress" for tasks running and "Done" for tasks that are completed. Main Issue: Now first thing I need to find is an algorithm to track the progress of how much amount of execution the controller method has completed and that means tracking how much amount of method has completed execution. For instance, this PHP script tracks progress of array being counted. Here the current state and state after total execution are known so it is possible to track its progress. But I am not able to devise anything analogous to it in my case. Maybe what I am trying to achieve is programmtically not possible. If its not possible then suggest me a workaround or a completely new approach. If some details are pending you can mention them. Sorry for my ignorance this is my first post here. I welcome you to point out my mistakes. EDIT: Database outline: The URL(s) and keyword(s) are first entered by user which are stored in a database table called link_master and keyword_master respectively. Then keywords are extracted from all the links present in this table and compared with keywords entered by user and their frequency is calculated which is the final result. And the results are stored in another table called link_result. Now sub-links are extracted from the domain links and stored in a table called sub_link_master. Now again the keywords are extracted from these sub-links and the corresponding results are stored in a table called sub_link_result. The number of records cannot be defined beforehand as the number of links on any web page can be different. Only the cardinality of *link_result* table can be known which will be equal to multiplication of number of keyword(s) and URL(s) . I insert multiple records at a time using this resource. Controller outline: The controller extracts keywords from a web page and also extracts keywords from all the links present on that page. There is a method called crawlLink. I used Rolling Curl to extract keywords and web page content. It has callback function which I used for extracting keywords alongwith generating results and extracting valid sub-links. There is a insertResult method which stores results for links and sub-links in the respective tables. Yes, the processing depends on the number of records. The more the number of records, the more time it takes to execute: Consider this scenario: Number of Domain Links = 1 Number of Keywords = 3 Number of Domain Links Result generated = 3 (3 x 1 as described in the question) Number of Sub Links generated = 41 Number of Sub Links Result = 117 (41 x 3 = 123 but some links are not valid or searchable) Approximate time taken for above process to complete = 55 seconds. The above result is for a single link. I want to track the progress of the above results getting stored in database. When all results are stored, the task is complete. If results are getting stored, the task is In Progress. I am not clear how can I track this progress.

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  • New R Interface to Oracle Data Mining Available for Download

    - by charlie.berger
      The R Interface to Oracle Data Mining ( R-ODM) allows R users to access the power of Oracle Data Mining's in-database functions using the familiar R syntax. R-ODM provides a powerful environment for prototyping data analysis and data mining methodologies. R-ODM is especially useful for: Quick prototyping of vertical or domain-based applications where the Oracle Database supports the application Scripting of "production" data mining methodologies Customizing graphics of ODM data mining results (examples: classification, regression, anomaly detection) The R-ODM interface allows R users to mine data using Oracle Data Mining from the R programming environment. It consists of a set of function wrappers written in source R language that pass data and parameters from the R environment to the Oracle RDBMS enterprise edition as standard user PL/SQL queries via an ODBC interface. The R-ODM interface code is a thin layer of logic and SQL that calls through an ODBC interface. R-ODM does not use or expose any Oracle product code as it is completely an external interface and not part of any Oracle product. R-ODM is similar to the example scripts (e.g., the PL/SQL demo code) that illustrates the use of Oracle Data Mining, for example, how to create Data Mining models, pass arguments, retrieve results etc. R-ODM is packaged as a standard R source package and is distributed freely as part of the R environment's Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). For information about the R environment, R packages and CRAN, see www.r-project.org. R-ODM is particularly intended for data analysts and statisticians familiar with R but not necessarily familiar with the Oracle database environment or PL/SQL. It is a convenient environment to rapidly experiment and prototype Data Mining models and applications. Data Mining models prototyped in the R environment can easily be deployed in their final form in the database environment, just like any other standard Oracle Data Mining model. What is R? R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files. The design of R has been heavily influenced by two existing languages: Becker, Chambers & Wilks' S and Sussman's Scheme. Whereas the resulting language is very similar in appearance to S, the underlying implementation and semantics are derived from Scheme. R was initially written by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. Since mid-1997 there has been a core group (the "R Core Team") who can modify the R source code archive. Besides this core group many R users have contributed application code as represented in the near 1,500 publicly-available packages in the CRAN archive (which has shown exponential growth since 2001; R News Volume 8/2, October 2008). Today the R community is a vibrant and growing group of dozens of thousands of users worldwide. It is free software distributed under a GNU-style copyleft, and an official part of the GNU project ("GNU S"). Resources: R website / CRAN R-ODM

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  • Silverlight Cream for January 15, 2011 -- #1028

    - by Dave Campbell
    Note to #1024 Swag Winners: I'm sending emails to the vendors Sunday night, thanks for your patience (a few of you have not contacted me yet) In this Issue: Ezequiel Jadib, Daniel Egan(-2-), Page Brooks, Jason Zander, Andrej Tozon, Marlon Grech, Jonathan van de Veen, Walt Ritscher, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Sacha Barber, William E. Burrows, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Building a Radar Control in Silverlight - Part 1" Page Brooks WP7: "Tutorial: Dynamic Tile Push Notification for Windows Phone 7" Jason Zander Training: "WP7 Unleashed Session I–Hands on Labs" Daniel Egan From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Rough Cut Editor SP1 Released Ezequiel Jadib has an announcement about the Rough Cut Editor SP1 release, and he walks you through the content, installation and a bit of the initial use. WP7 Unleashed Session I–Hands on Labs Daniel Egan posted Part 1 of 3 of a new WP7 HOL ... video online and material to download... get 'em while they're hot! WP7 Saving to Media Library Daniel Egan has another post up as well on saving an image to the media library... not the update from Tim Heuer... all good info Building a Radar Control in Silverlight - Part 1 This freakin' cool post from Page Brooks is the first one of a series on building a 'Radar Control' in Silverlight ... seriously, go to the bottom and run the demo... I pretty much guarantee you'll take the next link which is download the code... don't forget to read the article too! Tutorial: Dynamic Tile Push Notification for Windows Phone 7 Jason Zander has a nice-looking tutorial up on dynamic tile notifications... good diagrams and discussion and plenty of code. Reactive.buffering.from event. Andrej Tozon is continuing his Reactive Extensions posts with this one on buffering: BufferWithTime and BufferWIthCount ... good stuff, good write-up, and the start of a WP7 game? MEFedMVVM with PRISM 4 Marlon Grech combines his MEFedMVVM with Prism 4, and says it was easy... check out the post and the code. Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application part #40 Jonathan van de Veen has a discussion up about things you need to pay attention to as your project gets close to first deployment... lots of good information to think about Silverlight or not. Customize Windows 7 Preview pane for XAML files Walt Ritscher has a (very easy) XAML extension for Windows 7 that allows previewing of XAML files in an explorer window... as our UK friends say "Brilliant!" Entity Framework Code-First, oData & Windows Phone Client From the never-ending stream of posts that is Jesse Liberty comes this one on EF Code-First... so Jesse's describing Code-First and OData all wrapped up about a WP7 app Sterling Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Database Triggers and Auto-Identity Sterling and Database Triggers sitting in a tree... woot for WP7 from Jeremy Likness... provides database solutions including Validation, Data-specific concerns such as 'last modified', and post-save processing ... all good, Jeremy! A Look At Fluent APIs Sacha Barber has a great post up that isn't necessarily Silverlight, but is it? ... we've been hearing a lot about Fluent APIs... read on to see what the buzz is. Windows Phone 7 - Part 3 - Final Application William E. Burrows has Part 3 of his WP7 tutorial series up... this one completing the Golf Handicap app by giving the user the ability to manage scores. User Control vs Custom Control in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has a great diagram and description-filled post up on User Controls and Custom Controls in WP7... good external links too. 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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  • Synchronous Actions

    - by Dan Krasinski-Oracle
    Since the introduction of SMF, svcadm(1M) has had the ability to enable or disable a service instance and wait for that service instance to reach a final state.  With Oracle Solaris 11.2, we’ve expanded the set of administrative actions which can be invoked synchronously. Now all subcommands of svcadm(1M) have synchronous behavior. Let’s take a look at the new usage: Usage: svcadm [-v] [cmd [args ... ]] svcadm enable [-rt] [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... enable and online service(s) svcadm disable [-t] [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... disable and offline service(s) svcadm restart [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... restart specified service(s) svcadm refresh [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... re-read service configuration svcadm mark [-It] [-s [-T timeout]] <state> <service> ... set maintenance state svcadm clear [-s [-T timeout]] <service> ... clear maintenance state svcadm milestone [-d] [-s [-T timeout]] <milestone> advance to a service milestone svcadm delegate [-s] <restarter> <svc> ... delegate service to a restarter As you can see, each subcommand now has a ‘-s’ flag. That flag tells svcadm(1M) to wait for the subcommand to complete before returning. For enables, that means waiting until the instance is either ‘online’ or in the ‘maintenance’ state. For disable, the instance must reach the ‘disabled’ state. Other subcommands complete when: restart A restart is considered complete once the instance has gone offline after running the ‘stop’ method, and then has either returned to the ‘online’ state or has entered the ‘maintenance’ state. refresh If an instance is in the ‘online’ state, a refresh is considered complete once the ‘refresh’ method for the instance has finished. mark maintenance Marking an instance for maintenance completes when the instance has reached the ‘maintenance’ state. mark degraded Marking an instance as degraded completes when the instance has reached the ‘degraded’ state from the ‘online’ state. milestone A milestone transition can occur in one of two directions. Either the transition moves from a lower milestone to a higher one, or from a higher one to a lower one. When moving to a higher milestone, the transition is considered complete when the instance representing that milestone reaches the ‘online’ state. The transition to a lower milestone, on the other hand, completes only when all instances which are part of higher milestones have reached the ‘disabled’ state. That’s not the whole story. svcadm(1M) will also try to determine if the actions initiated by a particular subcommand cannot complete. Trying to enable an instance which does not have its dependencies satisfied, for example, will cause svcadm(1M) to terminate before that instance reaches the ‘online’ state. You’ll also notice the optional ‘-T’ flag which can be used in conjunction with the ‘-s’ flag. This flag sets a timeout, in seconds, after which svcadm gives up on waiting for the subcommand to complete and terminates. This is useful in many cases, but in particular when the start method for an instance has an infinite timeout but might get stuck waiting for some resource that may never become available. For the C-oriented, each of these administrative actions has a corresponding function in libscf(3SCF), with names like smf_enable_instance_synchronous(3SCF) and smf_restart_instance_synchronous(3SCF).  Take a look at smf_enable_instance_synchronous(3SCF) for details.

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  • To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 4

    - by AshishRay
    This is Part 4 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In Part 3, I talked in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing, and the distance implications you have to keep in mind. In this final article of the series, I will talk about how you can nicely complement Data Guard SYNC with the ability to failover in seconds. Wait - Did I Say “Seconds”? Did I just say that some customers do Data Guard failover in seconds? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Data Guard has an automatic failover capability, aptly called Fast-Start Failover. Initially available with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Data Guard SYNC transport mode (and enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support Data Guard ASYNC transport mode), this capability, managed by Data Guard Broker, lets your Data Guard configuration automatically failover to a designated standby database. Yes, this means no human intervention is required to do the failover. This process is controlled by a low footprint Data Guard Broker client called Observer, which makes sure that the primary database and the designated standby database are behaving like good kids. If something bad were to happen to the primary database, the Observer, after a configurable threshold period, tells that standby, “Your time has come, you are the chosen one!” The standby dutifully follows the Observer directives by assuming the role of the new primary database. The DBA or the Sys Admin doesn’t need to be involved. And - in case you are following this discussion very closely, and are wondering … “Hmmm … what if the old primary is not really dead, but just network isolated from the Observer or the standby - won’t this lead to a split-brain situation?” The answer is No - It Doesn’t. With respect to why-it-doesn’t, I am sure there are some smart DBAs in the audience who can explain the technical reasons. Otherwise - that will be the material for a future blog post. So - this combination of SYNC and Fast-Start Failover is the nirvana of lights-out, integrated HA and DR, as practiced by some of our advanced customers. They have observed failover times (with no data loss) ranging from single-digit seconds to tens of seconds. With this, they support operations in industry verticals such as manufacturing, retail, telecom, Internet, etc. that have the most demanding availability requirements. One of our leading customers with massive cloud deployment initiatives tells us that they know about server failures only after Data Guard has automatically completed the failover process and the app is back up and running! Needless to mention, Data Guard Broker has the integration hooks for interfaces such as JDBC and OCI, or even for custom apps, to ensure the application gets automatically rerouted to the new primary database after the database level failover completes. Net Net? To sum up this multi-part blog article, Data Guard with SYNC redo transport mode, plus Fast-Start Failover, gives you the ideal triple-combo - that is, it gives you the assurance that for critical outages, you can failover your Oracle databases: very fast without human intervention, and without losing any data. In short, it takes the element of risk out of critical IT operations. It does require you to be more careful with your network and systems planning, but as far as HA is concerned, the benefits outweigh the investment costs. So, this is what we in the MAA Development Team believe in. What do you think? How has your deployment experience been? We look forward to hearing from you!

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  • Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service

    - by David Dorf
    When most people discuss mobile in retail, they immediately go to shopping applications.  While I agree the consumer side of mobile is huge, I believe its also important to arm store associates with mobile tools.  There are around a dozen major roll-outs of mobile POS to chain retailers, and all have been successful.  This does not, however, signal the demise of traditional registers.  Retailers will adopt mobile POS slowly and reduce the number of fixed registers over time, but there's likely to be a combination of both for the foreseeable future.  Even Apple retains at least one fixed register in every store, you just have to know where to look. The business benefits for mobile POS are pretty straightforward: 1. Faster checkout.  Walmart's CFO recently reported that for every second they shave off the average transaction time, they can potentially save $12M a year in labor.  I think its more likely that labor will be redeployed to enhance the customer experience. 2. Smarter associates.  The sales associates on the floor need the same access to information that consumers have, if not more.  They need ready access to product details, reviews, inventory, etc. to meet consumer expectations.  In a recent study, 40% of consumers said a savvy store associate can impact their final product selection more than a website. 3. Lower costs.  Mobile POS hardware (iPod touch + sled) costs about a fifth of fixed registers, not to mention the reclaimed space that can be used for product displays. But almost all Mobile POS solutions can claim those benefits equally.  Where there's differentiation is on the technical side.  Oracle recently announced availability of the Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, and it has three big technology advantages in the market: 1. Portable. We used a popular open-source component called PhoneGap that abstracts the app from the underlying OS and hardware so that iOS, Android, and other platforms could be supported.  Further, we used Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, which are commonly known by many programmers, as opposed to ObjectiveC which is more difficult to find.  The screen can adjust to different form-factors and sizes, just like you see with browsers.  In the future when a new, zippy device gets released, retailers will have the option to move to that device more easily than if they used a native app. 2. Flexible.  Our Mobile POS is free with the Oracle Retail Point-of-Service product.  Retailers can use any combination of fixed and mobile registers, and those ratios can change as required.  Perhaps start with 1 mobile and 4 fixed per store, then transition over time to 4 mobile and 1 fixed without any additional software licenses.  Our scalable solution supports lots of combinations. 3. Consistent.  Because our Mobile POS is fully integrated to our traditional POS, the same business logic is reused.  Third-party Mobile POS solutions often handle pricing, promotions, and tax calculations separately leading to possible inconsistencies within the store.  That won't happen with Oracle's solution. For many retailers, Mobile POS can lower costs, increase customer service, and generally enhance a consumer's in-store experience.  Apple led the way, but lots of other retailers are discovering the many benefits of adding mobile capabilities in their stores.  Just be sure to examine both the business and technology benefits so you get the most value from your solution for the longest period of time.

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  • Development Quirk From ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

    - by jkauffman
    The Problem I got a compilation error in my ASP.NET MVC3 project that tested my sanity today. (As always, names are changed to protect the innocent) The type or namespace name 'FishViewModel' does not exist in the namespace 'Company.Product.Application.Models' (are you missing an assembly reference?) Sure looks easy! There must be something in the project referring to a FishViewModel. The Confusing Part The first thing I noticed was the that error was occuring in a folder clearly not in my project and in files that I definitely had not created: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\(versionNumber)\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ App_Web_mezpfjae.1.cs I also ascertained these facts, each of which made me more confused than the last: Rebuild and Clean had no effect. No controllers in the project ever returned a ViewResult using FishViewModel. No views in the project defined that they use FishViewModel. Searching across all files included in the project for “FishViewModel” provided no results. The build server did not report a problem. The Solution The problem stemmed from a file that was not included in the project but still present on the file system: (By the way, if you don’t know this trick already, there is a toolbar button in the Solution Explorer window to “Show All Files” which allows you to see files all files in the file system) In my situation, I was working on the mission-critical Fish view before abandoning the feature. Instead of deleting the file, I excluded it from the project. However, this was a bad move. It caused the build failure, and in order to fix the error, this file must be deleted. By the way, this file was not in source control, so the build server did not have it. This explains why my build server did not report a problem for me. The Explanation So, what’s going on? This file isn’t even a part of the project, so why is it failing the build? This is a behavior of the ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation. This is the same process that occurs when deploying a webpage; ASP.NET compiles the web application’s code. When this occurs on a production server, it has to do so without the .csproj file (which isn’t usually deployed, if you’ve taken your time to do a deployment cleanly). This process has merely the file system available to identify what to compile. So, back in the world of developing the webpage in visual studio on my developer box, I run into the situation because the same process is occuring there. This is true even though I have more files on my machine than will actually get deployed. I can’t help but think that this error could be attributed back to the real culprit file (Fish.cshtml, rather than the temporary files) with some work, but at least the error had enough information in it to narrow it down. The Conclusion I had previously been accustomed to the idea that for c# projects, the .csproj file always “defines” the build behavior. This investigation has taught me that I’ll need to shift my thinking a bit to remember that the file system has the final say when it comes to web applications, even on the developer’s machine!

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  • Sparse virtual machine disk image resizing weirdness?

    - by Matt H
    I have a partitioned virtual machine disk image created by vmware. What I want to do is resize that by 10GB. The file size is showing as 64424509440. Or 60GB. So I ran this: dd if=/dev/zero of=./win7.img seek=146800640 count=0 It ran without errors and I can verify the new size is in fact 75161927680 bytes or 70GB. This is where it gets a little odd. I started the guest domain in xen which is a Windows 7 enterprise machine. What I was expecting to see in diskmgmt.msc is 2 partitions. 1 system partition at the start of around 100MB and near 60GB partition (which is C drive) followed by around 10GB of free space. Actually what I saw was a 70GB partition!?! That confused me... so I decided to run the Check Disk which when you set it on the C drive it asks you to reboot so it'll run on boot. So I did that and during the boot it ran the checks. It got all the way through stage 3 and didn't show any errors at all. Looked at the partitions in disk manager and now C drive has shrunk back to 60GB and there is no free space. What gives? Ok, I thought I'd try mounting it under Dom0 and examining it with fdisk. This is what I get when mounted sudo xl block-attach 0 tap:aio:/home/xen/vms/otoy_v1202-xen.img xvda w sudo fdisk -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4 GB, 64424509440 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7832 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x582dfc96 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/xvda1 * 1 13 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/xvda2 13 7833 62810112 7 HPFS/NTFS Note the cylinder boundary comment. When I run sudo cfdisk /dev/xvda I get: FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder Press any key to exit cfdisk So I guess this is a bigger problem than first thought. How can I fix this? EDIT: Oops, the cylinder boundary thing is not a problem at all since disks have used LBA etc. So that threw me for a moment... still the problem exists... Now this output looks a little different. sudo sfdisk -uS -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 7832 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System /dev/xvda1 * 2048 206847 204800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda2 206848 125827071 125620224 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda3 0 - 0 0 Empty /dev/xvda4 0 - 0 0 Empty BTW: I do have a backup of the image so if you help me mess it up that's ok. EDIT: sudo parted /dev/xvda print free Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd) Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 32.3kB 1049kB 1016kB Free Space 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary ntfs boot 2 106MB 64.4GB 64.3GB primary ntfs 64.4GB 64.4GB 1049kB Free Space Cool. Linux is showing free space is 10GB which is what I expect. The problem is windows isn't seeing this?

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  • Is there a theory for "transactional" sequences of failing and no-fail actions?

    - by Ross Bencina
    My question is about writing transaction-like functions that execute sequences of actions, some of which may fail. It is related to the general C++ principle "destructors can't throw," no-fail property, and maybe also with multi-phase transactions or exception safety. However, I'm thinking about it in language-neutral terms. My concern is with correctly designing error handling in C++ functions that must be reliable. I would like to know what the concepts below are called so that I can learn more about them. I'm sorry that I can't ask the question more directly. Since I don't know this area I have provided an example to explain my question. The question is at the end. Here goes: Consider a sequence of steps or actions executed sequentially, where actions belong to one of two classes: those that always succeed, and those that may fail. In the examples below: S stands for an action that always succeeds (called "no-fail" in some settings). F stands for an action that may fail (for example, it might fail to allocate memory or do I/O that could fail). Consider a sequences of actions (executed sequentially from left to right): S->S->S->S Since each action in the sequence above succeeds, the whole sequence succeeds. On the other hand, the following sequence may fail because the last action may fail: S->S->S->F So, claim: a sequence has the no-fail (S) property if and only if all of its actions are no-fail. Now, I'm interested in action sequences that form "atomic transactions", with "failure atomicity," i.e. where either the whole sequence completes successfully, or there is no effect. I.e. if some action fails, the earlier ones must be rolled back. This requires that any successfully executed actions prior to a failing action must always be able to be rolled back. Consider the sequence: S->S->S->F S<-S<-S In the example above, the first row is the forward path of the transaction, and the second row are inverse actions (executed from right to left) that can be used to roll back if the final top row actions fails. It seems to me that for a transaction to support failure atomicity, the following invariant must hold: Claim: To support failure atomicity (either completion or complete roll-back on failure) all actions preceding the latest failable (F) action on the forward path (marked * in the example below) must have no-fail (S) inverses. The following is an example of a sequence that supports failure atomicity: * S->F->F->F S<-S<-S Further, if we want the transaction to be able to attempt cancellation mid-way through, but still guarantee either full completion or full rollback then we need the following property: Claim: To support failure atomicity and cancellation mid-way through execution, in the face of errors in the inverse (cancellation) path, all actions following the earliest failable (F) inverse on the reverse path (marked *) must be no-fail (S). F->F->F->S->S S<-S<-F<-F * I believe that these two conditions guarantee that an abortable/cancelable transaction will never get "stuck". My questions are: What is the study and theory of these properties called? are my claims correct? and what else is there to know? UPDATE 1: Updated terminology: what I previously called "robustness" is called atomicity in the database literature. UPDATE 2: Added explicit reference to failure atomicity, which seems to be a thing.

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  • Ubiquitous BIP

    - by Tim Dexter
    The last number I heard from Mike and the PM team was that BIP is now embedded in more than 40 oracle products. That's a lot of products to keep track of and to help out with new releases, etc. Its interesting to see how internal Oracle product groups have integrated BIP into their products. Just as you might integrate BIP they have had to make a choice about how to integrate. 1. Library level - BIP is a pure java app and at the bottom of the architecture are a group of java libraries that expose APIs that you can use. they fall into three main areas, data extraction, template processing and formatting and delivery. There are post processing capabilities but those APIs are embedded withing the template processing libraries. Taking this integration route you are going to need to manage templates, data extraction and processing. You'll have your own UI to allow users to control all of this for themselves. Ultimate control but some effort to build and maintain. I have been trawling some of the products during a coffee break. I found a great post on the reporting capabilities provided by BIP in the records management product within WebCenter Content 11g. This integration falls into the first category, content manager looks after the report artifacts itself and provides you the UI to manage and run the reports. 2. Web Service level - further up in the stack is the web service layer. This is sitting on the BI Publisher server as a set of services, runReport and scheduleReport are the main protagonists. However, you can also manage the reports and users (locally managed) on the server and the catalog itself via the services layer.Taking this route, you still need to provide the user interface to choose reports and run them but the creation and management of the reports is all handled by the Publisher server. I have worked with a few customer on this approach. The web services provide the ability to retrieve a list of reports the user can access; then the parameters and LOVs for the selected report and finally a service to submit the report on the server. 3. Embedded BIP server UI- the final level is not so well supported yet. You can currently embed a report and its various levels of surrounding  'chrome' inside another html based application using a URL. Check the docs here. The look and feel can be customized but again, not easy, nor documented. I have messed with running the server pages inside an IFRAME, not bad, but not great. Taking this path should present the least amount of effort on your part to get BIP integrated but there are a few gotchas you need to get around. So a reasonable amount of choices with varying amounts of effort involved. There is another option coming soon for all you ADF developers out there, the ability to drop a BIP report into your application pages. But that's for another post.

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  • Programmatically Making the Selected OutlineView Cell Editable

    - by Geertjan
    When you're using the OutlineView and you use the Tab key to move through its cells, the cells are shown to be selected, as below: However, until you press the Space key in the selected cell, or until you click the mouse within it, you cannot edit it. That's extremely annoying when you're creating a data-entry application. Your user would like to begin editing a cell as soon as they have tabbed into it. Needing to press Space first, or click the mouse in the cell first, is a cumbersome additional step that completely destroys your work flow. Below, you can see that an editable cell looks very different to one that is merely selected: I.e., now I can type and the text changes. How to set up the OutlineView so that the Tab key makes the selected cell editable? Here's the constructor of the TopComponent you see above: public ViewerTopComponent() {     initComponents();     setName(Bundle.CTL_ViewerTopComponent());     setToolTipText(Bundle.HINT_ViewerTopComponent());     setLayout(new BorderLayout());     OutlineView ov = new OutlineView();     final Outline outline = ov.getOutline();     outline.setRootVisible(false);     //When column selection changes, e.g., via Tab key,     //programmatically start editing the cell:     ListSelectionListener listSelectionListener = new ListSelectionListener() {         @Override         public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) {             int row = outline.getSelectedRow();             int column = outline.getSelectedColumn();             //Ignore the node column:             if (row > -1 && row > -1) {                 outline.editCellAt(row, column);             }         }     };     outline.getColumnModel().getSelectionModel().addListSelectionListener(listSelectionListener);     ov.setPropertyColumns(             "city", "City", "state", "State");     add(ov, BorderLayout.CENTER);     em.setRootContext(             new AbstractNode(Children.create(new CustomerChildFactory(), true)));     associateLookup(ExplorerUtils.createLookup(em, getActionMap())); }

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  • Give a session on C++ AMP – here is how

    - by Daniel Moth
    Ever since presenting on C++ AMP at the AMD Fusion conference in June, then the Gamefest conference in August, and the BUILD conference in September, I've had numerous requests about my material from folks that want to re-deliver the same session. The C++ AMP session I put together has evolved over the 3 presentations to its final form that I used at BUILD, so that is the one I recommend you base yours on. Please get the slides and the recording from channel9 (I'll refer to slide numbers below). This is how I've been presenting the C++ AMP session: Context (slide 3, 04:18-08:18) Start with a demo, on my dual-GPU machine. I've been using the N-Body sample (for VS 11 Developer Preview). (slide 4) Use an nvidia slide that has additional examples of performance improvements that customers enjoy with heterogeneous computing. (slide 5) Talk a bit about the differences today between CPU and GPU hardware, leading to the fact that these will continue to co-exist and that GPUs are great for data parallel algorithms, but not much else today. One is a jack of all trades and the other is a number cruncher. (slide 6) Use the APU example from amd, as one indication that the hardware space is still in motion, emphasizing that the C++ AMP solution is a data parallel API, not a GPU API. It has a future proof design for hardware we have yet to see. (slide 7) Provide more meta-data, as blogged about when I first introduced C++ AMP. Code (slide 9-11) Introduce C++ AMP coding with a simplistic array-addition algorithm – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 12-13) index<N>, extent<N>, and grid<N>. (Slide 14-16) array<T,N>, array_view<T,N> and comparison between them. (Slide 17) parallel_for_each. (slide 18, 21) restrict. (slide 19-20) actual restrictions of restrict(direct3d) – the slides speak for themselves. (slide 22) bring it altogether with a matrix multiplication example. (slide 23-24) accelerator, and accelerator_view. (slide 26-29) Introduce tiling incl. tiled matrix multiplication [tiling probably deserves a whole session instead of 6 minutes!]. IDE (slide 34,37) Briefly touch on the concurrency visualizer. It supports GPU profiling, but enhancements specific to C++ AMP we hope will come at the Beta timeframe, which is when I'll be spending more time talking about it. (slide 35-36, 51:54-59:16) Demonstrate the GPU debugging experience in VS 11. Summary (slide 39) Re-iterate some of the points of slide 7, and add the point that the C++ AMP spec will be open for other compiler vendors to implement, even on other platforms (in fact, Microsoft is actively working on that). (slide 40) Links to content – see slide – including where all your questions should go: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/parallelcppnative/threads.   "But I don't have time for a full blown session, I only need 2 (or just 1, or 3) C++ AMP slides to use in my session on related topic X" If all you want is a small number of slides, you can take some from the session above and customize them. But because I am so nice, I have created some slides for you, including talking points in the notes section. Download them here. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Implementing Service Level Agreements in Enterprise Manager 12c for Oracle Packaged Applications

    - by Anand Akela
    Contributed by Eunjoo Lee, Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager. Service Level Management, or SLM, is a key tool in the proactive management of any Oracle Packaged Application (e.g., E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards E1, Fusion Apps, etc.). The benefits of SLM are that administrators can utilize representative Application transactions, which are constantly and automatically running behind the scenes, to verify that all of the key application and technology components of an Application are available and performing to expectations. A single transaction can verify the availability and performance of the underlying Application Tech Stack in a much more efficient manner than by monitoring the same underlying targets individually. In this article, we’ll be demonstrating SLM using Siebel Applications, but the same tools and processes apply to any of the Package Applications mentioned above. In this demonstration, we will log into the Siebel Application, navigate to the Contacts View, update a contact phone record, and then log-out. This transaction exposes availability and performance metrics of multiple Siebel Servers, multiple Components and Component Groups, and the Siebel Database - in a single unified manner. We can then monitor and manage these transactions like any other target in EM 12c, including placing pro-active alerts on them if the transaction is either unavailable or is not performing to required levels. The first step in the SLM process is recording the Siebel transaction. The following screenwatch demonstrates how to record Siebel transaction using an EM tool called “OpenScript”. A completed recording is called a “Synthetic Transaction”. The second step in the SLM process is uploading the Synthetic Transaction into EM 12c, and creating Generic Service Tests. We can create a Generic Service Test to execute our synthetic transactions at regular intervals to evaluate the performance of various business flows. As these transactions are running periodically, it is possible to monitor the performance of the Siebel Application by evaluating the performance of the synthetic transactions. The process of creating a Generic Service Test is detailed in the next screenwatch. EM 12c provides a guided workflow for all of the key creation steps, including configuring the Service Test, uploading of the Synthetic Test, determining the frequency of the Service Test, establishing beacons, and selecting performance and usage metrics, just to name a few. The third and final step in the SLM process is the creation of Service Level Agreements (SLA). Service Level Agreements allow Administrators to utilize the previously created Service Tests to specify expected service levels for Application availability, performance, and usage. SLAs can be created for different time periods and for different Service Tests. This last screenwatch demonstrates the process of creating an SLA, as well as highlights the Dashboards and Reports that Administrators can use to monitor Service Test results. Hopefully, this article provides you with a good start point for creating Service Level Agreements for your E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards E1, or Fusion Applications. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, with the Application Management Suites, represents a quick and easy way to implement Service Level Management capabilities at customer sites. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Google+ |  Newsletter

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  • Oracle Spatial and Graph – A year in review

    - by Mandy Ho
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} What a great year for Oracle Spatial! Or shall I now say, Oracle Spatial and Graph, with our official name change this summer. There were so many exciting events and updates we had this year, and this blog will review and link to some of the events you may have missed over the year. We kicked off 2012 with our webinar: Situational Analysis at OnStar with Oracle Spatial and Graph. We collaborated with OnStar’s Emergency Strategy and Outreach expert, Jeff Joyner ,on how Onstar uses Google Earth Visualization, NAVTEQ data and Oracle Database to deliver fast, accurate emergency services to its customers. In the next webinar in our 2012 series, Oracle partner TARGUSinfo showcased how to build a robust, scalable and secure customer relationship management systems – with built-in mapping and spatial analysis, and deployed in the cloud. This is a very cool system using all Oracle technologies including Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware MapViewer. Attendees learned how to gather market insight, score prospects and customers and perform location analysis. The replay is available here. Our final webinar of the year focused on using Oracle Business Intelligence tools, along with Oracle Spatial and Graph to perform location-aware predictive analysis. Watch the webcast here: In June, we joined up with the Location Intelligence conference in Washington, DC, and had a very successful 2012 Oracle Spatial User Conference. Customers and partners from the US, as well as from EMEA and Asia, flew in to share experiences and ideas, and get technical updates from Oracle experts. Users were excited to hear about spatial-Exadata performance, and advances in MapViewer and BI. Peter Doolan of Oracle Public Sector kicked off the event with a great keynote, and US Census, NOAA, and Ordnance Survey Great Britain were just a few of the presenters. Presentation archive here. We recognized some of the most exceptional partners and customers for their contributions to advancing mainstream solutions using geospatial technologies. Planning for 2013’s conference has already started. Please contribute your papers for consideration here. http://www.locationintelligence.net/ We also launched a new Oracle PartnerNetwork Spatial Specialization – to enable partners to get validated in the marketplace for their expertise in taking solutions to market. Individuals can also get individual certifications. Learn more here. Oracle Open World was not to disappoint, with news regarding our next Oracle Spatial and Graph release, as well as the announcement of our new Oracle Spatial and Graph SIG board! Join the SIG today. One more exciting event as we look to 2013. Spatial and location technologies have a dedicated track at the January BIWA SIG Summit – on January 9-10 in Redwood Shores, CA. View the agenda and register here: www.biwasummit.org. We thank you for all your support during the year of 2012 and look towards an even more exciting 2013! Wishing you and your family a prosperous New Year and Happy Holidays!

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  • How do I make a firefox extension execute script on page open/load? [migrated]

    - by Will Mc
    Thanks in advance! I am creating my first extension (A firefox extension). See below for full description of final product. I need help starting off. I have looked and studied the HelloWorld.xpi example found on Mozilla's site so I am happy to edit that to learn. In the example, when you click a menu item it runs script to display an alert message. My question is, how would I edit this extension to run the script on page load? I am guessing I need to insert some code in the browserOverlay as it loads on page load so, here is the browserOverlay.xpi from the example I am editing to learn: <?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="chrome://global/skin/" ?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="chrome://xulschoolhello/skin/browserOverlay.css" ?> <!DOCTYPE overlay SYSTEM "chrome://xulschoolhello/locale/browserOverlay.dtd"> <overlay id="xulschoolhello-browser-overlay" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"> <script type="application/x-javascript" src="chrome://xulschoolhello/content/browserOverlay.js" /> <stringbundleset id="stringbundleset"> <stringbundle id="xulschoolhello-string-bundle" src="chrome://xulschoolhello/locale/browserOverlay.properties" /> </stringbundleset> <menubar id="main-menubar"> <menu id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloMenu.accesskey;" insertafter="helpMenu"> <menupopup> <menuitem id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-item" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloItem.accesskey;" oncommand="XULSchoolChrome.BrowserOverlay.sayHello(event);" /> </menupopup> </menu> </menubar> <vbox id="appmenuSecondaryPane"> <menu id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-2" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloMenu.accesskey;" insertafter="appmenu_addons"> <menupopup> <menuitem id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-item-2" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloItem.accesskey;" oncommand="XULSchoolChrome.BrowserOverlay.sayHello(event);" /> </menupopup> </menu> </vbox> </overlay> I hope you can help me. I need to know what code I should use and where I should put it... Here is the gist of my overall extension - I am creating a click to call extension. This extension will search any new page for a phone number whether just refreshed, new page, new tab etc... Each phone number when clicked will open a new tab and direct user to a custom URL. Thanks again!

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  • Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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  • Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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  • Process Power to the People that Create Engagement

    - by Michael Snow
    Organizations often speak about their engagement problems as if the problem is the people they are trying to engage - employees,  partners, customers and citizens.  The reality of most engagement problems is that the processes put in place to engage are impersonal, inflexible, unintuitive, and often completely ignorant of the population they are trying to serve. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Delight? How appropriate during this short week of the US Independence Day Holiday that we're focusing on People, Process and Engagement. As we celebrate this holiday in the US and the historic independence we gained (sorry Brits!) - it's interesting to think back to 1776 to the creation of that pivotal document, the Declaration of Independence. What tremendous pressure to create an engaging document and founding experience they must have felt. "On June 11, 1776, in anticipation of the impending vote for independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress appointed five men — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston — to write a declaration that would make clear to people everywhere why this break from Great Britain was both necessary and inevitable. The committee then appointed Jefferson to draft a statement. Jefferson produced a "fair copy" of his draft declaration, which became the basic text of his "original Rough draught." The text was first submitted to Adams, then Franklin, and finally to the other two members of the committee. Before the committee submitted the declaration to Congress on June 28, they made forty-seven emendations to the document. During the ensuing congressional debates of July 1-4, 1776, Congress adopted thirty-nine further revisions to the committee draft. (http://www.constitution.org) If anything was an attempt for engaging the hearts and minds of the 13 Colonies at the time, this document certainly succeeded in its mission. ...Their tools at the time were pen and ink and parchment. Although the final document would later be typeset with lead type for a printing press to distribute to the colonies, all of the original drafts were hand written. And today's enterprise complains about using "Review and Track Changes" at times.  Can you imagine the manual revision control process? or lack thereof?  Collaborative process? Time delays? Would  implementing a better process have helped our founding fathers collaborate better? Declaration of Independence rough draft below. One of many during the creation process. Great comparison across multiple versions of the document here. (from http://www.ushistory.org/): While you may not be creating a new independent nation, getting your employees to engage is crucial to your success as a company in today's world. Oracle WebCenter provides the tools that power engagement. Employees that have better tools for communication, collaboration and getting their job done are more engaged employees. Better engaged employees create more engaged customers and partners. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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  • 101 Ways to Participate...and make the future Java

    - by heathervc
     In case you missed it earlier today, and as promised in BOF6283, here are the 101 Ways to Improve (and Make the Future) Java...thanks to Bruno Souza of SouJava and Martijn Verburg of the London Java Community for their contributions! Join or create a JUG Come to the meetings Help promoting your JUG: twitter, facebook, etc Find someone that can give a talk Get your company to sponsor (a meeting, an event) Organize an activity (meetings, hackathons, dojos, etc) Answer questions on a mailing list (or simply join!) Volunteer for a small, one time tasks (creating a web page, helping with an activity) Come early to an event, and help to carry the piano Moderate a list or add things to the wiki Participate in the organization meetings or mailing lists Take pictures of an event or meeting and publish them online Write a blog about an event or meeting, to help promote the group Help record and post a session online Present your JavaOne experience when you get back Repeat the best talk you saw at JavaOne at a JUG meeting Send this list of ideas to other Java developers in your area so they can help out too! Present a step-by-step tutorial Present GreenFoot and Alice to school students Present BlueJ and Alice to university students Teach those tools to teachers and professors Write a step-by-step tutorial on your blog or to a magazine Create a page that lists resources Give a talk about your favorite Java feature or technology Learn a new Java API and present to your co-workers Then, present in a JUG meeting, and then, present it in an event in your area, and submit it to JavaOne! Create a study group to get certified or to learn some new Java technology Teach a non-Java developer how to download the basic tools and where to find more information Download and use an open source project Improve the documentation Write an article or a blog post about the project Write an FAQ Join and participate on the mailing list Describe a bug in detail and submit a bug report Fix a bug and submit it to the project Give a talk about it at a JUG meeting Teach your co-workers how to use the project Sign up to Adopt a JSR Test regular builds of the Reference Implementation (RI) Report bugs in the RI Submit Feature Requests to the spec Triage issues on the issue tracker Run a hack day to discuss the API Moderate mailing lists and forums Create an FAQ or Wiki Evangelize a specification on Twitter, G+, Hacker News, etc Give a lightning talk Help build the RI Help build the Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK) Create a Podcast Learn Latin - e.g. legal language, translate to English Sign up to Adopt OpenJDK Run a Bugathon Fix javac compiler warnings Build virtual images Add tests to Java Submit Javadoc patches Give a webbing Teach someone to build OpenJDK Hold a brown bag session at work Fix the oldest known bug Overhaul Javadoc to use HTML Load the OpenJDK into different IDEs Run a build farm node Test your code on a nightly build Learn how to read Java byte code Visit JCP.org Follow jcp_org on Twitter Friend JCP on Facebook Read JCP Blog Register for JCP.org site Create a JSR Watch List Review JSRs in progress Comment on JSRs in progress, write and track bug reports, use cases, etc Review JSRs in Maintenance Comment on JSRs in Maintenance Implement Final JSRs Review the Transparency of JSRs in progress and provide feedback to the PMO and Spec Lead/community Become a JCP Member or associate with a current JCP member Nominate to serve on an Expert Group (EG) Serve on an EG Submit a JSR proposal and become Spec Lead Take a Spec Lead role in an Inactive or Dormant JSR Nominate for an Executive Committee (EC) seat Vote in the EC elections Vote in EC Special Elections Review EC Meeting Summaries Attend Spec Lead calls Write blogs, articles on your experiences Join the EC project on java.net Join JCP.Next on java.net/JSR 358 Participate on the JCP forums and join JSR projects on java.net Suggest agenda items for open EC meetings Attend public EC teleconference (2x per year) Attend open EC meetings at JavaOne Nominate for JCP Annual Awards Attend annual JavaOne and JCP Annual Awards Ceremony Attend JCP related BOF sessions and give your feedback to Program Office Invite JCP program office members to your JUG  or meetup Invite JSR Spec Leads to your JUG or meetup And always - hold a party!

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  • How much is a subscriber worth?

    - by Tom Lewin
    This year at Red Gate, we’ve started providing a way to back up SQL Azure databases and Azure storage. We decided to sell this as a service, instead of a product, which means customers only pay for what they use. Unfortunately for us, it makes figuring out revenue much trickier. With a product like SQL Compare, a customer pays for it, and it’s theirs for good. Sure, we offer support and upgrades, but, fundamentally, the sale is a simple, upfront transaction: we’ve made this product, you need this product, we swap product for money and everyone is happy. With software as a service, it isn’t that easy. The money and product don’t change hands up front. Instead, we provide a service in exchange for a recurring fee. We know someone buying SQL Compare will pay us $X, but we don’t know how long service customers will stay with us, or how much they will spend. How do we find this out? We use lifetime value analysis. What is lifetime value? Lifetime value, or LTV, is how much a customer is worth to the business. For Entrepreneurs has a brilliant write up that we followed to conduct our analysis. Basically, it all boils down to this equation: LTV = ARPU x ALC To make it a bit less of an alphabet-soup and a bit more understandable, we can write it out in full: The lifetime value of a customer equals the average revenue per customer per month, times the average time a customer spends with the service Simple, right? A customer is worth the average spend times the average stay. If customers pay on average $50/month, and stay on average for ten months, then a new customer will, on average, bring in $500 over the time they are a customer! Average spend is easy to work out; it’s revenue divided by customers. The problem comes when we realise that we don’t know exactly how long a customer will stay with us. How can we figure out the average lifetime of a customer, if we only have six months’ worth of data? The answer lies in the fact that: Average Lifetime of a Customer = 1 / Churn Rate The churn rate is the percentage of customers that cancel in a month. If half of your customers cancel each month, then your average customer lifetime is two months. The problem we faced was that we didn’t have enough data to make an estimate of one month’s cancellations reliable (because barely anybody cancels)! To deal with this data problem, we can take data from the last three months instead. This means we have more data to play with. We can still use the equation above, we just need to multiply the final result by three (as we worked out how many three month periods customers stay for, and we want our answer to be in months). Now these estimates are likely to be fairly unreliable; when there’s not a lot of data it pays to be cautious with inference. That said, the numbers we have look fairly consistent, and it’s super easy to revise our estimates when new data comes in. At the very least, these numbers give us a vague idea of whether a subscription business is viable. As far as Cloud Services goes, the business looks very viable indeed, and the low cancellation rates are much more than just data points in LTV equations; they show that the product is working out great for our customers, which is exactly what we’re looking for!

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  • AI to move custom-shaped spaceships (shape affecting movement behaviour)

    - by kaoD
    I'm designing a networked turn based 3D-6DOF space fleet combat strategy game which relies heavily on ship customization. Let me explain the game a bit, since you need to know a bit about it to set the question. What I aim for is the ability to create your own fleet of ships with custom shapes and attached modules (propellers, tractor beams...) which would give advantages and disadvantages to each ship, so you have lots of different fleet distributions. E.g., long ship with two propellers at the side would let the ship spin around that plane easily, bigger ships would move slowly unless you place lots of propellers at the back (therefore spending more "construction" points and energy when moving, and it will only move fast towards that direction.) I plan to balance all the game around this feature. The game would revolve around two phases: orders and combat phase. During the orders phase, you command the different ships. When all players finish the order phase, the combat phase begins and the ship orders get resolved in real-time for some time, then the action pauses and there's a new orders phase. The problem comes when I think about player input. To move a ship, you need to turn on or off different propellers if you want to steer, travel forward, brake, rotate in place... These propellers don't have to work at their whole power, so you can achieve more movement combinations with less propellers. I think this approach is a bit boring. The player doesn't want to fiddle with motors or anything, you just want to MOVE and KILL. The way I intend the player to give orders to these ships is by a destination and a rotation, and then the AI would calculate the correct propeller power to achive that movement and rotation. Propulsion doesn't have to be the same throught the entire turn calculation (after the orders have been given) so it would be cool if the ships reacted as they move, adjusting the power of the propellers for their needs dynamically, but it may be too hard to implement and it's not really needed for the game to work. In both cases, how would that AI decide which propellers to activate for the best (or at least not worst) trajectory to be achieved? I though about some approaches: Learning AI: The ship types would learn about their movement by trial and error, adjusting their behaviour with more uses, and finally becoming "smart". I don't want to get involved THAT far in AI coding, and I think it can be frustrating for the player (even if you can let it learn without playing.) Pre-calculated timestep movement: Upon ship creation, ALL possible movements are calculated for each propeller configuration and power for a given delta-time. Memory intensive, ugly, bad. Pre-calculated trajectories: The same as above but not for each delta-time but the whole trajectory, which would then be fitted as much as possible. Requires a fixed propeller configuration for the whole combat phase and is still memory intensive, ugly and bad. Continuous brute forcing: The AI continously checks ALL possible propeller configurations throughout the entire combat phase, precalculates a few time steps and decides which is the best one based on that. Con: what's good now might not be that good later, and it's too CPU intensive, ugly, and bad too. Single brute forcing: Same as above, but only brute forcing at the beginning of the simulation, so it needs constant propeller configuration throughout the entire combat phase. Coninuous angle check: This is not a full movement method, but maybe a way to discard "stupid" propeller configurations. Given the current propeller's normal vector and the final one, you can approximate the power needed for the propeller based on the angle. You must do this continuously throughout the whole combat phase. I figured this one out recently so I didn't put in too much thought. A priori, it has the "what's good now might not be that good later" drawback too, and it doesn't care about the other propellers which may act together to make a better propelling configuration. I'm really stuck here. Any ideas?

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