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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Backward-compatible vs. forward-compatible: a tale of two clouds | William Vambenepe "There is the Cloud that provides value by requiring as few changes as possible. And there is the Cloud that provides value by raising the abstraction and operation level," says William Vambenepe. "The backward-compatible Cloud versus the forward-compatible Cloud." Vambenepe was a panelist on the recent ArchBeat podcast Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds. Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog: ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis investigates "how you can customize a standard BPM Task Flow through MDS Seeded customization." Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Music Festival If, after a day spent in sessions at Oracle Openworld, you want nothing more than to head back to your hotel for a quiet evening spent responding to email, please ignore the rest of this message. Because every night from Sept 30 to Oct 4 the streets of San Francisco will pulsate with music from a vast array of bands representing more musical styles than a single human brain an comprehend. It's the first ever Oracle Music Festival, baby, 7:00pm to 1:00am every night. Are those emails that important...? Resource Kit: Oracle Exadata - includes demos, videos, product datasheets, and technical white papers. This free resource kit includes several customer case study videos, two 3D product demos, several product datasheets, and three technical architecture white papers. Registration is required for the who don't already have a free Oracle.com membership account. Some execs contemplate making 'Bring Your Own Device' mandatory | ZDNet "Companies and agencies are recognizing that individual employees are doing a better job of handling and managing their devices than their harried and overworked IT departments – who need to focus on bigger priorities, such as analytics and cloud," says ZDNet SOA blogger Joe McKendrick. Podcast Show Notes: Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds All three parts of this discussion are now available. Featuring a panel of leading Oracle cloud computing experts, including Dr. James Baty, Mark T. Nelson, Ajay Srivastava, and William Vambenepe, the discussion covers an overview of the various flavors of cloud computing, the importance of standards, Why cloud computing is a paradigm shift—and why it isn't, and advice on what architects need to know to take advantage of the cloud. And for those who prefer reading to listening, a complete transcript is also available. Amazon AMIs and Oracle VM templates (Cloud Migrations) Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski shares an objective comparison of these two resources. IOUC : Blogs : Read the latest news on the global user group community - June 2012! The June 2012 edition of "Are You a Member Yet?"—the quarterly newsletter about Oracle user group communities around the world. Webcast: Introducing Identity Management 11g R2 - July 19 Date: Thursday, July 19, 2012 Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET Please join Oracle and customer executives for the launch of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2, the breakthrough technology that dramatically expands the reach of identity management to cloud and mobile environments. Thought for the Day "The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." — Bjarne Stroustrup Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Five Key Trends in Enterprise 2.0 for 2011

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We recently sat down with Andy MacMillan, an industry veteran and vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle, to get his take on the year ahead in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). He offered us his five predictions about the ways he believes E2.0 technologies will transform business in 2011. 1. Forward-thinking organizations will achieve an unprecedented level of organizational awareness. Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. But this year we are anticipating that organizations will go to the next step and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver rich contextual "activity streams." Activity streams are a new way for enterprise users to get relevant information as quickly as it happens, by navigating to that information in context directly from their portal. We don't mean syndicating social activities limited to a single application. Instead, we believe back-office systems will be combined with social media tools to drive how users make informed business decisions in brand new ways. For example, an account manager might log into the company portal and automatically receive notification that colleagues are closing business around a certain product in his market segment. With a single click, he can reach out instantly to these colleagues via social media and learn from their successes to drive new business opportunities in his own area. 2. Online customer engagement will become a high priority for CMOs. A growing number of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have created a new direct report called "head of online"--a senior marketing executive responsible for all engagements with customers and prospects via the Web, mobile, and social media. This new field has been dubbed "Web experience management" or "online customer engagement" by firms and analyst organizations. It is likely to rapidly increase demand for a host of new business objectives and metrics from Web content management solutions. As companies interface with customers more and more over the Web, Web experience management solutions will help deliver more targeted interactions to ensure increased customer loyalty while meeting sales and business objectives. 3. Real composite applications will be widely adopted. We expect organizations to move from the concept of a single "uber-portal" that encompasses all the necessary features to a more modular, component-based concept for composite applications. This approach is now possible as IT and power users are empowered to assemble new, purpose-built composite applications quickly from existing components. 4. Records management will drive ECM consolidation. We continue to see a significant shift in the approach to records management. Several years ago initiatives were focused on overlaying records management across a set of electronic repositories and physical storage locations. We believe federated records management will continue, but we also expect to see records management driving conversations around single-platform content management consolidation. 5. Organizations will demand ECM at extreme scale. We have already seen a trend within IT organizations to provide a common, highly scalable infrastructure to consolidate and support content and information needs. But as data sizes grow exponentially, ECM at an extreme scale is likely to spread at unprecedented speeds this year. This makes sense as regulations and transparency requirements rise. The model in which ECM and lightweight CMS systems provide basic content services such as check-in, update, delete, and search has converged around a set of industry best practices and has even been coded into new industry standards such as content management interoperability services. As these services converge and the demand for them accelerates, organizations are beginning to rationalize investments into a single, highly scalable infrastructure. Is your organization ready for Enterprise 2.0 in 2011? Learn more.

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• Don't Forget To Enjoy Life

  - by Justin

  I have a pretty clear stance on posting personal information in my blogs. I tend to avoid it almost instinctively. Part of that is because I am a somewhat private person. And the other is because I know how easy it is for personal information to be gathered and collected from sources such as blogs. So, this has remained a tech only blog for me. I've only posted topics mostly related to issues I have encountered at work. In a way this blog is a 'bookmark' for me. If I post something here and run into the issue again it allows me to refer back to a convenient place where the 'fix' is documented in a way that I understand. But today, I am posting something that speaks to everyone. Something PERSONAL. Honestly, I expect this entry to receive zero views. But if nothing else, I can come back to this blog one day when I'm having a bad day or something and run across this post. And I will be reminded... DON'T FORGET TO ENJOY LIFE. Say this to yourself out loud, right now. People, we can get caught up in some rather mundane details as we trek through life. It's so easy to lose track of what really matters that it should be no surprise to find yourself reading something like this and thinking to yourself 'Yeah. You are right, man. Some of this crap I'm clinging on to right now is so small in the grand scheme of things'. I have no reservation, no shame, in saying that I am more often than not caught up in the ever evolving world of 'shit that does not matter'. When you work in technology, you are surrounded by deadlines, upgrades, new versions, support 'end of life', etc. And by time you get done with your 8 hours you go home and put in a few more because you are STILL CAUGHT UP in the things you dealt with at work all day. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR. DO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIEND A FAVOR. When you are done for the day, and you drive home, get those work-related things out of your head before you pull into the driveway. If you are still thinking on them when you park the car, leave the engine running, close your eyes and take a deep breath. If you believe in God, pray. If you don't then meditate for a second with the INTENTION of letting go of the day and becoming the 'real you'. You may have forgotten who the real you is so I'll remind you.... THE REAL YOU IS THAT GUY OR GAL THAT LAUGHS, LOVES, AND LIVES. Be the real you as often as possible. If you can't do it during your 9 - 5, do it at home. YOUR RELATIONSHIPS AND YOUR PERSONAL HAPPINESS DEPEND ON IT. I am going to make you a promise right now. If you do what I've just said, your days will be longer and your joy will be exponential. I can't explain why I know this to be true. But I do know it. And if you are there reading this right now, you know it is true too. We both know it is true because it COMES FROM WITHIN EVERY MAN, WOMAN and CHILD. We are born into love and happiness. Lets not fade away into the darkness so easily found in this world. Lets keep the flame burning. The flame of passion. Passion for LIFE. Peace be with you.

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• "previousMode": Controling the Pin Action of a TopComponent

  - by Geertjan

  An excellent thing I learned today is that you, as a developer of a NetBeans module or NetBeans Platform application, can control the pin button. Up until today, whenever I had a TopComponent defined to appear in "rightSlidingSide" mode and then I clicked the "pin" button, as shown here... ...the TopComponent would then find itself pinned in the "explorer" mode. Would make more sense if it would be pinned in the "properties" mode, which is the docked mode closest to the "rightSlidingSide" mode. Not being able to control the "pin" button has been a recurring question (including in my own head) over several years. But the NetBeans Team's window system guru Stan Aubrecht informed me today that a "previousMode" attribute exists in the "tc-ref" file of the TopComponent. Since a few releases, that file is generated via the annotations in the TopComponent. However, "previousMode" is currently not one of the attributes exposed by the @TopComponent.Registration annotation. Therefore, what I did was this: Set "rightSlidingSide" in the "mode" attribute of the @TopComponent.Registration. Build the module. Find the "generated-layer.xml" (in the Files window) and move the layer registration of the TopComponent, including its action and menu item for opening the TopComponent, into my own manual layer within the module. Then remove all the TopComponent annotations from the TopComponent, though you can keep @ConvertAsProperties and @Messages. Then add the "previousMode" attribute, as highlighted below, into my own layer file, i.e., within the tags copied from the "generated-layer.xml": <folder name="Modes"> <folder name="rightSlidingSide"> <file name="ComparatorTopComponent.wstcref"> <![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE tc-ref PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Top Component in Mode Properties 2.0//EN" "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/tc-ref2_0.dtd"> <tc-ref version="2.0"> <tc-id id="ComparatorTopComponent"/> <state opened="false"/> <previousMode name="properties" index="0" /> </tc-ref> ]]> </file> </folder> </folder> Now when you run the application and pin the specific TopComponent defined above, i.e., in the above case, named "ComparatorTopComponent", you will find it is pinned into the "properties" mode! That's pretty cool and if you agree, then you're a pretty cool NetBeans Platform developer, and I'd love to find out more about the application/s you're creating on the NetBeans Platform! Meanwhile, I'm going to create an issue for exposing the "previousMode" attribute in the @TopComponent.Registration annotation.

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• Fresh Ubuntu Install - Grub not loading

  - by Ryan Sharp

  System Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 Samsung 64GB SSD - OS' Samsung 1TB HDD - Games, /Home, Swap WD 300'ishGB HDD - Backup Okay, so I'm very frustrated, so please excuse me if I miss anything out as my head is clouded by anger and impatience, etc. I'll try me best, though. First of all, I'll explain how I got to my predicament. I finally got my new SSD. I firstly installed Windows, which completed without a hitch. Afterwards, I tried to install Ubuntu, which failed several times due to problems irrelevant to this question, but I mention this to explain my frustrations, sorry. Anyway, I finally installed Ubuntu. However, I chose the 'bootloader' to be installed on the same partition as where I was installing the Ubuntu Root partition, as that was what I believed to be the best choice. It was of my thinking that it was supposed to go on the same partition and on the SSD, which is my OS drive, though with my problem, it apparently was wrong. So I tried to fix it by checking guides and following their directions, but seemed to have messed it up even more. Here is what I receive after I use the fdisk -l command: (I also added explanations for which I used each partition for) Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders, total 125045424 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x324971d1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 208896 48957439 24374272 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 48959486 125044735 38042625 5 Extended /dev/sda5 48959488 125044735 38042624 83 Linux sda1 --/ Windows Recovery sda2 --/ Windows 7 sda3/5 --/ Ubuntu root [ / ] Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xc0ee6a69 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1024208894 1953523711 464657409 5 Extended /dev/sdb3 * 2048 1024206847 512102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb5 1024208896 1939851263 457821184 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 1939853312 1953523711 6835200 82 Linux swap / Solaris sdb3 --/ Partition for Steam games, etc. sdb5 --/ Ubuntu Home [ /home ] sdb6 --/ Ubuntu Swap Partition table entries are not in disk order Disk /dev/sdc: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x292eee23 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 2048 625141759 312569856 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT sdc1 --/ Generic backup I also used a Boot Script that other users suggested, so that I can give more details on my partitions and also where Grub is located... ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos5)/boot/grub on this drive. => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos5)/boot/grub on this drive. => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc. Now that is weird... Why would Grub2 be installed on both my SSD and HDD? Even weirder is why is Windows on the MBR of my backup hard drive? Nothing I did should have done that... Anyway, here is the entire Output from that script... PASTEBIN So, to summarize what I need: How can I fix my setup so grub loads on startup? How can I clean my partitions to remove unnecessary grubs? What did I do wrong so that I don't do something so daft again? Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you can help me. I've been trying to have a successful setup since Friday, and I'm almost at the point that I'm really tempted to throw my computer out the window due to my frustration.

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• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

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• Enabling Google Webmaster Tools With Your GWB Blog

  - by ToStringTheory

  I’ll be honest and save you some time, if you don’t have your own domain for your GWB blog, this won’t help, you may just want to move on…  I don’t want to waste your time……… Still here?  Good.  How great are Google’s website tools?  I don’t just mean Analytics which rocks, but also their Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) which gives you a glimpse into the queries that provide you your website traffic, search engine behavior on your site, and important keywords, just to name a few.   Pictured Above: Cool statistics. Problem Thanks to svickn over at wtfnext.com (another GeeksWithBlogs blog), we already have the knowledge on how to setup Google Analytics (wtfnext.com - How to: Set up Google Analytics on your GeeksWithBlogs blog).  However, one of the questions raised in the post, and even semi-answered in the questions, was how to setup Google Webmaster Tools with your blog as well. At first glance, it seems like it can’t be done.  Google graciously gives you several different options on how to authorize that you own a site.  The authentication options are: 1. (Recommended) – Upload an HTML file to your server 2. Add a meta tag to your site’s home page 3. Use your Google Analytics account 4. Add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration Since you don’t have access to the base path, you can’t do #1.  Same goes for #2 since you can’t edit the master/index page.  As for #3, they REQUIRE the Analytics code to be in the <head> section of your page, so even though we can use the workaround of hosting it in the news section, it won’t allow it since it isn’t in the correct place. Solution Last I checked, I didn’t see the DNS record option for Webmaster Tools.  Maybe this was recently added, or maybe I don’t remember it since I was always able to use some other method to authorize it.  In this case though, this is the option that we need.  My registrar wasn’t in their list, but they provide detailed enough instructions for the ‘Other’ option: Simply create a TXT record with your domain hoster (mine is DynDns), fill in the tag information, and then click verify.  My entry was able to be resolved immediately, but since you are working with DNS, it may take longer.  If after 24 hours you still aren’t able to verify, you can use a site such as mxtoolbox.com, and in the searchbox type “txt: {domain-name-here}”, to see if your TXT record was entered successfully. It is pretty simple to setup the TXT entry in DynDns, but if you have questions/comments, feel free to post them. Conclusion With this simple workaround (not really a workaround, but feature since they offer it..), you are now able to see loads of information regarding your standings in the world of the Google Search Engine.  No critical issues?  Did I do something wrong?! As an aside, you can do the same thing with the Bing Webmaster Tools by adding a CNAME record to bing.verify.com…  Instructions can be found on the ‘Add Site’ popup when adding your site. If you don’t have your own domain, but continued, to read to this point – thank you!

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• Personal Financial Management – The need for resuscitation

  - by Salil Ravindran

  Until a year or so ago, PFM (Personal Financial Management) was the blue eyed boy of every channel banking head. In an age when bank account portability is still fiction, PFM was expected to incentivise customers to switch banks. It still is, in some emerging economies, but if the state of PFM in matured markets is anything to go by, it is in a state of coma and badly requires resuscitation. Studies conducted around the year show an alarming decline and stagnation in PFM usage in mature markets. A Sept 2012 report by Aite Group – Strategies for PFM Success shows that 72% of users hadn’t used PFM and worse, 58% of them were not kicked about using it. Of the rest who had used it, only half did on a bank site. While there are multiple reasons for this lack of adoption, some are glaringly obvious. While pretty graphs and pie charts are important to provide a visual representation of my income and expense, it is simply not enough to encourage me to return. Static representation of data without any insightful analysis does not help me. Budgeting and Cash Flow is important but when I have an operative account, a couple of savings accounts, a mortgage loan and a couple of credit cards help me with what my affordability is in specific contexts rather than telling me I just busted my budget. Help me with relative importance of each budget category so that I know it is fine to go over budget on books for my daughter as against going over budget on eating out. Budget over runs and spend analysis are post facto and I am informed of my sins only when I return to online banking. That too, only if I decide to come to the PFM area. Fundamentally, PFM should be a part of my banking engagement rather than an analysis tool. It should be contextual so that I can make insight based decisions. So what can be done to resuscitate PFM? Amalgamation with banking activities – In most cases, PFM tools are integrated into online banking pages and they are like chapter 37 of a long story. PFM needs to be a way of banking rather than a tool. Available balances should shift to Spendable Balances. Budget and goal related insights should be integrated with transaction sessions to drive pre-event financial decisions. Personal Financial Guidance - Banks need to think ground level and see if their PFM offering is really helping customers achieve self actualisation. Banks need to recognise that most customers out there are non-proficient about making the best value of their money. Customers return when they know that they are being guided rather than being just informed on their finance. Integrating contextual financial offers and financial planning into PFM is one way ahead. Yet another way is to help customers tag unwanted spending thereby encouraging sound savings habits. Mobile PFM – Most banks have left all those numbers on online banking. With access mostly having moved to devices and the success of apps, moving PFM on to devices will give it a much needed shot in the arm. This is not only about presenting the same wine in a new bottle but also about leveraging the power of the device in pushing real time notifications to make pre-purchase decisions. The pursuit should be to analyse spend, budgets and financial goals real time and push them pre-event on to the device. So next time, I should know that I have over run my eating out budget before walking into that burger joint and not after. Increase participation and collaboration – Peer group experiences and comments are valued above those offered by the bank. Integrating social media into PFM engagement will let customers share and solicit their financial management experiences with their peer group. Peer comparisons help benchmark one’s savings and spending habits with those of the peer group and increases stickiness. While mature markets have gone through this learning in some way over the last one year, banks in maturing digital banking economies increasingly seem to be falling into this trap. Best practices lie in profiling and segmenting customers, being where they are and contextually guiding them to identify and achieve their financial goals. Banks could look at the likes of Simple and Movenbank to draw inpiration from.

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• Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform

  - by Michael Snow

  Openmatics s.r.o. was founded in 2010 as a subsidiary of ZF Friedrichshafen AG, a global player in driveline and chassis technology. Oracle Customer:  Openmatics s.r.o.Location:  Pilsen, Czech RepublicIndustry:  AutomotiveEmployees:  70 Its goal was to develop and operate a flexible, open telematics platform for automotive applications, which is independent from vehicle and component suppliers—recognizing that the fragmented telematics market was not meeting today’s fleet management needs. Openmatics provides a rich product portfolio, and customers can extend the platform, as required, to meet their needs. Partners and third-parties can develop their own applications using the Openmatics’ software development kit and can sell them via the Openmatics app shop.ZF Friedrichshafen AG is a global player in driveline and chassis technology. With 121 production companies and 650 service partners in 26 countries, ZF is among the top 10 largest automotive suppliers worldwide. Founded in 1915 to develop and produce transmissions for airships and vehicles, the group’s product offerings now include transmissions and steering systems as well as chassis components and complete axle systems and modules.  A word from Openmatics s.r.o.  “Oracle WebCenter Portal, together with the underlying Oracle Application Development Framework, provided the fundamental infrastructure for the Openmatics platform. Fleet managers can now reduce fuel consumption and operating costs, and more efficiently manage vehicle usage, maintenance, and safety. The standards-based platform allows third-party suppliers to deploy their own vehicle telematics services as Openmatics apps and creates a de facto standard for the automotive industry, independent from a single manufacturer or service provider.” – Gero Strobel, Head of Development, Openmatics s.r.o. Challenges Create an industry standard for vehicle telematics by establishing a customizable platform that enables access to telematics information, such as current and past fuel consumption, through a web browser to better meet automotive market and customer needs Reduce fleet-management costs by eliminating the need to invest in isolated telematics hardware and software solutions per vehicle brand and vehicle component manufacturer Establish an open platform where third-party providers—such as original equipment manufacturers (OEM), insurers, fleet operators, and individual developers—can deploy their own vehicle telematics services Allow users to purchase targeted telematics services as single apps to reduce costs and ensure rapid growth of telematics services available on the platform Enable users to configure their telematics apps with ease to make sure the platform meets individual fleet management requirements, such as analyzing past and current fuel consumption of a truck fleet Solutions Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal as a foundation for Openmatics, a standards-based automotive telematics platform that provides next-generation fleet management with unified digital communication from and to vehicles on the move Used Oracle Application Development Framework as the development framework for Oracle WebCenter Portal’s components and services, providing developers with ready-to-use software development kits with application programming interfaces, design templates, and visual tools that accelerated time to market Used Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse to simplify telematics application development in Java Enabled fleet monitoring by recording vehicle data—such as fuel consumption information—through onboard units, delivering the information to Oracle Database, and making it accessible through a customizable app portfolio on any web browser Stored vehicle telematics data—sent as encrypted information—in Oracle Database, ensuring data integrity and immediate availability for the platform’s telematics applications Enabled a wide range of telematics services suppliers, from vehicle component manufacturers to fleet application developers, to offer vehicle telematics services on the Openmatics platform, ensuring platform independence from OEMs Provided Openmatics customers with the means to individually select the automotive telematics services that are relevant to their business requirements, eliminating the need to pay for superfluous information and reducing fleet management costs Oracle Products & Services Oracle Application Development Framework Oracle WebCenter Portal Oracle SOA Suite Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Oracle Database Oracle Consulting &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

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• Design Pattern for building a Budget

  - by Scott

  So I've looked at the Builder Pattern, Abstract Interfaces, other design patterns, etc. - and I think I'm over thinking the simplicity behind what I'm trying to do, so I'm asking you guys for some help with either recommending a design pattern I should use, or an architecture style I'm not familiar with that fits my task. So I have one model that represents a Budget in my code. At a high level, it looks like this: public class Budget { public int Id { get; set; } public List<MonthlySummary> Months { get; set; } public float SavingsPriority { get; set; } public float DebtPriority { get; set; } public List<Savings> SavingsCollection { get; set; } public UserProjectionParameters UserProjectionParameters { get; set; } public List<Debt> DebtCollection { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public List<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } public List<Income> IncomeCollection { get; set; } public bool AutoSave { get; set; } public decimal AutoSaveAmount { get; set; } public FundType AutoSaveType { get; set; } public decimal TotalExcess { get; set; } public decimal AccountMinimum { get; set; } } To go into more detail about some of the properties here shouldn't be necessary, but if you have any questions about those I will fill more out for you guys. Now, I'm trying to create code that builds one of these things based on a set of BudgetBuildParameters that the user will create and supply. There are going to be multiple types of these parameters. For example, on the sites homepage, there will be an example section where you can quickly see what your numbers look like, so they would be a much simpler set of SampleBudgetBuildParameters then say after a user registers and wants to create a fully filled out Budget using much more information in the DebtBudgetBuildParameters. Now a lot of these builds are going to be using similar code for certain tasks, but might want to also check the status of a users DebtCollection when formulating a monthly spending report, where as a Budget that only focuses on savings might not want to. I'd like to reduce code duplication (obviously) as much as possible, but in my head, every way I can think to do this would require using a base BudgetBuilderFactory to return the correct builder to the caller, and then creating say a SimpleBudgetBuilder that inherits from a BudgetBuilder, and put all duplicate code in the BudgetBuilder, and let the SimpleBudgetBuilder handle it's own cases. Problem is, a lot of the unique cases are unique to 2/4 builders, so there will be duplicate code somewhere in there obviously if I did that. Can anyone think of a better way to either explain a solution to this that may or may not be similar to mine, or a completely different pattern or way of thinking here? I really appreciate it.

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• Controlling soft errors and false alarms in SSIS

  - by Jim Giercyk

  If you are like me, you dread the 3AM wake-up call.  I would say that the majority of the pages I get are false alarms.  The alerts that require action often require me to open an SSIS package, see where the trouble is and try to identify the offending data.  That can be very time-consuming and can take quite a chunk out of my beauty sleep.  For those reasons, I have developed a simple error handling scenario for SSIS which allows me to rest a little easier.  Let me first say, this is a high level discussion; getting into the nuts and bolts of creating each shape is outside the scope of this document, but if you have an average understanding of SSIS, you should have no problem following along. In the Data Flow above you can see that there is a caution triangle.  For the purpose of this discussion I am creating a truncation error to demonstrate the process, so this is to be expected.  The first thing we need to do is to redirect the error output.  Double-clicking on the Query shape presents us with the properties window for the input.  Simply set the columns that you want to redirect to Redirect Row in the dropdown box and hit Apply. Without going into a dissertation on error handling, I will just note that you can decide which errors you want to redirect on Error and on Truncation.  Therefore, to override this process for a column or condition, simply do not redirect that column or condition. The next thing we want to do is to add some information about the error; specifically, the name of the package which encountered the error and which step in the package wrote the record to the error table.  REMEMBER: If you redirect the error output, your package will not fail, so you will not know where the error record was created without some additional information.    I added 3 columns to my error record; Severity, Package Name and Step Name.  Severity is just a free-form column that you can use to note whether an error is fatal, whether the package is part of a test job and should be ignored, etc.  Package Name and Step Name are system variables. In my package I have created a truncation situation, where the firstname column is 50 characters in the input, but only 4 characters in the output.  Some records will pass without truncation, others will be sent to the error output.  However, the package will not fail. We can see that of the 14 input rows, 8 were redirected to the error table. This information can be used by another step or another scheduled process or triggered to determine whether an error should be sent.  It can also be used as a historical record of the errors that are encountered over time.  There are other system variables that might make more sense in your infrastructure, so try different things.  Date and time seem like something you would want in your output for example.  In summary, we have redirected the error output from an input, added derived columns with information about the errors, and inserted the information and the offending data into an error table.  The error table information can be used by another step or process to determine, based on the error information, what level alert must be sent.  This will eliminate false alarms, and give you a head start when a genuine error occurs.

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• WiX, MSDeploy and an appealing configuration/deployment paradigm

  - by alexhildyard

  I do a lot of application and server configuration; I've done this for many years and have tended to view the complexity of this strictly in terms of the complexity of the ultimate configuration to be deployed. For example, specific APIs aside, I would tend to regard installing a server certificate as a more complex activity than, say, copying a file or adding a Registry entry.My prejudice revolved around the idea of a sequential deployment script that not only had the explicit prescription to apply a specific server configuration, but also made the implicit presumption that the server in question was in a good known state. Scripts like this fail for hundreds of reasons -- the Default Website didn't exist; the application had already been deployed; the application had already been partially deployed and failed to rollback fully, and so on. And so the problem is that the more complex the configuration activity, the more scope for error in any individual part of that activity, and therefore the greater the chance the server in question will not end up at exactly the desired configuration level.Recently I was introduced to a completely different mindset, which, for want of a better turn of phrase, I will call the "make it so" mindset. It's extremely simple both to explain and to implement. In place of the head-down, imperative script you used to use, you substitute a set of checks -- much like exception handlers -- around each configuration activity, starting with a check of the current system state. Thus the configuration logic becomes: "IF these services aren't started then start them, and IF XYZ website doesn't exist then create it, and IF these shares don't exist then create them, and IF these shares aren't permissioned in some particular way, then permission them so." This works. Really well, in my experience. Scenario 1: You want to get a system into a good known state; it's already in a good known state; you quickly realise there is nothing to do.Scenario 2: You want to get the system into a good known state; your script is flawed or the system is bust; it cannot be put into that state. You know exactly where (at least part of) the problem is and why.Scenario 3: You want to get the system into a good known state; people are fiddling around with the system just now. That's fine. You do what you can, and later you come back and try it againScenario 4: No one wants to deploy anything; they want you to prove that the previous deployment was successful. So you re-run the deployment script with the "-WhatIf" flag. It reports that there was nothing to change. There's your proof.I mentioned two technologies in the title -- MSI and MSDeploy. I am thinking specifically of the conversation that took place here. Having worked with both technologies, I think Rob Mensching's response is appropriately nuanced, and in essence the difference is this: sometimes your target is either to achieve a specific new server state, or to rollback to a known good one. Then again, your target may be to configure what you can, and to understand what you can't. Implicitly MSDeploy's "rollback" is simply to redeploy the previous version, whereas a well-crafted MSI will actively put your system into that state without further intervention. Either way, if all goes well it will leave you with a system in one of two states, whereas MSDeploy could leave your system in one of many states. The key is that MSDeploy and MSI are complementary technologies; which suits you best depends as much on Operational guidance as your Configuration remit.What I wanted to say was that I have always been for atomic, transactional-based configuration, but having worked with the "make it so" paradigm, I have been favourably impressed by the actual results. I'm tempted to put a more technical post up on this in due course.

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• Help Me Help You Fix That

  - by BuckWoody

  If you've been redirected here because you posted on a forum, or asked a question in an e-mail, the person wanted you to know how to get help quickly from a group of folks who are willing to do so - but whose time is valuable. You need to put a little effort into the question first to get others to assist. This is how to do that. It will only take you a moment to read... 1. State the problem succinctly in the title When an e-mail thread starts, or a forum post is the "head" of the conversation, you'll attract more helpers by using a descriptive headline than a vague one. This: "Driver for Epson Line Printer Not Installing on Operating System XYZ" Not this: "Can't print - PLEASE HELP" 2. Explain the Error Completely Make sure you include all pertinent information in the request. More information is better, there's almost no way to add too much data to the discussion. What you were doing, what happened, what you saw, the error message, visuals, screen shots, whatever you can include. This: "I'm getting error '5203 - Driver not compatible with Operating System since about 25 years ago' in a message box on the screen when I tried to run the SETUP.COM file from my older computer. It was a 1995 Compaq Proliant and worked correctly there.." Not this: "I get an error message in a box. It won't install." 3. Explain what you have done to research the problem If the first thing you do is ask a question without doing any research, you're lazy, and no one wants to help you. Using one of the many fine search engines you can most always find the answer to your problem. Sometimes you can't. Do yourself a favor - open a notepad app, and paste the URL's as you look them up. If you get your answer, don't save the note. If you don't get an answer, send the list along with the problem. It will show that you've tried, and also keep people from sending you links that you've already checked. This: "I read the fine manual, and it doesn't mention Operating System XYZ for some reason. Also, I checked the following links, but the instructions there didn't fix the problem: " Not this: <NULL> 4. Say "Please" and "Thank You" Remember, you're asking for help. No one owes you their valuable time. Ask politely, don't pester, endure the people who are rude to you, and when your question is answered, respond back to the thread or e-mail with a thank you to close it out. It helps others that have your same problem know that this is the correct answer. This: "I could really use some help here - if you have any pointers or things to try, I'd appreciate it." Not this: "I really need this done right now - why are there no responses?" This: "Thanks for those responses - that last one did the trick. Turns out I needed a new printer anyway, didn't realize they were so inexpensive now." Not this: <NULL> There are a lot of motivated people that will help you. Help them do that.

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Make your TSQL easier to read during a presentation

  - by Jonathan Allen

  SQL Server Management Studio 2012 has some neat settings that you can use to help your presentations at a SQL event better for the attendees if you are willing to spend a few minutes making some settings changes. Historically, I have been reluctant to make changes to my SSMS settings as it is such a tedious process and it’s not 100% clear that what you think you are changing is actually what gets changed. With SSMS 2012 this has become a lot easier and a lot less risky. In any session that involves TSQL there is a trade off between the speaker having all the code on screen and the attendees being able to read any of what is on screen. You (the speaker) might be able to read this when you are working on the code but plenty of your audience wont be able to make head or tail of it. SSMS 2012 has a zoom facility that can help: but don’t go nuts … Having the font too big means you will be scrolling a lot and the code will again be rendered unreadable. There is more though but you need to take a deep breath and open the Tools menu and delve into the SSMS options. In previous versions of SSMS this is a deep, dark and scary place where changing values can be obscure and sometimes catastrophic to the UI when you get back to the code editor. First things first, we set out as a good DBA and save our current (and presumably acceptable) SSMS configuration. From the import and Export Settings you can set up a file to hold all of the settings that you currently have. The wizard will open and ask you to pick an option. This time around choose to export settings. hit next and next again and then name your settings profile in the final step of the wizard and then click Finish. Once this is done then you can change whatever you like and always get back to this configuration in a couple of clicks. So what can you change to make for a good experience? Well there are plenty of things that can be altered but don’t go too mad and change too many things without taking a look at the results for every item on the list above you can change font, size, weight, colour, background colour etc. etc. but consider what you are trying to achieve and take it slowly. I have seen presenters with their settings set to have a yellow highlight and black font rather than the default pale blue background and slightly darker font so to achieve that select Text Editor and then select “Selected Text” in the Display Items listbox. As you change things the Sample area give you an idea of what effect you are going to have. Black and yellow is the colour combination with the highest contrast – that’s why bees and wasps# are that colour. What next? how about increasing the default font for your demo scripts? This means that any script you open and any new ones that you start will take on this font. No more zooming (or forgetting to) in the middle of sessions. now don’t forget to save this profile – follow the same steps as above but give the profile a different name, something like PresentationBigFontHighContrast might be appropriate. Once you are done making changes, export the settings once more and then go into the Import Export wizard and import settings from the first profile you created. Everything will be back to normal. Now making changes to suit your environment can be done very easily and with confidence. * – and warning tape and safety signs and so forth – Health and Safety officers simply copy nature!

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• Something about Property Management or &hellip; the understanding of SharePoint Admins/roles ?!?

  - by Enrique Lima

  When I talk about SharePoint, for some reason it comes to my mind as if it were property management and all the tasks associated with it. So, imagine you have a lot ( a piece of land of sorts), you then decide there is something you want to do with it.  So, you make the choice of having a building built.  Now, in order to go forward with your plan, you need to check what the rules/regulations are.  Has is it been zoned residential, commercial, industrial … you get the idea.  This to me sounds like Governance.  The what am I to do given a defined set of rules. We keep on moving forward based on those rules.  And with this we start the process of building, the building process takes us to survey the land, identify what our boundaries are.  And as we go along we start getting the idea in our head as to what we will do as far as the building goes.  We identify the essentials of the building, basic services and such.  All in all, we plan.  And as with many things we do, we like solid foundations.  What a solid foundation looks like will depend on where and what we build.  The way buildings are built depends in many ways in being able to foresee the potential for natural disasters or to try to leverage the lay of the land.  Sound familiar?  We have done our Requirements Gathering. We have the building in place, we have followed the zoning rules, we have implemented services.  But we need someone to manage the building, now we move on to the human side of the story.  We want to establish a means to normalcy in the building, someone that can be the monitoring agent as to the “what’s going on?” of it.  This person will be tasked with making sure all basic services are functional, that measures are taken if there is an issue and so on.  Enter the Farm Administrator. In a way, we establish an extension of the rules to make sure the building and the apartments/offices build follow a standard set of rules too. Now, in turn you will have people leasing or buying the apartments/offices, they will be the keepers of that space.  So, now we are building sites, we have moved from having the building (farm) ready, to leasing/selling offices/apartments (site collections).  There will be someone assuming responsibility for those offices, that person will authorize or be informed about activities and also who not only gets a code into the building, but perhaps a key to the office.  Enter Site Collection Administrator.  And then perhaps we move on to the person that would be responsible for specifics within the office, for example a Human Resources Manager or Coordinator.  They will have specific control and knowledge about people.  A facilities coordinator, and so on.  I would translate that into Site Administrators. With that said then, we identify the following: Role Name Responsibility (but not limited to) Farm Administrator Infrastructure Site Collection Admin Policies for Content, Hierarchy, Recycle Bin, Security and Access Site Owner (Site Admin) Security and Access, Training, Guidance, Manage Templates All in all there are different levels of responsibility to be handled, but it is very important to understand what they are and what they mean. Here is a link to very well laid out explanation on this … http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/08/11/site-managers-and-end-user-expectations-roles-and-responsibilities/

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• Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

  - by Job

  I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some of them into my C# code at a previous job, and luckily it was easy to write C# code in a more functional style. At my new job we use Python and multiple inheritance is all the rage. My co-workers are very smart but they have to produce code fast given the nature of the company. I am learning both the tools and the codebase, but the architecture itself slows me down as well. I have not written the existing class hierarchy (neither would I be able to remember everything about it), and so, when I started adding a fairly small feature, I realized that I had to read a lot of code in the process. At the surface the code is neatly organized and split into small functions/methods and not copy-paste-repetitive, but the flip side of being not repetitive is that there is some magic functionality hidden somewhere in the hierarchy chain that magically glues things together and does work on my behalf, but it is very hard to find and follow. I had to fire up a profiler and run it through several examples and plot the execution graph as well as step through a debugger a few times, search the code for some substring and just read pages at the time. I am pretty sure that once I am done, my resulting code will be short and neatly organized, and yet not very readable. What I write feels declarative, as if I was writing an XML file that drives some other magic engine, except that there is no clear documentation on what the XML should look like and what the engine does except for the existing examples that I can read as well as the source code for the 'engine'. There has got to be a better way. IMO using composition over inheritance can help quite a bit. That way the computation will be linear rather than jumping all over the hierarchy tree. Whenever the functionality does not quite fit into an inheritance model, it will need to be mangled to fit in, or the entire inheritance hierarchy will need to be refactored/rebalanced, sort of like an unbalanced binary tree needs reshuffling from time to time in order to improve the average seek time. As I mentioned before, my co-workers are very smart; they just have been doing things a certain way and probably have an ability to hold a lot of unrelated crap in their head at once. I want to convince them to give composition and functional as opposed to OOP approach a try. To do that, I need to find some very good material. I do not think that a SCIP lecture or one by Rich Hickey will do - I am afraid it will be flagged down as too academic. Then, simple examples of Dog and Frog and AddressBook classes do not really connivence one way or the other - they show how inheritance can be converted to composition but not why it is truly and objectively better. What I am looking for is some real-world example of code that has been written with a lot of inheritance, then hit a wall and re-written in a different style that uses composition. Perhaps there is a blog or a chapter. I am looking for something that can summarize and illustrate the sort of pain that I am going through. I already have been throwing the phrase "composition over inheritance" around, but it was not received as enthusiastically as I had hoped. I do not want to be perceived as a new guy who likes to complain and bash existing code while looking for a perfect approach while not contributing fast enough. At the same time, my gut is convinced that inheritance is often the instrument of evil and I want to show a better way in a near future. Have you stumbled upon any great resources that can help me?

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• Does Jquery and Mootools usually have conflict if both are used on a webpage? [migrated]

  - by Charming Prince

  I have this website am designing, i tried using mootools 1.31 to animate some of the div boxes when clicked or when the mouse hover rounds it, to shows the content. the thing is that it doesn't seem to work on the webpage, but if i try the same script on a blank webpage it works, am thinking probably it's because i have Jquery 1.52 on the same page and maybe both scripts are conflicting with each other because, if i remove the Jquery, the Mootools works. What should be my option, because i need the Jquery to do some validations for me, so i can't remove it completely. Here are the codes <script> //-vertical var mySlide = new Fx.Slide('test'); $('slidein').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.slideIn(); e.stop(); }); $('slideout').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.slideOut(); e.stop(); }); $('toggle').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.toggle(); e.stop(); }); $('hide').addEvent('click', function(e){ e = new Event(e); mySlide.hide(); e.stop(); }); </script> here's the HTML <html> <h3 class="section">Fx.Slide Vertical</h3> <a id="slideout" href="#">slideout</a> | <a id="slidein" href="#">slidein</a> | <a id="toggle" href="#"> toggle</a> | <a id="hide" href="#">hide</a> <div id="test"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad mi nim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. </div> Here's the CSS #test { background: #222; color: #fff; padding: 10px; margin: 20px; border: 10px solid pink; } #test2 { background: #222; color: #fff; padding: 10px; margin: 20px; border: 10px solid pink; } Am using the exact same code supplied by Mootools in their own example, if i do this on a blank webpage it works but incorporated into my own webpage, it doesn't, and my own page just have the script tag of the Jquery in the head section of the HTML.

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• Resolving collisions between dynamic game objects

  - by TheBroodian

  I've been building a 2D platformer for some time now, I'm getting to the point where I am adding dynamic objects to the stage for testing. This has prompted me to consider how I would like my character and other objects to behave when they collide. A typical staple in many 2D platformer type games is that the player takes damage upon touching an enemy, and then essentially becomes able to pass through enemies during a period of invulnerability, and at the same time, enemies are able to pass through eachother freely. I personally don't want to take this approach, it feels strange to me that the player should receive arbitrary damage for harmless contact to an enemy, despite whether the enemy is attacking or not, and I would like my enemies' interactions between each other (and my player) to be a little more organic, so to speak. In my head I sort of have this idea where a game object (player, or non player) would be able to push other game objects around by manner of 'pushing' each other out of one anothers' bounding boxes if there is an intersection, and maybe correlate the repelling force to how much their bounding boxes are intersecting. The problem I'm experiencing is I have no idea what the math might look like for something like this? I'll show what work I've done so far, it sort of works, but it's jittery, and generally not quite what I would pass in a functional game: //Clears the anti-duplicate buffer collisionRecord.Clear(); //pick a thing foreach (GameObject entity in entities) { //pick another thing foreach (GameObject subject in entities) { //check to make sure both things aren't the same thing if (!ReferenceEquals(entity, subject)) { //check to see if thing2 is in semi-near proximity to thing1 if (entity.WideProximityArea.Intersects(subject.CollisionRectangle) || entity.WideProximityArea.Contains(subject.CollisionRectangle)) { //check to see if thing2 and thing1 are colliding. if (entity.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(subject.CollisionRectangle) || entity.CollisionRectangle.Contains(subject.CollisionRectangle) || subject.CollisionRectangle.Contains(entity.CollisionRectangle)) { //check if we've already resolved their collision or not. if (!collisionRecord.ContainsKey(entity.GetHashCode())) { //more duplicate resolution checking. if (!collisionRecord.ContainsKey(subject.GetHashCode())) { //if thing1 is traveling right... if (entity.Velocity.X > 0) { //if it isn't too far to the right... if (subject.CollisionRectangle.Contains(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(entity.CollisionRectangle.Right, entity.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, entity.CollisionRectangle.Height)) || subject.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(entity.CollisionRectangle.Right, entity.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, entity.CollisionRectangle.Height))) { //Find how deep thing1 is intersecting thing2's collision box; float offset = entity.CollisionRectangle.Right - subject.CollisionRectangle.Left; //Move both things in opposite directions half the length of the intersection, pushing thing1 to the left, and thing2 to the right. entity.Velocities.Add(new Vector2(-(((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); subject.Velocities.Add(new Vector2((((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); } } //if thing1 is traveling left... if (entity.Velocity.X < 0) { //if thing1 isn't too far left... if (entity.CollisionRectangle.Contains(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(subject.CollisionRectangle.Right, subject.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, subject.CollisionRectangle.Height)) || entity.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(subject.CollisionRectangle.Right, subject.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, subject.CollisionRectangle.Height))) { //Find how deep thing1 is intersecting thing2's collision box; float offset = subject.CollisionRectangle.Right - entity.CollisionRectangle.Left; //Move both things in opposite directions half the length of the intersection, pushing thing1 to the right, and thing2 to the left. entity.Velocities.Add(new Vector2((((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); subject.Velocities.Add(new Vector2(-(((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); } } //Make record that thing1 and thing2 have interacted and the collision has been solved, so that if thing2 is picked next in the foreach loop, it isn't checked against thing1 a second time before the next update. collisionRecord.Add(entity.GetHashCode(), subject.GetHashCode()); } } } } } } } } One of the biggest issues with my code aside from the jitteriness is that if one character were to land on top of another character, it very suddenly and abruptly resolves the collision, whereas I would like a more subtle and gradual resolution. Any thoughts or ideas are incredibly welcome and helpful.

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• Managing software projects - advice needed

  - by Callum

  I work for a large government department as part of an IT team that manages and develops websites as well as stand alone web applications. We’re running in to problems somewhere in the SDLC that don’t rear their ugly head until time and budget are starting to run out. We try to be “Agile” (software specifications are not as thorough as possible, clients have direct access to the developers any time they want) and we are also in a reasonably peculiar position in that we are not allowed to make profit from the services we provide. We only service the divisions within our government department, and can only charge for the time and effort we actually put in to a project. So if we deliver a project that we have over-quoted on, we will only invoice for the actual time spent. Our software specifications are not as thorough as they could be, but they always include at a minimum: Wireframe mockups for every form view A data dictionary of all field inputs Descriptions of any business rules that affect the system Descriptions of the outputs I’m new to software management, but I’ve overseen enough software projects now to know that as soon as users start observing demos of the system, they start making a huge amount of requests like “Can we add a few more fields to this report.. can we redesign the look of this interface.. can we send an email at this part of the workflow.. can we take this button off this view.. can we make this function redirect to a different screen.. can we change some text on this screen… can we create a special account where someone can log in and get access to X… this report takes too long to run can it be optimised.. can we remove this step in the workflow… there’s got to be a better image we can put here…” etc etc etc. Some changes are tiny and can be implemented reasonably quickly.. but there could be up to 50-100 or so of such requests during the course of the SDLC. Other change requests are what clients claim they “just assumed would be part of the system” even if not explicitly spelled out in the spec. We are having a lot of difficulty managing this process. With no experienced software project managers in our team, we need to come up with a better way to both internally identify whether work being requested is “out of spec”, and be able to communicate this to a client in such a manner that they can understand why what they are asking for is “extra” work. We need a way to track this work and be transparent with it. In the spirit of Agile development where we are not spec'ing software systems in to the ground and back again before development begins, and bearing in mind that clients have access to any developer any time they want it, I am looking for some tips and pointers from experienced software project managers on how to handle this sort of "scope creep" problem, in tracking it, being transparent with it, and communicating it to clients such that they understand it. Happy to clarify anything as needed. I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to offer some advice. Thanks.

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• AABB vs OBB Collision Resolution jitter on corners

  - by patt4179

  I've implemented a collision library for a character who is an AABB and am resolving collisions between AABB vs AABB and AABB vs OBB. I wanted slopes for certain sections, so I've toyed around with using several OBBs to make one, and it's working great except for one glaring issue; The collision resolution on the corner of an OBB makes the player's AABB jitter up and down constantly. I've tried a few things I've thought of, but I just can't wrap my head around what's going on exactly. Here's a video of what's happening as well as my code: Here's the function to get the collision resolution (I'm likely not doing this the right way, so this may be where the issue lies): public Vector2 GetCollisionResolveAmount(RectangleCollisionObject resolvedObject, OrientedRectangleCollisionObject b) { Vector2 overlap = Vector2.Zero; LineSegment edge = GetOrientedRectangleEdge(b, 0); if (!SeparatingAxisForRectangle(edge, resolvedObject)) { LineSegment rEdgeA = new LineSegment(), rEdgeB = new LineSegment(); Range axisRange = new Range(), rEdgeARange = new Range(), rEdgeBRange = new Range(), rProjection = new Range(); Vector2 n = edge.PointA - edge.PointB; rEdgeA.PointA = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 0); rEdgeA.PointB = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 1); rEdgeB.PointA = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 2); rEdgeB.PointB = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 3); rEdgeARange = ProjectLineSegment(rEdgeA, n); rEdgeBRange = ProjectLineSegment(rEdgeB, n); rProjection = GetRangeHull(rEdgeARange, rEdgeBRange); axisRange = ProjectLineSegment(edge, n); float axisMid = (axisRange.Maximum + axisRange.Minimum) / 2; float projectionMid = (rProjection.Maximum + rProjection.Minimum) / 2; if (projectionMid > axisMid) { overlap.X = axisRange.Maximum - rProjection.Minimum; } else { overlap.X = rProjection.Maximum - axisRange.Minimum; overlap.X = -overlap.X; } } edge = GetOrientedRectangleEdge(b, 1); if (!SeparatingAxisForRectangle(edge, resolvedObject)) { LineSegment rEdgeA = new LineSegment(), rEdgeB = new LineSegment(); Range axisRange = new Range(), rEdgeARange = new Range(), rEdgeBRange = new Range(), rProjection = new Range(); Vector2 n = edge.PointA - edge.PointB; rEdgeA.PointA = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 0); rEdgeA.PointB = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 1); rEdgeB.PointA = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 2); rEdgeB.PointB = RectangleCorner(resolvedObject, 3); rEdgeARange = ProjectLineSegment(rEdgeA, n); rEdgeBRange = ProjectLineSegment(rEdgeB, n); rProjection = GetRangeHull(rEdgeARange, rEdgeBRange); axisRange = ProjectLineSegment(edge, n); float axisMid = (axisRange.Maximum + axisRange.Minimum) / 2; float projectionMid = (rProjection.Maximum + rProjection.Minimum) / 2; if (projectionMid > axisMid) { overlap.Y = axisRange.Maximum - rProjection.Minimum; overlap.Y = -overlap.Y; } else { overlap.Y = rProjection.Maximum - axisRange.Minimum; } } return overlap; } And here is what I'm doing to resolve it right now: if (collisionDetection.OrientedRectangleAndRectangleCollide(obb, player.PlayerCollision)) { var resolveAmount = collisionDetection.GetCollisionResolveAmount(player.PlayerCollision, obb); if (Math.Abs(resolveAmount.Y) < Math.Abs(resolveAmount.X)) { var roundedAmount = (float)Math.Floor(resolveAmount.Y); player.PlayerCollision._position.Y -= roundedAmount; } else if (Math.Abs(resolveAmount.Y) <= 30.0f) //Catch cases where the player should be able to step over the top of something { var roundedAmount = (float)Math.Floor(resolveAmount.Y); player.PlayerCollision._position.Y -= roundedAmount; } else { var roundedAmount = (float)Math.Floor(resolveAmount.X); player.PlayerCollision._position.X -= roundedAmount; } } Can anyone see what might be the issue here, or has anyone experienced this before that knows a possible solution? I've tried for a few days to figure this out on my own, but I'm just stumped.

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• Where should instantiated classes be stored?

  - by Eric C.

  I'm having a bit of a design dilemma here. I'm writing a library that consists of a bunch of template classes that are designed to be used as a base for creating content. For example: public class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } The problem is, not only is the library providing the templates, it will also supply quite a few predefined templates which are instances of these template classes. The question is, where do I put these instances of the templates? The three solutions I've come up with so far are: 1) Provide serialized instances of the templates as files. On the one hand, this solution would keep the instances separated from the library itself, which is nice, but it would also potentially add complexity for the user. Even if we provided methods for loading/deserializing the files, they'd still have to deal with a bunch of files, and some kind of config file so the app knows where to look for those files. Plus, creating the template files would probably require a separate app, so if the user wanted to stick with the files method of storing templates, we'd have to provide some kind of app for creating the template files. Also, this requires external dependencies for testing the templates in the user's code. 2) Add readonly instances to the template class Example: public class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template PredefinedTemplate { get { Template templateInstance = new Template(); templateInstance.Name = "Some Name"; templateInstance.Description = "A description"; ... return templateInstance; } } public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } This method would be convenient for users, as they would be able to access the predefined templates in code directly, and would be able to unit test code that used them. The drawback here is that the predefined templates pollute the Template type namespace with a bunch of extra stuff. I suppose I could put the predefined templates in a different namespace to get around this drawback. The only other problem with this approach is that I'd have to basically duplicate all the namespaces in the library in the predefined namespace (e.g. Templates.SubTemplates and Predefined.Templates.SubTemplates) which would be a pain, and would also make refactoring more difficult. 3) Make the templates abstract classes and make the predefined templates inherit from those classes. For example: public abstract class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } and public class PredefinedTemplate : Template { public PredefinedTemplate() { this.Name = "Some Name"; this.Description = "A description"; this.Attribute1 = "Some Value"; ... } } This solution is pretty similar to #2, but it ends up creating a lot of classes that don't really do anything (none of our predefined templates are currently overriding behavior), and don't have any methods, so I'm not sure how good a practice this is. Has anyone else had any experience with something like this? Is there a best practice of some kind, or a different/better approach that I haven't thought of? I'm kind of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out the best way to go. Thanks!

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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• How'd they do it: Millions of tiles in Terraria

  - by William 'MindWorX' Mariager

  I've been working up a game engine similar to Terraria, mostly as a challenge, and while I've figured out most of it, I can't really seem to wrap my head around how they handle the millions of interactable/harvestable tiles the game has at one time. Creating around 500.000 tiles, that is 1/20th of what's possible in Terraria, in my engine causes the frame-rate to drop from 60 to around 20, even tho I'm still only rendering the tiles in view. Mind you, I'm not doing anything with the tiles, only keeping them in memory. Update: Code added to show how I do things. This is part of a class, which handles the tiles and draws them. I'm guessing the culprit is the "foreach" part, which iterates everything, even empty indexes. ... public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { foreach (Tile tile in this.Tiles) { if (tile != null) { if (tile.Position.X < -this.Offset.X + 32) continue; if (tile.Position.X > -this.Offset.X + 1024 - 48) continue; if (tile.Position.Y < -this.Offset.Y + 32) continue; if (tile.Position.Y > -this.Offset.Y + 768 - 48) continue; tile.Draw(spriteBatch, gameTime); } } } ... Also here is the Tile.Draw method, which could also do with an update, as each Tile uses four calls to the SpriteBatch.Draw method. This is part of my autotiling system, which means drawing each corner depending on neighboring tiles. texture_* are Rectangles, are set once at level creation, not each update. ... public virtual void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { if (this.type == TileType.TileSet) { spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position, texture_tl, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(8, 0), texture_tr, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(0, 8), texture_bl, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(8, 8), texture_br, this.BlendColor); } } ... Any critique or suggestions to my code is welcome. Update: Solution added. Here's the final Level.Draw method. The Level.TileAt method simply checks the inputted values, to avoid OutOfRange exceptions. ... public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { Int32 startx = (Int32)Math.Floor((-this.Offset.X - 32) / 16); Int32 endx = (Int32)Math.Ceiling((-this.Offset.X + 1024 + 32) / 16); Int32 starty = (Int32)Math.Floor((-this.Offset.Y - 32) / 16); Int32 endy = (Int32)Math.Ceiling((-this.Offset.Y + 768 + 32) / 16); for (Int32 x = startx; x < endx; x += 1) { for (Int32 y = starty; y < endy; y += 1) { Tile tile = this.TileAt(x, y); if (tile != null) tile.Draw(spriteBatch, gameTime); } } } ...

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