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• SQL SERVER – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – A Collection of Inspiring and Funny Posts by Vinod Kumar

  - by pinaldave

  One of the most popular quotes is: A picture is worth a thousand words. Working on this concept I started a series over my blog called the “Picture Post”. Rather than rambling over tons of material over text, we are trying to give you a capsule mode of the blog in a quick glance. Some of the picture posts already available over my blog are: Correlation of Ego and Work: Ego and Pride most of the times become a hindrance when we work inside a team. Take this cue, the first ever Picture post was published. Simple and easy to understand concept. Would want to say, Ego is the biggest enemy to humans. Read Original Post. Success (Perception Vs Reality): Personally, have always thought success is not something the talented achieve with the opportunity presented to them, but success is developed using the opportunity in hand now. In this fast paced world where success is pre-defined and convoluted by metrics it is hard to understand how complex it can sometimes be. So I took a stab at this concept in a simple way. Read Original Post. Doing Vs Saying: As Einstein would describe, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Given the amount of information we get, it is difficult to keep track, learn and implement the same. If you were ever reminded of your college days, there will always be 5-6 people doing different things and we naturally try to emulate what they are doing. This could be from competitive exams GMAT, GRE, CAT, Higher-Ed, B-School hunting etc. Rather than saying you are going to do, it is best to do and then say!!! Read Original Picture Post. Your View Vs Management View: Being in the corporate world can be really demanding and we keep asking this question – “Why me?” when the performance appraisal process ends. In this post I just want to ask you one frank opinion – “Are you really self-critical in your assessments?”. If that is the case there shouldn’t be any heartburns or surprises. If you had just one thing to take back, well forget what others are getting but invest time in making yourself better because that is going to take you longer and further in your career. Read Picture Post. Blogging lifecycle for majority: I am happy and fortunate to be in this blog post because this picture post surely doesn’t apply to SQLAuthority where consistency and persistence have been the hallmark of the blog. For the majority others, who have a tendency to start a blog, get into slumber for a while and write saying they want to get back to blogging, the picture post was specifically done for them. Paradox of being someone else: It is always a dream that we want to become somebody and in this process of doing so, we become nobody. In this constant tussle of lost identity we forget to enjoy the moment that is in front of us. I just depicted this using a simple analogy of our constant struggle to get to the other side, just to realize we missed the wonderful moments. Grass is not greener on the other side, but grass is greener where we water the surface. Read Picture Post. And on the lighter side… Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – What is SSRS and Why SSRS is asked for in many Job Opening?

  - by Pinal Dave

  This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. This will be a 5 day blog post in getting started with SSRS. Today will show the importance of SSRS in the business. Why is SSRS asked for in so many job openings? If you talk to an SSRS expert it’s very clear to them exactly why companies really need this invention and how it saves time and adds business value. You don’t have to be an SSRS expert to know its value or to start using it. For example you don’t have to be an airline pilot to know the usefulness of modern transportation. Even the people who don’t know how to run SSRS but need the reports can tell you why that is needed. This blog post will go into why SSRS is an important invention by showing how it improves the usage of information in your company. Before SSRS there has always been a need for a company to benefit from the use of its own information. Excel spreadsheets have been a popular way to do this for a long time. With SSRS you can still use this solution and gain many other options too. A friend of mine told me a story about doing database work in the 90s for a major company and how he wished SSRS was available back then. The Vice President of the marketing channel would often come to him just before an important meeting with the board of directors. He often needed to show how certain product sales were performing over time. All this information was in the database so it was my friend’s job to get the information out and organized into a medium the VP could use. This medium was usually Excel. The VP often had meetings all over the world where he showcased this Excel report. The solution to get the VP to him anywhere he was in the world was an Excel file attached to an e-mail. This worked pretty well but with some drawbacks. One time my friend sent the wrong file in the e-mail. A few minutes later my friend realized his mistake and sent another frantic e-mail to VP. This one was saying to ignore the last e-mail and use this newer one. Would the VP see the correct e-mail in time? If SSRS had been available, my friend could have created a solution that let the VP run the report any time he wished. The report could have been published to the company intranet where the VP could run it from any of the offices he happened to be traveling to that month. There is a fair amount of work up front to develop and publish the report, but once that work is completed, the report can be reused as many times as needed. My friend could even be on vacation for the first day of the monthly and the VP can get his real-time report. Not only could the report show the most recent data, the VP could choose to view reports of previous months with just a few clicks. The deployed SSRS is user friendly, and can also be configured to protect reports from being run by the wrong people. Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to know if you already have SSRS installed. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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• It&rsquo;s ok to throw System.Exception&hellip;

  - by Chris Skardon

  No. No it’s not. It’s not just me saying that, it’s the Microsoft guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229007.aspx  Do not throw System.Exception or System.SystemException. Also – as important: Do not catch System.Exception or System.SystemException in framework code, unless you intend to re-throw.. Throwing: Always, always try to pick the most specific exception type you can, if the parameter you have received in your method is null, throw an ArgumentNullException, value received greater than expected? ArgumentOutOfRangeException. For example: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("theInt", theInt, "theInt needs to be greater than zero."); if (theString == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("theString"); if (theString.Length == 0) throw new ArgumentException("theString needs to have content.", "theString"); } Why do we want to do this? It’s a lot of extra code when compared with a simple: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0 || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(theString)) throw new Exception("The parameters were invalid."); } It all comes down to a couple of things; the catching of the exceptions, and the information you are passing back to the calling code. Catching: Ok, so let’s go with introduction level Exception handling, taught by many-a-university: You do all your work in a try clause, and catch anything wrong in the catch clause. So this tends to give us code like this: try { /* All the shizzle */ } catch { /* Deal with errors */ } But of course, we can improve on that by catching the exception so we can report on it: try { } catch(Exception ex) { /* Log that 'ex' occurred? */ } Now we’re at the point where people tend to go: Brilliant, I’ve got exception handling nailed, what next??? and code gets littered with the catch(Exception ex) nastiness. Why is it nasty? Let’s imagine for a moment our code is throwing an ArgumentNullException which we’re catching in the catch block and logging. Ok, the log entry has been made, so we can debug the code right? We’ve got all the info… What about an OutOfMemoryException – what can we do with that? That’s right, not a lot, chances are you can’t even log it (you are out of memory after all), but you’ve caught it – and as such - have hidden it. So, as part of this, there are two things you can do one, is the rethrow method: try { /* code */ } catch (Exception ex) { //Log throw; } Note, it’s not catch (Exception ex) { throw ex; } as that will wipe all your important stack trace information. This does get your exception to continue, and is the only reason you would catch Exception (anywhere other than a global catch-all) in your code. The other preferred method is to catch the exceptions you can deal with. It may not matter that the string I’m passing in is null, and I can cope with it like this: try{ DoSomething(myString); } catch(ArgumentNullException){} And that’s fine, it means that any exceptions I can’t deal with (OutOfMemory for example) will be propagated out to other code that can deal with it. Of course, this is horribly messy, no one wants try / catch blocks everywhere and that’s why Microsoft added the ‘Try’ methods to the framework, and it’s a strategy we should continue. If I try: int i = (int) "one"; I will get an InvalidCastException which means I need the try / catch block, but I could mitigate this using the ‘TryParse’ method: int i; if(!Int32.TryParse("one", out i)) return; Similarly, in the ‘DoSomething’ example, it might be beneficial to have a ‘TryDoSomething’ that returns a boolean value indicating the success of continuing. Obviously this isn’t practical in every case, so use the ol’ common sense approach. Onwards Yer thanks Chris, I’m looking forward to writing tonnes of new code. Fear not, that is where helpers come into it… (but that’s the next post)

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• Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

  - by steve.diamond

  Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Experimenting with ACID Transactions, SQL Compliant, Elastically Scalable Database

  - by pinaldave

  Database technology is huge and big world. I like to explore always beyond what I know and share the learning. Weekend is the best time when I sit around download random software on my machine which I like to call as a lab machine (it is a pretty old laptop, hardly a quality as lab machine) and experiment it. There are so many free betas available for download that it’s hard to keep track and even harder to find the time to play with very many of them.  This blog is about one you shouldn’t miss if you are interested in the learning various relational databases. NuoDB just released their Beta 7.  I had already downloaded their Beta 6 and yesterday did the same for 7.   My impression is that they are onto something very very interesting.  In fact, it might be something really promising in terms of database elasticity, scale and operational cost reduction. The folks at NuoDB say they are working on the world’s first “emergent” database which they tout as a brand new transitional database that is intended to dramatically change what’s possible with OLTP.  It is SQL compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, yet scales elastically on heterogeneous and decentralized cloud-based resources. Interesting note for sure, making me explore more. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they are solving the architectural challenge that exists between elastic, cloud-based compute infrastructures designed to scale out in response to workload requirements versus the traditional relational database management system’s architecture of central control. Here’s my experience with the NuoDB Beta 6 so far: First they pretty much threw away all the features you’d associate with existing RDBMS architectures except the SQL and ACID transactions which they were smart to keep.  It looks like they have incorporated a number of the big ideas from various algorithms, systems and techniques to achieve maximum DB scalability. From a user’s perspective, the NuoDB Beta software behaves like any other traditional SQL database and seems to offer all the benefits users have come to expect from standards-based SQL solutions. One of the interesting feature is that one can run a transactional node and a storage node on my Windows laptop as well on other platforms – indeed interesting for sure. It’s quite amazing to see a database elastically scale across machine boundaries. So, one of the basic NuoDB concepts is that as you need to scale out, you can easily use more inexpensive hardware when/where you need it.  This is unlike what we have traditionally done to scale a database for an application – we replace the hardware with something more powerful (faster CPU and Disks). This is where I started to feel like NuoDB is on to something that has the potential to elastically scale on commodity hardware while reducing operational expense for a big OLTP database to a degree we’ve never seen before. NuoDB is able to fully leverage the cloud in an asynchronous and highly decentralized manner – while providing both SQL compliance and ACID transactions. Basically what NuoDB is doing is so new that it is all hard to believe until you’ve experienced it in action.  I will keep you up to date as I test the NuoDB Beta 7 but if you are developing a web-scale application or have an on-premise app you are thinking of moving to the cloud, testing this beta is worth your time. If you do try it, let me know what you think.  Before I say anything more, I am going to do more experiments and more test on this product and compare it with other existing similar products. For me it was a weekend worth spent on learning something new. I encourage you to download Beta 7 version and share your opinions here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Silverlight Cream for May 15, 2010 -- #862

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Victor Gaudioso, Antoni Dol(-2-), Brian Genisio, Shawn Wildermuth, Mike Snow, Phil Middlemiss, Pete Brown, Kirupa, Dan Wahlin, Glenn Block, Jeff Prosise, Anoop Madhusudanan, and Adam Kinney. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso would like you to Checkout my Interview with Microsoft’s Murray Gordon at MIX 10 Pete Brown announced: Connected Show Podcast #29 With … Me! From SilverlightCream.com: New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Create Fast Forward for the MediaElement Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is on creating the ability to fast-forward a MediaElement... check it out in the tutorial player itself! Overlapping TabItems with the Silverlight Toolkit TabControl Antoni Dol has a very cool tutorial up on the Toolkit TabItems control... not only is he overlapping them quite nicely but this is a very cool tutorial... QuoteFloat: Animating TextBlock PlaneProjections for a spiraling effect in Silverlight Antoni Dol also has a Blend tutorial up on animating TextBlock items... run the demo and you'll want to read the rest :) Adventures in MVVM – My ViewModel Base – Silverlight Support! Brian Genisio continues his MVVM tutorials with this update on his ViewModel base using some new C# 4.0 features, and fully supports Silverlight and WPF My Thoughts on the Windows Phone 7 Shawn Wildermuth gives his take on WP7. He included a port of his XBoxGames app to WP7 ... thanks Shawn! Silverlight Tip of the Day #20 – Using Tooltips in Silverlight I figured Mike Snow was going to overrun me with tips since I have missed a couple days, but there's only one! ... and it's on Tooltips. Animating the Silverlight opacity mask Phil Middlemiss has an article at SilverZine describing a Behavior he wrote (and is sharing) that turns a FrameworkElement into an opacity mask for it's parent container... cool demo on the page too. Breaking Apart the Margin Property in Xaml for better Binding Pete Brown dug in on a Twitter message and put some thoughts down about breaking a Margin apart to see about binding to the individual elements. Building a Simple Windows Phone App Kirupa has a 6-part tutorial up on building not-your-typical first WP7 application... all good stuff! Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications Dan Wahlin has a post up discussing three ways to display HTML inside a Silverlight app. Hello MEF in Silverlight 4 and VB! (with an MVVM Light cameo) Glenn Block has a post up discussing MEF, MVVM, and it's in VB this time... and it's actually a great tutorial top to bottom... all source included of course :) Understanding Input Scope in Silverlight for Windows Phone Jeff Prosise has a good post up on the WP7 SIP and how to set the proper InputScope to get the SIP you want. Thinking about Silverlight ‘desktop’ apps – Creating a Standalone Installer for offline installation (no browser) Anoop Madhusudanan is discussing something that's been floating around for a while... installing Silverlight from, say, a CD or DVD when someone installs your app. He's got some good code, but be sure to read Tim Heuer and Scott Guthrie's comments, and consider digging deeper into that part. Using FluidMoveBehavior to animate grid coordinates in Silverlight Adam Kinney has a cool post up on animating an object using the FluidMotionBehavior of Blend 4... looks great moving across a checkerboard... check out the demo, then grab the code. 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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• C# 4.0: COM Interop Improvements

  - by Paulo Morgado

  Dynamic resolution as well as named and optional arguments greatly improve the experience of interoperating with COM APIs such as Office Automation Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). But, in order to alleviate even more COM Interop development, a few COM-specific features were also added to C# 4.0. Ommiting ref Because of a different programming model, many COM APIs contain a lot of reference parameters. These parameters are typically not meant to mutate a passed-in argument, but are simply another way of passing value parameters. Specifically for COM methods, the compiler allows to declare the method call passing the arguments by value and will automatically generate the necessary temporary variables to hold the values in order to pass them by reference and will discard their values after the call returns. From the point of view of the programmer, the arguments are being passed by value. This method call: object fileName = "Test.docx"; object missing = Missing.Value; document.SaveAs(ref fileName, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); can now be written like this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx", Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value); And because all parameters that are receiving the Missing.Value value have that value as its default value, the declaration of the method call can even be reduced to this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx"); Dynamic Import Many COM methods accept and return variant types, which are represented in the PIAs as object. In the vast majority of cases, a programmer calling these methods already knows the static type of a returned object form the context of the call, but has to explicitly perform a cast on the returned values to make use of that knowledge. These casts are so common that they constitute a major nuisance. To make the developer’s life easier, it is now possible to import the COM APIs in such a way that variants are instead represented using the type dynamic which means that COM signatures have now occurrences of dynamic instead of object. This means that members of a returned object can now be easily accessed or assigned into a strongly typed variable without having to cast. Instead of this code: ((Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1])).Value2 = "Hello World!"; this code can now be used: excel.Cells[1, 1] = "Hello World!"; And instead of this: Excel.Range range = (Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1]); this can be used: Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; Indexed And Default Properties A few COM interface features are still not available in C#. On the top of the list are indexed properties and default properties. As mentioned above, these will be possible if the COM interface is accessed dynamically, but will not be recognized by statically typed C# code. No PIAs – Type Equivalence And Type Embedding For assemblies indentified with PrimaryInteropAssemblyAttribute, the compiler will create equivalent types (interfaces, structs, enumerations and delegates) and embed them in the generated assembly. To reduce the final size of the generated assembly, only the used types and their used members will be generated and embedded. Although this makes development and deployment of applications using the COM components easier because there’s no need to deploy the PIAs, COM component developers are still required to build the PIAs.

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• Enable Full Screen Mode in Media Center Without Trapping the Mouse

  - by DigitalGeekery

  If you have a dual monitor setup and use Windows Media Center, you’re probably aware that when WMC is in full screen mode, it traps the mouse so you can’t work on a second monitor. Here we look at how to solve the annoyance. The Maxifier is an application that allows you to open Media Center in full screen mode without restricting the mouse. It relieves the annoyance of WMC capturing your mouse on a dual monitor setup. Note: If you don’t have two monitors attached, most of The Maxifier’s functions won’t work. Installation and Use Download, extract, and install The Maxifier. (See the download link below) The Maxifier runs minimized in the system tray and you access the options by right-clicking on the icon. If Media Center is not already open, you can choose Start Media Center to start WMC on the main start screen. Or, choose one of the other selections to open another area of Media Center. By default, Maxifier opens Media Center in full screen mode on the secondary monitor. When Media Center is open in full screen mode, you’ll notice you can now freely move your mouse around your multi-monitor setup. When Media Center is open, you’ll see five additional options. The Fit Screen options simply fits Media Center to the full screen, but still show the Windows borders. Full screen options put WMC in full screen mode.   The Maxifier Options allow you to choose from the various start up options. Selecting Watch for Media Center starting will prompt Maxifier to open WMC to the main start page in full screen mode on the secondary monitor automatically, even if you open Media Center without using The Maxifier.  (You may need to restart for this to take effect) If you have more than 2 monitors, you can define on which monitor to open Media Center, and which monitor you consider to be the main screen.   You can also define a number of Hotkeys in The Maxifier settings. First, select the Enable Hotkeys checkbox. To create a Hotkey, click in the text field and then press the keys to use as the Hotkey. To remove a Hotkey, click in the field and press the Delete key.   Conclusion The Maxifier is a simple program that enables Media Center users to take full advantage of a multi-monitor workspace. It works with both Vista and Windows 7. Version 1.4 is a stable application for Vista, and Version 1.5b is a beta application for Windows 7. Looking for more Media Center tips and tweaks? Check out some startup customizations for Windows 7 Media Center, how to automatically mount and view ISO’s in WMC, and how to add background images and themes to Windows 7 Media Center. Link Download the Maxifier Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Startup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Lock The Screen While in Full-Screen Mode in Windows Media PlayerSwitch Windows by Hovering the Mouse Over a Window in Windows 7 or VistaIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video Watch World Cup Online On These Sites Speed Up Windows With ReadyBoost Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites

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• Gamify your Web

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  Yesterday Valencia welcomed the Gamification World Congress that I follow virtually through #GWC2012. BBVA, Iberia, Ligeresa, Axe, Wayra, ESADE, GlaxoSmithKline, Macmillan, Gamisfaction, Nomaders, Blaffin were among the companies presenting success stories on gaming. It has been proved that people remember things easily when an emotion is created. The marketing expectations around Gamification techniques have a lot to do with Neuromarketing theories. There are a lot of expectations on internal enterprise Gamification. In the public Web some sectors are taking the lead on following the trend. The Gartner Analyst Brian Burke opened another Gamification recent event in Madrid remembering that “Gamification is mostly about Engagement”, and this can be applied both to customers or employees. Gamification and Banking The experience of the Spanish Financial Group BBVA that just launched BBVA Game was also presented a week ago at the BBVA Innovation Centre during the event “Gamification & Banking: a fad or a serious business?” . One of the objectives of the BBVA Game was to double the name of registered users. “People like the efficiency of the online channel want to keep a one-to-one contact with the brand”-explained Bernardo Crespo. Another interested data coming out the BBVA presentation was that “only 20% of Spanish users –out of the total holders of Bank Accounts in the country- is familiar with the use of a Web Site to consult their bank accounts”, the project aims also to reverse this situation helping people to learn making a heavy use of the Video in the gaming context. In general Banking presenters seem to agree that Gamification techniques are helping to increase the time spent on the Web. Gamification and Health Using Gamification techniques for chronic illness rehabilitation was another topic of the World Congress. Here you can find some ideas and experiences What can games do for the health (In Spanish) I have personally started my own mental-health gaming project at http://www.lumosity.com/ Gamification in the Enterprise I really recommend Reading this excellent post of Ultan ÓBroin my Introduction to Gamification and Applications. Employee´s motivation and learning are experiencing a 360º turn and it looks than some of us will become soon the Dragon of the year instead of the Employee of the Year. Using Web 2.0 Tools for Gamification Projects  What type of tools do we need for a quick-win Gamification project? To certain extend Gamification can be considered an evolution of the participative Web. Badging, avatars, points and awards, leader boards, progress charts, virtual currencies, gifting and giving challenges and quests are common components and elements. The Web is offering new development frameworks to that purpose as this Avatar Framework from Paypal or Badgeville to include in web applications. Besides, tools to create communities around a game are required to comment, share and vote players as well as for an efficient multimedia management. Due to its entirely open architecture, its community features, and its multimedia and imaging solutions is were I see WebCenter as a tool helping brands to success. Link to Sources & Recommended Readings YouTube Video of BBVAGame presentation Where To Apply Gamification In Your Incentive Jim Calhoun Cancer Challenge Ride and Walkh For my Spanish Readers El aburrimiento es el enemigo número uno del éxito

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• Asynchrony in C# 5: Dataflow Async Logger Sample

  - by javarg

  Check out this (very simple) code examples for TPL Dataflow. Suppose you are developing an Async Logger to register application events to different sinks or log writers. The logger architecture would be as follow: Note how blocks can be composed to achieved desired behavior. The BufferBlock<T> is the pool of log entries to be process whereas linked ActionBlock<TInput> represent the log writers or sinks. The previous composition would allows only one ActionBlock to consume entries at a time. Implementation code would be something similar to (add reference to System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll in %User Documents%\Microsoft Visual Studio Async CTP\Documentation): TPL Dataflow Logger var bufferBlock = new BufferBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> infoLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Info: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> errorLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}", e.Item2)); bufferBlock.LinkTo(infoLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Info) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(errorLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Error) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Info, "info message")); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Error, "error message")); Note the filter applied to each link (in this case, the Logging Level selects the writer used). We can specify message filters using Predicate functions on each link. Now, the previous sample is useless for a Logger since Logging Level is not exclusive (thus, several writers could be used to process a single message). Let´s use a Broadcast<T> buffer instead of a BufferBlock<T>. Broadcast Logger var bufferBlock = new BroadcastBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(     e => new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(e.Item1, e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> infoLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Info: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> errorLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> allLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(     e => Console.WriteLine("All: {0}", e.Item2)); bufferBlock.LinkTo(infoLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Info) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(errorLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Error) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(allLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.All) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Info, "info message")); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Error, "error message")); As this block copies the message to all its outputs, we need to define the copy function in the block constructor. In this case we create a new Tuple, but you can always use the Identity function if passing the same reference to every output. Try both scenarios and compare the results.

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• Three Easy Ways of Providing Feedback to the Oracle AutoVue Team

  - by Celine Beck

  Customer feedback is essential in helping us deliver best-in-class Enterprise Visualization solutions which are centered around real-world usage. As the Oracle AutoVue Product Management team is busy prioritizing the next round of improvements, enhancements and new innovation to the AutoVue platform, I thought it would be a good idea to provide our blog-readers with a recap of how best to provide product feedback to the AutoVue Product Management team. This gives you the opportunity to help shape our future agenda and make our solutions better for you. Enterprise Visualization Special Interest Group (EV SIG): the AutoVue EV SIG is a customer-driven initiative that has recently been created to share knowledge and information between members and discuss common and best practices around Enterprise Visualization. The EV SIG also serves as a mechanism for establishing and communicating to AutoVue Product Management users’ collective priorities for the future development, direction and enhancement of the AutoVue product family with the objective of ensuring their continuous improvement. Essentially, EV SIG members meet in order to share and prioritize feedback and use this input to begin dialog with the AutoVue Product Management team on what they deem to be the most important improvements to Enterprise Visualization solutions. The AutoVue EV SIG is by far the best platform for sharing and relaying feedback to our Product Strategy / Management team regarding general product enhancements, industry-specific scenarios, new use cases, usability, support, deployability, etc, and helping us shape the future direction of Enterprise Visualization solutions. We strongly encourage ALL our customers to sign up for the SIG;  here is how you can do so: Sign up for the EVSIG mailing list b.    Visit the group’s website c.    Contact Dennis Walker at Harris Corporation directly should you have any questions: dwalke22-AT-harris-DOT-com Customer / Partner Advisory Boards: The AutoVue Product Strategy / Management team also periodically runs Customer and Partner Advisory Boards. These invitation-only events bring together individuals chosen from Oracle AutoVue’s top customers that are using AutoVue at the enterprise level, as well as strategic partners.  The idea here is to establish open lines of communication between top customers and partners and the Oracle AutoVue Product Strategy team, help us communicate AutoVue’s product direction, share perspectives on today and tomorrow’s challenges and needs for Enterprise Visualization, and validate that proposed additions to the product are valid industry solutions. Our next Customer / Partner Advisory Board will be held in San Francisco during Oracle Open World, please contact your account manager to find out more about the CAB Members’ nomination process. Enhancement Requests:  Enhancement requests are request logged by customers or partners with Product Development for a feature that is not currently available in Oracle AutoVue. Enhancement requests (ER) can be logged easily via the My Oracle Support portal. This is the best way to share feedback with us at the functionality level; for instance if you would like to see a new format supported in AutoVue or make suggestions as per how certain functionality can be improved or should behave. Once the ER is logged, it is then evaluated by Product Management based on feasibility, product adequation and business justification. Product Management then decides whether to consider this ER for future release or not. What helps accelerate the process is hearing from a large number of customers who urgently need a particular feature or configuration. Hence the importance of logging Metalink Service Requests, and describing in details your business expectations. You can include key milestones dates and justifications as to why this request is important and the benefits your organization stands to gain should this request be accepted. Again, feedback from customers and partners is critical to ensure we offer solutions that have the biggest impact on customers’ business processes and day-to-day operations. All feedback is welcome,. So please don’t be shy! 

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Client-Side Validation Summary with jQuery Validation (Unobtrusive JavaScript)

  - by Soe Tun

  When we were working with ASP.NET MVC 2, we needed to write our own JavaScript to get Client-Side Validation Summary with jQuery Validation plugin. I am one of those unfortunate people still stuck with .NET Framework Runtime 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.5; meaning I am still on ASP.NET MVC 2. So I will still keep on supporting by answering any question you may have with my original code.   Long awaited ASP.NET MVC 3 has been released, and it supports Client Side Validation Summary with jQuery out-of-the-box with new features like Unobtrusive JavaScript.   1. _Layout.cshtml Template Notice that I am using Protocol Relative URLs ( i.e., '//'.  Not 'http://' or 'https://' ) to reference script files and css files and you should use it too like that! However, please note that IE7 and IE8 will download the CSS files twice so use it with judgement. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>@ViewBag.Title</title> <link href="@Url.Content("~/Assets/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.9/themes/redmond/jquery-ui.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" /> </head> <body> @RenderBody() <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.9/jquery-ui.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="//ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery.Validate/1.7/jQuery.Validate.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="//ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/mvc/3.0/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </body> </html>   2. MVC View Template There are 3 things you *must* do exactly to get Client Side Validation Summary working. (1)  You must declare your Validation Summary **inside** the `Html.BeginForm()` block like below. (2)  You must pass `excludePropertyErrors: false` to the  Html.ValidationSummary()  method. @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(false, "Please fix these errors."); <!-- The rest of your View Template --> }   (3)  You have to put the following two elements in the `<appSettings />` block of your Web.config file. <add key="ClientValidationEnabled" value="true"/> <add key="UnobtrusiveJavaScriptEnabled" value="true"/>   That is all you need to do.  Simple, right? I will upload a sample project for download soon.  Please let me know if you run into some issues.     P.S: Without getting into too much technical details, I just wanted to let you know what I went through to get this to work. I had to look into the ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM Source Code and the jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js source. Initially, I thought I have to hack the jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js or something to get this to work. But after digging into MVC3 RTM source, I found out how to do it.

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• Oracle at The Forrester Customer Intelligence and Marketing Leadership Forums

  - by Christie Flanagan

  The Forrester Customer Intelligence Forum and the Forrester Marketing Leadership Forums will soon be here.  This year’s events will be co-located on April 18-19 at the J.W. Marriott at the L.A. Live entertainment complex in downtown Los Angeles.  Last year’s Marketing Forum was quite memorable for me.  You see, while Forrester analysts and business marketers were busy mingling over at the Marriott, another marketing powerhouse was taking up residence a few feet away at The Staples Center.  That’s right folks. Lada Gaga was coming to town.  And, as I came to learn, it made perfect sense for Lady Gaga and her legions of fans to be sharing a small patch of downtown L.A. with marketing leaders from all over the world.  After all, whether you like Lady Gaga or not, what pop star in recent memory has done more to build herself into a brand and to create an engaging, social and interactive customer experience for her Little Monsters?  While Lady Gaga won’t be back in town for this year’s Forrester events, there are still plenty of compelling reasons to make the trip out to Los Angeles.   The theme for The Forrester Customer Intelligence and Marketing Leadership Forums this year is “From Cool To Critical: Creating Engagement In The Age Of The Customer” and will tackle the important questions about how marketers can survive and thrive in the age of the empowered customer: •    How can you assess consumer uptake of new innovations?•    How do you build deep customer knowledge to drive competitive advantage?•    How do you drive deep, personalized customer engagement?•    What is more valuable — eyeballs or engagement?•    How do business customers engage in new media types?•    How can you tie social data to corporate data?•    Who should lead the movement to customer obsession?•    How should you shift your planning and measurement approaches to accommodate more data and a higher signal-to-noise ratio?•    What role does technology play in customizing and synchronizing marketing efforts across channels?As a platinum sponsor of the event, there will be a numbers of ways to interact with Oracle while you’re attending the Forums.  Here are some of the highlights:Oracle Speaking SessionThursday, April 19, 9:15am – 9:55amMaximize Customer Engagement and Retention with Integrated Marketing & LoyaltyMelissa Boxer, Vice President, Oracle CRM Marketing & LoyaltyCustomers expect to interact with your company, brand and products in more ways than ever before.   New devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. While Marketing's objectives (attract, convert, retain) remain fundamentally the same, your approach and tools must adapt quickly to succeed in this more complex, cross-channel world. Hear how leading brands are using Oracle's integrated marketing and loyalty solutions to maximize customer engagement and retention through better planning, execution, and measurement of synchronized cross-channel marketing initiatives.Solution ShowcaseWednesday, April 1810:20am – 11:50am 12:30pm – 1:30pm2:55pm – 3:40pmThursday, April 199:55am – 10:40am12:00pm – 1:00pmSolution Showcase & Networking ReceptionWednesday, April 185:10pm – 6:20pmBe sure to follow the #webcenter hashtag for updates on these events.  And for a more considered perspective on what Lady Gaga can teach businesses about branding and customer experience, check out Denise Lee Yohn’s post, Lessons from Lady Gaga from the Brand as Business Bites blog.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 30, 2010 -- #825

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Jeremy Likness, Tim Greenfield, Tim Heuer, ondrejsv, XAML Ninja, Nikhil Kothari, Sergey Barskiy, Shawn Oster, smartyP, Christian Schormann(-2-), and John Papa And Glenn Block. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso produced a RefCard for DZone: Getting Started with Silverlight and Expression Blend Way to go Victor... it looks great! Gavin Wignall announced Metia launch FourSquare and Bing maps mash up – called Near.me Cheryl Simmons talks about VS2010 and the design surface: Changing Templates with the Silverlight Designer (and seeing the changes immediately) Michael S. Scherotter posted that New York Times Silverlight Kit Updated for Windows Phone 7 Series Jaime Rodriguez posted about 2 free chapters in his new book (with Yochay Kiriaty): A Journey Into Silverlight On Windows Phone -Via Learning WIndows PHone Programming Did you know there was "MSDN Radio"?? Tim Heuer posted follow-up answers to this morning's show: MSDN Radio follow-up answers: Prism for Silverlight, DomainServices and relationships Michael Klucher posted a great set of links for WP7 game development this morning: Great Game Development Tutorials for Windows Phone Zhiming Xue has 3 pages of synopsis and links for everything Windows Phone at MIX. This is the 1st, but at the top of the pages are links to the other two: Windows Phone 7 Content From MIX10 – Part I From SilverlightCream.com: Using WriteableBitmap to Simplify Animations with Clones Jeremy Likness takes a break from his LOB posts to demonstrate a page flip animation using WriteableBitmap to simplify the animation using clones. SAX-like Xml parsing Want some experience or fun with Rx? Tim Greenfield has a post up on building an observable XmlReader. nstalling Silverlight applications without the browser involved Last night I blogged Mike Taulty's take on the "Silent Install" for an OOB app, tonight, I'm posting Tim Heuer's insight on the topic. How to: Create computed/custom properties for sample data in Blend/Sketchflow ondrejsv posted an example of digging into the files that control the sample data for Blend to get what you really want. PathListBox Adventures – radial layout Check out the radial layout XAML Ninja did using the PathListBox ... and all code available. RIA Services and Validation Nikhil Kothari has a great (duh!) post up that follows his Silverlight TV on the same subject: RIA Services and validation... lots of good external links also. Windows Phone 7 Application with OData Sergey Barskiy did an OData to WP7 app by using the feed from MIX10. You can see a list of sessions, and click on one to see details. Getting Blur And DropShadow to work in the Windows Phone Emulator Shawn Oster responds to some forum questions about Blur and DropShadow effects not showing up in the WP7 emulator, and gives the code trick we have to do for now. Metro Icons for Windows Phone 7 We all got the other icon set for WP7 from MSDN, but smartyP pulled the Metro Icons from the PPT deck of the MIX10 presentations... good job! Fonts in SketchFlow Christian Schormann talks about fonts in Sketchflow, where they live on your machine, and how you can use them. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part III Christian Schormann also has Part III of his epic tutorial up on Path Layout and Blend. This one is on dynamic resizing layouts, and he has links back to the other two if you missed them... or you can find them with a search at SilverlightCream... :) Simple ViewModel Locator for MVVM: The Patients Have Left the Asylum John Papa And Glenn Block teamed up to solve the View First model only without the maintenance involved with the ViewModel locator by using MEF. It only took these guys and hour... sigh... :) 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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• MvcExtensions - PerRequestTask

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  In the previous post, we have seen the BootstrapperTask which executes when the application starts and ends, similarly there are times when we need to execute some custom logic when a request starts and ends. Usually, for this kind of scenario we create HttpModule and hook the begin and end request events. There is nothing wrong with this approach, except HttpModules are not at all IoC containers friendly, also defining the HttpModule execution order is bit cumbersome, you either have to modify the machine.config or clear the HttpModules and add it again in web.config. Instead, you can use the PerRequestTask which is very much container friendly as well as supports execution orders. Lets few examples where it can be used. Remove www Subdomain Lets say we want to remove the www subdomain, so that if anybody types http://www.mydomain.com it will automatically redirects to http://mydomain.com. public class RemoveWwwSubdomain : PerRequestTask { public RemoveWww() { Order = DefaultOrder - 1; } protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(PerRequestExecutionContext executionContext) { const string Prefix = "http://www."; Check.Argument.IsNotNull(executionContext, "executionContext"); HttpContextBase httpContext = executionContext.HttpContext; string url = httpContext.Request.Url.ToString(); bool startsWith3W = url.StartsWith(Prefix, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase); bool shouldContinue = true; if (startsWith3W) { string newUrl = "http://" + url.Substring(Prefix.Length); HttpResponseBase response = httpContext.Response; response.StatusCode = (int)HttpStatusCode.MovedPermanently; response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"; response.RedirectLocation = newUrl; response.SuppressContent = true; shouldContinue = false; } return shouldContinue ? TaskContinuation.Continue : TaskContinuation.Break; } } As you can see, first, we are setting the order so that we do not have to execute the remaining tasks of the chain when we are redirecting, next in the ExecuteCore, we checking the whether www is present, if present we are sending a permanently moved http status code and breaking the task execution chain otherwise we are continuing with the chain. Blocking IP Address Lets take another scenario, your application is hosted in a shared hosting environment where you do not have the permission to change the IIS setting and you want to block certain IP addresses from visiting your application. Lets say, you maintain a list of IP address in database/xml files which you want to block, you have a IBannedIPAddressRepository service which is used to match banned IP Address. public class BlockRestrictedIPAddress : PerRequestTask { protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(PerRequestExecutionContext executionContext) { bool shouldContinue = true; HttpContextBase httpContext = executionContext.HttpContext; if (!httpContext.Request.IsLocal) { string ipAddress = httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress; HttpResponseBase httpResponse = httpContext.Response; if (executionContext.ServiceLocator.GetInstance<IBannedIPAddressRepository>().IsMatching(ipAddress)) { httpResponse.StatusCode = (int)HttpStatusCode.Forbidden; httpResponse.StatusDescription = "IPAddress blocked."; shouldContinue = false; } } return shouldContinue ? TaskContinuation.Continue : TaskContinuation.Break; } } Managing Database Session Now, let see how it can be used to manage NHibernate session, assuming that ISessionFactory of NHibernate is already registered in our container. public class ManageNHibernateSession : PerRequestTask { private ISession session; protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(PerRequestExecutionContext executionContext) { ISessionFactory factory = executionContext.ServiceLocator.GetInstance<ISessionFactory>(); session = factory.OpenSession(); return TaskContinuation.Continue; } protected override void DisposeCore() { session.Close(); session.Dispose(); } } As you can see PerRequestTask can be used to execute small and precise tasks in the begin/end request, certainly if you want to execute other than begin/end request there is no other alternate of HttpModule. That’s it for today, in the next post, we will discuss about the Action Filters, so stay tuned.

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• Error:couldn't read file-Kernel panic

  - by Thanos

  I have just installed ubuntu 12.04.1. To be honest I had to run installation several times until it was finished fine. When I finally managed to install it properly, I power on the laptop and the grub shoed up! I selected ubuntu generic. It takes some time to load and when it does I get an error message stating that error: couldn't read file Press any key to continue If I press any button nothing happens. If a leave it there, in a short while there is a black screen loading which gives some weird messages [0.946710] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0) [0.946755] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu [0.946792] Call Trace: [0.946831] [<ffffffff81640ec8>] panic+0x91/0x1a4 [0.946869] [<ffffffff81cfc01e>] mount_block_root+0xdc/0x18e [0.946909] [<ffffffff81002930>] ? populate_rootfs_wait+0x300/0x9d0 [0.946947] [<ffffffff81cfc257>] mount_root+0x54/0x59 [0.946982] [<ffffffff81cfcec9>] prepare_namespace+0x16d/0x1a6 [0.947019] [<ffffffff81cfbd63>] kernel_init+0x153/0x158 [0.947094] [<ffffffff81cfbc10>] ? start_kernel+0x3bd/0x3bd [0.947129] [<ffffffff81664030>] ? gs_change+0x13/0x13 The thing is that the laptop isn't mine. A friend tried to dual boot ubuntu alongside windows 7 but he didn't succeed. Ubuntu option was in grub, but when you tried to boot it rebooted from the start. So from a Live CD I erased ubuntu, started windows to check if something went wrong, and fortunately everything was OK. Windows started normally! So I tried to install ubuntu. Before installation was completed the installer crashed! I was afraid that he would lost windows, something that was true... At that point I tried to install windows but whichever distro(XP, 7{home, proffessional, ultimate},8) I tried it could never reach the end. So I tried to reinstall ubuntu but I was facing those weird messages. What can I do to move on? ______________________________________________________________________ EDIT1: I tried to check and fix(if possible) with GParted it took a lot of hours,although gparted displays only 01:14, I restarted the system and now I get not exactly the same messages. Numbers in braces [ ] are different [0.818189] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0) [0.818235] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu [0.818272] Call Trace: [0.818312] [<ffffffff81640ec8>] panic+0x91/0x1a4 [0.818351] [<ffffffff81cfc01e>] mount_block_root+0xdc/0x18e [0.818391] [<ffffffff81002930>] ? populate_rootfs_wait+0x300/0x9d0 [0.818428] [<ffffffff81cfc257>] mount_root+0x54/0x59 [0.818464] [<ffffffff81cfcec9>] prepare_namespace+0x16d/0x1a6 [0.818501] [<ffffffff81cfbd63>] kernel_init+0x153/0x158 [0.818574] [<ffffffff81cfbc10>] ? start_kernel+0x3bd/0x3bd [0.818610] [<ffffffff81664030>] ? gs_change+0x13/0x13 What on earth is going on? ______________________________________________________________________ EDIT2: I forgot to mention that my friend gave a punch to his laptop during a game. After that his cooler became to make a weird noise so I checked and it is a bit tortuous but it is working. What I beleive must be wrong is that his HDD makes a weird noise while trying to load ubuntu, which means he might need a new HDD. Could that be true?

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• Meet our Interns: Adam and Hanadi

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This week, we’d like to introduce you to two of our ECEMEA Interns, Adam and Hanadi. They’re based in different countries and are part of different teams; however they both have the same enthusiasm in being an Intern at Oracle. “Hi! I’m Adam (Bachelor of Accounting Science & CIMA Diploma in Management Accounting), a member of the Oracle Applications Pre-sales team in Johannesburg, South Africa. Joining Oracle has been a truly inspiring experience thus far. My first week at Oracle has been one of insight and learning. I have had the opportunity to meet and interact with industry leading software solution professionals. Gaining insight into a mammoth multinational company has changed my perception on how things work and has truly opened my eyes to the world of business. Having the privilege of joining the Oracle Graduate Program has afforded me the chance to take advantage of countless training opportunities as well as the chance to learn about Information Technology in a practical manner which is vital to most businesses in today’s modern environment.” “Hi! I’m Hanadi, an Oracle 2013 Sales Intern from Saudi Arabia. I received my BSc in Information Technology from King Saud University and immediately after graduating I applied for the internship at Oracle. I thought it was an incredible opportunity and a great way to shift from college life to career life through learning and practicing in an environment with such high standards. At the beginning, I was a bit nervous in joining the serious business world, but once I joined, I found the program very organized and everyone was extremely helpful, which made it easier for us, as interns, to learn faster. If you are a self-motivated, committed person, who has initiative, accepts challenges, has good soft skills and some technical experience, I would definitely advice you to take a chance and apply for the program once you graduate. Best of luck!” Get the latest updates from the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme 2013 by following #Oracleinterns on Twitter or visiting CampusatOracle Facebook Page! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• InSync12 and Australia Visits: UX is Global, Regional, Everywhere!

  - by ultan o'broin

  I attended the Australian Oracle User Group (AUSOUG) and Quest International User Group's InSync12 event in Melbourne, Australia: the user group conference for Oracle products in the ANZ region. I demoed Oracle Fusion Applications and then presented how Oracle crafted the world class Fusion Apps user experience (UX). I explained about the Oracle user experience design pattern strategy of uptake for all apps, not just Fusion, and what our UX pattern externalization strategy means for customers, partners, and ADF developers. A great conference, lots of energy, the InSync12 highlights for me were Oracle's Senior Vice President Cliff Godwin’s fast-moving Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) roadshow with the killer Oracle Endeca user experience uptake, and Oracle ADF product outreachmeister Chris Muir’s (@chriscmuir) session on Oracle ADF Mobile solution and his hands-on mobile app development showing how existing ADF/JDev skills can build a secure, code once-deploy-to-many-device hybrid app solution in minutes. Cliff Godwin shows off the Oracle Endeca integration with Oracle E-Business Suite. Chris Muir talked the talk and then walked the walked with Oracle ADF Mobile. Applications UX was mixing it up with the crowd at InSync12 too, showing off cool mobile UX solutions, gathering data for future innovations, and engaging with EBS, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft apps customers and partners. User conferences such as InSync12 are an important part of our Oracle Applications UX user-centered design process, giving real apps users the opportunity to make real inputs and a way for us to watch and to listen to their needs and wants and get views on current and emerging UX too. Eric Stilan (@icondaddy) of Applications UX uses an iPad to gather feedback on the latest UX designs from conference attendees. While in Melbourne, I also visited impressive Oracle partner, Callista for a major ADF and UX pow-wow, and was the er, star of a very proactive event hosted by another partner Park Lane Information Technology (coordinated by Bambi Price (@bambiprice) of ODTUG) where I explained what UX is about, and how partner and customers can engage, participate and deploy that Applications UX scientific insight to advantage for their entire business. I also paired up with Oracle Australia in Sydney to visit key customers while there, and back at Oracle in Melbourne I spoke with sales consultants and account managers about regional opportunities and UX strategy, and came away with an understanding of what makes the Oracle market tick in Australia. Mobile worker solution development and user experience is hot news in Australia, and this was a great opportunity to team up with Chris Muir and show how the alignment of the twin stars of UX design patterns and ADF technology enables developers to make great-looking, usable apps that really sparkle. Our UX design patterns--or functional (UI) patterns, to use the developer world language--means that developers now have not only a great tool set to build apps on Oracle ADF/FMW but proven, tested usability solutions to solve common problems they can apply in the IDE too. In all, a whirlwind UX visit, packed with events and delivery opportunities, and all too short a time in the wonderful city of Melbourne. I need to get back there soon! For those who need a reminder, there's a website explaining how to get involved with, and participate in, Applications User Experience (including the Oracle Usability Advisory Board) events and programs. Thank you to AUSOUG, Quest, InSync, Callista, Park Lane IT, everyone at Oracle Australia, Chris Muir, and all the other people who came together to make this a productive visit. Stay tuned for more UX developments and engagements in the region on the Oracle VoX blog and Usable Apps website too!

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• Database – Beginning with Cloud Database As A Service

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love my weekend projects. Everybody does different activities in their weekend – like traveling, reading or just nothing. Every weekend I try to do something creative and different in the database world. The goal is I learn something new and if I enjoy my learning experience I share with the world. This weekend, I decided to explore Cloud Database As A Service – Morpheus. In my career I have managed many databases in the cloud and I have good experience in managing them. I should highlight that today’s applications use multiple databases from SQL for transactions and analytics, NoSQL for documents, In-Memory for caching to Indexing for search.  Provisioning and deploying these databases often require extensive expertise and time.  Often these databases are also not deployed on the same infrastructure and can create unnecessary latency between the application layer and the databases.  Not to mention the different quality of service based on the infrastructure and the service provider where they are deployed. Moreover, there are additional problems that I have experienced with traditional database setup when hosted in the cloud: Database provisioning & orchestration Slow speed due to hardware issues Poor Monitoring Tools High network latency Now if you have a great software and expert network engineer, you can continuously work on above problems and overcome them. However, not every organization have the luxury to have top notch experts in the field. Now above issues are related to infrastructure, but there are a few more problems which are related to software/application as well. Here are the top three things which can be problems if you do not have application expert: Replication and Clustering Simple provisioning of the hard drive space Automatic Sharding Well, Morpheus looks like a product build by experts who have faced similar situation in the past. The product pretty much addresses all the pain points of developers and database administrators. What is different about Morpheus is that it offers a variety of databases from MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch to Reddis as a service.  Thus users can pick and chose any combination of these databases.  All of them can be provisioned in a matter of minutes with a simple and intuitive point and click user interface.  The Morpheus cloud is built on Solid State Drives (SSD) and is designed for high-speed database transactions.  In addition it offers a direct link to Amazon Web Services to minimize latency between the application layer and the databases. Here are the few steps on how one can get started with Morpheus. Follow along with me.  First go to http://www.gomorpheus.com and register for a new and free account. Step 1: Signup It is very simple to signup for Morpheus. Step 2: Select your database   I use MySQL for my daily routine, so I have selected MySQL. Upon clicking on the big red button to add Instance, it prompted a dialogue of creating a new instance.   Step 3: Create User Now we just have to create a user in our portal which we will use to connect to a database hosted at Morpheus. Click on your database instance and it will bring you to User Screen. Over here you will notice once again a big red button to create a new user. I created a user with my first name.   Step 4: Configure your MySQL client I used MySQL workbench and connected to MySQL instance, which I had created with an IP address and user.   That’s it! You are connecting to MySQL instance. Now you can create your objects just like you would create on your local box. You will have all the features of the Morpheus when you are working with your database. Dashboard While working with Morpheus, I was most impressed with its dashboard. In future blog posts, I will write more about this feature.  Also with Morpheus you use the same process for provisioning and connecting with other databases: MongoDB, ElasticSearch and Reddis. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Ongoing confusion about ivars and properties in objective C

  - by Earl Grey

  After almost 8 months being in ios programming, I am again confused about the right approach. Maybe it is not the language but some OOP principle I am confused about. I don't know.. I was trying C# a few years back. There were fields (private variables, private data in an object), there were getters and setters (methods which exposed something to the world) ,and properties which was THE exposed thing. I liked the elegance of the solution, for example there could be a class that would have a property called DailyRevenue...a float...but there was no private variable called dailyRevenue, there was only a field - an array of single transaction revenues...and the getter for DailyRevenue property calculated the revenue transparently. If somehow the internals of daily revenue calculation would change, it would not affect somebody who consumed my DailyRevenue property in any way, since he would be shielded from getter implementation. I understood that sometimes there was , and sometimes there wasn't a 1-1 relationship between fields and properties. depending on the requirements. It seemed ok in my opinion. And that properties are THE way to acces the data in object. I know the difference betweeen private, protected, and public keyword. Now lets get to objectiveC. On what factor should I base my decision about making someting only an ivar or making it as a property? Is the mental model the same as I describe above? I know that ivars are "protected" by default, not "private" asi in c#..But thats ok I think, no big deal for my presnet level of understanding the whole ios development. The point is ivars are not accesible from outside (given i don't make them public..but i won't). The thing that clouds my clear understanding is that I can have IBOutlets from ivars. Why am I seeing internal object data in the UI? *Why is it ok?* On the other hand, if I make an IBOutlet from property, and I do not make it readonly, anybody can change it. Is this ok too? Let's say I have a ParseManager object. This object would use a built in Foundation framework class called NSXMLParser. Obviously my ParseManager will utilize this nsxmlparser's capabilities but will also do some additional work. Now my question is, who should initialize this NSXMLParser object and in which way should I make a reference to it from the ParseManager object, when there is a need to parse something. A) the ParseManager -1) in its default init method (possible here ivar - or - ivar+ppty) -2) with lazyloading in getter (required a ppty here) B) Some other object - who will pass a reference to NSXMLParser object to the ParseManager object. -1) in some custom initializer (initWithParser:(NSXMLPArser *) parser) when creating the ParseManager object.. A1 - the problem is, we create a parser and waste memory while it is not yet needed. However, we can be sure that all methods that are part ot ParserManager object, can use the ivar safely, since it exists. A2 - the problem is, the nsxmlparser is exposed to outside world, although it could be read only. Would we want a parser to be exposed in some scenario? B1 - this could maybe be useful when we would want to use more types of parsers..i dont know... I understand that architectural requirements and and language is not the same. But clearly the two are in relation. How to get out of that mess of my? Please bear with me, I wasn't able to come up with a single ultimate question. And secondly, it's better to not scare me with some superadvanced newspeak that talks about some crazy internals (what the compiler does) and edge cases.

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• Big Data – Beginning Big Data Series Next Month in 21 Parts

  - by Pinal Dave

  Big Data is the next big thing. There was a time when we used to talk in terms of MB and GB of the data. However, the industry is changing and we are now moving to a conversation where we discuss about data in Petabyte, Exabyte and Zettabyte. It seems that the world is now talking about increased Volume of the data. In simple world we all think that Big Data is nothing but plenty of volume. In reality Big Data is much more than just a huge volume of the data. When talking about the data we need to understand about variety and volume along with volume. Though Big data look like a simple concept, it is extremely complex subject when we attempt to start learning the same. My Journey I have recently presented on Big Data in quite a few organizations and I have received quite a few questions during this roadshow event. I have collected all the questions which I have received and decided to post about them on the blog. In the month of October 2013, on every weekday we will be learning something new about Big Data. Every day I will share a concept/question and in the same blog post we will learn the answer of the same. Big Data – Plenty of Questions I received quite a few questions during my road trip. Here are few of the questions. I want to learn Big Data – where should I start? Do I need to know SQL to learn Big Data? What is Hadoop? There are so many organizations talking about Big Data, and every one has a different approach. How to start with big Data? Do I need to know Java to learn about Big Data? What is different between various NoSQL languages. I will attempt to answer most of the questions during the month long series in the next month. Big Data – Big Subject Big Data is a very big subject and I no way claim that I will be covering every single big data concept in this series. However, I promise that I will be indeed sharing lots of basic concepts which are revolving around Big Data. We will discuss from fundamentals about Big Data and continue further learning about it. I will attempt to cover the concept so simple that many of you might have wondered about it but afraid to ask. Your Role! During this series next month, I need your one help. Please keep on posting questions you might have related to big data as blog post comments and on Facebook Page. I will monitor them closely and will try to answer them as well during this series. Now make sure that you do not miss any single blog post in this series as every blog post will be linked to each other. You can subscribe to my feed or like my Facebook page or subscribe via email (by entering email in the blog post). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Microsoft hosting free Hyper-V training for VMware Pros

  - by Ryan Roussel

  Microsoft will be hosting free training for virtualization professionals focused on Hyper-V, System Center, and virtualization architecture.  Details are below:   Just one week after Microsoft Management Summit 2011 (MMS), Microsoft Learning will be hosting an exclusive three-day Jump Start class specially tailored for VMware and Microsoft virtualization technology pros.  Registration for “Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals” is open now and will be delivered as an online class on March 29-31, 2010 from 10:00am-4:00pm PDT.    The course is COMPLETELY FREE and OPEN TO ANYONE!  Please share with your customers, blog, Tweet, etc. – help us get the word out to strengthen support for Microsoft’s virtualization offerings. What’s the high-level overview? This cutting edge course will feature expert instruction and real-world demonstrations of Hyper-V and brand new releases from System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta (many of which will be announced just one week earlier at MMS).  Register Now!   Day 1 will focus on “Platform” (Hyper-V, virtualization architecture, high availability & clustering) 10:00am – 10:30pm PDT:  Virtualization 360 Overview 10:30am – 12:00pm:  Microsoft Hyper-V Deployment Options & Architecture 1:00pm – 2:00pm:  Differentiating Microsoft and VMware (terminology, etc.) 2:00pm – 4:00pm:  High Availability & Clustering Day 2 will focus on “Management” (System Center Suite, SCVMM 2012 Beta, Opalis, Private Cloud solutions) 10:00am – 11:00pm PDT:  System Center Suite Overview w/ focus on DPM 11:00am – 12:00pm:  Virtual Machine Manager 2012 | Part 1 1:00pm –   1:30pm:  Virtual Machine Manager 2012 | Part 2 1:30pm – 2:30pm:  Automation with System Center Opalis & PowerShell 2:30pm – 4:00pm:  Private Cloud Solutions, Architecture & VMM SSP 2.0 Day 3 will focus on “VDI” (VDI Infrastructure/architecture, v-Alliance, application delivery via VDI) 10:00am – 11:00pm PDT:  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Architecture | Part 1 11:00am – 12:00pm:  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Architecture | Part 2 1:00pm – 2:30pm:  v-Alliance Solution Overview 2:30pm – 4:00pm:  Application Delivery for VDI     Every section will be team-taught by two of the most respected authorities on virtualization technologies: Microsoft Technical Evangelist Symon Perriman and leading Hyper-V, VMware, and XEN infrastructure consultant, Corey Hynes Who is the target audience for this training? Suggested prerequisite skills include real-world experience with Windows Server 2008 R2, virtualization and datacenter management. The course is tailored to these types of roles: · IT Professional · IT Decision Maker · Network Administrators & Architects · Storage/Infrastructure Administrators & Architects How do I to register and learn more about this great training opportunity? · Register: Visit the Registration Page and sign up for all three sessions · Blog: Learn more from the Microsoft Learning Blog · Twitter: Here are a few posts you can retweet: o Mar. 29-31 "Microsoft #Virtualization for VMware Pros" @SymonPerriman Corey Hynes http://bit.ly/JS-Hyper-V @MSLearning #Hyper-V o @SysCtrOpalis Mar. 29-31 "Microsoft #Virtualization for VMware Pros" @SymonPerriman Corey Hynes http://bit.ly/JS-Hyper-V #Hyper-V o Learn all the cool new features in Hyper-V & System Center 2012! SCVMM, Self-Service Portal 2.0, http://bit.ly/JS-Hyper-V #Hyper-V #Opalis What is a “Jump Start” course? A “Jump Start” course is “team-taught” by two expert instructors in an engaging radio talk show style format. The idea is to deliver readiness training on strategic and emerging technologies that drive awareness at scale before Microsoft Learning develops mainstream Microsoft Official Courses (MOC) that map to certifications.  All sessions are professionally recorded and distributed through MS Showcase, Channel 9, Zune Marketplace and iTunes for broader reach.

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• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I were more intuitive

  - by pjohnson

  I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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• Java EE 6 Pocket Guide from O'Reilly - Now Available in Paperback and Kindle Edition

  - by arungupta

  Hot off the press ... Java EE 6 Pocket Guide from 'OReilly Media is now available in Paperback and Kindle Edition. Here are the book details: Release Date: Sep 21, 2012 Language: English Pages: 208 Print ISBN: 978-1-4493-3668-4 | ISBN 10:1-4493-3668-X Ebook ISBN:978-1-4493-3667-7 | ISBN 10:1-4493-3667-1 The book provides a comprehensive summary of the Java EE 6 platform. Main features of different technologies from the platform are explained and accompanied by tons of samples. A chapter is dedicated to Managed Beans, Servlets, Java Persistence API, Enterprise JavaBeans, Contexts and Dependency Injection, JavaServer Faces, SOAP-Based Web Services, RESTful Web Services, Java Message Service, and Bean Validation in that format. Many thanks to Markus Eisele, John Yeary, and Bert Ertman for reviewing and providing valuable comments. This book was not possible without their extensive feedback! This book was mostly written by compiling my blogs, material from 2-day workshops, and several hands-on workshops around the world. The interactions with users of different technologies and whiteboard discussions with different specification leads helped me understand the technology better. Many thanks to them for helping me be a better user! The long international flights during my travel around the world proved extremely useful for authoring the content. No phone, no email, no IM, food served on the table, power outlet = a perfect recipe for authoring ;-) Markus wrote a detailed review of the book. He was one of the manuscript reviewers of the book as well and provided valuable guidance. Some excerpts from his blog: It covers the basics you need to know of Java EE 6 and gives good examples of all relevant parts. ... This is a pocket guide which is comprehensively written. I could follow all examples and it was a good read overall. No complicated constructs and clear writing. ... GO GET IT! It is the only book you probably will need about Java EE 6! It is comprehensive, wonderfully written and covers everything you need in your daily work. It is not a complete reference but provides a great shortcut to the things you need to know. To me it is a good beginners guide and also works as a companion for advanced users. Here is the first tweet feedback ... Jeff West was super prompt to place the first pre-order of my book, pretty much the hour it was announced. Thank you Jeff! @mike_neck posted the very first tweet about the book, thanks for that! The book is now available in Paperback and Kindle Edition from the following websites: O'Reilly Media (Ebook, Print & Ebook, Print) Amazon.com (Kindle Edition and Paperback) Barnes and Noble Overstock (1% off Amazon) Buy.com Booktopia.com Tower Books Angus & Robertson Shopping.com Here is how I can use your help: Help spread the word about the book If you bought a Paperback or downloaded Kindle Edition, then post your review here. If you have not bought, then you can buy it at amazon.com and multiple other websites mentioned above. If you are coming to JavaOne, you'll have an opportunity to get a free copy at O'Reilly's booth on Monday (October 1) from 2-3pm. And you can always buy it from the JavaOne Bookstore. I hope you enjoy reading it and learn something new from it or hone your existing skills. As always, looking forward to your feedback!

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• Announcing Oracle Knowledge 8.5: Even Superheroes Need Upgrades

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  It’s no secret that we like Iron Man here at Oracle. We've certainly got stuff in common: one of the world’s largest technology companies and one of the world’s strongest technology-driven superheroes. If you've seen the recent Iron Man movies, you might have even noticed some of our servers sitting in Tony Stark’s lab. Heck, our CEO made a cameo appearance in one of the movies. Yeah, we’re fans. Especially as Iron Man is a regular guy with some amazing technology – like us. But Like all great things even Superheroes need upgrades, whether it’s their suit, their car or their spacestation. Oracle certainly has its share of advanced technology.  For example, Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 after years of watching the company advance the science of Knowledge Management.  And it was some extremely super technology.  At that time, Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote about it in ‘Standalone Knowledge Management Is Dead With Oracle's Announcement To Acquire InQuira’ saying ‘Knowledge, accessible via web self-service or agent UIs, is a critical customer service component for industries fielding repetitive questions about policies, procedures, products, and solutions.’  One short sentence that amounts to a very tall order.  Since the acquisition our KM scientists have been hard at work in their labs. Today Oracle announced its first major knowledge management release since its acquisition of InQuira: Oracle Knowledge 8.5. We’ve put a massively-upgraded supersuit on our KM solution because we still have bad guys to fight. And we are very proud to say that we went way beyond our original plans. So what, exactly, did we do in Oracle Knowledge 8.5? We did what any high-tech super-scientist would do. We made Oracle Knowledge smarter, stronger and faster. First, we gave Oracle Knowledge a stronger heart: Certified on Oracle technologies, including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Huge scaling and performance improvements. Then we gave it a better reach: Improved iConnect functionality that delivers contextualized knowledge directly into CRM applications. Better content acquisition support across disparate sources. Enhanced Language Support including Natural Language search support for 16 Languages. Enhanced Keyword Search for 23 authoring languages, as well as enhanced out-of-the-box industry ontologies covering 14 languages. And finally we made Oracle Knowledge ridiculously smarter: Improved Natural Language Search and a new Contextual Answer Delivery that understands the true intent of each inquiry to deliver the best possible answers. AnswerFlow for Guided Navigation & Answer Delivery, a new application for guided troubleshooting and answer delivery. Knowledge Analytics standardized on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Knowledge Analytics Dashboards optimized search and content creation through targeted, actionable insights. A new three-level language model "Global - Language - Locale" that provides an improved search experience for organizations with a global footprint. We believe that Oracle Knowledge 8.5 is the most sophisticated KM solution in existence today and we’ve worked very hard to help it fulfill the promise of KM: empowering customers and employees with deep insights wherever they need them. We hope you agree it’s a suit worth wearing. We are continuing to invest in Knowledge Management as it continues to be especially relevant today with the enterprise push for peer collaboration, crowd-sourced wisdom, agile innovation, social interaction channels, applied real-time analytics, and personalization. In fact, we believe that Knowledge Management is a critical part of the Customer Experience portfolio for success. From empowering employee’s, to empowering customers, to gaining the insights from interactions across all channels, businesses today cannot efficiently scale their efforts, strengthen their customer relationships or achieve their growth goals without a solid Knowledge Management foundation to build from. And like every good superhero saga, we’re not even close to being finished. Next we are taking Oracle Knowledge into the Cloud. Yes, we’re thinking what you’re thinking: ROCKET BOOTS! Stay tuned for the next adventure… By Nav Chakravarti, Vice-President, Product Management, CRM Knowledge and previously the CTO of InQuira, a knowledge management company acquired by Oracle in 2011

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