Search Results

Search found 8842 results on 354 pages for 'plug and play'.

Page 299/354 | < Previous Page | 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306  | Next Page >

• How Can I Improve This Card-Game AI?

  - by James Burgess

  Let me get this out there before anything else: this is a learning exercise for me. I am not a game developer by trade or hobby (at least, not seriously) and am purely delving into some AI- and 3D-related topics to broaden my horizons a bit. As part of the learning experience, I thought I'd have a go at developing a basic card game AI. I selected Pit as the card game I was going to attempt to emulate (specifically, the 'bull and bear' variation of the game as mentioned in the link above). Unfortunately, the rule-set that I'm used to playing with (an older version of the game) isn't described. The basics of it are: The number of commodities played with is equal to the number of players. The bull and bear cards are included. All but two players receive 8 cards, two receive 9 cards. A player can win the round with 7 + bull, 8, or 8 + bull (receiving double points). The bear is a penalty card. You can trade up to a maximum of 4 cards at a time. They must all be of the same type, but can optionally include the bull or bear (so, you could trade A, A, A, Bull - but not A, B, A, Bull). For those who have played the card game, it will probably have been as obvious to you as it was to me that given the nature of the game, gameplay would seem to resemble a greedy algorithm. With this in mind, I thought it might simplify my AI experience somewhat. So, here's what I've come up with for a basic AI player to play Pit... and I'd really just like any form of suggestion (from improvements to reading materials) relating to it. Here it is in something vaguely pseudo-code-ish ;) While AI does not hold 7 similar + bull, 8 similar, or 8 similar + bull, do: 1. Establish 'target' hand, by seeing which card AI holds the most of. 2. Prepare to trade next-most-numerous card type in a trade (max. held, or 4, whichever is fewer) 3. If holding the bear, add to (if trading <=3 cards) or replace in (if trading 4 cards) hand. 4. Offer cards for trade. 5. If cards are accepted for trade within X turns, continue (clearing 'failed card types'). Otherwise: a. If only one card remains in the trade, go to #6. Otherwise: i. Remove one non-penalty card from the trade. ii. Return to #5. 6. Add card type to temporary list of failed card types. 7. Repeat from #2 (excluding 'failed card types'). I'm aware this is likely to be a sub-optimal way of solving the problem, but that's why I'm posting this question. Are there any AI- or algorithm-related concepts that I've missed and should be incorporating to make a better AI? Additionally, what are the flaws with my AI at present (I'm well aware it's probably far from complete)? Thanks in advance!

  Read the article

• Visual Studio Exceptions dialogs

  - by Daniel Moth

  Previously I covered step 1 of live debugging with start and attach. Once the debugger is attached, you want to go to step 2 of live debugging, which is to break. One way to break under the debugger is to do nothing, and just wait for an exception to occur in your code. This is true for all types of code that you debug in Visual Studio, and let's consider the following piece of C# code:3: static void Main() 4: { 5: try 6: { 7: int i = 0; 8: int r = 5 / i; 9: } 10: catch (System.DivideByZeroException) {/*gulp. sue me.*/} 11: System.Console.ReadLine(); 12: } If you run this under the debugger do you expect an exception on line 8? It is a trick question: you have to know whether I have configured the debugger to break when exceptions are thrown (first-chance exceptions) or only when they are unhandled. The place you do that is in the Exceptions dialog which is accessible from the Debug->Exceptions menu and on my installation looks like this: Note that I have checked all CLR exceptions. I could have expanded (like shown for the C++ case in my screenshot) and selected specific exceptions. To read more about this dialog, please read the corresponding Exception Handling debugging msdn topic and all its subtopics. So, for the code above, the debugger will break execution due to the thrown exception (exactly as if the try..catch was not there), so I see the following Exception Thrown dialog: Note the following: I can hit continue (or hit break and then later continue) and the program will continue fine since I have a catch handler. If this was an unhandled exception, then that is what the dialog would say (instead of first chance exception) and continuing would crash the app. That hyperlinked text ("Open Exception Settings") opens the Exceptions dialog I described further up. The coolest thing to note is the checkbox - this is new in this latest release of Visual Studio: it is a shortcut to the checkbox in the Exceptions dialog, so you don't have to open it to change this setting for this specific exception - you can toggle that option right from this dialog. Finally, if you try the code above on your system, you may observe a couple of differences from my screenshots. The first is that you may have an additional column of checkboxes in the Exceptions dialog. The second is that the last dialog I shared may look different to you. It all depends on the Debug->Options settings, and the two relevant settings are in this screenshot: The Exception assistant is what configures the look of the UI when the debugger wants to indicate exception to you, and the Just My Code setting controls the extra column in the Exception dialog. You can read more about those options on MSDN: How to break on User-Unhandled exceptions (plus Gregg’s post) and Exception Assistant. Before I leave you to go play with this stuff a bit more, please note that this level of debugging is now available for JavaScript too, and if you are looking at the Exceptions dialog and wondering what the "GPU Memory Access Exceptions" node is about, stay tuned on the C++ AMP blog ;-) Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2011 -- #1058

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Martin Krüger, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Karl Shifflett, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics" John Papa WP7: "Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Telerik announced a special sale on their RadControls for WP7... check it out: RadControls for Windows Phone 7 - on Sale from March 16th at a Special Promo Price! From SilverlightCream.com: Prism BootStrapper Load ModuleCatalog Ansyc Ian T. Lackey has a post up about reading the module catalog for Prism from an XML file asynchronously... fun stuff... this is how we kick-started our app... XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 6 - Input (accelerometer) Peter Kuhn has Part 6 of his XNA for Silverlight devs up at SilverlightShow. This post is on the use of the accelerometer... some great diagrams and explanations of it's use along with some code to play with... including a 'problems and pitfalls' section, and some good external links. Getting Started with Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has an introduction to Unit Testing in general, and then moves into Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7, providing 3 options with links to the materials and code demonstrating the concepts. Using DockPanel in WP7 Responding to reader's questions, WindowsPhoneGeek's next post is on the DockPanel from the Silverlight Toolkit, and using it in WP7... defined declaratively and in code. Reactive Extensions–More About Chaining Jesse Liberty has post number 10 on Rx up and is a follow-on to the last one on Chaining. This time he exercises the chaining aspect of SelectMany. Yet Another Podcast #26–Walt Ritscher In his next post, Jesse Liberty has his 26th 'Yet Another Podcast' up and is chatting with my friend Walt Ritscher. If you don't know who Walt is, check out the links Jesse has on the post... I'm sure you've crossed paths. How to: Create A half square from a regular polygon (triangle) Martin Krüger demonstrates the exact placement of a half-square (isosceles right triangle), formed with a regular polygon in Blend... this is much more involved than I've made it sound... check out his post. Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics John Papa has Silverlight TV number 65 up and it's all about the 3D graphics stuff we saw at the Firestarter. John is talking with Danny Riddel, the CEO of Archetype, the company that built the awesome 3D demo we all gushed over. Jounce Part 12: Providing History-Based Back Navigation Jeremy Likness has part 12 of his Jounce exploration up... and discussing the stack of navigated pages that Jounce retains and providing a 'go back' functionality... and provides a good example of using it all. Prism 4 Region Navigation with Silverlight Frame Navigation and Unity Karl Shifflett has a post for all us Prism afficianados... Prism, Unity, and the Silverlight Frame Navigation framework. Some great external links for 'required reading' too. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control Colin Eberhardt has an awesome tutorial up for creating a JumpList control for WP7... what a bunch of effort... this is a step-by-step description of designing the control he built and blogged about a while back... and it's still cool! 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

  Read the article

• Oracle Employees Support New World Record for IYF Children's Hour

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 960 students ‘crouched’, ‘touched’ and ‘set’ under the watchful eye of International Rugby Referee Alain Roland, and supported by Oracle employees, to successfully set a new world record for the World’s Largest Scrum to raise funds and awareness for the Irish Youth Foundation. Last year Oracle Employees supported the Irish Youth Foundation by donating funds from their payroll through the Giving Tree Appeal. We were the largest corporate donor to the IYF by raising €3075. To acknowledge our generosity the IYF asked Oracle Leadership in Society team members to participate in their most recent campaign which was to break the Guinness Book of Records by forming the World’s Largest Rugby Scrum. This was a wonderful opportunity for Oracle’s Leadership in Society to promote the charity, support education and to make a mark in the Corporate Social Responsibility field. The students who formed the scrum also gave up their lunch money and raised a total of €3000. This year we hope Oracle Employees will once again support the IYF with the challenge to match that amount. On the 24th of October the sun shone down on the streaming lines of students entering the field. 480 students were decked out in bright red Oracle T-Shirts against the other 480 in blue and white jerseys - all ready to form a striking scrum. Ryan Tubridy the host of the event made the opening announcement and with the blow of a whistle the Scum began. 960 students locked tight together with the Leinster players also at each side. Leinster Manager Matt O’Connor was there along with presenters Ryan Tubridy and George Hook to assist with getting the boys in line and keeping the shape of the scrum. In accordance with Guinness Book of Records rules, the ball was fed into the scrum properly by Ireland and Leinster scrum-half, Eoin Reddan, and was then passed out the line to his Leinster team mates including Ian Madigan, Brendan Macken and Jordi Murphy, also proudly sporting the Oracle T-Shirt. The new World Record was made, everyone gave a big cheer and thankfully nobody got injured! Thank you to everyone in Oracle who donated last year through the Giving Tree Appeal. Your generosity has gone a long way to support local groups both. Last year’s donation was so substantial that the IYF were able to spread it across two youth groups: The first being Ballybough Youth Project in Dublin. The funding gave them the chance to give 24 young people from their project the chance to get away from the inner city and the problems and issues they face in their daily life by taking a trip to the Cavan Centre to spend a weekend away in a safe and comfortable environment; a very rare holiday in these young people’s lives. The Rahoon Family Centre. Used the money to help secure the long term sustainability of their project. They act as an educational/social/fun project that has been working with disadvantaged children for the past 16 years. Their aim is to change young people’s future with fun /social education and supporting them so they can maximize their creativity and potential. We hope you can help support this worthy cause again this year, so keep an eye out for the Children’s Hour and Giving Tree Appeal! About the Irish Youth Foundation The IYF provides opportunities for marginalised children and young people facing difficult and extreme conditions to experience success in their lives. It passionately believes that achievement starts with opportunity. The IYF’s strategy is based on providing safe places where children can go after school; to grow, to learn and to play; and providing opportunities for teenagers from under-served communities to succeed and excel in their lives. The IYF supports innovative grassroots projects operated by dedicated professionals who understand young people and care about them. This allows the IYF to focus on supporting young people at risk of dropping out of school and, in particular, on the critical transition from primary to secondary school; and empowering teenagers from disadvantaged neighborhoods to become engaged in their local communities. Find out more here www.iyf.ie

  Read the article

• Secret Agent Man

  - by Bil Simser

  Just a quick one this morning as we all get started in the week. Something that comes into play (sometimes in a big way) is the user agent string your browser gives off. So for example using the User-Agent field in the request header, you can determine what browser the user is running and act accordingly.Internet Explorer 9 modified the UA string slightly so just in case you're looking for it here are the user agent strings for IE9 (in various modes):Internet Explorer 9 Mode: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)Internet Explorer 8 Mode: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.7)Internet Explorer 7 Mode: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.7)Internet Explorer 9 (Compatibility Mode): Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.7)A couple of things to note here:This was from a 64-bit Windows 7 client so that might account for the WOW64 in the agent string (I don't have a 32-bit client to test from)Various applications and platforms add to the UA string just like they do in previous IE releases. So for example you can see I have various .NET versions installed as well as Zune. You can take advantage of this by querying the UA string for compatibilities and present options accordingly to the end user.As applications will continue to add and modify this string you'll want to query the string for parts not the entire string. For example if you want to detect if you're coming from IE running  on a Windows Phone 7 just look for "iemobile" in the user agent stringHappy hacking!

  Read the article

• Fastest pathfinding for static node matrix

  - by Sean Martin

  I'm programming a route finding routine in VB.NET for an online game I play, and I'm searching for the fastest route finding algorithm for my map type. The game takes place in space, with thousands of solar systems connected by jump gates. The game devs have provided a DB dump containing a list of every system and the systems it can jump to. The map isn't quite a node tree, since some branches can jump to other branches - more of a matrix. What I need is a fast pathfinding algorithm. I have already implemented an A* routine and a Dijkstra's, both find the best path but are too slow for my purposes - a search that considers about 5000 nodes takes over 20 seconds to compute. A similar program on a website can do the same search in less than a second. This website claims to use D*, which I have looked into. That algorithm seems more appropriate for dynamic maps rather than one that does not change - unless I misunderstand it's premise. So is there something faster I can use for a map that is not your typical tile/polygon base? GBFS? Perhaps a DFS? Or have I likely got some problem with my A* - maybe poorly chosen heuristics or movement cost? Currently my movement cost is the length of the jump (the DB dump has solar system coordinates as well), and the heuristic is a quick euclidean calculation from the node to the goal. In case anyone has some optimizations for my A*, here is the routine that consumes about 60% of my processing time, according to my profiler. The coordinateData table contains a list of every system's coordinates, and neighborNode.distance is the distance of the jump. Private Function findDistance(ByVal startSystem As Integer, ByVal endSystem As Integer) As Integer 'hCount += 1 'If hCount Mod 0 = 0 Then 'Return hCache 'End If 'Initialize variables to be filled Dim x1, x2, y1, y2, z1, z2 As Integer 'LINQ queries for solar system data Dim systemFromData = From result In jumpDataDB.coordinateDatas Where result.systemId = startSystem Select result.x, result.y, result.z Dim systemToData = From result In jumpDataDB.coordinateDatas Where result.systemId = endSystem Select result.x, result.y, result.z 'LINQ execute 'Fill variables with solar system data for from and to system For Each solarSystem In systemFromData x1 = (solarSystem.x) y1 = (solarSystem.y) z1 = (solarSystem.z) Next For Each solarSystem In systemToData x2 = (solarSystem.x) y2 = (solarSystem.y) z2 = (solarSystem.z) Next Dim x3 = Math.Abs(x1 - x2) Dim y3 = Math.Abs(y1 - y2) Dim z3 = Math.Abs(z1 - z2) 'Calculate distance and round 'Dim distance = Math.Round(Math.Sqrt(Math.Abs((x1 - x2) ^ 2) + Math.Abs((y1 - y2) ^ 2) + Math.Abs((z1 - z2) ^ 2))) Dim distance = firstConstant * Math.Min(secondConstant * (x3 + y3 + z3), Math.Max(x3, Math.Max(y3, z3))) 'Dim distance = Math.Abs(x1 - x2) + Math.Abs(z1 - z2) + Math.Abs(y1 - y2) 'hCache = distance Return distance End Function And the main loop, the other 30% 'Begin search While openList.Count() != 0 'Set current system and move node to closed currentNode = lowestF() move(currentNode.id) For Each neighborNode In neighborNodes If Not onList(neighborNode.toSystem, 0) Then If Not onList(neighborNode.toSystem, 1) Then Dim newNode As New nodeData() newNode.id = neighborNode.toSystem newNode.parent = currentNode.id newNode.g = currentNode.g + neighborNode.distance newNode.h = findDistance(newNode.id, endSystem) newNode.f = newNode.g + newNode.h newNode.security = neighborNode.security openList.Add(newNode) shortOpenList(OLindex) = newNode.id OLindex += 1 Else Dim proposedG As Integer = currentNode.g + neighborNode.distance If proposedG < gValue(neighborNode.toSystem) Then changeParent(neighborNode.toSystem, currentNode.id, proposedG) End If End If End If Next 'Check to see if done If currentNode.id = endSystem Then Exit While End If End While If clarification is needed on my spaghetti code, I'll try to explain.

  Read the article

• Combining template method with strategy

  - by Mekswoll

  An assignment in my software engineering class is to design an application which can play different forms a particular game. The game in question is Mancala, some of these games are called Wari or Kalah. These games differ in some aspects but for my question it's only important to know that the games could differ in the following: The way in which the result of a move is handled The way in which the end of the game is determined The way in which the winner is determined The first thing that came to my mind to design this was to use the strategy pattern, I have a variation in algorithms (the actual rules of the game). The design could look like this: I then thought to myself that in the game of Mancala and Wari the way the winner is determined is exactly the same and the code would be duplicated. I don't think this is by definition a violation of the 'one rule, one place' or DRY principle seeing as a change in rules for Mancala wouldn't automatically mean that rule should be changed in Wari as well. Nevertheless from the feedback I got from my professor I got the impression to find a different design. I then came up with this: Each game (Mancala, Wari, Kalah, ...) would just have attribute of the type of each rule's interface, i.e. WinnerDeterminer and if there's a Mancala 2.0 version which is the same as Mancala 1.0 except for how the winner is determined it can just use the Mancala versions. I think the implementation of these rules as a strategy pattern is certainly valid. But the real problem comes when I want to design it further. In reading about the template method pattern I immediately thought it could be applied to this problem. The actions that are done when a user makes a move are always the same, and in the same order, namely: deposit stones in holes (this is the same for all games, so would be implemented in the template method itself) determine the result of the move determine if the game has finished because of the previous move if the game has finished, determine who has won Those three last steps are all in my strategy pattern described above. I'm having a lot of trouble combining these two. One possible solution I found would be to abandon the strategy pattern and do the following: I don't really see the design difference between the strategy pattern and this? But I am certain I need to use a template method (although I was just as sure about having to use a strategy pattern). I also can't determine who would be responsible for creating the TurnTemplate object, whereas with the strategy pattern I feel I have families of objects (the three rules) which I could easily create using an abstract factory pattern. I would then have a MancalaRuleFactory, WariRuleFactory, etc. and they would create the correct instances of the rules and hand me back a RuleSet object. Let's say that I use the strategy + abstract factory pattern and I have a RuleSet object which has algorithms for the three rules in it. The only way I feel I can still use the template method pattern with this is to pass this RuleSet object to my TurnTemplate. The 'problem' that then surfaces is that I would never need my concrete implementations of the TurnTemplate, these classes would become obsolete. In my protected methods in the TurnTemplate I could just call ruleSet.determineWinner(). As a consequence, the TurnTemplate class would no longer be abstract but would have to become concrete, is it then still a template method pattern? To summarize, am I thinking in the right way or am I missing something easy? If I'm on the right track, how do I combine a strategy pattern and a template method pattern? This is part of a homework assignment but I'm not looking to be gifted the answer, I have deliberately been very verbose in my question to show that I have thought about it before coming here to ask a question

  Read the article

• Fake It Easy On Yourself

  - by Lee Brandt

  I have been using Rhino.Mocks pretty much since I started being a mockist-type tester. I have been very happy with it for the most part, but a year or so ago, I got a glimpse of some tests using Moq. I thought the little bit I saw was very compelling. For a long time, I had been using: 1: var _repository = MockRepository.GenerateMock<IRepository>(); 2: _repository.Expect(repo=>repo.SomeCall()).Return(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository); 4:  5: ... some exercising code 6: _repository.AssertWasCalled(repo => repo.SomeCall()); I was happy with that syntax. I didn’t go looking for something else, but what I saw was: 1: var _repository = new Mock(); And I thought, “That looks really nice!” The code was very expressive and easier to read that the Rhino.Mocks syntax. I have gotten so used to the Rhino.Mocks syntax that it made complete sense to me, but to developers I was mentoring in mocking, it was sometimes to obtuse. SO I thought I would write some tests using Moq as my mocking tool. But I discovered something ugly once I got into it. The way Mocks are created makes Moq very easy to read, but that only gives you a Mock not the object itself, which is what you’ll need to pass to the exercising code. So this is what it ends up looking like: 1: var _repository = new Mock<IRepository>(); 2: _repository.SetUp(repo=>repo.SomeCall).Returns(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository.Object); 4: .. some exercizing code 5: _repository.Verify(repo => repo.SomeCall()); Two things jump out at me: 1) when I set up my mocked calls, do I set it on the Mock or the Mock’s “object”? and 2) What am I verifying on SomeCall? Just that it was called? that it is available to call? Dealing with 2 objects, a “Mock” and an “Object” made me have to consider naming conventions. Should I always call the mock _repositoryMock and the object _repository? So I went back to Rhino.Mocks. It is the most widely used framework, and show other how to use it is easier because there is one natural object to use, the _repository. Then I came across a blog post from Patrik Hägne, and that led me to a post about FakeItEasy. I went to the Google Code site and when I saw the syntax, I got very excited. Then I read the wiki page where Patrik stated why he wrote FakeItEasy, and it mirrored my own experience. So I began to play with it a bit. So far, I am sold. the syntax is VERY easy to read and the fluent interface is super discoverable. It basically looks like this: 1: var _repository = A.Fake<IRepository>(); 2: a.CallTo(repo=>repo.SomeMethod()).Returns(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository); 4: ... some exercising code 5: A.CallTo(() => _repository.SOmeMethod()).MustHaveHappened(); Very nice. But is it mature? It’s only been around a couple of years, so will I be giving up some thing that I use a lot because it hasn’t been implemented yet? I doesn’t seem so. As I read more examples and posts from Patrik, he has some pretty complex scenarios. He even has support for VB.NET! So if you are looking for a mocking framework that looks and feels very natural, try out FakeItEasy!

  Read the article

• Fill a Flash Drive with Portable Software using Lupo PenSuite

  - by Asian Angel

  A flash drive full of portable software is helpful to have along wherever you go. The Lupo PenSuite lets you choose from three different versions to get the best fit for your everyday needs. Note: If running the full version you will need a 512 MB USB flash drive or larger. Using Lupo PenSuite The one window to watch for during the setup process is where you have the opportunity to add a specific language pack if needed. Outside of that all that you need to do is sit back and wait for the suite to be extracted. Note: Extraction times will vary based on version and extraction location. Here we browsed to our flash drive to extract it to… Once the setup process is complete locate and double click the Lupo_PenSuite.exe file. This one time window will present you the opportunity to start using the suite immediately, or go directly into the options. When the suite is active you will have a new system tray icon that operates as a start menu button. At the bottom you can monitor the remaining room on your flash drive, and use the close button to exit the suite (may display as a power button based on menu theme). A quick look at the set up inside the suite. There is a pre-configured area for organizing and storing your personal files. Prefer a classic style menu? Just select for it in the options (various tab) and enjoy a smaller streamlined look. Note: You can also change the theme for the regular menu and add a user pic. The suite provides access to your portable software and online sites. You get to enjoy the best of both as shown in the following examples. Websites will open using the suite’s portable Firefox install. VLC is ready to play your downloaded videos. The suite also has some very nice photo editing programs added in. Installing Additional Apps If one of your favorite programs is not included in the suite version, it only takes a few minutes to add it in. Go to the Additional Apps webpage, download the app(s), and extract them onto your hard-drive. Note: Link for additional apps webpage provided below. Add the extracted app(s) to the MyApps folder in the suite’s folder hierarchy. Click on ASuite in the suite’s start menu. Drag and drop the portable app’s exe file into the MyApps section in the ASuite window. Your new software’s shortcut should display as shown here. Close this window when finished. Checking the suite’s start menu will show your new software ready to be used. Conclusion If you need a good portable software collection to carry with you on a flash drive then Lupo PenSuite is definitely worth taking a look at. We tested Lupo PenSuite on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 and it works great on all three. Another popular choice is PortableApps and you can check out our Review of that too they are essentially the same thing, each is just packaged differently. Links Download Lupo PenSuite (Full, Lite, & Zero versions) *Download links approximately one-third down the page. Download Additional Apps for Lupo PenSuite Download Additional Skins for Lupo PenSuite Start Menu View Video Tutorials *Has tutorial for easy updating of entire suite. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Install and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 PlayerRebit Backup Software [Review]BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WaySpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost 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 All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor

  Read the article

• General website publishing questions involving domain forwarding issue

  - by Gorgeousyousuf

  Even though I have been having a certain level of knowledge and experience about web development I have never interested in obtaining a domain and publishing a website from my own server. Since today I have been struggling with getting my own domain and configuring it utilizing web sources. I started with learning the outline of web publishing process including web server installation, deploying a website for testing purpose,router port forwarding, getting a domain and forwarding domain to my router which will also forward http requests to my web server I am confused about some parts and so far could not get the web site accessed from outside of the network. All I try to do is just for learning purpose so I do not pay much attention to security issues for now. I have Server 2008 and IIS 7.5 installed. I use a laptop and have access to the modem over wireless and my modem is Zoom x6 5590. Well I will continue explaining what I have done so far and what I think will be after each action I did, I have successfully had access to my website on any local computer entering the internal ip address and port pair of the host machine in a browser. Next, I forwarded port 80 of my host machine creating a virtual server like 10.0.0.x(internal ip(static) of the host) - tcp - start port : 80 - end port : 80 in router options. Now I suppose every request that will come to the public Ip on port 80 will be forwarded to my host machine(10.0.0.x) over port 80. So If everyhing went as desired, the website listening on port 80 will accept the request and process the issue and finally respond bla bla bla... I suppose to access my website from outside of the network by entering http://MyPublicIp:80 in a browser but I couldn't accomplish this task by now despite using godady's domain forwarding tool,I see a small view of my website when I click the "preview" button that checks whether the address(http://publicip/Index.aspx) I entered where my domain will be forwarded is available or not. I am sure that configuring domain does not play a role in solving such a problem since using public ip and port matching does not help. So here is the first question, What is the fact that I face this problem? After that, I have couple of question regarding domain forwarding using godaddy tool. Can I forward my domain to a any port for example port 8080 other than default http port 80? Additionally, can I use a sub-domain to forward to a different port of the host? What I want to design is if the client enters www.mydomain.com, website1 will respond over a specified port and after when a client enters info.mydomain.com, another website which listens on different port will respond. I tried to add a sub-domain and forward it to a address like http://www.mydomain.com:8080/Index.aspx with no success. Can I really do that? Finally, what if I have a ftp site listening on the default port 21 and I create a domain like ftp.mydomain.com that will forward to that ftp site address. Is it possible to use sub-domains for ftp site access? I know I am more than confused but no matter whatever and however you reply to me, you will help me have a more clear view on this subject. Thank you very much from now.

  Read the article

• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

  Read the article

• What Counts For a DBA: Ego

  - by Louis Davidson

  Leaving aside, for a second, Freud’s psychoanalytical definitions, the term “ego” generally refers to a person’s sense of self, and their self-esteem. In casual usage, however, it usually appears in the adjectival form, “egotistical” (most often followed by “jerk”). You don’t need to be a jerk to be a DBA; humility is important. However, ego is important too. A good DBA needs a certain degree of self-esteem…a belief and pride in what he or she can do better than anyone else can. The ideal DBA needs to be humble enough to admit when they are wrong but egotistical enough to know when they are right, and to stand up for that knowledge and make their voice heard. In most organizations, the DBA team is seriously outnumbered by headstrong developers and clock driven managers, and “great” DBAs will often be outnumbered by…well…the not so great. In order to be heard in this environment, a DBA will not only need to be very skilled, but will also need a healthy dose of ego. As Freud might have put it, the unconscious desire of the DBA (the id) is for iron-fist control over their databases, and code that runs in them. However, the ego moderates this desire, seeking to “satisfy the id in realistic ways that, in the long term, bring benefit rather than grief“. In other words, the ego understands the need to exert a measure of control and self-belief, but also to tolerate and play nicely with developers and other DBAs. The trick, naturally, is learning how to be heard when it is important, but also to make everyone around you welcome that input, even when you have to be bold to make the “I know what I am talking about, and you…well…not so much” decisions. Consider a baseball team, bottom of the ninth inning of the championship game, man on first and down one run. Almost anyone on that team will have the ability to hit a home run, but only one or two will have the iron belief that they can pull it off in this critical, end-game situation. The player you need in this situation is the one who has passionately gone the extra mile preparing for just this moment, is bursting at the seams with self-confidence, and can look the coach in the eye and state, boldly, “Put me in, I am your best bet“. Likewise, on those occasions when high customer demand coincides with copious system errors, and panic is bubbling just beneath the surface, you don’t need the minimally qualified support person, armed with the “reboot and hope” technique (though that sometimes works!). You need the DBA who steps up and says, “Put me in” and has the skill and tenacity to back up those words and to fix the pinpoint and fix the problem, whatever it takes, while keeping customers and managers happy. Of course, the egotistical DBA will happily spend hours telling you how great they are at their job, and how brilliantly they put out a previous fire, and this is no guarantee that they can deliver. However, if an otherwise-humble DBA looks you in the eye and says, “I can do it”, then hear them out. Sometimes, this burst of ego will be exactly what’s required.

  Read the article

• Ubuntu 12.04 - No sound - HELP!

  - by Bruno Tacca

  I'm panicking... my sound stopped working after I tried to set-up my notebook speakers, plus two headphone jacks... My idea was to multichannel the sound to 3 channels, built-in speakers, and sound-card 2 headphone jacks. After a couple efforts I did it with 2 channels, speakers and 1 headphone jack, but the other wasn't working. After more tries and tries, sound stop working. I just want my sound back... crying like a baby on the floor. And, if possible, but not necessary, a simple guide to active the 3 channels. xD I will post the diagnosis according to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure STEP 1 Did it, still no sound. STEP 2 Did it, still no sound. STEP 3 and #STEP 4 (I removed the log cause there is a limit of characters to be posted.) The log can be found here: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+question/238653 STEP 5 Rebooted, still no sound. STEP 6 Did it. In the Output Devices tab, nothing is muted. I play a music with the Rhythmbox Music Player, I don't hear anything but in the pavucontrol I can see in the Built-in Audio Analog Stereo a sound bar shaking... but, no sound. STEP 7 In alsamixer, AlsaMixer v1.0.25 Card: HDA Intel PCH Chip: Creative CA0132 information View: F3:[Playback] F4: Capture F5: All Item: Headphone [dB gain: 25.00, 25.00] Then, I have 5 columns Headphone, Speaker, PCM, S/PDIF, S/PDIF Default PCM A little weird when I try to mute the Headphone and the Speaker, here what happens: Starting both unmutted, mutting headphone cause speaker being mutted automaticaly. Starting both unmutted, mutting speaker cause headphone being mutted automaticaly. Starting both mutted, possible to unmute both separately. STEP 8 I cannot hear sound on both (headphone and/or speaker). STEP 9 Dual boot... Restarted, windows was with sound at max volume. Restarted again, still no sound at ubuntu. I heard something when ubuntu started, a little noise, then silence again. The sound icon always start mutted, after unmutting, I have no sound. STEP 10 I dont have this command in my ubuntu. STEP 11 Tried at STEP 8, no sound. There are no problem with jumpers or hardware, cause I have sound working on windows. STEP 12 No way to open my alienware and loss the warranty x.X" STEP 13 I think it's loaded, judging my the logs STEP 14 Alienware M17xR4, the hardware is listed in the logs above, at STEP 4. There are two headphone hacks, one with just an headphone printed above, and the other with an headset (with mic) printed, there is a mic jack too, and a spdif (optical) too. STEP 15 I dont want to enable S/PDIF STEP 16 I never used the HDMI output, yet... Thanks in advance. I hope I listed all the information you need.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Shard No More – An Innovative Look at Distributed Peer-to-peer SQL Database

  - by pinaldave

  There is no doubt that SQL databases play an important role in modern applications. In an ideal world, a single database can handle hundreds of incoming connections from multiple clients and scale to accommodate the related transactions. However the world is not ideal and databases are often a cause of major headaches when applications need to scale to accommodate more connections, transactions, or both. In order to overcome scaling issues, application developers often resort to administrative acrobatics, also known as database sharding. Sharding helps to improve application performance and throughput by splitting the database into two or more shards. Unfortunately, this practice also requires application developers to code transactional consistency into their applications. Getting transactional consistency across multiple SQL database shards can prove to be very difficult. Sharding requires developers to think about things like rollbacks, constraints, and referential integrity across tables within their applications when these types of concerns are best handled by the database. It also makes other common operations such as joins, searches, and memory management very difficult. In short, the very solution implemented to overcome throughput issues becomes a bottleneck in and of itself. What if database sharding was no longer required to scale your application? Let me explain. For the past several months I have been following and writing about NuoDB, a hot new SQL database technology out of Cambridge, MA. NuoDB is officially out of beta and they have recently released their first release candidate so I decided to dig into the database in a little more detail. Their architecture is very interesting and exciting because it completely eliminates the need to shard a database to achieve higher throughput. Each NuoDB database consists of at least three or more processes that enable a single database to run across multiple hosts. These processes include a Broker, a Transaction Engine and a Storage Manager.  Brokers are responsible for connecting client applications to Transaction Engines and maintain a global view of the network to keep track of the multiple Transaction Engines available at any time. Transaction Engines are in-memory processes that client applications connect to for processing SQL transactions. Storage Managers are responsible for persisting data to disk and serving up records to the Transaction Managers if they don’t exist in memory. The secret to NuoDB’s approach to solving the sharding problem is that it is a truly distributed, peer-to-peer, SQL database. Each of its processes can be deployed across multiple hosts. When client applications need to connect to a Transaction Engine, the Broker will automatically route the request to the most available process. Since multiple Transaction Engines and Storage Managers running across multiple host machines represent a single logical database, you never have to resort to sharding to get the throughput your application requires. NuoDB is a new pioneer in the SQL database world. They are making database scalability simple by eliminating the need for acrobatics such as sharding, and they are also making general administration of the database simpler as well.  Their distributed database appears to you as a user like a single SQL Server database.  With their RC1 release they have also provided a web based administrative console that they call NuoConsole. This tool makes it extremely easy to deploy and manage NuoDB processes across one or multiple hosts with the click of a mouse button. See for yourself by downloading NuoDB here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: CodeProject, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

  Read the article

• Day 4 - Game Sprites In Action

  - by dapostolov

  Yesterday I drew an image on the screen. Most exciting, but ... I spent more time blogging about it then actual coding. So this next little while I'm going to streamline my game and research and simply post key notes. Quick notes on the last session: The most important thing I wanted to point out were the following methods:           spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);           spriteBatch.End(); The spriteBatch object is used to draw Textures and a 2D texture is called a Sprite A texture is generally an image, which is called an Asset in XNA The Draw Method in the Game1.cs is looped (until exit) and utilises the spriteBatch object to draw a Scene To begin drawing a Scene you call the Begin Method. To end a Scene you call the End Method. And to place an image on the Scene you call the Draw method. The most simple implementation of the draw method is:           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White); 1) sprite - the 2D texture you loaded to draw 2) position - the 2d vector, a set of x & y coordinates 3) Color.White - the tint to apply to the texture, in this case, white light = nothing, nada, no tint. Game Sprites In Action! Today, I played around with Draw methods to get comfortable with their "quirks". The following is an example of the above draw method, but with more parameters available for us to use. Let's investigate!             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position2, null, Color.White, MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), new Vector2(sprite.Width / 2, sprite.Height / 2), 1.0F, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0F); The parameters (in order): 1) sprite  the texture to display 2) position2 the position on the screen / scene this can also be a rectangle 3) null the portion of the image to display within an image null = display full image this is generally used for animation strips / grids (more on this below) 4) Color.White Texture tinting White = no tint 5) MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f) rotation of the object, in this case 45 degrees rotates from the set plotting point. 6) new Vector(0,0) the plotting point in this case the top left corner the image will rotate from the top left of the texture in the code above, the point is set to the middle of the image. 7) 1.0f Image scaling (1x) 8) SpriteEffects.None you can flip the image horizontally or vertically 9) 0.0f The z index of the image. 0 = closer, 1 behind? And playing around with different combinations I was able to come up with the following whacky display:   Checking off Yesterdays Intention List: learn game development terminology (in progress) - We learned sprite, scene, texture, and asset. how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen (completed) - The thing to note was, it's was in radians and I found a cool helper method to convert degrees into radians. Also, the image rotates from it's specified point. how to layer static images on the screen (completed) - I couldn't seem to get the zIndex working, but one things for sure, the order you draw the image in also determines how it is rendered on the screen. understand image scaling (in progress) - I'm not sure I have this fully covered, but for the most part plug a number in the scaling field and the image grows / shrinks accordingly. can we reuse images? (completed) - yes, I loaded one image and plotted the bugger all over the screen. understand how framerate is handled in XNA (in progress) - I hacked together some code to display the framerate each second. A framerate of 60 appears to be the standard. Interesting to note, the GameTime object does provide you with some cool timing capabilities, such as...is the game running slow? Need to investigate this down the road. how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen (in progress) - i got text rendered on the screen, and i understand containing rectangles. However, I didn't display "shapes" & "colors" how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) (todo) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques (in progress) - I was able to create a stripe animation of numbers ranging from 1 - 4, each block was 40 x 40 pixles for a total stripe size of 160 x 40. Using the portion (source Rectangle) parameter, i limited this display to each section at varying intervals. It was interesting to note my first implementation animated at rocket speed. I then tried to create a smoother animation by limiting the redraw capacity, which seemed to work. I guess a little more research will have to be put into this for animating characters / scenes. how to detect colliding images or screen edges (todo) - but the rectangle object can detect collisions I believe. how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching (in progress) - I haven't figured out how to modify a specific color to be another color, but the tinting parameter definately could be used. As for stretching, use the rectangle object as the positioning and the image will stretch to fit! how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel (completed) - as per basic animation techniques what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) (todo) Tomorrows Intention Tomorrow I am going to take a stab at rendering a game menu and from there I'm going to investigate how I can improve upon the code and techniques. Intention List: Render a menu, fancy or not Show the mouse cursor Hook up click event A basic animation of somesort Investigate image / menu techniques D.

  Read the article

• New JavaScript Editor

  - by Petr

  I did not write a blog post here for a few weeks. I think the last my post was  about releasing NetBeans 7.1 in the beginning of January. The reason is not that I would change the job:), but that I have concentrated on new JavaScript support/editor. The new JavaScript editor is written basically from scratch. The answer for the question "Why from beginning again, why do you just improve the old one?" is not easy and the decision has more aspects. One of the main reasons is that the old support was written 4 years ago and the architecture is limited. Also during the time, the APIs were changed and it was very hard to keep the editor up to date. Also there is a license issue etc. In short, it is time to rewrite the old JS editor.  We build up strong community about the PHP support in NetBeans and because many PHP developers also write JavaScript code I would like to ask you for a help. There is a continual PHP build with the new JavaScript support. You can download the result of the builds here. It's a zip file. You can unzip the file anywhere, where you want. I recommend to run the build with the new userdir, to avoid damaging your current userdir. It shouldn't happened, but just to be sure:). You can achieve this through the switch --userdir. So start the unzipped file from command line from the folder, where you unzipped it, can be done with this command on unix: bin/netbeans.sh --userdir /path/to/new/userdir and on windows: bin\netbeans.exe --userdir D:\path\to\new\userdir For the developers who use continual php build already, it's well known. There is also full IDE build with the new JavaScript support for people, who need more than only PHP support.  Because the builds with the new JavaScript editor is created from a branch, there are not nightly builds available. They will be, when we merge the branch to the trunk, but so far we have to work only with the mentioned continual build. We will merge our branch after branching NetBeans 7.2 from trunk. This is also answer for the question, what release of NetBeans will contain the new JS support. It should be the release after NetBeans 7.2. I'm asking you whether you could play with the builds or better, could work in the builds with new JavaScript support and tell us every issue that you run in. It can be everything what doesn't fit you, something doesn't work as you expected, something is slow, you want change the behaviour of a feature etc. Your input / comments are very important for us and it will help us to achieve the new JavaScript support that you need.  The best way how to communicate issues is through our Bugzilla, because it is simple to track them. Sure you can write comment here:), but still I prefer Bugzilla for any issue. You can click here (you should be already log in Bugzilla), a form for the new JavaScript issue is opened, with pre-filled component Editor and NO72 keyword. I will write about the single features later, but now I will mentioned a few features that should work in better way than in the old support.  Syntactic and semantic colouring Navigator Mark Occurrences and GoTo Declaration  Code Completion Code Completion is invoked through keyboard shortcut CTRL+SPACE. The first invocation offers items that are found through a source model. Almost all editor features are based on the model, that is build from source code. There is a lot of work on the model yet, but it should offer better results. When the pop up window with code completion items is open and you press CTRL+SPACE again, then the code completion offers all elements that are in the project. In the pictures all elements that starts with letter 't'. Formatter with many options and more :) A few features are not still implemented that are supported in the old JavaScript support (for example jQuery support), but we are adding this features ASAP.

  Read the article

• Developer Profile: Marcelo Quinta

  - by Tori Wieldt

  As the Java developer community lead for Oracle, the best part of my job is going to conferences and meeting Java developers. I’ve had the pleasure to meet men and women who are smart, fun and passionate about Java—they make the Java community happen. The current issue of Java Magazine provides profiles of other young Java developers around the world. Subscribe to read them! Marcelo Quinta Age: 24Occupation: Professor, Federal University of GoiasLocation: Goias, Brazil Twitter: @mrquinta Marcelo (white polo shirt, center) and class OTN: When did you realize that you were good at programming? When I was in graduate school, I developed a Java system that displayed worked out the logics of getting the maximum coverage using the fewest resources (for example, the minimum number of soldiers [and positions] needed for a battlefield. It may seems not difficult, but it's a hard problem to solve, mathematically. Here I was, a freshman, who came up with an app  "solving" it. Some Master's students use my software today. It was then I began to believe in what I could do.OTN: What most inspires you about programming?I'm really inspired by the challenges and tension that comes from solving a complicated problems. Lately, I've been doing a new system focused on education and digital inclusion and was very gratifying to see it working and the results. I felt useful for the community. OTN: What are some things you would like to accomplish using Java?Java is a very strong platform and that gives us power to develop applications for different devices and purposes, from home automation with little microcontrollers to systems in big servers. I would like to build more systems that integrate the people life or different business contexts, from PCs to cell phones and tablets, ubiquitously. I think IT has reached a level where the current challenge is to make systems that leverage existing technologies that are present in daily life. Java gives us a very interesting set of options to put it into practice, especially in systems that require more strength.OTN: What technical insights into Java technology have been most important to you?I have really enjoyed the way that Java has evolved with Oracle, with new features added, many of them which were suggested by the community. Java 7 came with substantial improvements in the language syntax and it seems that Java 8 takes it even further. I also made some applications in JavaFX and liked the new version. The Java GUI is on a higher level than is offered out there. I saw some JavaFX prototypes running in modern tablets and I got excited. OTN: What would you like to be doing 10 years from now?I want my work to make a difference for individuals or an institution. It would be interesting to be improving one of the systems that I am making today. Recently I've been mixing my hobbies and work, playing with Arduino and home automation. The JHome project, winner of the Duke's Choice Award in 2011, is very interesting to me.OTN: Do you listen to music when you write code? If so, what kind?Absolutely! I usually listen to electronic music (Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold), rock (Metallica, Strokes, The Black Keys) and a bit of local alternative music. I live in Goiânia, "The Brazilian Seattle" and I profit from it very well. OTN: What do you do when you're not programming?I like to play guitar and to fish. Last year I sold my economy car and bought a old jeep. Some people called me crazy, but since then I've been having a great time and having adventures on the backroads of Brazil. Once I broke my glasses in a funny game involving my car's suspension and the airbags. OTN: Does your girlfriend think you are crazy?Crazy is someone who doesn't have courage to do strange things! My girlfriend likes my style. =D Subscribe to the free Java Magazine to read profiles of other young Java developers. Visit the Java channel on YouTube to see a video of Marcelo in action.

  Read the article

• NetBeans PHP Community Council

  - by Tomas Mysik

  Hi all, today we would like to inform all of you that now you have a chance to improve NetBeans via NetBeans PHP Community Council. The author of this activity is Timur Poperecinii and he would like to tell you a few words about it. Hello passionate technical people, First of all let me introduce myself: my name is Timur, I’m a developer from Moldova (that little country between Romania and Ukraine), I develop mostly in .NET and JQuery, but I love to learn more, not being an expert I am familiar with Java (Struts2, Play), PHP (Symfony2), Ruby (Rails), Sencha Touch 2 and other technologies. I was “introduced” in PHP recently by a client of mine who requested to make the work specifically in PHP. Let me tell you a little story about my experience with open source and IDEs: when I was studying in university in 2007 I think, I did a simple little application in PHP and thought “Damn, if only there was a good IDE for PHP so I could relax and no having to remember all the function names”, then when I searched on internet pretty much everyone was using Vim or Emacs on Linux, but it had no autocomplete anyway, just syntax highlighting. I remember using some tool like Notepad++ I think. Nowadays everything changed, we have highlighting and autocomplete for about all standard things in PHP in many IDEs. I use NetBeans for PHP, and I really am happy with the experience I have there with standard PHP code, but for frameworks I still think there is lots of room for improvements. For example we have some Symfony 2 and Twig support. But I’d love to see more of that coming, for example I’m a big fan of file templates, where the main goal is to not waste time on writing over and over again something that can be generated, and it counts even more when you don’t have a lot of autocomplete. So what I thought, “Hey I know Java a little, and NetBeans has plugins, so may be it worth trying to do a file templates plugin”, and so I did, you can find details about my Unified Udevi Symfony2 Plugin for NetBeans 7.2 on my blog. It wasn’t hard, and it even was fun! Give back to open source Now think a little, NetBeans is an open source project and PHP support is just a part of it, so the resources are pretty limited in this area. But we as a community that uses this product, want to have the best possible experience with PHP and frameworks(!!!). So why don’t we GIVE BACK TO OPENSOURCE ? Imagine an IDE that can do all the things you wanted + it is free. Now how far is NetBeans from that point? I guess not so far – you might miss a little niche thing that you use on a daily basis, but then the question appears why don’t you make it happen on your own? NetBeans PHP Community Council What I proposed is to create a NetBeans PHP Community Council that will be formed of people willing to change something, willing to create plugins for their own needs and for the needs of the community, test the plugins created by them too, and basically evolve NetBeans in direction they want to reach. I already talked with the NetBeans PHP team. They are only happy to help this Council, with technical advises, opening some APIs we might need to have access to, and other things. One important thing to mention is that this Council is a Community project, so though we’ll have direct discussions with NetBeans PHP Dev team, NetBeans is not the leading force here, it is the community. You can see more details about the goals and structure I proposed at NetBeans PHP Community Council wiki page. We use this mail list: [email protected] for discussions and topics related to the Council. How can I join To join the NetBeans PHP Community Council please send an email to [email protected] with the subject of the mail starting with [Council New Member]. You can subscribe to this mail list here:http://netbeans.org/projects/php/lists. in your mail please indicate your location, age and experience both in Java and PHP. I need these data to assign you to a team. A response will be send to you with your next assignment and some people to contact. I really hope that you’ll make a step forward and try to make your everyday use of NetBeans even more fun.

  Read the article

• Organizational characteristics that impact the selection of Development Methodology concepts applied to a project

  Based on my experience, no one really follows a specific methodology exactly as it is formally designed. In fact, the key concepts of a few methodologies are usually combined to form a hybrid methodology for each project based on the current organizational makeup and the project need/requirements to be accomplished. Organizational characteristics that impact the selection of methodology concepts applied to a project. Prior subject knowledge pertaining to a project can be critical when deciding on what methodology or combination of methodologies to apply to a project. For example, if a project is very straight forward, and the development staff has experience in developing  that are similar, then the waterfall method could possibly be the best choice because little to no research is needed  in order to complete the project tasks and there is very little need for changes to occur.  On the other hand, if the development staff has limited subject knowledge or the requirements/specification of the project could possibly change as the project progresses then the use of spiral, iterative, incremental, agile, or any combination would be preferred. The previous methodologies used by an organization typically do not change much from project to project unless the needs of a project dictate differently. For example, if the waterfall method is the preferred development methodology then most projects will be developed by the waterfall method. Depending on the time allotted to a project each day can impact the selection of a development methodology. In one example, if the staff can only devote a few hours a day to a project then the incremental methodology might be ideal because modules can be added to the final project as they are developed. On the other hand, if daily time allocation is not an issue, then a multitude of methodologies could work well for a project. Project characteristics that impact the selection of methodology concepts applied to a project. The type of project being developed can often dictate the type of methodology used for the project. Based on my experience, projects that tend to have a lot of user interaction, follow a more iterative, incremental, or agile approach typically using a prototype that develops into a final project. These methodologies desire back and forth communication between users, clients, and developers to allow for requirements to change and functionality to be enhanced. Conversely, limited interaction applications or automated services can still sometimes get away with using the waterfall or transactional approach. The timeline of a project can also force an organization to prefer a particular methodology over the rest. For instance, if the project must be completed within 24 hours, then there is very little time for discussions back and forth between clients, users and the development team. In this scenario, the waterfall method would be perfect because the only interaction with the client occurs prior to a development project to outline the system requirements, and the development team can quickly move through the software development stages in order to complete the project within the deadline. If the team had more time, then the other methodologies could also be considered because there is more time for client and users to review the project and make changes as they see fit, and/or allow for more time to review the project in order to enhance the business performance and functionality. Sometimes the client and or user involvement can dictate the selection of methodologies applied to a project. One example of this is if a client is highly motivated to get a project completed and desires to play an active part in the development process then the agile development approach would work perfectly with this client because it allows for frequent interaction between clients, users and the development team. The inverse of this situation is a client that just wants to provide the project requirements and only wants to get involved when the project is to be delivered. In this case the waterfall method would work well because there is no room for changes and no back and forth between the users, clients or the development team.

  Read the article

• Windows Phone 8, possible tablets and what the latest update might mean

  - by Roger Hart

  Microsoft have just announced an update to Windows Phone 8. As one of the five, maybe six people who actually bought a WP8 handset I found this interesting. Then I read the blog post about it, and rushed off to write somewhat less than a thousand words about a single picture. The blog post announces an extra column of tiles on the start screen, and support for higher resolutions. If we ignore all the usual flummery about how this will make your life better, that (and the rotation lock) sounds a little like stage setting for tablets. Looking at the preview screenshot, I started to wonder. What it’s called Phablet_5F00_StartScreenProductivity_5F00_01_5F00_072A1240.jpg Pretty conclusive. If you can brand something a “phablet” and sleep at night you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, but that’s beside the point. It’s explicit in the post that Microsoft are expecting a broader range of form factors for WP8, but they stop short of quite calling out tablet size. The extra columns and resolution definitely back that up, so why stop at a 6 inch “phablet”? Sadly, the string of numbers there don’t really look like a Lumia model number – that would be a bit tendentious even for a speculative blog post about a single screenshot. “Productivity” is interesting too. I get into this a bit more below, but this is a pretty clear pitch for a business device. What it looks like Something that would look quite decent on a 7 inch screen, but something a bit too vertical to go toe-to-toe with the Surface. Certainly, it would look a lot better on a large-factor phone than any of the current models. Those tiles are going to get cramped and a bit ugly if the handsets aren’t getting bigger. What’s on it You have a bunch of missed calls, you rarely text, use a stocks app, and your budget spreadsheet and meeting notes are a thumb-reach away. Outlook is your main form of email. You care enough about LinkedIn to not only install its app but give it a huge live tile. There’s no beating about the bush here, the implicit persona is a corporate exec. With Nokia in the bag and Blackberry pushing daisies, that may not be a stupid play. There’s almost certainly a niche there if they can parlay their corporate credentials into filling it before BYOD (which functionally means an iPhone) reaches the late adopters. The really quite slick WP8 Office implementation ought to help here. This is the face they’ve chosen to present, the cultural milieu they’re normalizing for Windows Phone. It’s an iPhone for Serious Business Grown-ups. Could work, I guess. Does it mean anything? Is the latest WP8 update a sign that we can expect to see tablets running Windows Phone rather than WinRT? Well, WinRT tablets haven’t exactly taken off but I’m not quite going to make a leap like that just from a file name and a column of icons. I feel pretty safe, however, conjecturing that Microsoft would like to squeeze a WP8 “phablet” into the palm of every exec who’s ever grumbled about their Blackberry, and this release might get them a bit closer. If it works well incrementing up to larger devices, then that could be a fair hedge against WinRt crashing and burning any harder in the marketplace.

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for May 11, 2010 -- #859

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this All Submittal Issue: Colin Eberhardt, Ken Johnson, Alan Beasley, Pencho Popadiyn, Phil Middlemiss, Khawar(-2-), Levente Mihály, Alex van Beek, Bart Czernicki, Michael Washington, and Mark Monster. Shoutout: Not Silverlight necessarily, but definitely VS2010, read what Brett Balmer has to say In Defense of Portrait Mode From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MultiBinding solution for Silverlight 4 Colin Eberhardt updated his Silverlight Multibinding solution to Silverlight 4. Great article with explanatory graphics, and links to the code... congrats on the use in the FaceBook Client too! Spirograph Shapes: WPF Bezier shapes from math formulae Wow... I haven't seen this much math since my Master's Thesis! ... Check out all the shapes Ken Johnson has built... don't let the math scare you... just use it :) Busy Dizzy Bee-sley Spirographic Animation in Expression Blend and Silverlight This is just fun... I saw Michael Washington playing with this yesterday at the Arizona Day of .NET but didn't have a chance to ask what it was.. Alan Beasley had a good time building this, and is sharing a very detailed tutorial with us. ModalDialogs, IEditableObject and MVVM in Silverlight 4 Pencho Popadiyn said the 'M' word over at SilverlightShow... actually the 'MVVM' word :) ... he's discussing Modal dialogs with no code in the View ... check out how he did it. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 6 Phil Middlemiss is up to episode 6 in his Theme-building tutorial... this time out, he's giving the TabControl and TabItem new clothes ... specifically discussing what to change and what to allow to inherit ... good stuff! Silverlight 4 Fonts gotcha Check out Khawar's ATM Machine demo -- there's a link on the page for this post... he had an issue with fonts, ratted it out, and explains it for all of us... thanks Khawar Demystifying Silverlight Obfuscation Khawar also has a good post up on Obfuscating your Silverlight... definitely showing that it's not all that difficult to do. geoGallery, a WinPhone7 sample OK this is interesting... using the geoLocation feature of WP7, Levente Mihály hits Google Picasa to find pictures... good write-up and all the code. Silverlight 4: Digitally signing a XAP with Visual Studio 2010 Alex van Beek has a nice tutorial on Signing your XAP file using Visual Studio 2010... of course you may want to visit Tim Heuer's blog (search at SC) to find the two good deals on certificates that are still in play. Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Expression Blend 4 for Business Intelligence applications In an interesting post, Bart Czernicki describes using the shape assets in Blend 4 to produce a KPI display in Silverlight or WPF. A discussion of the shape's evolution for KPI is included as well as some alternate shape uses. A DotNetNuke Silverlight 4 Drag and Drop File Manager Michael Washington has blogged about his Drag and Drop File Manager using the View Model Style pattern. This is covered in two CodeProject articles listed in the post. The design work was done by Alan Beasely and links to his work is there as well as covered in other SC posts. How to select a ListItem on Hover Mark Monster had a Use Case for Selecting a ListBox entry by hovering ... but he did it with a Behavior and for a ListBox and PathListBox and it works with DataBinding... 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

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Why Do We Need Master Data Management – Importance and Significance of Master Data Management (MDM)

  - by pinaldave

  Let me paint a picture of everyday life for you.  Let’s say you and your wife both have address books for your groups of friends.  There is definitely overlap between them, so that you both have the addresses for your mutual friends, and there are addresses that only you know, and some only she knows.  They also might be organized differently.  You might list your friend under “J” for “Joe” or even under “W” for “Work,” while she might list him under “S” for “Joe Smith” or under your name because he is your friend.  If you happened to trade, neither of you would be able to find anything! This is where data management would be very important.  If you were to consolidate into one address book, you would have to set rules about how to organize the book, and both of you would have to follow them.  You would also make sure that poor Joe doesn’t get entered twice under “J” and under “S.” This might be a familiar situation to you, whether you are thinking about address books, record collections, books, or even shopping lists.  Wherever there is a lot of data to consolidate, you are going to run into problems unless everyone is following the same rules. I’m sure that my readers can figure out where I am going with this.  What is SQL Server but a computerized way to organize data?  And Microsoft is making it easier and easier to get all your “addresses” into one place.  In the  2008 version of SQL they introduced a new tool called Master Data Services (MDS) for Master Data Management, and they have improved it for the new 2012 version. MDM was hailed as a major improvement for business intelligence.  You might not think that an organizational system is terribly exciting, but think about the kind of “address books” a company might have.  Many companies have lots of important information, like addresses, credit card numbers, purchase history, and so much more.  To organize all this efficiently so that customers are well cared for and properly billed (only once, not never or multiple times!) is a major part of business intelligence. MDM comes into play because it will comb through these mountains of data and make sure that all the information is consistent, accurate, and all placed in one database so that employees don’t have to search high and low and waste their time. MDM also has operational MDM functions.  This is not a redundancy.  Operational MDM means that when one employee updates one bit of information in the database, for example – updating a new address for a customer, operational MDM ensures that this address is updated throughout the system so that all departments will have the correct information. Another cool thing about MDM is that it features Master Data Services Configuration Manager, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It has a built-in “helper” that lets you set up your database quickly, easily, and with the correct configurations.  While talking about cool features, I can’t skip over the add-in for Excel.  This allows you to link certain data to Excel files for easier sharing and uploading. In summary, I want to emphasize that the scariest part of the database is slowly disappearing.  Everyone knows that a database – one consolidated area for all your data – is a good idea, but the idea of setting one up is daunting.  But SQL Server is making data management easier and easier with features like Master Data Services (MDS). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Master Data Services, MDM

  Read the article

• Bad Spot to Be In: Playing Catch-up with Mobile Advertising

  - by Mike Stiles

  You probably noticed, there’s a mass migration going on from online desktop/laptop usage to smartphone/tablet usage.  It’s an indicator of how we live our lives in the modern world: always on the go, with no intention of being disconnected while out there. Consequently, paid as it relates to mobile advertising is taking the social spotlight. eMarketer estimated that in 2013, US adults would spend about 2 hours, 21 minutes a day on mobile, not counting talking time. More people in the world own smartphones than own toothbrushes (bad news I suppose if you’re marketing toothpaste). They’re using those mobile devices to access social networks, consuming at least 17% of their mobile time on them. Frankly, you don’t need a deep dive into mobile usage stats to know what’s going on. Just look around you in any store, venue or coffee shop. It’s really obvious…our mobile devices are now where we “are,” so that’s where marketers can increasingly reach us. And it’s a smart place for them to do just that. Mobile devices can be viewed more and more as shopping facilitators. Usually when someone is on mobile, they are not in passive research mode. They are likely standing near a store or in front of a product, using their mobile to seek reassurance that buying that product is the right move. They are the hottest of hot prospects. Consider that 4 out of 5 consumers use smartphones to shop, 52% of Americans use mobile devices for in-store for research, 70% of mobile searches lead to online action inside of an hour, and people that find you on mobile convert at almost 3x the rate as those that find you on desktop or laptop. But what are marketers doing? Enter statistics from Mary Meeker’s latest State of the Internet report. Common sense says you buy advertising where people are spending their eyeball time, right? But while mobile is 20% of media use and rising, the ad spend there is 4%. Conversely, while print usage is at 5% and falling, ad spend there is 19%. We all love nostalgia, but come on. There are reasons marketing dollar migration to mobile has not matched user migration, including the availability of mobile ad products and the ability to measure user response to mobile ads. But interesting things are happening now. First came Facebook’s mobile ad, which let app developers pay to get potential downloads. Then their mobile ad network was announced at F8, allowing marketers to target users across non-Facebook apps while leveraging the wealth of diverse data Facebook has on those users, a big deal since Nielsen has pointed out mobile apps make up 89% of the media time spent on mobile. Twitter has a similar play in motion with their MoPub acquisition. And now mobile deeplinks have arrived, which can take users straight to sub-pages of mobile apps for a faster, more direct shopper/researcher user experience. The sooner the gratification, the smoother and faster the conversion. To be clear, growth in mobile ad spending is well underway. After posting $13.1 billion in 2013, Gartner expects global mobile ad spending to reach $18 billion this year, then go to $41.9 billion by 2017. Cheap smartphones and data plans are spreading worldwide, further fueling the shift to mobile. Mobile usage in India alone should grow 400% by 2018. And, of course, there’s the famous statistic that mobile should overtake desktop Internet usage this year. How can we as marketers mess up this opportunity? Two ways. We could position ourselves in perpetual “catch-up” mode and keep spending ad dollars where the public used to be. And we could annoy mobile users with horrid old-school marketing practices. Two-thirds of users told Forrester they think interruptive in-app ads are more annoying than TV ads. Make sure your brand’s social marketing technology platform is delivering a crystal clear picture of your social connections so the mobile touch point is highly relevant, mobile optimized, and delivering real value and satisfying experiences. Otherwise, all we’ve done is find a new way to be unwanted. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Kate Mallatratt, freeimages.com

  Read the article

• AZURE - Stairway To Heaven

  - by Waclaw Chrabaszcz

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Wchrabaszcz/archive/2014/08/02/azure---stairway-to-heaven.aspx  Before you’ll start reading please start to play this song.   OK boys and girls, time get familiar with clouds. Time to become a meteorologist. To be honest I don’t know how to start. Is cloud better or worse than on campus resources … hmm … it is just different. I think for successful adoption in cloud world IT Dinosaurs need to forget some “Private Cloud” virtualization bad habits, and learn new way of thinking. Take a look: - I don’t need any  tapes or  CDs  (Physical Kingdom of Windows XP and 2000) - I don’t need any locally stored MP3s (CD virtualization :-) - I can just stream music to your computer no matter whether my on-site infrastructure is powered on. Why not to do exactly the same with WebServer, SQL, or just rented for a while Windows server ? Let’s go, to the other side of the mirror. 1st  - register yourself for free one month trial, as happy MSDN subscriber you’ve got monthly budget to spent. In addition in default setting your limit protects you against loosing real money, if your toys will consume too much traffic and space. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/ Once your account is ready forget WebPortal, we are PowerShell knights. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9811175&clcid=0x409 #Authenticate yourself in Azure Add-AzureAccount #download once your settings file Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile #Import it to your PowerShell Module Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\Azure\[filename].publishsettings" #validation Get-AzureAccount Get-AzureSubscription #where are Azure datacenters Get-AzureLocation #You will need it Update-Help #storage account is related to physical location, there are two datacenters on each continent, try nearest to you # all your VMs will store VHD files on your storage account #your storage account must be unique globally, so I assume that words account or server are already used New-AzureStorageAccount -StorageAccountName "[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]" -Label "AzureTwo" -Location "West Europe" Get-AzureStorageAccount #it looks like you are ready to deploy first VM, what templates we can use Get-AzureVMImage | Select ImageName #what a mess, let’s choose Server 2012 $ImageName = (Get-AzureVMImage)[74].ImageName $cloudSvcName = '[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]' $AdminUsername = "[YOUR-ADMIN]" $adminPassword = '[YOUR_PA$$W0RD]' $MediaLocation = "West Europe" $vmnameDC = 'DC01' #burn baby burn !!! $vmDC01 = New-AzureVMConfig -Name $vmnameDC -InstanceSize "Small" -ImageName $ImageName   `     | Add-AzureProvisioningConfig -Windows -Password $adminPassword -AdminUsername $AdminUsername   `     | New-AzureVM -ServiceName $cloudSvcName #ice, ice baby … Get-AzureVM Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -ServiceName "[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]" -Name "DC01" -LocalPath "c:\AZURE\DC01.rdp" As you can see it is not just a new-VM, you need to associate your VM with AzureVMConfig (it sets your template), AzureProvisioningConfig (it sets your customizations), and Storage account. In next releases you’ll need to put this machine in specific subnet, attach a HDD and many more. After second reading I found that I am using the same name for STORAGE and SERVICE account, please be aware of it if you need to split these values. Conclusions: - pipe rules ! - at the beginning it is hard to change your mind and agree with fact that it is easier to remove and recreate a VM than move it to different subnet - by default everything is firewalled, limited access to DNS, but NATed outside on custom ports. It is good to check these translations sometimes on the webportal. - if you remove your VMs your harddrives remains on storage and MS will charge you . Remove-AzureVM -DeleteVHD For me AZURE it is a lot of fun, once again I can be newbie and learn every page. For me Azure offers real freedom in deployment of VMs without arguing with NetAdmins, WinAdmins, DBAs, PMs and other Change Managers. Unfortunately soon or later they will come to my haven and change it into …

  Read the article

• ORACLE is WEB 2.0

  - by anca.rosu

  You never know what to expect in life, where it can take you and what kind of fulfillment it can offer you. It’s just like an amazing lottery with millions of winning tickets. My name is Paula, I am an Online Marketing Specialist at Oracle University and this is my story. Having graduated from a technical profile college, it seemed almost normal to follow the same career path. But I said no. I wanted to try something else, so I took an Advertising Masters Program and I really became in love with this entire industry. Advertising and the new impact of the Internet through social networking is my current fascination. I knew I had to work to incorporate both my skills intro one dream job. I want to believe that I have come to work at Oracle as part of a great plan that life has for me. It’s not the most glamorous job in advertising or in the fashion industry, but it’s everything you need to start investing in your development and to build relationships. A normal day at work begins at 9.30 at our Oracle Office in Bucharest. After a short chit-chat, coffee and some conference calls, marketing gets to work! Some of the members of my team are working besides me but others are based all over Europe. This is extremely useful when coordinating the EMEA Marketing for Oracle University, because this way it’s easier to keep an eye on these various locations. Even though it’s a team play, you need to speak up and make your mark. I am the kind of person that never stands-by and waits to be given directions, I am curious and intuitive. This makes things easier. In Oracle you really need to find your own way and to discover how to organize your time and how to get involved with people. People to people, this is the focus. But everything is up to you and it strongly depends on the type of personality that you have. I try to get involved in various activities, participate in Oracle Days Events, interact and meet all kinds of people. For those who are newly graduates or interns, Oracle has lots of trainings and webcasts you can attend to help you develop your career shape and to understand better the way the business works. You can also be awarded for ideas and setting the trends so that makes it worth it. What I like most about my job is the fact that I can come with ideas and bring them to life. For example Oracle University has a special seminar program called “Celebrity Seminars” where top industry speakers teach 1-day or 2-day condensed seminars. We thought of creating something exclusive and a video was the best idea. So my colleague and I became reporters for a day and interviewed this well-known speaker regarding his seminar. I think this is a good way to market this business. Live footage is a very good marketing tool so we are planning to use the video to target our online audiences via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This can even go in the newsletters that marketing sends regarding the Celebrity Seminars. This is what I meant when I said Oracle is a free spirited organization and you can surely find your place here among us. The best way to describe my job is WEB 2.0. The modern online approach comes to life while we are trying to sell our business. We need to be out there and we are responsible of spreading the buzz regarding our training offerings and our official courseware materials. There are so many new ways to interact with the target audience nowadays and I am so eager to discover the best online techniques! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: WEB 2.0,Online Marketing,Oracle University,Bucharest,events,graduates,interns,training,webcast,seminar,newsletters,business,Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306  | Next Page >