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• How to be successful at BDD Specifications Workshops?

  - by sigo

  Today we tried to introduce BDD in our software development process by having a specification workshop. For this workshop we had 2 developers, 1 tester and 1 business analyst. The workshop lasted 1h30 and by the end of it we managed to figure out some BDD scenarios for our new feature. We tried to focus on finding the scenarios that we could miss, and the difficult ones. At the end of the workshop some people were actually unhappy with the workshop. One developer felt he wasted his time as he was used to be given out the scenarios directly by the business analyst and review them with her. The business analyst didn't feel confident with our scenario coverage (Had a feeling that we could have missed out other important stuff) but more importantly felt that this workshop was also a waste of time as she could have figured out all these scenarios by herself and in a shorter period of time. So my question is how that kind of workshop can actually work. In the theory, given you have a new feature to develop, you put the tree 'amigos' (dev/tester/ba) in the same room so that they can collaborate together on writing the differents requirements for the new feature using examples. I can see all the benefits from that. Specially in term of knowledge sharing and common product/end goal/done vision. But in practice, we still think it is more cost effective to first have a BA to work on his own on the examples and only then to have the scenarios to be reviewed/reworked by the 3 'amigos'. By having the BA to work on his own, we actually feel more confident that we are less going to miss out stuff + we still get to review the scenarios afterward to double check. We don't think than simple brainstorming/deliberate discovery is actually enought to seriously cover all the requirement for a feature. The business analyst is actually the best person for that kind of stuff. The thing we just do is to review what she wrote and see if then we have a common understanding (which could then lead to rewrite some of her scenarios or add new ones she could have missed). This workshop lasted 1h30, and by the end of it, we didn't feel confident enought about wha we did...sure we could have spent more time on it but honestly most people get exhausted after 1h30 of brainstorming. So how can you get that to work effectively in practice ?

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• Best Practices for High Volume CPA Import Operations with ebXML in B2B 11g

  - by Shub Lahiri, A-Team

  Background B2B 11g supports ebXML messaging protocol, where multiple CPAs can be imported via command-line utilities.  This note highlights one aspect of the best practices for import of CPA, when large numbers of CPAs in the excess of several hundreds are required to be maintained within the B2B repository. Symptoms The import of CPA usually is a 2-step process, namely creating a soa.zip file using b2bcpaimport utility based on a CPA properties file and then using b2bimport to import the b2b repository.  The commands are provided below: ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bcpaimport -Dpropfile="<Path to cpp_cpa.properties>" -Dstandard=true ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bimport -Dlocalfile=true -Dexportfile="<Path to soa.zip>" -Doverwrite=true Usually the first command completes fairly quickly regardless of the number of CPAs in the repository. However, as the number of trading partners within the repository goes up, the time to complete the second command could go up to ~30 secs per operation. So, this could add up to a significant amount, if there is a need to import hundreds of CPA in a production system within a limited downtime, maintenance window.  Remedy In situations, where there is a large number of entries to be imported, it is best to setup a staging environment and go through the import operation of each individual CPA in an empty repository. Since, this will be done in an empty repository, the time taken for completion should be reasonable.  After all the partner profiles have been imported, a full repository export can be taken to capture the metadata for all the entries in one file.  If this single file with all the partner entries is imported in a loaded repository, the total time taken for import of all the CPAs should see a dramatic reduction. Results Let us take a look at the numbers to see the benefit of this approach. With a pre-loaded repository of ~400 partners, the individual import time for each entry takes ~30 secs. So, if we had to import another 100 partners, the individual entries will take ~50 minutes (100 times ~30 secs). On the other hand, if we prepare the repository export file of the same 100 partners from a staging environment earlier, the import takes about ~5 mins. The total processing time for the loading of metadata, specially in a production environment, can thus be shortened by almost a factor of 10. Summary The following diagram summarizes the entire approach and process. Acknowledgements The material posted here has been compiled with the help from B2B Engineering and Product Management teams.

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• What economic books would you suggest for learning about economic valuation of goods and simulations thereof?

  - by Rushyo

  I'm looking to create an economic model for a game based on goods created procedurally. Every natural resource and produced good would be procedurally generated, with certain goods being assigned certain uses. Fakesium might be used for the production of Weapon A and produced from Fakesium factories which use Dilithium and Widgets as reagents, where Widgets are also the product of Foo and Bar The problem is not creating the resources and their various production utlities - but getting the game's AI empires and merchants to (Addendum: somewhat) correctly value the goods according to their scarcity, utility and production costs. I need to create a simulation of goods which allows the various game factions to assign a common value denominator (credits) to each resource, depending on how much its worth to that empire. I see the simulation being something like: "I have a high requirement for Weapon A. Since I don't have much of Fakesium, which is needed for Weapon A - I must have a high demand for Fakesium. If I can acquire Fakesium, devalue it. If not, increase its value - and also increase demand for Dilithium and Widgets too." This is very naive - because it may be much much cheaper for the empire to simply purchase Dilithium and Widgets directly rather than purchasing Fakesium, for example. Another example is two resources might allow the creation of Weapon A (Fakesium and Lieron), so we'd need to consider that. I've been scratching my head over the problem and it keeps growing. By the time the player joins the world, I'd expect enough iterations of this process to have occurred that prices would have largely normalised - and would then only trigger rarely to compensate for major changes (eg. if the player blows up the world's only Foo mine!) Could anyone suggest resources (books, largely) which outline this style of modelling, preferably in the context of simulations? Since this problem would never occur outside fantasy worlds, I figured this is probably the most likely place to find people who have encountered similar problems and I'm sure there's people who know of good places for Games Developers to start looking at less specific economic theory too. Additionally, does anyone know of any developers with blogs whose games or research applications perform similar modelling? EDIT: I think I should underline that I'm not looking for optimal solutions. I'm looking to make the actors impulsive - making rudimentary decisions based on fuzzy inputs about what they care about or don't. I'm aiming to understand the problem area better not derive answers. All the textbooks I've found seem to be about real-world economics or how to solve complex theoretical problems, neither of which are terribly relevant to the actor's decision making.

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• Assessing Relative Maintainability

  - by João Bragança

  We (a contractor, actually) are implementing an off the shelf system to replace a legacy homegrown system for the core domain of the company (designing widgets). Unfortunately both systems will have to run concurrently for some time, as the product just isn't ready yet. Also, the decision was made to only migrate some of the widgets from the legacy system, based on date of last sale activity. Later on a new requirement came down: certain people in the company, most of them outside of the widget development context, want to search all widgets. The search results screen has 3 pieces of data: a GUID, a human readable id that is searchable, and a brief description (may need to be searchable in the future). In the widget details, there will be multiple screens. These screens align very well along SOA / bounded context lines - a screen for marketing data, a screen for sales history, etc. UML ahead! I am probably using the wrong kind of arrows here so please forgive me. The current solution - which is not in production yet - is something like the following: Both systems will be queried and the controller will merge the results. The new system has its own proprietary query language (we've alleviated this a bit with a LINQ provider). It also puts a lot of data on the wire. 15 search results typically run about 60k of unintelligible SOAP-wrapped xml. So I would prefer to avoid querying this system directly. These two systems publish events to help us integrate with other systems, mainly an ERP system. One of these events contains all the data necessary for the search screen. I proposed the following alternative: However I am being told that 'adding another database' will create more maintenance down the road. However, I believe this to be false, as I had to add a relatively simple feature that took several hours longer than anticipated because of this merging code. I want to get a feel for which system is more maintainable in the long run. I personally have not had the burden of maintaining any large system. I want something more than my gut. Specifically I'd like to know if having more, specialized physical databases is more or less maintainable than having less larger physical databases.

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• Segmentation and Targeting: Your Tools for Personalizing the Online Customer Experience

  - by Christie Flanagan

  In order to deliver the kind of personalized and engaging online experiences that customers expect today, look to segmentation and targeting.  Segmentation is the practice of dividing your site visitors into distinct groups based on shared characteristics or behavior – for example, a segment may consist of site visitors who have visited pages related to certain product type, or they may consist of visitors within the same age group or geographic area.  The idea is that those within a segment are more likely to have common needs, problems or interests that can be served by your business. Targeting is the process by which the most relevant content, whether an article promotion or other piece of content, is delivered to your visitors based on their segment membership. Segmentation and targeting are used to drive greater engagement on your web presence by delivering content to your site visitors that is tailored to their interests, behavior or other attributes.  You may have a number of different goals for your segmentation and targeting efforts: Up-sell or cross-sell to your customers Conduct A/B testing on your offers and creative Offer discounts, promotions or other incentives for the time and duration that you specify Make is easier to find relevant information about products and services Create premium content model There are two different approaches you can take toward segmentation and targeting for you online customer experience initiatives. The first is more of a manual process, in which marketers manage the process of determining which segments to create and which content to target to those segments. The benefit of this approach is that it gives marketers a high level of control over the whole process which works well when you have a thorough understanding of your segments and which content is most likely to serve their needs.  Tools for marketer managed segmentation and targeting are often built right in to your WEM platform, as they are with Oracle WebCenter Sites. The downside is that the more segments and content that you have, the more time consuming and complicated in can be to manage manually.The second approach relies on predictive intelligence to automate the segmentation and targeting process.  This allows optimization of the process to occur in real time. This approach helps reduce the burden of manual segmentation and targeting and can result in new insights into segments that you may never have thought of on your own.  It also provides you with the capability to quickly test new offers and promotions on your site.  Predictive segmentation and targeting can be achieved by using Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions together. *****Get a taste for how Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions combine to deliver powerful capabilities for predictive segmentation and targeting by watching this on demand webcast introducing Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g or by reading IDC’s take on the latest release of Oracle’s web experience management solution.  Be sure to return to the Oracle WebCenter blog on Thursday for a closer look at how to optimize the online customer experience using these two products together.

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• Data Virtualization: Federated and Hybrid

  - by Krishnamoorthy

  Data becomes useful when it can be leveraged at the right time. Not only enterprises application stores operate on large volume, velocity and variety of data. Mobile and social computing are in the need of operating in foresaid data. Replicating and transferring large swaths of data is one challenge faced in the field of data integration. However, smaller chunks of data aggregated from a variety of sources presents and even more interesting challenge in the industry. Over the past few decades, technology trends focused on best user experience, operating systems, high performance computing, high performance web sites, analysis of warehouse data, service oriented architecture, social computing, cloud computing, and big data. Operating on the ‘dark data’ becomes mandatory in the future technology trend, although, no solution can make dark data useful data in a single day. Useful data can be quantified by the facts of contextual, personalized and on time delivery. In most cases, data from a single source may not be complete the picture. Data has to be combined and computed from various sources, where data may be captured as hybrid data, meaning the combination of structured and unstructured data. Since related data is often found across disparate sources, effectively integrating these sources determines how useful this data ultimately becomes. Technology trends in 2013 are expected to focus on big data and private cloud. Consumers are not merely interested in where data is located or how data is retrieved and computed. Consumers are interested in how quick and how the data can be leveraged. In many cases, data virtualization is the right solution, and is expected to play a foundational role for SOA, Cloud integration, and Big Data. The Oracle Data Integration portfolio includes a data virtualization product called ODSI (Oracle Data Service Integrator). Unlike other data virtualization solutions, ODSI can perform both read and write operations on federated/hybrid data (RDBMS, Webservices,  delimited file and XML). The ODSI Engine is built on XQuery, hence ODSI user can perform computations on data either using XQuery or SQL. Built in data and query caching features, which reduces latency in repetitive calls. Rightly positioning ODSI, can results in a highly scalable model, reducing spend on additional hardware infrastructure.

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• What are these errors when I try to "make" the driver of my wireless network?

  - by Tom Brito

  I got got a wireless to usb adapter, and I'm having some trouble to install the drivers on Ubuntu. First of all, the readme file say to use the "make" command, and I already got errors: $ make make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic' CC [M] /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.o /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c: In function ‘rtl8192_usb_probe’: /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12325: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘open’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12326: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘stop’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12327: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘tx_timeout’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12328: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘do_ioctl’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12329: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘set_multicast_list’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12330: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘set_mac_address’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12331: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘get_stats’ /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.c:12332: error: ‘struct net_device’ has no member named ‘hard_start_xmit’ make[2]: *** [/home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u/r8192U_core.o] Error 1 make[1]: *** [_module_/home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/HAL/rtl8192u] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic' make: *** [all] Error 2 /home/wellington/Desktop/rtl8192su_linux_2.4_2.6.0003.0301.2010/ is the path where I copied the drivers on my computer. Any idea how to solve this? (I don't even know what the error is...) update: sudo lshw -class network *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 03 serial: 78:e3:b5:e7:5f:6e size: 10MB/s capacity: 1GB/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10MB/s resources: irq:42 ioport:d800(size=256) memory:fbeff000-fbefffff memory:faffc000-faffffff memory:fbec0000-fbedffff *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface physical id: 2 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:26:18:a1:ae:64 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes wireless=802.11b/g

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• Survey: Your Plans for Adopting New Firefox Releases?

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Mozilla is committing to releasing new Firefox versions every six weeks.  Mozilla released Firefox 5 this week.  With this release, Mozilla states that Firefox 4 is End-of-Life and will not receive any additional security updates.  In a comment thread posted on to a Mike Kaply's blog article discussing these new Firefox policies, Asa Dotzler from Mozilla stated: ... Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.  In a later comment, he added: ... A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I’d much rather Mozilla spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don’t have enterprise support systems already taking care of them. Asa then confirmed that every new Firefox release will put the previous one into End-of-Life: As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?” He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.  He added: “You’re basically saying you don’t care about corporations.” Yes, I’m basically saying that I don’t care about making Firefox enterprise friendly. Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla later stated to PC Mag: The Web and Web browsers continue to evolve rapidly. Mozilla's focus is on providing users with the best Web experience possible, and Firefox needs to evolve at the pace the Web's users and developers expect. By releasing small, focused updates more often, we are able to deliver improved security and stability even as we introduce new features, which is better for our users, and for the Web.We recognize that this shift may not be compatible with a large organization's IT Policy and understand that it is challenging to organizations that have effort-intensive certification polices. However, our development process is geared toward delivering products that support the Web as it is today, while innovating and building future Web capabilities. Tying Firefox product development to an organizational process we do not control would make it difficult for us to continue to innovate for our users and the betterment of the Web.  Your feedback needed for E-Business Suite certifications  Mozilla's new support policy has significant implications for enterprise users of Firefox with Oracle E-Business Suite.  We are reviewing the implications for our certification and support policies for Firefox now.  It would be very helpful if you could let me know about your organisation's plans for Firefox in light of this new information.  Please feel free to drop me a private email, or post a comment here if that's appropriate. 

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• SharePoint Thoughts

  - by Tim Murphy

  I was listening to .NET Rocks episode #713 and it got me thinking about a number of SharePoint related topics. I have been working with SharePoint since the 2001 product came out and have watched it evolve over the years.  Today SharePoint is one of the most powerful and flexible products in the market.  Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement (a lot of improvement in fact) and with much power comes much responsibility. My main gripe these days is that you have to develop on a server instance.  This adds a real barrier to entry for developers.  You either have to run VMWare or Hyper-V on your developer machine or actually develop on your dev server for most tasks.  Yes, there is a way to setup a Windows 7 machine with the SharePoint components but it is very hackish. Beyond that the tools in VS2010 are a great leap forward from past generations.  Not requiring a separate package creation tool is not the least of the improvements.  Better workflow and web part development have also eased the burden of many developers. The other thing the show brought up in my thoughts was more around usage.  Users want to be able to self server everything without regard to what affect that has on leveraging their data from a corporate perspective.  My coworkers who work on Lotus Notes ask why the user can’t just do what ever they want? Part of the reason is that those features have not been built, but the other part is that giving them those features is often like giving an infant a loaded hand gun.  You can do it but it doesn’t make it the smart thing to do. As with any tool that is going to be used in the enterprise it should be subject to governance.  If controls are not in place as they said in the episode of DNR the document libraries and I believe SharePoint in general starts to look as disarrayed and unusable as a shared drive.  Consider these factors before giving into every whim of the users.  You should be able to explain to them the tradeoffs of giving them full control versus being able to leverage the information they collect to the benefit of the organization. These are just a couple of the thoughts that were triggered by the show.  I’m sure there are more discussions that can be had.  Feel free to leave your comments about the pros and cons of SharePoint. del.icio.us Tags: .NET Rocks,SharePoint,software development

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• So, I though I wanted to learn frontend/web development and break out of my comfort zone...

  - by ripper234

  I've been a backend developer for a long time, and I really swim in that field. C++/C#/Java, databases, NoSql, caching - I feel very much at ease around these platforms/concepts. In the past few years, I started to taste end-to-end web programming, and recently I decided to take a job offer in a front end team developing a large, complex product. I wanted to break out of my comfort zone and become more of an "all around developer". Problem is, I'm getting more and more convinced I don't like it. Things I like about backend programming, and missing in frontend stuff: More interesting problems - When I compare designing a server that handle massive data, to adding another form to a page or changing the validation logic, I find the former a lot more interesting. Refactoring refactoring refactoring - I am addicted to Visual Studio with Resharper, or IntelliJ. I feel very comfortable writing code as it goes without investing too much thought, because I know that with a few clicks I can refactor it into beautiful code. To my knowledge, this doesn't exist at all in javascript. Intellisense and navigation - I hate looking at a bunch of JS code without instantly being able to know what it does. In VS/IntelliJ I can summon the documentation, navigate to the code, climb up inheritance hiererchies ... life is sweet. Auto-completion - Just hit Ctrl-Space on an object to see what you can do with it. Easier to test - With almost any backend feature, I can use TDD to capture the requirements, see a bunch of failing tests, then implement, knowing that if the tests pass I did my job well. With frontend, while tests can help a bit, I find that most of the testing is still manual - fire up that browser and verify the site didn't break. I miss that feeling of "A green CI means everything is well with the world." Now, I've only seriously practiced frontend development for about two months now, so this might seem premature ... but I'm getting a nagging feeling that I should abandon this quest and return to my comfort zone, because, well, it's so comfy and fun. Another point worth mentioning in this context is that while I am learning some frontend tools, a lot of what I'm learning is our company's specific infrastructure, which I'm not sure will be very useful later on in my career. Any suggestions or tips? Do you think I should give frontend programming "a proper chance" of at least six to twelve months before calling it quits? Could all my pains be growing pains, and will they magically disappear as I get more experienced? Or is gaining this perspective is valuable enough, even if plan to do more "backend stuff" later on, that it's worth grinding my teeth and continuing with my learning?

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• JavaOne 2012: Camel, Twitter, Coherence, Wicket and GlassFish

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Before joining Oracle as Product Manager for WebLogic and GlassFish for Latin America, at the beggining of this year I proposed two talks to JavaOne USA that I had been presenting in Brazil for quite a while. One of them I presented last year at ApacheCon in Vancouver, Canada as well in JavaOne Brazil. In June I got the news that they were accepted as Alternate Sessions. Surprisingly enough, few weeks later and at the same time I joined Oracle, I received the news that they were officially accepted and put on schedule. Tomorrow I'll be flying to San Francisco, to my first JavaOne in the United States, and I wanted to share with you what I'm going to present there. My two sessions are these ones: Wed, 10/03, 4:30pm - CON2989 Leverage Enterprise Integration Patterns with Apache Camel and TwitterOn this one, you will be introducted to the Apache Camel framework that I had been talking about in Brazil at conferences, before joining Oracle, and to a component I contributed to integrate with Twitter. Also, you will have a preview of a new component I've been working on to integrate Camel with the Oracle Coherence distributed cache. Thu, 10/04, 3:30pm - CON3395 How Scala, Wicket, and Java EE Can Improve Web DevelopmentThis one I've been working on for quite a while. It was based on an idea to have an architecture that could be as agile as frameworks and technologies such as Ruby on Rails, PHP or Python, for rapid web development. You will be introduced to the Apache Wicket framework, another Apache project I enjoy working with and gave lots of talks at Brazilian conferences, including JavaOne Brazil, JustJava, QCon SP, and The Developers Conference. You will also be introduced to the Scala language and how to create nice DSLs to boost productiveness. And last but not least, the Java EE 6 platform, that offers an awesome improvement from previous versions with its CDI, JPA, EJB3 and JAX-RS features for web development. Other events I will be participating during my stay in SF: Geeks Bike Ride GlassFish Community Event GlassFish and Friends Party    If you have any other event to suggest, please do suggest! It's my first JavaOne and I'm really looking forward to enjoying everything. See you guys in a few days!!

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• Setting up Ubuntu on my mother's computer

  - by idealmachine

  Intended use My mother had an old Compaq desktop computer running Windows 98, which she used for occasional Web browsing and playing cards. The name of her card game is Hoyle Card Games 3. Although I had to repair it several times over the last 10 years, it worked fine until it finally died at the end of last year. Hardware specifications A relative brought up a newer computer soon afterward: Operating system: Windows XP Asus K8N motherboard (with broken on-board sound; getting a sound card) Athlon 64? processor (don't remember the clock speed) 512 MB RAM Hope the graphics card works... Replacement sound card will be one of: Ensoniq ES1370 AudioPCI Diamond Monster Sound MX300 (Aureal chipset) Sound Blaster Audigy 2 SE Peripherals HP Scanjet 3400c scanner (USB connected) HP LaserJet multi-function printer (parallel port connected, and printing works with a PCL driver) Same serial mouse as old computer Question I had set up an SSH/VNC connection to allow for remotely working out problems. Or so I thought. A month later, the computer would not boot, rendering the SSH connection useless and an OS reinstall necessary. Unfortunately, I have neither the original Windows disc nor the product key. Unless I were to pay $200 for a full Windows 7 Home Premium license for my computer, I would not be able to re-install Windows XP on hers. I consider myself an advanced Linux user, having used Debian for years. So here are my questions. I have only one day to decide whether to use Ubuntu or buy Windows: A quick search leads me to believe all the hardware listed above is supposed to work with Linux, but am I mistaken? Would Ubuntu/Xubuntu suffice (specify which one if it matters), or would I be better off paying the $200 necessary for Windows XP? Is the card game likely to run on Wine? I believe the minimum system requirement is Windows 95. Failing Wine compatibility, will VirtualBox run fast enough on such a computer (Windows 98 as the guest OS)? Are there any free card games just as good? She plays mainly Bridge, Poker, and Solitaire. Is there any "Large Fonts" option for those with poor vision? The lack of it would be a big disadvantage. BONUS: Although I would probably replace the old mouse upon a move to Ubuntu, is it even possible to get a serial mouse working?

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• DTLoggedExec 1.1.2008.4 Released!

  - by Davide Mauri

  Today I've relased the latest version of my DTExec replacement tool, DTLoggedExec. The main changes are the following: Used a new strategy for version numbers. Now it will follow the following pattern Major.Minor.TargetSQLServerVersion.Revision Added support for Auto Configurations Fixed a bug that reported incorrect number of errors and warnings to Log Providers Fixed a buf that prevented correct casting of values when using /Set and /Param options Errors and Warnings are now counted more precisely. Updated database and log import scripts to categorize logs by projects and sections. E.g.: Project: MyBIProject; Sections: Staging, Datawarehouse Removed unused report stored procedures from database Updated Samples: 12 samples are now available to show ALL DTLoggedExec features From this version only SSIS 2008 will be supported http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/62218  It useful to say something more on a couple of specific points: From this version only SSIS 2008 will be supportedYes, Integration Services 2005 are not supported anymore. The latest version capable of running SSIS 2005 Packages is the 1.0.0.2. Updated database and log import scripts to categorize logs by projects and sectionsWhen you import a log file, you can now assign it to a Project and to a Section of that project. In this way it's easier to gather statistical information for an entire project or a subsection of it. This also allows to store logged data of package belonging to different projects in the same database. For example:  Updated SamplesA complete set of samples that shows how to use all DTLoggedExec features are now shipped with the product. Enjoy! Added support for Auto ConfigurationsThis point will have a post on its own, since it's quite important and is by far the biggest new feature introduced in this release. To explain it in a few words, I can just say that you don't need to waste time with complex DTS configuration files or options, since a package will configure itself automatically. You just need to write a single statement as a parameter for DTLoggedExec. This feature can simplify deployment *a lot* :)   I the next days I'll write the mentioned post on Auto-Configurations and i'll update the documentation available on theDTLoggedExec website:   http://dtloggedexec.davidemauri.it/MainPage.ashx

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• Defining a service layer: the text-based adventure

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Applications these days have more options than ever for a user interface, and it’s only going to grow. A successful product might require native applications for mobile devices, a regular web implementation, or even a gaming console. These systems often will be centralized and data driven. The solution is one that’s fairly solitary, a service layer! Simply put, take what’s shared and put it behind a physical or abstract layer that defines the boundary between the specific user interface and the shared content.   I know, I know, none of this is complicated. But some times it can be difficult to discern what belongs on which side of the line. For instance, say we’re creating a service that will provide content for both an ASP.NET MVC application and a WP7 application. Although the content served to each application is the same, there are different paradigms and patterns for displaying that data in the different environments. In ASP.NET MVC, you may create a model specific to a page that combines necessary information. In the WP7 application you might require different sets of data that you will connect via MVVM with the view. The general rule of thumb is that any shared content, business rules, or data should exist separately. Any element that is specific to the current UI implementation should be included in a separate library or with the UI implementation itself. The WP7 application doesn’t need my MVC specific model classes. My MVC application doesn’t require those INotifyPropertyChanged viewmodels that the WP7 application depends on. In both cases, there should be additional processing done above the service layer to massage the data to the application’s specific needs.   Service-ocalypse: the text based adventure What helps me the most about deciding whether or not something belongs coupled to the UI implementation or in the shared implementation is thinking of the simplest implementation you could have: a console application. You might have played a game like Peasant’s Quest: The console app is the text based adventure game version of your application. If you’re service was consumed in its simplest form, you would simply have a console based API for it that issues requests. Maybe those requests aren’t SWIM TO BOAT, but they might be CREATE USER JOHN. If I issue a request, I expect that request to be issued to the service. If the service has any exceptions or issues with my input, that business logic should be encapsulated in that service, not implemented in the UI. The service layer should be your functional application in its entirety, and anything above that layer should only assist with the display of that information.

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• Embracing Imperfection

  - by Johnm

  The pursuit of perfection is a road on which we often find ourselves traveling. It is an unpaved road filed with pot-holes and ruts that often destroy our stride. The shoulders of this road are lined with the bones and rotting carcasses of well planned projects, solutions and dreams of others who have dared the journey. Often the choice to engage in this travel is a compulsive one. We can't help but to pack our bags and make the trip. We justify it by equating it to the delivery of a quality product or service. We use our past travels as validation of our worthiness and value. Our shared experience, as tortured pilgrims of perfection, reveals that each odyssey that bewitched us resulted in a stark reminder of the very weaknesses and fears that we were attempting to mollify. The voice of the critic that berated us for the lack of craftsmanship was our own. Although, at the end of the journey our own critical voice was joined by the gnashing of teeth of those who could not reap the fruit of your labor due to its lack of timely delivery. There is another road in which to travel. It is the pursuit of embracing imperfection. The cost of traveling this route is your contribution to its eternal construction. Each segment is designed uniquely. At times it has the appearance of a patchwork quilt; while other times it is well organized and highly measured. In all cases, its construction has continually advanced and been utilized as each segment was delivered by its architect. Those who choose to select this spindle of these crossroads crack open the shells of their fears to reveal the vapor that is within. They construct their houses upon these shells. Through their hunger for mastery they wring every drop of nectar from failure and discard its husks to the ditches of this road. Through their efforts the thoroughfare begins to develop a personality of its own, a beautifully human one, rich with the strengths and weaknesses of all of its contributors. Like many of us, the pursuit of perfection has not served me well. In fact, I would say that it has been more damaging than it has been helpful. While the perfectionist in me occasionally makes its presence known, I consider myself a "recovering perfectionist". It is evident to me that there is immense beauty found in imperfection. I choose to embrace it. It is grounding. It is constructive. It is honest.

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• Avoiding the Black Hole of Leads

  - by Charles Knapp

  Sales says, "Marketing doesn’t deliver enough qualified leads. So, we generate 90% of our own leads." Meanwhile, Marketing says, "We generate most of the leads. But, Sales doesn’t contact them quickly enough, while the lead is still interested." According to Sirius Decisions: Up to 90% of leads never make it to closure Sales works on only 11% of the leads supplied by Marketing Only 18% of the leads Sales accepts convert to opportunities Yet, 45% of prospects typically buy a product from someone within 12 months The root cause of these commonplace complaints is a disconnect between the funnels of marketing and sales. Unfortunately, we often see companies with an assortment of poorly integrated marketing tools. It takes too long and too many people to move the data around, scrub it, upload it from one system to another, and get it routed to the right sales teams. As a result, leads fall through the cracks, contextual information is lost, and by the time sales actually contacts a customer it may be too late. Sales automation alone is not enough. Marketing automation (including social) is not enough. Sales and Marketing must work together. It’s time to connect the silos of marketing and sales pipelines and analytics. It’s time for integrated Sales and Marketing automation. Integrated pipelines improve lead quality and timeliness. Marketing systems can track a rich set of contextual information about a prospect–self-disclosed information about interests, content viewed, and so on. This insight can equip the sales rep with rich information to make a face-to-face conversation more relevant and more likely to convert to the next stage in the sales process. Integrated lead to revenue (LTR) management provides end-to-end visibility, enabling the company to measure what is working. Marketing can measure its impact on revenue and other business outcomes, and sales can harness and redirect marketing investments to areas where they most help achieve sales objectives. It’s a win-win play. Marketing delivers more leads that are qualified, cuts cost per lead, and demonstrates a strong Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). Sales spends more time with warm leads and less time on cold calls, achieves higher close rates, and delivers more revenue. Learn more by attending our Integrated Sales and Marketing session at the upcoming CloudWorld conferences. Or, visit our Sales and Marketing Cloud Service site for videos and other learning resources.

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• Oracle Virtualization Friday Spotlight - November 8, 2013

  - by Monica Kumar

  Hands-on Private Cloud Simulator In One Hour Submitted by: Doan Nguyen, Senior Principal Product Marketing Director My aeronautics instructor used to say, "you can’t appreciate flying until you take flight." To clarify, this is not about gearing up in a flying squirrel suit and hopping off a cliff (topic for another blog!) but rather about flying an airplane. The idea is to get hands-on with the controls at the cockpit and experience flight before you actually fly a real plane. After the initial 40 hours of flight time, the concept sank in and it really made sense.This concept is what inspired our technical experts to put together the hands-on lab for a private cloud deployment and management self-service model. Yes, we are comparing the lab to a flight simulator! Let’s look at the parallels: To get trained to fly, starting in the simulator gets you off the ground quicker. There is no need to have a real plane to begin with. In a hands-on lab, there is no need for a real server, with networking and real storage installed. All you need is your laptop The simulator is pre-configured, pre-flight check done. Similarly, in a hands-on lab, Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager are pre-configured and assembled using Oracle VM VirtualBox as the container. Software installations are not needed. After time spent training at the controls, you can really appreciate the practical experience of flying. Along the same lines, the hands-on lab is a guided learning path, without the encumbrances of hardware, software installation, so you can learn about cloud deployment and management.  However, unlike the simulator training, your time investment with the lab is only about an hour and not 40 hours! This hands-on lab takes you through private cloud deployment and management using Oracle VM and  Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c in an Infrastructure as a service IaaS model. You will first configure the IaaS cloud as the cloud administrator and then deploy guest virtual machines (VMs) as a self-service user. Then you are ready to take flight into the cloud! Why not step into the cockpit now!

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• Switch from back-end to front-end programming: I'm out of my comfort zone, should I switch back?

  - by ripper234

  I've been a backend developer for a long time, and I really swim in that field. C++/C#/Java, databases, NoSql, caching - I feel very much at ease around these platforms/concepts. In the past few years, I started to taste end-to-end web programming, and recently I decided to take a job offer in a front end team developing a large, complex product. I wanted to break out of my comfort zone and become more of an "all around developer". Problem is, I'm getting more and more convinced I don't like it. Things I like about backend programming, and missing in frontend stuff: More interesting problems - When I compare designing a server that handle massive data, to adding another form to a page or changing the validation logic, I find the former a lot more interesting. Refactoring refactoring refactoring - I am addicted to Visual Studio with Resharper, or IntelliJ. I feel very comfortable writing code as it goes without investing too much thought, because I know that with a few clicks I can refactor it into beautiful code. To my knowledge, this doesn't exist at all in javascript. Intellisense and navigation - I hate looking at a bunch of JS code without instantly being able to know what it does. In VS/IntelliJ I can summon the documentation, navigate to the code, climb up inheritance hiererchies ... life is sweet. Auto-completion - Just hit Ctrl-Space on an object to see what you can do with it. Easier to test - With almost any backend feature, I can use TDD to capture the requirements, see a bunch of failing tests, then implement, knowing that if the tests pass I did my job well. With frontend, while tests can help a bit, I find that most of the testing is still manual - fire up that browser and verify the site didn't break. I miss that feeling of "A green CI means everything is well with the world." Now, I've only seriously practiced frontend development for about two months now, so this might seem premature ... but I'm getting a nagging feeling that I should abandon this quest and return to my comfort zone, because, well, it's so comfy and fun. Another point worth mentioning in this context is that while I am learning some frontend tools, a lot of what I'm learning is our company's specific infrastructure, which I'm not sure will be very useful later on in my career. Any suggestions or tips? Do you think I should give frontend programming "a proper chance" of at least six to twelve months before calling it quits? Could all my pains be growing pains, and will they magically disappear as I get more experienced? Or is gaining this perspective is valuable enough, even if plan to do more "backend stuff" later on, that it's worth grinding my teeth and continuing with my learning?

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• Keep Learning After Your Oracle Training Class is Over - Save 50%!

  - by KJones

  Written by Amit Kumar, Senior Director Oracle University Digital Training        Every training class you take about the latest Oracle application or technology moves you closer to developing the skills you need to succeed. But after class is over, how do you keep up with today’s accelerating pace of innovation? To   To keep with the very latest technological advances, you need an ongoing and flexible training solution.       One that lets you learn during your own downtime.       Knowledge that’s easy to access.       Interactive lessons where you connect with experts.       A simple way to increase your knowledge, on your own time and at your own pace. The new Oracle Learning Streams is the flexible training solution you're looking for. Continuously Learn with Oracle Learning Streams Over time, Oracle Learning Streams help you develop the depth and breadth of knowledge that will give you the tools to become an expert in your field. By taking advantage of comprehensive and frequently updated information, you can keep learning continuously, at your own pace, when it's convenient for you. Sign up today and get 12 months of unlimited access to: •    Hundreds of videos delivered by Oracle experts for fresh and continuous product learning•    Live connections with Oracle's top instructors•    Robust video search capability to find exactly what you’re looking for•    Features that allow you to build your own custom learning queue and request new content Oracle Learning Streams are now available for Oracle Database and Oracle Middleware. Take a moment to preview the content now.  For a Limited Time - Save 50% For a limited time, save 50% when you order Oracle Learning Streams with any other Oracle Classroom, Live Virtual Class or Training On Demand course. Now there is no reason for learning to stop when class is over!

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• Alert: It is No Longer 1982, So Why is CRM Still There?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Hot off the heels of Oracle’s recent LinkedIn integration announcement and Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014, the Oracle Social Cloud is preparing for another big event, the CRM Evolution conference and exhibition in NYC. The role of social channels in customer engagement continues to grow, and social customer engagement will be a significant theme at the conference. According to Paul Greenberg, CRM Evolution Conference Chair, author, and Managing Principal at The 56 Group, social channels have become so pervasive that there is no longer a clear reason to make a distinction between “social CRM” and traditional CRM systems. Why not? Because social is a communication hub every bit as vital and used as the phone or email. What makes social different is that if you think of it as a phone, it’s a party line. That means customer interactions are far from secret, and social connections are listening in by the hundreds, hearing whether their friend is having a positive or negative experience with your brand. According to a Mention.com study, 76% of brand mentions are neutral, neither positive nor negative. These mentions fail to get much notice. So think what that means about the remaining 24% of mentions. They’re standing out, because a verdict, about you, is being rendered in them, usually with emotion. Suddenly, where the R of CRM has been lip service and somewhat expendable in the past, “relationship” takes on new meaning, seriousness, and urgency. Remarkably, legions of brands still approach CRM as if it were 1982. Today, brands must provide customer experiences the customer actually likes (how dare they expect such things). They must intimately know not only their customers, but each customer, because technology now makes personalized experiences possible. That’s why the Oracle Social Cloud has been so mission-oriented about seamlessly integrating social with sales, marketing and customer service interactions so the enterprise can have an actionable 360-degree view of the customer. It’s the key to that customer-centricity we hear so much about these days. If you’re attending CRM Evolution, Chris Moody, Director of Product Marketing for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, will show you how unified customer experiences and enhanced customer centricity will help you attract and keep ideal customers and brand advocates (“The Pursuit of Customer-Centricity” Aug 19 at 2:45p ET) And Meg Bear, Group Vice President for the Oracle Social Cloud, will sit on a panel talking about “terms of engagement” and the ways tech can now enhance your interactions with customers (Aug 20 at 10a ET). If you can’t be there, we’ll be doing our live-tweeting thing from the @oraclesocial handle, so make sure you’re a faithful follower. You’ll notice NOBODY is writing about the wisdom of “company-centricity.” Now is the time to bring your customer relationship management into the socially connected age. @mikestilesPhoto: Sue Pizarro, freeimages.com

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• No wireless connection using a conceptronic c54i (RT2561/RT61 rev B)

  - by jrosell

  Detected but not working. New install on ubuntu 11.10 using coneptronic C54Ri. As documentation says it uses Ralink drivers.... Any ideas why my wireless does not work? $ lspci -nn | grep -i 'ralink' 01:05.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1e:90:e5:af:13 inet addr:192.168.0.197 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21e:90ff:fee5:af13/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:28361 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:16858 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:39812172 (39.8 MB) TX bytes:1633405 (1.6 MB) Interrupt:43 Base address:0xc000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:80 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:80 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:6608 (6.6 KB) TX bytes:6608 (6.6 KB) iwconfig wlan0 wlan0 IEEE 802.11abg ESSIDff/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff Power Managementff lsmod | grep rt rt61pci 27493 0 crc_itu_t 12627 1 rt61pci rt2x00pci 14202 1 rt61pci rt2x00lib 48114 2 rt61pci,rt2x00pci mac80211 272785 2 rt2x00pci,rt2x00lib cfg80211 172392 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211 eeprom_93cx6 12653 1 rt61pci parport_pc 32114 1 parport 40930 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp lsmod | grep rt [ 2497.816989] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.827112] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.837430] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.847528] phy0 -> rt2x00pci_regbusy_read: Error - Indirect register access failed: offset=0x0000308c, value=0xffffffff [ 2497.847632] phy0 -> rt61pci_wait_bbp_ready: Error - BBP register access faile d, aborting. [ 2497.847637] phy0 -> rt61pci_set_device_state: Error - Device failed to enter state 4 (-5). sudo lshw -C network *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface product: RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g vendor: Ralink corp. physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 00 serial: fa:b8:14:58:62:35 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt61pci driverversion=3.0.0-12-generic firmware=0.8 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:16 memory:fdef8000-fdefffff iwlist scan lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. wlan0 Failed to read scan data : Network is down uname -mr 3.0.0-12-generic i686 Edit 1 $ rfkill list all 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no On reboot, sudo lshw -C network returns network is ok. Hovever, WPA keeps on asking the wireless key

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• S11 launched

  - by unixman

  Now that Oracle Solaris 11 is out, its time to do 2 things -- 1) Its time to see what's in it, what's new and why its important, and then assess why it might make sense to begin evaluating it for your needs and 2) Its time to acknowledge, give thanks to and congratulate all the R&D personnel, architects, engineers, designers and testers who've put in so much effort and energy into helping make Solaris 11 (and SunOS 5.11) what it has become -- starting way back circa 2004 and, more importantly, culminating in the recent years and months -- staying focused on the execution, unwavering in the face of various challenges. For #1 above, here are a few good things to get going with - Watch the product launch replay - Visit the Solaris 11 Spotlight section on oracle.com - Get comfortable through introductory videos and detailed "how-to" guides (ex: how to create and publish IPS packages), white papers on the new default root file system, ZFS, and reap the benefits brought on by the fundamental shift in easing the administration experience - Look at the next level of software lifecycle management that is enabled by technologies such as Automated Installer and Image Packaging System -- that dramatically address patch management-related challenges - Understand how we continue to innovate in areas of service intelligence, reliability and availability - Start to evaluate enhancements in virtualization capabilities -- whether influenced by the need to consolidate or motivated by the need to have increased service mobility across physical systems, leveraging hardware-level abstractions - Gain more control over your network-centric services through enhancements in network resource management, observability and I/O performance - Look beyond your existing infrastructure with confidence that you can re-host and transition to newer systems with the use of Solaris 10 zones running on top of Solaris 11 - Relish in the fact that you can do all this, get your data to be secure and encrypted and more, on both, SPARC and x86-based systems. - Stay informed by keeping an eye on relevant blogs, which we've begun turning up recently. - Go through a hands-on lab - Sign up to take a class or just opt to watch various videos to begin to raise your comfort level with these technologies For #2 above -- There are many ways to do that. One way is to just say "thanks" with an email, a post, or a simple card,  similar to this one seen at a Barnes and Noble store recently.  The front of the card is followed by what's inside... and as the saying goes, now more then ever "it's what's inside that counts" And here's the inside of the card: So, what are you waiting for ? Go download and try it out, and please let us know what you think of it!

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• EBusiness Maintenace Wizard

  - by cwarticki

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Seriously folks, you'd be amazed by the power and functionality of this tool.  If you're an EBus customer, you must use the Maintenance Wizard.  I know customers that have logged 2000+ SRs doing EBus upgrades the hard way and others that have use the Maintenance Wizard and have performed production upgrades on 7 global instances with only a handful of SRs.  You decide which is better. Oh, btw......it's part of your Premier Support investment. No additional cost necessary. -Chris Warticki The Maintenance Wizard is an E-Business Suite upgrade tool that can guide you through the code line upgrade process from 11.5.10.2 to 12.1.3 with an 11gR2 database. Additionally, it includes maintenance features for most releases of E-Business Suite applications. The Tool: * Presents step-by-step upgrade and maintenance processes * Enables validation of each step, tracks the completion of the steps, and maintains a log and status * Is a multi-user tool that enables the System Administrator to give different users assignments based on any combination of category, product family or task * Automatically installs many required patches * Provides project management utilities to record the time taken for each task, completion status and project reporting For More Information: * Review Note 215527.1 for additional information on the Maintenance Wizard * See Note 430732.1 to download the new Patch Sincerely, Oracle Proactive Support Center

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• Big Companies Influence Retail in 2010

  - by David Dorf

  From a retail industry perspective, 2010 will go down as the year mobile went mainstream, the economy recovered from the crash, and Facebook surpassed Google as the most influential online property. While the economy certainly had the biggest impact on the retail industry, a few big companies also exerted influence. Here's a rundown and a look back at 2010: Apple -- Steve Jobs and company continued to lead the mobile pack. Consumers are using their iPhones to shop, retailers are using the iPod Touch for mobile checkout, and both are embracing the iPad as the next wave of technology. The Next Technology from Apple Mobile Platforms in Retail Apple Stores, Touch2Systems, and the iPad Google -- Not to be outdone, Google's Android platform grew faster than Apple's, plus they support QRCodes natively and will probably beat Apple to NFC. Google Checkout, Product Search, and Boutiques.com continue to impact the e-commerce scene. Google Leverages Like.com Facebook -- While the movie The Social Network certainly made Facebook a household name, Connect, Places, and seeing the "like" button all over the Web really pushed Facebook everywhere. 2010 set the foundations for f-commerce. Facebook Participatory Promotions Crowd Savers What's the value of a Facebook fan? Step Aside Google Leveraging Social Networks for Retail Social Shopping at Nine West Groupon -- This newcomer executed on a simple concept flawlessly, making them the fasted company to reach $1B in revenue. (See cool chart from Silicon Alley Insider.) Google's offer of $5-6B wasn't enough, so now they are raising an additional $1B in funding, presumably to buy-up all the copycats across the globe. Changing the Way We Shop Amazon -- As if leading the e-commerce charge wasn't enough, Amazon shook things up with their purchase of Woot and release of their Price Checker mobile app. They continue to push boundaries with Kindle, and don't seem worried about the iPad at all. You Can't Win on Price Amazon Looks at Your Social Graph eBay -- Acquiring Skype didn't exactly work out, but eBay's purchase of PayPal and RedLaser are driving the company forward. They are still a major force. Bump the Bill Oracle, SAP, HP, IBM, and Cisco left their marks on the retail industry as well with various acquisitions and CxO shake-ups. We'll just have to wait and see what 2011 brings next.

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• Keeping your options open in a cloud solution

  - by BuckWoody

  In on-premises solutions we have the full range of options open for a given computing solution – but we don’t always take advantage of them, for multiple reasons. Data goes in a Relational Database Management System, files go on a share, and e-mail goes to the Exchange server. Over time, vendors (including ourselves) add in functionality to one product that allow non-standard use of the platform. For example, SQL Server (and Oracle, and others) allow large binary storage in or through the system – something not originally intended for an RDBMS to handle. There are certainly times when this makes sense, of course, but often these platform hammers turn every problem into a nail. It can make us “lazy” in our design – we sometimes don’t take the time to learn another architecture because the one we’ve spent so much time with can handle what we want to do. But there’s a distinct danger here. In nature, when a population shares too many of the same traits, it can cause a complete collapse if a situation exploits a weakness shared by that population. The same is true with not using the righttool for the job in a computing environment. Your company or organization depends on your knowledge as a professional to select the best mix of supportable, flexible, cost-effective technologies to solve their problems, whether you’re in an architect role or not.  So take some time today to learn something new. The way I do this is to select a given problem, and try to solve it with a technology I’m not familiar with. For instance – create a Purchase Order system in Excel, then in Hadoop or MongoDB, or even in flat-files using PowerShell as an interface. No, I’m not suggesting any of these architectures are the proper way to solve the PO problem, but taking something concrete that you know well and applying that meta-knowledge to another platform will assist you in exercising the “little grey cells” and help you and your organization understand what is open to you. And of course you can do all of this on-premises – but my recommendation is to check out a cloud platform (my suggestion would of course be Windows Azure :) ) and try it there. Most providers (including Microsoft) provide free time to do that.

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