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• Silverlight for Everyone!!

  - by subodhnpushpak

  Someone asked me to compare Silverlight / HTML development. I realized that the question can be answered in many ways: Below is the high level comparison between a HTML /JavaScript client and Silverlight client and why silverlight was chosen over HTML / JavaScript client (based on type of users and major functionalities provided): 1. For end users Browser compatibility Silverlight is a plug-in and requires installation first. However, it does provides consistent look and feel across all browsers. For HTML / DHTML, there is a need to tweak JavaScript for each of the browser supported. In fact, tags like <span> and <div> works differently on different browser / version. So, HTML works on most of the systems but also requires lot of efforts coding-wise to adhere to all standards/ browsers / versions. Out of browser support No support in HTML. Third party tools like  Google gears offers some functionalities but there are lots of issues around platform and accessibility. Out of box support for out-of-browser support. provides features like drag and drop onto application surface. Cut and copy paste in HTML HTML is displayed in browser; which, in turn provides facilities for cut copy and paste. Silverlight (specially 4) provides rich features for cut-copy-paste along with full control over what can be cut copy pasted by end users and .advanced features like visual tree printing. Rich user experience HTML can provide some rich experience by use of some JavaScript libraries like JQuery. However, extensive use of JavaScript combined with various versions of browsers and the supported JavaScript makes the solution cumbersome. Silverlight is meant for RIA experience. User data storage on client end In HTML only small amount of data can be stored that too in cookies. In Silverlight large data may be stored, that too in secure way. This increases the response time. Post back In HTML / JavaScript the post back can be stopped by use of AJAX. Extensive use of AJAX can be a bottleneck as browser stack is used for the calls. Both look and feel and data travel over network.                           In Silverlight everything run the client side. Calls are made to server ONLY for data; which also reduces network traffic in long run. 2. For Developers Coding effort HTML / JavaScript can take considerable amount to code if features (requirements) are rich. For AJAX like interfaces; knowledge of third party kits like DOJO / Yahoo UI / JQuery is required which has steep learning curve. ASP .Net coding world revolves mostly along <table> tags for alignments whereas most popular tools provide <div> tags; which requires lots of tweaking. AJAX calls can be a bottlenecks for performance, if the calls are many. In Silverlight; coding is in C#, which is managed code. XAML is also very intuitive and Blend can be used to provide look and feel. Event handling is much clean than in JavaScript. Provides for many clean patterns like MVVM and composable application. Each call to server is asynchronous in silverlight. AJAX is in built into silverlight. Threading can be done at the client side itself to provide for better responsiveness; etc. Debugging Debugging in HTML / JavaScript is difficult. As JavaScript is interpreted; there is NO compile time error handling. Debugging in Silverlight is very helpful. As it is compiled; it provides rich features for both compile time and run time error handling. Multi -targeting browsers HTML / JavaScript have different rendering behaviours in different browsers / and their versions. JavaScript have to be written to sublime the differences in browser behaviours. Silverlight works exactly the same in all browsers and works on almost all popular browser. Multi-targeting desktop No support in HTML / JavaScript Silverlight is very close to WPF. Bot the platform may be easily targeted while maintaining the same source code. Rich toolkit HTML /JavaScript have limited toolkit as controls Silverlight provides a rich set of controls including graphs, audio, video, layout, etc. 3. For Architects Design Patterns Silverlight provides for patterns like MVVM (MVC) and rich (fat)  client architecture. This segregates the "separation of concern" very clearly. Client (silverlight) does what it is expected to do and server does what it is expected of. In HTML / JavaScript world most of the processing is done on the server side. Extensibility Silverlight provides great deal of extensibility as custom controls may be made. Extensibility is NOT restricted by browser but by the plug-in silverlight runs in. HTML / JavaScript works in a certain way and extensibility is generally done on the server side rather than client end. Client side is restricted by the limitations of the browser. Performance Silverlight provides localized storage which may be used for cached data storage. this reduces the response time. As processing can be done on client side itself; there is no need for server round trips. this decreases the round about time. Look and feel of the application is downloaded ONLY initially, afterwards ONLY data is fetched form the server. Security Silverlight is compiled code downloaded as .XAP; As compared to HTML / JavaScript, it provides more secure sandboxed approach. Cross - scripting is inherently prohibited in silverlight by default. If proper guidelines are followed silverlight provides much robust security mechanism as against HTML / JavaScript world. For example; knowing server Address in obfuscated JavaScript is easier than a compressed compiled obfuscated silverlight .XAP file. Some of these like (offline and Canvas support) will be available in HTML5. However, the timelines are not encouraging at all. According to Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5 for details. The above is MY opinion. I will love to hear yours; do let me know via comments. Technorati Tags: Silverlight

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• Recap: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation

  - by Harish Gaur

  Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle. Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies: 1. Build and deploy native mobile applications using Oracle ADF Mobile 2. Empower business user to model processes, design user interface and have rich mobile experience for process interaction using Oracle BPM Suite PS6. 3. Create collaborative user experience and integrate social sign-on using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Social Network & Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 4. Deploy and manage business applications on Oracle Exalogic Nike, LA Department of Water & Power and Nintendo joined Hasan on stage to share how their organizations are leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable business innovation. Managing Performance in the Wrld of Social and Mobile How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata. Fig 2: Oracle Coherence enabled data grid improves performance of Nike+ Digital Sports Platform Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a  "product"  to  a "product +" experience.  There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices.  Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences. To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid.  Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns.  This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid. Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use.  This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system  had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands. Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform. Figure 3: Multi channel & Multi lingual LADWP.com built using Oracle WebCenter & Oracle Identity Management platform Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account -  like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012. Matt indicated that LADWP's Self-Service Portal has greatly improved customer satisfaction.  In a JD Power Associates website satisfaction survey, results indicate rankings have climbed by 25+ points, marking a remarkable increase in user experience. Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems. Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons: 1. High performance  2. Ease of management Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion. Faster Processing of Big Data Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata.  This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone. Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data. Figure 5: Mobile traffic data processing at NTT Docomo with Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence    

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• CEN/CENELEC Lacks Perspective

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  Over the last few months, two of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN and CENELEC have circulated an unfortunate position statement distorting the facts around fora and consortia. For the benefit of outsiders to this debate, let's just say that this debate regards whether and how the EU should recognize standards and specifications from certain fora and consortia based on a process evaluating the openness and transparency of such deliverables. The topic is complex, and somewhat confusing even to insiders, but nevertheless crucial to the European economy. As far as I can judge, their positions are not based on facts. This is unfortunate. For the benefit of clarity, here are some of the observations they make: a)"Most consortia are in essence driven by technology companies making hardware and software solutions, by definition very few of the largest ones are European-based". b) "Most consortia lack a European presence, relevant Committees, even those that are often cited as having stronger links with Europe, seem to lack an overall, inclusive set of participants". c) "Recognising specific consortia specifications will not resolve any concrete problems of interoperability for public authorities; interoperability depends on stringing together a range of specifications (from formal global bodies or consortia alike)". d) "Consortia already have the option to have their specifications adopted by the international formal standards bodies and many more exercise this than the two that seem to be campaigning for European recognition. Such specifications can then also be adopted as European standards." e) "Consortium specifications completely lack any process to take due and balanced account of requirements at national level - this is not important for technologies but can be a critical issue when discussing cross-border issues within the EU such as eGovernment, eHealth and so on". f) "The proposed recognition will not lead to standstill on national or European activities, nor to the adoption of the specifications as national standards in the CEN and CENELEC members (usually in their official national languages), nor to withdrawal of conflicting national standards. A big asset of the European standardization system is its coherence and lack of fragmentation." g) "We always miss concrete and specific examples of where consortia referencing are supposed to be helpful." First of all, note that ETSI, the third ESO, did not join the position. The reason is, of course, that ETSI beyond being an ESO, also has a global perspective and, moreover, does consider reality. Secondly, having produced arguments a) to g), CEN/CENELEC has the audacity to call a meeting on Friday 25 February entitled "ICT standardization - improving collaboration in Europe". This sounds very nice, but they have not set the stage for constructive debate. Rather, they demonstrate a striking lack of vision and lack of perspective. I will back this up by three facts, and leave it there. 1. Since the 1980s, global industry fora and consortia, such as IETF, W3C and OASIS have emerged as world-leading ICT standards development organizations with excellent procedures for openness and transparency in all phases of standards development, ex post and ex ante. - Practically no ICT system can be built without using fora and consortia standards (FCS). - Without using FCS, neither the Internet, upon which the EU economy depends, nor EU institutions would operate. - FCS are of high relevance for achieving and promoting interoperability and driving innovation. 2. FCS are complementary to the formally recognized standards organizations including the ESOs. - No work will be taken away from the ESOs should the EU recognize certain FCS. - Each FCS would be evaluated on its merit and on the openness of the process that produced it. ESOs would, with other stakeholders, have a say. - ESOs could potentially educate and assist European stakeholders to engage more actively and constructively with FCS. - ETSI, also an ESO, seems to clearly recognize these facts. 3. Europe and its Member States have a strong voice in several of the most relevant global industry fora and consortia. - W3C: W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased - a development that is very much desired by W3C. Current members of the W3C Advisory Board includes Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Charles McCathie Nevile (Opera). Nokia is Finnish company, Opera is a Norwegian company. SAP's Claus von Riegen is an alumni of the same Advisory Board. - OASIS: its membership - 30% of which is European - represents the marketplace, reflecting a balance of providers, user companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In particular, about 15% of OASIS members are governments or universities. Frederick Hirsch from Nokia, Claus von Riegen from SAP AG and Charles-H. Schulz from Ars Aperta are on the Board of Directors. Nokia is a Finnish company, SAP is a German company and Ars Aperta is a French company. The Chairman of the Board is Peter Brown, who is an Independent Consultant, an Austrian citizen AND an official of the European Parliament currently on long-term leave. - IETF: The oversight of its activities is by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), since 2007 chaired by Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch national who lives in Uithoorn, NL. Kolkman is director of NLnet Labs, a foundation chartered to develop open source software and open source standards for the Internet. Other IAB members include Marcelo Bagnulo whose affiliation is the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain as well as Hannes Tschofenig from Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia is a Finnish company. Siemens is a German company. Nokia Siemens is a European joint venture. - Member States: At least 17 European Member States have developed Interoperability Frameworks that include FCS, according to the EU-funded National Interoperability Framework Observatory (see list and NIFO web site on IDABC). This also means they actively procure solutions using FCS, reference FCS in their policies and even in laws. Member State reps are free to engage in FCS, and many do. It would be nice if the EU adjusted to this reality. - A huge number of European nationals work in the global IT industry, on European soil or elsewhere, whether in EU registered companies or not. CEN/CENELEC lacks perspective and has engaged in an effort to twist facts that is quite striking from a publicly funded organization. I wish them all possible success with Friday's meeting but I fear all of the most important stakeholders will not be at the table. Not because they do not wish to collaborate, but because they just have been insulted. If they do show up, it would be a gracious move, almost beyond comprehension. While I do not expect CEN/CENELEC to line up perfectly in favor of fora and consortia, I think it would be to their benefit to stick to more palatable observations. Actually, I would suggest an apology, straightening out the facts. This works among friends and it works in an organizational context. Then, we can all move on. Standardization is important. Too important to ignore. Too important to distort. The European economy depends on it. We need CEN/CENELEC. It is an important organization. But CEN/CENELEC needs fora and consortia, too.

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• Nashorn, the rhino in the room

  - by costlow

  Nashorn is a new runtime within JDK 8 that allows developers to run code written in JavaScript and call back and forth with Java. One advantage to the Nashorn scripting engine is that is allows for quick prototyping of functionality or basic shell scripts that use Java libraries. The previous JavaScript runtime, named Rhino, was introduced in JDK 6 (released 2006, end of public updates Feb 2013). Keeping tradition amongst the global developer community, "Nashorn" is the German word for rhino. The Java platform and runtime is an intentional home to many languages beyond the Java language itself. OpenJDK’s Da Vinci Machine helps coordinate work amongst language developers and tool designers and has helped different languages by introducing the Invoke Dynamic instruction in Java 7 (2011), which resulted in two major benefits: speeding up execution of dynamic code, and providing the groundwork for Java 8’s lambda executions. Many of these improvements are discussed at the JVM Language Summit, where language and tool designers get together to discuss experiences and issues related to building these complex components. There are a number of benefits to running JavaScript applications on JDK 8’s Nashorn technology beyond writing scripts quickly: Interoperability with Java and JavaScript libraries. Scripts do not need to be compiled. Fast execution and multi-threading of JavaScript running in Java’s JRE. The ability to remotely debug applications using an IDE like NetBeans, Eclipse, or IntelliJ (instructions on the Nashorn blog). Automatic integration with Java monitoring tools, such as performance, health, and SIEM. In the remainder of this blog post, I will explain how to use Nashorn and the benefit from those features. Nashorn execution environment The Nashorn scripting engine is included in all versions of Java SE 8, both the JDK and the JRE. Unlike Java code, scripts written in nashorn are interpreted and do not need to be compiled before execution. Developers and users can access it in two ways: Users running JavaScript applications can call the binary directly:jre8/bin/jjs This mechanism can also be used in shell scripts by specifying a shebang like #!/usr/bin/jjs Developers can use the API and obtain a ScriptEngine through:ScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngineManager().getEngineByName("nashorn"); When using a ScriptEngine, please understand that they execute code. Avoid running untrusted scripts or passing in untrusted/unvalidated inputs. During compilation, consider isolating access to the ScriptEngine and using Type Annotations to only allow @Untainted String arguments. One noteworthy difference between JavaScript executed in or outside of a web browser is that certain objects will not be available. For example when run outside a browser, there is no access to a document object or DOM tree. Other than that, all syntax, semantics, and capabilities are present. Examples of Java and JavaScript The Nashorn script engine allows developers of all experience levels the ability to write and run code that takes advantage of both languages. The specific dialect is ECMAScript 5.1 as identified by the User Guide and its standards definition through ECMA international. In addition to the example below, Benjamin Winterberg has a very well written Java 8 Nashorn Tutorial that provides a large number of code samples in both languages. Basic Operations A basic Hello World application written to run on Nashorn would look like this: #!/usr/bin/jjs print("Hello World"); The first line is a standard script indication, so that Linux or Unix systems can run the script through Nashorn. On Windows where scripts are not as common, you would run the script like: jjs helloWorld.js. Receiving Arguments In order to receive program arguments your jjs invocation needs to use the -scripting flag and a double-dash to separate which arguments are for jjs and which are for the script itself:jjs -scripting print.js -- "This will print" #!/usr/bin/jjs var whatYouSaid = $ARG.length==0 ? "You did not say anything" : $ARG[0] print(whatYouSaid); Interoperability with Java libraries (including 3rd party dependencies) Another goal of Nashorn was to allow for quick scriptable prototypes, allowing access into Java types and any libraries. Resources operate in the context of the script (either in-line with the script or as separate threads) so if you open network sockets and your script terminates, those sockets will be released and available for your next run. Your code can access Java types the same as regular Java classes. The “import statements” are written somewhat differently to accommodate for language. There is a choice of two styles: For standard classes, just name the class: var ServerSocket = java.net.ServerSocket For arrays or other items, use Java.type: var ByteArray = Java.type("byte[]")You could technically do this for all. The same technique will allow your script to use Java types from any library or 3rd party component and quickly prototype items. Building a user interface One major difference between JavaScript inside and outside of a web browser is the availability of a DOM object for rendering views. When run outside of the browser, JavaScript has full control to construct the entire user interface with pre-fabricated UI controls, charts, or components. The example below is a variation from the Nashorn and JavaFX guide to show how items work together. Nashorn has a -fx flag to make the user interface components available. With the example script below, just specify: jjs -fx -scripting fx.js -- "My title" #!/usr/bin/jjs -fx var Button = javafx.scene.control.Button; var StackPane = javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; var Scene = javafx.scene.Scene; var clickCounter=0; $STAGE.title = $ARG.length>0 ? $ARG[0] : "You didn't provide a title"; var button = new Button(); button.text = "Say 'Hello World'"; button.onAction = myFunctionForButtonClicking; var root = new StackPane(); root.children.add(button); $STAGE.scene = new Scene(root, 300, 250); $STAGE.show(); function myFunctionForButtonClicking(){   var text = "Click Counter: " + clickCounter;   button.setText(text);   clickCounter++;   print(text); } For a more advanced post on using Nashorn to build a high-performing UI, see JavaFX with Nashorn Canvas example. Interoperable with frameworks like Node, Backbone, or Facebook React The major benefit of any language is the interoperability gained by people and systems that can read, write, and use it for interactions. Because Nashorn is built for the ECMAScript specification, developers familiar with JavaScript frameworks can write their code and then have system administrators deploy and monitor the applications the same as any other Java application. A number of projects are also running Node applications on Nashorn through Project Avatar and the supported modules. In addition to the previously mentioned Nashorn tutorial, Benjamin has also written a post about Using Backbone.js with Nashorn. To show the multi-language power of the Java Runtime, there is another interesting example that unites Facebook React and Clojure on JDK 8’s Nashorn. Summary Nashorn provides a simple and fast way of executing JavaScript applications and bridging between the best of each language. By making the full range of Java libraries to JavaScript applications, and the quick prototyping style of JavaScript to Java applications, developers are free to work as they see fit. Software Architects and System Administrators can take advantage of one runtime and leverage any work that they have done to tune, monitor, and certify their systems. Additional information is available within: The Nashorn Users’ Guide Java Magazine’s article "Next Generation JavaScript Engine for the JVM." The Nashorn team’s primary blog or a very helpful collection of Nashorn links.

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• Personal Development : Time, Planning , Repairs & Maintenance

  - by Rajesh Pillai

  Personal Development : Time, Planning, Repairs & Maintenance These are just my thoughts, but some you may find something interesting in it. Please think over it. We may know many things, but still we always keeps procrastinating it. I have written this as I have heard many people coming back and saying they don’t have time to do things they like. These are my thoughts buy may be useful to someone else too. Certain things in life needs periodic repairs and maintenance. To cite some examples , your CAR, your HOUSE, your personal laptop/desktop, your health etc. Likewise there are certain other things in professional life that requires repair/ maintenance /or some kind of polishing, so that you always stay on top of it. But they are not always obvious. Some of them are - Improving your communication skills - Increasing your vocabulary - Upgrading your technical skills - Pursuing your hobby - Increasing your knowledge/awareness etc… etc… And then there are certain things that we are always short of…. one is TIME. We all know TIME is one of the most precious things in life and yet we all are very miserable at managing it. Remember you can only manage it and not control it. You can only control which you own or which you create. In theory time is infinite. So, there should be abundant of it. But remember one thing, you know this, it’s not reversible. Once it has elapsed you cannot live it again. Think over it. So, how do find that golden 25th hour every day. To find the 25th hour you need to reflect back on your current daily activities. Analyze them and see where you are spending most of your time and is it really important. Even the 8 hours that you spent in the office, is it spent fruitfully. At the end of the day is the 8 precious hour that you spent was worth it. Just reflect back on your activities. Did you learn something? If yes did you make a point to NOTE IT. If you didn’t NOTED it then was the time you spent really worth it. Just ponder over it. Some calculations of your daily activities where most of the time is spent. Let’s start (in no particular order though) - Sleep (6.5 hours) [Remember you only require 6 good hours of sleep every day]. Some may thing it is 8, but it’s a myth.   o To achive 6 hours of sleep and be in good health you can practice 15 minutes of daily meditation. So effectively you can    round it to 6.5 hours. - Morning chores(2 hours) : Some may need to prepare breakfast and all other things. - Office commuting (avg. to and fro 3 hours) - Office Work (avg 9.5 hours) Total Hours: 21 hours effective time which is spent irrespective of what you do. There may be some variations here and there. Still you have 3 hours EXTRA. Where do these 3 hours go? If you can find it, then you may get that golden 25th hour out of these 3 hours. Let’s discount 2 hours for contingencies, still you have 1 hour with you. If you can’t find it then you are living a direction less life. As you can see, the 25th Hour lies within the 24 hours of the day. It’s upto each one of us to find and make use of it. Now what can you do with that 25th hour i.e. 1 hour extra of your life. Imagine the possibility. Again some calculations 1 hour daily * 30 days = 30 hours every month 30 hours pm * 12 month = 360 hours every year. 360 hours every year seems very promising. Let’s add some contingencies, say, let’s be optimistic and say 50 % contingency. Still you have 180 hours every year. That leaves with 30 minutes every day of extra time. That’s hell a lot of time, if you could manage it. These may sound like a high talk [yes, it is, unless you apply these simple rules and rationalize your everyday living and stop procrastinating]. NOTE: I haven’t taken weekend, holidays and leaves into account. So, that leaves us with a lot of buffer time. You can meet family friends, relatives, other tasks, and yet have these 180 pure hours of joy every year. Do whatever you want to do with it. So, how important is this 180 hours per year to you? Just think over it. You may use it the way you like - 50 hours [pursue your hobby like drawing, crafting, learn dance, learn juggling, learn swimming, travelling hmm.. anything you like doing and you didn’t had time to do it.] - 30 hours you can learn a new programming language or technology (i.e. you can get comfortable with it) - 50 hours [improve existing skills] - 20 hours [improve you communication skill]. Do some light reading. - 30 hours [YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO]? So, if you had done this for one year you would have learnt a new programming language, upgraded existing skills, improved you communication etc.. If you had done this for two years.. imagine the level of personal development or growth which you may have attained….. If you had done this for three years….. NOW I think I don’t need to mention this… So, you still have TIME, as they say TIME is infinite. So, make judicious use of this precious thing. And never ever comeback saying “I don’t have time”. So, if you are RICH in TIME, everything else will be automatically taken care of, as those things may just be a byproduct of how you spend your time… So, happy TIMING your TIME everyday.

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• xml file save/read error (making a highscore system for XNA game)

  - by Eddy

  i get an error after i write player name to the file for second or third time (An unhandled exception of type 'System.InvalidOperationException' occurred in System.Xml.dll Additional information: There is an error in XML document (18, 17).) (in highscores load method In data = (HighScoreData)serializer.Deserialize(stream); it stops) the problem is that some how it adds additional "" at the end of my .dat file could anyone tell me how to fix this? the file before save looks: <?xml version="1.0"?> <HighScoreData xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <PlayerName> <string>neil</string> <string>shawn</string> <string>mark</string> <string>cindy</string> <string>sam</string> </PlayerName> <Score> <int>200</int> <int>180</int> <int>150</int> <int>100</int> <int>50</int> </Score> <Count>5</Count> </HighScoreData> the file after save looks: <?xml version="1.0"?> <HighScoreData xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <PlayerName> <string>Nick</string> <string>Nick</string> <string>neil</string> <string>shawn</string> <string>mark</string> </PlayerName> <Score> <int>210</int> <int>210</int> <int>200</int> <int>180</int> <int>150</int> </Score> <Count>5</Count> </HighScoreData>> the part of my code that does all of save load to xml is: DECLARATIONS PART [Serializable] public struct HighScoreData { public string[] PlayerName; public int[] Score; public int Count; public HighScoreData(int count) { PlayerName = new string[count]; Score = new int[count]; Count = count; } } IAsyncResult result = null; bool inputName; HighScoreData data; int Score = 0; public string NAME; public string HighScoresFilename = "highscores.dat"; Game1 constructor public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; Width = graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 960; Height = graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight =640; GamerServicesComponent GSC = new GamerServicesComponent(this); Components.Add(GSC); } Inicialize function (end of it) protected override void Initialize() { //other game code base.Initialize(); string fullpath =Path.Combine(HighScoresFilename); if (!File.Exists(fullpath)) { //If the file doesn't exist, make a fake one... // Create the data to save data = new HighScoreData(5); data.PlayerName[0] = "neil"; data.Score[0] = 200; data.PlayerName[1] = "shawn"; data.Score[1] = 180; data.PlayerName[2] = "mark"; data.Score[2] = 150; data.PlayerName[3] = "cindy"; data.Score[3] = 100; data.PlayerName[4] = "sam"; data.Score[4] = 50; SaveHighScores(data, HighScoresFilename); } } all methods for loading saving and output public static void SaveHighScores(HighScoreData data, string filename) { // Get the path of the save game string fullpath = Path.Combine("highscores.dat"); // Open the file, creating it if necessary FileStream stream = File.Open(fullpath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate); try { // Convert the object to XML data and put it in the stream XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(HighScoreData)); serializer.Serialize(stream, data); } finally { // Close the file stream.Close(); } } /* Load highscores */ public static HighScoreData LoadHighScores(string filename) { HighScoreData data; // Get the path of the save game string fullpath = Path.Combine("highscores.dat"); // Open the file FileStream stream = File.Open(fullpath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Read); try { // Read the data from the file XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(HighScoreData)); data = (HighScoreData)serializer.Deserialize(stream);//this is the line // where program gives an error } finally { // Close the file stream.Close(); } return (data); } /* Save player highscore when game ends */ private void SaveHighScore() { // Create the data to saved HighScoreData data = LoadHighScores(HighScoresFilename); int scoreIndex = -1; for (int i = 0; i < data.Count ; i++) { if (Score > data.Score[i]) { scoreIndex = i; break; } } if (scoreIndex > -1) { //New high score found ... do swaps for (int i = data.Count - 1; i > scoreIndex; i--) { data.PlayerName[i] = data.PlayerName[i - 1]; data.Score[i] = data.Score[i - 1]; } data.PlayerName[scoreIndex] = NAME; //Retrieve User Name Here data.Score[scoreIndex] = Score; // Retrieve score here SaveHighScores(data, HighScoresFilename); } } /* Iterate through data if highscore is called and make the string to be saved*/ public string makeHighScoreString() { // Create the data to save HighScoreData data2 = LoadHighScores(HighScoresFilename); // Create scoreBoardString string scoreBoardString = "Highscores:\n\n"; for (int i = 0; i<5;i++) { scoreBoardString = scoreBoardString + data2.PlayerName[i] + "-" + data2.Score[i] + "\n"; } return scoreBoardString; } when ill make this work i will start this code when i call game over (now i start it when i press some buttons, so i could test it faster) public void InputYourName() { if (result == null && !Guide.IsVisible) { string title = "Name"; string description = "Write your name in order to save your Score"; string defaultText = "Nick"; PlayerIndex playerIndex = new PlayerIndex(); result= Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput(playerIndex, title, description, defaultText, null, null); // NAME = result.ToString(); } if (result != null && result.IsCompleted) { NAME = Guide.EndShowKeyboardInput(result); result = null; inputName = false; SaveHighScore(); } } this where i call output to the screen (ill call this in highscores meniu section when i am done with debugging) spriteBatch.DrawString(Font1, "" + makeHighScoreString(),new Vector2(500,200), Color.White); }

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• Cost Comparison Hard Disk Drive to Solid State Drive on Price per Gigabyte - dispelling a myth!

  - by tonyrogerson

  It is often said that Hard Disk Drive storage is significantly cheaper per GiByte than Solid State Devices – this is wholly inaccurate within the database space. People need to look at the cost of the complete solution and not just a single component part in isolation to what is really required to meet the business requirement. Buying a single Hitachi Ultrastar 600GB 3.5” SAS 15Krpm hard disk drive will cost approximately £239.60 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012) compared to an OCZ 600GB Z-Drive R4 CM84 PCIe costing £2,316.54 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012); I’ve not included FusionIO ioDrive because there is no public pricing available for it – something I never understand and personally when companies do this I immediately think what are they hiding, luckily in FusionIO’s case the product is proven though is expensive compared to OCZ enterprise offerings. On the face of it the single 15Krpm hard disk has a price per GB of £0.39, the SSD £3.86; this is what you will see in the press and this is what sales people will use in comparing the two technologies – do not be fooled by this bullshit people! What is the requirement? The requirement is the database will have a static size of 400GB kept static through archiving so growth and trim will balance the database size, the client requires resilience, there will be several hundred call centre staff querying the database where queries will read a small amount of data but there will be no hot spot in the data so the randomness will come across the entire 400GB of the database, estimates predict that the IOps required will be approximately 4,000IOps at peak times, because it’s a call centre system the IO latency is important and must remain below 5ms per IO. The balance between read and write is 70% read, 30% write. The requirement is now defined and we have three of the most important pieces of the puzzle – space required, estimated IOps and maximum latency per IO. Something to consider with regard SQL Server; write activity requires synchronous IO to the storage media specifically the transaction log; that means the write thread will wait until the IO is completed and hardened off until the thread can continue execution, the requirement has stated that 30% of the system activity will be write so we can expect a high amount of synchronous activity. The hardware solution needs to be defined; two possible solutions: hard disk or solid state based; the real question now is how many hard disks are required to achieve the IO throughput, the latency and resilience, ditto for the solid state. Hard Drive solution On a test on an HP DL380, P410i controller using IOMeter against a single 15Krpm 146GB SAS drive, the throughput given on a transfer size of 8KiB against a 40GiB file on a freshly formatted disk where the partition is the only partition on the disk thus the 40GiB file is on the outer edge of the drive so more sectors can be read before head movement is required: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 3,733 IOps at an average latency of 34.06ms (34 MiB/s). The same test was done on the same disk but the test file was 130GiB: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 528 IOps at an average latency of 217.49ms (4 MiB/s). From the result it is clear random performance gets worse as the disk fills up – I’m currently writing an article on short stroking which will cover this in detail. Given the work load is random in nature looking at the random performance of the single drive when only 40 GiB of the 146 GB is used gives near the IOps required but the latency is way out. Luckily I have tested 6 x 15Krpm 146GB SAS 15Krpm drives in a RAID 0 using the same test methodology, for the same test above on a 130 GiB for each drive added the performance boost is near linear, for each drive added throughput goes up by 5 MiB/sec, IOps by 700 IOps and latency reducing nearly 50% per drive added (172 ms, 94 ms, 65 ms, 47 ms, 37 ms, 30 ms). This is because the same 130GiB is spread out more as you add drives 130 / 1, 130 / 2, 130 / 3 etc. so implicit short stroking is occurring because there is less file on each drive so less head movement required. The best latency is still 30 ms but we have the IOps required now, but that’s on a 130GiB file and not the 400GiB we need. Some reality check here: a) the drive randomness is more likely to be 50/50 and not a full 100% but the above has highlighted the effect randomness has on the drive and the more a drive fills with data the worse the effect. For argument sake let us assume that for the given workload we need 8 disks to do the job, for resilience reasons we will need 16 because we need to RAID 1+0 them in order to get the throughput and the resilience, RAID 5 would degrade performance. Cost for hard drives: 16 x £239.60 = £3,833.60 For the hard drives we will need disk controllers and a separate external disk array because the likelihood is that the server itself won’t take the drives, a quick spec off DELL for a PowerVault MD1220 which gives the dual pathing with 16 disks 146GB 15Krpm 2.5” disks is priced at £7,438.00, note its probably more once we had two controller cards to sit in the server in, racking etc. Minimum cost taking the DELL quote as an example is therefore: {Cost of Hardware} / {Storage Required} £7,438.60 / 400 = £18.595 per GB £18.59 per GiB is a far cry from the £0.39 we had been told by the salesman and the myth. Yes, the storage array is composed of 16 x 146 disks in RAID 10 (therefore 8 usable) giving an effective usable storage availability of 1168GB but the actual storage requirement is only 400 and the extra disks have had to be purchased to get the  IOps up. Solid State Drive solution A single card significantly exceeds the IOps and latency required, for resilience two will be required. ( £2,316.54 * 2 ) / 400 = £11.58 per GB With the SSD solution only two PCIe sockets are required, no external disk units, no additional controllers, no redundant controllers etc. Conclusion I hope by showing you an example that the myth that hard disk drives are cheaper per GiB than Solid State has now been dispelled - £11.58 per GB for SSD compared to £18.59 for Hard Disk. I’ve not even touched on the running costs, compare the costs of running 18 hard disks, that’s a lot of heat and power compared to two PCIe cards!Just a quick note: I've left a fair amount of information out due to this being a blog! If in doubt, email me :)I'll also deal with the myth that SSD's wear out at a later date as well - that's just way over done still, yes, 5 years ago, but now - no.

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• Does Test Driven Development (TDD) improve Quality and Correctness? (Part 1)

  - by David V. Corbin

  Since the dawn of the computer age, various methodologies have been introduced to improve quality and reduce cost. In this posting, I will by sharing my experiences with Test Driven Development; both its benefits and limitations. To start this topic, we need to agree on what TDD is. The first is to define each of the three words as used in this context. Test - An item or action which measures something in some quantifiable form. Driven - The primary motivation or focus of a series of activities (process) Development - All phases of a software project/product from concept through delivery. The above are very simple definitions that result in the following: "TDD is a process where the primary focus is on measuring and quantifying all aspects of the creation of a (software) product." There are many places where TDD is used outside of software development, even though it is not known by this name. Consider the (conventional) education process that most of us grew up on. The focus was to get the best grades as measured by different tests. Many of these tests measured rote memorization and not understanding of the subject matter. The result of this that many people graduated with high scores but without "quality and correctness" in their ability to utilize the subject matter (of course, the flip side is true where certain people DID understand the material but were not very good at taking this type of test). Returning to software development, let us look at some common scenarios. While these items are generally applicable regardless of platform, language and tools; the remainder of this post will utilize Microsoft Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) for examples. It should be realized that everyone does at least some aspect of TDD. At the most rudimentary level, getting a program to compile involves a "pass/fail" measurement (is the syntax valid) that drives their ability to proceed further (run the program). Other developers may create "Unit Tests" in the belief that having a test for every method/property of a class and good code coverage is the goal of TDD. These items may be helpful and even important, but really only address a small aspect of the overall effort. To see TDD in a bigger view, lets identify the various activities that are part of the Software Development LifeCycle. These are going to be presented in a Waterfall style for simplicity, but each item also occurs within Iterative methodologies such as Agile/Scrum. the key ones here are: Requirements Gathering Architecture Design Implementation Quality Assurance Can each of these items be subjected to a process which establishes metrics (quantified metrics) that reflect both the quality and correctness of each item? It should be clear that conventional Unit Tests do not apply to all of these items; at best they can verify that a local aspect (e.g. a Class/Method) of implementation matches the (test writers perspective of) the appropriate design document. So what can we do? For each of area, the goal is to create tests that are quantifiable and durable. The ability to quantify the measurements (beyond a simple pass/fail) is critical to tracking progress(eventually measuring the level of success that has been achieved) and for providing clear information on what items need to be addressed (along with the appropriate time to address them - in varying levels of detail) . Durability is important so that the test can be reapplied (ideally in an automated fashion) over the entire cycle. Returning for a moment back to our "education example", one must also be careful of how the tests are organized and how the measurements are taken. If a test is in a multiple choice format, there is a significant statistical probability that a correct answer might be the result of a random guess. Also, in many situations, having the student simply provide a final answer can obscure many important elements. For example, on a math test, having the student simply provide a numeric answer (rather than showing the methodology) may result in a complete mismatch between the process and the result. It is hard to determine which is worse: The student who makes a simple arithmetric error at one step of a long process (resulting in a wrong answer) or The student who (without providing the "workflow") uses a completely invalid approach, yet still comes up with the right number. The "Wrong Process"/"Right Answer" is probably the single biggest problem in software development. Even very simple items can suffer from this. As an example consider the following code for a "straight line" calculation....Is it correct? (for Integral Points)         int Solve(int m, int b, int x) { return m * x + b; }   Most people would respond "Yes". But let's take the question one step further... Is it correct for all possible values of m,b,x??? (no fair if you cheated by being focused on the bolded text!)  Without additional information regarding constrains on "the possible values of m,b,x" the answer must be NO, there is the risk of overflow/wraparound that will produce an incorrect result! To properly answer this question (i.e. Test the Code), one MUST be able to backtrack from the implementation through the design, and architecture all the way back to the requirements. And the requirement itself must be tested against the stakeholder(s). It is only when the bounding conditions are defined that it is possible to determine if the code is "Correct" and has "Quality". Yet, how many of us (myself included) have written such code without even thinking about it. In many canses we (think we) "know" what the bounds are, and that the code will be correct. As we all know, requirements change, "code reuse" causes implementations to be applied to different scenarios, etc. This leads directly to the types of system failures that plague so many projects. This approach to TDD is much more holistic than ones which start by focusing on the details. The fundamental concepts still apply: Each item should be tested. The test should be defined/implemented before (or concurrent with) the definition/implementation of the actual item. We also add concepts that expand the scope and alter the style by recognizing: There are many things beside "lines of code" that benefit from testing (measuring/evaluating in a formal way) Correctness and Quality can not be solely measured by "correct results" In the future parts, we will examine in greater detail some of the techniques that can be applied to each of these areas....

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• What Makes a Good Design Critic? CHI 2010 Panel Review

  - by jatin.thaker

  Author: Daniel Schwartz, Senior Interaction Designer, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Applications UX Chief Evangelist Patanjali Venkatacharya organized and moderated an innovative and stimulating panel discussion titled "What Makes a Good Design Critic? Food Design vs. Product Design Criticism" at CHI 2010, the annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The panelists included Janice Rohn, VP of User Experience at Experian; Tami Hardeman, a food stylist; Ed Seiber, a restaurant architect and designer; John Kessler, a food critic and writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and Larry Powers, Chef de Cuisine at Shaun's restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. Building off the momentum of his highly acclaimed panel at CHI 2009 on what interaction design can learn from food design (for which I was on the other side as a panelist), Venkatacharya brought together new people with different roles in the restaurant and software interaction design fields. The session was also quite delicious -- but more on that later. Criticism, as it applies to food and product or interaction design, was the tasty topic for this forum and showed that strong parallels exist between food and interaction design criticism. Figure 1. The panelists in discussion: (left to right) Janice Rohn, Ed Seiber, Tami Hardeman, and John Kessler. The panelists had great insights to share from their respective fields, and they enthusiastically discussed as if they were at a casual collegial dinner. John Kessler stated that he prefers to have one professional critic's opinion in general than a large sampling of customers, however, "Web sites like Yelp get users excited by the collective approach. People are attracted to things desired by so many." Janice Rohn added that this collective desire was especially true for users of consumer products. Ed Seiber remarked that while people looked to the popular view for their target tastes and product choices, "professional critics like John [Kessler] still hold a big weight on public opinion." Chef Powers indicated that chefs take in feedback from all sources, adding, "word of mouth is very powerful. We also look heavily at the sales of the dishes to see what's moving; what's selling and thus successful." Hearing this discussion validates our design work at Oracle in that we listen to our users (our diners) and industry feedback (our critics) to ensure an optimal user experience of our products. Rohn considers that restaurateur Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, which is about creating successful restaurant experiences, has many applicable parallels to user experience design. Meyer actually argues that the customer is not always right, but that "they must always feel heard." Seiber agreed, but noted "customers are not designers," and while designers need to listen to customer feedback, it is the designer's job to synthesize it. Seiber feels it's the critic's job to point out when something is missing or not well-prioritized. In interaction design, our challenges are quite similar, if not parallel. Software tasks are like puzzles that are in search of a solution on how to be best completed. As a food stylist, Tami Hardeman has the demanding and challenging task of presenting food to be as delectable as can be. To present food in its best light requires a lot of creativity and insight into consumer tastes. It's no doubt then that this former fashion stylist came up with the ultimate catch phrase to capture the emotion that clients want to draw from their users: "craveability." The phrase was a hit with the audience and panelists alike. Sometime later in the discussion, Seiber remarked, "designers strive to apply craveability to products, and I do so for restaurants in my case." Craveabilty is also very applicable to interaction design. Creating straightforward and smooth workflows for users of Oracle Applications is a primary goal for my colleagues. We want our users to really enjoy working with our products where it makes them more efficient and better at their jobs. That's our "craveability." Patanjali Venkatacharya asked the panel, "if a design's "craveability" appeals to some cultures but not to others, then what is the impact to the food or product design process?" Rohn stated that "taste is part nature and part nurture" and that the design must take the full context of a product's usage into consideration. Kessler added, "good design is about understanding the context" that the experience necessitates. Seiber remarked how important seat comfort is for diners and how the quality of seating will add so much to the complete dining experience. Sometimes if these non-food factors are not well executed, they can also take away from an otherwise pleasant dining experience. Kessler recounted a time when he was dining at a restaurant that actually had very good food, but the photographs hanging on all the walls did not fit in with the overall décor and created a negative overall dining experience. While the tastiness of the food is critical to a restaurant's success, it is a captivating complete user experience, as in interaction design, which will keep customers coming back and ultimately making the restaurant a hit. Figure 2. Patanjali Venkatacharya enjoyed the Sardinian flatbread salad. As a surprise Chef Powers brought out a signature dish from Shaun's restaurant for all the panelists to sample and critique. The Sardinian flatbread dish showcased Atlanta's taste for fresh and local produce and cheese at its finest as a salad served on a crispy flavorful flat bread. Hardeman said it could be photographed from any angle, a high compliment coming from a food stylist. Seiber really enjoyed the colors that the dish brought together and thought it would be served very well in a casual restaurant on a summer's day. The panel really appreciated the taste and quality of the different components and how the rosemary brought all the flavors together. Seiber remarked that "a lot of effort goes into the appearance of simplicity." Rohn indicated that the same notion holds true with software user interface design. A tremendous amount of work goes into crafting straightforward interfaces, including user research, prototyping, design iterations, and usability studies. Design criticism for food and software interfaces clearly share many similarities. Both areas value expert opinions and user feedback. Both areas understand the importance of great design needing to work well in its context. Last but not least, both food and interaction design criticism value "craveability" and how having users excited about experiencing and enjoying the designs is an important goal. Now if we can just improve the taste of software user interfaces, people may choose to dine on their enterprise applications over a fresh organic salad.

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• Reg Gets a Job at Red Gate (and what happens behind the scenes)

  - by red(at)work

  Mr Reg Gater works at one of Cambridge’s many high-tech companies. He doesn’t love his job, but he puts up with it because... well, it could be worse. Every day he drives to work around the Red Gate roundabout, wondering what his boss is going to blame him for today, and wondering if there could be a better job out there for him. By late morning he already feels like handing his notice in. He got the hacky look from his boss for being 5 minutes late, and then they ran out of tea. Again. He goes to the local sandwich shop for lunch, and picks up a Red Gate job menu and a Book of Red Gate while he’s waiting for his order. That night, he goes along to Cambridge Geek Nights and sees some very enthusiastic Red Gaters talking about the work they do; it sounds interesting and, of all things, fun. He takes a quick look at the job vacancies on the Red Gate website, and an hour later realises he’s still there – looking at videos, photos and people profiles. He especially likes the Red Gate’s Got Talent page, and is very impressed with Simon Johnson’s marathon time. He thinks that he’d quite like to work with such awesome people. It just so happens that Red Gate recently decided that they wanted to hire another hot shot team member. Behind the scenes, the wheels were set in motion: the recruitment team met with the hiring manager to understand exactly what they’re looking for, and to decide what interview tests to do, who will do the interviews, and to kick-start any interview training those people might need. Next up, a job description and job advert were written, and the job was put on the market. Reg applies, and his CV lands in the Recruitment team’s inbox and they open it up with eager anticipation that Reg could be the next awesome new starter. He looks good, and in a jiffy they’ve arranged an interview. Reg arrives for his interview, and is greeted by a smiley receptionist. She offers him a selection of drinks and he feels instantly relaxed. A couple of interviews and an assessment later, he gets a job offer. We make his day and he makes ours by accepting, and becoming one of the 60 new starters so far this year. Behind the scenes, things start moving all over again. The HR team arranges for a “Welcome” goodie box to be whisked out to him, prepares his contract, sends an email to Information Services (Or IS for short - we’ll come back to them), keeps in touch with Reg to make sure he knows what to expect on his first day, and of course asks him to fill in the all-important wiki questionnaire so his new colleagues can start to get to know him before he even joins. Meanwhile, the IS team see an email in SupportWorks from HR. They see that Reg will be starting in the sales team in a few days’ time, and they know exactly what to do. They pull out a new machine, and within minutes have used their automated deployment software to install every piece of software that a new recruit could ever need. They also check with Reg’s new manager to see if he has any special requirements that they could help with. Reg starts and is amazed to find a fully configured machine sitting on his desk, complete with stationery and all the other tools he’ll need to do his job. He feels even more cared for after he gets a workstation assessment, and realises he’d be comfier with an ergonomic keyboard and a footstool. They arrive minutes later, just like that. His manager starts him off on his induction and sales training. Along with job-specific training, he’ll also have a buddy to help him find his feet, and loads of pre-arranged demos and introductions. Reg settles in nicely, and is great at his job. He enjoys the canteen, and regularly eats one of the 40,000 meals provided each year. He gets used to the selection of teas that are available, develops a taste for champagne launch parties, and has his fair share of the 25,000 cups of coffee downed at Red Gate towers each year. He goes along to some Feel Good Fund events, and donates a little something to charity in exchange for a turn on the chocolate fountain. He’s looking a little scruffy, so he decides to get his hair cut in between meetings, just in time for the Red Gate birthday company photo. Reg starts a new project: identifying existing customers to up-sell to new bundles. He talks with the web team to generate lists of qualifying customers who haven’t recently been sent marketing emails, and sends emails out, using a new in-house developed tool to schedule follow-up calls in CRM for the same group. The customer responds, saying they’d like to upgrade but are having a licensing problem – Reg sends the issue to Support, and it gets routed to the web team. The team identifies a workaround, and the bug gets scheduled into the next maintenance release in a fortnight’s time (hey; they got lucky). With all the new stuff Reg is working on, he realises that he’d be way more efficient if he had a third monitor. He speaks to IS and they get him one - no argument. He also needs a test machine and then some extra memory. Done. He then thinks he needs an iPad, and goes to ask for one. He gets told to stop pushing his luck. Some time later, Reg’s wife has a baby, so Reg gets 2 weeks of paid paternity leave and a bunch of flowers sent to his house. He signs up to the childcare scheme so that he doesn’t have to pay National Insurance on the first £243 of his childcare. The accounts team makes it all happen seamlessly, as they did with his Give As You Earn payments, which come out of his wages and go straight to his favorite charity. Reg’s sales career is going well. He’s grateful for the help that he gets from the product support team. How do they answer all those 900-ish support calls so effortlessly each month? He’s impressed with the patches that are sent out to customers who find “interesting behavior” in their tools, and to the customers who just must have that new feature. A little later in his career at Red Gate, Reg decides that he’d like to learn about management. He goes on some management training specially customised for Red Gate, joins the Management Book Club, and gets together with other new managers to brainstorm how to get the most out of one to one meetings with his team. Reg decides to go for a game of Foosball to celebrate his good fortune with his team, and has to wait for Finance to finish. While he’s waiting, he reflects on the wonderful time he’s had at Red Gate. He can’t put his finger on what it is exactly, but he knows he’s on to a good thing. All of the stuff that happened to Reg didn’t just happen magically. We’ve got teams of people working relentlessly behind the scenes to make sure that everyone here is comfortable, safe, well fed and caffeinated to the max.

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric 2D game with moderate-scale multiplayer, approximately 20-30 players connected at once to a persistent server. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Physics/Movement The game doesn't have a true physics implementation, but uses the basic principles to implement movement. Rather than continually polling input, state changes (ie/ mouse down/up/move events) are used to change the state of the character entity the player is controlling. The player's direction (ie/ north-east) is combined with a constant speed and turned into a true 3D vector - the entity's velocity. In the main game loop, "Update" is called before "Draw". The update logic triggers a "physics update task" that tracks all entities with a non-zero velocity uses very basic integration to change the entities position. For example: entity.Position += entity.Velocity.Scale(ElapsedTime.Seconds) (where "Seconds" is a floating point value, but the same approach would work for millisecond integer values). The key point is that no interpolation is used for movement - the rudimentary physics engine has no concept of a "previous state" or "current state", only a position and velocity. State Change and Update Packets When the velocity of the character entity the player is controlling changes, a "move avatar" packet is sent to the server containing the entity's action type (stand, walk, run), direction (north-east), and current position. This is different from how 3D first person games work. In a 3D game the velocity (direction) can change frame to frame as the player moves around. Sending every state change would effectively transmit a packet per frame, which would be too expensive. Instead, 3D games seem to ignore state changes and send "state update" packets on a fixed interval - say, every 80-150ms. Since speed and direction updates occur much less frequently in my game, I can get away with sending every state change. Although all of the physics simulations occur at the same speed and are deterministic, latency is still an issue. For that reason, I send out routine position update packets (similar to a 3D game) but much less frequently - right now every 250ms, but I suspect with good prediction I can easily boost it towards 500ms. The biggest problem is that I've now deviated from the norm - all other documentation, guides, and samples online send routine updates and interpolate between the two states. It seems incompatible with my architecture, and I need to come up with a better movement prediction algorithm that is closer to a (very basic) "networked physics" architecture. The server then receives the packet and determines the players speed from it's movement type based on a script (Is the player able to run? Get the player's running speed). Once it has the speed, it combines it with the direction to get a vector - the entity's velocity. Some cheat detection and basic validation occurs, and the entity on the server side is updated with the current velocity, direction, and position. Basic throttling is also performed to prevent players from flooding the server with movement requests. After updating its own entity, the server broadcasts an "avatar position update" packet to all other players within range. The position update packet is used to update the client side physics simulations (world state) of the remote clients and perform prediction and lag compensation. Prediction and Lag Compensation As mentioned above, clients are authoritative for their own position. Except in cases of cheating or anomalies, the client's avatar will never be repositioned by the server. No extrapolation ("move now and correct later") is required for the client's avatar - what the player sees is correct. However, some sort of extrapolation or interpolation is required for all remote entities that are moving. Some sort of prediction and/or lag-compensation is clearly required within the client's local simulation / physics engine. Problems I've been struggling with various algorithms, and have a number of questions and problems: Should I be extrapolating, interpolating, or both? My "gut feeling" is that I should be using pure extrapolation based on velocity. State change is received by the client, client computes a "predicted" velocity that compensates for lag, and the regular physics system does the rest. However, it feels at odds to all other sample code and articles - they all seem to store a number of states and perform interpolation without a physics engine. When a packet arrives, I've tried interpolating the packet's position with the packet's velocity over a fixed time period (say, 200ms). I then take the difference between the interpolated position and the current "error" position to compute a new vector and place that on the entity instead of the velocity that was sent. However, the assumption is that another packet will arrive in that time interval, and it's incredibly difficult to "guess" when the next packet will arrive - especially since they don't all arrive on fixed intervals (ie/ state changes as well). Is the concept fundamentally flawed, or is it correct but needs some fixes / adjustments? What happens when a remote player stops? I can immediately stop the entity, but it will be positioned in the "wrong" spot until it moves again. If I estimate a vector or try to interpolate, I have an issue because I don't store the previous state - the physics engine has no way to say "you need to stop after you reach position X". It simply understands a velocity, nothing more complex. I'm reluctant to add the "packet movement state" information to the entities or physics engine, since it violates basic design principles and bleeds network code across the rest of the game engine. What should happen when entities collide? There are three scenarios - the controlling player collides locally, two entities collide on the server during a position update, or a remote entity update collides on the local client. In all cases I'm uncertain how to handle the collision - aside from cheating, both states are "correct" but at different time periods. In the case of a remote entity it doesn't make sense to draw it walking through a wall, so I perform collision detection on the local client and cause it to "stop". Based on point #2 above, I might compute a "corrected vector" that continually tries to move the entity "through the wall" which will never succeed - the remote avatar is stuck there until the error gets too high and it "snaps" into position. How do games work around this?

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• Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

  - by mbcrump

  Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2)  ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you.  Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source.   So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish.  After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  IStart with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• Guide to MySQL & NoSQL, Webinar Q&A

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 959 5469 Homework 45 12 6416 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Yesterday we ran a webinar discussing the demands of next generation web services and how blending the best of relational and NoSQL technologies enables developers and architects to deliver the agility, performance and availability needed to be successful. Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into areas like auto-sharding and cross-shard JOINs, replication, performance, client libraries, etc. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the webinar. Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to those looking at NoSQL capabilities within MySQL: - On-Demand webinar (coming soon!) - Slides used during the webinar - Guide to MySQL and NoSQL whitepaper  - MySQL Cluster demo, including NoSQL interfaces, auto-sharing, high availability, etc.  So here is the Q&A from the event  Q. Where does MySQL Cluster fit in to the CAP theorem? A. MySQL Cluster is flexible. A single Cluster will prefer consistency over availability in the presence of network partitions. A pair of Clusters can be configured to prefer availability over consistency. A full explanation can be found on the MySQL Cluster & CAP Theorem blog post.  Q. Can you configure the number of replicas? (the slide used a replication factor of 1) Yes. A cluster is configured by an .ini file. The option NoOfReplicas sets the number of originals and replicas: 1 = no data redundancy, 2 = one copy etc. Usually there's no benefit in setting it >2. Q. Interestingly most (if not all) of the NoSQL databases recommend having 3 copies of data (the replication factor).    Yes, with configurable quorum based Reads and writes. MySQL Cluster does not need a quorum of replicas online to provide service. Systems that require a quorum need > 2 replicas to be able to tolerate a single failure. Additionally, many NoSQL systems take liberal inspiration from the original GFS paper which described a 3 replica configuration. MySQL Cluster avoids the need for a quorum by using a lightweight arbitrator. You can configure more than 2 replicas, but this is a tradeoff between incrementally improved availability, and linearly increased cost. Q. Can you have cross node group JOINS? Wouldn't that run into the risk of flooding the network? MySQL Cluster 7.2 supports cross nodegroup joins. A full cross-join can require a large amount of data transfer, which may bottleneck on network bandwidth. However, for more selective joins, typically seen with OLTP and light analytic applications, cross node-group joins give a great performance boost and network bandwidth saving over having the MySQL Server perform the join. Q. Are the details of the benchmark available anywhere? According to my calculations it results in approx. 350k ops/sec per processor which is the largest number I've seen lately The details are linked from Mikael Ronstrom's blog The benchmark uses a benchmarking tool we call flexAsynch which runs parallel asynchronous transactions. It involved 100 byte reads, of 25 columns each. Regarding the per-processor ops/s, MySQL Cluster is particularly efficient in terms of throughput/node. It uses lock-free minimal copy message passing internally, and maximizes ID cache reuse. Note also that these are in-memory tables, there is no need to read anything from disk. Q. Is access control (like table) planned to be supported for NoSQL access mode? Currently we have not seen much need for full SQL-like access control (which has always been overkill for web apps and telco apps). So we have no plans, though especially with memcached it is certainly possible to turn-on connection-level access control. But specifically table level controls are not planned. Q. How is the performance of memcached APi with MySQL against memcached+MySQL or any other Object Cache like Ecache with MySQL DB? With the memcache API we generally see a memcached response in less than 1 ms. and a small cluster with one memcached server can handle tens of thousands of operations per second. Q. Can .NET can access MemcachedAPI? Yes, just use a .Net memcache client such as the enyim or BeIT memcache libraries. Q. Is the row level locking applicable when you update a column through memcached API? An update that comes through memcached uses a row lock and then releases it immediately. Memcached operations like "INCREMENT" are actually pushed down to the data nodes. In most cases the locks are not even held long enough for a network round trip. Q. Has anyone published an example using something like PHP? I am assuming that you just use the PHP memcached extension to hook into the memcached API. Is that correct? Not that I'm aware of but absolutely you can use it with php or any of the other drivers Q. For beginner we need more examples. Take a look here for a fully worked example Q. Can I access MySQL using Cobol (Open Cobol) or C and if so where can I find the coding libraries etc? A. There is a cobol implementation that works well with MySQL, but I do not think it is Open Cobol. Also there is a MySQL C client library that is a standard part of every mysql distribution Q. Is there a place to go to find help when testing and/implementing the NoSQL access? If using Cluster then you can use the [email protected] alias or post on the MySQL Cluster forum Q. Are there any white papers on this?  Yes - there is more detail in the MySQL Guide to NoSQL whitepaper If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to use the comments below!

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• Disk Drive not working

  - by user287681

  The CD/DVD drive on my sisters' (I'm helping her shift from Win. XP (now officially deprecated by Microsoft) to Ubuntu) system. Now, it may end up being a failed attempt, all together (Almost the whole last year (when she's been on XP) the disk drive hasn't (not even powering on) been working.), I just want to make sure I've explored every remote possibility. Because I figure, "Huh, now that I've got Ubuntu running, instead of XP, that (just) might make a difference.". I have tried using the sudo lshw command in the terminal, to (seemingly) no avil, but, who knows, you might be able to make something out of it. Here's the output: kyra@kyra-Satellite-P105:~$ sudo lshw [sudo] password for kyra: kyra-satellite-p105 description: Notebook product: Satellite P105 () vendor: TOSHIBA version: PSPA0U-0TN01M serial: 96084354W width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4 vsyscall32 configuration: administrator_password=disabled boot=oem-specific chassis=notebook frontpanel_password=unknown keyboard_password=unknown power-on_password=disabled uuid=00900559-F88E-D811-82E0-00163680E992 *-core description: Motherboard product: Satellite P105 vendor: TOSHIBA physical id: 0 version: Not Applicable serial: 1234567890 *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: TOSHIBA physical id: 0 version: V4.70 date: 01/19/20092 size: 92KiB capabilities: isa pci pcmcia pnp upgrade shadowing escd cdboot acpi usb biosbootspecification *-cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5500 @ 1.66GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5 slot: U2E1 size: 1667MHz capacity: 1667MHz width: 64 bits clock: 166MHz capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm dtherm cpufreq *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1 Cache size: 16KiB capacity: 16KiB capabilities: asynchronous internal write-back *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2 Cache size: 2MiB capabilities: burst external write-back *-memory description: System Memory physical id: c slot: System board or motherboard size: 2GiB capacity: 3GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR2 Synchronous physical id: 0 slot: M1 size: 1GiB width: 64 bits *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR2 Synchronous physical id: 1 slot: M2 size: 1GiB width: 64 bits *-pci description: Host bridge product: Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 03 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: driver=agpgart-intel resources: irq:0 *-display:0 description: VGA compatible controller product: Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 03 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=i915 latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:d0200000-d027ffff ioport:1800(size=8) memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0300000-d033ffff *-display:1 UNCLAIMED description: Display controller product: Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.1 version: 03 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:d0280000-d02fffff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 02 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:44 memory:d0340000-d0343fff *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:3000(size=4096) memory:84000000-841fffff ioport:84200000(size=2097152) *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.1 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:41 ioport:4000(size=4096) memory:84400000-846fffff ioport:84700000(size=2097152) *-network description: Wireless interface product: PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 02 serial: 00:13:02:d6:d2:35 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwl3945 driverversion=3.13.0-29-generic firmware=15.32.2.9 ip=10.110.20.157 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:43 memory:84400000-84400fff *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 3 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.2 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:42 ioport:5000(size=4096) memory:84900000-84afffff ioport:84b00000(size=2097152) *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 ioport:1820(size=32) *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.1 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:1840(size=32) *-usb:2 description: USB controller product: NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.2 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:18 ioport:1860(size=32) *-usb:3 description: USB controller product: NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.3 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: uhci bus_master configuration: driver=uhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 ioport:1880(size=32) *-usb:4 description: USB controller product: NM10/ICH7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d.7 bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.7 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci-pci latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:d0544000-d05443ff *-pci:3 description: PCI bridge product: 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1e bus info: pci@0000:00:1e.0 version: e2 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci subtractive_decode bus_master cap_list resources: ioport:2000(size=4096) memory:d0000000-d00fffff ioport:80000000(size=67108864) *-pcmcia description: CardBus bridge product: PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller vendor: Texas Instruments physical id: 4 bus info: pci@0000:0a:04.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pcmcia bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=yenta_cardbus latency=176 maxlatency=5 mingnt=192 resources: irq:17 memory:d0004000-d0004fff ioport:2400(size=256) ioport:2800(size=256) memory:80000000-83ffffff memory:88000000-8bffffff *-firewire description: FireWire (IEEE 1394) product: PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller vendor: Texas Instruments physical id: 4.1 bus info: pci@0000:0a:04.1 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm ohci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=firewire_ohci latency=64 maxlatency=4 mingnt=3 resources: irq:17 memory:d0007000-d00077ff memory:d0000000-d0003fff *-storage description: Mass storage controller product: 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD) vendor: Texas Instruments physical id: 4.2 bus info: pci@0000:0a:04.2 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: storage pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=tifm_7xx1 latency=64 maxlatency=4 mingnt=7 resources: irq:17 memory:d0005000-d0005fff *-generic description: SD Host controller product: PCIxx12 SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller vendor: Texas Instruments physical id: 4.3 bus info: pci@0000:0a:04.3 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=sdhci-pci latency=64 maxlatency=4 mingnt=7 resources: irq:17 memory:d0007800-d00078ff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: PRO/100 VE Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 8 bus info: pci@0000:0a:08.0 logical name: eth0 version: 02 serial: 00:16:36:80:e9:92 size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e100 driverversion=3.5.24-k2-NAPI duplex=half latency=64 link=no maxlatency=56 mingnt=8 multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:20 memory:d0006000-d0006fff ioport:2000(size=64) *-isa description: ISA bridge product: 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=lpc_ich latency=0 resources: irq:0 *-ide description: IDE interface product: 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7-M Family) SATA Controller [IDE mode] vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ide pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ata_piix latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:1f0(size=8) ioport:3f6 ioport:170(size=8) ioport:376 ioport:18b0(size=16) *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: NM10/ICH7 Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 02 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: ioport:18c0(size=32) *-scsi physical id: 1 logical name: scsi0 capabilities: emulated *-disk description: ATA Disk product: ST9250421AS vendor: Seagate physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: SD13 serial: 5TH0B2HB size: 232GiB (250GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=000d7fd5 *-volume:0 description: EXT4 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 logical name: / version: 1.0 serial: 13bb4bdd-8cc9-40e2-a490-dbe436c2a02d size: 230GiB capacity: 230GiB capabilities: primary bootable journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2014-06-01 17:37:01 filesystem=ext4 lastmountpoint=/ modified=2014-06-01 21:15:21 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered mounted=2014-06-01 21:15:21 state=mounted *-volume:1 description: Extended partition physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 size: 2037MiB capacity: 2037MiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 2037MiB capabilities: nofs *-remoteaccess UNCLAIMED vendor: Intel physical id: 1 capabilities: inbound kyra@kyra-Satellite-P105:~$

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• April Oracle Database Events

  - by Mandy Ho

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 17-18, 2012 – Moscow, Russia Oracle Develop Conference The Oracle database developer conference, Oracle Develop, will visit Moscow, Russia and Hyderabad, India this spring. Oracle Develop includes a database development track, which contains .NET sessions and hands-on lab led by an Oracle .NET product manager. Register today before the event fills up. http://www.oracle.com/javaone/ru-en/index.html Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 24, 26 – San Diego, CA & San Jose, CA ISC2 Leadership Regional Event Series Oracle at (ISC)2 Security Leadership Series: Herding Clouds -- Managing Cloud Security Concerns and Expectations Join us for his interactive day-long session where industry leaders, including Oracle solution experts, will talk about how to: dispel the top Cloud security myths minimize "rogue Cloud" implementations identify potential compliance pitfalls and how to avoid them develop contract language for your cloud providers manage users across your fractured datacenter leverage existing technologies to protect data as it moves from the enterprise to the cloud http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=146972&src=7239493&src=7239493&Act=228 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 22-26, 2012 – Las Vegas, NV IOUG Collaborate 12 From April 22-26, 2012, Oracle takes Las Vegas. Thousands of Oracle professionals will descend upon the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for a weeks worth of education sessions, networking opportunities and more, at the only user-driven and user-run Oracle conference - COLLABORATE 12.  Your COLLABORATE 12 - IOUG Forum registration comes complete with a bonus- a full day Deep Dive education program on Sunday! Choose from numerous hot topics, including Real World Performance, High Availability and more, presented by legendary and seasoned Oracle pros, including Tom Kyte and Craig Shallahamer. http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=143637&src=7360364&src=7360364&Act=5 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events: April 16, 2012 – Columbus, Ohio Ohio Oracle Users Group Higher Performance PL/PQL and Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL New Features – Featuring Steven Feuerstein http://www.ooug.org/ Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 26, 2012- Irving, TX Dallas Oracle Users Group Oracle Database Forum: 5-7PM Oracle Corporation, 6031 Connection Drive Irving, TX http://memberservices.membee.com/538/irmevents.aspx?id=64 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Apr 30, 2012- Los Angeles, CA Real World Performance Tour A full day of real world database performance with: Tom Kyte, author of the ever popular AskTom Blog, Andrew Holdsworth, head of Oracle's Real World Performance Team, and Graham Wood, renowned Oracle Database performance architect. Through discussion, debate and demos, they’ll show you how to master performance engineering topics like: Best practices for designing hardware architectures and how to spot and fix bad design. How to develop applications that deliver the fastest possible performance without sacrificing accuracy.  New for 2012! Updates on Enterprise Manager, Exadata, and what these technologies mean to your current systems. http://www.ioug.org/Events/ADayofRealWorldPerformance/tabid/194/Default.aspx

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• Waterfall Model (SDLC) vs. Prototyping Model

  The characters in the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare can easily be used to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the Waterfall and Prototyping software development models. This children fable is about a race between a consistently slow moving but steadfast turtle and an extremely fast but unreliable rabbit. After closely comparing each character’s attributes in correlation with both software development models, a trend seems to appear in that the Waterfall closely resembles the Tortoise in that Waterfall Model is typically a slow moving process that is broken up in to multiple sequential steps that must be executed in a standard linear pattern. The Tortoise can be quoted several times in the story saying “Slow and steady wins the race.” This is the perfect mantra for the Waterfall Model in that this model is seen as a cumbersome and slow moving. Waterfall Model Phases Requirement Analysis & Definition This phase focuses on defining requirements for a project that is to be developed and determining if the project is even feasible. Requirements are collected by analyzing existing systems and functionality in correlation with the needs of the business and the desires of the end users. The desired output for this phase is a list of specific requirements from the business that are to be designed and implemented in the subsequent steps. In addition this phase is used to determine if any value will be gained by completing the project. System Design This phase focuses primarily on the actual architectural design of a system, and how it will interact within itself and with other existing applications. Projects at this level should be viewed at a high level so that actual implementation details are decided in the implementation phase. However major environmental decision like hardware and platform decision are typically decided in this phase. Furthermore the basic goal of this phase is to design an application at the system level in those classes, interfaces, and interactions are defined. Additionally decisions about scalability, distribution and reliability should also be considered for all decisions. The desired output for this phase is a functional  design document that states all of the architectural decisions that have been made in regards to the project as well as a diagrams like a sequence and class diagrams. Software Design This phase focuses primarily on the refining of the decisions found in the functional design document. Classes and interfaces are further broken down in to logical modules based on the interfaces and interactions previously indicated. The output of this phase is a formal design document. Implementation / Coding This phase focuses primarily on implementing the previously defined modules in to units of code. These units are developed independently are intergraded as the system is put together as part of a whole system. Software Integration & Verification This phase primarily focuses on testing each of the units of code developed as well as testing the system as a whole. There are basic types of testing at this phase and they include: Unit Test and Integration Test. Unit Test are built to test the functionality of a code unit to ensure that it preforms its desired task. Integration testing test the system as a whole because it focuses on results of combining specific units of code and validating it against expected results. The output of this phase is a test plan that includes test with expected results and actual results. System Verification This phase primarily focuses on testing the system as a whole in regards to the list of project requirements and desired operating environment. Operation & Maintenance his phase primarily focuses on handing off the competed project over to the customer so that they can verify that all of their requirements have been met based on their original requirements. This phase will also validate the correctness of their requirements and if any changed need to be made. In addition, any problems not resolved in the previous phase will be handled in this section. The Waterfall Model’s linear and sequential methodology does offer a project certain advantages and disadvantages. Advantages of the Waterfall Model Simplistic to implement and execute for projects and/or company wide Limited demand on resources Large emphasis on documentation Disadvantages of the Waterfall Model Completed phases cannot be revisited regardless if issues arise within a project Accurate requirement are never gather prior to the completion of the requirement phase due to the lack of clarification in regards to client’s desires. Small changes or errors that arise in applications may cause additional problems The client cannot change any requirements once the requirements phase has been completed leaving them no options for changes as they see their requirements changes as the customers desires change. Excess documentation Phases are cumbersome and slow moving Learn more about the Major Process in the Sofware Development Life Cycle and Waterfall Model. Conversely, the Hare shares similar traits with the prototyping software development model in that ideas are rapidly converted to basic working examples and subsequent changes are made to quickly align the project with customers desires as they are formulated and as software strays from the customers vision. The basic concept of prototyping is to eliminate the use of well-defined project requirements. Projects are allowed to grow as the customer needs and request grow. Projects are initially designed according to basic requirements and are refined as requirement become more refined. This process allows customer to feel their way around the application to ensure that they are developing exactly what they want in the application This model also works well for determining the feasibility of certain approaches in regards to an application. Prototypes allow for quickly developing examples of implementing specific functionality based on certain techniques. Advantages of Prototyping Active participation from users and customers Allows customers to change their mind in specifying requirements Customers get a better understanding of the system as it is developed Earlier bug/error detection Promotes communication with customers Prototype could be used as final production Reduced time needed to develop applications compared to the Waterfall method Disadvantages of Prototyping Promotes constantly redefining project requirements that cause major system rewrites Potential for increased complexity of a system as scope of the system expands Customer could believe the prototype as the working version. Implementation compromises could increase the complexity when applying updates and or application fixes When companies trying to decide between the Waterfall model and Prototype model they need to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages for both models. Typically smaller companies or projects that have major time constraints typically head for more of a Prototype model approach because it can reduce the time needed to complete the project because there is more of a focus on building a project and less on defining requirements and scope prior to the start of a project. On the other hand, Companies with well-defined requirements and time allowed to generate proper documentation should steer towards more of a waterfall model because they are in a position to obtain clarified requirements and have to design and optimal solution prior to the start of coding on a project.

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• Get Information to Your Blog with Microsoft Broadcaster

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you often have people ask you for advice about technology, or do you write tech-focused blog or newsletter?  Here’s how you can get information to share with your readers about Microsoft technology with Microsoft Broadcaster. Microsoft Broadcaster is a new service from Microsoft to help publishers, bloggers, developers, and other IT professionals find relevant information and resources from Microsoft.  You can use it to help discover things to write about, or simply discover new information about the technology you use.  Broadcaster will also notify you when new resources are available about the topics that interest you.  Let’s look at how you could use this to expand your blog and help your users. Getting Started Head over to the Microsoft Broadcaster site (link below), and click Join to get started. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new account if you don’t already have one. Near the bottom of the page, add information about your blog, newsletter, or group that you want to share Broadcaster information with.  Click Add when you’re done entering information.  You can enter as many sites or groups as you wish. When you’ve entered all of your information, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.  Broadcaster will then let you know your information has been submitted, but you’ll need to wait several days to see if you are approved or not. Our application was approved about 2 days after applying, though this may vary.  When you’re approved, you’ll receive an email letting you know.  Return to the Broadcaster website (link below), but this time, click Sign in. Accept the terms of use by clicking I Accept at the bottom of the page. Confirm that your information entered previously is correct, and then click Configure my keywords at the bottom of the page. Now you can pick the topics you want to stay informed about.  Type keywords in the textbox, and it will bring up relevant topics with IntelliSense. Here we’ve added several topics to keep up with. Next select the Microsoft Products you want to keep track of.  If the product you want to keep track of is not listed, make sure to list it in the keywords section as above. Finally, select the types of content you wish to see, including articles, eBooks, webcasts, and more. Finally, when everything’s entered, click Configure My Alerts at the bottom of the page. Broadcaster can automatically email you when new content is found.  If you would like this, click Subscribe.  Otherwise, simply click Access Dashboard to go ahead and find your personalized content. If you choose to receive emails of new content, you’ll have to configure it with Windows Live Alerts.  Click Continue to set this up. Select if you want to receive Messenger alerts, emails, and/or text messages when new content is available.  Click Save when you’re finished. Finally, select how often you want to be notified, and then click Access Dashboard to view the content currently available. Finding Content For Your Blog, Site, or Group Now you can find content specified for your interests from the dashboard.  To access the dashboard in the future, simply go to the Broadcaster site and click Sign In. Here you can see available content, and can search for different topics or customize the topics shown. You’ll see snippets of information from various Microsoft videos, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, and more, depending on your settings.  Click the link at the top of the snippet to view the content, or right-click and copy the link to use in emails or on social networks like Twitter. If you’d like to add this snippet to your website or blog, click the Download content link at the bottom.   Now you can preview what the snippet will look like on your site, and change the width or height to fit your site.  You can view and edit the source code of the snippet from the box at the bottom, and then copy it to use on your site. Copy the code, and paste it in the HTML of a blog post, email, webpage, or anywhere else you wish to share it.  Here we’re pasting it into the HTML editor in Windows Live Writer so we can post it to a blog. After adding a title and opening paragraph, we have a nice blog post that only took a few minutes to put together but should still be useful for our readers.  You can check out the blog post we created at the link below. Readers can click on the links, which will direct them to the content on Microsoft’s websites. Conclusion If you frequently need to find educational and informative content about Microsoft products and services, Broadcaster can be a great service to keep you up to date.  The service worked quite good in our tests, and generally found relevant content to our keywords.  We had difficulty embedding links to eBooks that were listed by Broadcaster, but everything else worked for us.  Now you can always have high quality content to help your customers, coworkers, friends, and more, and you just might find something that will help you, too! Link Microsoft Broadcaster (registration required) Example Post at Techinch.com with Content from Microsoft Broadcaster Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPAnnouncing the How-To Geek BlogsNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineHow To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Fix Common Inkjet Printer Errors Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com

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• Personal Technology – Laptop Screen Blank – No Post – No BIOS – No Boot

  - by Pinal Dave

  If your laptop Screen is Blank and there is no POST, BIOS or boot, you can follow the steps mentioned here and there are chances that it will work if there is no hardware failure inside. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Those, who care about how I come up with this not SQL related blog post, here is the very funny true story. If you are a married man, you will know what I am going to describe next. May be you have faced the same situation or at least you feel and understand my situation. My wife’s computer suddenly stops working when she was searching for my daughter’s mathematics worksheets online. While the fatal accident happened with my wife’s computer (which was my loyal computer for over 4 years before she got it), I was working in my home office, fixing a high priority issue (live order’s database was corrupted) with one of the largest eCommerce websites.  While I was working on production server where I was fixing database corruption, my wife ran to my home office. Here is how the conversation went: Wife: This computer does not work. I: Restart it. Wife: It does not start. I: What did you do with it? Wife: Nothing, it just stopped working. I: Okey, I will look into it later, working on the very urgent issue. Wife: I was printing my daughter’s worksheet. I: Hm.. Okey. Wife: It was the mathematics worksheet, which you promised you will teach but you never get around to do it, so I am doing it myself. I: Thanks. I appreciate it. I am very busy with this issue as million dollar transaction are not happening as the database got corrupted and … Wife: So what … umm… You mean to say that you care about this customer more than your daughter. You know she got A+ in every other class but in mathematics she got only A. She missed that extra credit question. I: She is only 4, it is okay. Wife: She is 4.5 years old not 4. So you are not going to fix this computer which does not start at all. I think our daughter next time will even get lower grades as her dad is busy fixing something. I: Alright, I give up bring me that computer. Our daughter who was listening everything so far she finally decided to speak up. Daughter: Dad, it is a laptop not computer. I: Yes, sweety get that laptop here and your dad is going to fix the this small issue of million dollar issue later on. I decided to pay attention to my wife’s computer. She was right. No matter what I do, it will not boot up, it will not start, no BIOS, no POST screen. The computer starts for a second but nothing comes up on the screen. The light indicating hard drive comes up for a second and goes off. Nothing happens. I removed every single USB drive from the laptop but it still would not start. It was indeed no fun for me. Finally I remember my days when I was not married and used to study in University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I remembered that I used to have very old second (or maybe third or fourth) hand computer with me. In polite words, I had pre-owned computer and it used to face very similar issues again and again. I had small routine I used to follow to fix my old computer and I had decided to follow the same steps again with this computer. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Once I followed above process, her computer worked. I was very delighted, that now I can go back to solving the problem where millions of transactions were waiting as I was fixing corrupted database and it the current state of the database was in emergency mode. Once I fixed the computer, I looked at my wife and asked. I: Well, now this laptop is back online, can I get guaranteed that she will get A+ in mathematics in this week’s quiz? Wife: Sure, I promise. I: Fantastic. After saying that I started to look at my database corruption and my wife interrupted me again. Wife: Btw, I forgot to tell you. Our daughter had got A in mathematics last week but she had another quiz today and she already have received A+ there. I kept my promise. I looked at her and she started to walk outside room, before I say anything my phone rang. DBA from eCommerce company had called me, as he was wondering why there is no activity from my side in last 10 minutes. DBA: Hey bud, are you still connected. I see um… no activity in last 10 minutes. I: Oh, well, I was just saving the world. I am back now. After two hours I had fixed the database corruption and everything was normal. I was outsmarted by my wife but honestly I still respect and love her the same as she is the one who spends countless hours with our daughter so she does not miss me and I can continue writing blogs and keep on doing technology evangelism. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Free Document/Content Management System Using SharePoint 2010

  - by KunaalKapoor

  That’s right, it’s true. You can use the free version of SharePoint 2010 to meet your document and content management needs and even run your public facing website or an internal knowledge bank.  SharePoint Foundation 2010 is free. It may not have all the features that you get in the enterprise license but it still has enough to cater to your needs to build a document management system and replace age old file shares or folders. I’ve built a dozen content management sites for internal and public use exploiting SharePoint. There are hundreds of web content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix).  On one hand we have commercial platforms like SharePoint, SiteCore, and Ektron etc. which are the most frequently used and on the other hand there are free options like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone etc. which are pretty common popular as well. But I would be very surprised if anyone was able to find a single CMS platform that is all things to all people. Infact not a lot of people consider SharePoint’s free version under the free CMS side but its high time organizations benefit from this. Through this blog post I wanted to present SharePoint Foundation as an option for running a FREE CMS platform. Even if you knew that there is a free version of SharePoint, what most people don’t realize is that SharePoint Foundation is a great option for running web sites of all kinds – not just team sites. It is a great option for many reasons, but in reality it is supported by Microsoft, and above all it is FREE (yay!), and it is extremely easy to get started.  From a functionality perspective – it’s hard to beat SharePoint. Even the free version, SharePoint Foundation, offers simple data connectivity (through BCS), cross browser support, accessibility, support for Office Web Apps, blogs, wikis, templates, document support, health analyzer, support for presence, and MUCH more.I often get asked: “Can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?” The answer really depends on ·          What are your specific requirements? ·          What systems you currently have in place for managing documents. ·          And of course how much money you have J Benefits? Not many large organizations have benefited from SharePoint yet. For some it has been an IT project to see what they can achieve with it, for others it has been used as a collaborative platform or in many cases an extended intranet. SharePoint 2010 has changed the game slightly as the improvements that Microsoft have made have been noted by organizations, and we are seeing a lot of companies starting to build specific business applications using SharePoint as the basis, and nearly every business process will require documents at some stage. If you require a document management system and have SharePoint in place then it can be a relatively straight forward decision to use SharePoint, as long as you have reviewed the considerations just discussed. The collaborative nature of SharePoint 2010 is also a massive advantage, as specific departmental or project sites can be created quickly and easily that allow workers to interact in a variety of different ways using one source of information.  This also benefits an organization with regards to how they manage the knowledge that they have, as if all of their information is in one source then it is naturally easier to search and manage. Is SharePoint right for your organization? As just discussed, this can only be determined after defining your requirements and also planning a longer term strategy for how you will manage your documents and information. A key factor to look at is how the users would interact with the system and how much value would it get for your organization. The amount of data and documents that organizations are creating is increasing rapidly each year. Therefore the ability to archive this information, whilst keeping the ability to know what you have and where it is, is vital to any organizations management of their information life cycle. SharePoint is best used for the initial life of business documents where they need to be referenced and accessed after time. It is often beneficial to archive these to overcome for storage and performance issues. FREE CMS – SharePoint, Really? In order to show some of the completely of what comes with this free version of SharePoint 2010, I thought it would make sense to use Wikipedia (since every one trusts it as a credible source). Wikipedia shows that a web content management system typically has the following components: Document Management:   -       CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction. SharePoint is king when it comes to document management.  Version history, exclusive check-out, security, publication, workflow, and so much more.  Content Virtualization:   -       CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission. Through the use of versioning, each content manager can preview, publish, and roll-back content of pages, wiki entries, blog posts, documents, or any other type of content stored in SharePoint.  The idea of each user having an entire copy of the website virtualized is a bit odd to me – not sure why anyone would need that for anything but the simplest of websites. Automated Templates:   -       Create standard output templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place. Through the use of Master Pages and Themes, SharePoint provides the ability to change the entire look and feel of site.  Of course, the older brother version of SharePoint – SharePoint Server 2010 – also introduces the concept of Page Layouts which allows page template level customization and even switching the layout of an individual page using different page templates.  I think many organizations really think they want this but rarely end up using this bit of functionality.  Easy Edits:   -       Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content. This is probably easier described with a screen cap of a vanilla SharePoint Foundation page in edit mode.  Notice the page editing toolbar, the multiple layout options…  It’s actually easier to use than Microsoft Word. Workflow management: -       Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it. Workflow, it’s in there. In fact, the same workflow engine is running under SharePoint Foundation that is running under the other versions of SharePoint.  The primary difference is that with SharePoint Foundation – you need to configure the workflows yourself.   Web Standards: -       Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards. SharePoint is in the fourth major iteration under Microsoft with the 2010 release.  In addition to the innovation that Microsoft continuously adds, you have the entire global ecosystem available. Scalable Expansion:   -       Available in most modern WCMSs is the ability to expand a single implementation (one installation on one server) across multiple domains. SharePoint Foundation can run multiple sites using multiple URLs on a single server install.  Even more powerful, SharePoint Foundation is scalable and can be part of a multi-server farm to ensure that it will handle any amount of traffic that can be thrown at it. Delegation & Security:  -       Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management. SharePoint Foundation provides very granular security capabilities. Read @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537811.aspx Content Syndication:  -       CMS software often assists in content distribution by generating RSS and Atom data feeds to other systems. They may also e-mail users when updates are available as part of the workflow process. SharePoint Foundation nails it.  With RSS syndication and email alerts available out of the box, content syndication is already in the platform. Multilingual Support: -       Ability to display content in multiple languages. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports more than 40 languages. Read More Read more @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256(v=office.12).aspxYou can download the free version from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5970

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• Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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• What Makes a Good Design Critic? CHI 2010 Panel Review

  - by Applications User Experience

  Author: Daniel Schwartz, Senior Interaction Designer, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Applications UX Chief Evangelist Patanjali Venkatacharya organized and moderated an innovative and stimulating panel discussion titled "What Makes a Good Design Critic? Food Design vs. Product Design Criticism" at CHI 2010, the annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The panelists included Janice Rohn, VP of User Experience at Experian; Tami Hardeman, a food stylist; Ed Seiber, a restaurant architect and designer; Jonathan Kessler, a food critic and writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and Larry Powers, Chef de Cuisine at Shaun's restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. Building off the momentum of his highly acclaimed panel at CHI 2009 on what interaction design can learn from food design (for which I was on the other side as a panelist), Venkatacharya brought together new people with different roles in the restaurant and software interaction design fields. The session was also quite delicious -- but more on that later. Criticism, as it applies to food and product or interaction design, was the tasty topic for this forum and showed that strong parallels exist between food and interaction design criticism. Figure 1. The panelists in discussion: (left to right) Janice Rohn, Ed Seiber, Tami Hardeman, and Jonathan Kessler. The panelists had great insights to share from their respective fields, and they enthusiastically discussed as if they were at a casual collegial dinner. Jonathan Kessler stated that he prefers to have one professional critic's opinion in general than a large sampling of customers, however, "Web sites like Yelp get users excited by the collective approach. People are attracted to things desired by so many." Janice Rohn added that this collective desire was especially true for users of consumer products. Ed Seiber remarked that while people looked to the popular view for their target tastes and product choices, "professional critics like John [Kessler] still hold a big weight on public opinion." Chef Powers indicated that chefs take in feedback from all sources, adding, "word of mouth is very powerful. We also look heavily at the sales of the dishes to see what's moving; what's selling and thus successful." Hearing this discussion validates our design work at Oracle in that we listen to our users (our diners) and industry feedback (our critics) to ensure an optimal user experience of our products. Rohn considers that restaurateur Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, which is about creating successful restaurant experiences, has many applicable parallels to user experience design. Meyer actually argues that the customer is not always right, but that "they must always feel heard." Seiber agreed, but noted "customers are not designers," and while designers need to listen to customer feedback, it is the designer's job to synthesize it. Seiber feels it's the critic's job to point out when something is missing or not well-prioritized. In interaction design, our challenges are quite similar, if not parallel. Software tasks are like puzzles that are in search of a solution on how to be best completed. As a food stylist, Tami Hardeman has the demanding and challenging task of presenting food to be as delectable as can be. To present food in its best light requires a lot of creativity and insight into consumer tastes. It's no doubt then that this former fashion stylist came up with the ultimate catch phrase to capture the emotion that clients want to draw from their users: "craveability." The phrase was a hit with the audience and panelists alike. Sometime later in the discussion, Seiber remarked, "designers strive to apply craveability to products, and I do so for restaurants in my case." Craveabilty is also very applicable to interaction design. Creating straightforward and smooth workflows for users of Oracle Applications is a primary goal for my colleagues. We want our users to really enjoy working with our products where it makes them more efficient and better at their jobs. That's our "craveability." Patanjali Venkatacharya asked the panel, "if a design's "craveability" appeals to some cultures but not to others, then what is the impact to the food or product design process?" Rohn stated that "taste is part nature and part nurture" and that the design must take the full context of a product's usage into consideration. Kessler added, "good design is about understanding the context" that the experience necessitates. Seiber remarked how important seat comfort is for diners and how the quality of seating will add so much to the complete dining experience. Sometimes if these non-food factors are not well executed, they can also take away from an otherwise pleasant dining experience. Kessler recounted a time when he was dining at a restaurant that actually had very good food, but the photographs hanging on all the walls did not fit in with the overall décor and created a negative overall dining experience. While the tastiness of the food is critical to a restaurant's success, it is a captivating complete user experience, as in interaction design, which will keep customers coming back and ultimately making the restaurant a hit. Figure 2. Patnajali Venkatacharya enjoyed the Sardian flatbread salad. As a surprise Chef Powers brought out a signature dish from Shaun's restaurant for all the panelists to sample and critique. The Sardinian flatbread dish showcased Atlanta's taste for fresh and local produce and cheese at its finest as a salad served on a crispy flavorful flat bread. Hardeman said it could be photographed from any angle, a high compliment coming from a food stylist. Seiber really enjoyed the colors that the dish brought together and thought it would be served very well in a casual restaurant on a summer's day. The panel really appreciated the taste and quality of the different components and how the rosemary brought all the flavors together. Seiber remarked that "a lot of effort goes into the appearance of simplicity." Rohn indicated that the same notion holds true with software user interface design. A tremendous amount of work goes into crafting straightforward interfaces, including user research, prototyping, design iterations, and usability studies. Design criticism for food and software interfaces clearly share many similarities. Both areas value expert opinions and user feedback. Both areas understand the importance of great design needing to work well in its context. Last but not least, both food and interaction design criticism value "craveability" and how having users excited about experiencing and enjoying the designs is an important goal. Now if we can just improve the taste of software user interfaces, people may choose to dine on their enterprise applications over a fresh organic salad.

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• 5 Best Practices - Laying the Foundation for WebCenter Projects

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Today’s guest post comes from Oracle WebCenter expert John Brunswick. John specializes in enterprise portal and content management solutions and actively contributes to the enterprise software business community and has authored a series of articles about optimal business involvement in portal, business process management and SOA development, examining ways of helping organizations move away from monolithic application development. We’re happy to have John join us today! Maximizing success with Oracle WebCenter portal requires a strategic understanding of Oracle WebCenter capabilities.  The following best practices enable the creation of portal solutions with minimal resource overhead, while offering the greatest flexibility for progressive elaboration. They are inherently project agnostic, enabling a strong foundation for future growth and an expedient return on your investment in the platform.  If you are able to embrace even only a few of these practices, you will materially improve your deployment capability with WebCenter. 1. Segment Duties Around 3Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data "Agility" is one of the most common business benefits touted by modern web platforms.  It sounds good - who doesn't want to be Agile, right?  How exactly IT organizations go about supplying agility to their business counterparts often lacks definition - hamstrung by ambiguity. Ultimately, businesses want to benefit from reduced development time to deliver a solution to a particular constituent, which is augmented by as much self-service as possible to develop and manage the solution directly. All done in the absence of direct IT involvement. With Oracle WebCenter's depth in the areas of content management, pallet of native collaborative services, enterprise mashup capability and delegated administration, it is very possible to execute on this business vision at a technical level. To realize the benefits of the platform depth we can think of Oracle WebCenter's segmentation of duties along the lines of the 3 Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data.  All three of which can have their foundations developed by IT, then provisioned to the business on a per role basis. Content – Oracle WebCenter benefits from an extremely mature content repository.  Work flow, audit, notification, office integration and conversion capabilities for documents (HTML & PDF) make this a haven for business users to take control of content within external and internal portals, custom applications and web sites.  When deploying WebCenter portal take time to think of areas in which IT can provide the "harness" for content to reside, then allow the business to manage any content items within the site, using the content foundation to ensure compliance with business rules and process.  This frees IT to work on more mission critical challenges and allows the business to respond in short order to emerging market needs. Collaboration – Native collaborative services and WebCenter spaces are a perfect match for business users who are looking to enable document sharing, discussions and social networking.  The ability to deploy the services is granular and on the basis of roles scoped to given areas of the system - much like the first C “content”.  This enables business analysts to design the roles required and IT to provision with peace of mind that users leveraging the collaborative services are only able to do so in explicitly designated areas of a site. Bottom line - business will not need to wait for IT, but cannot go outside of the scope that has been defined based on their roles. Contextual Data – Collaborative capabilities are most powerful when included within the context of business data.  The ability to supply business users with decision shaping data that they can include in various parts of a portal or portals, just as they would with content items, is one of the most powerful aspects of Oracle WebCenter.  Imagine a discussion about new store selection for a retail chain that re-purposes existing information from business intelligence services about various potential locations and or custom backend systems - presenting it directly in the context of the discussion.  If there are some data sources that are preexisting in your enterprise take a look at how they can be made into discrete offerings within the portal, then scoped to given business user roles for inclusion within collaborative activities. 2. Think Generically, Execute Specifically Constructs.  Anyone who has spent much time around me knows that I am obsessed with this word.  Why? Because Constructs offer immense power - more than APIs, Web Services or other technical capability. Constructs offer organizations the ability to leverage a platform's native characteristics to offer substantial business functionality - without writing code.  This concept becomes more powerful with the additional understanding of the concepts from the platform that an organization learns over time.  Let's take a look at an example of where an Oracle WebCenter construct can substantially reduce the time to get a subscription-based site out the door and into the hands of the end consumer. Imagine a site that allows members to subscribe to specific disciplines to access information and application data around that various discipline.  A space is a collection of secured pages within Oracle WebCenter.  Spaces are not only secured, but also default content stored within it to be scoped automatically to that space. Taking this a step further, Oracle WebCenter’s Activity Stream surfaces events, discussions and other activities that are scoped to the given user on the basis of their space affiliations.  In order to have a portal that would allow users to "subscribe" to information around various disciplines - spaces could be used out of the box to achieve this capability and without using any APIs or low level technical work to achieve this. 3. Make Governance Work for You Imagine driving down the street without the painted lines on the road.  The rules of the road are so ingrained in our minds, we often do not think about the process, but seemingly mundane lane markers are critical enablers. Lane markers allow us to travel at speeds that would be impossible if not for the agreed upon direction of flow. Additionally and more importantly, it allows people to act autonomously - going where they please at any given time. The return on the investment for mobility is high enough for people to buy into globally agreed up governance processes. In Oracle WebCenter we can use similar enablers to lane markers.  Our goal should be to enable the flow of information and provide end users with the ability to arrive at business solutions as needed, not on the basis of cumbersome processes that cannot meet the business needs in a timely fashion. How do we do this? Just as with "Segmentation of Duties" Oracle WebCenter technologies offer the opportunity to compartmentalize various business initiatives from each other within the system due to constructs and security that are available to use within the platform. For instance, when a WebCenter space is created, any content added within that space by default will be secured to that particular space and inherits meta data that is associated with a folder created for the space. Oracle WebCenter content uses meta data to support a broad range of rich ECM functionality and can automatically impart retention, workflow and other policies automatically on the basis of what has been defaulted for that space. Depending on your business needs, this paradigm will also extend to sub sections of a space, offering some interesting possibilities to enable automated management around content. An example may be press releases within a particular area of an extranet that require a five year retention period and need to the reviewed by marketing and legal before release.  The underlying content system will transparently take care of this process on the basis of the above rules, enabling peace of mind over unstructured data - which could otherwise become overwhelming. 4. Make Your First Project Your Second Imagine if Michael Phelps was competing in a swimming championship, but told right before his race that he had to use a brand new stroke.  There is no doubt that Michael is an outstanding swimmer, but chances are that he would like to have some time to get acquainted with the new stroke. New technologies should not be treated any differently.  Before jumping into the deep end it helps to take time to get to know the new approach - even though you may have been swimming thousands of times before. To quickly get a handle on Oracle WebCenter capabilities it can be helpful to deploy a sandbox for the team to use to share project documents, discussions and announcements in an effort to help the actual deployment get under way, while increasing everyone’s knowledge of the platform and its functionality that may be helpful down the road. Oracle Technology Network has made a pre-configured virtual machine available for download that can be a great starting point for this exercise. 5. Get to Know the Community If you are reading this blog post you have most certainly faced a software decision or challenge that was solved on the basis of a small piece of missing critical information - which took substantial research to discover.  Chances were also good that somewhere, someone had already come across this information and would have been excited to share it. There is no denying the power of passionate, connected users, sharing key tips around technology.  The Oracle WebCenter brand has a rich heritage that includes industry-leading technology and practitioners.  With the new Oracle WebCenter brand, opportunities to connect with these experts has become easier. Oracle WebCenter Blog Oracle Social Enterprise LinkedIn WebCenter Group Oracle WebCenter Twitter Oracle WebCenter Facebook Oracle User Groups Additionally, there are various Oracle WebCenter related blogs by an excellent grouping of services partners.

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• NUMA-aware placement of communication variables

  - by Dave

  For classic NUMA-aware programming I'm typically most concerned about simple cold, capacity and compulsory misses and whether we can satisfy the miss by locally connected memory or whether we have to pull the line from its home node over the coherent interconnect -- we'd like to minimize channel contention and conserve interconnect bandwidth. That is, for this style of programming we're quite aware of where memory is homed relative to the threads that will be accessing it. Ideally, a page is collocated on the node with the thread that's expected to most frequently access the page, as simple misses on the page can be satisfied without resorting to transferring the line over the interconnect. The default "first touch" NUMA page placement policy tends to work reasonable well in this regard. When a virtual page is first accessed, the operating system will attempt to provision and map that virtual page to a physical page allocated from the node where the accessing thread is running. It's worth noting that the node-level memory interleaving granularity is usually a multiple of the page size, so we can say that a given page P resides on some node N. That is, the memory underlying a page resides on just one node. But when thinking about accesses to heavily-written communication variables we normally consider what caches the lines underlying such variables might be resident in, and in what states. We want to minimize coherence misses and cache probe activity and interconnect traffic in general. I don't usually give much thought to the location of the home NUMA node underlying such highly shared variables. On a SPARC T5440, for instance, which consists of 4 T2+ processors connected by a central coherence hub, the home node and placement of heavily accessed communication variables has very little impact on performance. The variables are frequently accessed so likely in M-state in some cache, and the location of the home node is of little consequence because a requester can use cache-to-cache transfers to get the line. Or at least that's what I thought. Recently, though, I was exploring a simple shared memory point-to-point communication model where a client writes a request into a request mailbox and then busy-waits on a response variable. It's a simple example of delegation based on message passing. The server polls the request mailbox, and having fetched a new request value, performs some operation and then writes a reply value into the response variable. As noted above, on a T5440 performance is insensitive to the placement of the communication variables -- the request and response mailbox words. But on a Sun/Oracle X4800 I noticed that was not the case and that NUMA placement of the communication variables was actually quite important. For background an X4800 system consists of 8 Intel X7560 Xeons . Each package (socket) has 8 cores with 2 contexts per core, so the system is 8x8x2. Each package is also a NUMA node and has locally attached memory. Every package has 3 point-to-point QPI links for cache coherence, and the system is configured with a twisted ladder "mobius" topology. The cache coherence fabric is glueless -- there's not central arbiter or coherence hub. The maximum distance between any two nodes is just 2 hops over the QPI links. For any given node, 3 other nodes are 1 hop distant and the remaining 4 nodes are 2 hops distant. Using a single request (client) thread and a single response (server) thread, a benchmark harness explored all permutations of NUMA placement for the two threads and the two communication variables, measuring the average round-trip-time and throughput rate between the client and server. In this benchmark the server simply acts as a simple transponder, writing the request value plus 1 back into the reply field, so there's no particular computation phase and we're only measuring communication overheads. In addition to varying the placement of communication variables over pairs of nodes, we also explored variations where both variables were placed on one page (and thus on one node) -- either on the same cache line or different cache lines -- while varying the node where the variables reside along with the placement of the threads. The key observation was that if the client and server threads were on different nodes, then the best placement of variables was to have the request variable (written by the client and read by the server) reside on the same node as the client thread, and to place the response variable (written by the server and read by the client) on the same node as the server. That is, if you have a variable that's to be written by one thread and read by another, it should be homed with the writer thread. For our simple client-server model that means using split request and response communication variables with unidirectional message flow on a given page. This can yield up to twice the throughput of less favorable placement strategies. Our X4800 uses the QPI 1.0 protocol with source-based snooping. Briefly, when node A needs to probe a cache line it fires off snoop requests to all the nodes in the system. Those recipients then forward their response not to the original requester, but to the home node H of the cache line. H waits for and collects the responses, adjudicates and resolves conflicts and ensures memory-model ordering, and then sends a definitive reply back to the original requester A. If some node B needed to transfer the line to A, it will do so by cache-to-cache transfer and let H know about the disposition of the cache line. A needs to wait for the authoritative response from H. So if a thread on node A wants to write a value to be read by a thread on node B, the latency is dependent on the distances between A, B, and H. We observe the best performance when the written-to variable is co-homed with the writer A. That is, we want H and A to be the same node, as the writer doesn't need the home to respond over the QPI link, as the writer and the home reside on the very same node. With architecturally informed placement of communication variables we eliminate at least one QPI hop from the critical path. Newer Intel processors use the QPI 1.1 coherence protocol with home-based snooping. As noted above, under source-snooping a requester broadcasts snoop requests to all nodes. Those nodes send their response to the home node of the location, which provides memory ordering, reconciles conflicts, etc., and then posts a definitive reply to the requester. In home-based snooping the snoop probe goes directly to the home node and are not broadcast. The home node can consult snoop filters -- if present -- and send out requests to retrieve the line if necessary. The 3rd party owner of the line, if any, can respond either to the home or the original requester (or even to both) according to the protocol policies. There are myriad variations that have been implemented, and unfortunately vendor terminology doesn't always agree between vendors or with the academic taxonomy papers. The key is that home-snooping enables the use of a snoop filter to reduce interconnect traffic. And while home-snooping might have a longer critical path (latency) than source-based snooping, it also may require fewer messages and less overall bandwidth. It'll be interesting to reprise these experiments on a platform with home-based snooping. While collecting data I also noticed that there are placement concerns even in the seemingly trivial case when both threads and both variables reside on a single node. Internally, the cores on each X7560 package are connected by an internal ring. (Actually there are multiple contra-rotating rings). And the last-level on-chip cache (LLC) is partitioned in banks or slices, which with each slice being associated with a core on the ring topology. A hardware hash function associates each physical address with a specific home bank. Thus we face distance and topology concerns even for intra-package communications, although the latencies are not nearly the magnitude we see inter-package. I've not seen such communication distance artifacts on the T2+, where the cache banks are connected to the cores via a high-speed crossbar instead of a ring -- communication latencies seem more regular.

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