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• Must-see sessions at TCUK11

  - by Roger Hart

  Technical Communication UK is probably the best professional conference I've been to. Last year, I spoke there on content strategy, and this year I'll be co-hosting a workshop on embedded user assistance. Obviously, I'd love people to come along to that; but there are some other sessions I'd like to flag up for anybody thinking of attending. Tuesday 20th Sept - workshops This will be my first year at the pre-conference workshop day, and I'm massively glad that our workshop hasn't been scheduled along-side the one I'm really interested in. My picks: It looks like you're embedding user assistance. Would you like help? My colleague Dom and I are presenting this one. It's our paen to Clippy, to the brilliant idea he represented, and the crashing failure he was. Less precociously, we'll be teaching embedded user assistance, Red Gate style. Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data This doesn't need to do anything apart from what it says on the tin in order to be gold dust. But given the speakers, I suspect it will. A data-informed approach is a great asset to technical communications, so I'd recommend this session to anybody event faintly interested. The speakers here have a great track record of giving practical, accessible introductions to big topics. Go along. Wednesday 21st Sept - day one There's no real need to recommend the keynote for a conference, but I will just point out that this year it's Google's Patrick Hofmann. That's cool. You know what else is cool: Focus on the user, the rest follows An intro to modelling customer experience. This is a really exciting area for tech comms, and potentially touches on one of my personal hobby-horses: the convergence of technical communication and marketing. It's all part of delivering customer experience, and knowing what your users need lets you help them, sell to them, and delight them. Content strategy year 1: a tale from the trenches It's often been observed that content strategy is great at banging its own drum, but not so hot on compelling case studies. Here you go, folks. This is the presentation I'm most excited about so far. On a mission to communicate! Skype help their users communicate, but how do they communicate with them? I guess we'll find out. Then there's the stuff that I'm not too excited by, but you might just be. The standards geeks and agile freaks can get together in a presentation on the forthcoming ISO standards for agile authoring. Plus, there's a session on VBA for tech comms. I do have one gripe about day 1. The other big UK tech comms conference, UA Europe, have - I think - netted the more interesting presentation from Ellis Pratt. While I have no doubt that his TCUK case study on producing risk assessments will be useful, I'd far rather go to his talk on game theory for tech comms. Hopefully UA Europe will record it. Thursday 22nd Sept - day two Day two has a couple of slots yet to be confirmed. The rumour is that one of them will be the brilliant "Questions and rants" session from last year. I hope so. It's not ranting, but I'll be going to: RTFMobile: beyond stating the obvious Ultan O'Broin is an engaging speaker with a lot to say, and mobile is one of the most interesting and challenging new areas for tech comms. Even if this weren't a research-based presentation from a company with buckets of technology experience, I'd be going. It is, and you should too. Pattern recognition for technical communicators One of the best things about TCUK is the tendency to include sessions that tackle the theoretical and bring them towards the practical. Kai and Chris delivered cracking and well-received talks last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for us on some of the conceptual underpinning of technical communication. Developing an interactive non-text learning programme Annoyingly, this clashes with Pattern Recognition, so I hope at least one of the streams is recorded again this year. The idea of communicating complex information without words us fascinating and this sounds like a great example of this year's third stream: "anything but text". For the localization and DITA crowds, there's rich pickings on day two, though I'm not sure how many of those sessions I'm interested in. In the 13:00 - 13:40 slot, there's an interesting clash between Linda Urban on re-use and training content, and a piece on minimalism I'm sorely tempted by. That's my pick of #TCUK11. I'll be doing a round-up blog after the event, and probably talking a bit more about it beforehand. I'm also reliably assured that there are still plenty of tickets.

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• Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore

  - by sathya

  Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore   I was really excited on attending the day 1 of Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Bangalore. This is the first Teched that am attending. The event was really fun filled with lot of knowledge sharing sessions and lots of goodies and gifts by the partners Initially the Event Started by Murthy's Session. He explained about the Developers relating to the 5 elements of nature (Pancha Boothaas) 1. Fire - Passion 2. Wave (Water) - Catch the right wave which we need to apply. 3. Earth - Connections and lots of opportunities around the world 4. Air -  Its whatever we breathe. Developers.. Without them nothing is possible. they are like the air 5. Sky - Cloud based applications   Next the Keynote and the announcement of Visual Studio by SomaSegar. List of things that he delivered his speech on : 1. Announcement of Visual Studio 2010 2. Announcement of .NET 4.0 3. Announcement of Silverlight later this week 4. What is the current Trend? Microsoft has done a research with many developers across the globe and have got the following feedback from the users. Get Lost (interrupted) - When we do some work and somebody is calling or interrepting by someother way we lose track of what we were doing and we need to do from the start Falling Behind- Technology gets updated  phenomenally over a period of time and developers always have a scenario like they are not in the state of the art technology and they always have a doubt whether they are staying updated. Lack of Collobaration - When a Manager asks a person what the team members have done and some might be done and some might not be and finally all are into a state like we dont know where we are. So they have addressed these 3 points in the VS 2010 by the following features : Get Lost - Some cool features which could overcome this. We have some Graphical interface. which could show what we have done and where we are. Some Zoom features in the code level. Falling Behind - Everything is based on .NET language base. 2010 has been built in such a way that if developers know the native language that's enough for building good applications. Lack of Collobaration - Some Dashboard Features which would show where exactly the project is. And a graphical user interface is shown on clicking which it directly drills down even to the code level. 5. An overview on all new features in VS 2010. 6. Some good demos of new features in VS 2010 by Polita and one more girl. Some of the new features included : 1. Team Explorer 2. Zoom in Code 3. Ribbon Development 4. Development in Single Platform for Windows Phone, XBox, Zune, Azure, Web Based and Windows based applications 5. Sequence Diagram Generation directly from code 6. Dashboards to show project status 7. Javascript and JQuery intellisense 8. Native support for JQuery 9. Packaging feature while deploying. 10. Generation of different versions of web.config like Web.Config.Production, Web.Config.Staging, etc. 11. IntelliTrace - Eliminating the "Not Reproducible" statement. 12. Automated User Interface Testing. At last in the closing of the day we had a great event called Demo Extravaganza, where lot of cool projects that were launched by Microsoft and also the projects that are under research were also shown. I got a lot of info about Bing today. BING really rocks!!! It has the following : 1. Visual Search 2. Product based search. For each product different menu filters were provided to make an advanced search 3. BING Maps was awesome!! It zoomed in to the street level and we can assume that we are the persons who are walking or running on the road and we can see the real objects like buildings moving by our side. 4. PhotoSynth was used in BING to show up all the images taken around the globe in a 3D format. 5. Formula - If we give some formula it automatically gives the value for the variable or derivation of expression Also some info about some kool touch apps which does an authentication and computation of Teched Attendee's Points that they have scored and the sessions attended. One guy won an XBOX in lucky draw as a gift. There were lot of Partner Stalls like Accenture,Intel,Citrix,MicroFocus,Telerik,infragistics,Sapient etc. Some Offers were provided for us like 50% off on Certifications, 1 free Elearning Course, etc. Stay tuned!! Wil update you on other events too..

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• Adding a Network Loopback Adapter to Windows 8

  - by Greg Low

  I have to say that I continue to be frustrated with finding out how to do things in Windows 8. Here's another one and it's recorded so it might help someone else. I've also documented what I tried so that if anyone from the product group ever reads this, they'll understand how I searched for it and might try to make it easier.I wanted to add a network loopback adapter, to have a fixed IP address to work with when using an "internal" network with Hyper-V. (The fact that I even need to do this is also painful. I don't know why Hyper-V can't make it easy to work with host system folders, etc. as easily as I can with VirtualPC, VirtualBox, etc. but that's a topic for another day).In the end, what I needed was a known IP address on the same network that my guest OS was using, via the internal network (which allows connectivity from the host OS to/from guest OS's).I started by looking in the network adapters areas but there is no "add" functionality there. Realising that this was likely to be another unexpected challenge, I resorted to searching for info on doing this. I found KB article 2777200 entitled "Installing the Microsoft Loopback Adapter in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012". Aha, I thought that's what I'd need. It describes the symptom as "You are trying to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, but are unable to find it." and that certainly sounded like me. There's a certain irony in documenting that something's hard to find instead of making it easier to find. Anyway, you'd hope that in that article, they'd then provide a step by step example of how to do it, but what they supply is this: The Microsoft Loopback Adapter was renamed in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. The new name is "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter". When using the Add Hardware Wizard to manually add a network adapter, choose Manufacturer "Microsoft" and choose network adapter "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter".The trick with this of course is finding the "Add Hardware Wizard". In Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound, there are options to "Add a device" and for "Device Manager". I tried the "Add a device" wizard (seemed logical to me) but after that wizard tries it's best, it just tells you that there isn't any hardware that it thinks it needs to install. It offers a link for when you can't find what you're looking for, but that leads to a generic help page that tells you how to do things like turning on your printer.In Device Manager, I checked the options in the program menus, and nothing useful was present. I even tried right-clicking "Network adapters", hoping that would lead to an option to add one, also to no avail.So back to the search engine I went, to try to find out where the "Add Hardware Wizard" is. Turns out I was in the right place in Device Manager, but I needed to right-click the computer's name, and choose "Add Legacy Hardware". No doubt that hasn't changed location lately but it's a while since I needed to add one so I'd forgotten. Regardless, I'm left wondering why it couldn't be in the menu as well.Anyway, for a step by step list, you need to do the following:1. From Control Panel, select "Device Manager" under the "Devices and Printers" section of the "Hardware and Sound" tab.2. Right-click the name of the computer at the top of the tree, and choose "Add Legacy Hardware".3. In the "Welcome to the Add Hardware Wizard" window, click Next.4. In the "The wizard can help you install other hardware" window, choose "Install the hardware that I manually select from a list" option and click Next.5. In the "The wizard did not find any new hardware on your computer" window, click Next.6. In the "From the list below, select the type of hardware you are installing" window, select "Network Adapters" from the list, and click Next.7. In the "Select Network Adapter" window, from the Manufacturer list, choose Microsoft, then in the Network Adapter window, choose "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter", then click Next.8. In the "The wizard is ready to install your hardware" window, click Next.9. In the "Completing the Add Hardware Wizard" window, click Finish.Then you need to continue to set the IP address, etc.10. Back in Control Panel, select the "Network and Internet" tab, click "View Network Status and Tasks".11. In the "View your basic network information and set up connections" window, click "Change adapter settings".12. Right-click the new adapter that has been added (find it in the list by checking the device name of "Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter"), and click Properties.   

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• The Oracle Graduate Experience...A Graduates Perspective by Angelie Tierney

  - by david.talamelli

  [Note: Angelie has just recently joined Oracle in Australia in our 2011 Graduate Program. Last week I shared my thoughts on our 2011 Graduate Program, this week Angelie took some time to share her thoughts of our Graduate Program. The notes below are Angelie's overview from her experience with us starting with our first contact last year - David Talamelli] How does the 1 year program work? It consists of 3 weeks of training, followed by 2 rotations in 2 different Lines of Business (LoB's). The first rotation goes for 4 months, while your 2nd rotation goes for 7, when you are placed into your final LoB for the program. The interview process: After sorting through the many advertised graduate jobs, submitting so many resumes and studying at the same time, it can all be pretty stressful. Then there is the interview process. David called me on a Sunday afternoon and I spoke to him for about 30 minutes in a mini sort of phone interview. I was worried that working at Oracle would require extensive technical experience, but David stressed that even the less technical, and more business-minded person could, and did, work at Oracle. I was then asked if I would like to attend a group interview in the next weeks, to which I said of course! The first interview was a day long, consisting of a brief introduction, a group interview where we worked on a business plan with a group of other potential graduates and were marked by 3 Oracle employees, on our ability to work together and presentation. After lunch, we then had a short individual interview each, and that was the end of the first round. I received a call a few weeks later, and was asked to come into a second interview, at which I also jumped at the opportunity. This was an interview based purely on your individual abilities and would help to determine which Line of Business you would go to, should you land a graduate position. So how did I cope throughout the interview stages? I believe the best tool to prepare for the interview, was to research Oracle and its culture and to see if I thought I could fit into that. I personally found out about Oracle, its partners as well as competitors and along the way, even found out about their part (or Larry Ellison's specifically) in the Iron Man 2 movie. Armed with some Oracle information and lots of enthusiasm, I approached the Oracle Graduate Interview process. Why did I apply for an Oracle graduate position? I studied a Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Science in IT, and wanted to be able to use both my degrees, while have the ability to work internationally in the future. Coming straight from university, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do in terms of my career. With the program, you are rotated across various lines of business, to not only expose you to different parts of the business, but to also help you to figure out what you want to achieve out of your career. As a result, I thought Oracle was the perfect fit. So what can an Oracle ANZ Graduate expect? First things first, you can expect to line up for your visitor pass. Really. Next you enter a room full of unknown faces, graduates just like you, and then you realise you're in this with 18 other people, going through the same thing as you. 3 weeks later you leave with many memories, colleagues you can call your friends, and a video of your presentation. Vanessa, the Graduate Manager, will also take lots of photos and keep you (well) fed. Well that's not all you leave with, you are also equipped with a wealth of knowledge and contacts within Oracle, both that will help you throughout your career there. What training is involved? We started our Oracle experience with 3 weeks of training, consisting of employee orientation, extensive product training, presentations on the various lines of business (LoB's), followed by sales and presentation training. While there was potential for an information overload, maybe even death by Powerpoint, we were able to have access to the presentations for future reference, which was very helpful. This period also allowed us to start networking, not only with the graduates, but with the managers who presented to us, as well as through the monthly chinwag, HR celebrations and even with the sharing of tea facilities. We also had a team bonding day when we recorded a "commercial" within groups, and learned how to play an Irish drum. Overall, the training period helped us to learn about Oracle, as well as ourselves, and to prepare us for our transition into our rotations. Where to now? I'm now into my 2nd week of my first graduate rotation. It has been exciting to finally get out into the work environment and utilise that knowledge we gained from training. My manager has been a great mentor, extremely knowledgeable, and it has been good being able to participate in meetings, conference calls and make a contribution towards the business. And while we aren't necessarily working directly with the other graduates, they are still reachable via email, Pidgin and lunch and they are important as a resource and support, after all, they are going through a similar experience to you. While it is only the beginning, there is a lot more to learn and a lot more to experience along the way, especially because, as we learned during training, at Oracle, the only constant is change.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  Another SharePoint Server 2010 feature which cannot go unnoticed is the Access Services. Access Services is a service in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows administrators to view, edit, and configure a Microsoft access application within a Web Browser. Access Services settings support backup and recovery, regardless of whether there is a UI setting in Central Administration. However, backup and recovery only apply to service-level and administrative-level settings; end-user content from the Access application is not backed up as part of this process. Access Services has Windows PowerShell functionality that can be used to provide the service that uses settings from a previous backup; configure and manage macro and query setting; manage and configure session management; and configure all the global settings of the service. Key Benefits of SharePoint Server Access Services Easier Access to right tools: The enhanced, customizable Ribbon in Access 2010 makes it easy to uncover more commands so you can focus on the end product. The new Microsoft Office BackstageTM view is yet another feature that can help you easily analyze and document your database, share, publish, and customize your Access 2010 experience, all from one convenient location. Helps build database effortlessly and quickly: Out-of-the box templates and reusable components make Access Services the fastest, simplest database solution available. It helps find new pre-built templates which you can start using without customization or select templates created by your peers in the Access online community and customize them to meet your needs. It builds your databases with new modular components. New Application Parts enable you to add a set of common Access components, such as a table and form for task management, to your database in a few simple clicks. Database navigation is now simplified. It creates Navigation Forms and makes your frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. Create Impactful forms and reports: Whether it's an inventory of your assets or customer sales database, Access 2010 brings the innovative tools you'd expect from Microsoft Office. Access Services easily spot trends and add emphasis to your data. It quickly create coordinating database forms and reports and bring the Web into your database. Obtain a centralized landing pad for your data: Access 2010 offers easy ways to bring your data together and help increase work quality. New technologies help break down barriers so you can share and work together on your databases, making you or your team more efficient and productive. Add automation and complex expressions: If you need a more robust database design, such as preventing record deletion if a specific condition is met or if you need to create calculations to forecast your budget, Access 2010 empowers you to be your own developer. The enhanced Expression Builder greatly simplifies your expression building experience with IntelliSense®. With the revamped Macro Designer, it's now even easier for you to add basic logic to your database. New Data Macros allow you to attach logic to your data, centralizing the logic on the table, not the objects that update your data. Key features of Access Services 2010 - Access database content through a Web browser: Newly added Access Services on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to make your databases available on the Web with new Web databases. Users without an Access client can open Web forms and reports via a browser and changes are automatically synchronized. - Simplify how you access the features you need: The Ribbon, improved in Access 2010, helps you access commands even more quickly by enabling you to customize or create your own tabs. The new Microsoft Office Backstage view replaces the traditional File menu to provide one central, organized location for all of your document management tasks. - Codeless navigation: Use professional looking web-like navigation forms to make frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. - Easily reuse Access items in other databases: Use Application Parts to add pre-built Access components for common tasks to your database in a few simple clicks. You can also package common database components, such as data entry forms and reports for task management, and reuse them across your organization or other databases. - Simplified formatting: By using Office themes you can create coordinating professional forms and reports across your database. Simply select a familiar and great looking Office theme, or design your own, and apply it to your database. Newly created Access objects will automatically match your chosen theme.

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• How to build a great relationship with your colleagues

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When you start new job, you worry about your performance, about being able to do what the manager asks you to do, but you also worry about the relations with your colleagues. How will you get along with them? What if they don’t like you? Have you ever felt you’re „the new guy” and your colleagues have already their own way of talking one to each other, their own jokes? It’s a common feeling and can actually become stressful. I am Norbert, Middleware Presales Intern in Hungary and I’ve been working within Oracle for only 1 month. Joining such a big company has been a challenge from many perspectives. One of them was adapting with the environment and getting to know all my colleagues. You know it’s quite difficult to introduce yourself, to try to liaise with them and find some common topics, so I felt very lucky and comfortable when my manager introduced me to all of my colleagues. It was easier to accommodate and we basically we had a starting point for our discussions. We started to talk about what my position means, for how many years they’ve been within Oracle, other Oracle related topics, but also more personal stuff like what they do after work. Having this opportunity of talking with all of them helped me introduce myself in a proper way and actually I told them many things about myself. Networking wasn’t my best skill, but these first days were really helpful from a network point of view. What else can you do to get along with your colleagues? One second thing I consider as being really helpful in networking is asking work-related questions. For instance, when you don’t know how to do something or don’t understand it, asking one of your colleagues will also help you to make a connection with him and you could easily continue the discussion with some other topics which are more personal. It’s a very effective strategy and in a company like Oracle people are very willing to help you with your tasks and perform at a high level. If you see your colleagues going to lunch, you should join them. It will help you become part of their community, finding out what’s new in their lives, you’ll, step-by-step, take part in their conversations and be up to date with the hot topics they talk about. One other opportunity of becoming part of your colleagues’ community are the internal events. Subscribing to the local free time activities mailing list is very useful for finding out information about when they’re going out and have a drink or attending all sorts of events. For instance, this is how I’ve found out about a party within Oracle that most of the employees here attend. It’s a wonderful opportunity for chatting and make a stronger connection to some of them. How important is attending these events? Think about how much time you spend at work. You’d like to enjoy your work and the environment, so getting along with your colleagues is a nice thing to have. I recently attended a corporate party whose purpose was to facilitate the interaction and communication between employees. It was a real success and we had a lot of fun, especially because it was a costume party.  All the fancy dresses and funny clothes we wore made the atmosphere really enjoyable. It was easy to liaise with colleague with whom I had never interacted with before. There was a friendly spirit among us, chatting about personal stuff and about various pleasant things. Working in an international company is not an easy thing because you interact with many people and they have different styles, but all these opportunities of informal interaction are a good way to adapt to the new working environment.

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• Run Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close Diagnostic

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document Be Proactive & Save Time—Use the Period Close Diagnostic During the Month Have you ever closed your books at the end of the month and, due to problems with your Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close, you found yourself working all night or all weekend to resolve your issues? You can avoid issues by running the Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close Diagnostics throughout the month, prior to closing Oracle Financial Assets, General Ledger, Payables, and/or Receivables. You can identify issues that will interfere with your period close early, preventing last minute fire drills. Correct your errors or, if you need Oracle Support’s assistance, attach the output to a service request for faster resolution by the support engineer. Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics are included in your Oracle Premier Support agreement at no extra charge. They are proactive, easy to use, tools provided by Oracle Support to ease the gathering and analyzing of information from your E-Business Suite, specific to an existing issue or setup. Formatted output displays the information gathered, the findings of the analysis, and the appropriate actions to take if necessary. These tools are designed for both the functional and technical user, providing no EBS administration features, so you can safely assign this responsibility to users who are not administrators. A good place to start with the Support Diagnostics is the install patch Note 167000.1. Everything you need is in this patch and you install it on top of your E-Business Suite. If you are on EBS 12.0.6 or below, Oracle delivers the diagnostic tests in a standard Oracle patch and you apply it using the adpatch utility. If you are on EBS release 12.1.1 or above, your diagnostics are already there. Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics: Prevent Issues—resolving configuration and data issues that would cause processes to fail Identify Issues Quickly—resolving problems without the need to contact Oracle Support Reduce Resolution Time—minimizing the time spent to resolve an issue by increasing support engineer efficiency In the example below, you will see how to run the EBS Period Close Diagnostic step-by-step using an SQLGL Period Closing Activity Test. This allows you to check throughout the month to identify and resolve any issue that might prevent closing the period in the General Ledger on schedule.   Click the Select Application button. Select your Application. In this example, we will use the Period Close test. Scroll down to Period Close Place a check mark in the Period Closing box in the Select column. Click the Execute button at the bottom of the page Input the parameters. Click the Submit button Click the Refresh button, until the Status of the test changes from “In Progress” to “Completed” Click the icon under, View Report to view the test results   The report will complete successfully or show completed with errors. The report will show where the error is located, what the error is, and what action(s) to take for resolution. Remember, if you need to work with Oracle Support to resolve your issue, attach the report to your Service Request so the engineer can start working the issue. Completed with errors Completed successfully with no errors If you have questions, please ask in the E-Business Suite Category’s Diagnostic Tools Community. You may find the answer waiting for you in a prior community discussion or in one of the resources posted by an Oracle Support moderator. Oracle’s Period Close Diagnostic, and the other E-Business Suite Diagnostics, save you time and help keep you on schedule. If you run the Period Close Diagnostic throughout the month, you can identify issues to resolve and get help, if needed. When opening a Service Request, attaching the output from the diagnostic report, speeds resolution. With the issues resolved ahead of time, your Period Close should complete without errors. Avoiding the unexpected, helps to close your books on time and without late nights or working through your weekend. Recommended Reads E-Business Suite Diagnostics Period / Year End Close [ID 402237.1] lists all of the Closing Period Diagnostic Tests. I highly recommend that customers execute these tests prior to closing a period. The period closing tests listed in this document help you identify known issues that prevent a successful period close. Use these tests prior to closing a period. To learn about all the available EBS Diagnostics, please review the E-Business Suite Diagnostics Overview [ID 342459.1].

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• .NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8

  - by Jeff

  I remember sitting in Building 5 at Microsoft with some of my coworkers, when one of them came in with a shiny new 11” MacBook Air. It was nearly two years ago, and we found it pretty odd that the OEM’s building Windows machines sucked at industrial design in a way that defied logic. While Dell and HP were in a race to the bottom building commodity crap, Apple was staying out of the low-end market completely, and focusing on better design. In the process, they managed to build machines people actually wanted, and maintain an insanely high margin in the process. I stopped buying the commodity crap and custom builds in 2006, when Apple went Intel. As a .NET guy, I was still in it for Microsoft’s stack of development tools, which I found awesome, but had back to back crappy laptops from HP and Dell. After that original 15” MacBook Pro, I also had a Mac Pro tower (that I sold after three years for $1,500!), a 27” iMac, and my favorite, a 17” MacBook Pro (the unibody style) with an SSD added from OWC. The 17” was a little much to carry around because it was heavy, but it sure was nice getting as much as eight hours of battery life, and the screen was amazing. When the rumors started about a 15” model with a “retina” screen inspired by the Air, I made up my mind I wanted one, and ordered it the day it came out. I sold my 17”, after three years, for $750 to a friend who is really enjoying it. I got the base model with the upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM. It feels solid for being so thin, and if you’ve used the third generation iPad or the newer iPhone, you’ll be just as thrilled with the screen resolution. I’m typically getting just over six hours of battery life while running a VM, but Parallels 8 allegedly makes some power improvements, so we’ll see what happens. (It was just released today.) The nice thing about VM’s are that you can run more than one at a time. Primarily I run the Windows 8 VM with four cores (the laptop is quad-core, but has 8 logical cores due to hyperthreading or whatever Intel calls it) and 8 gigs of RAM. I also have a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM I spin up when I need to test stuff in a “real” server environment, and I give it two cores and 4 gigs of RAM. The Windows 8 VM spins up in about 8 seconds. Visual Studio 2012 takes a few more seconds, but count part of that as the “ReSharper tax” as it does its startup magic. The real beauty, the thing I looked most forward to, is that beautifully crisp C# text. Consolas has never looked as good as it does at 10pt. as it does on this display. You know how it looks great at 80pt. when conference speakers demo stuff on a projector? Think that sharpness, only tiny. It’s just gorgeous. Beyond that, everything is just so responsive and fast. Builds of large projects happen in seconds, hundreds of unit tests run in seconds… you just don’t spend a lot of time waiting for stuff. It’s kind of painful to go back to my 27” iMac (which would be better if I put an SSD in it before its third birthday). Are there negatives? A few minor issues, yes. As is the case with OS X, not everything scales right. You’ll see some weirdness at times with splash screens and icons and such. Chrome’s text rendering (in Windows) is apparently not aware of how to deal with higher DPI’s, so text is fuzzy (the OS X version is super sharp, however). You’ll also have to do some fiddling with keyboard settings to use the Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts. Overall, it’s as close to a no-compromise development experience as I’ve ever had. I’m not even going to bother with Boot Camp because the VM route already exceeds my expectations. You definitely get what you pay for. If this one also lasts three years and I can turn around and sell it, it’s worth it for something I use every day.

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• Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

  - by Joe Mayo

  Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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• Session Report - Modern Software Development Anti-Patterns

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  In this standing-room-only session, building upon his 2011 JavaOne Rock Star “Diabolical Developer” session, Martijn Verburg, this time along with Ben Evans, identified and explored common “anti-patterns” – ways of doing things that keep developers from doing their best work. They emphasized the importance of social interaction and team communication, along with identifying certain psychological pitfalls that lead developers astray. Their emphasis was less on technical coding errors and more how to function well and to keep one’s focus on what really matters. They are the authors of the highly regarded The Well-Grounded Java Developer and are both movers and shakers in the London JUG community and on the Java Community Process. The large room was packed as they gave a fast-moving, witty presentation with lots of laughs and personal anecdotes. Below are a few of the anti-patterns they discussed.Anti-Pattern One: Conference-Driven DeliveryThe theme here is the belief that “Real pros hack code and write their slides minutes before their talks.” Their response to this anti-pattern is an expression popular in the military – PPPPPP, which stands for, “Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”“Communication is very important – probably more important than the code you write,” claimed Verburg. “The more you speak in front of large groups of people the easier it gets, but it’s always important to do dry runs, to present to smaller groups. And important to be members of user groups where you can give presentations. It’s a great place to practice speaking skills; to gain new skills; get new contacts, to network.”They encouraged attendees to record themselves and listen to themselves giving a presentation. They advised them to start with a spouse or friends if need be. Learning to communicate to a group, they argued, is essential to being a successful developer. The emphasis here is that software development is a team activity and good, clear, accessible communication is essential to the functioning of software teams. Anti-Pattern Two: Mortgage-Driven Development The main theme here was that, in a period of worldwide recession and economic stagnation, people are concerned about keeping their jobs. So there is a tendency for developers to treat knowledge as power and not share what they know about their systems with their colleagues, so when it comes time to fix a problem in production, they will be the only one who knows how to fix it – and will have made themselves an indispensable cog in a machine so you cannot be fired. So developers avoid documentation at all costs, or if documentation is required, put it on a USB chip and lock it in a lock box. As in the first anti-pattern, the idea here is that communicating well with your colleagues is essential and documentation is a key part of this. Social interactions are essential. Both Verburg and Evans insisted that increasingly, year by year, successful software development is more about communication than the technical aspects of the craft. Developers who understand this are the ones who will have the most success. Anti-Pattern Three: Distracted by Shiny – Always Use the Latest Technology to Stay AheadThe temptation here is to pick out some obscure framework, try a bit of Scala, HTML5, and Clojure, and always use the latest technology and upgrade to the latest point release of everything. Don’t worry if something works poorly because you are ahead of the curve. Verburg and Evans insisted that there need to be sound reasons for everything a developer does. Developers should not bring in something simply because for some reason they just feel like it or because it’s new. They recommended a site run by a developer named Matt Raible with excellent comparison spread sheets regarding Web frameworks and other apps. They praised it as a useful tool to help developers in their decision-making processes. They pointed out that good developers sometimes make bad choices out of boredom, to add shiny things to their CV, out of frustration with existing processes, or just from a lack of understanding. They pointed out that some code may stay in a business system for 15 or 20 years, but not all code is created equal and some may change after 3 or 6 months. Developers need to know where the code they are contributing fits in. What is its likely lifespan? Anti-Pattern Four: Design-Driven Design The anti-pattern: If you want to impress your colleagues and bosses, use design patents left, right, and center – MVC, Session Facades, SOA, etc. Or the UML modeling suite from IBM, back in the day… Generate super fast code. And the more jargon you can talk when in the vicinity of the manager the better.Verburg shared a true story about a time when he was interviewing a guy for a job and asked him what his previous work was. The interviewee said that he essentially took patterns and uses an approved book of Enterprise Architecture Patterns and applied them. Verburg was dumbstruck that someone could have a job in which they took patterns from a book and applied them. He pointed out that the idea that design is a separate activity is simply wrong. He repeated a saying that he uses, “You should pay your junior developers for the lines of code they write and the things they add; you should pay your senior developers for what they take away.”He explained that by encouraging people to take things away, the code base gets simpler and reflects the actual business use cases developers are trying to solve, as opposed to the framework that is being imposed. He told another true story about a project to decommission a very long system. 98% of the code was decommissioned and people got a nice bonus. But the 2% remained on the mainframe so the 98% reduction in code resulted in zero reduction in costs, because the entire mainframe was needed to run the 2% that was left. There is an incentive to get rid of source code and subsystems when they are no longer needed. The session continued with several more anti-patterns that were equally insightful.

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• Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

  - by smisner

  We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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• Code refactoring with Visual Studio 2010 Part-4

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I have been writing few post with code refactoring features in Visual Studio 2010. This post also will be part of series and this post will be last of the series. In this post I am going explain two features 1) Encapsulate Field and 2) Extract Interface. Let’s explore both features in details. Encapsulate Field: This is a nice code refactoring feature provides by Visual Studio 2010. With help of this feature we can create properties from the existing private field of the class. Let’s take a simple example of Customer Class. In that I there are two private field called firstName and lastName. Below is the code for the class. public class Customer { private string firstName; private string lastName; public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } Now lets encapsulate first field firstName with Encapsulate feature. So first select that field and goto refactor menu in Visual Studio 2010 and click on Encapsulate Field. Once you click that a dialog box will appear like following. Now once you click OK a preview dialog box will open as we have selected preview reference changes. I think its a good options to check that option to preview code that is being changed by IDE itself. Dialog will look like following. Once you click apply it create a new property called FirstName. Same way I have done for the lastName and now my customer class code look like following. public class Customer { private string firstName; public string FirstName { get { return firstName; } set { firstName = value; } } private string lastName; public string LastName { get { return lastName; } set { lastName = value; } } public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } } So you can see that its very easy to create properties with existing fields and you don’t have to change anything there in code it will change all the stuff itself. Extract Interface: When you are writing software prototype and You don’t know the future implementation of that then its a good practice to use interface there. I am going to explain here that How we can extract interface from the existing code without writing a single line of code with the help of code refactoring feature of Visual Studio 2010. For that I have create a Simple Repository class called CustomerRepository with three methods like following. public class CustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } In above class there are three method Add,Update and Delete where we are going to implement some code for each one. Now I want to create a interface which I can use for my other entities in project. So let’s create a interface from the above class with the help of Visual Studio 2010. So first select class and goto refactor menu and click Extract Interface. It will open up dialog box like following. Here I have selected all the method for interface and Once I click OK then it will create a new file called ICustomerRespository where it has created a interface. Just like following. Here is a code for that interface. using System; namespace CodeRefractoring { interface ICustomerRespository { void Add(); void Delete(); void Update(); } } Now let's see the code for the our class. It will also changed like following to implement the interface. public class CustomerRespository : ICustomerRespository { public void Add() { // Some code to add customer } public void Update() { //some code to update customer } public void Delete() { //some code delete customer } } Isn't that great we have created a interface and implemented it without writing a single line of code. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more.. Till that Happy Programming.

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• Styling ASP.NET MVC Error Messages

  - by MightyZot

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/11/styling-asp.net-mvc-error-messages.aspxOff the cuff, it may look like you’re stuck with the presentation of your error messages (model errors) in ASP.NET MVC. That’s not the case, though. You actually have quite a number of options with regard to styling those boogers. Like many of the helpers in MVC, the Html.ValidationMessageFor helper has multiple prototypes. One of those prototypes lets you pass a dictionary, or anonymous object, representing attribute values for the resulting markup. @Html.ValidationMessageFor( m => Model.Whatever, null, new { @class = “my-error” }) By passing the htmlAttributes parameter, which is the last parameter in the call to the prototype of Html.ValidationMessageFor shown above, I can style the resulting markup by associating styles to the my-error css class.  When you run your MVC project and view the source, you’ll notice that MVC adds the class field-validation-valid or field-validation-error to a span created by the helper. You could actually just style those classes instead of adding your own…it’s really up to you. Now, what if you wanted to move that error message around? Maybe you want to put that error message in a box or a callout. How do you do that? When I first started using MVC, it didn’t occur to me that the Html.ValidationMessageFor helper just spits out a little bit of markup. I wanted to put the error messages in boxes with white backgrounds, our site originally had a black background, and show a little nib on the side to make them look like callouts or conversation bubbles. Not realizing how much freedom there is in the styling and markup, and after reading someone else’s post, I created my own version of the ValidationMessageFor helper that took out the span and replaced it with divs. I styled the divs to produce the effect of a popup box and had a lot of trouble with sizing and such. That’s a really silly and unnecessary way to solve this problem. If you want to move your error messages around, all you have to do is move the helper. MVC doesn’t appear to care where you put it, which makes total sense when you think about it. Html.ValidationMessageFor is just spitting out a little markup using a little bit of reflection on the name you’re passing it. All you’ve got to do to style it the way you want it is to put it in whatever markup you desire. Take a look at this, for example… <div class=”my-anchor”>@Html.ValidationMessageFor( m => Model.Whatever )</div> @Html.TextBoxFor(m => Model.Whatever) Now, given that bit of HTML, consider the following CSS… <style> .my-anchor { position:relative; } .field-validation-error {    background-color:white;    border-radius:4px;    border: solid 1px #333;    display: block;    position: absolute;    top:0; right:0; left:0;    text-align:right; } </style> The my-anchor class establishes an anchor for the absolutely positioned error message. Now you can move the error message wherever you want it relative to the anchor. Using css3, there are some other tricks. For example, you can use the :not(:empty) selector to select the span and apply styles based upon whether or not the span has text in it. Keep it simple, though. Moving your elements around using absolute positioning may cause you issues on devices with screens smaller than your standard laptop or PC. While looking for something else recently, I saw someone asking how to style the output for Html.ValidationSummary.  Html.ValidationSummery is the helper that will spit out a list of property errors, general model errors, or both. Html.ValidationSummary spits out fairly simple markup as well, so you can use the techniques described above with it also. The resulting markup is a <ul><li></li></ul> unordered list of error messages that carries the class validation-summary-errors In the forum question, the user was asking how to hide the error summary when there are no errors. Their errors were in a red box and they didn’t want to show an empty red box when there aren’t any errors. Obviously, you can use the css3 selectors to apply different styles to the list when it’s empty and when it’s not empty; however, that’s not support in all browsers. Well, it just so happens that the unordered list carries the style validation-summary-valid when the list is empty. While the div rendered by the Html.ValidationSummary helper renders a visible div, containing one invisible listitem, you can always just style the whole div with “display:none” when the validation-summary-valid class is applied and make it visible when the validation-summary-errors class is applied. Or, if you don’t like that solution, which I like quite well, you can also check the model state for errors with something like this… int errors = ViewData.ModelState.Sum(ms => ms.Value.Errors.Count); That’ll give you a count of the errors that have been added to ModelState. You can check that and conditionally include markup in your page if you want to. The choice is yours. Obviously, doing most everything you can with styles increases the flexibility of the presentation of your solution, so I recommend going that route when you can. That picture of the fat guy jumping has nothing to do with the article. That’s just a picture of me on the roof and I thought it was funny. Doesn’t every post need a picture?

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• "Guiding" a Domain Expert to Retire from Programming

  - by James Kolpack

  I've got a friend who does IT at a local non-profit where they're using a custom web application which is no longer supported by the company who built it. (out of business, support was too expensive, I'm not sure...) Development on this app started around 10+ years ago so the technologies being harnessed are pretty out of date now - classic asp using vbscript and SQL Server 2000. The application domain is in the realm of government bookkeeping - so even though the development team is long gone, there are often new requirements of this software. Enter the... The domain expert. This is an middle aged accounting whiz without much (or any?) prior development experience. He studied the pages, code and queries and learned how to ape the style of the original team which, believe me, is mediocre at best. He's very clever and very tenacious but has no experience in software beyond what he's picked up from this app. Otherwise, he's a pleasant guy to talk to and definitely knows his domain. My friend in IT, and probably his superiors in the company, want him out of the code. They view him as wasting his expertise on coding tasks he shouldn't be doing. My friend got me involved with a few small contracts which I handled without much problem - other than somewhat of a communication barrier with the domain expert. He explained the requirements very quickly, assuming prior knowledge of the domain which I do not have. This is partially his normal style, and I think maybe a bit of resentment from my involvement. So, I think he feels like the owner of the code and has entrenched himself in a development position. So... his coding technique. One of his latest endeavors was to make a page that only he could reach (theoretically - the security model for the system is wretched) where he can enter a raw SQL query, run it, and save the query to run again later. A report that I worked on had been originally implemented by him using 6 distinct queries, 3 or 4 temp tables to coordinate the data between the queries, and the final result obtained by importing the data from the final query into Access and doing a pivot and some formatting. It worked - well, some of the results were incorrect - but at what a cost! (I implemented the report in a single query with at least 1/10th the amount of code.) He edits code in notepad. He doesn't seem to know about online reference material for the languages. I recently read an article on Dr. Dobbs titled "What Makes Bad Programmers Different" - and instantly thought of our domain expert. From the article: Their code is large, messy, and bug laden. They have very superficial knowledge of their problem domain and their tools. Their code has a lot of copy/paste and they have very little interest in techniques that reduce it. The fail to account for edge cases, while inefficiently dealing with the general case. They never have time to comment their code or break it into smaller pieces. Empirical evidence plays no little role in their decisions. 5.5 out of 6. My friend is wanting me to argue the case to their management - specifically, I got this email from their manager to respond to: ...Also, I need to talk to you about what effect there is from Domain Expert continuing to make edits to the live environment. If that is a problem for you I need to know so I can have his access blocked. Some examples would help. In my opinion, from a technical standpoint, it's dangerous to have him making changes without any oversight. On the other hand, I'm just doing one-off contracts at this point and don't have much desire to get involved deeply enough that I'm essentially arguing as one of the Bobs from Office Space. I'd like to help my friend out - but I feel like I'm getting in the middle of a political battle. More importantly - if I do get involved and suggest that his editing privileges be removed, it needs to be handled carefully so that doesn't feel belittled. He is beyond a doubt the foremost expert on this system. I'm hoping this is familiar territory for some other stackechangers, because I'm feeling a little bewildered. How should I respond? Should I argue that he shouldn't be allowed to touch the code? Should I phrase it as "no single developer, no matter how experienced, should be working on production code unchecked"? Should I argue to keep him involved with the code, but with a review process? Should I say "glad I could help, but uh, I'm busy now!" Other options? Thanks a bunch!

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• Speakers, Please Check Your Time

  - by AjarnMark

  Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied.  Whether that is a true story or an urban legend, I don’t really know, but either way, it is a poignant reminder for all speakers, and particularly apropos this week leading up to the PASS Community Summit. (Cross-posted to the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog #PASSProfDev.) What’s the point of that story?  Simply this…if you have plenty of time to do your presentation, you don’t need to prepare much because it is easy to throw in more and more material to stretch out to your allotted time.  But if you are on a tight time constraint, then it will take significant preparation to distill your talk down to only the essential points. I have attended seven of the last eight North American Summit events, and every one of them has been fantastic.  The speakers are great, the material is timely and relevant, and the networking opportunities are awesome.  And every year, there is one little thing that just bugs me…speakers going over their allotted time.  Why does it bother me so?  Well, if you look at a typical schedule for a Summit, you’ll see that there are six or more sessions going on at the same time, and only 15 minutes to move from one to another.  If you’re trying to maximize your training dollar by attending something during every session time slot, and you don’t want to be the last guy trying to squeeze into the middle of the row, then those 15 minutes can be critical.  All the more so if you need to stop and use the bathroom or if you have to hike to the opposite end of the convention center.  It is really a bad position to find yourself having to choose between learning the last key points of Speaker A who is going over time, and getting over to Speaker B on time so you don’t miss her key opening remarks. And frankly, I think it is just rude.  Yes, the speakers are the function, after all they are bringing the content that the rest of us are paying to learn.  But it is also an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at a conference like this, and no one speaker is so important that the conference would be a disaster without him.  Speakers know when they submit their abstract, long before the conference, how much time they will have.  It has been the same pattern at the Summit for at least the last eight years.  Program Sessions are 75 minutes long.  Some speakers who have a good track record, and meet other qualifying criteria, are extended an invitation to present a Spotlight Session which is 90 minutes (a 20% increase).  So there really is no excuse.  It’s not like you were promised a 2-hour segment and then discovered when you got here that it was only 75 minutes.  In fact, it’s not like PASS advertised 90-minute sessions for everyone and then a select few were cut back to only 75.  As a speaker, you know well before you get here which type of session you are doing and how long it is, so as a professional, you should plan accordingly. Now you might think that this only happens to rookies, but I’ll tell you that some of the worst offenders are big-name veterans who draw huge attendance numbers for their sessions.  Some attendees blow this off as, “Hey, it’s so-and-so, and I’d stay here for hours and listen to him/her talk.”  To which I would reply, “Then they should have submitted for a pre- or post-conference day-long seminar instead, but don’t try to squeeze your day-long talk into a 90-minute session.”  Now I don’t really believe that these speakers are being malicious or just selfishly trying to extend their time in the spotlight.  I think that most of them are merely being undisciplined and did not trim their presentation sufficiently, or allowed themselves to get off-track (often in a generous attempt to help someone in the audience with a question or problem that really should have been noted for further discussion after the session). So here is my recommendation…my plea, even.  TRIM THE FAT!  Now.  Before it’s too late.  Before you even get on the airplane, take a long, hard look at your presentation and eliminate some of the points that you originally thought you had to make, but in reality are not truly crucial to your main topic.  Delete a few slides.  Test your demos and have them already scripted rather than typing them during your talk.  It is better to cut out too much and end up with plenty of time at the end for Questions & Answers.  And you can always keep some notes on the stuff that you cut out so that you could fill it back in at the end as bonus material if you really do end up with a whole bunch of time on your hands.  But I don’t think you will.  And if you do, that will look even better to the audience as it will look like you’re giving them something extra that not every audience gets.  And they will thank you for that.

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• Why Executives Need Enterprise Project Portfolio Management: 3 Key Considerations to Drive Value Across the Organization

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} By: Guy Barlow, Oracle Primavera Industry Strategy Director Over the last few years there has been a tremendous shift – some would say tectonic in nature – that has brought project management to the forefront of executive attention. Many factors have been driving this growing awareness, most notably, the global financial crisis, heightened regulatory environments and a need to more effectively operationalize corporate strategy. Executives in India are no exception. In fact, given the phenomenal rate of progress of the country, top of mind for all executives (whether in finance, operations, IT, etc.) is the need to build capacity, ramp-up production and ensure that the right resources are in place to capture growth opportunities. This applies across all industries from asset-intensive – like oil & gas, utilities and mining – to traditional manufacturing and the public sector, including services-based sectors such as the financial, telecom and life sciences segments are also part of the mix. However, compounding matters is a complex, interplay between projects – big and small, complex and simple – as companies expand and grow both domestically and internationally. So, having a standardized, enterprise wide solution for project portfolio management is natural. Failing to do so is akin to having two ERP systems, one to manage “large” invoices and one to manage “small” invoices. It makes no sense and provides no enterprise wide visibility. Therefore, it is imperative for executives to understand the full range of their business commitments, the benefit to the company, current performance and associated course corrections if needed. Irrespective of industry and regardless of the use case (e.g., building a power plant, launching a new financial service or developing a new automobile) company leaders need to approach the value of enterprise project portfolio management via 3 critical areas: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif";} 1. Greater Financial Discipline – Improve financial rigor and results through better governance and control is an imperative given today’s financial uncertainty and greater investment scrutiny. For example, as India plans a US$1 trillion investment in the country’s infrastructure how do companies ensure costs are managed? How do you control cash flow? Can you easily report this to stakeholders? 2. Improved Operational Excellence – Increase efficiency and reduce costs through robust collaboration and integration. Upwards of 66% of cost variances are driven by poor supplier collaboration. As you execute initiatives do you have visibility into the performance of your supply base? How are they integrated into the broader program plan? 3. Enhanced Risk Mitigation – Manage and react to uncertainty through improved transparency and contingency planning. What happens if you’re faced with a skills shortage? How do you plan and account for geo-political or weather related events? In summary, projects are not just the delivery of a product or service to a customer inside a predetermined schedule; they often form a contractual and even moral obligation to shareholders and stakeholders alike. Hence the intimate connection between executives and projects, with the latter providing executives with the platform to demonstrate that their organization has the capabilities and competencies needed to meet and, whenever possible, exceed their customer commitments. Effectively developing and operationalizing corporate strategy is the hallmark of successful executives and enterprise project and portfolio management allows them to achieve this goal. Article was first published for Manage India, an e-newsletter, PMI India.

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• UK OUG Conference Highlights and Insights

  - by Richard Bingham

  As per my preemptive post, this was the first time the annual conference organized by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) was split into two events, one for Oracle Applications and another in December for Oracle Technology. Apps13, as it was branded, was hailed as a success, with over 1000 registered attendees and three days of sessions, exhibition, round-tables and many other types of content. As this poster on their stand illustrates, the UKOUG is a strong community with popular participants from both big and small Oracle partners and customers. The venue was a more intimate setting than previous years also, allowing everyone to casually bump into those they hoped to. It gave a real feeling of an Apps Community. The main themes over the days where CRM and Customer Experience, HCM, and FIN/SCM. This allowed people to attend just one focused day if they wanted. In addition the Apps Transformation stream ran across all three days, offering insights, advice, and details on the newer product solutions like Fusion Applications.  Here are some of the key take-aways I got from the conference, specific to my role in Fusion Applications Developer Relations: User Experience continues to be a significant reason for adopting some of the newer application products available, with immediately obvious gains in user productivity and satisfaction reported by customers. Also this doesn't stop with the baked-in UX either, with their Design Patterns proving popular and indeed currently being extended to including things like extending on ADF mobile and customizing the Simplified UI. More on this to come from us soon. The executive sessions emphasized the "it's a journey" phrase, illustrating that modern business applications are powered by technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data and these can be harnessed to help propel your organization forward. Indeed the emphasis is away from the traditional vendor prescribed linear applications road map, and towards plotting a course based on business priorities supported by a broad range of integrated solutions. To help with this several conference sessions demoed the new "Applications Navigator" tool, developed in partnership with OUG members, which offers a visual framework to help organizations plan their Oracle Applications investments around business and technology imperatives. Initial reaction was positive, especially as customers do not need to decipher Oracle's huge product catalog and embeds the best blend of proven and integrated applications solutions. We'll share more on this when it is generally available. Several sessions focused around explanations and interpretation of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, helping highlight the key Oracle Applications messages and directions. With a relative small percentage of conference attendees also at OpenWorld (from a show of hands) this was a popular way to distill the information available down into specific items of interest for the community. Please note the original OpenWorld 2013 content is still available for download but will not remain available forever (via the Oracle website OpenWorld Content Catalog > pick a session > see the PDF download). With the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 the move to develop and deploy on the Fusion Middleware stack becomes a reality for many Oracle Applications customers. This coupled with recent E-Business Suite features such as the Integrated SOA Gateway and the E-Business Suite SDK for Java, illustrates how the gap between the technologies and techniques involved in extending E-Business Suite and Fusion Applications is quickly narrowing. We'll see this merging continue to evolve going forwards. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Applications is actually easier than many customers expected, with a broad selection of both large and medium sized organizations explaining how they added new features to their existing Oracle Applications portfolios. New functionality available from Fusion HCM and CX are popular extensions that do not have to disrupt those core business services. Coexistence is the buzzword here, and the available integration is also simpler than many expected, commonly involving an initial setup data load, then regularly incremental synchronizations, often without a need for real-time constant communication between systems. With much of this pre-built already the implementation process is also quite rapid. With most people dressed in suits, we wanted to get the conversations going without the traditional english reserve, so we decided to make ourselves a bit more obvious, as the photo below shows. This seemed to be quite successful and helped those interested identify and approach us. Keep a look out for similar again. In fact if you're in the UK there is an "Apps Transformation Day" planned by the UKOUG for the 19th March 2014, with more details to follow. Again something we'll be sure to participate in. I am hoping to attend the next half of the UKOUG annual conference, Tech13, that focuses more on Oracle technology and where there is more likely to be larger attendance of those interested in the lower-level aspects of applications customization and development. If you're going, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

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• Quadratic Programming with Oracle R Enterprise

  - by Jeff Taylor-Oracle

       I wanted to use quadprog with ORE on a server running Oracle Solaris 11.2 on a Oracle SPARC T-4 server For background, see: Oracle SPARC T4-2 http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23075_01/ Oracle Solaris 11.2 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html quadprog: Functions to solve Quadratic Programming Problems http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/quadprog/index.html Oracle R Enterprise 1.4 ("ORE") 1.4 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-analytics/r-enterprise/ore-downloads-1502823.html Problem: path to Solaris Studio doesn't match my installation: $ ORE CMD INSTALL quadprog_1.5-5.tar.gz * installing to library \u2018/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/R/library\u2019 * installing *source* package \u2018quadprog\u2019 ... ** package \u2018quadprog\u2019 successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked ** libs /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 -m64   -PIC  -g  -c aind.f -o aind.o bash: /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95: No such file or directory *** Error code 1 make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `aind.o' ERROR: compilation failed for package \u2018quadprog\u2019 * removing \u2018/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/R/library/quadprog\u2019 $ ls -l /opt/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root          15 Aug 19 17:36 /opt/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 -> ../prod/bin/f90 Solution: a symbolic link: $ sudo mkdir -p /opt/SunProd/studio12u3 $ sudo ln -s /opt/solarisstudio12.3 /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/ Now, it is all good: $ ORE CMD INSTALL quadprog_1.5-5.tar.gz * installing to library \u2018/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/R/library\u2019 * installing *source* package \u2018quadprog\u2019 ... ** package \u2018quadprog\u2019 successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked ** libs /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 -m64   -PIC  -g  -c aind.f -o aind.o /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/ cc -xc99 -m64 -I/usr/lib/64/R/include -DNDEBUG -KPIC  -xlibmieee  -c init.c -o init.o /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 -m64  -PIC -g  -c -o solve.QP.compact.o solve.QP.compact.f /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 -m64  -PIC -g  -c -o solve.QP.o solve.QP.f /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/f95 -m64   -PIC  -g  -c util.f -o util.o /opt/SunProd/studio12u3/solarisstudio12.3/bin/ cc -xc99 -m64 -G -o quadprog.so aind.o init.o solve.QP.compact.o solve.QP.o util.o -xlic_lib=sunperf -lsunmath -lifai -lsunimath -lfai -lfai2 -lfsumai -lfprodai -lfminlai -lfmaxlai -lfminvai -lfmaxvai -lfui -lfsu -lsunmath -lmtsk -lm -lifai -lsunimath -lfai -lfai2 -lfsumai -lfprodai -lfminlai -lfmaxlai -lfminvai -lfmaxvai -lfui -lfsu -lsunmath -lmtsk -lm -L/usr/lib/64/R/lib -lR installing to /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/R/library/quadprog/libs ** R ** preparing package for lazy loading ** help *** installing help indices   converting help for package \u2018quadprog\u2019     finding HTML links ... done     solve.QP                                html      solve.QP.compact                        html  ** building package indices ** testing if installed package can be loaded * DONE (quadprog) ====== Here is an example from http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/quadprog/quadprog.pdf > require(quadprog) > Dmat <- matrix(0,3,3) > diag(Dmat) <- 1 > dvec <- c(0,5,0) > Amat <- matrix(c(-4,-3,0,2,1,0,0,-2,1),3,3) > bvec <- c(-8,2,0) > solve.QP(Dmat,dvec,Amat,bvec=bvec) $solution [1] 0.4761905 1.0476190 2.0952381 $value [1] -2.380952 $unconstrained.solution [1] 0 5 0 $iterations [1] 3 0 $Lagrangian [1] 0.0000000 0.2380952 2.0952381 $iact [1] 3 2 Here, the standard example is modified to work with Oracle R Enterprise require(ORE) ore.connect("my-name", "my-sid", "my-host", "my-pass", 1521) ore.doEval(   function () {     require(quadprog)   } ) ore.doEval(   function () {     Dmat <- matrix(0,3,3)     diag(Dmat) <- 1     dvec <- c(0,5,0)     Amat <- matrix(c(-4,-3,0,2,1,0,0,-2,1),3,3)     bvec <- c(-8,2,0)    solve.QP(Dmat,dvec,Amat,bvec=bvec)   } ) $solution [1] 0.4761905 1.0476190 2.0952381 $value [1] -2.380952 $unconstrained.solution [1] 0 5 0 $iterations [1] 3 0 $Lagrangian [1] 0.0000000 0.2380952 2.0952381 $iact [1] 3 2 Now I can combine the quadprog compute algorithms with the Oracle R Enterprise Database engine functionality: Scale to large datasets Access to tables, views, and external tables in the database, as well as those accessible through database links Use SQL query parallel execution Use in-database statistical and data mining functionality

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• What Counts for A DBA - Logic

  - by drsql

  "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who will always wonder why there are only two items in my list and those who will figured it out the first time they saw this very old joke."  Those readers who will give up immediately and get frustrated with me for not explaining it to them are not likely going to be great technical professionals of any sort, much less a programmer or administrator who will be constantly dealing with the common failures that make up a DBA's day.  Many of these people will stare at this like a dog staring at a traffic signal and still have no more idea of how to decipher the riddle. Without explanation they will give up, call the joke "stupid" and, feeling quite superior, walk away indignantly to their job likely flipping patties of meat-by-product. As a data professional or any programmer who has strayed  to this very data-oriented blog, you would, if you are worth your weight in air, either have recognized immediately what was going on, or felt a bit ignorant.  Your friends are chuckling over the joke, but why is it funny? Unfortunately you left your smartphone at home on the dresser because you were up late last night programming and were running late to work (again), so you will either have to fake a laugh or figure it out.  Digging through the joke, you figure out that the word "two" is the most important part, since initially the joke mentioned 10. Hmm, why did they spell out two, but not ten? Maybe 10 could be interpreted a different way?  As a DBA, this sort of logic comes into play every day, and sometimes it doesn't involve nerdy riddles or Star Wars folklore.  When you turn on your computer and get the dreaded blue screen of death, you don't immediately cry to the help desk and sit on your thumbs and whine about not being able to work. Do that and your co-workers will question your nerd-hood; I know I certainly would. You figure out the problem, and when you have it narrowed down, you call the help desk and tell them what the problem is, usually having to explain that yes, you did in fact try to reboot before calling.  Of course, sometimes humility does come in to play when you reach the end of your abilities, but the ‘end of abilities’ is not something any of us recognize readily. It is handy to have the ability to use logic to solve uncommon problems: It becomes especially useful when you are trying to solve a data-related problem such as a query performance issue, and the way that you approach things will tell your coworkers a great deal about your abilities.  The novice is likely to immediately take the approach of  trying to add more indexes or blaming the hardware. As you become more and more experienced, it becomes increasingly obvious that performance issues are a very complex topic. A query may be slow for a myriad of reasons, from concurrency issues, a poor query plan because of a parameter value (like parameter sniffing,) poor coding standards, or just because it is a complex query that is going to be slow sometimes. Some queries that you will deal with may have twenty joins and hundreds of search criteria, and it can take a lot of thought to determine what is going on.  You can usually figure out the problem to almost any query by using basic knowledge of how joins and queries work, together with the help of such things as the query plan, profiler or monitoring tools.  It is not unlikely that it can take a full day’s work to understand some queries, breaking them down into smaller queries to find a very tiny problem. Not every time will you actually find the problem, and it is part of the process to occasionally admit that the problem is random, and everything works fine now.  Sometimes, it is necessary to realize that a problem is outside of your current knowledge, and admit temporary defeat: You can, at least, narrow down the source of the problem by looking logically at all of the possible solutions. By doing this, you can satisfy your curiosity and learn more about what the actual problem was. For example, in the joke, had you never been exposed to the concept of binary numbers, there is no way you could have known that binary - 10 = decimal - 2, but you could have logically come to the conclusion that 10 must not mean ten in the context of the joke, and at that point you are that much closer to getting the joke and at least won't feel so ignorant.

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• Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

  - by simonc

  As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be an a**hole'. If you act like an a**hole, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• How to Point sprite's direction towards Mouse or an Object [duplicate]

  - by Irfan Dahir

  This question already has an answer here: Rotating To Face a Point 1 answer I need some help with rotating sprites towards the mouse. I'm currently using the library allegro 5.XX. The rotation of the sprite works but it's constantly inaccurate. It's always a few angles off from the mouse to the left. Can anyone please help me with this? Thank you. P.S I got help with the rotating function from here: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2012/11/18/GameDev-math-recipes-Rotating-to-face-a-point.aspx Although it's by javascript, the maths function is the same. And also, by placing: if(angle < 0) { angle = 360 - (-angle); } doesn't fix it. The Code: #include <allegro5\allegro.h> #include <allegro5\allegro_image.h> #include "math.h" int main(void) { int width = 640; int height = 480; bool exit = false; int shipW = 0; int shipH = 0; ALLEGRO_DISPLAY *display = NULL; ALLEGRO_EVENT_QUEUE *event_queue = NULL; ALLEGRO_BITMAP *ship = NULL; if(!al_init()) return -1; display = al_create_display(width, height); if(!display) return -1; al_install_keyboard(); al_install_mouse(); al_init_image_addon(); al_set_new_bitmap_flags(ALLEGRO_MIN_LINEAR | ALLEGRO_MAG_LINEAR); //smoother rotate ship = al_load_bitmap("ship.bmp"); shipH = al_get_bitmap_height(ship); shipW = al_get_bitmap_width(ship); int shipx = width/2 - shipW/2; int shipy = height/2 - shipH/2; int mx = width/2; int my = height/2; al_set_mouse_xy(display, mx, my); event_queue = al_create_event_queue(); al_register_event_source(event_queue, al_get_mouse_event_source()); al_register_event_source(event_queue, al_get_keyboard_event_source()); //al_hide_mouse_cursor(display); float angle; while(!exit) { ALLEGRO_EVENT ev; al_wait_for_event(event_queue, &ev); if(ev.type == ALLEGRO_EVENT_KEY_UP) { switch(ev.keyboard.keycode) { case ALLEGRO_KEY_ESCAPE: exit = true; break; /*case ALLEGRO_KEY_LEFT: degree -= 10; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_RIGHT: degree += 10; break;*/ case ALLEGRO_KEY_W: shipy -=10; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_S: shipy +=10; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_A: shipx -=10; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_D: shipx += 10; break; } }else if(ev.type == ALLEGRO_EVENT_MOUSE_AXES) { mx = ev.mouse.x; my = ev.mouse.y; angle = atan2(my - shipy, mx - shipx); } // al_draw_bitmap(ship,shipx, shipy, 0); //al_draw_rotated_bitmap(ship, shipW/2, shipH/2, shipx, shipy, degree * 3.142/180,0); al_draw_rotated_bitmap(ship, shipW/2, shipH/2, shipx, shipy,angle, 0); //I directly placed the angle because the allegro library calculates radians, and if i multiplied it by 180/3. 142 the rotation would go hawire, not would, it actually did. al_flip_display(); al_clear_to_color(al_map_rgb(0,0,0)); } al_destroy_bitmap(ship); al_destroy_event_queue(event_queue); al_destroy_display(display); return 0; } EDIT: This was marked duplicate by a moderator. I'd like to say that this isn't the same as that. I'm a total beginner at game programming, I had a view at that other topic and I had difficulty understanding it. Please understand this, thank you. :/ Also, while I was making a print of what the angle is I got this... Here is a screenshot:http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/7396/fzuq.jpg Which is weird because aren't angles supposed to be 360 degrees only?

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• What are the industry metrics for average spend on dev hardware and software? [on hold]

  - by RationalGeek

  I'm trying to budget for my dev shop and compare our budget items to industry expectations. I'm hoping to find some information on what percentage of a dev's salary is generally spent on tooling, both hardware and software. Where can I find such information? If instead there is a source that looks at raw dollars that is useful, too. I can extrapolate what I need from that. NOTE: Your anecdotal evidence from your own job will not be very helpful. I'm looking for industry average statistics from a credible source. EDIT: I'm reluctant to even keep this question going based on the passionate negative responses of commenters, but I do think this is valuable information (assuming anyone will care to answer) so let me make one attempt to clarify why I'm looking for this information, and then leave it at that. I'm not sure why understanding and validating my motives is a necessary step to providing the information, but apparently that is the case, so I will do my best. Firstly, let me respond to the idea that us "management types" shouldn't use these types of metrics to evaluate budgets. I agree in part. Ideally, you should spend whatever is necessary on developers in order to keep them fully happy and productive. And this is true of all employees. However, companies operate in a world of limited resources, and every dollar spent in one area means a dollar not spent in another. So it is not enough to simply say "I need to spend $10,000 per developer next year" without having some way to justify that position. One way to help justify it is to compare yourself against the industry. If it is the case that on average a software shops spends 5% (making up that number) of their total development budget (salaries being the large portion of the other 95%, for arguments sake), and I'm only spending 3%, it helps in the justification process. So, it is not my intent to use this information to limit what I spend on developers, but rather to arm myself with the necessary justification to spend what I need to spend on developers to give them the best tools I can. I have been a developer for many years and I understand the need for proper tooling. Next, let's examine the idea that even considering the relationship between a spend on developer salaries and developer tooling is ludicrous and should be banned from budgetary thinking. As Jimmy Hoffa put it in their comment, it's like saying "I'm going to spend no more than 10% of median employee salary on light bulbs and coffee from now on.". Well, yes, it is like saying that, and from a budgeting perspective, this is a useful way to look at things. If you know that, on average, an employee consumes X dollars of coffee a year, then you can project a coffee budget based on that. And you can compare it to an industry metric to understand where you fall: do you spend more on coffee than other companies or less? Why might this be? If you are a coffee supply manager, that seems like a useful thought process. The same seems to hold true for developers. Now, on to the idea that I need to compare "apples to apples" and only look at other shops that are in the same place geographically, the same business, the same application architecture, and the same development frameworks. I guess if I could find such a statistic that said "a shop that is exactly identical to yours spends X on developer tooling" it would be wonderful. But there is plenty of value in an average statistic. Here's an analogy: let's say you are working on a household budget and need to decide how much to spend on groceries. Is it enough to know that the average consumer spends 15% on groceries and therefore decide that you will budget exactly 15%? No. You have to tweak your budget based on your individual needs and situation. But the generalized statistic does help in this evaluation. You can know if your budget is grossly off from what others are doing, and this can help you figure out why this is. So, I will concede the point that it would be better to find statistics that align to my shop, though I think any statistics I could find would be useful for what I'm doing. In that light, let's say that my shop is mostly focused on ASP.NET web applications. That doesn't map perfectly to reality because large enterprises have very heterogenous IT environments. But if I was going to pick one technology that is our focus that would be it. But, if you were to point me at some statistics that are related to a Linux shop doing embedded Java applications, I would still find it useful as a point of comparison. SUMMARY: Let me try to rephrase my question. I'm trying to find industry metrics on how much dev shops spend on developer tooling, both hardware and software. I don't so much care whether it is expressed as a percentage of total budget or as X dollars per dev or as Y percentage of salary. Any metric would be useful. If there are metrics that are specific to ASP.NET dev shops in the Northeast US, all the better, but I would be happy to find anything.

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• What to leave when you're leaving

  - by BuckWoody

  There's already a post on this topic - sort of. I read this entry, where the author did a good job on a few steps, but I found that a few other tips might be useful, so if you want to check that one out and then this post, you might be able to put together your own plan for when you leave your job.  I once took over the system administrator (of which the Oracle and SQL Server servers were a part) at a mid-sized firm. The outgoing administrator had about a two- week-long scheduled overlap with me, but was angry at the company and told me "hey, I know this is going to be hard on you, but I want them to know how important I was. I'm not telling you where anything is or what the passwords are. Good luck!" He then quit that day. It took me about three days to find all of the servers and crack the passwords. Yes, the company tried to take legal action against the guy and all that, but he moved back to his home country and so largely got away with it. Obviously, this isn't the way to leave a job. Many of us have changed jobs in the past, and most of us try to be very professional about the transition to a new team, regardless of the feelings about a particular company. I've been treated badly at a firm, but that is no reason to leave a mess for someone else. So here's what you should put into place at a minimum before you go. Most of this is common sense - which of course isn't very common these days - and another good rule is just to ask yourself "what would I want to know"? The article I referenced at the top of this post focuses on a lot of documentation of the systems. I think that's fine, but in actuality, I really don't need that. Even with this kind of documentation, I still perform a full audit on the systems, so in the end I create my own system documentation. There are actually only four big items I need to know to get started with the systems: 1. Where is everything/everybody?The first thing I need to know is where all of the systems are. I mean not only the street address, but the closet or room, the rack number, the IU number in the rack, the SAN luns, all that. A picture here is worth a thousand words, which is why I really like Visio. It combines nice graphics, full text and all that. But use whatever you have to tell someone the physical locations of the boxes. Also, tell them the physical location of the folks in charge of those boxes (in case you aren't) or who share that responsibility. And by "where" in this case, I mean names and phones.  2. What do they do?For both the servers and the people, tell them what they do. If it's a database server, detail what each database does and what application goes to that, and who "owns" that application. In my mind, this is one of hte most important things a Data Professional needs to know. In the case of the other administrtors or co-owners, document each person's responsibilities.   3. What are the credentials?Logging on/in and gaining access to the buildings are things that the new Data Professional will need to do to successfully complete their job. This means service accounts, certificates, all of that. The first thing they should do, of course, is change the passwords on all that, but the first thing they need is the ability to do that!  4. What is out of the ordinary?This is the most tricky, and perhaps the next most important thing to know. Did you have to use a "special" driver for that video card on server X? Is the person that co-owns an application with you mentally unstable (like me) or have special needs, like "don't talk to Buck before he's had coffee. Nothing will make any sense"? Do you have service pack requirements for a specific setup? Write all that down. Anything that took you a day or longer to make work is probably a candidate here. This is my short list - anything you care to add? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Server configuration

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index Welcome to the second article in this quick quide to Oracle IRM 11g. Hopefully you've just finished the first article which takes you through deploying the software onto a Linux server. This article walks you through the configuration of this new service and contains a subset of information from the official documentation and is focused on installing the server on Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you are planning to deploy on a non-Linux platform, you will need to reference the documentation for platform specific information. Contents Introduction Create IRM WebLogic Domain Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration Introduction In the previous article the database was prepared, the WebLogic Application Server installed and the files required for an IRM server installed. But we don't actually have a configured system yet. We need to now create a WebLogic Domain in which the IRM server will run, then configure some of the settings and crypography so that we can create a context and be ready to seal some content and test it all works. This article doesn't cover the configuration of SSL communication from client to server. This is quite a big topic and a separate article has been dedicated for this area. In these articles I also use the hostname, irm.company.internal to reference the IRM server and later on use the hostname irm.company.com in reference to the public facing service. Create IRM WebLogic Domain First step is creating the WebLogic domain, in a console switch to the newly created IRM installation folder as shown below and we will run the domain configuration wizard. [oracle@irm /]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin [oracle@irm bin]$ ./config.sh First thing the wizard will ask is if you wish to create a new or extend an existing domain. This guide is creating a standalone system so you should select to create a new domain. Next step is to choose what technologies from the Oracle ECM Suite you wish this domain to host. You are only interested in selecting the option "Oracle Information Rights Management". When you select this check box you will notice that it also selects "Oracle Enterprise Manager" and "Oracle JRF" as these are dependencies of the IRM server. You then need to specify where you wish to place the domain files. I usually just change the domain name from base_domain or irm_domain and leave the others with their defaults. Now the domain will have a single user initially and by default this user is called "weblogic". I usually change this account name to "sysadmin" or "administrator", but in this guide lets just accept the default. With respects to the next dialog, again for eval or dev reasons, leave the server startup mode as development. The JDK should also be automatically detected. We now need to provide details of the database. This guide is using the Oracle 11gR2 database and the settings I used can be seen in the image to the right. There is a lot of configuration that can now be done for the admin server, any managed servers and where the deployments reside. In this guide I am leaving all of these to their defaults so do not check any of the boxes. However I will on this blog be detailing later how you can go back and setup things such as automated startup of an IRM server which require changes to these default settings. But for now, lets leave it all alone and just click next. Now we are ready to install. Note that from this dialog you can scroll the left window and see there are going to be two servers created from the defaults. The AdminServer which is where you modify settings for the WebLogic Server and also hosts the Oracle Enterprise Manager for IRM which allows to monitor the IRM service performance and also make service related settings (which we shortly do below) and the IRM_server1 which hosts the actual IRM services themselves. So go right ahead and hit create, the process is pretty quick and usually under 10 minutes. When the domain creation ends, it will give you the URL to the admin server. It's worth noting this down and the URL is usually; http://irm.company.internal:7001 Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration First thing to do is to start the WebLogic Admin server and review the initial IRM server settings. In this guide we are going to run the Admin server and IRM server in console windows, in another article I will discuss running these as background services. So for now, start a console and run the Admin server by doing the following. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/ ./startWebLogic.sh Wait for the server to start, you are looking for the following line to be reported in the console window. <BEA-00360><Server started in RUNNING mode> First step is configuring the IRM service via Enterprise Manager. Now that the Admin server is running you can point a browser at http://irm.company.internal:7001/em. Login with the username and password you supplied when you created the domain. In Enterprise Manager the IRM service administrator is able to make server wide configuration. However finding where to access the pages with these settings can be a bit of a challenge. After logging in on the left you'll see a tree containing elements of the Enterprise Manager farm Farm_irm_domain. Open up Content Management, then Information Rights Management and finally select the IRM node. On the right then select the IRM menu item, navigate to the Administration section and now we have four options, for now, we are just going to look at General Settings. The image on the right proves that a picture is worth a thousand words (or 113 in this case). The General Settings page allows you to set the cryptographic algorithms used for protecting sealed content. Unless you have a burning need to increase the key lengths or you need to comply to a regulation or government mandate, AES192 is a good start. You can change this later on without worry. The most important setting here we need to make is the Server URL. In this blog article I go over why this URL is so important, basically every single piece of content you protect with Oracle IRM is going to have this URL embedded in it, so if it's wrong or unresolvable, then nobody can open the secured documents. Note that in our environment we have yet to do any SSL configuration of the service. If you intend to build a server without SSL, then use http as the protocol instead of https. But I would recommend using SSL and setting this up is described in the next article. I would also probably up the device count from 1 to 3. This means that any user can retrieve rights to access content onto 3 computers at any one time. The default of 1 doesn't really make sense in development, evaluation nor even production environments and my experience is that 3 is a better number. Next step is to create the keystore for the IRM server. When a classification (called a context) is created, Oracle IRM generates a unique set of symmetric keys which are used to secure the content itself. These keys are then encrypted with a set of "wrapper" asymmetric cryptography keys which are stored externally to the server either in a Java Key Store or a HSM. These keys need to be generated and the following shows my commands and the resulting output. I have greyed out the responses from the commands so you can see the input a little easier. [oracle@irmsrv ~]$ cd /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./setWLSEnv.sh CLASSPATH=/oracle/middleware/patch_wls1033/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/oracle/middleware/patch_ocp353/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/lib/tools.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic_sp.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/features/weblogic.server.modules_10.3.3.0.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/webservices.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/lib/ant-all.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/net.sf.antcontrib_1.1.0.0_1-0b2/lib/ant-contrib.jar: PATH=/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/oracle/bin Your environment has been set. [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ keytool -genkeypair -alias oracle.irm.wrap -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -keystore irm.jks Enter keystore password: Re-enter new password: What is your first and last name? [Unknown]: Simon Thorpe What is the name of your organizational unit? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your organization? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your City or Locality? [Unknown]: San Francisco What is the name of your State or Province? [Unknown]: CA What is the two-letter country code for this unit? [Unknown]: US Is CN=Simon Thorpe, OU=Oracle, O=Oracle, L=San Francisco, ST=CA, C=US correct? [no]: yes Enter key password for (RETURN if same as keystore password): At this point we now have an irm.jks in the directory /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig. The reason we store it here is this folder would be backed up as part of a domain backup. As with any cryptographic technology, DO NOT LOSE THESE KEYS OR THIS KEY STORE. Once you've sealed content against a context, the keys will be wrapped with these keys, lose these keys, and you can't get access to any secured content, pretty important. Now we've got the keys created, we need to go back to the IRM Enterprise Manager and set the location of the key store. Going back to the General Settings page in Enterprise Manager scroll down to Keystore Settings. Leave the type as JKS but change the location to; /oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/irm.jks and hit Apply. The final step with regards to the key store is we need to tell the server what the password is for the Java Key Store so that it can be opened and the keys accessed. Once more fire up a console window and run these commands (again i've greyed out the clutter to see the commands easier). You will see dummy passed into the commands, this is because the command asks for a username, but in this instance we don't use one, hence the value dummy is passed and it isn't used. [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./wlst.sh ... lots of settings fly by... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands wls:/offline>connect('weblogic','password','t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001') Connecting to t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'irm_domain'. Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead. wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","keystore:irm.jks","dummy","password") Location changed to domainRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with DomainMBean as the root. For more help, use help(domainRuntime)wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","key:irm.jks:oracle.irm.wrap","dummy","password") Already in Domain Runtime Tree wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig> At last we are now ready to fire up the IRM server itself. The domain creation created a managed server called IRM_server1 and we need to start this, use the following commands in a new console window. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin/ ./startManagedWebLogic.sh IRM_server1 This will start up the server in the console, unlike the Admin server, you need to provide the username and password for the service to start. Enter in your weblogic username and password when prompted. You can change this behavior by putting the password into a boot.properties file, read more about this in the WebLogic Server documentation. Once running, wait until you see the line; <Notice><WebLogicServer><BEA-000360><Server started in RUNNING mode> At this point we can now login to the Oracle IRM Management Website at the URL. http://irm.company.internal:1600/irm_rights/ The server is just configured for HTTP at the moment, no SSL involved. Just want to ensure we can get a working system up and running. You should now see a login like the image on the right and you can now login using your weblogic username and password. The next article in this guide goes over adding SSL and now testing your server by actually adding a few users, sealing some content and opening this content as a user.

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