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• Tell Us Once&ndash;Guardian Innovation Award Winner

  - by BizTalk Visionary

  Yesterday the Tell Us Once project received it’s latest accolade. My partner in crime in the execution of the delivery of software for this project, Mark Usher,  reports: It’s always great to receive recognition for the effort you put in when working on a project. It’s no secret that here at Solidsoft we are extremely proud of our association with the Government’s Tell Us Once (TUO) programme. Having already been selected by Microsoft as Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2011 Award Winners for Application Integration, we are very pleased that the TUO programme as a whole has been recognised and has won the Guardian Newspaper’s Innovation Nation Award for Frontline Services (link to http://www.guardian.co.uk/innovation-nation-awards )  The TUO entry was judged the winner over three other shortlisted solutions from Dyfed Powys Police, North Yorkshire County Council and Staffordshire County Council. Innovation Nation is a partnership between Virgin Media Business and the Guardian, an initiative to uncover the most innovative businesses, public sector organisations and charities in the UK today.  Its aim is to showcase the ideas, the endeavour and the energy that are making things better in the areas of customer service, unique working practices, frontline government services and collaboration. Solidsoft have been involved with the Tell Us Once programme since its inception in 2007 and worked closely with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to produce a business case for the programme. Teaming up with Atos (who host the application) Solidsoft delivered the first national solution in 2011 and a second phase in April 2012. Whilst currently restricted to distributing citizen data to central government organisations and local government authorities, DWP is now actively engaging with the private sector to see if TUO data can be disclosed to private sector organisations such as banks and building societies. Solidsoft welcome this expansion into the private sector where even more efficiencies will be realised. Mark Usher - Solidsoft Sales and Marketing Director For my part I’d like to say a big thank you to the Solidsoft Team, ATOS team and DWP team that made it happen.

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• Questions about Code Reviews

  - by bamboocha

  My team plans to do Code Review and asked me to make a concept what and how we are going to make our Code Reviews. We are a little group of 6 team members. We use an SVN repository and write programs in different languages (mostly: VB.NET, Java, C#), but the reviews should be also possible for others, yet not defined. Basically I am asking you, how are you doing it, to be more precise I made a list of some questions I got: 1. Peer Meetings vs Ticket System? Would you tend to do meetings with all members, rather than something like a ticket system, where the developer can add a new code change and some or all need to check and approve it? 1. What tool? I made some researches on my own and it showed that Rietveld seems to be the program to use for non-git solutions. Do you agree/disagree and why? 2. A good workflow to follow? 3. Are there good ways to minimize the effort for those meetings even more? 4. What are good questions, every code reviewer should follow? I already made a list with some questions, what would you append/remove? are there any magic numbers in the code? do all variable and method names make sense and are easily understandable? are all querys using prepared statement? are all objects disposed/closed when they are not needed anymore? 5. What are your general experiences with it? What's important? Things to consider/prevent/watch out?

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• geomipmapping using displacement mapping (and glVertexAttribDivisor)

  - by Will

  I wake up with a clear vision, but sadly my laptop card doesn't do displacement mapping nor glVertexAttribDivisor so I can't test it out; I'm left sharing here: With geomipmapping, the grid at any factor is transposable - if you pass in an offset - say as a uniform - you can reuse the same vertex and index array again and again. If you also pass in the offset into the heightmap as a uniform, the vertex shader can do displacement mapping. If the displacement map is mipmapped, you get the advantages of trilinear filtering for distant maps. And, if the scenery is closer, rather than exposing that the you have a world made out of quads, you can use your transposable grid vertex array and indices to do vertex-shader interpolation (fancy splines) to do super-smooth infinite zoom? So I have some questions: does it work? In theory, in practice? does anyone do it? Does this technique have a name? Papers, demos, anything I can look at? does glVertexAttribDivisor mean that you can have a single glMultiDrawElementsEXT or similar approach to draw all your terrain tiles in one call rather than setting up the uniforms and emitting each tile? Would this offer any noticeable gains? does a heightmap that is GL_LUMINANCE take just one byte per pixel(=vertex)? (On mainstream cards, obviously. Does storage vary in practice?) Does going to the effort of reusing the same vertices and indices mean that you can basically fill the GPU RAM with heightmap and not a lot else, giving you either bigger landscapes or more detailed landscapes/meshes for the same bang? is mipmapping the displacement map going to work? On future cards? Is it going to introduce unsurmountable inaccuracies if it is enabled?

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• Dependency injection: what belongs in the constructor?

  - by Adam Backstrom

  I'm evaluating my current PHP practices in an effort to write more testable code. Generally speaking, I'm fishing for opinions on what types of actions belong in the constructor. Should I limit things to dependency injection? If I do have some data to populate, should that happen via a factory rather than as constructor arguments? (Here, I'm thinking about my User class that takes a user ID and populates user data from the database during construction, which obviously needs to change in some way.) I've heard it said that "initialization" methods are bad, but I'm sure that depends on what exactly is being done during initialization. At the risk of getting too specific, I'll also piggyback a more detailed example onto my question. For a previous project, I built a FormField class (which handled field value setting, validation, and output as HTML) and a Model class to contain these fields and do a bit of magic to ease working with fields. FormField had some prebuilt subclasses, e.g. FormText (<input type="text">) and FormSelect (<select>). Model would be subclassed so that a specific implementation (say, a Widget) had its own fields, such as a name and date of manufacture: class Widget extends Model { public function __construct( $data = null ) { $this->name = new FormField('length=20&label=Name:'); $this->manufactured = new FormDate; parent::__construct( $data ); // set above fields using incoming array } } Now, this does violate some rules that I have read, such as "avoid new in the constructor," but to my eyes this does not seem untestable. These are properties of the object, not some black box data generator reading from an external source. Unit tests would progressively build up to any test of Widget-specific functionality, so I could be confident that the underlying FormFields were working correctly during the Widget test. In theory I could provide the Model with a FieldFactory() which could supply custom field objects, but I don't believe I would gain anything from this approach. Is this a poor assumption?

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• Best practices for App Idea ownership and shares

  - by JOG

  I am developing apps on my sparetime. I am the sole developer, and two non-programmer friends of mine provide vision, content, algorithms and ideas. We always agree happily on all the features, todos and prioritizations. But naturally, coding it is the biggest part. When selling, we agree on splitting profit equally, that is 33% each. But version 1.0 naturally does not sell much. And I go on to try to make the app more viral. This includes tons of stuff where the others are of little help. Examples: Adding support for sharing, facebook connect, gameifying, letting users add content, home page, support, maintenance, server services to make it easier for to update content. The list is long. Suddenly I will be doing 100% of a lot of work but only "own" a third of the income. My friends may either "fade out" of the project after 1.0, or they continue to contribute, but with less value and I would rather exchange them for more programmers or graphic designers. The effort they made to version 1.0 is worth a lot to the app and I realize I would have never done it without them. But I am doing all the work in the end. It is hard to negotiate about splitting 90, 5, 5 instead of 33% each, because the idea is still theirs. How to solve this? What are the best practices to regard the ownership of the app? What kind of agreements could I make that make it beneficial and motivational for me to continue developing the app?

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• Can I assume interface oriented programming as a good object oriented programming?

  - by david

  I have been programming for decades but I have not been used to object oriented programming. But for recenet years, I had a great opportunity to learn OOP, its principles, and a lot of patterns that are great. Since I've learned OOP, I tried to apply them to a couple of projects and found those projects successful. Unfortunately I didn't follow extreme programming that suggests writing test first, mainly because their time frame were tight. What I did for those projects were Identify all necessary classes and create them with proper properties and methods whenever there is dependency between classes, write interface between them see if there is any patterns for certain relationships between classes to replace By successful, I meant that it was quick development effort, the classes can be reused better, and flexible enough so that another programmer does not have to change something else to fix another part. But I wonder if this is a good practice. Of course, I know I need to put writing unit tests first in my work process. But other than that, is there any problem with this approach - creating lots of interfaces - in long term?

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• Ubuntu doesn't load, can't even open a terminal to type commands, even after boot repair

  - by Sky

  When I start Ubuntu I only get my desktop picture and am unable to open a terminal to type any commands. When I try a Guest session all I get is a red Ubuntu backdrop, nothing else. I tried boot repair but no improvement. Summary information following boot repair: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8109809/ I can paste some of it here if someone can tell me which part of it is relevant. This all occurred after I tried to remove compizconfig (which I might not have completed), because it's been using up my CPU (running at 50-60% with compiz at the top in System monitor. My laptop has been running very slow since installing Ubuntu so I've been trying to fix that, also website videos play slow and the startup of Ubuntu has been faulty. I also installed a proprietory Nvidia driver (304) before this launcher issue occurred, in an effort to fix my video problem (didn't help anything). Laptop is Dell 620m with Intel Core 2; 1.83GHz, 2 GB RAM, Ubuntu 14.04 (new to Linux); 66GB Ubuntu partition. Everything works fine on the small XP partition of my laptop, but I've moved all my files to the larger Ubuntu portion. I wanted to try some answers I found to similar questions but they all seem to involve commands in a terminal and I can't open a terminal. How can I get the launcher back, along with access to my programmes etc? Thank you for any help.

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• Dealing with institutionalized programmers.

  - by Singleton

  Some times programmers who work in a project for long time tend to get institutionalized. It is difficult to convince them with reasoning. Even if we manage to convince them they will be adamant to take suggestion on board. How do we handle the situation without developing friction in team? Institutionalized in terms of practices. I recently joined in a project where build &release process was made so complicated with unnecessary roadblocks. My suggestion was we can get rid of some of the development overheads(like filling few spreadsheets) just by integrating defect management and version controlling tools (both are IBM-Rational tools integration can be very easy and one-off effort). Also by using tools like Maven & Ant (project involves java and some COTS products) build & release can be simplified and reduce manual errors& intervention. I managed to convince and ready to put efforts for developing proof of concept. But the ‘Senior’ developer is not willing to take it on board. One reason could be the current process makes him valuable in team.

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• Happy holiday! Thanks for making the SOA Partner Community a superb success in 2010!

  - by Jürgen Kress

  2010 highlights to remember: Partners who became SOA Specialized – thanks for the effort SOA Blackbelt training by Clemens Utschig-Utschig – thanks for all the wonderful support! OSB Blackbelt training by Samrat Ray – thanks for taking the challange SOA & Cloud Symposium 2010 by Thomas Erl SOA Partner Community Awards 2010 SOA Partner Community @ OOW 2010 All the SOA books you published! OFM 11g Launch part II SOA Partner Community Forum XI all the great SOA project you have realized! For 2011 please make sure you: Attend our SOA Partner Community Forum! March 15th & 16th 2010 Attend our SOA Blackbelt training January 31st – February 4th 2011 Become SOA Specialized Have fun in the sun! We wish you all a happy holiday and a great start in 2011! Jürgen Kress       For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: Happy holiday,SOA Partner Community,SOA Community,OPN,Oracle,SOA,Jürgen Kress,SOA Partner Community Forum

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• LTS 12.04.1 will not resolve domain.local websites

  - by user108502

  I have done a brand new installation of the Ubuntu server (v12.10) with bind configured to have a dns zone of gdos.local and apache configured for said domain. With a brand new installation of Ubuntu desktop LTS I try to connect to www.gdos.local and all I get is: Server not found Firefox can't find the server at www.gdos.local. Check the address for typing errors such as ww.example.com instead of www.example.com However if I change the domain to gdos.tmp and type in www.gdos.tmp, I get the internal website. If I change it to mybusiness.local , I get the same error message. If I use a Microsoft os, this works fine, all three domains resolve to a webpage. I have searched the internet flat for the past week on dns issues but have not come up with a solution. I have followed instructions from removing dnsmasq to editing like resolv.conf (in some very strange places) and I still have no joy on getting the .local domain extension to work. I can safely say the issue is not with the server but with the desktops because if the issue was server related the Microsoft OS's would not resolve it either. I have done several installs of the desktop in an effort to make sure that I did not break anything while trying to fix this. Please can anyone point to a workable solution for fixing the .local domain extension. Thank you Mark Hollander

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• What You Said: Where Do You Find Your Next Game?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite places and tricks for finding new video games to play. It turns out the least of your problems was finding new games! From the comments it became apparent How-To Geek readers had absolutely no problem finding new games to add to their gaming stable. Buzz writes: I have quite an elaborate procedure in finding my next game:For free games i simply follow the feeds on a few websites like Freegamer, LinuxGames, HappyPenguin and Penguspy. Every now and them i browse Wikipedia articles on free/FOSS games. For commercial games the procedure depends on what i enjoyed the most in that game:- If i enjoyed the story or the general feel: i usually start with a game i like and look for sequels, prequels, mods or spinoffs. I even go out on a limb and give other platforms (than a PC) a try, even if it usually means emulation. If you really enjoy a game series/saga it’s usually worth the effort.- If i enjoy the producer/gaming company then i seek out more of their games.- If i enjoy the technical achievements that went into making the game or if i am concerned for the system requirements of my gear i try to play games that are built on the same engine(s) as one of the games i ran smooth and enjoyed.- If i feel like playing a particular genre i usually start with a title i enjoyed and look for alternatives or similar games- You can always try searching for Game of The Year winners for a particular time period or other similar accomplishments. They usually yield great results. How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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• Java.net Reborn

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Java.net, the home of  Java community projects, has been re-launched with a new look and new tools for developers.  The move from CollabNet to the Kenai infrastructure offers more flexibility for developers who want to host or contribute to community projects.  Instead of the large, fixed infrastructure per project (for example, several mailing lists per project), Kenai's ala carte features allow users to take only what they need. "We will continue to have the great mix of blogs, forums, and editorial content as well as new tools on the project side, including Mercurial, Git, and JIRA for developers," Java.net Community Manager Sonya Barry explains.  The migration was huge effort. Over 1400 projects were migrated (and some 30 projects are left to go). A large part of the migration was a big cleanup of abandoned projects. With the high abandonment rate of open source projects, the was a lot to remove. The new java.net site is smaller, faster and now the percentage of good, current content is much higher. Check it out at http://home.java.net/   Technorati Tags: java,java.net,oracle,oracle technology network del.icio.us Tags: java,java.net,oracle,oracle technology network

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• links for 2011-03-01

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Oracle Technology Network Architect Day: Denver - March 23 This live one-day event will bring together architects from a broad range of disciplines and domains to share insights and expertise in the use of Oracle technologies to meet the challenges today’s architects regularly face. (tags: oracle otn architect entarch) Java.net Reborn (Oracle Technology Network Blog (aka TechBlog)) "The migration was huge effort. Over 1400 projects were migrated (and some 30 projects are left to go). A large part of the migration was a big cleanup of abandoned projects...The new java.net site is smaller, faster and now the percentage of good, current content is much higher." (tags: oracle otn java java.net) This Week: OTN Java Developer Day in Boston, Massachusetts (US) | Java.net "This Thursday, March 3, the Oracle Technology Network will be hosting an OTN Developer Day titled You are the future of Java in Boston, Massachusetts (US). The all-day event includes a keynote address ("Java, the Language of the Future") and four separate tracks..." (tags: oracle otn java event) A brief introduction to BRM and architecture (Red Adventure) Yani Miguel offers a primer on the architecture behind Billing and Revenue Management. (tags: oracle otn brm) SOA Suite Integration: Part 1: Building a Web Service (The Shorten Spot) Anthony Shorten's first post in a new series "will not feature SOA Suite at all, but will concentrate on the capability for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework to create Web Services you can use for integration." (tags: oracle otn SOA soasuite) Darwin-IT: VirtualBox on Windows XP Martien van den Akker shares a few tips. (tags: oracle otn virtualization virtualbox) Pas Apicella: Developing RESTful Web Services from JDeveloper 11g (11.1.1.4) Plas says: "In this example we use JDeveloper to create a basic JAX-RS Web Service from support provided within the code editor as no wizard support exists within JDeveloper 11g at this stage." (tags: oracle otn REST SOA) Alexander Buckley: Maintenance Review of the Java VM Specification The Java Virtual Machine Specification is the authoritative reference for the design of the Java virtual machine that underpins the Java SE platform. In an implementation-independent manner, the Specification describes the architecture, linking model, and instruction set of the Java virtual machine, (tags: oracle otn java virtualization jvm javase)

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• Dependency Analyser

  - by tsutha

  I have been watching 3 videos put together by SSIS team on Dependency Analyser. I am happy Microsoft have made an effort to do something about it. I have been asking for this feature since SQL 2005 TAP. Still a long way to go before they catch up with competetion. It looks like it currently supports SSIS and SQL dependencies. Release note states its still in development and support only limited sets of tasks. You still would not know the impact of dropping a column on cubes, reports etc. I hope that changes by the time RTM comes out. I am struggling to understand why it is impossible to do it across the solution. Ideally if you have a BI solution which holds DB, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS & PPS projects I would like to right click and execute a dependency analyser, stating what impact would have if I drop / rename a specific column. Has anyone else looked at it and what are your thoughts? ThanksSutha  

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• the OpenJDK group at Oracle is growing

  - by john.rose

  p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline ; color: #0000ee} The OpenJDK software development team at Oracle is hiring. To get an idea of what we’re looking for, go to the Oracle recruitment portal and enter the Keywords “Java Platform Group” and the Location Keywords “Santa Clara”.  (We are a global engineering group based in Santa Clara.)  It’s pretty obvious what we are working on; just dive into a public OpenJDK repository or OpenJDK mailing list. Here is a typical job description from the current crop of requisitions: The Java Platform group is looking for an experienced, passionate and highly-motivated Software Engineer to join our world class development effort. Our team is responsible for delivering the Java Virtual Machine that is used by millions of developers. We are looking for a development engineer with a strong technical background and thorough understanding of the Java Virtual Machine, Java execution runtime, classloading, garbage collection, JIT compiler, serviceability and a desire to drive innovations. As a member of the software engineering division, you will take an active role in the definition and evolution of standard practices and procedures. You will be responsible for defining and developing software for tasks associated with the developing, designing and debugging of software applications or operating systems. Work is non-routine and very complex, involving the application of advanced technical/business skills in area of specialization. Leading contributor individually and as a team member, providing direction and mentoring to others. BS or MS degree or equivalent experience relevant to functional area. 7 years of software engineering or related experience.

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• New CAM Editor v2.3 with Open-XDX for Open Data APIs

  - by drrwebber

  Creating actual working XML exchanges, loading data from data stores, generating XML, testing, integrating with web services and then deployment delivery takes a lot of coding and effort. Then writing the documentation, models, schema and doing naming and design rule (NDR) checks and packaging all this together (such as for NIEM IEPD use). What if there was a tool that helped you do all that easily and simply? Welcome to the new Open-XDX and the CAM Editor! Open-XDX uses code-free techniques in combination with CAM templates and visual drag and drop to rapidly design your XML exchange. Then Open-XDX will automatically generate all the SQL for you, read the database data, generate and populate the valid output XML, and filter with parameters. To complete the processing solution Open-XDX works with web services and JDBC database connections as a callable module that can be deployed plug and play with your middleware stack, all with just a few lines of Java code (about 5 actually). You can build either Query/Response or Publish/Subscribe services from existing data stores to XML literally in minutes. To see a demonstration of using Open-XDX, a MySQL data store and integrating with Oracle Web Logic server please see this short few minutes video - http://youtube.com/user/TheCameditor There is also a Quick Guide available that provides more technical insights along with a sample pack download of templates and SQL that you can try for yourself. Head on over to our project resource site to learn more, download the latest CAM Editor and see links to all the resources and materials. We look forward to seeing how the developer community is able to jump start information sharing initiatives using this new innovative approach.

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• AsyncBridge? Async on .NET 4.0 using VS11

  - by Alex.Davies

  I've just found something quite cool. It's a code snippet that lets you use the real VS 11 C#5 compiler to write code that uses the async and await keywords, but to target .NET 4.0. It was published by Daniel Grunwald (from SharpDevelop).That means I can stop using the Async CTP for VS2010, which is not at all supported anymore, and a pain to install if you have windows updates turned on. Obviously I couldn't ask all my users to install .NET 4.5 beta, but .NET Demon is a VS 2010 extension, so we already have .NET 4.0. At the time of writing, VS11 is in beta still, but hopefully it's stable enough for my team to use!I would have written the code myself, but I had the wrong impression that the C# 5 beta compiler only looked in mscorlib for the helper classes it needs to implement async methods. Turns out you can provide them yourself. You can get the code here: https://gist.github.com/1961087You just add it to your project, and the compiler will apparently pick it up and use it to implement async/await. I'm at my parents' place for Easter without access to a machine with VS 11 to try it out. Let me know whether you get it to work!This reminds me of LINQBridge, which let us use C# 3 LINQ, but only require .NET 2. We should stick up a webpage to explain, with a nice easy dll, put it in nuget, and call it AsyncBridge.If you were really enthusiastic, you could re-implement the skeleton of the Task Parallel Library against .NET 2 to use async/await without even requiring .NET 4. Our usage stats suggest that practically everyone that uses Red Gate tools already has .NET 4 installed though, so I don't think I'll go to the effort.

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• Glimpse: Open Source Web Development

  - by Elizabeth Ayer

  We’re delighted to announce that Red Gate will be backing Glimpse! For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, Glimpse is an open source tool which does for the server what Firebug does for the client. It’s been in beta for the last year, and we’re very excited to give Glimpse the support and dedicated effort needed to take it to a v1 and beyond. Glimpse’s founders (Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn) have joined Red Gate, and they’re just as excited as we are about the opportunities that active development of Glimpse will bring. They will continue to write code, support the community and drive the project forward (as they’ve done since its inception). With full-time attention on growing Glimpse and its community, users and developers can expect the project to accelerate, with frequent releases of new functionality. Red Gate is excited about its first major involvement with open source. You may well be wondering, though, why Red Gate is doing this. Glimpse dovetails beautifully with Red Gate’s .NET tools, which makes Glimpse an ideal framework for plugging in advanced, paid-for functionality (like performance analysis) the way web developers want to see it. As a means to this end, we will contribute to the Glimpse open source project in order to broaden its adoption and delight web developers. Since bringing in .NET Reflector in 2008, we’ve learnt sharp lessons from the community about the right and wrong ways to engage with developers, not to mention the enduring value of free. Glimpse further shows what the .NET community can achieve through open source collaboration, and we’re looking forward to working with the Glimpse community to make something enduring and awesome. Nik and Anthony, themselves passionate advocates of community-driven software, will continue to control the Glimpse project, steering it to best meet the needs of its users and contributors. If you have any questions or queries about Glimpse, or Red Gate’s involvement in the project, please tweet with the #glimpse hashtag, contact us at Red Gate on [email protected], or post to the Glimpse Development Forum on Google Groups.

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• Standard ratio of cookies to "visitors"?

  - by Jeff Atwood

  As noted in a recent blog post, We see a large discrepancy between Google Analytics "visitors" and Quantcast "visitors". Also, for reasons we have never figured out, Google Analytics just gets larger numbers than Quantcast. Right now GA is showing more visitors (15 million) on stackoverflow.com alone than Quantcast sees on the whole network (14 million): Why? I don’t know. Either Google Analytics loses cookies sometimes, or Quantcast misses visitors. Counting is an inexact science. We think this is because Quantcast uses a more conservative ratio of cookies-to-visitors. Whereas Google Analytics might consider every cookie a "visitor", Quantcast will only consider every 1.24 cookies a "visitor". This makes sense to me, as people may access our sites from multiple computers, multiple browsers, etcetera. I have two closely related questions: Is there an accepted standard ratio of cookies to visitors? This is obviously an inexact science, but is there any emerging rule of thumb? Is there any more accurate way to count "visitors" to a website other than relying on browser cookies? Or is this just always going to be kind of a best-effort estimation crapshoot no matter how you measure it?

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• How to show or direct a business analyst to do data modelling?

  - by AaronLS

  Our business analysts pushed hard to collect data through a spreadsheet. I am the programmer responsible for importing that data. Usually when they push hard for something like this, I never know how well it will work out until a few weeks later when I have time assigned to work on the task of programming the import of the data. I have tried to do as much as possible along the way, named ranges, data validations, etc. But I usually don't have time to take a detailed look at all the data and compare to the destination in the database to determine how well it matches up. A lot of times there will be maybe a little table of items that somehow I have to relate to something else in the database, but there are not natural or business keys present that would allow me to do so. Make the best of this, trying to write something that can compare strings and make a best guess at it and then go through the effort of creating interfaces for a user to match the imported data to the destination. I feel like if the business analyst was actually creating a data model, they would be forced to think about these relationships, and have an appreciation for the need of natural or business keys to be part of the spreadsheet for the purposes of smoothly importing the data. The closest they come to business analysis is a big flat list of fields, and that would be fine if it were like any other data dictionary and include data types+relationships, but it isn't. They are just a bunch of names. No indication of what type of data they might hold, and it is up to me to guess. When I have pushed for more detail, they say that it is just busy work. How can I explain the importance of data modelling? How can I tell them what it is and how to do it? It feels impossible, because they don't have an appreciation for its importance. They do however, usually have an interest in helping out in whatever way they can, it's just this in particular has never gotten a motivated response.

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• KISS principle applied to programming language design?

  - by Giorgio

  KISS ("keep it simple stupid", see e.g. here) is an important principle in software development, even though it apparently originated in engineering. Citing from the wikipedia article: The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the 'stupid' refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them. If I wanted to apply this to the field of software development I would replace "jet aircraft" with "piece of software", "average mechanic" with "average developer" and "under combat conditions" with "under the expected software development / maintenance conditions" (deadlines, time constraints, meetings / interruptions, available tools, and so on). So it is a commonly accepted idea that one should try to keep a piece of software simple stupid so that it easy to work on it later. But can the KISS principle be applied also to programming language design? Do you know of any programming languages that have been designed specifically with this principle in mind, i.e. to "allow an average programmer under average working conditions to write and maintain as much code as possible with the least cognitive effort"? If you cite any specific language it would be great if you could add a link to some document in which this intent is clearly expressed by the language designers. In any case, I would be interested to learn about the designers' (documented) intentions rather than your personal opinion about a particular programming language.

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• Oracle Exalogic Customer Momentum @ OOW'12

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  [Adapted from here]  At Oracle Open World 2012, i sat down with some of the Oracle Exalogic early adopters  to discuss the business benefits these businesses were realizing by embracing the engineered systems approach to data-center modernization and application consolidation. Below is an overview of the 4 businesses that won the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award for Oracle Exalogic this year. Company: Netshoes About: Leading online retailer of sporting goods in Latin America.Challenges: Rapid business growth resulted in frequent outages and poor response-time of online store-front Conventional ad-hoc approach to horizontal scaling resulted in high CAPEX and OPEX Poor performance and unavailability of online store-front resulted in revenue loss from purchase abandonment Solution: Consolidated ATG Commerce and Oracle WebLogic running on Oracle Exalogic.Business Impact:Reduced abandonment rates resulting in a two-digit increase in online conversion rates translating directly into revenue up-liftCompany: ClaroAbout: Leading communications services provider in Latin America.Challenges: Support business growth over the next 3  - 5 years while maximizing re-use of existing middleware and application investments with minimal effort and risk Solution: Consolidated Oracle Fusion Middleware components (Oracle WebLogic, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Tuxedo) and JAVA applications onto Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. Business Impact:Improved partner SLA’s 7x while improving throughput 5X and response-time 35x for  JAVA applicationsCompany: ULAbout: Leading safety testing and certification organization in the world.Challenges: Transition from being a non-profit to a profit oriented enterprise and grow from a $1B to $5B in annual revenues in the next 5 years Undertake a massive business transformation by aligning change strategy with execution Solution: Consolidated Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, Siebel, BI, Hyperion) and Oracle Fusion Middleware (AIA, SOA Suite) on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Reduced financial and operating risk in re-architecting IT services to support new business capabilities supporting 87,000 manufacturersCompany: Ingersoll RandAbout: Leading manufacturer of industrial, climate, residential and security solutions.Challenges: Business continuity risks due to complexity in enforcing consistent operational and financial controls; Re-active business decisions reduced ability to offer differentiation and compete Solution: Consolidated Oracle E-business Suite on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Service differentiation with faster order provisioning and a shorter lead-to-cash cycle translating into higher customer satisfaction and quicker cash-conversionCheck out the winners of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation awards in other categories here.

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• One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?

  - by Arkaaito

  At my company (3-yr-old web industry startup), we have frequent problems with the product team saying "aaaah this is a crisis patch it now!" (doesn't everybody?) This has an impact on the productivity (and morale) of engineering staff, self included. Management has spent some time thinking about how to reduce the frequency of these same-day requests and has come up with the solution that we are going to have a release every week. (Previously we'd been doing one every two weeks, which usually slipped by a couple of days or so.) There are 13 developers and 6 local / 9 offshore testers; the theory is that only 4 developers (and all testers) will work on even-numbered releases, unless a piece of work comes up that really requires some specific expertise from one of the other devs. Each cycle will contain two days of dev work and two days of QA work (plus 1 day of scoping / triage / ...). My questions are: (a) Does anyone have experience with this length of release cycle? (b) Has anyone heard of this length of release cycle even being attempted? (c) If (a) or (b), how on Earth do you make it work? (Any pitfalls to avoid, etc., are also appreciated.) (d) How can we minimize the damage if this effort fails?

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• Standards Matter: The Battle For Interoperability Continues

  - by michael.rowell

  Great Article, although it is a little dated at this point. Information Week Article Standards Matter: The Battle for Interoperability goes on Summary If you're guilty of relegating standards support to a "nice to have" feature rather than a requirement, you're part of the problem. If you want products to interoperate, be prepared to walk away if a vendor can't prove compliance. Don't be brushed off with promises of standards support "on the road map." The alternative is vendor lock-in and higher costs, including the cost of maintaining systems that don't work together. Standards bodies are imperfect and must do better. The alternative: splintered networks and broken promises. The point: "The secret sauce to a successful 'working standard' isn't necessarily IETF or another longstanding body," says Jonathan Feldman, director of IT services for the city of Asheville, N.C., and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. "Rather, an earnest and honest effort by a group that has governance outside of a single corporation's control is what's important." In order to have true interoperability vendors as well as customers must be actively engaged in the standards process. Vendors must be willing to truly work together and not be protecting an existing product. Customers must also be willing to truly to work together and not be demanding a solution that only meets their needs but instead meets the needs of all participants. Ultimately, customers must be willing to reward vendor compliance by requiring compliance in products and services that they purchase and deploy. Managers that deploy systems without compliance to standards are only hurting themselves. Standards do matter. When developed openly and deployed compliantly standards deliver interoperability which provides solid business value.

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• Got that Friday feeling?

  - by Rebecca Amos

  Saturday is just around the corner, and we’re all starting to wrap up for the weekend. If you’re the DBA that ‘Friday feeling’ might be as much about checking and preparing your SQL Servers for the next two days, as about looking forward to spending time with friends and family. Whether you’re double-checking your disaster recovery strategy, or know that it’s your turn to be on-call this weekend, it’s likely you’re preparing for the worst, just in case. The fact that you’re making these checks, and caring about both your servers and your users, means that you might be an exceptional DBA. You’re already putting in that extra effort to make other people’s lives easier. So why not take some time for your professional development and enter the Exceptional DBA Awards? If you’re looking for some inspiration for your entry, download our Judges’ Top Tips poster for advice on what the judges are looking for from this year’s entrants. Not only will you be boosting your professional development, but you could win full conference registration for the 2011 PASS Summit in Seattle (where the awards ceremony will take place), four nights' hotel accommodation, and a copy of Red Gate’s SQL DBA Bundle. So take some time out for yourself this weekend and get started on your entry: www.exceptionaldba.com

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