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• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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• Is Data Science “Science”?

  - by BuckWoody

  I hold the term “science” in very high esteem. I grew up on the Space Coast in Florida, and eventually worked at the Kennedy Space Center, surrounded by very intelligent people who worked in various scientific fields. Recently a new term has entered the computing dialog – “Data Scientist”. Since it’s not a standard term, it has a lot of definitions, and in fact has been disputed as a correct term. After all, the reasoning goes, if there’s no such thing as “Data Science” then how can there be a Data Scientist? This argument has been made before, albeit with a different term – “Computer Science”. In Peter Denning’s excellent article “Is Computer Science Science” (April  2005/Vol. 48, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM) there are many points that separate “science” from “engineering” and even “art”.  I won’t repeat the content of that article here (I recommend you read it on your own) but will leverage the points he makes there. Definition of Science To ask the question “is data science ‘science’” then we need to start with a definition of terms. Various references put the definition into the same basic areas: Study of the physical world Systematic and/or disciplined study of a subject area ...and then they include the things studied, the bodies of knowledge and so on. The word itself comes from Latin, and means merely “to know” or “to study to know”. Greek divides knowledge further into “truth” (episteme), and practical use or effects (tekhne). Normally computing falls into the second realm. Definition of Data Science And now a more controversial definition: Data Science. This term is so new and perhaps so niche that the major dictionaries haven’t yet picked it up (my OED reference is older – can’t afford to pop for the online registration at present). Researching the term's general use I created an amalgam of the definitions this way: “Studying and applying mathematical and other techniques to derive information from complex data sets.” Using this definition, data science certainly seems to be science - it's learning about and studying some object or area using systematic methods. But implicit within the definition is the word “application”, which makes the process more akin to engineering or even technology than science. In fact, I find that using these techniques – and data itself – part of science, not science itself. I leave out the concept of studying data patterns or algorithms as part of this discipline. That is actually a domain I see within research, mathematics or computer science. That of course is a type of science, but does not seek for practical applications. As part of the argument against calling it “Data Science”, some point to the scientific method of creating a hypothesis, testing with controls, testing results against the hypothesis, and documenting for repeatability.  These are not steps that we often take in working with data. We normally start with a question, and fit patterns and algorithms to predict outcomes and find correlations. In this way Data Science is more akin to statistics (and in fact makes heavy use of them) in the process rather than starting with an assumption and following on with it. So, is Data Science “Science”? I’m uncertain – and I’m uncertain it matters. Even if we are facing rampant “title inflation” these days (does anyone introduce themselves as a secretary or supervisor anymore?) I can tolerate the term at least from the intent that we use data to study problems across a wide spectrum, rather than restricting it to a single domain. And I also understand those who have worked hard to achieve the very honorable title of “scientist” who have issues with those who borrow the term without asking. What do you think? Science, or not? Does it matter?

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• Remote Workers...We're Not That Bad!

  - by user12601034

  I work from home a lot – my team is located in different cities and countries, my manager is in a different city, and most of our work is done via conference calls, email and collaboration through Oracle Social Network. We’ve figured out how to be effective and involve team members, regardless of where we are all located. When I mention that I work from home, a lot of my friends will laugh, roll their eyes or use their fingers to make quotation marks around “work from home.” Their belief is that I’m sitting at home, eating bon-bons and watching television. The attempts at humor only multiply when they know that my husband also mostly works from home. So, it was with great joy that I read the Lifehacker article Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged. I’m not going to re-write the article for you, but four highlights from the article include: Proximity breeds complacency –because communicating with employees sitting next to you is so easy, you may not do it well. Absence makes people try harder to connect – because you have to make an effort to connect to your team, you tend to pay better attention when you do connect Leaders of virtual team make better use of tools – when working remotely, you will use technology (many different forms of it) to connect with your team. This daily use of the tools makes you more proficient with those tools Leaders of far-flung teams maximize the time spent together – getting together takes effort, time and money, so leaders tend to filter out distractions when teams do get together. These points made me happy because I’ve seen the same things play out in my team located around the world. And I’m not saying that a virtual team is more effective than a co-located team – but my virtual team doesn’t have the option of filing into a conference room for a face-to-face meeting whenever we want. Instead, we have to figure out how to work effectively without meeting face-to-face. Am I more engaged as a remote worker? I’d like to think that I am. I’ve been on calls with colleagues at 3am – this would never happen if my only option was to be in the office. I can leave my “office” to pick up my kids from school…and I’m willingly back online after kids are in bed to finish up anything I need to. Oracle Social Network lets me use my iPad to engage with my teammates when I’m waiting at music lessons, the doctor’s office or any place else with a network connection. I feel like I’m more connected with my team, and I feel like I’m more connected with my family life. So yes, I am a remote worker, and I am engaged. If you lead a virtual team, I challenge you to increase the ways that you communicate to effectively engage your team. If you are on a virtual team, I challenge you to think about how you might interact with team members to keep both them and yourself engaged in your work. And if you have some great ideas on how to make virtual teams (and workers) effective and engaged, please share those ideas in the comments! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get a bon-bon...   :) 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Resolving data redundancy up front

  - by okeofs

  Introduction As all of us do when confronted with a problem, the resource of choice is to ‘Google it’. This is where the plot thickens. Recently I was asked to stage data from numerous databases which were to be loaded into a data warehouse. To make a long story short, I was looking for a manner in which to obtain the table names from each database, to ascertain potential overlap.   As the source data comes from a SQL database created from dumps of a third party product,  one could say that there were +/- 95 tables for each database.   Yes I know that first instinct is to use the system stored procedure “exec sp_msforeachdb 'select "?" AS db, * from [?].sys.tables'”. However, if one stops to think about this, it would be nice to have all the results in a temporary or disc based  table; which in itself , implies additional labour. This said,  I decided to ‘re-invent’ the wheel. The full code sample may be found at the bottom of this article.   Define a few temporary tables and variables   declare @SQL varchar(max); declare @databasename varchar(75) /* drop table ##rawdata3 drop table #rawdata1 drop table #rawdata11 */ -- A temp table to hold the names of my databases CREATE TABLE #rawdata1 (    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) )     --A temp table with the same database names as above, HOWEVER using an --Identity number (recNO) as a loop variable. --You will note below that I loop through until I reach 25 (see below) as at --that point the system databases, the reporting server database etc begin. --1- 24 are user databases. These are really what I was looking for. --Whilst NOT the best solution,it works and the code was meant as a quick --and dirty. CREATE TABLE #rawdata11 (    recNo int identity(1,1),    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) )   --My output table showing the database name and table name CREATE TABLE ##rawdata3 (    database_name varchar(75) ,    table_name varchar(75), )   Insert the database names into a temporary table I pull the database names using the system stored procedure sp_databases   INSERT INTO #rawdata1 EXEC sp_databases Go   Insert the results from #rawdata1 into a table containing a record number  #rawdata11 so that I can LOOP through the extract   INSERT into #rawdata11 select * from  #rawdata1   We now declare 3 more variables:  @kounter is used to keep track of our position within the loop. @databasename is used to keep track of the’ current ‘ database name being used in the current pass of the loop;  as inorder to obtain the tables for that database we  need to issue a ‘USE’ statement, an insert command and other related code parts. This is the challenging part. @sql is a varchar(max) variable used to contain the ‘USE’ statement PLUS the’ insert ‘ code statements. We now initalize @kounter to 1 .   declare @kounter int; declare @databasename varchar(75); declare @sql varchar(max); set @kounter = 1   The Loop The astute reader will remember that the temporary table #rawdata11 contains our  database names  and each ‘database row’ has a record number (recNo). I am only interested in record numbers under 25. I now set the value of the temporary variable @DatabaseName (see below) .Note that I used the row number as a part of the predicate. Now, knowing the database name, I can create dynamic T-SQL to be executed using the sp_sqlexec stored procedure (see the code in red below). Finally, after all the tables for that given database have been placed in temporary table ##rawdata3, I increment the counter and continue on. Note that I used a global temporary table to ensure that the result set persists after the termination of the run. At some stage, I plan to redo this part of the code, as global temporary tables are not really an ideal solution.    WHILE (@kounter < 25)  BEGIN  select @DatabaseName = database_name from #rawdata11 where recNo = @kounter  set @SQL = 'Use ' + @DatabaseName + ' Insert into ##rawdata3 ' + + ' SELECT table_catalog,Table_name FROM information_schema.tables' exec sp_sqlexec  @Sql  SET @kounter  = @kounter + 1  END   The full code extract   Here is the full code sample.   declare @SQL varchar(max); declare @databasename varchar(75) /* drop table ##rawdata3 drop table #rawdata1 drop table #rawdata11 */ CREATE TABLE #rawdata1 (    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) ) CREATE TABLE #rawdata11 (    recNo int identity(1,1),    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) ) CREATE TABLE ##rawdata3 (    database_name varchar(75) ,    table_name varchar(75), )   INSERT INTO #rawdata1 EXEC sp_databases go INSERT into #rawdata11 select * from  #rawdata1 declare @kounter int; declare @databasename varchar(75); declare @sql varchar(max); set @kounter = 1 WHILE (@kounter < 25)  BEGIN  select @databasename = database_name from #rawdata11 where recNo = @kounter  set @SQL = 'Use ' + @DatabaseName + ' Insert into ##rawdata3 ' + + ' SELECT table_catalog,Table_name FROM information_schema.tables' exec sp_sqlexec  @Sql  SET @kounter  = @kounter + 1  END    select * from ##rawdata3  where table_name like '%SalesOrderHeader%'

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• Google Analytics on Android

  - by pjv

  There is a specific and official analytics SDK for native Android apps (note that I'm not talking about webpages in apps on a phone). This library basically sends pages and events to Google Analytics and you can view your analytics in exactly the same dashboard as for websites. Since my background is apps rather than websites, and since a lot of the Google Analytics terminology seems particularly inapplicable to a native app, I need some pointers. Please discuss my remarks, provide some clarification where you think I'm off-track, and above all share good experiences! 1. Page Views Pages mostly can match different Activities (and Dialogs) being displayed. Activities can be visible behind non-full-screen Activities however, though only the top-level Activity can be interacted. This sort-off clashes with a "(page) view". You'd also want at least one page view for each visit and therefore put one page view tracker in the Application class. However this does not constitute a window or sorts. Usually an Activity will open at the same time, so the time spent on that page will have been 0. This will influence your "time spent" statistics. How are these counted anyway? Moreover, there is a loose coupling between the Activities, by means of Intents. A user can, much like on any website, step in at any Activity, although usually this then concerns resuming the application where he left off. This makes that the hierarchy of Activities usually is very flat. And since there are no url's involved. What meaning would using slashes in page titles have, such as "/Home"? All pages would appear on an equal level in the reports, so no content drilldown. Non-unique page views seem to be counted as some kind of indicator of successfulness: how often does the visitor revisit the page. When the user rotates the screen however usually an Activity resumes again, thus making it a new page view. This happens a lot. Maybe a well-thought-through placement of the call might solve this, or placing several, I'm not sure. How to deal with Page Views? 2. Events I'd say there are two sorts: A user event Something that happened, usually as an indirect consequence of the above. The latter particularly is giving me headaches. First of all, many events aren't written in code any more, but pieced logically together by means of Intents. This means that there is no place to put the analytics call. You'd either have to give up this advantage and start doing it the old-fashioned way in favor of good analytics, or, just be missing some events. Secondly, as a developer you're not so much interested in when a user clicks a button, but if the action that should have been performed really was performed and what the result was. There seems to be no clear way to get resulting data into Google Analytics (what's up with the integers? I want to put in Strings!). The same that applies to the flat pages hierarchy, also goes for the event categories. You could do "vertical" categories (topically, that is), but some code is shared "horizontally" and the tracking will be equally shared. Just as with the Intents mechanism, inheritance makes it hard for you to put the tracking in the right places at all times. And I can't really imagine "horizontal" categories. Unless you start making really small categories, such as all the items form the same menu in one category, I have a hard time grasping the concept. Finally, how do you deal with cancelling? Usually you both have an explicit cancel mechanism by ways of a button, as well as the implicit cancel when the "back"-button is pressed to leave the activity and there were no changes. The latter also applies to "saves", when the back button is pressed and there ARE changes. How are you consequently going to catch all these if not by doing all the "back"-button work yourself? How to deal with events? 3. Goals For goal types I have choice of: URL Destination, Time on Site, and Pages/Visit. Most apps don't have a funnel that leads the user to some "registration done" or "order placed" page. Apps have either already been bought (in which case you want to stimulate the user to love your app, so that he might bring on new buyers) or are paid for by in-app ads. So URL Destination is not a very important goal. Time on Site also seems troublesome. First, I have some doubt on how this would be measured. Second, I don't necessarily want my user to spend a lot of time in my already paid app, just be active and content. Equivalently, why not mention how frequent a user uses your app? Regarding Pages/Visit I already mentioned how screen orientation changes blow up the page view numbers. In an app I'd be most interested in events/visit to measure the user's involvement/activity. If he's intensively using the app then he must be loving it right? Furthermore, I also have some small funnels (that do not lead to conversion though) that I want to see streamlined. In my mind those funnels would end in events rather than page views but that seems not to be possible. I could also measure clickthroughs on in-app ads, but then I'd need to track those as Page Views rather than Events, in view of "URL Destination". What are smart goals for apps and how can you fit them on top of Analytics? 4. Optimisation Is there a smart way to manually do what "Website Optimiser" does for websites? Most importantly, how would I track different landing page designs? 5. Traffic Sources Referrals deal with installation time referrals, if you're smart enough to get them included. But perhaps I'd also want to get some data which third-party app sends users to my app to perform some actions (this app interoperability is possible via Intents). Many of the terminologies related to "Traffic Sources" seem totally meaningless and there is no possibility of connecting in AdSense. What are smart uses of this data? 6. Visitors Of the "Browser capabilities", "Network Properties" and "Mobile" tabs, many things are pointless as they have no influence on / relation with my mostly offline app that won't use flash anyway. Only if you drill down far enough, can you get to OS versions, which do matter a lot. I even forgot where you could check what exact Android devices visited. What are smart uses of this data? How can you make the relevant info more prominent? 7. Other No in-page analytics. I have to register my app as a web-url (What!?)?

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• 5 Ways Android Still Disappoints (Me)

  - by TStewartDev

  Let me make this clear: I'm annoyed with Apple. I don't like their current policies and I don't like where Steve Jobs is taking the company. In general, I don't like it when any one company gets too much control in a market. When that happens, the leading company dictates the game and as consumers, our options all but disappear. That said, I'm still going to buy a new iPhone next week. My Apple-hating friends seem to desperately want me to go Android instead, but frankly, it's not good enough for me, and here are the reasons why. The Modern WinMo One of the reasons that Microsoft has identified for Windows Mobile's rapid decline is the breadth of hardware. They exercised little control over manufacturer's implementations. In theory, that sounds great. We as consumers have lots of choice. In practice, though, it meant among other things that updates to the devices were left up to the manufacturers. As a result, that rarely happened. (I'm still bitter at Toshiba for leaving me hanging back in 2002.) And now, Google is doing the same thing with Android. Case in point: my wife has a Motorola Backflip that we bought in April. It was released in March. Motorola says it will get Android 2.1 "sometime in Q3". Great. Meanwhile, I pull down the latest version of iPhone OS (now iOS) and install it the same day it's released. You may say that I can't judge Android by one lazy manufacturer. Yup, I sure can. With Apple, my original iPhone has been supported perfectly for 3 years. With Android, I will have to wait for upgrades after Google releases them, possibly indefinitely. Not cool. AT&T We signed a new contract with AT&T in April to get my wife's phone. I've had a reasonable experience with them. I don't imagine my experience with Verizon would be any better, and I'm relatively confident that Sprint doesn't have the coverage it takes to work well for us. The fact is, AT&T, for whatever reason, doesn't have jack for Android phones. May not be Android's fault, but it's still a shortcoming that prevents me from having it just like the iPhone's exclusivity keeps some folks on other networks from having it. Innovation? What Innovation? Android has a nice dashboard and a great notification system and… nothing else original. I keep reading about how disappointing the iPhone is nowadays. "It has no innovation," people say. Who does? Android has modeled its behavior after the iPhone. That's fine, but if all you've got is a similar product and I'm invested both skill-wise and app-wise in my current platform, why should I change? Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 looks somewhat innovative, and I'm pretty excited to see what they'll bring to the table, but that's another six months away, at least. I've got a 3 year old phone that has some annoying issues now (thanks to recent encounters with water). I need a new phone now. Is This Going to Work? There's no shortage of criticism of Apple over its App Store policies, and I've vented my own anger about it. However, I will give them credit: their screening of apps has done a great job of weeding out the crap and gives an excellent indication that the app will work on my device. How about Android? Nope. It might work on your phone. Maybe. You'll have to try it to see. Get burned by it? Well, write a nasty review to try to keep others from making the mistake you did. If you don't mind doing that stuff, then Android is the platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have a receptionist screening out the telemarketing and survey calls than hang up on them myself, but that's your call. Slow, Slowing, Slower All this yapping about multitasking. This is an area I've been on Apple's side from the beginning. Sorry folks, but this is the number one reason I hated Windows Mobile: the longer you use it, the slower it gets because it doesn't kill apps. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one: if you see a task manager, we're doing it wrong. I don't want to have to manually kill apps. I hate doing that on Windows let alone on a mobile device. To me, priority one should be keeping the device speedy. Waiting for your device to respond is unacceptable. Bonus! Taken from iPhone Letdown? 8 Things Apple Didn't Announce, here are my responses: 4G Yeah, let me know if your area actually has it. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. No carrier is going to have 4G here for at least 3 years. Meanwhile, you still get to pay for it. Yay! Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync You got me here. Of course, whether or not your Android device will be able to do it is always a good question. 3G Video Chat You got me here, too. I'm sure you spent countless hours in front of your phone with video chat. Also, I can't wait for the "No Video Chat While Driving" laws. Mobile Hotspot This is a neat feature, but as the author points out, it's left up to the carrier whether to implement it or not. Pretty sure any Android phones that come to AT&T won't have this enabled in the foreseeable future. Is Verizon even allowing this? I just figured Sprint was because they're failing so hard at keeping customers. Free MobileMe I use Google's services with my iPhone. The only people I know who use MobileMe are Apple fanboys and fangirls. If you choose to pay for a service that you can get for free, that's your decision, not Apple's. Voice Input Voice input has been available on phones (even "dumb" phones) for years now. iPhone does have the ability, though limited. Why don't I hear people telling their phones what to do? Maybe because it's still easier to use your fingers than talk to it. Get back to me when this becomes an important feature. Free Navigation Maybe this will be a bigger deal to me now that I'm getting a phone with GPS, but when using my buddy's 3gs, Google maps has worked just fine. Maybe I just don't trust turn-by-turn navigation enough to want it. Dashboard The only legitimate complaint on this list, to me. iPhone's home screen is pathetic, doubly so for the iPad. What a waste of perfectly usable space. I also want to add notifications to this list. Android's notification panel is far superior to the iPhone's. I don't want to hunt all over my screen to find little red dots. Put 'em in one place, Apple.

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• Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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• My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

  - by Valter Minute

  Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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• Identity Globe Trotters (Sep Edition): The Social Customer

  - by Tanu Sood

  Welcome to the inaugural edition of our monthly series - Identity Globe Trotters. Starting today, the last Friday of every month, we will explore regional commentary on Identity Management. We will invite guest contributors from around the world to share their opinions and experiences around Identity Management and highlight regional nuances, specific drivers, solutions and more. Today's feature is contributed by Michael Krebs, Head of Business Development at esentri consulting GmbH, a (SOA) specialized Oracle Gold Partner based in Ettlingen, Germany. In his current role, Krebs is dealing with the latest developments in Enterprise Social Networking and the Integration of Social Media within business processes.  By Michael Krebs The relevance of "easy sign-on" in the age of the "Social Customer" With the growth of Social Networks, the time people spend within those closed "eco-systems" is growing year by year. With social networks looking to integrate search engines, like Facebook announced some weeks ago, their relevance will continue to grow in contrast to the more conventional search engines. This is one of the reasons why social network accounts of the users are getting more and more like a virtual fingerprint. With the growing relevance of social networks the importance of a simple way for customers to get in touch with say, customer care or contract departments, will be crucial for sales processes in critical markets. Customers want to have one single point of contact and also an easy "login-method" with no dedicated usernames, passwords or proprietary accounts. The golden rule in the future social media driven markets will be: The lower the complexity of the initial contact, the better a company can profit from social networks. If you, for example, can generate a smart way of how an existing customer can use self-service portals, the cost in providing phone support can be lowered significantly. Recruiting and Hiring of "Digital Natives" Another particular example is "social" recruiting processes. The so called "digital natives" don´t want to type in their profile facts and CV´s in proprietary systems. Why not use the actual LinkedIn profile? In German speaking region, the market in the area of professional social networks is dominated by XING, the equivalent to LinkedIn. A few weeks back, this network also opened up their interfaces for integrating social sign-ons or the usage of profile data for recruiting-purposes. In the European (and especially the German) employment market, where the number of young candidates is shrinking because of the low birth rate in the region, it will become essential to use social-media supported hiring processes to find and on-board the rare talents. In fact, you will see traditional recruiting websites integrated with social hiring to attract the best talents in the market, where the pool of potential candidates has decreased dramatically over the years. Identity Management as a key factor in the Customer Experience process To create the biggest value for customers and also future employees, companies need to connect their HCM or CRM-systems with powerful Identity management solutions. With the highly efficient Oracle (social & mobile enabling) Identity Management solution, enterprises can combine easy sign on with secure connections to the backend infrastructure. This combination enables a "one-stop" service with personalized content for customers and talents. In addition, companies can collect valuable data for the enrichment of their CRM-data. The goal is to enrich the so called "Customer Experience" via all available customer channels and contact points. Those systems have already gained importance in the B2C-markets and will gradually spread out to B2B-channels in the near future. Conclusion: Central and "Social" Identity management is key to Customer Experience Management and Talent Management For a seamless delivery of "Customer Experience Management" and a modern way of recruiting the best talent, companies need to integrate Social Sign-on capabilities with modern CX - and Talent management infrastructure. This lowers the barrier for existing and future customers or employees to get in touch with sales, support or human resources. Identity management is the technology enabler and backbone for a modern Customer Experience Infrastructure. Oracle Identity management solutions provide the opportunity to secure Social Applications and connect them with modern CX-solutions. At the end, companies benefit from "best of breed" processes and solutions for enriching customer experience without compromising security. About esentri: esentri is a provider of enterprise social networking and brings the benefits of social network communication into business environments. As one key strength, esentri uses Oracle Identity Management solutions for delivering Social and Mobile access for Oracle’s CRM- and HCM-solutions. …..End Guest Post…. With new and enhanced features optimized to secure the new digital experience, the recently announced Oracle Identity Management 11g Release 2 enables organizations to securely embrace cloud, mobile and social infrastructures and reach new user communities to help further expand and develop their businesses. Additional Resources: Oracle Identity Management 11gR2 release Oracle Identity Management website Datasheet: Mobile and Social Access (pdf) IDM at OOW: Focus on Identity Management Facebook: OracleIDM Twitter: OracleIDM We look forward to your feedback on this post and welcome your suggestions for topics to cover in Identity Globe Trotters. Last Friday, every month!

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• A Visual Studio Release Grows in Brooklyn

  - by andrewbrust

  Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan.  Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn.  How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here’s the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that.  NBC’s Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you’d need some inside knowledge to recognize that.  Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent.  Appreciating VS 2010’s value takes a bit more savvy.  Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product.  How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers?  Well, it can be tough.  Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited. Turns out there’s a lot of reasons.  Support fro SharePoint development is a big one.  In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best.  Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help.  There’s also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.  ASP.NET MVC, a “close-to-the-metal” Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS.  So too does jQuery, the Open Source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze.  The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to that Open Source project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor. Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in, and block selection.  If you’re not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute.  I’ll just say that for people who are developers these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs. The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010’s new debugging features.  This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it’s truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug.  Cool?  Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren’t the tester and weren’t present while the testing was being done.  Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred.  VS 2010 allows all that.  This could be the demise of the IWOMM (“it works on my machine”) syndrome. After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft’s competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010’s.  His answer was an earnest “we don’t think so.”  If that’s true, that’s a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams who adopt it.  It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient.  Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan! VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren’t the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now.  There’s also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7.  With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age.  How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially when with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely?  Hard to say.  But if focusing on core value, including value that’s hard to play into a sexy demo, is part oft the answer, then Microsoft’s doing OK.  And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely. Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics?  I honestly don’t know, because it’s the market’s prerogative to pass that judgement.  I can say this though: based on today’s show, I think Microsoft’s been doing its homework.

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• What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

  - by Jacek Ziabicki

  Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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• JPRT: A Build & Test System

  - by kto

  DRAFT A while back I did a little blogging on a system called JPRT, the hardware used and a summary on my java.net weblog. This is an update on the JPRT system. JPRT ("JDK Putback Reliablity Testing", but ignore what the letters stand for, I change what they mean every day, just to annoy people :\^) is a build and test system for the JDK, or any source base that has been configured for JPRT. As I mentioned in the above blog, JPRT is a major modification to a system called PRT that the HotSpot VM development team has been using for many years, very successfully I might add. Keeping the source base always buildable and reliable is the first step in the 12 steps of dealing with your product quality... or was the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous... oh well, anyway, it's the first of many steps. ;\^) Internally when we make changes to any part of the JDK, there are certain procedures we are required to perform prior to any putback or commit of the changes. The procedures often vary from team to team, depending on many factors, such as whether native code is changed, or if the change could impact other areas of the JDK. But a common requirement is a verification that the source base with the changes (and merged with the very latest source base) will build on many of not all 8 platforms, and a full 'from scratch' build, not an incremental build, which can hide full build problems. The testing needed varies, depending on what has been changed. Anyone that was worked on a project where multiple engineers or groups are submitting changes to a shared source base knows how disruptive a 'bad commit' can be on everyone. How many times have you heard: "So And So made a bunch of changes and now I can't build!". But multiply the number of platforms by 8, and make all the platforms old and antiquated OS versions with bizarre system setup requirements and you have a pretty complicated situation (see http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/build/README-builds.html). We don't tolerate bad commits, but our enforcement is somewhat lacking, usually it's an 'after the fact' correction. Luckily the Source Code Management system we use (another antique called TeamWare) allows for a tree of repositories and 'bad commits' are usually isolated to a small team. Punishment to date has been pretty drastic, the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland' said 'Off With Their Heads', well trust me, you don't want to be the engineer doing a 'bad commit' to the JDK. With JPRT, hopefully this will become a thing of the past, not that we have had many 'bad commits' to the master source base, in general the teams doing the integrations know how important their jobs are and they rarely make 'bad commits'. So for these JDK integrators, maybe what JPRT does is keep them from chewing their finger nails at night. ;\^) Over the years each of the teams have accumulated sets of machines they use for building, or they use some of the shared machines available to all of us. But the hunt for build machines is just part of the job, or has been. And although the issues with consistency of the build machines hasn't been a horrible problem, often you never know if the Solaris build machine you are using has all the right patches, or if the Linux machine has the right service pack, or if the Windows machine has it's latest updates. Hopefully the JPRT system can solve this problem. When we ship the binary JDK bits, it is SO very important that the build machines are correct, and we know how difficult it is to get them setup. Sure, if you need to debug a JDK problem that only shows up on Windows XP or Solaris 9, you'll still need to hunt down a machine, but not as a regular everyday occurance. I'm a big fan of a regular nightly build and test system, constantly verifying that a source base builds and tests out. There are many examples of automated build/tests, some that trigger on any change to the source base, some that just run every night. Some provide a protection gateway to the 'golden' source base which only gets changes that the nightly process has verified are good. The JPRT (and PRT) system is meant to guard the source base before anything is sent to it, guarding all source bases from the evil developer, well maybe 'evil' isn't the right word, I haven't met many 'evil' developers, more like 'error prone' developers. ;\^) Humm, come to think about it, I may be one from time to time. :\^{ But the point is that by spreading the build up over a set of machines, and getting the turnaround down to under an hour, it becomes realistic to completely build on all platforms and test it, on every putback. We have the technology, we can build and rebuild and rebuild, and it will be better than it was before, ha ha... Anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Man, I gotta get out more often.. Anyway, now the nightly build and test can become a 'fetch the latest JPRT build bits' and start extensive testing (the testing not done by JPRT, or the platforms not tested by JPRT). Is it Open Source? No, not yet. Would you like to be? Let me know. Or is it more important that you have the ability to use such a system for JDK changes? So enough blabbering on about this JPRT system, tell me what you think. And let me know if you want to hear more about it or not. Stay tuned for the next episode, same Bloody Bat time, same Bloody Bat channel. ;\^) -kto

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• 7 Steps To Cut Recruiting Costs & Drive Exceptional Business Results

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Steve Viarengo, Vice President Product Management, Oracle Taleo Cloud Services  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In good times, trimming operational costs is an ongoing goal. In tough times, it’s a necessity. In both good times and bad, however, recruiting occurs. Growth increases headcount in good times, and opportunistic or replacement hiring occurs in slow business cycles. By employing creative recruiting strategies in tandem with the latest technology developments, you can reduce recruiting costs while driving exceptional business results. Here are some critical areas to focus on. 1.  Target Direct Cost Savings Total recruiting process expenses are the sum of external costs plus internal labor costs. Most organizations can reduce recruiting expenses with direct cost savings. While additional savings on indirect costs can be realized from process improvement and efficiency gains, there are direct cost savings and benefits readily available in three broad areas: sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting. 2. Sourcing: Reduce Agency Costs Agency search firm fees can amount to 35 percent of a new employee’s annual base salary. Typically taken from the hiring department budget, these fees may not be visible to HR. By relying on internal mobility programs, referrals, candidate pipelines, and corporate career Websites, organizations can reduce or eliminate this agency spend. And when you do have to pay third-party agency fees, you can optimize the value you receive by collaborating with agencies to identify referred candidates, ensure access to candidate data and history, and receive automatic notifications and correspondence. 3. Sourcing: Reduce Advertising Costs You can realize significant cost reductions by placing all job positions on your corporate career Website. This will allow you to reap a substantial number of candidates at minimal cost compared to job boards and other sourcing options. 4.  Sourcing: Internal Talent Pool Internal talent pools provide a way to reduce sourcing and advertising costs while delivering improved productivity and retention. Internal redeployment reduces costs and ramp-up time while increasing retention and employee satisfaction. 5.  Sourcing: External Talent Pool Strategic recruiting requires identifying and matching people with a given set of skills to a particular job while efficiently allocating sourcing expenditures. By using an e-recruiting system (which drives external talent pool management) with a candidate relationship database, you can automate prescreening and candidate matching while communicating with targeted candidates. Candidate relationship management can lower sourcing costs by marketing new job opportunities to candidates sourced in the past. By mining the talent pool in this fashion, you eliminate the need to source a new pool of candidates for each new requisition. Managing and mining the corporate candidate database can reduce the sourcing cost per candidate by as much as 50 percent. 6.  Assessments: Reduce Turnover Costs By taking advantage of assessments during the recruitment process, you can achieve a range of benefits, including better productivity, superior candidate performance, and lower turnover (providing considerable savings). Assessments also save recruiter and hiring manager time by focusing on a short list of qualified candidates. Hired for fit, such candidates tend to stay with the organization and produce quality work—ultimately driving revenue.  7. Green Recruiting: Reduce Paper and Processing Costs You can reduce recruiting costs by automating the process—and making it green. A paperless process informs candidates that you’re dedicated to green recruiting. It also leads to direct cost savings. E-recruiting reduces energy use and pollution associated with manufacturing, transporting, and recycling paper products. And process automation saves energy in mailing, storage, handling, filing, and reporting tasks. Direct cost savings come from reduced paperwork related to résumés, advertising, and onboarding. Improving the recruiting process through sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting not only saves costs. It also positions the company to improve the talent base during the recession while retaining the ability to grow appropriately in recovery. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Understanding the 'High Performance' meaning in Extreme Transaction Processing

  - by kyap

  Despite my previous blogs entries on SOA/BPM and Identity Management, the domain where I'm the most passionated is definitely the Extreme Transaction Processing, commonly called XTP.I came across XTP back to 2007 while I was still FMW Product Manager in EMEA. At that time Oracle acquired a company called Tangosol, which owned an unique product called Coherence that we renamed to Oracle Coherence. Beside this innovative renaming of the product, to be honest, I didn't know much about it, except being a "distributed in-memory cache for Extreme Transaction Processing"... not very helpful still.In general when people doesn't fully understand a technology or a concept, they tend to find some shortcuts, either correct or not, to justify their lack-of understanding... and of course I was part of this category of individuals. And the shortcut was "Oracle Coherence Cache helps to improve Performance". Excellent marketing slogan... but not very meaningful still. By chance I was able to get away quickly from that group in July 2007* at Thames Valley Park (UK), after I attended one of the most interesting workshops, in my 10 years career in Oracle, delivered by Brian Oliver. The biggest mistake I made was to assume that performance improvement with Coherence was related to the response time. Which can be considered as legitimus at that time, because after-all caches help to reduce latency on cached data access, hence reduce the response-time. But like all caches, you need to define caching and expiration policies, thinking about the cache-missed strategy, and most of the time you have to re-write partially your application in order to work with the cache. At a result, the expected benefit vanishes... so, not very useful then?The key mistake I made was my perception or obsession on how performance improvement should be driven, but I strongly believe this is still a common problem to most of the developers. In fact we all know the that the performance of a system is generally presented by the Capacity (or Throughput), with the 2 important dimensions Speed (response-time) and Volume (load) :Capacity (TPS) = Volume (T) / Speed (S)To increase the Capacity, we can either reduce the Speed(in terms of response-time), or to increase the Volume. However we tend to only focus on reducing the Speed dimension, perhaps it is more concrete and tangible to measure, and nicer to present to our management because there's a direct impact onto the end-users experience. On the other hand, we assume the Volume can be addressed by the underlying hardware or software stack, so if we need more capacity (scale out), we just add more hardware or software. Unfortunately, the reality proves that IT is never as ideal as we assume...The challenge with Speed improvement approach is that it is generally difficult and costly to make things already fast... faster. And by adding Coherence will not necessarily help either. Even though we manage to do so, the Capacity can not increase forever because... the Speed can be influenced by the Volume. For all system, we always have a performance illustration as follow: In all traditional system, the increase of Volume (Transaction) will also increase the Speed (Response-Time) as some point. The reason is simple: most of the time the Application logics were not designed to scale. As an example, if you have a while-loop in your application, it is natural to conceive that parsing 200 entries will require double execution-time compared to 100 entries. If you need to "Speed-up" the execution, you can only upgrade your hardware (scale-up) with faster CPU and/or network to reduce network latency. It is technically limited and economically inefficient. And this is exactly where XTP and Coherence kick in. The primary objective of XTP is about designing applications which can scale-out for increasing the Volume, by applying coding techniques to keep the execution-time as constant as possible, independently of the number of runtime data being manipulated. It is actually not just about having an application running as fast as possible, but about having a much more predictable system, with constant response-time and linearly scale, so we can easily increase throughput by adding more hardwares in parallel. It is in general combined with the Low Latency Programming model, where we tried to optimize the network usage as much as possible, either from the programmatic angle (less network-hoops to complete a task), and/or from a hardware angle (faster network equipments). In this picture, Oracle Coherence can be considered as software-level XTP enabler, via the Distributed-Cache because it can guarantee: - Constant Data Objects access time, independently from the number of Objects and the Coherence Cluster size - Data Objects Distribution by Affinity for in-memory data grouping - In-place Data Processing for parallel executionTo summarize, Oracle Coherence is indeed useful to improve your application performance, just not in the way we commonly think. It's not about the Speed itself, but about the overall Capacity with Extreme Load while keeping consistant Speed. In the future I will keep adding new blog entries around this topic, with some sample codes experiences sharing that I capture in the last few years. In the meanwhile if you want to know more how Oracle Coherence, I strongly suggest you to start with checking how our worldwide customers are using Oracle Coherence first, then you can start playing with the product through our tutorial.Have Fun !

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• To My 24 Year Old Self, Wherever You Are&hellip;

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  A decade is a milestone in one’s life, regardless of when it occurs. 2011 might seem like a weird year to mark a decade, but 2001 was a defining year for me. It marked my emergence into the technology industry, an unexpected loss of innocence, and triggered an ongoing struggle with faith and belief. Once you go through a valley, climbing the mountain and looking back over where you travelled, you can take in the entirety of the journey. Over the last 10 years I kept journals, and in this new year I took some time to review them. For those today that are me a decade ago, I share with you what I’ve gleamed from my experiences. Take it for what it’s worth, and safe travels on your own journeys through life. Life is a Performance-Based Sport Have confidence, believe you’re capable, but realize that life is a performance-based sport. Everything you get in life is based on whether you can show that you deserve it. Performance is also your best defense against personal attacks. Just make sure you know what standards you’re expected to hit and if people want to poke holes at you let them do the work of trying to find them. Sometimes performance won’t matter though. Good things will happen to bad people, and bad things to good people. What’s important is that you do the right things and ensure the good and bad even out in your own life. How you finish is just as important as how you start. Start strong, end strong. Respect is Your Most Prized Reward Respect is more important than status or ego. The formula is simple: Performing Well + Building Trust + Showing Dedication = Respect Focus on perfecting your craft and helping your team and respect will come. Life is a Team Sport Whatever aspect of your life, you can’t do it alone. You need to rely on the people around you and ensure you’re a positive aspect of their lives; even those that may be difficult or unpleasant. Avoid criticism and instead find ways to help colleagues and superiors better whatever environment you’re in (work, home, etc.). Don’t just highlight gaps and issues, but also come to the table with solutions. At the same time though, stand up for yourself and hold others accountable for the commitments they make to the team. A healthy team needs accountability. Give feedback early and often, and make it verbal. Issues should be dealt with immediately, and positives should be celebrated as they happen. Life is a Contact Sport Difficult moments will happen. Don’t run from them or shield yourself from experiencing them. Embrace them. They will further mold you and reveal who you will become. Find Your Tribe and Embrace Your Community We all need a tribe: a group of people that we gravitate to for support, guidance, wisdom, and friendship. Discover your tribe and immerse yourself in them. Don’t look for a non-existent tribe just to fill the need of belonging though that will leave you empty and bitter when they don’t meet your unrealistic expectations. Try to associate with people more experienced and more knowledgeable than you. You’ll always learn, and you’ll always remember you have much to learn. Put yourself out there, get involved with the community. Opportunities will present themselves. When we open ourselves up to be vulnerable, we also give others the chance to do the same. This helps us all to grow and help each other, it’s very important. And listen to your wife. (Easter *is* a romantic holiday btw, regardless of what you may think.) Don’t Believe Your Own Press Clippings (and by that I mean the ones you write) Until you have a track record of performance to refer to, any notions of grandeur are just that: notions. You lose your rookie status through trials and tribulations, not by the number of stamps in your passport. Be realistic about your own “experience and leadership” and be honest when you aren’t ready for something. And always remember: nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Don’t Let Assholes Get You Down The world isn’t evil, but there is evil in the world. Know the difference and don’t paint all people with the same brush. Do be wary of those that use personal beliefs to describe their business (i.e. “We’re a [religion] company”). What matters is the culture of the organization, and that will tell you the moral compass and what is truly valued. Don’t make someone or something a priority that only makes you an option. Life is unfair and enemies/opponents will succeed when you fail. Don’t waste your energy getting upset at this; the only one that will lose out is you. As mentioned earlier, nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Misc Ecclesiastes is bullshit. Everything is certainly *not* meaningless. Software development is about delivery, not the process. Having a great process means nothing if you don’t produce anything. Watch “The Weatherman” (“It’s not easy, but easy doesn’t enter into grownup life.”). Read Tony Dungee’s autobiography, even if you don’t like football, and even if you aren’t a Christian. Say no, don’t feel like you have to commit right away when someone asks you to.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Managing common code on Windows 7 (.NET) and Windows 8 (WinRT)

  - by ryanabr

  Recent announcements regarding Windows Phone 8 and the fact that it will have the WinRT behind it might make some of this less painful but I  discovered the "XmlDocument" object is in a new location in WinRT and is almost the same as it's brother in .NET System.Xml.XmlDocument (.NET) Windows.Data.Xml.Dom.XmlDocument (WinRT) The problem I am trying to solve is how to work with both types in the code that performs the same task on both Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 platforms. The first thing I did was define my own XmlNode and XmlNodeList classes that wrap the actual Microsoft objects so that by using the "#if" compiler directive either work with the WinRT version of the type, or the .NET version from the calling code easily. public class XmlNode     { #if WIN8         public Windows.Data.Xml.Dom.IXmlNode Node { get; set; }         public XmlNode(Windows.Data.Xml.Dom.IXmlNode xmlNode)         {             Node = xmlNode;         } #endif #if !WIN8 public System.Xml.XmlNode Node { get; set ; } public XmlNode(System.Xml.XmlNode xmlNode)         {             Node = xmlNode;         } #endif     } public class XmlNodeList     { #if WIN8         public Windows.Data.Xml.Dom.XmlNodeList List { get; set; }         public int Count {get {return (int)List.Count;}}         public XmlNodeList(Windows.Data.Xml.Dom.XmlNodeList list)         {             List = list;         } #endif #if !WIN8 public System.Xml.XmlNodeList List { get; set ; } public int Count { get { return List.Count;}} public XmlNodeList(System.Xml.XmlNodeList list)         {             List = list;        } #endif     } From there I can then use my XmlNode and XmlNodeList in the calling code with out having to clutter the code with all of the additional #if switches. The challenge after this was the code that worked directly with the XMLDocument object needed to be seperate on both platforms since the method for populating the XmlDocument object is completly different on both platforms. To solve this issue. I made partial classes, one partial class for .NET and one for WinRT. Both projects have Links to the Partial Class that contains the code that is the same for the majority of the class, and the partial class contains the code that is unique to the version of the XmlDocument. The files with the little arrow in the lower left corner denotes 'linked files' and are shared in multiple projects but only exist in one location in source control. You can see that the _Win7 partial class is included directly in the project since it include code that is only for the .NET platform, where as it's cousin the _Win8 (not pictured above) has all of the code specific to the _Win8 platform. In the _Win7 partial class is this code: public partial class WUndergroundViewModel     { public static WUndergroundData GetWeatherData( double lat, double lng)         { WUndergroundData data = new WUndergroundData();             System.Net. WebClient c = new System.Net. WebClient(); string req = "http://api.wunderground.com/api/xxx/yesterday/conditions/forecast/q/[LAT],[LNG].xml" ;             req = req.Replace( "[LAT]" , lat.ToString());             req = req.Replace( "[LNG]" , lng.ToString()); XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();             doc.Load(c.OpenRead(req)); foreach (XmlNode item in doc.SelectNodes("/response/features/feature" ))             { switch (item.Node.InnerText)                 { case "yesterday" :                         ParseForecast( new FishingControls.XmlNodeList (doc.SelectNodes( "/response/forecast/txt_forecast/forecastdays/forecastday" )), new FishingControls.XmlNodeList (doc.SelectNodes( "/response/forecast/simpleforecast/forecastdays/forecastday" )), data); break ; case "conditions" :                         ParseCurrent( new FishingControls.XmlNode (doc.SelectSingleNode("/response/current_observation" )), data); break ; case "forecast" :                         ParseYesterday( new FishingControls.XmlNodeList (doc.SelectNodes( "/response/history/observations/observation" )),data); break ;                 }             } return data;         }     } in _win8 partial class is this code: public partial class WUndergroundViewModel     { public async static Task< WUndergroundData > GetWeatherData(double lat, double lng)         { WUndergroundData data = new WUndergroundData (); HttpClient c = new HttpClient (); string req = "http://api.wunderground.com/api/xxxx/yesterday/conditions/forecast/q/[LAT],[LNG].xml" ;             req = req.Replace( "[LAT]" , lat.ToString());             req = req.Replace( "[LNG]" , lng.ToString()); HttpResponseMessage msg = await c.GetAsync(req); string stream = await msg.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(); XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument ();             doc.LoadXml(stream, null); foreach ( IXmlNode item in doc.SelectNodes("/response/features/feature" ))             { switch (item.InnerText)                 { case "yesterday" :                         ParseForecast( new FishingControls.XmlNodeList (doc.SelectNodes( "/response/forecast/txt_forecast/forecastdays/forecastday" )), new FishingControls.XmlNodeList (doc.SelectNodes( "/response/forecast/simpleforecast/forecastdays/forecastday" )), data); break; case "conditions" :                         ParseCurrent( new FishingControls.XmlNode (doc.SelectSingleNode("/response/current_observation" )), data); break; case "forecast" :                         ParseYesterday( new FishingControls.XmlNodeList (doc.SelectNodes( "/response/history/observations/observation")), data); break;                 }             } return data;         }     } Summary: This method allows me to have common 'business' code for both platforms that is pretty clean, and I manage the technology differences separately. Thank you tostringtheory for your suggestion, I was considering that approach.

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• BI Applications overview

  - by sv744

  Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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• Migrating Virtual Iron guest to Oracle VM 3.x

  - by scoter

  As stated on the official site, Oracle in 2009, acquired a provider of server virtualization management software named Virtual Iron; you can find all the acquisition details at this link. Into the FAQ on the official site you can also view that, for the future, Oracle plans to fully integrate Virtual Iron technology into Oracle VM products, and any enhancements will be delivered as a part of the combined solution; this is what is going on with Oracle VM 3.x. So, customers started asking us to migrate Virtual Iron guests to Oracle VM. IMPORTANT: This procedure needs a dedicated OVM-Server with no-guests running on top; be careful while execute this procedure on production environments. In these little steps you will find how-to migrate, as fast as possible, your guests between VI ( Virtual Iron ) and Oracle VM; keep in mind that OracleVM has a built-in P2V utility ( Official Documentation )  that you can use to migrate guests between VI and Oracle VM. Concepts: VI repositories.  On VI we have the same "repository" concept as in Oracle VM; the difference between these two products is that VI use a raw-lun as repository ( instead of using ocfs2 and its capabilities, like ref-links ). The VI "raw-lun" repository, with a pure operating-system perspective, may be presented as in this picture: Infact on this "raw-lun" VI create an LVM2 volume-group. The VI "raw-lun" repository, with an hypervisor perspective, may be presented as in this picture: So, the relationships are: LVM2-Volume-Group <-> VI Repository LVM2-Logical-Volume <-> VI guest virtual-disk The first step is to present the VI repository ( raw-lun ) to your dedicated OVM-Server. Prepare dedicated OVM-Server On the OVM-Server ( OVS ) you need to discover new lun and, after that, discover volume-group and logical-volumes containted in VI repository; due to default OVS configuration you need to edit lvm2 configuration file: /etc/lvm/lvm.conf     # By default for OVS we restrict every block device:     # filter = [ "r/.*/" ] and comment the line starting with "filter" as above. Now you have to discover the raw-lun presented and, next, activate volume-group and logical-volumes: #!/bin/bash for HOST in `ls /sys/class/scsi_host`;do echo '- - -' > /sys/class/scsi_host/$HOST/scan; done CPATH=`pwd` cd /dev for DEVICE in `ls sd[a-z] sd?[a-z]`;do echo '1' > /sys/block/$DEVICE/device/rescan; done cd $CPATH cd /dev/mapper for PARTITION in `ls *[a-z] *?[a-z]`;do partprobe /dev/mapper/$PARTITION; done cd $CPATH vgchange -a yAfter that you will see a new device:[root@ovs01 ~]# cd /dev/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994[root@ovs01 6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994]# ls -l 6000F4B0000000000061013* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 77 Oct 29 10:50 6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cb -> /dev/mapper/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994-6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cb By your OVM-Manager create a guest server with the same definition as on VI:same core number as VI source guestsame memory as VI source guestsame number of disks as VI source guest ( you can create OVS virtual disk with a small size of 1GB because the "clone" will, eventually, extend the size of your new virtual disks )Summarizing:source-virtual-disk path ( VI ):/dev/mapper/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994-6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cbdest-virtual-disk path ( OVS ):/OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300006cfeb81c12f12f00/VirtualDisks/0004fb000012000055e0fc4c5c8a35ee.img ** ** = to identify your virtual disk you have verify its name under the "vm.cfg" file of your new guest.Clone VI virtual-disk to OVS virtual-diskdd if=/dev/mapper/6000F4B00000000000210135bef64994-6000F4B00000000000610135c3a0b8cb of=/OVS/Repositories/0004fb00000300006cfeb81c12f12f00/VirtualDisks/0004fb000012000055e0fc4c5c8a35ee.img Clean unsupported parameters and changes on OVS.1. Restore original /etc/lvm/lvm.conf    # By default for OVS we restrict every block device:     filter = [ "r/.*/" ]    and uncomment the line starting with "filter" as above.2. Force-stop lvm2-monitor service  # service lvm2-monitor force-stop 3. Restore original /etc/lvm directories ( archive, backup and cache )  # cd /etc/lvm  # rm -fr archive backup cache; mkdir archive backup cache4. Reboot OVSRefresh OVS repository and start your guest.By OracleVM Manager refresh your repository:By OracleVM Manager start your "migrated" guest: Comments and corrections are welcome.  Simon COTER 

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• 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

  - by MarkPearl

  For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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• Easiest, most fun way to program 2D games? Flash? XNA? Some other engine?

  - by Maxi

  Hi, this is a post detailing my search for the most enjoyable way for a hobbyist game programmer to sweeten his free time with making a game. My requirements: I looked at Flash first, I made a couple of small games but I'm doubtful of the performance. I would like to make a fairly large strategy game, with several hundred units fighting simultaneously, explosions and animations included. Also zoomable maps. I saw that Adobe has a new 3D API for Flash, but I don't know if that improves 2D performance aswell, I couldn't find anything related to that question on their MAX10 sessions. Would you say that Flash is a good technology for making large 2D games easily? I really like Actionscript, and I love how easy everything is in Flash. There are several engines available which make it even easier. I just do this for fun, and it would be even better if there were proper animation/particle editors available and if the engine I were to use, would be available for multiple platforms. (so more people can play my game once finished). I'd like to have it available on many mobile platforms aswell. (because I love touch input for some reason) I do know the XNA framework pretty well, but there are no good engines available for it, and it will only run on Windows, which is a huge turn off. Even bigger is, that you need to install the XNA redistributable each time you want to give the game to someone. If I use XNA, I would have to make all the tools myself, and I'd probably have to make them with WPF. (I'd love to make tools with Adobe AIR, but unfortunately the API's for image manipulation etc. are far worse in Flash, than they are in XNA/WPF.) Now, I'm aware that I could make my own engine that supports each of those platforms, but quite frankly, that would be too much work plowing through APIs. After all, I want to make a game, not an engine. So the question becomes: Is there maybe a cross platform (free or free to develop?) engine available that I could use for 2D development? I prefer: C#, Actionscript. I don't mind using c++ if the toolset is above average, but I highly doubt that there is something out there like that. Please prove me wrong :) So summary: I'd like to use Flash, but I don't know if it scales well enough. I'm not a scripter, I want some real APIs that I can work with inside a proper IDE. Just for information, I looked at several alternatives, I'm actually looking for a long time already. You'd help me a lot to make a decision finally. Feature-wise the Flatredball engine would be ideal. But I tried their tools, and quite frankly, they are horrible. Absolutely unusable, I'd need to make my own for sure. I didn't look at their API, but if their tools are so bad, I'm not inclined to look further. Unity3D. This one is quite nice, but I really don't need 3D, and it is quite ...a lot of work to learn. I also don't like that it is so expensive to use for different platforms and that I can only code for it through scripting. You have to buy each platform separately. The editor usability is average, the product overall is good enough for most purposes, but learning it myself would be overkill. Shiva 3D. It looks good enough, but again: I don't really need 3D. The editor usability is a little worse than Unity3D in my opinion and it wasn't clear to me how to start programming. I think it requires C++ for coding, so that's a negative too. I want to have fun, and c# is fun ;) SDL. Quite frankly, I'd still need to port to all those different SDL implementations. And I don't like OpenGL style programming, it's just plain ugly. And it needs c++, I know that there might be some wrappers available, but I don't like to use wrappers, because... Irrlicht. A lot of features, but support seems to be low and it is aimed at enthusiasts. C# bindings get dropped repeatedly. I'm not an engine enthusiast, I just want to make a game. I don't see this happening with Irrlicht. Ogre3D. Way too much work, it's just a graphics engine. Also no multiple platform support and c++. Torque2D. Costs something to use, and I didn't hear a lot of good things about support and documentation. Also costs extra for each platform.

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• OData &ndash; The easiest service I can create: now with updates

  - by Jon Dalberg

  The other day I created a simple NastyWord service exposed via OData. It was read-only and used an in-memory backing store for the words. Today I’ll modify it to use a file instead of a list and I’ll accept new nasty words by implementing IUpdatable directly. The first thing to do is enable the service to accept new entries. This is done at configuration time by adding the “WriteAppend” access rule: 1: public class NastyWords : DataService<NastyWordsDataSource> 2: { 3: // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. 4: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 5: { 6: config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead | EntitySetRights.WriteAppend); 7: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; 8: } 9: }   Next I placed a file, NastyWords.txt, in the “App_Data” folder and added a few *choice* words to start. This required one simple change to our NastyWordDataSource.cs file: 1: public NastyWordsDataSource() 2: { 3: UpdateFromSource(); 4: } 5:   6: private void UpdateFromSource() 7: { 8: var words = File.ReadAllLines(pathToFile); 9: NastyWords = (from w in words 10: select new NastyWord { Word = w }).AsQueryable(); 11: }   Nothing too shocking here, just reading each line from the NastyWords.txt file and exposing them. Next, I implemented IUpdatable which comes with a boat-load of methods. We don’t need all of them for now since we are only concerned with allowing new values. Here are the methods we must implement, all the others throw a NotImplementedException: 1: public object CreateResource(string containerName, string fullTypeName) 2: { 3: var nastyWord = new NastyWord(); 4: pendingUpdates.Add(nastyWord); 5: return nastyWord; 6: } 7:   8: public object ResolveResource(object resource) 9: { 10: return resource; 11: } 12:   13: public void SaveChanges() 14: { 15: var intersect = (from w in pendingUpdates 16: select w.Word).Intersect(from n in NastyWords 17: select n.Word); 18:   19: if (intersect.Count() > 0) 20: throw new DataServiceException(500, "duplicate entry"); 21:   22: var lines = from w in pendingUpdates 23: select w.Word; 24:   25: File.AppendAllLines(pathToFile, 26: lines, 27: Encoding.UTF8); 28:   29: pendingUpdates.Clear(); 30:   31: UpdateFromSource(); 32: } 33:   34: public void SetValue(object targetResource, string propertyName, object propertyValue) 35: { 36: targetResource.GetType().GetProperty(propertyName).SetValue(targetResource, propertyValue, null); 37: }   I use a simple list to contain the pending updates and only commit them when the “SaveChanges” method is called. Here’s the order these methods are called in our service during an insert: CreateResource – here we just instantiate a new NastyWord and stick a reference to it in our pending updates list. SetValue – this is where the “Word” property of the NastyWord instance is set. SaveChanges – get the list of pending updates, barfing on duplicates, write them to the file and clear our pending list. ResolveResource – the newly created resource will be returned directly here since we aren’t dealing with “handles” to objects but the actual objects themselves. Not too bad, eh? I didn’t find this documented anywhere but a little bit of digging in the OData spec and use of Fiddler made it pretty easy to figure out. Here is some client code which would add a new nasty word: 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var svc = new ServiceReference1.NastyWordsDataSource(new Uri("http://localhost.:60921/NastyWords.svc")); 4: svc.AddToNastyWords(new ServiceReference1.NastyWord() { Word = "shat" }); 5:   6: svc.SaveChanges(); 7: }   Here’s all of the code so far for to implement the service: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Data.Services; 4: using System.Data.Services.Common; 5: using System.Linq; 6: using System.ServiceModel.Web; 7: using System.Web; 8: using System.IO; 9: using System.Text; 10:   11: namespace ONasty 12: { 13: [DataServiceKey("Word")] 14: public class NastyWord 15: { 16: public string Word { get; set; } 17: } 18:   19: public class NastyWordsDataSource : IUpdatable 20: { 21: private List<NastyWord> pendingUpdates = new List<NastyWord>(); 22: private string pathToFile = @"path to your\App_Data\NastyWords.txt"; 23:   24: public NastyWordsDataSource() 25: { 26: UpdateFromSource(); 27: } 28:   29: private void UpdateFromSource() 30: { 31: var words = File.ReadAllLines(pathToFile); 32: NastyWords = (from w in words 33: select new NastyWord { Word = w }).AsQueryable(); 34: } 35:   36: public IQueryable<NastyWord> NastyWords { get; private set; } 37:   38: public void AddReferenceToCollection(object targetResource, string propertyName, object resourceToBeAdded) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:   43: public void ClearChanges() 44: { 45: pendingUpdates.Clear(); 46: } 47:   48: public object CreateResource(string containerName, string fullTypeName) 49: { 50: var nastyWord = new NastyWord(); 51: pendingUpdates.Add(nastyWord); 52: return nastyWord; 53: } 54:   55: public void DeleteResource(object targetResource) 56: { 57: throw new NotImplementedException(); 58: } 59:   60: public object GetResource(IQueryable query, string fullTypeName) 61: { 62: throw new NotImplementedException(); 63: } 64:   65: public object GetValue(object targetResource, string propertyName) 66: { 67: throw new NotImplementedException(); 68: } 69:   70: public void RemoveReferenceFromCollection(object targetResource, string propertyName, object resourceToBeRemoved) 71: { 72: throw new NotImplementedException(); 73: } 74:   75: public object ResetResource(object resource) 76: { 77: throw new NotImplementedException(); 78: } 79:   80: public object ResolveResource(object resource) 81: { 82: return resource; 83: } 84:   85: public void SaveChanges() 86: { 87: var intersect = (from w in pendingUpdates 88: select w.Word).Intersect(from n in NastyWords 89: select n.Word); 90:   91: if (intersect.Count() > 0) 92: throw new DataServiceException(500, "duplicate entry"); 93:   94: var lines = from w in pendingUpdates 95: select w.Word; 96:   97: File.AppendAllLines(pathToFile, 98: lines, 99: Encoding.UTF8); 100:   101: pendingUpdates.Clear(); 102:   103: UpdateFromSource(); 104: } 105:   106: public void SetReference(object targetResource, string propertyName, object propertyValue) 107: { 108: throw new NotImplementedException(); 109: } 110:   111: public void SetValue(object targetResource, string propertyName, object propertyValue) 112: { 113: targetResource.GetType().GetProperty(propertyName).SetValue(targetResource, propertyValue, null); 114: } 115: } 116:   117: public class NastyWords : DataService<NastyWordsDataSource> 118: { 119: // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. 120: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 121: { 122: config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead | EntitySetRights.WriteAppend); 123: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; 124: } 125: } 126: } Next time we’ll allow removing nasty words. Enjoy!

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 2: Platforms and Features

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 2 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. In the previous post I discussed what reasons a company might have for creating a smartphone application.  In this installment I will cover some of history and state of the different platforms as well as features that can be leveraged for building enterprise smartphone applications. Platforms Before you start choosing a platform to develop your solutions on it is good to understand how we got here and what features you can leverage. History To my memory we owe all of this to a product called the Apple Newton that came out in 1987. It was the first PDA and back then I was much more of an Apple fan.  I was very impressed with this device even though it never really went anywhere.  The Palm Pilot by US Robotics was the next major advancement in PDA. It had a simple short hand window that allowed for quick stylus entry.. Later, Windows CE came out and started the broadening of the PDA market. After that it was the Palm and CE operating systems that started showing up on cell phones and for some time these were the two dominant operating systems that were distributed with devices from multiple hardware vendors. Current The iPhone was the first smartphone to take away the stylus and give us a multi-touch interface.  It was a revolution in usability and really changed the attractiveness of smartphones for the general public.  This brought us to the beginning of the current state of the market with the concept of an online store that makes it easy for customers to get new features and functionality on demand. With Android, Google made this more than a one horse race.  Not only did they come to compete, their low cost actually made them the leading OS.  Of course what made Android so attractive also is its major fault.  It is so open that it has been a target for malware which leaves consumers exposed.  Fortunately for Google though, most consumers aren’t aware of the threat that they are under. Although Microsoft had put out one of the first smart phone operating systems with CE it had to play catch up and finally came out with the Windows Phone.  They have gone for a market approach between those of iOS and Android.  They support multiple hardware vendors like Google, but they kept a certification process for applications that is similar to Apple.  They also created a user interface that was different enough to give it a clear separation from the other two platforms. The result of all this is hundreds of millions of smartphones being sold monthly across all three platforms giving us a wide range of choices and challenges when it comes to developing solutions. Features So what are the features that make these devices flexible enough be considered for use in the enterprise? The biggest advantage of today's devices is network connectivity.  The ability to access information from multiple sources at a moment’s notice is critical for businesses.  Add to that the ability to communicate over a variety of text, voice and video modes and we have a powerful starting point. Every smartphone has a cameras and they are not just useful for posting to Instagram. We are seeing more applications such as Bing vision that allow us to scan just about any printed code or text to find information.  These capabilities have been made available to developers in the form of standard libraries for reading barcodes of just about an flavor and optical character recognition (OCR) interpretation. Bluetooth give us the ability to communicate with multiple devices. Whether these are headsets, keyboard or printers the wireless communication capabilities are just starting to evolve.  The more these wireless communication protocols grow, the more opportunities we will see to transfer data between users and a variety of devices. Local storage of information that can be called up even when the device cannot reach the network is the other big capability.  This give users the ability to work offline as well and transmit information when connections are restored. These are the tools that we have to work with to build applications that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage for companies that implement them. Coming Up In the third installment I will cover key concerns that you face when building enterprise smartphone apps. del.icio.us Tags: smartphones,enterprise smartphone Apps,architecture,iOS,Android,Windows Phone

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• Impressions and Reactions from Alliance 2012

  - by user739873

  Alliance 2012 has come to a conclusion.  What strikes me about every Alliance conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions).  In addition to the vibrant U.S. organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K.  Their first meeting is planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount of interest and attendance. In my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to explain why I believe this to be true. First let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing. The second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case today. This is also perceived as lack of investment. Let me address these two points.  First the UI.  More is being done here than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca acquisition (see some cool examples here) there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue.  There are also some amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they had an impressive setup at Alliance.  Hopefully many of you that attended found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington in June. In the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also an area of focus for the company and my team.  We're making this a priority especially in the areas of identity management and security, leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging, and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic Suite as our platform for SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP), and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on OBI applications. But at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.  It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe. And I can't avoid mentioning that this kind of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional excellence (which starts with IT) and student success.  It's not (in my opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.  While I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review article (Information Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the opposite of long-term stability...."  Sure there has been healthy, creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of, in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and develop integrated solutions. Cole

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