Search Results

Search found 16208 results on 649 pages for 'pass community'.

Page 486/649 | < Previous Page | 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493  | Next Page >

• OWB 11gR2 &ndash; Degenerate Dimensions

  - by David Allan

  Ever wondered how to build degenerate dimensions in OWB and get the benefits of slowly changing dimensions and cube loading? Now its possible through some changes in 11gR2 to make the dimension and cube loading much more flexible. This will let you get the benefits of OWB's surrogate key handling and slowly changing dimension reference when loading the fact table and need degenerate dimensions (see Ralph Kimball's degenerate dimensions design tip). Here we will see how to use the cube operator to load slowly changing, regular and degenerate dimensions. The cube and cube operator can now work with dimensions which have no surrogate key as well as dimensions with surrogates, so you can get the benefit of the cube loading and incorporate the degenerate dimension loading. What you need to do is create a dimension in OWB that is purely used for ETL metadata; the dimension itself is never deployed (its table is, but has not data) it has no surrogate keys has a single level with a business attribute the degenerate dimension data and a dummy attribute, say description just to pass the OWB validation. When this degenerate dimension is added into a cube, you will need to configure the fact table created and set the 'Deployable' flag to FALSE for the foreign key generated to the degenerate dimension table. The degenerate dimension reference will then be in the cube operator and used when matching. Create the degenerate dimension using the regular wizard. Delete the Surrogate ID attribute, this is not needed. Define a level name for the dimension member (any name). After the wizard has completed, in the editor delete the hierarchy STANDARD that was automatically generated, there is only a single level, no need for a hierarchy and this shouldn't really be created. Deploy the implementing table DD_ORDERNUMBER_TAB, this needs to be deployed but with no data (the mapping here will do a left outer join of the source data with the empty degenerate dimension table). Now, go ahead and build your cube, use the regular TIMES dimension for example and your degenerate dimension DD_ORDERNUMBER, can add in SCD dimensions etc. Configure the fact table created and set Deployable to false, so the foreign key does not get generated. Can now use the cube in a mapping and load data into the fact table via the cube operator, this will look after surrogate lookups and slowly changing dimension references.   If you generate the SQL you will see the ON clause for matching includes the columns representing the degenerate dimension columns. Here we have seen how this use case for loading fact tables using degenerate dimensions becomes a whole lot simpler using OWB 11gR2. I'm sure there are other use cases where using this mix of dimensions with surrogate and regular identifiers is useful, Fact tables partitioned by date columns is another classic example that this will greatly help and make the cube operator much more useful. Good to hear any comments.

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick.  Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation).  I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems.  We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick.  Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation).  I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems.  We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him.

  Read the article

• Hello World Pagelet

  - by astemkov

  Introduction The goal of this exercise is to give you a basic feel of how you can use Pagelet Producer to proxy a web page We will proxy a simple static Hello World web page, cut one section out of that page and present it as a pagelet that you can later insert on your own application page or to your portal page such as WebCenter Portal space or WebCenter Interaction community page. Hello World sample app This is the static web page we will work with: Let's assume the following: The Hello World web page is running on server http://appserver.company.com:1234/ The Hello World web page path is: http://appserver.company.com:1234/helloworld/ Initial Pagelet Producer setup Let's assume that the Pagelet Producer server is running on http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/ First let's check that Pagelet Producer is up and running. In order to do that we just need to access the following URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/ And this is what should be returned: Now you can access Pagelet Producer administration screens using this URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/admin This is how the UI looks: Now if you connect to the internet via proxy server, you need to configure proxy in Pagelet Producer settings. In the Navigator pane: Jump To - Settings Click on "Proxy" Enter your proxy server configuration: Creating a resource First thing that you need to do is to create a resource for your web page. This will tell Pagelet Producer that all sub-paths of the web page should be proxied. It also will allow you to setup common rules of how your web page should be proxied and will serve as a container for your pagelets. In the Navigator pane: Jump To - Resources Click on any existing resource (ex. welcome_resource) Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Select "Web" in the "Select Producer Type" dialog box and click "OK" Now after the resource is created let's click on "General" sub-item a specify the following values Name = AppServer Source URL = http://appserver.company.com:1234/ Destination URL = /appserver/ Click on "Save" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane After the resource is created our web page becomes accessible by the URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/appserver/helloworld/ So in original web page address Source URL is replaced with Pagelet Producer URL (http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets) + Destination URL Creating a pagelet Now let's create "Hello World" pagelet. Under the resource node activate Pagelets subnode Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Click on "General" sub-node of newly created pagelet and specify the following values Name = Hello_World Library = MyLib Library is used for logical grouping. The portals use the "Library" value to group pagelets in their respective UI's. For example, when adding pagelets to a WebCenter Portal space you would see the individual pagelets listed under the "Library" name. URL Suffix = helloworld/index.html this is where the Hello World page html is served from Click on "Save" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane The Library name can be anything you want, it doesn't have to match the resource name at all. It is used as a logical grouping of pagelets, and you can include pagelets from multiple resources into the same library or create a new library for each pagelet. After you save the pagelet you can access it here: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/inject/v2/pagelet/MyLib/Hello_World which is : http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/inject/v2/pagelet/ + [Library] + [Name] Or to test the injection of a pagelet into iframe you can click on the pagelets "Documentation" sub-node and use "Access Pagelet using REST" URL: This is what we will see: Clipping The pagelet that we just created covers the whole web page, but we want just the "Hello World" segment of it. So let's clip it. Under the Hello_World pagelet node activate Clipper sub-node Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Specify a Name for newly created clipper. For example: "c1" Click on "Content" sub-node of the clipper Click on "Launch Clipper" button New browser window will open By moving a mouse pointer over the web page select the area you want to clip: Click left mouse button - the browser window will disappear and you will see that Clipping Path was automatically generated Now let's save and access the link from the "Documentation" page again Here's our pagelet nicely clipped and ready for being used on your Web Center Space

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for March 29, 2010 -- #824

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: smartyP(-2-), Al Pascual, Mike Taulty, Shawn Burke(-2-), Vikram Pendse, Tomasz Janczuk, Lee, and Alexey Zakharov. Shoutouts: Jeff Weber announced New Silverlight Game “Snow Spill” by Nick Avery of Liserd Arts Games John Papa summarized links to all the Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Sessions from MIX 10 Tim Heuer has a post up about OData and the MIX10 feed: MIX10: Yet another way to view video content sessions using their OData feed From SilverlightCream.com: Creating a Windows Phone 7 Metro Style Pivot Application [Part 1] smartyP has a two-part video tutorial up on creating a WP7 pivot navigation app using Expression Blend. He's also looking for feedback. Creating a Windows Phone 7 Metro Style Pivot Application [Part 2] In part 2, smartyP adds gestures to his navigation. He also has some good external links listed. Al Pascual: My First Windows Phone 7 Application Al Pascual extends the MIX10 keynote WP7 sample by adding the ability to send tweets ... with all the code. Silverlight 4 RC and the “silent installation” Mike Taulty discusses and demonstrates installing an OOB app without having to visit a webpage to get it. In other words, pass it around on a USB drive, send it in email, etc. iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World! Shawn Burke has a 2-part series up comparing iPhone and WP7 development looking at how easy it is to code and lines of code produced by the tools. This first post is the classic Hello World. Check out the comments as well. iPhone SDK vs. Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 2: MoveMe Shawn Burke's part 2 is comparing the classic iPhone 'MoveMe' app... again, check out all the comments. Silverlight 4 : Indic Support in Silverlight Vikram Pendse demonstrates using the Microsoft Indic Language Input tool. He has some screen shots and discussion about fonts in Silverlight. Comparison of HTTP polling duplex and net.tcp performance in Silverlight 4 RC Tomasz Janczuk is checking out Silverlight4 RC and has a comparison up of the performance of the three mechanisms for asynch data push for the server to the client/. Summary rows in Datagrid with multiple groups Lee revisted a post that displayed Summary/Totals in the group header to also support multiple groups now. Silverlight Commands Hacks: Passing EventArgs as CommandParameter to DelegateCommand triggered by EventTrigger Alexey Zakharov suggests a workaround 'InvokeDelegateCommandAction' to keep Blend from ignoring event args. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Asp.net session on browser close

  - by budugu

  Note: Cross posted from Vijay Kodali's Blog. Permalink How to capture logoff time when user closes browser? Or How to end user session when browser closed? These are some of the frequently asked questions in asp.net forums. In this post I'll show you how to do this when you're building an ASP.NET web application. Before we start, one fact: There is no full-proof technique to catch the browser close event for 100% of time. The trouble lies in the stateless nature of HTTP. The Web server is out of the picture as soon as it finishes sending the page content to the client. After that, all you can rely on is a client side script. Unfortunately, there is no reliable client side event for browser close. Solution: The first thing you need to do is create the web service. I've added web service and named it AsynchronousSave.asmx.    Make this web service accessible from Script, by setting class qualified with the ScriptServiceAttribute attribute...  Add a method (SaveLogOffTime) marked with [WebMethod] attribute. This method simply accepts UserId as a string variable and writes that value and logoff time to text file. But you can pass as many variables as required. You can then use this information for many purposes. To end user session, you can just call Session.Abandon() in the above web method. To enable web service to be called from page’s client side code, add script manager to page. Here i am adding to SessionTest.aspx page When the user closes the browser, onbeforeunload event fires on the client side. Our final step is adding a java script function to that event, which makes web service calls. The code is simple but effective My Code HTML:( SessionTest.aspx ) C#:( SessionTest.aspx.cs ) That’s’ it. Run the application and after browser close, open the text file to see the log off time. The above code works well in IE 7/8. If you have any questions, leave a comment.

  Read the article

• Asp.net session on browser close

  - by budugu

  Note: Cross posted from Vijay Kodali's Blog. Permalink How to capture logoff time when user closes browser? Or How to end user session when browser closed? These are some of the frequently asked questions in asp.net forums. In this post I'll show you how to do this when you're building an ASP.NET web application. Before we start, one fact: There is no full-proof technique to catch the browser close event for 100% of time. The trouble lies in the stateless nature of HTTP. The Web server is out of the picture as soon as it finishes sending the page content to the client. After that, all you can rely on is a client side script. Unfortunately, there is no reliable client side event for browser close. Solution: The first thing you need to do is create the web service. I've added web service and named it AsynchronousSave.asmx.    Make this web service accessible from Script, by setting class qualified with the ScriptServiceAttribute attribute...  Add a method (SaveLogOffTime) marked with [WebMethod] attribute. This method simply accepts UserId as a string variable and writes that value and logoff time to text file. But you can pass as many variables as required. You can then use this information for many purposes. To end user session, you can just call Session.Abandon() in the above web method. To enable web service to be called from page’s client side code, add script manager to page. Here i am adding to SessionTest.aspx page When the user closes the browser, onbeforeunload event fires on the client side. Our final step is adding a java script function to that event, which makes web service calls. The code is simple but effective My Code HTML:( SessionTest.aspx ) C#:( SessionTest.aspx.cs ) That’s’ it. Run the application and after browser close, open the text file to see the log off time. The above code works well in IE 7/8. If you have any questions, leave a comment.

  Read the article

• JavaFX Dialogs, Anyone?

  - by HecklerMark

  A common question about JavaFX, especially for those coming from a Swing background, is "How do I do Dialogs?" The reason this is a question at all is that, currently, there is no baked-in capability to do dialog boxes within a pure JavaFX 2.x application. But come on...you wouldn't be reading about this at all if you weren't a resourceful programmer. You have ways of making things happen.  :-) I ran across a decent patch of code recently that handles many of the dialog chores for you. Pros and cons follow, but pointing your browser to this link on Github (appropriately named JavaFXDialog) will get you off to a good start. Here are some screen shots the original code author, Anton Smirnov, provided: Nothing fancy, just clean and functional. Now, about those pros and cons. From my perspective, here's the bottom line: Pros Already developed. Time required to implement is limited to downloading and decompressing the file, doing a bit of reading, and writing a few lines of code to try things out. Easy. Most of the work is done, and the interface is pretty simple. Open source. If you want to make changes - and I'm already thinking along those lines, so you may as well admit you will, too - you can do it. Cons Documentation. What you see on the Wiki page is the extent of it. Lack of activity. As of the date this article was published, the code hasn't been updated in several months...so the project is a bit stale. To be fair, the cons listed above won't cause anyone to lose sleep. After all, you don't expect constant revisions against something that works well enough for most purposes, and if your needs exceed what is there, it's easy to mod the code yourself or "roll your own" if you prefer. The lack of documentation isn't a show-stopper either due to the limited functionality and complexity of the code. Wrapping It Up If you need a quick, drop-in dialog capability for your JavaFX 2.x app, give it a try and see what you think. And if you're already using something you like, please share it as well! I'd love to hear from you, take a look at what you pass along, and maybe do a "dialog shoot-out" article in the future. So..what works for you?  :-) All the best, Mark

  Read the article

• permission denied: /etc/apt/sources.list

  - by Eli

  I'm trying to install java jre, i usually do it like this sudo echo 'deb http://www.duinsoft.nl/pkg debs all' >> /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 5CB26B26 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install update-sun-jre exit but when i do sudo echo 'deb http://www.duinsoft.nl/pkg debs all' >> /etc/apt/sources.list i see permission denied: /etc/apt/sources.list When i do ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list i see -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3360 Aug 26 01:45 /etc/apt/sources.list When i do sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.old sudo cat /etc/apt/sources.list.old | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list i see #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ dists/precise/main/binary-i386/ #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ dists/precise/restricted/binary-i386/ #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ precise main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main and the issue is not solved, i still see that permission error, I'm on a 64 bit laptop

  Read the article

• Why Cornell University Chose Oracle Data Masking

  - by Troy Kitch

  One of the eight Ivy League schools, Cornell University found itself in the unfortunate position of having to inform over 45,000 University community members that their personal information had been breached when a laptop was stolen. To ensure this wouldn’t happen again, Cornell took steps to ensure that data used for non-production purposes is de-identified with Oracle Data Masking. A recent podcast highlights why organizations like Cornell are choosing Oracle Data Masking to irreversibly de-identify production data for use in non-production environments. Organizations often copy production data, that contains sensitive information, into non-production environments so they can test applications and systems using “real world” information. Data in non-production has increasingly become a target of cyber criminals and can be lost or stolen due to weak security controls and unmonitored access. Similar to production environments, data breaches in non-production environments can cost millions of dollars to remediate and cause irreparable harm to reputation and brand. Cornell’s applications and databases help carry out the administrative and academic mission of the university. They are running Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions that include highly sensitive faculty, student, alumni, and prospective student data. This data is supported and accessed by a diverse set of developers and functional staff distributed across the university. Several years ago, Cornell experienced a data breach when an employee’s laptop was stolen.  Centrally stored backup information indicated there was sensitive data on the laptop. With no way of knowing what the criminal intended, the university had to spend significant resources reviewing data, setting up service centers to handle constituent concerns, and provide free credit checks and identity theft protection services—all of which cost money and took time away from other projects. To avoid this issue in the future Cornell came up with several options; one of which was to sanitize the testing and training environments. “The project management team was brought in and they developed a project plan and implementation schedule; part of which was to evaluate competing products in the market-space and figure out which one would work best for us.  In the end we chose Oracle’s solution based on its architecture and its functionality.” – Tony Damiani, Database Administration and Business Intelligence, Cornell University The key goals of the project were to mask the elements that were identifiable as sensitive in a consistent and efficient manner, but still support all the previous activities in the non-production environments. Tony concludes,  “What we saw was a very minimal impact on performance. The masking process added an additional three hours to our refresh window, but it was well worth that time to secure the environment and remove the sensitive data. I think some other key points you can keep in mind here is that there was zero impact on the production environment. Oracle Data Masking works in non-production environments only. Additionally, the risk of exposure has been significantly reduced and the impact to business was minimal.” With Oracle Data Masking organizations like Cornell can: Make application data securely available in non-production environments Prevent application developers and testers from seeing production data Use an extensible template library and policies for data masking automation Gain the benefits of referential integrity so that applications continue to work Listen to the podcast to hear the complete interview.  Learn more about Oracle Data Masking by registering to watch this SANS Institute Webcast and view this short demo.

  Read the article

• Retrieving only the first record or record at a certain index in LINQ

  - by vik20000in

  While working with data it’s not always required that we fetch all the records. Many a times we only need to fetch the first record, or some records in some index, in the record set. With LINQ we can get the desired record very easily with the help of the provided element operators. Simple get the first record. If you want only the first record in record set we can use the first method [Note that this can also be done easily done with the help of the take method by providing the value as one].     List<Product> products = GetProductList();      Product product12 = (         from prod in products         where prod.ProductID == 12         select prod)         .First();   We can also very easily put some condition on which first record to be fetched.     string[] strings = { "zero", "one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine" };     string startsWithO = strings.First(s => s[0] == 'o');  In the above example the result would be “one” because that is the first record starting with “o”.  Also the fact that there will be chances that there are no value returned in the result set. When we know such possibilities we can use the FirstorDefault() method to return the first record or incase there are no records get the default value.        int[] numbers = {};     int firstNumOrDefault = numbers.FirstOrDefault();  In case we do not want the first record but the second or the third or any other later record then we can use the ElementAt() method. In the ElementAt() method we need to pass the index number for which we want the record and we will receive the result for that element.      int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 };      int fourthLowNum = (         from num in numbers         where num > 5         select num )         .ElementAt(1); Vikram

  Read the article

• Oracle Forms Migration to ADF - Webinar vom ORACLE Partner PITSS

  - by Thomas Leopold

    Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM CET Free Webinar Re-Engineering Legacy Oracle Forms Migration from Forms to ADF - A Case Study Join Oracle's Grant Ronald and PITSS to see a software architecture comparison of Oracle Forms and ADF and a live step-by-step presentation on how to achieve a successful migration. Learn about various migration options, challenges and best practices to protect your current investment in Oracle Forms. PL/SQL is without match for what it does: manipulating data in the database. If you blindly migrate all your PL/SQL to Java you will, in all probability, end up with less maintainable and less efficient code. Instead you should consider which code it best left as PL/SQL..." Grant Ronald - "Migrating Oracle Forms to Fusion: Myth or Magic Bullet?" Re-Engineering existing business logic is mandatory for your legacy Forms application to take advantage of the new Software architectures like ADF. The PITSS.CON solution combines the deep understanding of Oracle Forms and Reports applications architecture with powerful re-engineering capabilities that allows the developer community to protect the investment in the existing Forms applications and to concentrate on fine-tuning and customization of the modernized functionality rather than manually recreating every module and business logic from bottom up. Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/971702250   PITSS GmbHKönigsdorferstrasse 25D-82515 WolfratshausenDo not forget to check out these Free Webinars in March! Thursday, March 3, 2011 Upgrade and Modernize Your Application to Forms 11g Registration/Information Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Shaping the Future for your Oracle Forms Application:Forms 11g, ADF, APEX Registration/Information Tuesday, March 29, 2011 Oracle Forms Modernization to APEX Registration/Information Registration is limited, so sign up  today!Presented By:        Grant Ronald, Senior Group Product Manager,Oracle       Magdalena Serban, Product Manager,PITSS   Contact Us:            PITSS in Americas +1 248.740.0935 [email protected] www.pitssamerica.com       PITSS in Europe +49 (0) 717287 5200 [email protected] www.pitss.com   White Paper:      From Oracle Forms to Oracle ADF and JEE     © Copyright 2010 PITSS GmbH, Wolfratshausen, Stuttgart, München; Managing Directors: Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Gaede, Michael Kilimann, Dipl.-Ing. Dirk Fleischmann Commercial Register: HRB 125471 at District Court Munich. All rights reserved. Any duplication or further treatment in any medium, in parts or as a whole, requires a written agreement. If you do not want to receive invitations for events, meetings and seminars from us, then please click here.

  Read the article

• Devoxx 2011 Trip Report + Pictures

  - by arungupta

  3350 attendees from 40 countries lived in "paradise" for 5 days last week. This paradise had 170+ rock star speakers delivering 200+ hours of technical content in about 150 sessions. And it truly was a paradise with a clear differentiation from other Java conferences. There were several Oracle speakers at the paradise covering the entire gamut of Java platform. I delivered a Java EE 6 hands-on lab (new content), showcased Java EE 7 and GlassFish 4.0 early work at the keynote, and participated in a panel to talk about Contexts and Dependency Injection. The demo in the keynote showed how to deploy a Java EE application in a managed environment. The demo showed a Conference Planner application that can be used by conference organizers to display sessions, tracks, and speaker information. This same application can be deployed and display data from JavaOne 2011 or Devoxx 2011 based upon the SQL chosen for database initialization. If javaone-sf-2011.sql is chosen for datbase initialization then the application looks like as shown: If devoxx-2011.sql is chosen then the application looks like as shown: And of course, clicking on Tracks, Speakers, Sessions shows you information from the respective conference. The complete source code for the application and detailed instructions are availaable at glassfish.org/javaone2011. In short: Download the sample app and unzip Download GlassFish build b05. Download platform-specific Load Balancer template Run "bin/install.sh" to configure GlassFish Pick javaone-sf-2011.sql or devoxx-2011.sql for database initialization You can also watch the application in action in this video: A breaking news shared at the conference was that Devoxx France is coming from April 18- 20 and 75% of the talks will be in French. Stay tuned for more details on that. I'm sure Antonio and gang will put up a great show out there! Just a tip for the first timers to Devoxx ... A bus leaves from Brussels airport to Antwerp city center between 4am - 11pm at the top of every hour, takes about 45 minutes, and costs 10 euros (only cash). Take a tram #6 (going towards Luchtbal) from Astrid station (next to the city center) and get off at the last station for Metropolis. It takes about 15 minutes. Purchase a day pass at the station using kiosks (much cheaper) or you can buy in the bus as well (about double the price). Either way, cash only. Here are a few pictures captured from the event: And the complete album here: Thank you Stephan for giving me an opportunity to speak at my first Devoxx. I hope to be back next year, just in time for Java EE 7 going final!

  Read the article

• Sending Parameters with the BizTalk HTTP Adapter

  - by Christopher House

  I've never had occaison to use the BizTalk HTTP adapter since I've always needed SOAP rather than just POX (plain old XML).  Yesterday we decided that we're going to expose some data via a Java servlet that will accept an HTTP post and respond with POX.  I knew BizTalk had an HTTP adapter but I had no idea what it's capabilities were. After a quick read through the BizTalk docs, it was apparent that the HTTP send adapter does in fact do posts.  The concern I had though was how we were going to supply parameters to the servlet.  The examples I had seen using the HTTP adapter all involved posting an XML message to some HTTP location.  Our Java guy, however didn't want to take that approach.  He wanted us to provide a query string via post, much like you'd expect to see on an HTTP get.  I decided to put together a little test scenario and see what I could come up with.  We didn't have a test servlet I could go against and my Java experience is virtually nill, so I decided to put together an ASP.Net project to act as the servlet.  It didn't need to be fancy, just one HttpHandler that accepts a post, reads a parameter and returns XML.  With the HttpHandler done, I put together a simple orchestration to send a message to the handler.  I started by having the orch send a message of type System.String to see what it would look like when the handler received it. I set a breakpoint in my handler and kicked off the orchestration.  Below is what I saw: As I suspected, because of BizTalk's XML serialization, System.String was not going to work.  I thought back to my BizTalk 2004 days and I project I worked on that required sending HTML formatted emails via the SMTP adapter.  To acomplish that, I had used a .Net class with a custom serialization formatter that I got from a Microsoft sample.  The code for the class, RawString can be found here. I created a new class library with the RawString class as well as a static factory class, referenced that in my orchestration project and changed my message type from System.String to RawString.  Below is what the code in my message construction looks like: After deploying the updated orchestration, I fired it off again and checked the breakpoint in my HttpHandler.  This is what I saw: And there you have it.  The RawString message type allowed me to pass a query string in the HTTP post without wrapping it in XML.

  Read the article

• I spy a Live Framework portal

  - by jamiet

  Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Python PyBluez loses Bluetooth connection after a while

  - by Travis G.

  I am using Python to write a simple serial Bluetooth script that sends information about my computer stats periodically. The receiving device is a Sparkfun BlueSmirf Silver. The problem is that, after the script runs for a few minutes, it stops sending packets to the receiver and fails with the error: (11, 'Resource temporarily unavailable') Noticing that this inevitably happens, I added some code to automatically try to reopen the connection. However, then I get: Could not connect: (16, 'Device or resource busy') Am I doing something wrong with the connection? Do I need to occasionally reopen the socket? I'm not sure how to recover from this type of error. I understand that sometimes the port will be busy and a write operation is deferred to avoid blocking other processes, but I wouldn't expect the connection to fail so regularly. Any thoughts? Here is the script: import psutil import serial import string import time import bluetooth sampleTime = 1 numSamples = 5 lastTemp = 0 TEMP_CHAR = 't' USAGE_CHAR = 'u' SENSOR_NAME = 'TC0D' #gauges = serial.Serial() #gauges.port = '/dev/rfcomm0' #gauges.baudrate = 9600 #gauges.parity = 'N' #gauges.writeTimeout = 0 #gauges.open() filename = '/sys/bus/platform/devices/applesmc.768/temp2_input' def parseSensorsOutputLinux(output): return int(round(float(output) / 1000)) def connect(): while(True): try: gaugeSocket = bluetooth.BluetoothSocket(bluetooth.RFCOMM) gaugeSocket.connect(('00:06:66:42:22:96', 1)) break; except bluetooth.btcommon.BluetoothError as error: print "Could not connect: ", error, "; Retrying in 5s..." time.sleep(5) return gaugeSocket; gaugeSocket = connect() while(1): usage = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=sampleTime) sensorFile = open(filename) temp = parseSensorsOutputLinux(sensorFile.read()) try: #gauges.write(USAGE_CHAR) gaugeSocket.send(USAGE_CHAR) #gauges.write(chr(int(usage))) #write the first byte gaugeSocket.send(chr(int(usage))) #print("Wrote usage: " + str(int(usage))) #gauges.write(TEMP_CHAR) gaugeSocket.send(TEMP_CHAR) #gauges.write(chr(temp)) gaugeSocket.send(chr(temp)) #print("Wrote temp: " + str(temp)) except bluetooth.btcommon.BluetoothError as error: print "Caught BluetoothError: ", error time.sleep(5) gaugeSocket = connect() pass gaugeSocket.close() EDIT: I should add that this code connects fine after I power-cycle the receiver and start the script. However, it fails after the first exception until I restart the receiver. P.S. This is related to my recent question, Why is /dev/rfcomm0 giving PySerial problems?, but that was more about PySerial specifically with rfcomm0. Here I am asking about general rfcomm etiquette.

  Read the article

• When Less is More

  - by aditya.agarkar

  How do you reconcile the fact that while the overall warehouse volume is down you still need more workers in the warehouse to ship all the orders? A WMS customer recently pointed out this seemingly perplexing fact in a customer conference. So what is going on? Didn't we tell you before that for a warehouse the customer is really the "king"? In this case customers are merely responding to a low overall low demand and uncertainty. They do not want to hold down inventory and one of the ways to do that is by decreasing the order size and ordering more frequently. Overall impact to the warehouse? Two words: "More work!!" This is not all. Smaller order sizes also mean challenges from a transportation perspective including a rise in costlier parcel or LTL shipments instead of cheaper TL shipments. Here is a hypothetical scenario where a customer reduces the order size by 10% and increases the order frequency by 10%. As you can see in the following table, the overall volume declines by 1% but the warehouse has to ship roughly 10% more lines. Order Frequency (Line Count)Order Size (Units)Total VolumeChange (%)10010010,000 -110909,900-1% If you want to see how "Less is More" in graphical terms, this is how it appears: Even though the volume is down, there is going to be more work in the warehouse in terms of number of lines shipped. The operators need to pick more discrete orders, pack them into more shipping containers and ship more deliveries. What do you do differently if you are facing this situation?In this case here are some obvious steps to take:Uno: Change your pick methods. If you are used to doing order picks, it needs to go out the door. You need to evaluate batch picking and grouping techniques. Go for cluster picking, go for zone picking, pick and pass...anything that improves your picker productivity. More than anything, cluster picking works like a charm and above all, its simple and very effective. Dos: Are you minimize "touch" points in your pick process? Consider doing one step pick, pack and confirm i.e. pick and pack stuff directly into shipping cartons. Done correctly the container will not require any more "touch" points all the way to the trailer loading. Use cartonization!Tres: Are the being picked from an optimized pick face? Are the items slotted correctly? This needs to be looked into. Consider automated "pull" or "push" replenishment into your pick face and also make sure that high demand items are occupying the golden zones.  Cuatro: Are you tracking labor productivity? If not there needs to be a concerted push for having labor standards in place. Hope you found these ideas useful.

  Read the article

• Unable to apt-get upgrade in ubuntu 11.10

  - by blackhole

  These are the errors shows by different client Update Manager: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 968, in simulate trans.unauthenticated = self._simulate_helper(trans) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1092, in _simulate_helper return depends, self._cache.required_download, \ File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 235, in required_download pm.get_archives(fetcher, self._list, self._records) SystemError: E:Method has died unexpectedly!, E:Sub-process returned an error code (100), E:Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly Synaptic package Manager E: Method has died unexpectedly! E: Sub-process returned an error code (100) E: Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly E: Unable to lock the download directory Command: sudo apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be upgraded: libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev 2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Failed to exec method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ E: Method has died unexpectedly! E: Sub-process returned an error code (100) E: Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly Can anyone one tell me how to resolve these issues ? I have no volatile packages or anything so i am even posting the preview of my sources.list file. # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 10.10 _Maverick Meerkat_ - Release i386 (20101007)]/ maverick main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric universe deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric multiverse deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports' ## repository. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. # deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-backports main restricted universe multiverse # deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-backports main restricted universe multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security main restricted deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security universe deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security multiverse # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner Here is the preview of my sources.list file

  Read the article

• Gamify your Web

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  Yesterday Valencia welcomed the Gamification World Congress that I follow virtually through #GWC2012. BBVA, Iberia, Ligeresa, Axe, Wayra, ESADE, GlaxoSmithKline, Macmillan, Gamisfaction, Nomaders, Blaffin were among the companies presenting success stories on gaming. It has been proved that people remember things easily when an emotion is created. The marketing expectations around Gamification techniques have a lot to do with Neuromarketing theories. There are a lot of expectations on internal enterprise Gamification. In the public Web some sectors are taking the lead on following the trend. The Gartner Analyst Brian Burke opened another Gamification recent event in Madrid remembering that “Gamification is mostly about Engagement”, and this can be applied both to customers or employees. Gamification and Banking The experience of the Spanish Financial Group BBVA that just launched BBVA Game was also presented a week ago at the BBVA Innovation Centre during the event “Gamification & Banking: a fad or a serious business?” . One of the objectives of the BBVA Game was to double the name of registered users. “People like the efficiency of the online channel want to keep a one-to-one contact with the brand”-explained Bernardo Crespo. Another interested data coming out the BBVA presentation was that “only 20% of Spanish users –out of the total holders of Bank Accounts in the country- is familiar with the use of a Web Site to consult their bank accounts”, the project aims also to reverse this situation helping people to learn making a heavy use of the Video in the gaming context. In general Banking presenters seem to agree that Gamification techniques are helping to increase the time spent on the Web. Gamification and Health Using Gamification techniques for chronic illness rehabilitation was another topic of the World Congress. Here you can find some ideas and experiences What can games do for the health (In Spanish) I have personally started my own mental-health gaming project at http://www.lumosity.com/ Gamification in the Enterprise I really recommend Reading this excellent post of Ultan ÓBroin my Introduction to Gamification and Applications. Employee´s motivation and learning are experiencing a 360º turn and it looks than some of us will become soon the Dragon of the year instead of the Employee of the Year. Using Web 2.0 Tools for Gamification Projects  What type of tools do we need for a quick-win Gamification project? To certain extend Gamification can be considered an evolution of the participative Web. Badging, avatars, points and awards, leader boards, progress charts, virtual currencies, gifting and giving challenges and quests are common components and elements. The Web is offering new development frameworks to that purpose as this Avatar Framework from Paypal or Badgeville to include in web applications. Besides, tools to create communities around a game are required to comment, share and vote players as well as for an efficient multimedia management. Due to its entirely open architecture, its community features, and its multimedia and imaging solutions is were I see WebCenter as a tool helping brands to success. Link to Sources & Recommended Readings YouTube Video of BBVAGame presentation Where To Apply Gamification In Your Incentive Jim Calhoun Cancer Challenge Ride and Walkh For my Spanish Readers El aburrimiento es el enemigo número uno del éxito

  Read the article

• It’s the thought that counts…

  - by Tony Davis

  I recently finished editing a book called Tribal SQL, and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a community-sourced book written by first-timers. Fifteen previously unpublished authors contributed one chapter each, with the seemingly simple remit to write about “what makes them passionate about working with SQL Server, something that all SQL Server DBAs and developers really need to know”. Sure, some of the writing skills were a bit rusty as one would expect from busy people, but the ideas and energy were sheer nectar. Any seasoned editor can deal easily with the problem of fixing the output of untrained writers. We can handle with the occasional technical error too, which is why we have technical reviewers. The editor’s real job is to hone the clarity and flow of ideas, making the author’s knowledge and experience accessible to as many others as possible. What the writer needs to bring, on the other hand, is enthusiasm, attention to detail, common sense, and a sense of the person behind the writing. If any of these are missing, no editor can fix it. We can see these essential characteristics in many of the more seasoned and widely-published writers about SQL. To illustrate what I mean by enthusiasm, or passion, take a look at the work of Laerte Junior or Fabiano Amorim. Both authors have English as a second language, but their energy, enthusiasm, sheer immersion in a technology and thirst to know more, drives them, with a little editorial help, to produce articles of far more practical value than one can find in the “manuals”. There’s the attention to detail of the likes of Jonathan Kehayias, or Paul Randal. Read their work and one begins to understand the knowledge coupled with incredible rigor, the willingness to bend and test every piece of advice offered to make sure it’s correct, that marks out the very best technical writing. There’s the common sense of someone like Louis Davidson. All writers, including Louis, like to stretch the grey matter of their readers, but some of the most valuable writing is that which takes a complicated idea, or distils years of experience, and expresses it in a way that sounds like simple common sense. There’s personality and humor. Contrary to what you may have been told, they can and do mix well with technical writing, as long as they don’t become a distraction. Read someone like Rodney Landrum, or Phil Factor, for numerous examples of articles that teach hard technical lessons but also make you smile at least twice along the way. Writing well is not easy and it takes a certain bravery to expose your ideas and knowledge for dissection by others, but it doesn’t mean that writing should be the preserve only of those trained in the art, or best left to the MVPs. I believe that Tribal SQL is testament to the fact that if you have passion for what you do, and really know your topic then, with a little editorial help, you can write, and people will learn from what you have to say. You can read a sample chapter, by Mark Rasmussen, in this issue of Simple-Talk and I hope you’ll consider checking out the book (if you needed any further encouragement, it’s also for a good cause, Computers4Africa). Cheers, Tony  

  Read the article

• Hello World - My Name is Christian Finn and I'm a WebCenter Evangelist

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Good Morning World! I'd like to introduce a new member of the Oracle WebCenter Team, Christian Finn. We decided to let him do his own intros today. Look for his guest posts next week and he'll be a frequent contributor to WebCenter blog and voice of the community. Hello (Oracle) World! Hi everyone, my name is Christian Finn. It’s a coder’s tradition to have “hello world” be the first output from a new program or in a new language. While I have left my coding days far behind, it still seems fitting to start my new role here at Oracle by saying hello to all of you—our customers, partners and my colleagues. So by way of introduction, a little background about me. I am the new senior director for evangelism on the WebCenter product management team. Not only am I new to Oracle, but the evangelism team is also brand new. Our mission is to raise the profile of Oracle in all of the markets/conversations in which WebCenter competes—social business, collaboration, portals, Internet sites, and customer/audience engagement. This is all pretty familiar turf for me because, as some of you may know, until recently I was the director of product management at Microsoft for Microsoft SharePoint Server and several other SharePoint products. And prior to that, I held management roles at Microsoft in marketing, channels, learning, and enterprise sales. Before Microsoft, I got my start in the industry as a software trainer and Lotus Notes consultant. I am incredibly excited to be joining Oracle at this time because of the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead to improve how people and businesses work. Of all the vendors offering a vision for social business, Oracle is unique in having best of breed strength in market (or coming soon) in all three critical areas: customer experience management; the middleware and back-end applications that run your business; and in the social, collaboration, and content technologies that are the connective tissue between them. Everyone else can offer one or two of the above, but not all three unified together. So it is a great time to come board and there’s a fantastic team of people hard at work on building great products for you. In the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing much more from us. For now, we’ll kick things off with some blog posts here on the WebCenter blog. Enjoy the reads and please share your thoughts with me over Twitter on @cfinn.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Solution of Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this week I asked a question where I asked how to Swap Values of the column without using CASE Statement. Read here: SQL SERVER – A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement. I have proposed 3 different solutions in the blog posts itself. I had requested the help of the community to come up with alternate solutions and honestly I am stunned and amazed by the qualified entries. I will be not able to cover every single solution which is posted as a comment, however, I would like to for sure cover few interesting entries. However, I am selecting 5 solutions which are different (not necessary they are most optimal or best – just different and interesting). Just for clarity I am involving the original problem statement here. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE SimpleTable (ID INT, Gender VARCHAR(10)) GO INSERT INTO SimpleTable (ID, Gender) SELECT 1, 'female' UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'male' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'male' GO SELECT * FROM SimpleTable GO -- Insert Your Solutions here -- Swap value of Column Gender SELECT * FROM SimpleTable GO DROP TABLE SimpleTable GO Here are the five most interesting and different solutions I have received. Solution by Roji P Thomas UPDATE S SET S.Gender = D.Gender FROM SimpleTable S INNER JOIN SimpleTable D ON S.Gender != D.Gender I really loved the solutions as it is very simple and drives the point home – elegant and will work pretty much for any values (not necessarily restricted by the option in original question ‘male’ or ‘female’). Solution by Aneel CREATE TABLE #temp(id INT, datacolumn CHAR(4)) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES(1,'gent'),(2,'lady'),(3,'lady') DECLARE @value1 CHAR(4), @value2 CHAR(4) SET @value1 = 'lady' SET @value2 = 'gent' UPDATE #temp SET datacolumn = REPLACE(@value1 + @value2,datacolumn,'') Aneel has very interesting solution where he combined both the values and replace the original value. I personally liked this creativity of the solution. Solution by SIJIN KUMAR V P UPDATE SimpleTable SET Gender = RIGHT(('fe'+Gender), DIFFERENCE((Gender),SOUNDEX(Gender))*2) Sijin has amazed me with Difference and Soundex function. I have never visualized that above two functions can resolve the problem. Hats off to you Sijin. Solution by Nikhildas UPDATE St SET St.Gender = t.Gender FROM SimpleTable St CROSS Apply (SELECT DISTINCT gender FROM SimpleTable WHERE St.Gender != Gender) t I was expecting that someone will come up with this solution where they use CROSS APPLY. This is indeed very neat and for sure interesting exercise. If you do not know how CROSS APPLY works this is the time to learn. Solution by mistermagooo UPDATE SimpleTable SET Gender=X.NewGender FROM (VALUES('male','female'),('female','male')) AS X(OldGender,NewGender) WHERE SimpleTable.Gender=X.OldGender As per author this is a slow solution but I love how syntaxes are placed and used here. I love how he used syntax here. I will say this is the most beautifully written solution (not necessarily it is best). Bonus: Solution by Madhivanan Somehow I was confident Madhi – SQL Server MVP will come up with something which I will be compelled to read. He has written a complete blog post on this subject and I encourage all of you to go ahead and read it. Now personally I wanted to list every single comment here. There are some so good that I am just amazed with the creativity. I will write a part of this blog post in future. However, here is the challenge for you. Challenge: Go over 50+ various solutions listed to the simple problem here. Here are my two asks for you. 1) Pick your best solution and list here in the comment. This exercise will for sure teach us one or two things. 2) Write your own solution which is yet not covered already listed 50 solutions. I am confident that there is no end to creativity. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Monitoring the Application alongside SQL Server

  - by Tony Davis

  Sometimes, on Simple-Talk, it takes a while to spot strange and unexpected patterns of user activity, or small bugs. For example, one morning we spotted that an article’s comment count had leapt to 1485, but that only four were displayed. With some rooting around in Google Analytics, and the endlessly annoying Community Server admin-interface, we were able to work out that a few days previously the article had been subject to a spam attack and that the comment count was for some reason including both accepted and unaccepted comments (which in turn uncovered a bug in the SQL). This sort of incident made us a lot keener on monitoring Simple-talk website usage more effectively. However, the metrics we wanted are troublesome, because they are far too specific for Google Analytics to measure, and the SQL Server backend doesn’t keep sufficient information to enable us to plot trends. The latter could provide, for example, the total number of comments made on, or votes cast for, articles, over all time, but not the number that occur by hour over a set time. We lacked a baseline, in other words. We couldn’t alter the database, as it is a bought-in package. We had neither the resources nor inclination to build-in dedicated application monitoring. Possibly, we could investigate a third-party tool to do the job; but then it occurred to us that we were already using a monitoring tool (SQL Monitor) to keep an eye on the database. It stored data, made graphs and sent alerts. Could we get it to monitor some aspects of the application as well? Of course, SQL Monitor’s single purpose is to check and monitor SQL Server, over time, rather than to monitor applications that use SQL Server. However, how different is the business of gathering and plotting SQL Server Wait Stats, from gathering and plotting various aspects of user activity on the site? Not a lot, it turns out. The latest version allows us to write our own custom monitoring scripts, meaning that we could now monitor any metric in the application that returns an integer. It took little time to write a simple SQL Query that collects basic metrics of the total number of subscribers, votes cast, comments made, or views of articles, over time. The SQL Monitor database polls Simple-Talk every second or so in order to get the latest totals, and can then store and plot this information, or even correlate SQL Server usage to application usage. You can see the live data by visiting monitor.red-gate.com. Click the "Analysis" tab, and select one of the "Simple-talk:" entries in the "Show" box and an appropriate data range (e.g. last 30 days). It’s nascent, and we’re still working on it, but it’s already given us more confidence that we’ll spot quickly trends, bugs, or bursts of ‘abnormal’ activity. If there is a sudden rise in comments, we get an alert, and if it’s due to a spam attack, we can moderate or ban the perpetrator very quickly. We’ve often argued that a tool should perform a single job well rather than turn into a Swiss-army knife, but ironically we’ve rather appreciated being able to make best use of what’s there anyway for a slightly different purpose. Is this a good or common practice? What do you think? Cheers, Tony.

  Read the article

• How Exactly Is One Linux OS “Based On” Another Linux OS?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  When reviewing different flavors of Linux, you’ll frequently come across phrases like “Ubuntu is based on Debian” but what exactly does that mean? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader PLPiper is trying to get a handle on how Linux variants work: I’ve been looking through quite a number of Linux distros recently to get an idea of what’s around, and one phrase that keeps coming up is that “[this OS] is based on [another OS]“. For example: Fedora is based on Red Hat Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu For someone coming from a Mac environment I understand how “OS X is based on Darwin”, however when I look at Linux Distros, I find myself asking “Aren’t they all based on Linux..?” In this context, what exactly does it mean for one Linux OS to be based on another Linux OS? So, what exactly does it mean when we talk about one version of Linux being based off another version? The Answer SuperUser contributor kostix offers a solid overview of the whole system: Linux is a kernel — a (complex) piece of software which works with the hardware and exports a certain Application Programming Interface (API), and binary conventions on how to precisely use it (Application Binary Interface, ABI) available to the “user-space” applications. Debian, RedHat and others are operating systems — complete software environments which consist of the kernel and a set of user-space programs which make the computer useful as they perform sensible tasks (sending/receiving mail, allowing you to browse the Internet, driving a robot etc). Now each such OS, while providing mostly the same software (there are not so many free mail server programs or Internet browsers or desktop environments, for example) differ in approaches to do this and also in their stated goals and release cycles. Quite typically these OSes are called “distributions”. This is, IMO, a somewhat wrong term stemming from the fact you’re technically able to build all the required software by hand and install it on a target machine, so these OSes distribute the packaged software so you either don’t need to build it (Debian, RedHat) or they facilitate such building (Gentoo). They also usually provide an installer which helps to install the OS onto a target machine. Making and supporting an OS is a very complicated task requiring a complex and intricate infrastructure (upload queues, build servers, a bug tracker, and archive servers, mailing list software etc etc etc) and staff. This obviously raises a high barrier for creating a new, from-scratch OS. For instance, Debian provides ca. 37k packages for some five hardware architectures — go figure how much work is put into supporting this stuff. Still, if someone thinks they need to create a new OS for whatever reason, it may be a good idea to use an existing foundation to build on. And this is exactly where OSes based on other OSes come into existence. For instance, Ubuntu builds upon Debian by just importing most packages from it and repackaging only a small subset of them, plus packaging their own, providing their own artwork, default settings, documentation etc. Note that there are variations to this “based on” thing. For instance, Debian fosters the creation of “pure blends” of itself: distributions which use Debian rather directly, and just add a bunch of packages and other stuff only useful for rather small groups of users such as those working in education or medicine or music industry etc. Another twist is that not all these OSes are based on Linux. For instance, Debian also provide FreeBSD and Hurd kernels. They have quite tiny user groups but anyway. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

  Read the article

• Monogame/SharpDX - Shader parameters missing

  - by Layoric

  I am currently working on a simple game that I am building in Windows 8 using MonoGame (develop3d). I am using some shader code from a tutorial (made by Charles Humphrey) and having an issue populating a 'texture' parameter as it appears to be missing. Edit I have also tried 'Texture2D' and using it with a register(t0), still no luck I'm not well versed writing shaders, so this might be caused by a more obvious problem. I have debugged through MonoGame's Content processor to see how this shader is being parsed, all the non 'texture' parameters are there and look to be loading correctly. Edit This seems to go back to D3D compiler. Shader code below: #include "PPVertexShader.fxh" float2 lightScreenPosition; float4x4 matVP; float2 halfPixel; float SunSize; texture flare; sampler2D Scene: register(s0){ AddressU = Clamp; AddressV = Clamp; }; sampler Flare = sampler_state { Texture = (flare); AddressU = CLAMP; AddressV = CLAMP; }; float4 LightSourceMaskPS(float2 texCoord : TEXCOORD0 ) : COLOR0 { texCoord -= halfPixel; // Get the scene float4 col = 0; // Find the suns position in the world and map it to the screen space. float2 coord; float size = SunSize / 1; float2 center = lightScreenPosition; coord = .5 - (texCoord - center) / size * .5; col += (pow(tex2D(Flare,coord),2) * 1) * 2; return col * tex2D(Scene,texCoord); } technique LightSourceMask { pass p0 { VertexShader = compile vs_4_0 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_4_0 LightSourceMaskPS(); } } I've removed default values as they are currently not support in MonoGame and also changed ps and vs to v4 instead of 2. Could this be causing the issue? As I debug through 'DXConstantBufferData' constructor (from within the MonoGameContentProcessing project) I find that the 'flare' parameter does not exist. All others seem to be getting created fine. Any help would be appreciated. Update 1 I have discovered that SharpDX D3D compiler is what seems to be ignoring this parameter (perhaps by design?). The ConstantBufferDescription.VariableCount seems to be not counting the texture variable. Update 2 SharpDX function 'GetConstantBuffer(int index)' returns the parameters (minus textures) which is making is impossible to set values to these variables within the shader. Any one know if this is normal for DX11 / Shader Model 4.0? Or am I missing something else?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493  | Next Page >