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  • Optimizing drawing of cubes

    - by Christian Frantz
    After googling for hours I've come to a few conclusions, I need to either rewrite my whole cube class, or figure out how to use hardware instancing. I can draw up to 2500 cubes with little lag, but after that my fps drops. Is there a way I can use my class for hardware instancing? Or would I be better off rewriting my class for optimization? public class Cube { public GraphicsDevice device; public VertexBuffer cubeVertexBuffer; public Cube(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { device = graphicsDevice; var vertices = new List<VertexPositionTexture>(); BuildFace(vertices, new Vector3(0, 0, 0), new Vector3(0, 1, 1)); BuildFace(vertices, new Vector3(0, 0, 1), new Vector3(1, 1, 1)); BuildFace(vertices, new Vector3(1, 0, 1), new Vector3(1, 1, 0)); BuildFace(vertices, new Vector3(1, 0, 0), new Vector3(0, 1, 0)); BuildFaceHorizontal(vertices, new Vector3(0, 1, 0), new Vector3(1, 1, 1)); BuildFaceHorizontal(vertices, new Vector3(0, 0, 1), new Vector3(1, 0, 0)); cubeVertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(device, VertexPositionTexture.VertexDeclaration, vertices.Count, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); cubeVertexBuffer.SetData<VertexPositionTexture>(vertices.ToArray()); } private void BuildFace(List<VertexPositionTexture> vertices, Vector3 p1, Vector3 p2) { vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p1.X, p1.Y, p1.Z, 1, 0)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p1.X, p2.Y, p1.Z, 1, 1)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p2.X, p2.Y, p2.Z, 0, 1)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p2.X, p2.Y, p2.Z, 0, 1)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p2.X, p1.Y, p2.Z, 0, 0)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p1.X, p1.Y, p1.Z, 1, 0)); } private void BuildFaceHorizontal(List<VertexPositionTexture> vertices, Vector3 p1, Vector3 p2) { vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p1.X, p1.Y, p1.Z, 0, 1)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p2.X, p1.Y, p1.Z, 1, 1)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p2.X, p2.Y, p2.Z, 1, 0)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p1.X, p1.Y, p1.Z, 0, 1)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p2.X, p2.Y, p2.Z, 1, 0)); vertices.Add(BuildVertex(p1.X, p1.Y, p2.Z, 0, 0)); } private VertexPositionTexture BuildVertex(float x, float y, float z, float u, float v) { return new VertexPositionTexture(new Vector3(x, y, z), new Vector2(u, v)); } public void Draw(BasicEffect effect) { foreach (EffectPass pass in effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); device.SetVertexBuffer(cubeVertexBuffer); device.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, cubeVertexBuffer.VertexCount / 3); } } } The following class is a list that draws the cubes. public class DrawableList<T> : DrawableGameComponent { private BasicEffect effect; private ThirdPersonCam camera; private class Entity { public Vector3 Position { get; set; } public Matrix Orientation { get; set; } public Texture2D Texture { get; set; } } private Cube cube; private List<Entity> entities = new List<Entity>(); public DrawableList(Game game, ThirdPersonCam camera, BasicEffect effect) : base(game) { this.effect = effect; cube = new Cube(game.GraphicsDevice); this.camera = camera; } public void Add(Vector3 position, Matrix orientation, Texture2D texture) { entities.Add(new Entity() { Position = position, Orientation = orientation, Texture = texture }); } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { foreach (var item in entities) { effect.VertexColorEnabled = false; effect.TextureEnabled = true; effect.Texture = item.Texture; Matrix center = Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-0.5f, -0.5f, -0.5f)); Matrix scale = Matrix.CreateScale(1f); Matrix translate = Matrix.CreateTranslation(item.Position); effect.World = center * scale * translate; effect.View = camera.view; effect.Projection = camera.proj; effect.FogEnabled = true; effect.FogColor = Color.CornflowerBlue.ToVector3(); effect.FogStart = 1.0f; effect.FogEnd = 50.0f; cube.Draw(effect); } base.Draw(gameTime); } } } There are probably many reasons that my fps is so slow, but I can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I've looked at techcraft as well, but what I have is too specific to what I want the outcome to be to just rewrite everything from scratch

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  • Lesi, from Graduate Trainee to Territory Manager

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 It’s the final year, University is now coming to an end. A new chapter now awaits my arrival. This part of my life is called “Looking for a Job”. With no form of experience whatsoever, getting a job at a well renowned IT company is something that every IT student dreams about. CV: v, Application form: v, interviews: v. Acceptance Call, “Lesi I’m pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to be part of the Oracle Graduate Program for 2012”. Life would never again be the same. Being Part of the Graduate Program Going into the Graduate program, I felt like a baby seeing candy for the first time. The Program gave me the platform to not only break in to the workplace but also to help launch my career. Over the next 3 months, I went through various trainings / workshops / events / coaching / mentorship sessions. Like a construction worker building a solid foundation for a beautifully designed architecture, a clear path to build my career was set. With training out the way, it was now time to start working closely with my team. For the rest of the year, it was all about selling. Sales, Pipeline, Forecasting and numbers soon became the common words in my career. As the saying goes, “once a sales man, always a sales man”. There was no turning back now, a career in sales was the new hustle in my life. I worked closely with my mentor & coach (Ibrahim) who was heading up Zambia and Malawi. This was to be one of my best moments in the program as I started engaging with customers and getting some hands on experience in the field. By the end of the program all the experience, hard work, training and resources came in handy as I was now ready and fully groomed to be a sales rep. Life after the Graduate Program I’m proud to say that now I’m a Territory Manager, heading up Malawi, selling Technology, Middleware & Applications across all industries. I’m part of the Transition Cluster Team, a powerful team headed by the seasoned Senior Director. As a Territory Manager my role is to push for coverage, to penetrate the market by selling Oracle from end- to- end to all accounts in Malawi. I now spend my days living out of a suitcase, moving from hotel to hotel, chasing after business in all areas of Malawi. It’s the life of a Sales Man and I’m enjoying every minute of it. I’m truly fortunate and grateful to have been part of such a wonderful graduate program. I owe my Sales career to the graduate program, and I truly hope that the program will continue to develop and to groom new talent amongst the youth of this world. If you're interested in joining the Graduate Program in South Africa keep an eye on our CampusatOracle Facebook Page page to get the latest updates! /* 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-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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; 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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  • Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

    For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

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  • Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

    For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

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  • What developer conferences are you going to this year?

    - by mbcrump
    This short list is what I consider to be the “cream-of-the-crop” in developer conferences. This is also a list of the conferences that I plan on attending in 2011. If you feel your conference is just as good, then shoot me an email at [michael[at]michaelcrump[dot]net, and if possible I will check it out.   In-Person Event Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd, 2011 Redmond on October 17th-21st, 2011 Orlando on December 5th-9th, 2011 Visual Studio Live – I attended this event in November of last year and blogged about my experience. I am also planning on going back to the Orlando session in December of this year. So what did I like the most about this event? Being able to interact one-on-one with a majority of the speakers. If you read my blog post then you will see a list of the speakers that I met up with. I also made a lot of great connections with other professional developers all over the world. They are having an event in Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd. I noticed at this event that they have added a new track on mobile. Being a big fan of mobile, I feel that this is a great move. They also have a great selection for Silverlight Developers including Billy Hollis and Rocky Lhotka. For the full lineup of conference tracks, sessions and speakers visit http://bit.ly/VSLiveTrks. If you are interested in this then you can register here by February 16th. I must add that you can save $300 bucks by getting the early-bird special.   Virtual Conference SSWUG (DBTechCon) - holds the largest virtual conference in the information technology industry. It is also special to me because they selected a majority of my Silverlight content for the April conference. No traveling fees and all of the sessions are recorded so you can watch them on-demand for $189 bucks (early-bird special). For the entire speaker list then click here. The session list has also been published. If you are interested in this then you can register here.   In-Person Event Knoxville, TN on June 3rd/4th 2011. Codestock.org – If you live in the South then you have heard of CodeStock. To my knowledge, they have only had 3 events so far and they were a huge success. It was such a success that after the last event, everyone was telling me how good it was and how much they enjoyed it. They currently have a call for speakers going on right now, so if you have sessions then be sure to submit yours. So, what makes them stand out? Well for starters Michael Neal (organizer) developed an open API so conference attendees could build their own apps for the sessions. They also encouraged their speakers to go to other sessions instead of stay in a “speaker-room”. Another cool feature is that they are uploading videos from the conference so everyone can benefit. They are currently looking for sponsorship, so help out if you can.   In-Person Event Redmond, WA on October 28/29 2011 *NOT 100% SURE AT THIS POINT* PDC 11 – OK, so the logo should be pdc11 but its not out yet. This event is located on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. It is probably one of the most well known conferences for developers to attend. One of the big perks from this event is that you typically come away with free stuff. In 2010 they gave away Windows 7 Phones. I remember years earlier they gave away laptops. This of course isn’t the only reason to go, you may get to tour the Microsoft campus. Since pdc is a huge event, you can view all the events for free. Mike Taulty created a nice Silverlight application that consumes the OData feed. You can download it here. If everything goes as planned, I will be at all of these events. If you plan on going then send me a tweet and we will do lunch or dinner. I love meeting new developers and talking .net.  Subscribe to my feed

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  • Context is Everything

    - by Angus Graham
    Normal 0 false false false EN-CA 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Context is Everything How many times have you have you asked a question only to hear an answer like “Well, it depends. What exactly are you trying to do?”.  There are times that raw information can’t tell us what we need to know without putting it in a larger context. Let's take a real world example.  If I'm a maintenance planner trying to figure out which assets should be replaced during my next maintenance window, I'm going to go to my Asset Management System.  I can get it to spit out a list of assets that have failed several times over the last year.  But what are these assets connected to?  Is there any safety consequences to shutting off this pipeline to do the work?  Is some other work that's planned going to conflict with replacing this asset?  Several of these questions can't be answered by simply spitting out a list of asset IDs.  The maintenance planner will have to reference a diagram of the plant to answer several of these questions. This is precisely the idea behind Augmented Business Visualization. An Augmented Business Visualization (ABV) solution is one where your structured data (enterprise application data) and your unstructured data (documents, contracts, floor plans, designs, etc.) come together to allow you to make better decisions.  Essentially we're showing your business data into its context. AutoVue allows you to create ABV solutions by integrating your enterprise application with AutoVue’s hotspot framework. Hotspots can be defined for your document. Users can click these hotspots to trigger actions in your enterprise app. Similarly, the enterprise app can highlight the hotspots in your document based on its business data, creating a visual dashboard of your business data in the context of your document. ABV is not new. We introduced the hotspot framework in AutoVue 20.1 with text hotspots. Any text in a PDF or 2D CAD drawing could be turned into a hotspot. In 20.2 we have enhanced this to include 2 new types of hotspots: 3D and regional hotspots. 3D hotspots allow you to turn 3D parts into hotspots. Hotspots can be defined based on the attributes of the part, so you can create hotspots based on part numbers, material, date of delivery, etc.  Regional hotspots allow an administrator to define rectangular regions on any PDF, image, or 2D CAD drawing. This is perfect for cases where the document you’re using either doesn’t have text in it (a JPG or TIFF for example) or if you want to define hotspots that don’t correspond to the text in the document. There are lots of possible uses for AutoVue hotspots.  A great demonstration of how our hotspot capabilities can help add context to enterprise data in the Energy sector can be found in the following AutoVue movies: Maintenance Planning in the Energy Sector - Watch it Now Capital Construction Project Management in the Energy Sector  -  Watch it Now Commissioning and Handover Process for the Energy Sector  -  Watch it Now

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  • What to "CRM" in San Francisco? CRM Highlights for OpenWorld '12

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    There is plenty to SEE for CRM during OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 30 - October 4! Here are some of the sessions in the CRM Track that you might want to consider attending for products you currently own or might consider for the future. I think you'll agree, there is quite a bit of investment going on across Oracle CRM. Please use OpenWorld Schedule Builder or check the OpenWorld Content Catalog for all of the session details and any time or location changes. Tip: Pre-enrolled session registrants via Schedule Builder are allowed into the session rooms before anyone else, so Schedule Builder will guarantee you a seat. Many of the sessions below will likely be at capacity. General Session: Oracle Fusion CRM—Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use (Session ID: GEN9674) - Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM. Anthony Lye, Senior VP, Oracle leads this general session focused on Oracle Fusion CRM. Oracle Fusion CRM optimizes territories, combines quota management and incentive compensation, integrates sales and marketing, and cleanses and enriches data—all within a single application platform. Oracle Fusion can be configured, changed, and extended at runtime by end users, business managers, IT, and developers. Oracle Fusion CRM can be used from the Web, from a smartphone, from Microsoft Outlook, or from an iPad. Deloitte, sponsor of the CRM Track, will also present key concepts on CRM implementations. Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap (CON9407) - Oct 1, 3:15PM - 4:15PM. In this session, learn how Oracle Fusion CRM enables companies to create better sales plans, generate more quality leads, and achieve higher win rates and find out why customers are adopting Oracle Fusion CRM. Gain a deeper understanding of the unique capabilities only Oracle Fusion CRM provides, and learn how Oracle’s commitment to CRM innovation is driving a wide range of future enhancements. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap (CON9764) - Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service combines Web, social, and contact center experiences for a unified, cross-channel service solution in the cloud, enabling organizations to increase sales and adoption, build trust, strengthen relationships, and reduce costs and effort. Come to this session to hear from Oracle experts about where the product is going and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value to its customers. Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap (CON9700) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. The world’s most complete CRM solution, Oracle’s Siebel CRM helps organizations differentiate their businesses. Come to this session to learn about the Siebel product roadmap and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value for its customers on this platform. Additionally, the session covers how Siebel customers can leverage many Oracle assets such as Oracle WebCenter Sites; InQuira, RightNow, and ATG/Endeca applications, and Oracle Policy Automation in conjunction with their current Siebel investments. Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement (CON9750) - Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM. Social is changing the customer experience! Come find out how Oracle can help you know your customers better, encourage brand affinity, and improve collaboration within your ecosystem. This session reviews Oracle’s social media solution and shows how you can discover hidden insights buried in your enterprise and social data. Also learn how Oracle Social Network revolutionizes how enterprise users work, collaborate, and share to achieve successful outcomes. Oracle CRM On Demand Strategy and Roadmap (CON9727) - Oct 1, 10:45AM - 11:45AM. Oracle CRM On Demand is a powerful cloud-based customer relationship management solution. Come to this session to learn directly from Oracle experts about future product plans and hear how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value to its customers. Knowledge Management Roadmap and Strategy (CON9776) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. Learn how to harness the knowledge created as a natural byproduct of day-to-day interactions to lower costs and improve customer experience by delivering the right answer at the right time across channels. This session includes an overview of Oracle’s product roadmap and vision for knowledge management for both the Oracle RightNow and Oracle Knowledge (formerly InQuira) product families. Oracle Policy Automation Roadmap: Supercharging the Customer Experience (CON9655) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. Oracle Policy Automation delivers rapid customer value by streamlining the capture, analysis, and deployment of policies across every facet of the customer experience. This session discusses recent Oracle Policy Automation enhancements for policy analytics; the latest Oracle Policy Automation Connector for Siebel; and planned new capabilities, including availability with the Oracle RightNow product line. There is much more, so stay tuned for more highlights or check out the Content Catalog and search for your areas of interest. 

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  • Tip #19 Module Private Visibility in OSGi

    - by ByronNevins
    I hate public and protected methods and classes.  It requires so much work to change them in a huge project like GlassFish.  Not to mention that you may well have to support those APIs forever.  They are highly overused in GlassFish.  In fact I'd bet that > 95% of classes are marked as public for no good reason.  It's just (bad) habit is my guess. private and default visibility (I call it package-private) is easier to maintain.  It is much much easier to change such classes and methods around.  If you have ANY public method or public class in GlassFish you'll need to grep through a tremendous amount of source code to find all callers.  But even that won't be theoretically reliable.  What if a caller is using reflection to access public methods?  You may never find such usages. If you have package private methods, it's easy.  Simply grep through all the code in that one package.  As long as that package compiles ok you're all set.  There can' be any compile errors anywhere else.  It's a waste of time to even look around or build the "outside" world.  So you may be thinking: "Aha!  I'll just make my module have one giant package with all the java files.  Then I can use the default visibility and maintenance will be much easier.  But there's a problem.  You are wasting a very nice feature of java -- organizing code into separate packages.  It also makes the code much more encapsulated.  Unfortunately to share code between the packages you have no choice but to declare public visibility. What happens in practice is that a module ends up having tons of public classes and methods that are used exclusively inside the module.  Which finally brings me to the point of this blog:  If Only There Was A Module-Private Visibility Available Well, surprise!  There is such a mechanism.  If your project is running under OSGi that is.  Like GlassFish does!  With this mechanism you can easily add another level of visibility by telling OSGi exactly which public you want to be exposed outside of the module.  You get the best of both worlds: Better encapsulation of your code so that maintenance is easier and productivity is increased. Usage of public visibility inside the module so that you can encapsulate intra-module better with packages. How I do this in GlassFish: Carefully plan out at least one package that will contain "true" publics.  This is the package that will be exported by OSGi.  I recommend just one package. Here is how to tell OSGi to use it in GlassFish -- edit osgi.bundle like so:-exportcontents:     org.glassfish.mymodule.truepublics;  version=${project.osgi.version} Now all publics declared in any other packages will be visible module-wide but not outside the module. There is one caveat: Accessing "module-private" items outside of the module is controlled at run-time, not compile-time.  The compiler has no clue that a public in a dependent module isn't really public.  it will happily compile it.  At runtime you will definitely see fireworks.  The good news is that you don't have to wait for the code path that tries to use the "module-private" items to fire.  OSGi will complain loudly when that module gets loaded.  OSGi will refuse to load it.  You will see an error like this: remote failure: Error while loading FOO: Exception while adding the new configuration : Error occurred during deployment: Exception while loading the app : org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle com.oracle.glassfish.miscreant.code [115]: Unable to resolve 115.0: missing requirement [115.0] osgi.wiring.package; (osgi.wiring.package=org.glassfish.mymodule.unexported). Please see server.log for more details. That is if you accidentally change code in module B to use a public that is really a "module-private" in module A, then you will see the error immediately when you try to test whatever you were changing in module B.

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  • Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

    - by Simon Cooper
    All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

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  • How do I pass vertex and color positions to OpenGL shaders?

    - by smoth190
    I've been trying to get this to work for the past two days, telling myself I wouldn't ask for help. I think you can see where that got me... I thought I'd try my hand at a little OpenGL, because DirectX is complex and depressing. I picked OpenGL 3.x, because even with my OpenGL 4 graphics card, all my friends don't have that, and I like to let them use my programs. There aren't really any great tutorials for OpenGL 3, most are just "type this and this will happen--the end". I'm trying to just draw a simple triangle, and so far, all I have is a blank screen with my clear color (when I set the draw type to GL_POINTS I just get a black dot). I have no idea what the problem is, so I'll just slap down the code: Here is the function that creates the triangle: void CEntityRenderable::CreateBuffers() { m_vertices = new Vertex3D[3]; m_vertexCount = 3; m_vertices[0].x = -1.0f; m_vertices[0].y = -1.0f; m_vertices[0].z = -5.0f; m_vertices[0].r = 1.0f; m_vertices[0].g = 0.0f; m_vertices[0].b = 0.0f; m_vertices[0].a = 1.0f; m_vertices[1].x = 1.0f; m_vertices[1].y = -1.0f; m_vertices[1].z = -5.0f; m_vertices[1].r = 1.0f; m_vertices[1].g = 0.0f; m_vertices[1].b = 0.0f; m_vertices[1].a = 1.0f; m_vertices[2].x = 0.0f; m_vertices[2].y = 1.0f; m_vertices[2].z = -5.0f; m_vertices[2].r = 1.0f; m_vertices[2].g = 0.0f; m_vertices[2].b = 0.0f; m_vertices[2].a = 1.0f; //Create the VAO glGenVertexArrays(1, &m_vaoID); //Bind the VAO glBindVertexArray(m_vaoID); //Create a vertex buffer glGenBuffers(1, &m_vboID); //Bind the buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, m_vboID); //Set the buffers data glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(m_vertices), m_vertices, GL_STATIC_DRAW); //Set its usage glVertexAttribPointer(0, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex3D), 0); glVertexAttribPointer(1, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_TRUE, sizeof(Vertex3D), (void*)(3*sizeof(float))); //Enable glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); //Check for errors if(glGetError() != GL_NO_ERROR) { Error("Failed to create VBO: %s", gluErrorString(glGetError())); } //Unbind... glBindVertexArray(0); } The Vertex3D struct is as such... struct Vertex3D { Vertex3D() : x(0), y(0), z(0), r(0), g(0), b(0), a(1) {} float x, y, z; float r, g, b, a; }; And finally the render function: void CEntityRenderable::RenderEntity() { //Render... glBindVertexArray(m_vaoID); //Use our attribs glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS, 0, m_vertexCount); glBindVertexArray(0); //unbind OnRender(); } (And yes, I am binding and unbinding the shader. That is just in a different place) I think my problem is that I haven't fully wrapped my mind around this whole VertexAttribArray thing (the only thing I like better in DirectX was input layouts D:). This is my vertex shader: #version 330 //Matrices uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; uniform mat4 viewMatrix; uniform mat4 modelMatrix; //In values layout(location = 0) in vec3 position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 color; //Out values out vec3 frag_color; //Main shader void main(void) { //Position in world gl_Position = vec4(position, 1.0); //gl_Position = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * modelMatrix * vec4(in_Position, 1.0); //No color changes frag_color = color; } As you can see, I've disable the matrices, because that just makes debugging this thing so much harder. I tried to debug using glslDevil, but my program just crashes right before the shaders are created... so I gave up with that. This is my first shot at OpenGL since the good old days of LWJGL, but that was when I didn't even know what a shader was. Thanks for your help :)

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  • What Counts for A DBA - Logic

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

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  • Multithreading in lwjgl getting rid of sleep.

    - by pangaea
    I'm trying to use multithreading in my game. However, I can't seem to get rid of the sleep. If I don't it's a blank screen, as there is no time for the computer to actually render the triangleMob as it can't access getArrayList(), in my main class I have a TriangleMob arraylist. If I delay it, then it can access the previousMob and it renders. If I don't, then it's blank screen. Can I get rid of the delay? Also, is this a bad way to multithread? Surely, this should be fast. I need multithreading so can you please not suggest not using it. public class TriangleMob extends Thread implements Runnable { private static int count=0; private int objectDisplayList; private static ArrayList<TriangleMob> previousMob = new ArrayList<TriangleMob>(); private static ArrayList<TriangleMob> currentMob = new ArrayList<TriangleMob>(); private static ArrayList<TriangleMob> laterMob = new ArrayList<TriangleMob>(); private Vector3f position = new Vector3f(0f,0f,0f); private Vector3f movement = new Vector3f(0f,0f,0f); public TriangleMob() { // Create the display list CreateDisplayList(); count++; } public TriangleMob(Vector3f position) { // Create the display list CreateDisplayList(); this.position = position; count++; } private void CreateDisplayList() { objectDisplayList = glGenLists(1); glNewList(objectDisplayList, GL_COMPILE); { double topPoint = 0.75; glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glColor4f(1, 1, 0, 1f); glVertex3d(0, topPoint, -5); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(-1, -0.75, -4); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(1, -.75, -4); glColor4f(1, 1, 0, 1f); glVertex3d(0, topPoint, -5); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(1, -0.75, -4); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(1, -0.75, -6); glColor4f(1, 1, 0, 1f); glVertex3d(0, topPoint, -5); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(1, -0.75, -6); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(-1, -.75, -6); glColor4f(1, 1, 0, 1f); glVertex3d(0, topPoint, -5); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(-1, -0.75, -6); glColor4f(0, 0, 1, 1f); glVertex3d(-1, -.75, -4); glEnd(); glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); } glEndList(); } public static int getCount() { return count; } public Vector3f getMovement() { return movement; } public Vector3f getPosition() { return position; } public synchronized int getObjectList() { return objectDisplayList; } public synchronized static ArrayList<TriangleMob> getArrayList(){ if(previousMob != null) { return previousMob; } previousMob.add(new TriangleMob()); return previousMob; } public synchronized void move(Vector3f movement) { // If you want to move in all 3 axis position.x += movement.x; position.y += movement.y; position.z += movement.z; } public synchronized void render() { glPushMatrix(); glTranslatef(-position.x, -position.y, -position.z); glCallList(objectDisplayList); glPopMatrix(); } public synchronized static void setTriangleMob(ArrayList<TriangleMob> triangleMobSet) { laterMob = triangleMobSet; } private synchronized void setPreTriangleMob(ArrayList<TriangleMob> currentMob2) { previousMob = currentMob2; } public void run(){ while(true) { if(laterMob == null) { currentMob = laterMob; System.out.println("Copying"); } for(int i=0; i<currentMob.size(); i++) { currentMob.get(i).move(new Vector3f(0.1f,0.01f,0.01f)); } setPreTriangleMob(currentMob); try { sleep(1L); } catch (InterruptedException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } }

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  • CSS3 - "connecting" 2 classes animation [closed]

    - by Nave Tseva
    I have this CSS +HTML code: <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>What</title> <style type="text/css"> #page { width: 900px; padding: 0px; margin: 0 auto; direction: rtl; position: relative; } #box1 { position: relative; width: 500px; border: 1px solid black; box-shadow: -3px 8px 34px #808080; border-radius: 20px; box-shadow: -8px 5px 5px #888888; right: 300px; top: 250px; height: 150px; -webkit-transition: all 1s; font-size: large; color: Black; padding: 10px; background: #D0D0D0; opacity: 0; } @-webkit-keyframes myFirst { 0% { right: 300px; top: 150px; background: #D0D0D0; opacity: 0; } 100% { background: #909090; ; right: 300px; top: 200px; opacity: 1; } } #littlebox1 { top: 200px; position: absolute; display: inline-block; } .littlebox1-sentence { font-size: large; padding-bottom: 15px; padding-top: 15px; padding-left: 25px; padding-right: 10px; background: #D0D0D0; border-radius: 10px; -webkit-transition: background .25s ease-in-out; } #littlebox1:hover ~ #box1 { -webkit-transition: all 0s; background: #909090;; right: 300px; top: 200px; -webkit-animation: myFirst 1s; -webkit-animation-fill-mode: initial; opacity: 1; } .littlebox1-sentence:hover { background: #909090; } .littlebox1-sentence:hover + .triangle { border-right: 50px solid #909090; } .triangle { position: relative; width: 0; height: 0; border-right: 50px solid #D0D0D0; border-top: 24px solid transparent; border-bottom: 24px solid transparent; right: 160px; -webkit-transition: border-right .25s ease-in-out; } .triangle:hover { border-right:50px solid #909090; } </style> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js"></script> <script> $(function() { $('.littlebox1-sentence').hover(function() { $(this).css('background', '#909090'); $('.triangle').css('border-right', '50px solid #909090'); }); </script> <script> $(function() { $('.triangle').hover(function() { $(this).css('border-right', '50px solid #909090'); $('.littlebox1-sentence').css('background', '#909090'); }); </script> </head> <body dir="rtl"> <div id="page"> <div id="littlebox1" class="littlebox1-sentence">put your mouse here</div><div id="littlebox1" class="triangle"> </div> <div id="box1"> </div> </div> </body> </html> Live example you will find here: http://jsfiddle.net/FLe4g/12/ The problem here that something here wrong in the second jquery code. I want that every time that I put the mouse on the box, or on the triangke they both will change ther color together. when I put the mouse on the box it works fine, but when I put the mouse on the triangle it don't work. Any suggestions how to fix this code?

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  • From the Classroom to the Boardroom

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pens and Paper...these are the only things being a student and being a graduate / professional have in common. Walking in to the offices of Oracle South Africa as a graduate the first thing you notice is how polished and sleek all the people who work here look. 80% of the ladies wear sky-scraper heels and walk with the greatest grace. This was the first of many rude awakenings to remind me that I am no longer a student but a graduate. My first struggle was having to wake up at wee hours of the morning to prepare for work. As a student going to class was almost an optional thing, if you missed a morning class you could always attend an evening class to make up for it or simply attend with another group. But in the workplace, you HAVE to show up every single morning at the same time, with no option of coming in when it suits you and there is definitely no coming in with the evening class/shift. As a student, the earliest hour I ever woke up was 7:00am, anything earlier than that was considered inhumane torture. My reason for waking up every morning as a student was “you have a degree to go get” but as a graduate having to go to work I have to say to myself “here’s to a new day of learning and growing”. My second struggle has come in having to change my beloved wardrobe. Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about fashion and shopping. For me Shopping is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, that should not be messed with. Therefore it was with great sadness that I swopped my rippled skinny jeans for pin-striped formal pants, my long chandelier earrings for simple studs, my flat shoes for heels, my sheer blouses for crisp white shirts, even my beloved wild hair had to make way for a simple ponytail. Our looks as ladies also came under great scrutiny, we had to acquaint ourselves with some serious grooming tools: the mascara, blush, lip-gloss, blush, a touch of lipstick and a manicure set. Language was a struggle of its own as well. Being a student you learn to relate to your peers in a informal way. In the workplace you have to address everyone with the same respect, including your peers. Words like “Hey buddy” had to make way for “good morning friend”. The month long winter school holiday was one of the things I looked forward to as a student. This was a time where we got to be at home and avoid the coldest month of the year, July. It was the most amazing thing ever, just sleeping and snuggling up to all sorts of warm things but sadly it is now a thing of the past. It is currently winter in South Africa and going to work has become the most unfashionable thing with all the jackets, boots, scarves and gloves. But summer is coming and I will miss those holidays too. As a student the school holidays were like a gift for us to catch a break and not think for a while which was why it was imaginable how someone would go on for the entire year without a break, with only the promise of a mere 21 days annual leave!! Right now I am sure we are all looking forward to taking that annual leave when the time is right. The worst rude awakening I must say, has to be presenting in front of clients and managers. As a student you have the same class mates for almost four years therefore presenting in front of them becomes the norm over the years and your lecturer will always go gently on you. What they don’t tell you at University is that in the real world, time is money and clients pay money to see you present therefore there is no room for error. Clients are not there to give you a score and boost your ego, they expect nothing less than 100% and they will let you know without a second thought. For a graduate this can feel like you are being fed to the sharks, you either get eaten or you swim for your life. At the end of the day, it is all an experience that is meant to groom us into better professional and make us a part of the Red Team. All the sacrifices are worth it and they lead us to being better and more polished professionals. So if you are interested in joining the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for more information and for our latest vacancies and internships. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; 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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  • What are the industry metrics for average spend on dev hardware and software? [on hold]

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

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  • SOA, Governance, and Drugs

    Why is IT governance important in service oriented architecture (SOA)? IT Governance provides a framework for making appropriate decisions based on company guidelines and accepted standards. This framework also outlines each stakeholder’s responsibilities and authority when making important architectural or design decisions. Furthermore, this framework of governance defines parameters and constraints that are used to give context and perspective when making decisions. The use of governance as it applies to SOA ensures that specific design principles and patterns are used when developing and maintaining services. When governance is consistently applied systems the following benefits are achieved according to Anne Thomas Manes in 2010. Governance makes sure that services conform to standard interface patterns, common data modeling practices, and promotes the incorporation of existing system functionality by building on top of other available services across a system. Governance defines development standards based on proven design principles and patterns that promote reuse and composition. Governance provides developers a set of proven design principles, standards and practices that promote the reduction in system based component dependencies.  By following these guidelines, individual components will be easier to maintain. For me personally, I am a fan of IT governance, and feel that it valuable part of any corporate IT department. However, depending on how it is implemented can really affect the value of using IT governance.  Companies need to find a way to ensure that governance does not become extreme in its policies and procedures. I know for me personally, I would really dislike working under a completely totalitarian or laissez-faire version of governance. Developers need to be able to be creative in their designs and too much governance can really impede the design process and prevent the most optimal design from being developed. On the other hand, with no governance enforced, no standards will be followed and accepted design patterns will be ignored. I have personally had to spend a lot of time working on this particular scenario and I have found that the concept of code reuse and composition is almost nonexistent.  Based on this, too much time and money is wasted on redeveloping existing aspects of an application that already exist within the system as a whole. I think moving forward we will see a staggered form of IT governance, regardless if it is for SOA or IT in general.  Depending on the size of a company and the size of its IT department,  I can see IT governance as a layered approach in that the top layer will be defined by enterprise architects that focus on abstract concepts pertaining to high level design, general  guidelines, acceptable best practices, and recommended design patterns.  The next layer will be defined by solution architects or department managers that further expand on abstracted guidelines defined by the enterprise architects. This layer will contain further definitions as to when various design patterns, coding standards, and best practices are to be applied based on the context of the solutions that are being developed by the department. The final layer will be defined by the system designer or a solutions architect assed to a project in that they will define what design patterns will be used in a solution, naming conventions, as well as outline how a system will function based on the best practices defined by the previous layers. This layered approach allows for IT departments to be flexible in that system designers have creative leeway in designing solutions to meet the needs of the business, but they must operate within the confines of the abstracted IT governance guidelines.  A real world example of this can be seen in the United States as it pertains to governance of the people in that the US government defines rules and regulations in the abstract and then the state governments take these guidelines and applies them based on the will of the people in each individual state. Furthermore, the county or city governments are the ones that actually enforce these rules based on how they are interpreted by local community.  To further define my example, the United States government defines that marijuana is illegal. Each individual state has the option to determine this regulation as it wishes in that the state of Florida determines that all uses of the drug are illegal, but the state of California legally allows the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes only. Based on these accepted practices each local government enforces these rules in that a police officer will arrest anyone in the state of Florida for having this drug on them if they walk down the street, but in California if a person has a medical prescription for the drug they will not get arrested.  REFERENCESThomas Manes, Anne. (2010). Understanding SOA Governance: http://www.soamag.com/I40/0610-2.php

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  • Windows Phone 8 Launch Event Summary

    - by Tim Murphy
    Today was the official coming out party for Windows Phone 8.  Below is a summary of the launch event.  There is a lot here to stay with me. They started with a commercial staring Joe Belfiore show how his Windows Phone 8 was personal too him which highlights something I think Microsoft has done well over the last couple of event: spotlight how Windows Phone is a different experience from other smartphones.  Joe actually called iPhone and Android “tired old metaphors" and explained that the idea around Windows Phone was to “reinvent the smartphone around you” as “the most personal smartphone operating system”.  The is the message that they need to drive home in their adds. The only real technical aspect we found out was that they have optimized the operating system around the dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip set.  It seems like all of the other hardware goodies had already been announced.  The remainder of the event was centered around new features of the OS and app announcements. So what are we getting?  The integrated features included lock screen live tile, Data Sense, Rooms and Kids corner.  There wasn’t a lot of information about it, but Joe also talked about apps not just having live tiles, but being live apps that could integrate with wallet and the hub. The lock screen will now be able to be personalized with live tile data or even a photo slide show.  This gives the lock screen an even better ability to give you the information you want to know before you even unlock the phone. The Kids Corner allows you as a parent to setup an area on your phone that you kids can go into an use it without disturbing your apps.  They can play games or use apps that you have designated and will only see those apps.  It even has a special lock screen gesture just for the kids corner. Rooms allow you to organize your phone around the groups of people in your life.  You get a shared calendar, a room wall as well as shared notes beyond just being able to send messages to a group.  You can also invite people not on the Windows Phone platform to access an online version of the room. Data Sense is a new feature that gives you better control and understanding of your data plan usage.  You can see which applications are using data and it can automatically adjust they way your phone behaves as you get close to your data limit. Add to these features the fact that the entire Windows ecosystem is integrated with SkyDrive and you have an available anywhere experience that is unequaled by any other platform.  Your document, photos and music are available on your Windows Phone, Window 8 device and Xbox.  SkyDrive also doesn’t limit how long you can keep files like the competing cloud platforms and give more free storage. It was interesting the way they made the launch event more personal.  First Joe brought out his own kids to demo the Kids Corner.  They followed this up by bringing out Jessica Alba to discuss her experience on the Windows Phone 8.  They need to keep putting a face on the product instead of just showing features as a cold list. Then we get to apps.  We knew that the new Skype was coming, but we found out that it was created in such a way that it can receive calls without running consistently in the background which would eat up battery.  This announcement was follow by the coming Facebook app that is optimized for Windows Phone 8.  As a matter of fact they indicated that just after launch the marketplace would have 46 out of the top 50 apps used by all smartphone platforms.  In a rational world this tide with over 120,000 apps currently in the marketplace there should be no more argument about the Windows Phone ecosystem. For those of us who develop for Windows Phone and weren’t on the early adoption program will finally get access to the SDK tomorrow after an announcement at Build (more waiting).  Perhaps we will get a few new features then. In the end I wouldn’t say there were any huge surprises, but I am really excited about getting my hands on the devices next month and starting to develop.  Stay tuned. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Winodws Phone 8 Launch,Joe Belfiore,Jessica Alba

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  • Getting Started with ADF Mobile Sample Apps

    - by Denis T
    Getting Started with ADF Mobile Sample Apps   Installation Steps Install JDeveloper 11.1.2.3.0 from Oracle Technology Network After installing JDeveloper, go to Help menu and select "Check For Updates" and find the ADF Mobile extension and install this. It will require you restart JDeveloper For iOS development, be on a Mac and have Xcode installed. (Currently only Xcode 4.4 is officially supported. Xcode 4.5 support is coming soon) For Android development, have the Android SDK installed. In the JDeveloper Tools menu, select "Preferences". In the Preferences dialog, select ADF Mobile. You can expand it to select configure your Platform preferences for things like the location of Xcode and the Android SDK. In your /jdeveloper/jdev/extensions/oracle.adf.mobile/Samples folder you will find a PublicSamples.zip. Unzip this into the Samples folder so you have all the projects ready to go. Open each of the sample application's .JWS file to open the corresponding workspace. Then from the "Application" menu, select "Deploy" and then select the deployment profile for the platform you wish to deploy to. Try deploying to the simulator/emulator on each platform first because it won't require signing. Note: If you wish to deploy to the Android emulator, it must be running before you start the deployment.   Sample Application Details   Recommended Order of Use Application Name Description 1 HelloWorld The "hello world" application for ADF Mobile, which demonstrates the basic structure of the framework. This basic application has a single application feature that is implemented with a local HTML file. Use this application to ascertain that the development environment is set up correctly to compile and deploy an application. See also Section 4.2.2, "What Happens When You Create an ADF Mobile Application." 2 CompGallery This application is meant to be a runtime application and not necessarily to review the code, though that is available. It serves as an introduction to the ADF Mobile AMX UI components by demonstrating all of these components. Using this application, you can change the attributes of these components at runtime and see the effects of those changes in real time without recompiling and redeploying the application after each change. See generally Chapter 8, "Creating ADF Mobile AMX User Interface." 3 LayoutDemo This application demonstrates the user interface layout and shows how to create the various list and button styles that are commonly used in mobile applications. It also demonstrates how to create the action sheet style of a popup component and how to use various chart and gauge components. See Section 8.3, "Creating and Using UI Components" and Section 8.5, "Providing Data Visualization." Note: This application must be opened from the Samples directory or the Default springboard option must be cleared in the Applications page of the adfmf-application.xml overview editor, then selected again. 4 JavaDemo This application demonstrates how to bind the user interface to Java beans. It also demonstrates how to invoke EL bindings from the Java layer using the supplied utility classes. See also Section 8.10, "Using Event Listeners" and Section 9.2, "Understanding EL Support." 5 Navigation This application demonstrates the various navigation techniques in ADF Mobile, including bounded task flows and routers. It also demonstrates the various page transitions. See also Section 7.2, "Creating Task Flows." Note: This application must be opened from the Samples directory or the Default springboard option must be cleared in the Applications page of the adfmf-application.xml overview editor, then selected again. 6 LifecycleEvents This application implements lifecycle event handlers on the ADF Mobile application itself and its embedded application features. This application shows you where to insert code to enable the applications to perform their own logic at certain points in the lifecycle. See also Section 5.6, "About Lifecycle Event Listeners." Note: iOS, the LifecycleEvents sample application logs data to the Console application, located at Applications-Utilities-Console application. 7 DeviceDemo This application shows you how to use the DeviceFeatures data control to expose such device features as geolocation, e-mail, SMS, and contacts, as well as how to query the device for its properties. See also Section 9.5, "Using the DeviceFeatures Data Control." Note: You must also run this application on an actual device because SMS and some of the device properties do not function on an iOS simulator or Android emulator. 8 GestureDemo This application demonstrates how gestures can be implemented and used in ADF Mobile applications. See also Section 8.4, "Enabling Gestures." 9 StockTracker This application demonstrates how data change events use Java to enable data changes to be reflected in the user interface. It also has a variety of layout use cases, gestures and basic mobile patterns. See also Section 9.7, "Data Change Events."

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  • To Make Diversity Work, Managers Must Stop Ignoring Difference

    - by HCM-Oracle
    By Kate Pavao - Originally posted on Profit Executive coaches Jane Hyun and Audrey S. Lee noticed something during their leadership development coaching and consulting: Frustrated employees and overwhelmed managers. “We heard from voices saying, ‘I wish my manager understood me better’ or ‘I hope my manager would take the time to learn more about me and my background,’” remembers Hyun. “At the same token, the managers we were coaching had a hard time even knowing how to start these conversations.”  Hyun and Lee wrote Flex to address some of the fears managers have when it comes to leading diverse teams—such as being afraid of offending their employees by stumbling into sensitive territory—and also to provide a sure-footed strategy for becoming a more effective leader. Here, Hyun talks about what it takes to create innovate and productive teams in an increasingly diverse world, including the key characteristics successful managers share. Q: What does it mean to “flex”? Hyun: Flexing is the art of switching between leadership styles to work more effectively with people who are different from you. It’s not fundamentally changing who you are, but it’s understanding when you need to adapt your style in a situation so that you can accommodate people and make them feel more comfortable. It’s understanding the gap that might exist between you and others who are different, and then flexing across that gap to get the result that you're looking for. It’s up to all of us, not just managers, but also employees, to learn how to flex. When you hire new people to the organization, they're expected to adapt. The new people in the organization may need some guidance around how to best flex. They can certainly take the initiative, but if you can give them some direction around the important rules, and connect them with insiders who can help them figure out the most critical elements of the job, that will accelerate how quickly they can contribute to your organization. Q: Why is it important right now for managers to understand flexing? Hyun: The workplace is becoming increasingly younger, multicultural and female. The numbers bear it out. Millennials are entering the workforce and becoming a larger percentage of it, which is a global phenomenon. Thirty-six percent of the workforce is multicultural, and close to half is female. It makes sense to better understand the people who are increasingly a part of your workforce, and how to best lead them and manage them as well. Q: What do companies miss out on when managers don’t flex? Hyun: There are high costs for losing people or failing to engage them. The estimated costs of replacing an employee is about 150 percent of that person’s salary. There are studies showing that employee disengagement costs the U.S. something like $450 billion a year. But voice is the biggest thing you miss out on if you don’t flex. Whenever you want innovation or increased productivity from your people, you need to figure out how to unleash these things. The way you get there is to make sure that everybody’s voice is at the table. Q: What are some of the common misassumptions that managers make about the people on their teams? Hyun: One is what I call the Golden Rule mentality: We assume when we go to the workplace that people are going to think like us and operate like us. But sometimes when you work with people from a different culture or a different generation, they may have a different mindset about doing something, or a different approach to solving a problem, or a different way to manage some situation. When see something that’s different, we don't understand it, so we don't trust it. We have this hidden bias for people who are like us. That gets in the way of really looking at how we can tap our team members best potential by understanding how their difference may help them be effective in our workplace. We’re trained, especially in the workplace, to make assumptions quickly, so that you can make the best business decision. But with people, it’s better to remain curious. If you want to build stronger cross-cultural, cross-generational, cross-gender relationships, before you make a judgment, share what you observe with that team member, and connect with him or her in ways that are mutually adaptive, so that you can work together more effectively. Q: What are the common characteristics you see in leaders who are successful at flexing? Hyun: One is what I call “adaptive ability”—leaders who are able to understand that someone on their team is different from them, and willing to adapt his or her style to do that. Another one is “unconditional positive regard,” which is basically acceptance of others, even in their vulnerable moments. This attitude of grace is critical and essential to a healthy environment in developing people. If you think about when people enter the workforce, they're only 21 years old. It’s quite a formative time for them. They may not have a lot of management experience, or experience managing complex or even global projects. Creating the best possible condition for their development requires turning their mistakes into teachable moments, and giving them an opportunity to really learn. Finally, these leaders are not rigid or constrained in a single mode or style. They have this insatiable curiosity about other people. They don’t judge when they see behavior that doesn’t make sense, or is different from their own. For example, maybe someone on their team is a less aggressive than they are. The leader needs to remain curious and thinks, “Wow, I wonder how I can engage in a dialogue with this person to get their potential out in the open.”

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  • What are some concise and comprehensive introductory guide to unit testing for a self-taught programmer [closed]

    - by Superbest
    I don't have much formal training in programming and I have learned most things by looking up solutions on the internet to practical problems I have. There are some areas which I think would be valuable to learn, but which ended up both being difficult to learn and easy to avoid learning for a self-taught programmer. Unit testing is one of them. Specifically, I am interested in tests in and for C#/.NET applications using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools in Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2012, but I really want a good introduction to the principles so language and IDE shouldn't matter much. At this time I'm interested in relatively trivial tests for small or medium sized programs (development time of weeks or months and mostly just myself developing). I don't necessarily intend to do test-driven development (I am aware that some say unit testing alone is supposed to be for developing features in TDD, and not an assurance that there are no bugs in the software, but unit testing is often the only kind of testing for which I have resources). I have found this tutorial which I feel gave me a decent idea of what unit tests and TDD looks like, but in trying to apply these ideas to my own projects, I often get confused by questions I can't answer and don't know how to answer, such as: What parts of my application and what sorts of things aren't necessarily worth testing? How fine grained should my tests be? Should they test every method and property separately, or work with a larger scope? What is a good naming convention for test methods? (since apparently the name of the method is the only way I will be able to tell from a glance at the test results table what works in my program and what doesn't) Is it bad to have many asserts in one test method? Since apparently VS2012 reports only that "an Assert.IsTrue failed within method MyTestMethod", and if MyTestMethod has 10 Assert.IsTrue statements, it will be irritating to figure out why a test is failing. If a lot of the functionality deals with writing and reading data to/from the disk in a not-exactly trivial fashion, how do I test that? If I provide a bunch of files as input by placing them in the program's directory, do I have to copy those files to the test project's bin/Debug folder now? If my program works with a large body of data and execution takes minutes or more, should my tests have it do the whole use all of the real data, a subset of it, or simulated data? If latter, how do I decide on the subset or how to simulate? Closely related to the previous point, if a class is such that its main operation happens in a state that is arrived to by the program after some involved operations (say, a class makes calculations on data derived from a few thousands of lines of code analyzing some raw data) how do I test just that class without inevitably ending up testing that class and all the other code that brings it to that state along with it? In general, what kind of approach should I use for test initialization? (hopefully that is the correct term, I mean preparing classes for testing by filling them in with appropriate data) How do I deal with private members? Do I just suck it up and assume that "not public = shouldn't be tested"? I have seen people suggest using private accessors and reflection, but these feel like clumsy and unsuited for regular use. Are these even good ideas? Is there anything like design patterns concerning testing specifically? I guess the main themes in what I'd like to learn more about are, (1) what are the overarching principles that should be followed (or at least considered) in every testing effort and (2) what are popular rules of thumb for writing tests. For example, at one point I recall hearing from someone that if a method is longer than 200 lines, it should be refactored - not a universally correct rule, but it has been quite helpful since I'd otherwise happily put hundreds of lines in single methods and then wonder why my code is so hard to read. Similarly I've found ReSharpers suggestions on member naming style and other things to be quite helpful in keeping my codebases sane. I see many resources both online and in print that talk about testing in the context of large applications (years of work, 10s of people or more). However, because I've never worked on such large projects, this context is very unfamiliar to me and makes the material difficult to follow and relate to my real world problems. Speaking of software development in general, advice given with the assumptions of large projects isn't always straightforward to apply to my own, smaller endeavors. Summary So my question is: What are some resources to learn about unit testing, for a hobbyist, self-taught programmer without much formal training? Ideally, I'm looking for a short and simple "bible of unit testing" which I can commit to memory, and then apply systematically by repeatedly asking myself "is this test following the bible of testing closely enough?" and then amending discrepancies if it doesn't.

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  • CSS hover behavior inconsistent on desktop/mobile devices [migrated]

    - by tbart
    I have a strange problem: This page looks good on desktop browsers, but the hovering effect does not seem to work correctly on at least my CM7 Android 2.3.7 device. I know hovering is not supposed to work on touch displays as it does with a mouse, but I'd like to have touch feedback, i.e. the highlight color should show once the user has tapped a menu item. This does work when the link is just a href="#" but it does not when it is a real link. I tried all sorts of stuff as you can see, to no avail. If you go back in the browser history after having tapped a real link, the item is highlighted, so the browser understands the CSS I am throwing at it. However, the javascript alert makes it clear that it only seems to interpret the link opening action and does not care about the color changing stuff. Weird that is. Workarounds welcome, preferable without javascript, but if it has to be JS, then go ahead! either go here: http://orpheus.co.at/hoverprob and Use the source, Luke! or see it here in all its glory: <html> <head> <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> <style> #nav, #nav ul { width: 100%; float: left; list-style: none; line-height: 1; background: #fff; font-weight: bold; padding: 0; margin: 0 0 5px 0; } #nav a { display: block; color: #001834; text-decoration: none; padding: 5px 7px; } #nav li { float: left; padding: 0; width: 33%; } #nav li ul { position: absolute; left: -9999px; height: auto; margin: 0; opacity: .95; width: 100%; } #nav li a { text-align: center; height: 20px; line-height: 20px; } #nav li ul li a { text-align: left; } #nav li ul li { float: none; /* width: 316px; */ width: 100%; } #nav li:hover ul ul, #nav li:hover ul ul ul, #nav li.sfhover ul ul, #nav li.sfhover ul ul ul { left: -9999px; } #nav li:hover ul, #nav li li:hover ul, #nav li li li:hover ul, #nav li.sfhover ul, #nav li li.sfhover ul, #nav li li li.sfhover ul { left: 0; } #nav li.educate { background: #FFF0B8; /* background: #FF0000; */ /* border-radius: 5px; */ border: 5px; } #nav li.educate:hover { background: #FFCE00; /* border-radius: 5px; */ } </style> </head> <body> <div id="mobMenu"> <ul id="nav" class="nav"> <li class="educate"><a href="#">menu</a> <ul class="educate"> <li class="educate"><a href="#">href=&quot#&quot;, works</a></li> <!--(+emtpy onmouseover for iPose devices)--> <li class="educate"><a onmouseover="" href="index.html">does not work, real link</a></li> <li class="educate" id="bla"><a onmousedown="document.getElementById('bla').style.backgroundColor='Blue'; alert('Done');document.location='index.html';" href="#">JS, not interpreted in corr order</a></li> </ul> </li> </div> </body>

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  • What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?

    - by Fat Bloke
    A year is a long time in the IT industry. Since the last VirtualBox feature release, which was a little over a year ago, we've seen: new releases of cool new operating systems, such as Windows 8, ChromeOS, and Mountain Lion; we've seen a myriad of new Linux releases from big Enterprise class distributions like Oracle 6.3, to accessible desktop distros like Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17; and we've also seen the spec of a typical PC or laptop double in power. All of these events have influenced our new VirtualBox version which we're releasing today. Here's how... Powerful hosts  One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's. Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends.  So we're pleased to unveil a more powerful VirtualBox Manager to address the needs of these users: VM Groups Groups allow you to organize your VM library in a sensible way, e.g.  by platform type, by project, by version, by whatever. To create groups you can drag one VM onto another or select one or more VM's and choose Machine...Group from the menu bar. You can expand and collapse groups to save screen real estate, and you can Enter and Leave a group (think iPad navigation here) by using the right and left arrow keys when groups are selected. But groups are more than passive folders, because you can now also perform operations on groups, rather than all the individual VMs. So if you have a multi-tiered solution you can start the whole stack up with just one click. Autostart Many VirtualBox users run dedicated services in their VMs, for example, running a Wiki. With these types of VM workloads, you really want the VM start up when the host machine boots up. So with 4.2 we've introduced a cross-platform Auto-start mechanism to allow you to treat VMs as host services. Headless VM Launching With VM's such as web servers, wikis, and other types of server-class workloads, the Console of the VM is pretty much redundant. For some time now VirtualBox has offered a separate launch mechanism for these VM's, namely the command-line interface commands VBoxHeadless or VBoxManage startvm ... --type headless commands. But with 4.2 we also allow you launch headless VMs from the Manager. Simply hold down Shift when launching the VM from the Manager.  It's that easy. But how do you stop a headless VM? Well, with 4.2 we allow you to Close the VM from the Manager. (BTW best to use the ACPI Shutdown method which allows the guest VM to close down gracefully.) Easy VM Creation For our expert users, the  New VM Wizard was a little tiresome, so now there's a faster 2-click VM creation mode. Just Hide the description when creating a new VM. Powerful VMs  As the hosts have become more powerful, so are the guests that are running inside them. Here are some of the 4.2 features to accommodate them: Virtual Network Interface Cards  With 4.2, it's now possible to create VMs with up to 36 NICs, when using the ICH9 chipset emulation. But with great power comes great responsibility (didn't Obi-Wan say something similar?), and so we have also introduced bandwidth limiting to prevent a rogue VM stealing the whole pipe. VLAN tagging Some of our users leverage VLANs extensively so we've enhanced the E1000 NICs to support this.  Processor Performance If you are running a CPU which supports Nested Paging (aka EPT in the Intel world) such as most of the Core i5 and i7 CPUs, or are running an AMD Bulldozer or later, you should see some performance improvements from our work with these processors. And while we're talking Processors, we've added support for some of the more modern VIA CPUs too. Powerful Automation Because VirtualBox runs atop a fully blown operating system, it makes sense to leverage the capabilities of the host to run scripts that can drive the guest VMs. Guest Automation was introduced in a prior release but with 4.2 we've revamped the APIs to allow a richer and more powerful set of operations to be executed by the guest. Check out the IGuest APIs in the VirtualBox Programming Guide and Reference (SDK). Powerful Platforms  All the hardcore engineering that has gone into 4.2 has been done for a purpose and that is to deliver a fast and powerful engine that can run almost any x86 OS because of the integrity of the virtualization. So we're pleased to add support for these platforms: Mac OS X "Mountain Lion"  Windows 8 Windows Server 2012 Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”) Fedora 17 Oracle Linux 6.3  Here's the proof: We don't have time to go into the myriad of smaller improvements such as support for burning audio CDs from a guest, bi-directional clipboard control,  drag-and-drop of files into Linux guests, etc. so we'll leave that as an exercise for the user as soon as you've downloaded from the Oracle or community site and taken a peek at the User Guide. So all in all, a pretty solid release, one that we hope you'll enjoy discovering. - FB 

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  • IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

    - by andrewbrust
    Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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  • ASP.NET: Including JavaScript libraries conditionally from CDN

    - by DigiMortal
    When developing cloud applications it is still useful to build them so they can run also on local machine without network connection. One thing you use from CDN when in cloud and from app folder when not connected are common JavaScript libraries. In this posting I will show you how to add support for local and CDN script stores to your ASP.NET MVC web application. Our solution is simple. We will add new configuration setting to our web.config file (including cloud transform file of it) and new property to our web application. In master page where scripts are included we will include scripts from CDN conditionally. There is nothing complex, all changes we make are simple ones. 1. Adding new property to web application Although I am using ASP.NET MVC web application these modifications work also very well with ASP.NET Forms. Open Global.asax and add new static property to your application class. public static bool UseCdn {     get     {         var valueString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["useCdn"];         bool useCdn;           bool.TryParse(valueString, out useCdn);         return useCdn;     } } If you want less round-trips to configuration data you can keep some nullable boolean in your application class scope and load CDN setting first time it is asked. 2. Adding new configuration setting to web.config By default my application uses local scripts. Although my application runs on cloud I can do a lot of stuff without staging environment in cloud. So by default I don’t have costs on traffic when including scripts from application folders. <appSettings>   <add key="UseCdn" value="false" /> </appSettings> You can also set UseCdn value to true and change it to false when you are not connected to network. 3. Modifying web.config cloud transform I have special configuration for my solution that I use when deploying my web application to cloud. This configuration is called Cloud and transform for this configuration is located in web.cloud.config. To make application using CDN when deployed to cloud we need the following transform. <appSettings>   <add key="UseCdn"        value="true"        xdt:Transform="SetAttributes"        xdt:Locator="Match(key)" /> </appSettings> Now when you publish your application to cloud it uses CDN by default. 4. Including scripts in master pages The last thing we need to change is our master page. My solution is simple. I check if I have to include scripts from CDN and if it is true then I include scripts from there. Otherwise my scripts will be included from application folder. @if (MyWeb.MvcApplication.UseCdn) {     <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> } else {     <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> } Although here is only one script shown you can add all your scripts that are also available in some CDN in this if-else block. You are free to include scripts from different CDN services if you need. Conclusion As we saw it was very easy to modify our application to make it use CDN for JavaScript libraries in cloud and local scripts when run on local machine. We made only small changes to our application code, configuration and master pages to get different script sources supported. Our application is now more independent from external sources when we are working on it.

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  • The architecture and technologies to use for a secure, fast, reliable and easily scalable web application

    - by DSoul
    ^ For actual questions, skip to the lists down below I understand, that his is a vague topic, but please, before you turn the other way and disregard me, hear me out. I am currently doing research for a web application(I don't know if application is the correct word for it, but I will proceed w/ that for now), that one day might need to be everything mentioned in the title. I am bound by nothing. That means that every language, OS and framework is acceptable, but only if it proves it's usefulness. And if you are going to say, that scalability and speed depend on the code I write for this application, then I agree, but I am just trying to find something, that wouldn't stand in my way later on. I have done quite a bit reading on this subject, but I still don't have a clear picture, to what suits my needs, so I come to you, StackOverflow, to give me directions. I know you all must be wondering what I'm building, but I assure you, that it doesn't matter. I have heard of 12 factor app though, if you have any similar guidelines or what is, to suggest the please, go ahead. For the sake of keeping your answers as open as possible, I'm not gonna provide you my experience regarding anything written in this question. ^ Skippers, start here First off - the weights of the requirements are probably something like that (on a scale of 10): Security - 10 Speed - 5 Reliability (concurrency) - 7.5 Scalability - 10 Speed and concurrency are not a top priority, in the sense, that the program can be CPU intensive, and therefore slow, and only accept a not-that-high number of concurrent users, but both of these factors must be improvable by scaling the system Anyway, here are my questions: How many layers should the application have, so it would be future-proof and could best fulfill the aforementioned requirements? For now, what I have in mind is the most common version: Completely separated front end, that might be a web page or an MMI application or even both. Some middle-ware handling communication between the front and the back end. This is probably a server that communicates w/ the front end via HTTP. How the communication w/ the back end should be handled is probably dependent on the back end. The back end. Something that handles data through resources like DB and etc. and does various computations w/ the data. This, as the highest priority part of the software, must be easily spread to multiple computers later on and have no known security holes. I think ideally the middle-ware should send a request to a queue from where one of the back end processes takes this request, chops it up to smaller parts and buts these parts of the request back onto the same queue as the initial request, after what these parts will be then handled by other back end processes. Something *map-reduce*y, so to say. What frameworks, languages and etc. should these layers use? The technologies used here are not that important at this moment, you can ignore this part for now I've been pointed to node.js for this part. Do you guys know any better alternatives, or have any reasons why I should (not) use node.js for this particular job. I actually have no good idea, what to use for this job, there are too many options out there, so please direct me. This part (and the 2. one also, I think) depend a lot on the OS, so suggest any OSs alongside w/ the technologies/frameworks. Initially, all computers (or 1 for starters) hosting the back end are going to be virtual machines. Please do give suggestions to any part of the question, that you feel you have comprehensive knowledge and/or experience of. And also, point out if you feel that any part of the current set-up means an instant (or even distant) failure or if I missed a very important aspect to consider. I'm not looking for a definitive answer for how to achieve my goals, because there certainly isn't one, for I haven't provided you w/ all the required information. I'm just looking for recommendations and directions on what to look into. Also, bare in mind, that this isn't something that I have to get done quickly, to sell and let it be re-written by the new owner (which, I've been told for multiple times, is what I should aim for). I have all the time in the world and I really just want to learn doing something really high-end. Also, excuse me if my language isn't the best, I'm not a native. Anyway. Thanks in advance to anyone, who takes the time to help me out here. PS. When I do seem to come up w/ a good architecture/design for this project, I will certainly make it an open project and keep you guys up to date w/ it's development. As in what you could have told me earlier and etc. For obvious reasons the very same question got closed on SO, but could you guys still help me?.

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