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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by Red and the Community

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I’d spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it’s not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I’m very confident in my skills, but I’m also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn’t bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won’t bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I’d made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn’t made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. “Even if I hadn’t made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top.” There’s only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don’t let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom’n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don’t make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you’re more of a winner than you think. If you’re too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you’re the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you’re probably an Exceptional DBA. It’s time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As ‘Red Green’ says, "We’re all in this together and I’m pullin’ for ya". –Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• MVC 2 jQuery Client-side Validation

  - by nmarun

  Well, I watched Phil Haack’s show What's New in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 and was impressed about the client-side validation (starts at 17:45) that MVC 2 offers. I tried creating the same, but Phil does not show what .js files need to be included and also I was not able to find the source code for the application that he used. In order to find out the required JavaScript file references, I added all of the files in my application to the page and ran it. Of course it worked, but this is definitely not an optimum solution. By removing one at a time and testing the app, I’ve short-listed the following ones: 1: <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script 2: <script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 3: <script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftMvcValidation.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Now, a little about the feature itself. Say, I’m working with a Book application so my model will look something like: 1: public class Book 2: { 3: [HiddenInput(DisplayValue = false)] 4: public int BookId { get; set; } 5:  6: [DisplayName("Book Title")] 7: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Book title is required")] 8: [StringLength(20, ErrorMessage = "Must be under 20 characters")] 9: public string Title { get; set; } 10:  11: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Author is required")] 12: [StringLength(40, ErrorMessage = "Must be under 40 characters")] 13: public string Author { get; set; } 14:  15: public decimal Price { get; set; } 16: 17: [DisplayName("ISBN")] 18: [StringLength(13, ErrorMessage = "Must be 13 characters")] 19: public string Isbn { get; set; } 20: } This ensures that the data passed will be validated upon post. But what would happen if you add the line (along with the above mentioned .js files): 1: <% Html.EnableClientValidation(); %> Now, this acts as ‘on-the-fly’ or ‘real-time’ validation. Now, when the user types 20 characters for the Title, the error shows up right on the 21st character. Beautiful… and you do not have to create the JavaScript function(s) for this. They’re auto-magically created for you. (Doing a ‘View Source’ on the browser page shows you the JavaScript logic that goes on behind the scenes). I bumped into another post that shows how .net 4 allows us to create custom validation attributes: Dynamic Range validation in MVC 2. This will help us attach virtually any business logic to the model itself. Please see the source code I’ve worked with.

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• Silverlight Cream for June 08, 2010 -- #877

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, Chris Klug, Beau, Christian Schormann(-2-), Dan Wahlin, Pete Brown, Michael S. Scherotter, Philipp Sumi, Andy Wigley, and Phil Middlemiss. Shoutouts: Mark Tucker set about learning Caliburn, and in the process is writing a Caliburn Book: Chapters 1-3 Jesse Liberty has a great link-laden post up about why we should all be learning/using Blend: Why Developers Should, Must, Do Care About The New Expression Blend be sure to read what he says about WP7 development, however! Charlie Kindel announced an Install problem with the Developer Tools CTP Refresh and the WP7 tools... check this out if you're having problems. John Papa has a good post up on the happenings yesterday: Expression Studio 4 Launch of Blend, SketchFlow, Encoder and More! Erik Mork & Company's latest "This Week in Silverlight" is titled First Drop: Prism v4 – First Drop is Available From SilverlightCream.com: Animated navigation between Pages Miroslav Miroslavov has Part 8 of his "Silverlight in Action" series up, detailing cool things from the CompleteIT site... this one is on Animated navigation between pages. Subtitling videos Chris Klug got a gig adding subtitles to videos for Microsoft (sweet) ... and no, not *that* kind of subtitles... read how he approached the final solution. Silverlight Watermark TextBox I'm not sure we can have too many Watermark TextBoxes, and neither does Beau , who sent me a link to this one... give it a dance and decide. Blend 4: Collaborative SketchFlow Feedback with SharePoint With the new Blend release, Christian Schormann has a post up describing the lashup to Sharepoint for sharing Sketchflow and getting feedback. New Utility, Links, and Tutorials for Path-Based Layout Christian Schormann also has a collection of resources for Path-Based Layouts, including a utility "that lets you apply a whole bunch of position-specific effects without having to write any code"... lots of links to resources here. Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application Dan Wahlin draws on his recent experience and lays out some of the fun and pitfalls of building LOB apps in Silverlight... WCF, MVVM, slides, and code included WPF (and Silverlight): Choose your Fonts and Text Rendering Options Wisely Pete Brown has a great post up on using fonts wisely across multiple platforms... lots of info and good discussion in the comments as well. Ball Watch USA Remember the awesome watch Michael S. Scherotter did in Silverlight 1 and then converted to Updated Ball Trainmaster Cannonball Watch to Silverlight 2? Well... there's now a contest underfoot and 8 videos to help you get started... all good stuff, and good luck! ... Michael has a post up about the contest: Enter to Win a Ball Watch by Creating One in Silverlight Announcing Sketchables – Rapid Mockup Creation with SketchFlow By way of Jesse Libertyhttp://jesseliberty.com/2010/06/08/why-developers-should-must-do-care-about-the-new-expression-blend/, this is a cool production by Philipp Sumi about a simple mockup framework he's created. Perst - a database for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight I think one of my first comments to Michael Washington back at the MVP Summit 2010 was that we'd need a database engine, and too cool, but we've got one, Andy Wigley discusses Perst in this post... to save you some time, here's the Perst site A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 7 Phil Middlemiss has part 7 of his great theme-building series up... this time he's giving the accordian control a once-over. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• It’s the thought that counts…

  - by Tony Davis

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

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• SQL SERVER – Discard Results After Query Execution – SSMS

  - by pinaldave

  The first thing I do any day is to turn on the computer. Today I woke up and as soon as I turned on the computer I saw a chat message from a friend. He was a bit confused and wanted me to help him. Just as usual I am keeping the relevant conversation in focus and documenting our conversation as chat. Let us call him Ajit. Ajit: Pinal, every time I run a query there is no result displayed in the SSMS but when I run the query in my application it works and returns an appropriate result. Pinal:  Have you tried with different parameters? Ajit: Same thing. However, it works from another computer when I connect to the same server with the same query parameters? Pinal: What? That is new and I believe it is something to do with SSMS and not with the server. Send me screenshot please. Ajit: I believe so, let me send you a screenshot, Pinal: (looking at the screenshot) Oh man, there is no result-tab at all. Ajit: That is what the problem is. It does not have the tab which displays the result. This works just fine from another computer. Pinal: Have you referred Nakul’s blog post – SSMS – Query result options – Discard result after query executes, that talks about setting which can discard the query results after execution. (After a while) Ajit: I think it seems like on the computer where I am running the query my SSMS seems to have the option enabled related to discarding results. I fixed it by following Nakul’s blog post. Pinal: Great! Quite often I get the question what is the importance of the feature. Let us first see how to turn on or turn off this feature in SQL Server Management Studio 2012. In SSMS 2012 go to Tools >> Options >> Query Results > SQL Server >> Results to Grid >> Discard Results After Query Execution. When enabled this option will discard results after the execution. The advantage of disabling the option is that it will improve the performance by using less memory. However the real question is why would someone enable or disable the option. What are the cases when someone wants to run the query but do not care about the result? Matter of the fact, it does not make sense at all to run query and not care about the result. The matter of the fact, I can see quite a few reasons for using this option. I often enable this option when I am doing performance tuning exercise. During performance tuning exercise when I am working with execution plans and do not need results to verify every time or when I am tuning Indexes and its effect on execution plan I do not need the results. In this kind of situations I do keep this option on and discard the results. It always helps me big time as in most of the performance tuning exercise I am dealing with huge amount of the data and dealing with this data can be expensive. Nakul’s has done the experiment here already but I am going to repeat the same again using AdventureWorks Database. Run following T-SQL Script with and without enabling the option to discard the results. USE AdventureWorks2012 GO SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail GO 10 After enabling Discard Results After Query Execution After disabling Discard Results After Query Execution Well, this is indeed a good option when someone is debugging the execution plan or does not want the result to be displayed. Please note that this option does not reduce IO or CPU usage for SQL Server. It just discards the results after execution and a good help for debugging on the development server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• A SharePoint Developer&rsquo;s Toolchest

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). When we develop for SharePoint, we end up using many tools, third party or Microsoft, to facilitate our development. What are some of your favorite tools? Mine are as below - 1. Reflector: When I saw reflector, I was pretty convinced that a tool better and more useful than it doesn’t exist. Well I was wrong! Redgate took over reflector and they still offer it as a free version, but they have a paid version called reflector pro. It lets you debug third party source code, as if you had the source code. Brilliant! Who needs documentation anymore when you have real code? 2. ULS Viewer: It is no secret, reading ULS logs is a pain in the rear. Well, not so with ULS Viewer, which does work with SharePoint 2007 as well. But it’s just way cooler with SharePoint 2010. You know when you get an error in SharePoint 2010 it shows you an error like as below: Well, the ULS Viewer will allow you to set filtering critereon, allowing you to immediately zero in, into an error, across multiple WFEs even. Also there are numerous other facilities built into the tool, such as advanced filtering, critical error notifications, etc. A must have! You can read the documentation of the ULSViewer here. 3. SPDisposeCheck: Did you know that the MySite object is strange? What is strange about it? That you have to dispose it even if you didn’t create it!? Well who the hell remembers all that! Honestly I do! And you should too. But there is a tool to help you sanitize your code. And that is SPDisposeCheck. You run it against your DLL or EXE, and it will give you suggestions on where you might have missed calling dispose on an object. You still have to use your head, but having this tool helps. 4. DebugView: Debugging for SharePoint can be difficult sometimes. Sometimes your breakpoints don’t get hit. And while you can try and make them hit, it is sometimes easier to just write a bunch of Debug.WriteLines, and catch them from an external application such as DebugView. You simply use your code, and DebugView will catch all the Debug.WriteLine’s in your code like this - 5. BGInfo: One annoying thing about SharePoint projects, it causes the number of servers to multiply like bunnies. As I’m RDP’ing into many computers trying to diagnose a crazy issue, sometimes it becomes hard to remember which machine is which. BGInfo puts all that on the wallpaper, alongwith a bunch of other useful info. A bit like this - 5. WSPBuilder: SharePoint 2007 only, but I think there maybe a version for SP2010 coming later. I think the VS2010 tools for SP2010 development are quite nice, so WSPBuilder, well so far I don’t miss it. But lets see what WSPBuilder for 2010 brings – I haven’t seen it yet. However, I want to confidently assert that WSPBuilder for SP2007 is simply awesome. 6. SharePoint Manager: The SharePoint Manager 2010 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. It also enables you to change the properties. The VS2010 dev tools now include a server explorer, which show you a subset of properties in read-only. I would LOVE to see SharePoint manager like functionality built into VS2010. SharePoint Manager, a total must-have. Comment on the article ....

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• Install Oracle Configuration Manager's Standalone Collector

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document The Why and the How If you have heard of Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM), but haven’t installed it, I’m guessing this is for one of two reasons. Either you don’t know how it helps you or you don’t know how to install it. I’ll address both of those reasons today. First, let’s take a quick look at how My Oracle Support and the Oracle Configuration Manager work together to gain a good understanding of what their differences and roles are before we tackle the install.   Oracle Configuration Manger is the tool that actually performs the data collection task. You deploy this lightweight piece of software into your system to collect configuration information about the system and OCM uploads that data to Oracle’s customer configuration repository. Oracle Support Engineers then have the configuration data available when you file a service request. You can also view the data through My Oracle Support. The real value is that the data Oracle Configuration Manager collects can help you avoid problems and get your Service Requests solved more quickly. When you view the information in My Oracle Support’s user interface to OCM, it may help you avoid situations that create problems. The proactive tools included in Oracle Configuration Manager help you avoid issues before they occur. You also save time because you didn’t need to open a service request. For example, you can use this capability when you need to compare your system configuration at two points in time, or monitor the system health. If you make the configuration data available to Oracle Support Engineers, when you need to open a Service Request the data helps them diagnose and resolve your critical system issues more quickly, which means you get answers more quickly too. Quick Installation Process Overview Before we dive into the step-by-step details, let me provide a quick overview. For some of you, this will be all you need. Log in to My Oracle Support and download the data collector from Collector tab. If you don’t see the Collector tab, click the More tab gain access. On the Collector tab, you will find a drop-down list showing which platforms are available. You can also see more ways to the Collector can help you if you click through the carousel of benefits. After you download the software for your platform, use FTP to move that file (.zip) from your PC to the server that hosts the Oracle software. Once you have that file on the server, locate the $ORACLE_HOME directory, and unzip the file within that directory. You can then use the command line tool to start the installation process. The installation process requires the My Oracle Support credential (Support Identifier, username, and password) Proxy specification (Host IP Address, Port number, username and password) Installation Step-by-Step Download the collector zip file from My Oracle Support and place it into your $Oracle_Home Unzip the zip file you downloaded from My Oracle Support – this will create a directory named CCR with several subdirectories Using the command line go to “$ORACLE_HOME/CCR/bin” and run the following command “setupCCR” Provide your My Oracle Support credential: login, password, and Support Identifier The installer will start deploying the collector application You have installed the Collector Post Installation Now that you have installed successfully, the scheduler is ready to collect configuration information for the software available in your Oracle Home. By default, the first collection will take place the day after the installation. If you want to run an instrumentation script to start the configuration collection of your Oracle Database server, E-Business Suite, or Enterprise Manager, you will find more details on that in the Installation and Administration Guide for My Oracle Support Configuration Manager. Related documents available on My Oracle Support Oracle Configuration Manager Installation and Administration Guide [ID 728989.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Prerequisites [ID 728473.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Network Connectivity Test [ID 728970.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Collection Overview [ID 728985.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Security Overview [ID 728982.5] Oracle Software Configuration Manager: Disconnected Mode Collection [ID 453412.1]

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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I'd spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it's not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I'm very confident in my skills, but I'm also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn't bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won't bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I'd made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. "Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top." There's only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don't let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom'n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don't make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you're more of a winner than you think. If you're too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you're the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you're probably an Exceptional DBA. It's time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As 'Red Green' says, "We're all in this together and I'm pullin' for ya". --Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• From NaN to Infinity...and Beyond!

  - by Tony Davis

  It is hard to believe that it was once possible to corrupt a SQL Server Database by storing perfectly normal data values into a table; but it is true. In SQL Server 2000 and before, one could inadvertently load invalid data values into certain data types via RPC calls or bulk insert methods rather than DML. In the particular case of the FLOAT data type, this meant that common 'special values' for this type, namely NaN (not-a-number) and +/- infinity, could be quite happily plugged into the database from an application and stored as 'out-of-range' values. This was like a time-bomb. When one then tried to query this data; the values were unsupported and so data pages containing them were flagged as being corrupt. Any query that needed to read a column containing the special value could fail or return unpredictable results. Microsoft even had to issue a hotfix to deal with failures in the automatic recovery process, caused by the presence of these NaN values, which rendered the whole database inaccessible! This problem is history for those of us on more current versions of SQL Server, but its ghost still haunts us. Recently, for example, a developer on Red Gate’s SQL Response team reported a strange problem when attempting to load historical monitoring data into a SQL Server 2005 database via the C# ADO.NET provider. The ratios used in some of their reporting calculations occasionally threw out NaN or infinity values, and the subsequent attempts to load these values resulted in a nasty error. It turns out to be a different manifestation of the same problem. SQL Server 2005 still does not fully support the IEEE 754 standard for floating point numbers, in that the FLOAT data type still cannot handle NaN or infinity values. Instead, they just added validation checks that prevent the 'invalid' values from being loaded in the first place. For people migrating from SQL Server 2000 databases that contained out-of-range FLOAT (or DATETIME etc.) data, to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft have added to the latter's version of the DBCC CHECKDB (or CHECKTABLE) command a DATA_PURITY clause. When enabled, this will seek out the corrupt data, but won’t fix it. You have to do this yourself in what can often be a slow, painful manual process. Our development team, after a quizzical shrug of the shoulders, simply decided to represent NaN and infinity values as NULL, and move on, accepting the minor inconvenience of not being able to tell them apart. However, what of scientific, engineering and other applications that really would like the luxury of being able to both store and access these perfectly-reasonable floating point data values? The sticking point seems to be the stipulation in the IEEE 754 standard that, when NaN is compared to any other value including itself, the answer is "unequal" (i.e. FALSE). This is clearly different from normal number comparisons and has repercussions for such things as indexing operations. Even so, this hardly applies to infinity values, which are single definite values. In fact, there is some encouraging talk in the Connect note on this issue that they might be supported 'in the SQL Server 2008 timeframe'. If didn't happen; SQL 2008 doesn't support NaN or infinity values, though one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, based on the MSDN documentation for the FLOAT type, which states that "The behavior of float and real follows the IEEE 754 specification on approximate numeric data types". However, the truth is revealed in the XPath documentation, which states that "…float (53) is not exactly IEEE 754. For example, neither NaN (Not-a-Number) nor infinity is used…". Is it really so hard to fix this problem the right way, and properly support in SQL Server the IEEE 754 standard for the floating point data type, NaNs, infinities and all? Oracle seems to have managed it quite nicely with its BINARY_FLOAT and BINARY_DOUBLE types, so it is technically possible. We have an enterprise-class database that is marketed as being part of an 'integrated' Windows platform. Absurdly, we have .NET and XPath libraries that fully support the standard for floating point numbers, and we can't even properly store these values, let alone query them, in the SQL Server database! Cheers, Tony.

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• Release Management as Orchestra

  - by ericajanine

  I read an excellent, concise article (http://www.buildmeister.com/articles/software_release_management_best_practices) on the basics of release management practices. In the article, it states "Release Management is often likened to the conductor of an orchestra, with the individual changes to be implemented the various instruments within it." I played in music ensembles for years, so this is especially close to my heart as example. I learned most of my discipline from hours and hours of practice at the hand of a very skilled conductor and leader. I also learned that the true magic in symphonic performance is one where everyone involved is focused on one sound, one goal. In turn, that solid focus creates a sound and experience bigger than just mechanics alone accomplish. In symphony, a conductor's true purpose is to make you, a performer, better so the overall sound and end product is better. The big picture (the performance of the composition) is the end-game, and all musicians in the orchestra know without question their part makes up an important but incomplete piece of that performance. A good conductor works with each section (e.g. group) to ensure their individual pieces are solid. Let's restate: The conductor leads and is responsible for ensuring those pieces are solid. While the performers themselves are doing the work, the conductor is the final authority on when the pieces are ready or not. If not, the conductor initiates the efforts to get them ready or makes the decision to scrap their parts altogether for the sake of an overall performance. Let it sink in, because it's clear--It is not the performer's call if they play their part as agreed, it's the conductor's final call to allow it. In comparison, if a software release manager is a conductor, the only way for that manager to be effective is to drive the overarching process and execution of individual pieces of a software development lifecycle. It does not mean the release manager performs each and every piece, it means the release manager has oversight and influence because the end-game is a successful software enhancin a useable environment. It means the release manager, not the developer or development manager, has the final call if something goes into a software release. Of course, this is not a process of autocracy or dictation of absolute rule, it's cooperative effort. But the release manager must have the final authority to make a decision if something is ready to be added to the bigger piece, the overall symphony of software changes being considered for package and release. It also goes without saying a release manager, like a conductor, must have full autonomy and isolation from other software groups. A conductor is the one on the podium waving a little stick at the each section and cueing them for their parts, not yelling from the back of the room while also playing a tuba and taking direction from the horn section. I have personally seen where release managers are relegated to being considered little more than coordinators, red-tapers to "satisfy" the demands of an audit group without being bothered to actually respect all that a release manager gives a group willing to employ them fully. In this dysfunctional scenario, development managers, project managers, business users, and other stakeholders have been given nearly full clearance to demand and push their agendas forward, causing a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario where an inherent conflict will ensue. Depending on the strength, determination for peace, and willingness to overlook a built-in expectation that is wrong, the release manager here must face the crafted conflict head-on and diffuse it as quickly as possible. Then, the release manager must clearly make a case why a change cannot be released without negative impact to all parties involved. If a political agenda is solely driving a software release, there IS no symphony, there is no "software lifecycle". It's just out-of-tune noise. More importantly, there is no real conductor. Sometimes, just wanting to make a beautiful sound is not enough. If you are a release manager, are you freed up enough to move, to conduct the sections of software creation to ensure a solid release performance is possible? If not, it's time to take stock in what your role actually is and see if that is what you truly want to achieve in your position. If you are, then you can successfully build your career and that of the people in your groups to create truly beautiful software (music) together.

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• ATG Live Webcast: Advanced E-Business Suite Architectures

  - by BillSawyer

  I am pleased to announce the ATG Live Webcast event for Dec. 8th, 2011: Advanced E-Business Suite Architectures Join Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager and Sriram Veeraraghavan, Senior Principal Software Engineer as they discuss advanced E-Business Suite architectures that can help you improve performance, scalability, business continuity, utilization, provisioning, and security. This one-hour webcasts provides an overview of advanced architectures with Q&A. This session will cover the latest advanced architectural options, including the use of Oracle database high-availability features and functions such as Real Application Clusters, ASM, Active Data Guard, clouds, virtualization, Oracle VM, high-availability and load-balancing architectures, WebLogic Server, and more. This session will also cover the latest updates to systems management tools like AutoConfig, and may also include sneak previews of upcoming functionality. This event is targeted to architects, system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers. The agenda for the Advanced E-Business Suite Architectures webcast includes the following topics: Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures Optional External Integrations Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Improving Performance and Scalability Providing Business Continuity Improving Utilization and Provisioning Improving Security Date:            Thursday, December 8, 2011Time:           8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Standard TimePresenter:  Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager                      Sriram Veeraraghavan, Senior Principal Software EngineerWebcast Registration Link (Preregistration is optional but encouraged)To hear the audio feed:    Domestic Participant Dial-In Number:           877-697-8128    International Participant Dial-In Number:      706-634-9568    Additional International Dial-In Numbers Link:    Dial-In Passcode:                                              98514To see the presentation:    The Direct Access Web Conference details are:    Website URL: https://ouweb.webex.com    Meeting Number:  273291684If you miss the webcast, or you have missed any webcast, don't worry -- we'll post links to the recording as soon as it's available from Oracle University.  You can monitor this blog for pointers to the replay. And, you can find our archive of our past webcasts and training at http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/e_business_suite_technology_learningIf you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Bill Sawyer (Senior Manager, Applications Technology Curriculum) at BilldotSawyer-AT-Oracle-DOT-com.

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• Listen to Online Radio with Antenna

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you looking for some fresh new music to listen to at home or at work? With Antenna you can listen to online radio stations from all over the world. Note: Requires Adobe AIR (download link at bottom of article). Antenna in Action Once you have completed the installation and started Antenna up this is the window that you will see. The left side will have a “browsing pane” where you can search for the stations that you would like to listen to using the various categories. Based on the stations that you choose the background map will change location to match the stations locations. Here is a closer look at the “Categories Bar”. For our first example we used the “Country Category” to find our first station to listen to. When you choose a country you will be presented with a list of the stations available for that country. To start listening to a particular station just double click on the appropriate entry line. A closer look at the “browser pane” with our first station playing. Notice the “Reliability Indicator” that will be available for each listing…some may be better than others and you can use this to choose the best streaming stations from the list. In the upper left corner you will notice three icons…each will open a small pop-up window with a specific purpose. The first icon will open up the “About Window”. If you need to contact Antenna’s creator or would like to place a request for a station to be added to the app then this is the best way to do it. The second icon will open up a Antenna specific chat window. The third icon will allow you to set a default location and make adjustments to some of the app’s settings. Recording Audio The “Recording Function” is the only area where we experienced some “quirkiness” with the app. To start recording press the “Round White Button”… Note: Based on feedback on the app creator’s webpage some people have experienced the same problem as we did during our tests with the app failing to complete the recordings. Hopefully this bug will be fixed with the next release. Once recording has started the button will turn red. Click on the button again to stop recording. Once you have stopped recording you will see the following message window appear and the main window will be shaded over with a whitish color until you click “OK”. Conclusion Regardless of the slight quirkiness in recording online music Antenna more than makes up for it with the terrific selection of online stations and streaming capability. New fresh music for you to listen to is only a click or two away… Links Download Antenna (Antenna Homepage) Download Antenna at Softpedia Download Adobe AIR Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Listen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media CenterListen to Over 100,000 Radio Stations in Windows Media CenterListen To XM Radio with Windows Media Center in Windows 7Listen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureWeekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTV TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic

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• Google, typography, and cognitive fluency for persuasion

  - by Roger Hart

  Cognitive fluency is - roughly - how easy it is to think about something. Mere Exposure (or familiarity) effects are basically about reacting more favourably to things you see a lot. Which is part of why marketers in generic spaces like insipid mass-market lager will spend quite so much money on getting their logo daubed about the place; or that guy at the bus stop starts to look like a dating prospect after a month or two. Recent thinking suggests that exposure effects likely spin off cognitive fluency. We react favourably to things that are easier to think about. I had to give tech support to an older relative recently, and suggested they Google the problem. They were confused. They could not, apparently, Google the problem, because part of it was that their Google toolbar had mysteriously vanished. Once I'd finished trying not to laugh, I started thinking about typography. This is going somewhere, I promise. Google is a ubiquitous brand. Heck, it's a verb, and their recent, jaw-droppingly well constructed Paris advert is more or less about that ubiquity. It trades on Google's integration into any information-seeking behaviour. But, as my tech support encounter suggests, people settle into comfortable patterns of thinking about things. They build schemas, and altering them can take work. Maybe the ubiquity even works to cement that. Alongside their online effort, Google is running billboard campaigns to advertise Chrome, a free product in a crowded space. They are running these ads in some kind of kooky Calibri / Comic Sans hybrid. Now, at first it seems odd that one of the world's more ubiquitous brands needs to run a big print campaign in public places - surely they have all the fluency they need? Well, not so much. Chrome, after all, is not the same as their core product, so there's some basic awareness work to do, and maybe a whole new batch of exposure effect to try and grab. But why the typeface? It's heavily foregrounded, and the ads are extremely textual. Plus, don't we all know that jovial, off-beat fonts look unprofessional, or something? There's a whole bunch of people who want (often rightly) to ban Comic Sans I wonder, though. Are Google trying to subtly disrupt cognitive fluency? There's an interesting paper (pdf) about - among other things - the effects of typography on they way people answer survey questions. Participants given the slightly harder to read question gave more abstract answers. The paper references other work suggesting that generally speaking, less-fluent question framing elicits more considered answers. The Chrome ad typeface is less fluent for print. Reactions may therefore be more considered, abstract, and disruptive. Is that, in fact, what Google need? They have brand ubiquity, but they want here to change accustomed behaviour, to get people to think about changing their browser. Is this actually a very elegant piece of persuasive information design? If you think about their "what is a browser?" vox pop research video, there's certainly a perceptual barrier they're going to have to tackle somehow.

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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• 9 Ways Facebook Monetization Could Change Your Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Think Facebook monetization isn’t a head game? Imagine creating something so functional, fun and addictive you literally amass about 1/7th of the planet’s population as an audience. You have 1 billion users that use it at least once a month. But analysts and marketers look at what you’ve done and say, “eh…not good enough.” What if you had a TV show that garnered 1/7 of Earth’s population as an audience? How much would a spot cost? And how fast would marketers write that check, even without the targeting and engagement analytics Facebook offers? Having already changed the marketing landscape forever, if you’re Facebook’s creator, you’d have to be scratching your head and asking, “Wow, what more does a product need to do?” Facebook’s been busy answering that very question with products and betas that will likely directly affect your brand’s strategy. Item 1: Users can send physical gifts to friends through Facebook based on suggestions from user data. A giant step toward the potential power of social commerce. Item 2: Users can pay $7 to promote posts for higher visibility. Individual users, not just marketers, are being leveraged as a revenue stream. Not impressive enough? There’s also the potential Craigslist killer Facebook Marketplace. Item 3: Mobile ads. 600 million+ access Facebook on smartphones. According to the company, half of the $1 million a day generated by Sponsored Stories as of late June was coming from mobile. Ads in News Feeds seen on mobile had click-through rates 23x higher than on desktop News Feeds or the right side panel. Item 4: App developers can buy install ads that show up in mobile News Feeds so reliance on discovery in app stores is reduced. Item 5: Want your posts seen by people who never liked your Page? A test began in August where you could appear in non-fans’ News Feeds on both web and mobile. Item 6: How about an ability to use Facebook data to buy ads outside of Facebook? A mobile ad network is being tested to get your targeted messages on non-Facebook apps and sites surfaced on devices. Item 7: Facebook Collections, Facebook’s answer to Pinterest. Users can gather images of desired products and click through to the retailer to buy. Keep focusing on your imagery. Item 8: Facebook Offers, Facebook’s answer to the Groupons and Living Socials of the world. You can send deals to your fans’ News Feeds. Item 9: Facebook Exchange lets you track what fans do on Facebook and across the entire Web. Could lead to a Facebook ad network leveraging Facebook users and data but not limiting exposure to the Facebook platform. Marketers are seeing increasing value in Facebook (and Twitter for that matter).  But as social grows and adjusts, will marketing budgets aimed in that direction grow and adjust accordingly, and within a reasonable time frame? @mikestilesPhoto Christie Merrill/stock.xchng

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• Few events I&rsquo;m speaking at in early 2013

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  2013 has started great and the SQL community is already brimming with events. At some of these events you can come say hi. I’ll be glad you do! These are the events with dates and locations that I know I’ll be speaking at so far.   February 16th: SQL Saturday #198 - Vancouver, Canada The session I’ll present in Vancouver is SQL Impossible: Restoring/Undeleting a table Yes, you read the title right. No, it's not about the usual "one table per partition" and "restore full backup then copy the data over" methods. No, there are no 3rd party tools involved. Just you and your SQL Server. Yes, it's crazy. No, it's not for production purposes. And yes, that's why it's so much fun. Prepare to dive into the world of data pages, log records, deletes, truncates and backups and how it all works together to get your table back from the endless void. Want to know more? Come and see! This is an advanced level session where we’ll dive into the internals of data pages, transaction log records and page restores.   March 8th-9th: SQL Saturday #194 - Exeter, UK In Exeter I’ll be presenting twice. On the first day I’ll have a full day precon titled: From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch This pre-con will give you insight into both of the current tracing technologies in SQL Server. The old SQL Trace which has served us well over the past 10 or so years is on its way out because the overhead and details it produces are no longer enough to deal with today's loads. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. Mastering Extended Events requires learning at least one new skill: XML querying. The second session I’ll have on Saturday titled: SQL Injection from website to SQL Server SQL Injection is still one of the biggest reasons various websites and applications get hacked. The solution as everyone tells us is simple. Use SQL parameters. But is that enough? In this session we'll look at how would an attacker go about using SQL Injection to gain access to your database, see its schema and data, take over the server, upload files and do various other mischief on your domain. This is a fun session that always brings out a few laughs in the audience because they didn’t realize what can be done.   April 23rd-25th: NTK conference - Bled, Slovenia (Slovenian website only) This is a conference with history. This year marks its 18th year running. It’s a relatively large IT conference that focuses on various Microsoft technologies like .Net, Azure, SQL Server, Exchange, Security, etc… The main session’s language is Slovenian but this is slowly changing so it’s becoming more interesting for foreign attendees. This year it’s happening in the beautiful town of Bled in the Alps. The scenery alone is worth the visit, wouldn’t you agree? And this year there are quite a few well known speakers present! Session title isn’t known yet.       May 2nd-4th: SQL Bits XI – Nottingham, UK SQL Bits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe. It’s a 3 day conference with top speakers and content all dedicated to SQL Server. The session I’ll present here is an hour long version of the precon I’ll give in Exeter. From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch The session description is the same as for the Exeter precon but we'll focus more on how the Extended Events work with only a brief overview of old SQL Trace architecture.

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• Odd MVC 4 Beta Razor Designer Issue

  - by Rick Strahl

  This post is a small cry for help along with an explanation of a problem that is hard to describe on twitter or even a connect bug and written in hopes somebody has seen this before and any ideas on what might cause this. Lots of helpful people had comments on Twitter for me, but they all assumed that the code doesn't run, which is not the case - it's a designer issue. A few days ago I started getting some odd problems in my MVC 4 designer for an app I've been working on for the past 2 weeks. Basically the MVC 4 Razor designer keeps popping me errors, about the call signature to various Html Helper methods being incorrect. It also complains about the ViewBag object and not supporting dynamic requesting to load assemblies into the project. Here's what the designer errors look like: You can see the red error underlines under the ViewBag and an Html Helper I plopped in at the top to demonstrate the behavior. Basically any HtmlHelper I'm accessing is showing the same errors. Note that the code *runs just fine* - it's just the designer that is complaining with Errors. What's odd about this is that *I think* this started only a few days ago and nothing consequential that I can think of has happened to the project or overall installations. These errors aren't critical since the code runs but pretty annoying especially if you're building and have .csHtml files open in Visual Studio mixing these fake errors with real compiler errors. What I've checked Looking at the errors it indeed looks like certain references are missing. I can't make sense of the Html Helpers error, but certainly the ViewBag dynamic error looks like System.Core or Microsoft.CSharp assemblies are missing. Rest assured they are there and the code DOES run just fine at runtime. This is a designer issue only. I went ahead and checked the namespaces that MVC has access to in Razor which lives in the Views folder's web.config file: /Views/web.config For good measure I added <system.web.webPages.razor> <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, <split for layout> Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage"> <namespaces> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" /> <add namespace="System.Linq" /> <add namespace="System.Linq.Expressions" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsBusiness" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsWeb"/> <add namespace="Westwind.Utilities" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web.Mvc" /> </namespaces> </pages> </system.web.webPages.razor> For good measure I added System.Linq and System.Linq.Expression on which some of the Html.xxxxFor() methods rely, but no luck. So, has anybody seen this before? Any ideas on what might be causing these issues only at design time rather, when the final compiled code runs just fine?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Razor  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Algorithm to Find the Aggregate Mass of "Granola Bar"-Like Structures?

  - by Stuart Robbins

  I'm a planetary science researcher and one project I'm working on is N-body simulations of Saturn's rings. The goal of this particular study is to watch as particles clump together under their own self-gravity and measure the aggregate mass of the clumps versus the mean velocity of all particles in the cell. We're trying to figure out if this can explain some observations made by the Cassini spacecraft during the Saturnian summer solstice when large structures were seen casting shadows on the nearly edge-on rings. Below is a screenshot of what any given timestep looks like. (Each particle is 2 m in diameter and the simulation cell itself is around 700 m across.) The code I'm using already spits out the mean velocity at every timestep. What I need to do is figure out a way to determine the mass of particles in the clumps and NOT the stray particles between them. I know every particle's position, mass, size, etc., but I don't know easily that, say, particles 30,000-40,000 along with 102,000-105,000 make up one strand that to the human eye is obvious. So, the algorithm I need to write would need to be a code with as few user-entered parameters as possible (for replicability and objectivity) that would go through all the particle positions, figure out what particles belong to clumps, and then calculate the mass. It would be great if it could do it for "each" clump/strand as opposed to everything over the cell, but I don't think I actually need it to separate them out. The only thing I was thinking of was doing some sort of N2 distance calculation where I'd calculate the distance between every particle and if, say, the closest 100 particles were within a certain distance, then that particle would be considered part of a cluster. But that seems pretty sloppy and I was hoping that you CS folks and programmers might know of a more elegant solution? Edited with My Solution: What I did was to take a sort of nearest-neighbor / cluster approach and do the quick-n-dirty N2 implementation first. So, take every particle, calculate distance to all other particles, and the threshold for in a cluster or not was whether there were N particles within d distance (two parameters that have to be set a priori, unfortunately, but as was said by some responses/comments, I wasn't going to get away with not having some of those). I then sped it up by not sorting distances but simply doing an order N search and increment a counter for the particles within d, and that sped stuff up by a factor of 6. Then I added a "stupid programmer's tree" (because I know next to nothing about tree codes). I divide up the simulation cell into a set number of grids (best results when grid size ˜7 d) where the main grid lines up with the cell, one grid is offset by half in x and y, and the other two are offset by 1/4 in ±x and ±y. The code then divides particles into the grids, then each particle N only has to have distances calculated to the other particles in that cell. Theoretically, if this were a real tree, I should get order N*log(N) as opposed to N2 speeds. I got somewhere between the two, where for a 50,000-particle sub-set I got a 17x increase in speed, and for a 150,000-particle cell, I got a 38x increase in speed. 12 seconds for the first, 53 seconds for the second, 460 seconds for a 500,000-particle cell. Those are comparable speeds to how long the code takes to run the simulation 1 timestep forward, so that's reasonable at this point. Oh -- and it's fully threaded, so it'll take as many processors as I can throw at it.

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• Top Tier, A-Game Talent - How to Land em'

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Recently the question came up from a close friend of mine, "will my PhD help me attain a higher income in the north west?"  I had to tell him, that it might get him a little more, but it won't get him in the top income brackets for the occupation.  Another time, a few days later, someone else asked this too.  Then again, I see a job posting that requires a Bachelors Degree and some other nonsense.  The job posting even states they want "A-Game" talent. I am almost shocked at how poorly part of this industry doesn't realize how unimportant a degree is to getting real top tier, a-game talent.  (and yes, I get a little riled up about this matter) You Can't Make Good Software Developers.  No college out there is going to train someone to be in the top 10%, and absolutely not to be in the top 5% of skill levels.  Colleges can NOT do this.  It is up to the individual, and the individual alone.  If top tier talent seems to come from a college, one should check their premise and look at the motivations the individuals have to go to that school.  There is most likely a reason that top tier talent appears to be made there.  The college however, can only guide or assist, but I repeat that "top tier talent is a very individualistic endeavor". Some might say, well a group is needed, support is needed, this and that are needed.  True, an individual needs a support system and a college can provide that, but it generally ends there.  The support group helps, provides a sounding wall, and provides correlation to good ideas for the a-game top tier geek.  But again, the endeavor is the individuals desire. top tier talent is a very individualistic endeavor - Me Hiring Top Tier, A-Game Talent There are a few things when trying to hire this level of game player. The first thing is to not require a degree of any sort.  Sure, it looks good, but it won't dictate anything other than the individual was able to go through the regimented steps of college. List the skills and ideas that you would like to find in an individual.  Think of two people meeting for the first time, what do you want to know about the other individual.  Team fit is absolutely fundamental for top tier talent.  That support group that I mentioned above, top tier talent works best with a solid group of players. Keep your technology up to date, moving forward, and don't bore your top talent if you manage to get it.  If the company slows down, they will leave.  The more valuable they find out they are, the lower tolerance they'll have for this.  For managers, directors, and leaders in an organization this is THE challenge for them. Provide opportunities not just for advancement, but ways for them to advance their knowledge such as training, a book budget, or other means.  Even if some software they want to use isn't used ton the project, get it for them (within reason of course ? couple $100 or even a few $1000 for a good software license to MSDN, Tellerik, or other suite of software is ideal). Don't push them to, and don't let them overwork themselves into burnout.  This, as a leader in an organization is easy to do if one finds themselves actually hiring top talent.  Because top talent just provides results and more results.  But they are human, they will break, don't be the cause of that or you'll lose your talent. For now, that is it from me on this topic, back to the revenue, code, projects, and pushing forward. For the original entry, check out my personal blog with other juicy tech tidbits, rants, raves, and the like. Agilist Mercenary

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• FFmpeg Video Hosting for Linux and Windows Server

  - by Aditi

  FFmpeg hosting is a special type of web hosting where the host servers have video transcoding software loaded on them, which allows the automatic conversion of videos from one format to another. FFmpeg is a cross-platform solution for recording, converting, transcoding and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg hosting gets its name from a set of server side programs (modules) called FFmpeg. There are a number of applications or web scripts available, which allow webmasters to create their own video sharing websites. Video hosting typically requires: PHP 4.3 and above (including support of CLI) Mencoder and also Mplayer FFMpeg-PHP MySQL database server LAME MP3 Encoder Libogg + Libvorbis GD Library 2 or higher CGI-BIN There are number of web service providers who provide FFmpeg hosting service. Following is a list of some of the Best FFmpeg hosting providers for both Linux and Windows Server below. Dream Host Dreamhost provides for web based email access, mail filtering, spam filtering, unlimited email ids, vacation autoresponder, python support, full CGI access and many more services. Price: $7.95 View Details Micfo It offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Other services include free domain for life and free Website Transfer with many more services. All in all one of the best option to consider. Price: $5 View Details Host Upon HostUpon offers FFMpeg Hosting on all their hosting packages, with readily installed modules to start a Video website or Social Network with Video uploading. These scripts such as Boonex Dolphin / PHPMotion / Social Engine / ABKsoft Scripts / Joomla Video Plugin / Clipshare / ClipBucket / Social Media / Rayzz / Vidi Script work with their ffmpeg. Their FFMPEG hosting plan offers 24/7/365 support with typical response time of 15min or less. Price: $5.95 View Details DownTown Host DownTown Host provides full and exceptional support by live chat and telephone. It has high-power, modern servers and the finest web server technology. It offers free search engine Submission and continuous data backup protection with free email forwarding and site move. There are many more services too. Site5 This ffmpeg service provider offers uptime guarantee, a real time stats on each server and many more attractive services. Price: $4.95 View Details Cirtex Hosting Cirtex Hosting allows to host 7 websites & domains and provides for unlimited storage space and monthly bandwidth. It also offers FTP and email accounts and many more services. Price: $2.49 View Details FLV Hosting FLV hosting supplies RTMP SERVER STREAMING for large size video streaming and server side recording. It is flexible and costs less. They customize to the clients requirements. Price: $9.95 View Details AptHost This hosting service provides for 24x7x365 Premium Support and fully ffmpeg enabled services. Price: $4.95 View Details HostMDS Great Support, Priced Low. It provides for SSH access, CGI, Ruby on Rails, Perl, PHP, MySQL, front page extentions, 24/7 Support, FREE Domain transfer and spam filtering. It offers instant account setup, low latency fast bandwidth & much more! They were formerly known as Vistapages. Price: $4.95 View Details Related posts:Best WordPress Video Themes for a Video Blog Free Web Based Applications 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

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• JDBC Triggers

  - by Tim Dexter

  Received a question from a customer last week, they were using the new rollup patch on top of 10.1.3.4.1. What are these boxes for? Don't you know? Surely? Well, they are for ... that new functionality, you know it's in the user docs, that thingmabobby doodah. OK, I dont know either, I can have a guess but let me check first. Serveral IM sessions, emails and a dig through the readme for the new patch and I had my answer. Its not in the official documentation, yet. Leslie is on the case. The two fields were designed to allow an Admin to set a users context attributes before a connection is made to a database and for un-setting the attributes after the connection is broken by the extraction engine. We got a sample from the Enterprise Manager team on how they will be using it with their VPD connections. FUNCTION bip_to_em_user (user_name_in IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN IS BEGIN SETEMUSERCONTEXT(user_name_in, MGMT_USER.OP_SET_IDENTIFIER); return TRUE; END bip_to_em_user; And used in the jdbc data source definition like this (pre-process function): sysman.mgmt_bip.bip_to_em_user(:xdo_user_name) You, of course can call any function that is going to return a boolean value, another example might be. FUNCTION set_per_process_username (username_in IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN IS BEGIN SETUSERCONTEXT(username_in); return TRUE; END set_per_process_username Just use your own function/package to set some user context. Very grateful for the mail from Leslie on the EM team's usage but I had to try it out. Rather than set up a VPD, I opted for a simpler test. Can I log the comings and goings of users and their queries using the same pre-process text box. Reaching back into the depths of my developer brain to remember some pl/sql, it was not that deep and I came up with: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION BIPTEST (user_name_in IN VARCHAR2, smode IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN AS BEGIN INSERT INTO LOGTAB VALUES(user_name_in, sysdate,smode); RETURN true; END BIPTEST; To call it in the pre-fetch trigger. BIPTEST(:xdo_user_name) Not going to set the pl/sql world alight I know, but you get the idea. As a new connection is made to the database its logged in the LOGTAB table. The SMODE value just sets if its an entry or an exit. I used the pre- and post- boxes. NAME UPDATE_DATE S_FLAG oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.34.000000000 AM Start oracle 14-MAY-10 10.23.57.000000000 AM Finish administrator 14-MAY-10 09.51.38.000000000 AM Start administrator 14-MAY-10 09.51.38.000000000 AM Finish oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.42.000000000 AM Start oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.42.000000000 AM Finish It works very well, I had some fun trying to find a nasty query for the extraction engine so that the timestamps from in to out actually had a difference. That engine is fast! The only derived value you can pass from BIP is :xdo_user_name. None of the other server values are available. Connection pools are not currently supported but planned for a future release. Now you know what those fields are for and look for some official documentation, rather than my ramblings, coming soon!

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• The Oscar of Java Programming

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Why bother nominating a peer, yourself or your company for a Duke's Choice Award? I asked Duke's Choice Award winner Fabiane Nardon, whose team won in 2005 for the Healthcare Information System they created for the Brazilian government, what it was like winning the award and if it had any impact on her career. Here's what she told me: 1) What was it like to win a Duke's Choice Award? For me it was like winning an Oscar or a Grammy :-) I think that for a Java developer, a Duke's Choice Award is probably the highest award you can get, so it was really an honor. We had an amazing team working on that project and the team really deserved it. We were all very happy when we got that email with the announcement. That moment was one of the most important moments of my career. 2) What benefits have you gotten from being a "Duke's Choice Award Winner?" I think the most important benefit you get from winning a Duke is the fact that you become known by your peers. This opens many doors, since you are approached by more people, get invitations to speak in more conferences, you meet people with the same technical interests you have and so on. I certainly benefited a lot from it. We were lucky that in 2005, when we got our award, the winners were featured in the JavaOne keynote, with short documentaries produced about each one. So, we could be on the stage and talk a little about the project. We got lots of press at the time. We see  today's winners benefiting a lot from the press coverage. 3) How is the the Brazilian Healthcare Information System project doing today? Still running and getting new features every year. I'm not involved on the project anymore, but there are good people taking care of it. We opened the code since the beginning, so different cities could use and add features to it. There are many new developers working on that code base right now and I hope they can take the whole system to a new level. 4) What are you up to these days? I worked in the healthcare field for many years and a few years ago I decided that it was time to move on and take the experience I got designing large scale and mission critical systems to other fields. Since then I have been working with high access internet applications. I also co-founded ToolsCloud, a company that provides a development environment with open source tools in the cloud. We just launched ToolsCloud in USA, so other companies can get the same bundle of tools, hassle free, that several companies are successfully using in Brazil. Besides that, right now I'm personally working on the coolest project I ever worked on. It combines several technical challenges with a good dose of social impact. We should launch it in the second semester and I should keep it as a secret for now. Hopefully it will be useful to many people and disruptive enough to maybe get us a new Duke's Choice Award. Who knows? Read more about Fabiane in the "Heroes of Java" series by Markus Eisele. Her Twitter handle is @FabianeNardon. The Duke's Choice Awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Nominate an individual, a group or company who show the best in Java innovation. Nominate via the easy online form at www.Java.net/dukeschoice. Nominations are open until June 15, 2012.

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• PHP Web Services - Nice try

  Thanks to the membership in the O'Reilly User Group Programme the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (short: MSCC) recently received a welcome package with several book titles. Among them is the latest publication of Lorna Jane Mitchell - 'PHP Web Services: APIs for the Modern Web'. Following is the book review I put on Amazon: Nice try! Initially, I was astonished that a small book like 'PHP Web Services' would be able to cover all the interesting topics about APIs and Web Services, independently whether they are written in PHP or not. And unfortunately, the title isn't able to stand up to the readers (or at least my) expectations. Maybe as a light defense, there is no usual paragraph about the intended audience of that book, but still I have to admit that the first half (chapters 1 to 8) are well written and Lorna has her points on the various technologies. Also, the code samples in PHP are clean and easy to understand. With chapter 'Debugging Web Services' the book started to change my mind about the clarity of advice and the instructions on designing and developing good APIs. Eventually, this might be related to the fact that I'm used to other tools since years, like Telerik Fiddler as HTTP proxy in order to trace and inspect any kind of request/response handling. Including localhost monitoring, SSL certification acceptance, and the ability to debug mobile devices, especially iOS-based ones. Compared to Charles, Fiddler is available for free. What really got me off the hook is the following statement in chapter 10 about Service Type Decisions: "For users who have larger systems using technology stacks such as Java, C++, or .NET, it may be easier for them to integrate with a SOAP service." WHAT? A couple of pages earlier the author recommends to stay away from 'old-fashioned' API styles like SOAP (if possible). And on top of that I wonder why there are tons of documentation towards development of RESTful Web Services based on WebAPI. The ASP.NET stack clearly moves away from SOAP to JSON and REST since years! Honestly, as a software developer on the .NET stack this leaves a mixed feeling after all. As for the remaining chapters I simply consider them as 'blah blah' without any real value and lots of theoretical advice. Related to the chapter 13 about 'Documentation', I just had the 'pleasure' to write a C#-based client against a Java-based SOAP Web Service. Personally, I take the WSDL as the master reference in the first place and Visual Studio generates all the stub types involved in the communication. During the implementation and testing I came across a 'java.lang.NullPointerException' in various methods and for various method parameters. The WSDL and the generated types were declared as Nullable, so nothing to worry about, or? Well, I logged in a support ticket, and guess what was the response to that scenario? "The service definition in the WSDL is wrong, please refer to the documentation in order to use the methods and parameters correctly" - No comment! Lorna's title is a quick read and in some areas she has good advice on designing and implementing Web Services and APIs. But roughly 100 pages aren't enough to cover a vast topic like that. After all, nice try and I'm looking forward to an improved second edition. Honestly, I never thought that I would come across a poor review. In general, it's a good book but it clearly has a lack of depth, the PHP code samples are incomplete (closing tags missing), and there are too many assumptions and theoretical statements.

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• All for one and one for all…the power of partnership in higher education

  - by Student Solutions Team-Oracle

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size: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;} Recently, several of our Oracle student solutions team members were in Latin America at a user group conference. Not an Oracle user group—although the conference was about and for higher education customers using Oracle software—but a Higher Education User Group (HEUG) conference. So what’s the difference? First of all, the HEUG is an entirely independent organization from Oracle, incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation governed by a Board of Directors. As a self-governing organization, the more than 23,000 higher education members (and growing!) actively participate in a multitude of initiatives, communications and shared-learning opportunities that benefit each of them and their institutions. For example, one of these programs includes 16 active and effective Product Advisor Groups (PAGs) that interact directly with Oracle management, developers and business partners to provide input into product strategies and improvements. The HEUG also provides a variety of online tools to help its members navigate the world of Oracle applications software. There’s a lot more that this organization does, but you can go to www.heug.org yourself to learn more. We want to get back to our story! Anyway, as we were leaving the HEUG conference in Latin America, one of the guests invited to attend commented: “Do these users realize and appreciate how many people from Oracle come to support them? You have a much larger representation at these types of conferences than any other vendor. It shows the tremendous support you have for your higher education customers.” So that’s it! This is why the partnership between the HEUG and Oracle is so powerful and unique in the software industry. Two distinct, independent organizations come together focused entirely on providing the highest value and mutual benefit to each member, each organization and the larger higher education community. Through open communications and active engagement since the HEUG was formed in 1998, our partnership today is stronger than it has ever been and membership growing globally. Result? Everyone benefits. All for one and one for all—we are in this together. We’ve got a lot going on in the student solutions team and are working closely with customers and the HEUG to move ahead on continued development for PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.2 and a new Oracle Student Cloud. Come back here for more stories, news and information! --Oracle Student Solutions Team  

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• Triangle Line-Segment Intersection - detecting near misses

  - by Will

  A ray is a very poor approximation of a player! I think approximating a player with a sphere traveling a straight line each game tick will solve my problems of the player intersecting edges of scenery because their line segment missed it yet their own model is not infinitely thin... I have a 3D triangle and a line segment. I have the normal triangle-line-segment intersection code which I admit I have only a woolly grasp of. To model movement and compute collisions of the player I have to determine if a line passes within sphere-radius of a triangle. But I can find no convenient line near-miss intersection code! Here's the classic triangle intersection ### commented ### code with my starting assumptions: function triangle_ray_intersection(a,b,c,ray_origin,ray_dir,ray_radius) { // http://softsurfer.com/Archive/algorithm_0105/algorithm_0105.htm#intersect_RayTriangle%28%29 // get triangle edge vectors and plane normal var u = vec3_sub(b,a); var v = vec3_sub(c,a); var n = vec3_cross(u,v); if(n[0]==0 && n[1]==0 && n[2]==0) return null; // triangle is degenerate var w0 = vec3_sub(ray_origin,a); var j = vec3_dot(n,ray_dir); if(Math.abs(j) < 0.00000001) { //### if parallel, might still pass within ray_radius of it return null; // parallel, disjoint or on plane } var i = -vec3_dot(n,w0); // get intersect point of ray with triangle plane var k = i / j; if(k < 0.0) return null; // ray goes away from triangle //### as its a line segment, k > 1+ray_radius means no intersect var hit = vec3_add(ray_origin,vec3_scale(ray_dir,k)); // intersect point of ray and plane // is I inside T? //### here I'm a bit lost; this is presumably computing barycentric coordinates? var uu = vec3_dot(u,u); var uv = vec3_dot(u,v); var vv = vec3_dot(v,v); var w = vec3_sub(hit,a); var wu = vec3_dot(w,u); var wv = vec3_dot(w,v); var D = uv * uv - uu * vv; var s = (uv * wv - vv * wu) / D; //### therefore, compute if its within ray_radius scaled to the 0..1 of barycentric coordinates? if(s<0.0 || s>1.0) return null; // I is outside T var t = (uv * wu - uu * wv) / D; if(t<0.0 || (s+t)>1.0) return null; // I is outside T //### finally, if it passses a barycentric test it might still be too far //### to a point; must check that its distance from a corner is within ray_radius too if more than one barycentric coord is >1 //### so we have rounded corners... return [hit,n]; // I is in T } Given the distance between the point of plane intersection and each corner, I ought to be able to determine distance at world scale of how far beyond the edge - beyond 1.0 in barycentric coordinates for each axis - that point is... At this point my head explodes! Is this the right track? What's the actual code? UPDATE: you can earn 100 pts on SO if you answer this question there...! How can you determine if a line segment passes within some distance of a triangle?

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