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• WhatsApp &amp; Tasker for Android &ndash; Read &amp; Write messages

  - by Shaurya Anand

  So, I finally gave up on all my previous the Microsoft Mobile/Phone OS devices and made my switch to Android this year. I am using my Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 with CyanogenMod 9.1.0 (http://get.cm/get/jenkins/7086/cm-9.1.0-n7000.zip) and ClockworkMod 6.0.1.2 (http://download2.clockworkmod.com/recoveries/recovery-clockwork-6.0.1.2-n7000.zip) since August this year and I am so happy with the performance and the flexibility it offers me. As a software developer by profession, I would expect most of my gadget to be highly customizable and programmable (one time or at intervals) to suit my needs as close as it can. I was introduced to Automation for Android – Tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en) via reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/tasker) and the word ‘automation’ was enough for me to dive right into this app. Only automation that I did earlier was switching profiles depending on location on there phones. And now, just imagine a complete set of possibilities that can be automate on the phone or via the phone. I did my research and found a couple of other tools that do the same/as close as what Tasker can do and few of them are even free. There’s one even by Microsoft called on{X} (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.onx.app&hl=en). Microsoft’s on{X} really caught my eye. You can write code for your phone on the web application by them, deploy it on your phone and even trace the flow all using your PC. Really brilliant, I love the fact that it’s all JavaScript. Here comes the but, it is still very very young and it’s policy of accessing my News Feed on Facebook is not something that I can not digest. On{X} is good, but as I said earlier, the API is not very mature and hence, I gave up on it. I bought Tasker, the best 5,00 € I spent in ages and I want to talk about it in this post. I am still a “noob” while operating this tool, but I tried my shot at automating WhatsApp (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp&hl=en), a popular messenger for various platform. The requirement for the automation is that, if I send a WhatsApp ‘wru’ message to the phone, it should respond back giving the location and battery level of my phone. It could be useful, if you like to locate your misplaced phone or automatically reply to your partner/friend, honestly, I don’t know what you will use it - through this post, I am just introducing automating WhatsApp using Tasker. Before we begin, the following script only works when your phone is rooted as we will be accessing the WhatsApp database and type some special characters like ‘:’. Let’s follow the code line by line: Profile:         Location request from XYZ. (12) // Name of your profile. Event:         Notification [ Owner Application:WhatsApp Title:* ] // When a new notification comes from WhatsApp, this event is fired. Read the end note, if you face problems with Chrome app after enabling Tasker accessibility. Enter:         A1: Run Shell [ Command:sqlite3 // We will access the WhatsApp database and check if the message comes from designated phone number or not. We mustn’t reply to every message.                 /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db "SELECT _id, data FROM                  messages WHERE key_from_me='0' AND key_remote_jid LIKE '%XXXXXXXXXXX%' // Replace XXXXXXXXXXX with the phone number of your message sender.                 ORDER BY _id DESC LIMIT 1;" Timeout (Seconds):10 Use Root:On Store // I made a timeout for 10 seconds, if in case WhatsApp is busy accessing the database.                 Result In:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ] // Store the read Id and the last message on to the variable %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ         A2: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ~R .*[wW][rR][uU].* ] // Check if the pattern of the message is correct and we are all set to send the location.                 A3: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ !~ %WHATSAPP_LASTREQ ] // Verify that the message is different from the last request. Remember every message has a unique Id.                         A4: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request... Text:Sending location // Just a notification that the location message is being prepared.                                 to Krati Gupta... Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:On Priority:3 ] // Make a note it is a permanent notification, we will clear it later.                         A5: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Disabled // I am disabling the pattern lock, that I use using the plugin Secure Settings.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure // You can download the plugin from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin&hl=en                                 Settings ]                         A6: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Disabled // Disable the keygaurd, it is useful, when your phone is on lock and you want to automate everything, even the typing.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A7: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Enabled // Pretty clear, turn on the GPS and get location at A8                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A8: AutoShortcut [ Configuration:WhatsApp: Some One // I am using AutoShortcut plugin (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut) to start WhatsApp with the indented recipient.                                 Package:com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut Name:AutoShortcut ] // Replace Some One, actually choose it from the plugin, the right recipient.                         A9: Get Location [ Source:Any Timeout (Seconds):30 Continue Task // I am getting the location, timeout is 30 seconds, adjust it accordingly.                                 Immediately:Off Keep Tracking:Off ]                         A10: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Screen Dim // Now, this extension of the plugin Secure Settings, wakes your device so that you can type out the string on the WhatsApp app.                                 5 Seconds Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin                                 Name:Secure Settings ]                         A11: Run Shell [ Command:input text // Now, I am using the shell script to type the text to the window, because the ‘:’ while not be typed from the Type task in Tasker.                                 LOCATION:maps.google.com/maps?q=%LOC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On // And also, this is way faster, but remember you need root for this, not for the other way of typing.                                 Store Result In: ]                         A12: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] // Focus the Send button                         A13: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] // And press it.                         A14: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] // Get back to the typing box.                         A15: Run Shell [ Command:input text LOCATION_ACCURACY:%LOCACC Timeout                                 (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ]                         A16: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ]                         A17: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ]                         A18: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ]                         A19: Run Shell [ Command:input text BATTERY_LEVEL:%BATT% Timeout // I am adding Battery level in my case as well.                                 (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ]                         A20: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ]                         A21: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ]                         A22: Variable Set [ Name:%WHATSAPP_LASTREQ To:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ Do // And now, we say, request is done.                                 Maths:Off Append:Off ]                         A23: Button [ Button:Back ] // I am exiting the WhatsApp nicely and not killing it. If you are the murderer kind, kill it, just know, you don’t have any place in the heaven.                         A24: Button [ Button:Back ]                         A25: Notify Cancel [ Title: Warn Not Exist:Off ] // Remove the permanent notification.                         A26: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request Text:Location sent // Make a temporary notification, and say, location is sent.                                 successfully. Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:Off Priority:3 ]                                                         A27: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Disabled // Disable all the horrible things we turned on earlier.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A28: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Enabled                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A29: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Enabled                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                 A30: End If         A31: End If Download this Task from here: http://db.tt/9vRmbhyb That’s it in the above small example – you can read/write messages from/to WhatsApp app. I am using n7000-cm9.1-cwr6. Oh yea, and if you are having the Talkback auto enabled for Chrome browser, you need to turn Off the Web scripts to run. Tasker is amazing, I have automated a lot of tasks using this tool. I will share a few none generic ones with you in my coming post here.

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• Technologies used in Remote Administration applications(not RD)

  - by Michael

  I want to know what kind of technologies are used nowadays as underlying screen capture engine for remote administration software like VNC pcAnywhere TeamViewer RAC Remote Administrator etc.. The programming language is not so important as just to know whether a driver needs to be developed which is polling video memory 30 times per second or there are any com objects built in the Windows kernel to help doing this? I'm not interested in 3rd party components for doing this. Do I have to use DirectX facilities? Just want some start point to develop my own screen stream capture engine, which will be less CPU hog.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #034

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 UDF – User Defined Function to Strip HTML – Parse HTML – No Regular Expression The UDF used in the blog does fantastic task – it scans entire HTML text and removes all the HTML tags. It keeps only valid text data without HTML task. This is one of the quite commonly requested tasks many developers have to face everyday. De-fragmentation of Database at Operating System to Improve Performance Operating system skips MDF file while defragging the entire filesystem of the operating system. It is absolutely fine and there is no impact of the same on performance. Read the entire blog post for my conversation with our network engineers. Delay Function – WAITFOR clause – Delay Execution of Commands How do you delay execution of the commands in SQL Server – ofcourse by using WAITFOR keyword. In this blog post, I explain the same with the help of T-SQL script. Find Length of Text Field To measure the length of TEXT fields the function is DATALENGTH(textfield). Len will not work for text field. As of SQL Server 2005, developers should migrate all the text fields to VARCHAR(MAX) as that is the way forward. Retrieve Current Date Time in SQL Server CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} There are three ways to retrieve the current datetime in SQL SERVER. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} Explanation and Comparison of NULLIF and ISNULL An interesting observation is NULLIF returns null if it comparison is successful, whereas ISNULL returns not null if its comparison is successful. In one way they are opposite to each other. Here is my question to you - How to create infinite loop using NULLIF and ISNULL? If this is even possible? 2008 Introduction to SERVERPROPERTY and example SERVERPROPERTY is a very interesting system function. It returns many of the system values. I use it very frequently to get different server values like Server Collation, Server Name etc. SQL Server Start Time We can use DMV to find out what is the start time of SQL Server in 2008 and later version. In this blog you can see how you can do the same. Find Current Identity of Table Many times we need to know what is the current identity of the column. I have found one of my developers using aggregated function MAX () to find the current identity. However, I prefer following DBCC command to figure out current identity. Create Check Constraint on Column Some time we just need to create a simple constraint over the table but I have noticed that developers do many different things to make table column follow rules than just creating constraint. I suggest constraint is a very useful concept and every SQL Developer should pay good attention to this subject. 2009 List Schema Name and Table Name for Database This is one of the blog post where I straight forward display script. One of the kind of blog posts, which I still love to read and write. Clustered Index on Separate Drive From Table Location A table devoid of primary key index is called heap, and here data is not arranged in a particular order, which gives rise to issues that adversely affect performance. Data must be stored in some kind of order. If we put clustered index on it then the order will be forced by that index and the data will be stored in that particular order. Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. 2010 Data Pages in Buffer Pool – Data Stored in Memory Cache One of my earlier year article, which I still read it many times and point developers to read it again. It is clear from the Resultset that when more than one index is used, datapages related to both or all of the indexes are stored in Memory Cache separately. TRANSACTION, DML and Schema Locks Can you create a situation where you can see Schema Lock? Well, this is a very simple question, however during the interview I notice over 50 candidates failed to come up with the scenario. In this blog post, I have demonstrated the situation where we can see the schema lock in database. 2011 Solution – Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once In this example I have created following situation: Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated Auto Update Statistics and Auto Create Statistics for database is TRUE Now I have requested two things in the example 1) Why this is happening? 2) How to fix this issue? Selecting Domain from Email Address This is a straight to script blog post where I explain how to select only domain name from entire email address. Solution – Generating Zero Without using Any Numbers in T-SQL How to get zero digit without using any digit? This is indeed a very interesting question and the answer is even interesting. Try to come up with answer in next 10 minutes and if you can’t come up with the answer the blog post read this post for solution. 2012 Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. Read Only Files and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) I have come across a very interesting feature in SSMS related to “Read Only” files. I believe it is a little unknown feature as well so decided to write a blog about the same. Identifying Column Data Type of uniqueidentifier without Querying System Tables How do I know if any table has a uniqueidentifier column and what is its value without using any DMV or System Catalogues? Only information you know is the table name and you are allowed to return any kind of error if the table does not have uniqueidentifier column. Read the blog post to find the answer. Solution – User Not Able to See Any User Created Object in Tables – Security and Permissions Issue Interesting question – “When I try to connect to SQL Server, it lets me connect just fine as well let me open and explore the database. I noticed that I do not see any user created instances but when my colleague attempts to connect to the server, he is able to explore the database as well see all the user created tables and other objects. Can you help me fix it?” Importing CSV File Into Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #018 – Video Here is interesting small 60 second video on how to import CSV file into Database. ColumnStore Index – Batch Mode vs Row Mode Here is the logic behind when Columnstore Index uses Batch Mode and when it uses Row Mode. A batch typically represents about 1000 rows of data. Batch mode processing also uses algorithms that are optimized for the multicore CPUs and increased memory throughput. Follow up – Usage of $rowguid and $IDENTITY This is an excellent follow up blog post of my earlier blog post where I explain where to use $rowguid and $identity.  If you do not know the difference between them, this is a blog with a script example. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• projection / view matrix: the object is bigger than it should and depth does not affect vertices

  - by Francesco Noferi

  I'm currently trying to write a C 3D software rendering engine from scratch just for fun and to have an insight on what OpenGL does behind the scene and what 90's programmers had to do on DOS. I have written my own matrix library and tested it without noticing any issues, but when I tried projecting the vertices of a simple 2x2 cube at 0,0 as seen by a basic camera at 0,0,10, the cube seems to appear way bigger than the application's window. If I scale the vertices' coordinates down by 8 times I can see a proper cube centered on the screen. This cube doesn't seem to be in perspective: wheen seen from the front, the back vertices pe rfectly overlap with the front ones, so I'm quite sure it's not correct. this is how I create the view and projection matrices (vec4_initd initializes the vectors with w=0, vec4_initw initializes the vectors with w=1): void mat4_lookatlh(mat4 *m, const vec4 *pos, const vec4 *target, const vec4 *updirection) { vec4 fwd, right, up; // fwd = norm(pos - target) fwd = *target; vec4_sub(&fwd, pos); vec4_norm(&fwd); // right = norm(cross(updirection, fwd)) vec4_cross(updirection, &fwd, &right); vec4_norm(&right); // up = cross(right, forward) vec4_cross(&fwd, &right, &up); // orientation and translation matrices combined vec4_initd(&m->a, right.x, up.x, fwd.x); vec4_initd(&m->b, right.y, up.y, fwd.y); vec4_initd(&m->c, right.z, up.z, fwd.z); vec4_initw(&m->d, -vec4_dot(&right, pos), -vec4_dot(&up, pos), -vec4_dot(&fwd, pos)); } void mat4_perspectivefovrh(mat4 *m, float fovdegrees, float aspectratio, float near, float far) { float h = 1.f / tanf(ftoradians(fovdegrees / 2.f)); float w = h / aspectratio; vec4_initd(&m->a, w, 0.f, 0.f); vec4_initd(&m->b, 0.f, h, 0.f); vec4_initw(&m->c, 0.f, 0.f, -far / (near - far)); vec4_initd(&m->d, 0.f, 0.f, (near * far) / (near - far)); } this is how I project my vertices: void device_project(device *d, const vec4 *coord, const mat4 *transform, int *projx, int *projy) { vec4 result; mat4_mul(transform, coord, &result); *projx = result.x * d->w + d->w / 2; *projy = result.y * d->h + d->h / 2; } void device_rendervertices(device *d, const camera *camera, const mesh meshes[], int nmeshes, const rgba *color) { int i, j; mat4 view, projection, world, transform, projview; mat4 translation, rotx, roty, rotz, transrotz, transrotzy; int projx, projy; // vec4_unity = (0.f, 1.f, 0.f, 0.f) mat4_lookatlh(&view, &camera->pos, &camera->target, &vec4_unity); mat4_perspectivefovrh(&projection, 45.f, (float)d->w / (float)d->h, 0.1f, 1.f); for (i = 0; i < nmeshes; i++) { // world matrix = translation * rotz * roty * rotx mat4_translatev(&translation, meshes[i].pos); mat4_rotatex(&rotx, ftoradians(meshes[i].rotx)); mat4_rotatey(&roty, ftoradians(meshes[i].roty)); mat4_rotatez(&rotz, ftoradians(meshes[i].rotz)); mat4_mulm(&translation, &rotz, &transrotz); // transrotz = translation * rotz mat4_mulm(&transrotz, &roty, &transrotzy); // transrotzy = transrotz * roty = translation * rotz * roty mat4_mulm(&transrotzy, &rotx, &world); // world = transrotzy * rotx = translation * rotz * roty * rotx // transform matrix mat4_mulm(&projection, &view, &projview); // projview = projection * view mat4_mulm(&projview, &world, &transform); // transform = projview * world = projection * view * world for (j = 0; j < meshes[i].nvertices; j++) { device_project(d, &meshes[i].vertices[j], &transform, &projx, &projy); device_putpixel(d, projx, projy, color); } } } this is how the cube and camera are initialized: // test mesh cube = &meshlist[0]; mesh_init(cube, "Cube", 8); cube->rotx = 0.f; cube->roty = 0.f; cube->rotz = 0.f; vec4_initw(&cube->pos, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[0], -1.f, 1.f, 1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[1], 1.f, 1.f, 1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[2], -1.f, -1.f, 1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[3], -1.f, -1.f, -1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[4], -1.f, 1.f, -1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[5], 1.f, 1.f, -1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[6], 1.f, -1.f, 1.f); vec4_initw(&cube->vertices[7], 1.f, -1.f, -1.f); // main camera vec4_initw(&maincamera.pos, 0.f, 0.f, 10.f); maincamera.target = vec4_zerow; and, just to be sure, this is how I compute matrix multiplications: void mat4_mul(const mat4 *m, const vec4 *va, vec4 *vb) { vb->x = m->a.x * va->x + m->b.x * va->y + m->c.x * va->z + m->d.x * va->w; vb->y = m->a.y * va->x + m->b.y * va->y + m->c.y * va->z + m->d.y * va->w; vb->z = m->a.z * va->x + m->b.z * va->y + m->c.z * va->z + m->d.z * va->w; vb->w = m->a.w * va->x + m->b.w * va->y + m->c.w * va->z + m->d.w * va->w; } void mat4_mulm(const mat4 *ma, const mat4 *mb, mat4 *mc) { mat4_mul(ma, &mb->a, &mc->a); mat4_mul(ma, &mb->b, &mc->b); mat4_mul(ma, &mb->c, &mc->c); mat4_mul(ma, &mb->d, &mc->d); }

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• Microsoft Robotics Development Studio simulation project deployment

  - by slibby05

  I am currently working on a project in Microsoft Robotics Development Studio, and I am having a little trouble deploying the solution for general use. My problem is this. I am making a simulation, so I need to deploy the simulation engine along with my project. This is dependent on the Ageia PhysX engine, DirectX, and the Microsoft XNA framework. I understand this, and I understand that the deployment tool for MRDS (dssdeploy) isn't set up to deploy simulations by default. So, if anyone has worked with MRDS before, and has deployed a simulation, I could use some help with this.

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• Configuring Oracle HTTP Server 12c for WebLogic Server Domain

  - by Emin Askerov

  Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) 12c 12.1.2 which was released in July 2013 as a part of Oracle Web Tier 12c is the web server component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. In essence this is Apache HTTP Server 2.2.22 (with critical bug fixes from higher versions) which includes modules developed specifically by Oracle. It provides a listener functionality for Oracle WebLogic Server and the framework for hosting static pages, dynamic pages, and applications over the Web. OHS can be easily managed by Weblogic Management Framework, a set of tools which provides administrative capabilities (start, stop, lifecycle operations, etc.) for Oracle Fusion Middleware products. In other words all tools which are familiar to us (Node Manager, WLST, Administration Console, Fusion Middleware Control etc.) presented as a part of Weblogic Management Framework and using for managing Java and System Components both for Weblogic Server and Standalone Domain types. You can familiarize yourself with these terms using related documentation: 1. Introduction to Oracle HTTP Server: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/webtier/index.html 2. Weblogic Management Framework: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/core/ASCON/terminology.htm#ASCON11260 In the given post I would like to cover rather simple use case how to configure OHS as web proxy in Weblogic Cluster environment. For example, we have existing Weblogic Domain where some managed servers have been joined to cluster and host business applications. We need to configure web proxy component which will act as entry point, load balancer for our cluster for user requests. Of course, we could install old good Apache HTTP Server and configure mod_wl plugin. However this solution not optimal from manageability perspective: we need to install Apache, install additional plugin then configure it by editing configuration file which is not really convenient for FMW Administrators and often increase time of performing of simple administrative task. Alternatively, we could use OHS as System Component within Weblogic Domain and use full power of Weblogic Management Framework in order to configure, manage and monitor it! I like this idea! What about you? I hope after reading this post you will agree with me. First of all it is necessary to download OHS binaries. You can use this link for downloading: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/webtier/downloads/index2-303202.html As we will use Fusion Middleware Control for managing OHS instances it is necessary to extend your domain with Enterprise Manager and Oracle ADF and JRF templates. This is not topic for focusing in this post, but you could get more information from documentation or one of my previous posts: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/wls/WLDTR/fmw_templates.htm#sthref64 https://blogs.oracle.com/imc/entry/the_specifics_of_adf_12c Note: you should have properly configured Node Manager utility for managing OHS instances Let’s consider configuration process step by step: 1. Shut down all Weblogic instances of existing domain including Admin Server; 2. Install Oracle HTTP Server. You should use your Fusion Middleware Home Path (e.g. /u01/Oracle/FMW12) for Installation Location and select Colocated HTTP Server option as Installation Type. I will not focus on this topic in this post. All information related to OHS installation you could find here: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/webtier/WTINS/install_gui.htm#i1082009 3. Next we need to extend our existing domain with OHS component. In order to do this you should do the following: a. Run Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard (ORACLE_HOME/oracle_common/common/bin/config.sh); b. On the step 1 select Update an existing domain option and point your Fusion Middleware Home Path; c. On the step 2 check Oracle HTTP Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Plugin for WEBTIER templates; d. Go through other steps without any changes and finish configuration process. 4. Start Admin Server and all managed servers related to your cluster 5. Log in to Enterprise Manager FMW Control using http://<hostname>:<port>/em URL 6. Now we will create OHS instance within our Weblogic Domain Infrastructure. Navigate to Weblogic Domain -> Administration -> Create/Delete OHS menu item; 7. Enter to edit mode, clicking Changes -> Lock&Edit menu item; 8. Create new OHS instance clicking Create button; 9. Define Instance Name (e.g. DevOSH) and Machine parameters; 10. Now we need to define listen port. By default OHS will use 7777 port number for income HTTP requests. We could change it to any free port number we would like to use. In order to do it, right click on our created OHS instance (left hand panel) and navigate to Administration -> Port Configuration; 11. Click on record with port number 7777 and then click Edit button; 12. Change port number value (in our case this will be 8080) and then click OK button; 13. Now we need to edit mod_wl_ohs configuration in order to enable OHS to act as proxy for WebLogic Server Instances/Cluster; 14. In order to do it right click on our created OHS instance (left panel) and navigate to Administration -> mod_wl_ohs Configuration; a. In Weblogic Cluster you should enter cluster address (define <host:port> for all managed servers which participated in cluster), e.g: 192.168.56.2:7004,192.168.56.2:7005 b. Define Weblogic Port parameter at which the Oracle WebLogic Server host is listening for connection requests from the module (or from other servers); c. Check Dynamic Server List option. This will dynamically update cluster list for every request; d. In the Location table define list of endpoint locations which you would like to process. In order to do this click Add Row button and define Location, Weblogic Cluster, Path Trim and Path Prefix parameters (if required); e. Click Apply button in order to save changes. 15. Activate changes clicking Changes ? Activate Changes menu item; 16. Finally we will start configured OHS instance. Right click on OHS instance tree item under Web Tier folder, select Control -> Start Up menu item; 17. Ensure that OHS instance up and running and then test your environment. Run deployed application to your Weblogic Cluster accessing via OHS web proxy; Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Personal Technology – Laptop Screen Blank – No Post – No BIOS – No Boot

  - by Pinal Dave

  If your laptop Screen is Blank and there is no POST, BIOS or boot, you can follow the steps mentioned here and there are chances that it will work if there is no hardware failure inside. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Those, who care about how I come up with this not SQL related blog post, here is the very funny true story. If you are a married man, you will know what I am going to describe next. May be you have faced the same situation or at least you feel and understand my situation. My wife’s computer suddenly stops working when she was searching for my daughter’s mathematics worksheets online. While the fatal accident happened with my wife’s computer (which was my loyal computer for over 4 years before she got it), I was working in my home office, fixing a high priority issue (live order’s database was corrupted) with one of the largest eCommerce websites.  While I was working on production server where I was fixing database corruption, my wife ran to my home office. Here is how the conversation went: Wife: This computer does not work. I: Restart it. Wife: It does not start. I: What did you do with it? Wife: Nothing, it just stopped working. I: Okey, I will look into it later, working on the very urgent issue. Wife: I was printing my daughter’s worksheet. I: Hm.. Okey. Wife: It was the mathematics worksheet, which you promised you will teach but you never get around to do it, so I am doing it myself. I: Thanks. I appreciate it. I am very busy with this issue as million dollar transaction are not happening as the database got corrupted and … Wife: So what … umm… You mean to say that you care about this customer more than your daughter. You know she got A+ in every other class but in mathematics she got only A. She missed that extra credit question. I: She is only 4, it is okay. Wife: She is 4.5 years old not 4. So you are not going to fix this computer which does not start at all. I think our daughter next time will even get lower grades as her dad is busy fixing something. I: Alright, I give up bring me that computer. Our daughter who was listening everything so far she finally decided to speak up. Daughter: Dad, it is a laptop not computer. I: Yes, sweety get that laptop here and your dad is going to fix the this small issue of million dollar issue later on. I decided to pay attention to my wife’s computer. She was right. No matter what I do, it will not boot up, it will not start, no BIOS, no POST screen. The computer starts for a second but nothing comes up on the screen. The light indicating hard drive comes up for a second and goes off. Nothing happens. I removed every single USB drive from the laptop but it still would not start. It was indeed no fun for me. Finally I remember my days when I was not married and used to study in University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I remembered that I used to have very old second (or maybe third or fourth) hand computer with me. In polite words, I had pre-owned computer and it used to face very similar issues again and again. I had small routine I used to follow to fix my old computer and I had decided to follow the same steps again with this computer. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Once I followed above process, her computer worked. I was very delighted, that now I can go back to solving the problem where millions of transactions were waiting as I was fixing corrupted database and it the current state of the database was in emergency mode. Once I fixed the computer, I looked at my wife and asked. I: Well, now this laptop is back online, can I get guaranteed that she will get A+ in mathematics in this week’s quiz? Wife: Sure, I promise. I: Fantastic. After saying that I started to look at my database corruption and my wife interrupted me again. Wife: Btw, I forgot to tell you. Our daughter had got A in mathematics last week but she had another quiz today and she already have received A+ there. I kept my promise. I looked at her and she started to walk outside room, before I say anything my phone rang. DBA from eCommerce company had called me, as he was wondering why there is no activity from my side in last 10 minutes. DBA: Hey bud, are you still connected. I see um… no activity in last 10 minutes. I: Oh, well, I was just saving the world. I am back now. After two hours I had fixed the database corruption and everything was normal. I was outsmarted by my wife but honestly I still respect and love her the same as she is the one who spends countless hours with our daughter so she does not miss me and I can continue writing blogs and keep on doing technology evangelism. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Sorting the columns of an HTML table using JQuery

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will show you how easy is to sort the columns of an HTML table. I will use an external library,called Tablesorter which makes life so much easier for developers. ?here are other posts in my blog regarding JQuery.You can find them all here. You can find another post regarding HTML tables and JQuery here. We will demonstrate this with a step by step example. I will use Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. You can also use Visual Studio 2012 Express Edition. You can also use VS 2010 editions.   1) Launch Visual Studio. Create an ASP.Net Empty Web application. Choose an appropriate name for your application. 2) Add a web form, default.aspx page to the application. 3) Add a table from the HTML controls tab control (from the Toolbox) on the default.aspx page 4) Now we need to download the JQuery library. Please visit the http://jquery.com/ and download the minified version.Then we need to download the Tablesorter JQuery plugin. Please donwload it, here. 5) We need to reference the JQuery library and the external JQuery Plugin. In the head section ? add the following lines.   <script src="jquery-1_8_2_min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>  <script src="jquery.tablesorter.js" type="text/javascript"></script>6) We need to type the HTML markup, the HTML table and its columns <body>    <form id="form1" runat="server">    <div>        <h1>Liverpool Legends</h1>        <table style="width: 50%;" border="1" cellpadding="10" cellspacing ="10" class="liverpool">            <thead>                <tr><th>Defenders</th><th>MidFielders</th><th>Strikers</th></tr>            </thead>            <tbody>            <tr>                <td>Alan Hansen</td>                <td>Graeme Souness</td>                <td>Ian Rush</td>            </tr>            <tr>                <td>Alan Kennedy</td>                <td>Steven Gerrard</td>                <td>Michael Owen</td>            </tr>            <tr>                <td>Jamie Garragher</td>                <td>Kenny Dalglish</td>                <td>Robbie Fowler</td>            </tr>            <tr>                <td>Rob Jones</td>                <td>Xabi Alonso</td>                <td>Dirk Kuyt</td>            </tr>                </tbody>        </table>            </div>    </form></body> 7) Inside the head section we also write the simple JQuery code.   <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $('.liverpool').tablesorter(); }); </script> 8) Run your application.This is how the HTML table looks before the table is sorted on the basis of the selected column.   9) Now I will click on the Midfielders header.Have a look at the picture below  Tablesorter is an excellent JQuery plugin that makes sorting HTML tables a piece of cake. Hope it helps!!!

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; SpeedTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  SpeedTrace is a relatively unknown profiler made a company called Ipcas. A single professional license does cost 449€+VAT. For the test I did use SpeedTrace 4.5 which is currently Beta. Although it is cheaper than dotTrace it has by far the most options to influence how profiling does work. First you need to create a tracing project which does configure tracing for one process type. You can start the application directly from the profiler or (much more interesting) it does attach to a specific process when it is started. For this you need to check “Trace the specified …” radio button and enter the process name in the “Process Name of the Trace” edit box. You can even selectively enable tracing for processes with a specific command line. Then you need to activate the trace project by pressing the Activate Project button and you are ready to start VS as usual. If you want to profile the next 10 VS instances that you start you can set the Number of Processes counter to e.g. 10. This is immensely helpful if you are trying to profile only the next 5 started processes. As you can see there are many more tabs which do allow to influence tracing in a much more sophisticated way. SpeedTrace is the only profiler which does not rely entirely on the profiling Api of .NET. Instead it does modify the IL code (instrumentation on the fly) to write tracing information to disc which can later be analyzed. This approach is not only very fast but it does give you unprecedented analysis capabilities. Once the traces are collected they do show up in your workspace where you can open the trace viewer. I do skip the other windows because this view is by far the most useful one. You can sort the methods not only by Wall Clock time but also by CPU consumption and wait time which none of the other products support in their views at the same time. If you want to optimize for CPU consumption sort by CPU time. If you want to find out where most time is spent you need Clock Total time and Clock Waiting. There you can directly see if the method did take long because it did wait on something or it did really execute stuff that did take so long. Once you have found a method you want to drill deeper you can double click on a method to get to the Caller/Callee view which is similar to the JetBrains Method Grid view. But this time you do see much more. In the middle is the clicked method. Above are the methods that call you and below are the methods that you do directly call. Normally you would then start digging deeper to find the end of the chain where the slow method worth optimizing is located. But there is a shortcut. You can press the magic   button to calculate the aggregation of all called methods. This is displayed in the lower left window where you can see each method call and how long it did take. There you can also sort to see if this call stack does only contain methods (e.g. WCF connect calls which you cannot make faster) not worth optimizing. YourKit has a similar feature where it is called Callees List. In the Functions tab you have in the context menu also many other useful analysis options One really outstanding feature is the View Call History Drilldown. When you select this one you get not a sum of all method invocations but a list with the duration of each method call. This is not surprising since SpeedTrace does use tracing to get its timings. There you can get many useful graphs how this method did behave over time. Did it become slower at some point in time or was only the first call slow? The diagrams and the list will tell you that. That is all fine but what should I do when one method call was slow? I want to see from where it was coming from. No problem select the method in the list hit F10 and you get the call stack. This is a life saver if you e.g. search for serialization problems. Today Serializers are used everywhere. You want to find out from where the 5s XmlSerializer.Deserialize call did come from? Hit F10 and you get the call stack which did invoke the 5s Deserialize call. The CPU timeline tab is also useful to find out where long pauses or excessive CPU consumption did happen. Click in the graph to get the Thread Stacks window where you can get a quick overview what all threads were doing at this time. This does look like the Stack Traces feature in YourKit. Only this time you get the last called method first which helps to quickly see what all threads were executing at this moment. YourKit does generate a rather long list which can be hard to go through when you have many threads. The thread list in the middle does not give you call stacks or anything like that but you see which methods were found most often executing code by the profiler which is a good indication for methods consuming most CPU time. This does sound too good to be true? I have not told you the best part yet. The best thing about this profiler is the staff behind it. When I do see a crash or some other odd behavior I send a mail to Ipcas and I do get usually the next day a mail that the problem has been fixed and a download link to the new version. The guys at Ipcas are even so helpful to log in to your machine via a Citrix Client to help you to get started profiling your actual application you want to profile. After a 2h telco I was converted from a hater to a believer of this tool. The fast response time might also have something to do with the fact that they are actively working on 4.5 to get out of the door. But still the support is by far the best I have encountered so far. The only downside is that you should instrument your assemblies including the .NET Framework to get most accurate numbers. You can profile without doing it but then you will see very high JIT times in your process which can severely affect the correctness of the measured timings. If you do not care about exact numbers you can also enable in the main UI in the Data Trace tab logging of method arguments of primitive types. If you need to know what files at which times were opened by your application you can find it out without a debugger. Since SpeedTrace does read huge trace files in its reader you should perhaps use a 64 bit machine to be able to analyze bigger traces as well. The memory consumption of the trace reader is too high for my taste. But they did promise for the next version to come up with something much improved.

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• My OpenGL game switches Aero DWM Glass off.

  - by marc40000

  Hi ! I wrote a free game a few years ago: http://www.walkover.org. For the lobby and menus, it uses normal dialogs like win32. When the actual game starts it uses OpenGL. Now, on Windows 7, when the actual game starts, it switches windows aero glass off and switches it back on when the game is over. Is there something I can do to prevent this from happening? Some special flags that keep the glass on if it is on? (For newer, I have been using DirectX and this doesn#t happen there.) Maybe some (new) flag I have to specify somewhere? Thx Marc

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• JQuery Mobile Code Snippets 1

  - by Yousef_Jadallah

   I want to share with you some important codes that you may need during JQuery Mobile development.These codes are tested on Alpha 4 version. Beta 1 has been released before two days, Therefore I will test them in my current project and let you know if there is any changes : Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA /* 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Show and hide back button in your Application    $(document).bind("mobileinit", function () {           $.mobile.page.prototype.options.addBackBtn = true;        });     Customizing the back button text $(document).bind("mobileinit", function () {$.mobile.page.prototype.options.backBtnText = "previous";});       Hide "Close button" for dialog programatically:   $('[data-role=dialog]div[id="YourDiaogdivID"]').live('pagecreate', function (event) {     $("a[data-icon='delete']").hide();          });  Change Select option element index:      var myselect = $("select#foo");       myselect[0].selectedIndex = 0; //The new index        myselect.selectmenu("refresh"); //uset this line of code after any updating on the select element      Change Select optoin elemetn text value:    $("select#foo").parent().contents().children('.ui-btn-text').text('Your Text Here');    Refreshing a checkbox    $("select#foo").parent().contents().children('.ui-btn-text').text('Your Text Here');     Hide select option element  $('#foo').parent().hide();     Hide and Show Page Loading Message :  $.mobile.pageLoading(); //Show $.mobile.pageLoading(true); //hide            overriding $.mobile.loadingMessage  $(document).bind("mobileinit", function () {    $.mobile.loadingMessage = 'My Loading Message';    });    Hide and Show jQuery-Mobile-Themed-DatePicker    $(".ui-datepicker").hide();  $(".ui-datepicker").show();       Build your Custom Loading Message :           $('#CustomeLoadingMessage').hide();//Hide the div               $('# CustomeLoadingMessage').ajaxStart(function () {                $(this).show();            });             $('# CustomeLoadingMessage').ajaxStop(function () {                $(this).hide();            });   I wil publish other important codes soon.Hope that helps.

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• Navigating Libgdx Menu with arrow keys or controller

  - by Phil Royer

  I'm attempting to make my menu navigable with the arrow keys or via the d-pad on a controller. So Far I've had no luck. The question is: Can someone walk me through how to make my current menu or any libgdx menu keyboard accessible? I'm a bit noobish with some stuff and I come from a Javascript background. Here's an example of what I'm trying to do: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39448/webgl/qb/qb.html For a simple menu that you can just add a few buttons to and it run out of the box use this: http://www.sadafnoor.com/blog/how-to-create-simple-menu-in-libgdx/ Or you can use my code but I use a lot of custom styles. And here's an example of my code: import aurelienribon.tweenengine.Timeline; import aurelienribon.tweenengine.Tween; import aurelienribon.tweenengine.TweenManager; import com.badlogic.gdx.Game; import com.badlogic.gdx.Gdx; import com.badlogic.gdx.Screen; import com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.GL20; import com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture; import com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.Sprite; import com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch; import com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.TextureAtlas; import com.badlogic.gdx.math.Vector2; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.Actor; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.InputEvent; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.InputListener; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.Stage; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.ui.Skin; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.ui.Table; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.ui.TextButton; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.utils.Align; import com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.utils.ClickListener; import com.project.game.tween.ActorAccessor; public class MainMenu implements Screen { private SpriteBatch batch; private Sprite menuBG; private Stage stage; private TextureAtlas atlas; private Skin skin; private Table table; private TweenManager tweenManager; @Override public void render(float delta) { Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); batch.begin(); menuBG.draw(batch); batch.end(); //table.debug(); stage.act(delta); stage.draw(); //Table.drawDebug(stage); tweenManager.update(delta); } @Override public void resize(int width, int height) { menuBG.setSize(width, height); stage.setViewport(width, height, false); table.invalidateHierarchy(); } @Override public void resume() { } @Override public void show() { stage = new Stage(); Gdx.input.setInputProcessor(stage); batch = new SpriteBatch(); atlas = new TextureAtlas("ui/atlas.pack"); skin = new Skin(Gdx.files.internal("ui/menuSkin.json"), atlas); table = new Table(skin); table.setBounds(0, 0, Gdx.graphics.getWidth(), Gdx.graphics.getHeight()); // Set Background Texture menuBackgroundTexture = new Texture("images/mainMenuBackground.png"); menuBG = new Sprite(menuBackgroundTexture); menuBG.setSize(Gdx.graphics.getWidth(), Gdx.graphics.getHeight()); // Create Main Menu Buttons // Button Play TextButton buttonPlay = new TextButton("START", skin, "inactive"); buttonPlay.addListener(new ClickListener() { @Override public void clicked(InputEvent event, float x, float y) { ((Game) Gdx.app.getApplicationListener()).setScreen(new LevelMenu()); } }); buttonPlay.addListener(new InputListener() { public boolean keyDown (InputEvent event, int keycode) { System.out.println("down"); return true; } }); buttonPlay.padBottom(12); buttonPlay.padLeft(20); buttonPlay.getLabel().setAlignment(Align.left); // Button EXTRAS TextButton buttonExtras = new TextButton("EXTRAS", skin, "inactive"); buttonExtras.addListener(new ClickListener() { @Override public void clicked(InputEvent event, float x, float y) { ((Game) Gdx.app.getApplicationListener()).setScreen(new ExtrasMenu()); } }); buttonExtras.padBottom(12); buttonExtras.padLeft(20); buttonExtras.getLabel().setAlignment(Align.left); // Button Credits TextButton buttonCredits = new TextButton("CREDITS", skin, "inactive"); buttonCredits.addListener(new ClickListener() { @Override public void clicked(InputEvent event, float x, float y) { ((Game) Gdx.app.getApplicationListener()).setScreen(new Credits()); } }); buttonCredits.padBottom(12); buttonCredits.padLeft(20); buttonCredits.getLabel().setAlignment(Align.left); // Button Settings TextButton buttonSettings = new TextButton("SETTINGS", skin, "inactive"); buttonSettings.addListener(new ClickListener() { @Override public void clicked(InputEvent event, float x, float y) { ((Game) Gdx.app.getApplicationListener()).setScreen(new Settings()); } }); buttonSettings.padBottom(12); buttonSettings.padLeft(20); buttonSettings.getLabel().setAlignment(Align.left); // Button Exit TextButton buttonExit = new TextButton("EXIT", skin, "inactive"); buttonExit.addListener(new ClickListener() { @Override public void clicked(InputEvent event, float x, float y) { Gdx.app.exit(); } }); buttonExit.padBottom(12); buttonExit.padLeft(20); buttonExit.getLabel().setAlignment(Align.left); // Adding Heading-Buttons to the cue table.add().width(190); table.add().width((table.getWidth() / 10) * 3); table.add().width((table.getWidth() / 10) * 5).height(140).spaceBottom(50); table.add().width(190).row(); table.add().width(190); table.add(buttonPlay).spaceBottom(20).width(460).height(110); table.add().row(); table.add().width(190); table.add(buttonExtras).spaceBottom(20).width(460).height(110); table.add().row(); table.add().width(190); table.add(buttonCredits).spaceBottom(20).width(460).height(110); table.add().row(); table.add().width(190); table.add(buttonSettings).spaceBottom(20).width(460).height(110); table.add().row(); table.add().width(190); table.add(buttonExit).width(460).height(110); table.add().row(); stage.addActor(table); // Animation Settings tweenManager = new TweenManager(); Tween.registerAccessor(Actor.class, new ActorAccessor()); // Heading and Buttons Fade In Timeline.createSequence().beginSequence() .push(Tween.set(buttonPlay, ActorAccessor.ALPHA).target(0)) .push(Tween.set(buttonExtras, ActorAccessor.ALPHA).target(0)) .push(Tween.set(buttonCredits, ActorAccessor.ALPHA).target(0)) .push(Tween.set(buttonSettings, ActorAccessor.ALPHA).target(0)) .push(Tween.set(buttonExit, ActorAccessor.ALPHA).target(0)) .push(Tween.to(buttonPlay, ActorAccessor.ALPHA, .5f).target(1)) .push(Tween.to(buttonExtras, ActorAccessor.ALPHA, .5f).target(1)) .push(Tween.to(buttonCredits, ActorAccessor.ALPHA, .5f).target(1)) .push(Tween.to(buttonSettings, ActorAccessor.ALPHA, .5f).target(1)) .push(Tween.to(buttonExit, ActorAccessor.ALPHA, .5f).target(1)) .end().start(tweenManager); tweenManager.update(Gdx.graphics.getDeltaTime()); } public static Vector2 getStageLocation(Actor actor) { return actor.localToStageCoordinates(new Vector2(0, 0)); } @Override public void dispose() { stage.dispose(); atlas.dispose(); skin.dispose(); menuBG.getTexture().dispose(); } @Override public void hide() { dispose(); } @Override public void pause() { } }

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• The challenge of communicating externally with IRM secured content

  - by Simon Thorpe

  I am often asked by customers about how they handle sending IRM secured documents to external parties. Their concern is that using IRM to secure sensitive information they need to share outside their business, is troubled with the inability for third parties to install the software which enables them to gain access to the information. It is a very legitimate question and one i've had to answer many times in the past 10 years whilst helping customers plan successful IRM deployments. The operating system does not provide the required level of content security The problem arises from what IRM delivers, persistent security to your sensitive information where ever it resides and whenever it is in use. Oracle IRM gives customers an array of features that help ensure sensitive information in an IRM document or email is always protected and only accessed by authorized users using legitimate applications. Examples of such functionality are; Control of the clipboard, either by disabling completely in the opened document or by allowing the cut and pasting of information between secured IRM documents but not into insecure applications. Protection against programmatic access to the document. Office documents and PDF documents have the ability to be accessed by other applications and scripts. With Oracle IRM we have to protect against this to ensure content cannot be leaked by someone writing a simple program. Securing of decrypted content in memory. At some point during the process of opening and presenting a sealed document to an end user, we must decrypt it and give it to the application (Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word, Excel etc). This process must be secure so that someone cannot simply get access to the decrypted information. The operating system alone just doesn't have the functionality to deliver these types of features. This is why for every IRM technology there must be some extra software installed and typically this software requires administrative rights to do so. The fact is that if you want to have very strong security and access control over a document you are going to send to someone who is beyond your network infrastructure, there must be some software to provide that functionality. Simple installation with Oracle IRM The software used to control access to Oracle IRM sealed content is called the Oracle IRM Desktop. It is a small, free piece of software roughly about 12mb in size. This software delivers functionality for everything a user needs to work with an Oracle IRM solution. It provides the functionality for all formats we support, the storage and transparent synchronization of user rights and unique to Oracle, the ability to search inside sealed files stored on the local computer. In Oracle we've made every technical effort to ensure that installing this software is a simple as possible. In situations where the user's computer is part of the enterprise, this software is typically deployed using existing technologies such as Systems Management Server from Microsoft or by using Active Directory Group Policies. However when sending sealed content externally, you cannot automatically install software on the end users machine. You need to rely on them to download and install themselves. Again we've made every effort for this manual install process to be as simple as we can. Starting with the small download size of the software itself to the simple installation process, most end users are able to install and access sealed content very quickly. You can see for yourself how easily this is done by walking through our free and easy self service demonstration of using sealed content. How to handle objections and ensure there is value However the fact still remains that end users may object to installing, or may simply be unable to install the software themselves due to lack of permissions. This is often a problem with any technology that requires specialized software to access a new type of document. In Oracle, over the past 10 years, we've learned many ways to get over this barrier of getting software deployed by external users. First and I would say of most importance, is the content MUST have some value to the person you are asking to install software. Without some type of value proposition you are going to find it very difficult to get past objections to installing the IRM Desktop. Imagine if you were going to secure the weekly campus restaurant menu and send this to contractors. Their initial response will be, "why on earth are you asking me to download some software just to access your menu!?". A valid objection... there is no value to the user in doing this. Now consider the scenario where you are sending one of your contractors their employment contract which contains their address, social security number and bank account details. Are they likely to take 5 minutes to install the IRM Desktop? You bet they are, because there is real value in doing so and they understand why you are doing it. They want their personal information to be securely handled and a quick download and install of some software is a small task in comparison to dealing with the loss of this information. Be clear in communicating this value So when sending sealed content to people externally, you must be clear in communicating why you are using an IRM technology and why they need to install some software to access the content. Do not try and avoid the issue, you must be clear and upfront about it. In doing so you will significantly reduce the "I didn't know I needed to do this..." responses and also gain respect for being straight forward. One customer I worked with, 6 months after the initial deployment of Oracle IRM, called me panicking that the partner they had started to share their engineering documents with refused to install any software to access this highly confidential intellectual property. I explained they had to communicate to the partner why they were doing this. I told them to go back with the statement that "the company takes protecting its intellectual property seriously and had decided to use IRM to control access to engineering documents." and if the partner didn't respect this decision, they would find another company that would. The result? A few days later the partner had made the Oracle IRM Desktop part of their approved list of software in the company. Companies are successful when sending sealed content to third parties We have many, many customers who send sensitive content to third parties. Some customers actually sell access to Oracle IRM protected content and therefore 99% of their users are external to their business, one in particular has sold content to hundreds of thousands of external users. Oracle themselves use the technology to secure M&A documents, payroll data and security assessments which go beyond the traditional enterprise security perimeter. Pretty much every company who deploys Oracle IRM will at some point be sending those documents to people outside of the company, these customers must be successful otherwise Oracle IRM wouldn't be successful. Because our software is used by a wide variety of companies, some who use it to sell content, i've often run into people i'm sharing a sealed document with and they already have the IRM Desktop installed due to accessing content from another company. The future In summary I would say that yes, this is a hurdle that many customers are concerned about but we see much evidence that in practice, people leap that hurdle with relative ease as long as they are good at communicating the value of using IRM and also take measures to ensure end users can easily go through the process of installation. We are constantly developing new ideas to reducing this hurdle and maybe one day the operating systems will give us enough rich security functionality to have no software installation. Until then, Oracle IRM is by far the easiest solution to balance security and usability for your business. If you would like to evaluate it for yourselves, please contact us.

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• Easy Flood Fill

  - by Jimmy

  Some advice, please. I'm just starting out in C#. I've managed to get some shapes created on a Windows form, and now I'd like to fill them with color. In the old C++ I studied years ago, there was a floodfill function that was really easy. It has been an unpleasant realization to find there's not a similar method available in regular old C#. Does anyone have advice for me, or some code, so I can implement filling without understanding GDI+, DirectX, or rest of the avalanche of acronyms that I've run into by researching this on the web? I need to fill irregular shapes, bounded by a certain color. Gradient and transparency control would be nice, but I'd settle for plain old solid fill right now, just to get a modicom of control over this. Any help, code or advice would be really appreciated.

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• How do I do Collisions in my JavaScript Game Code Below?

  - by Henry

  I'm trying to figure out how would I add collision detection to my code so that when the "Man" character touches the "RedHouse" the RedHouse disappears? Thanks. By the way, I'm new to how things are done on this site, so thus, if there is anything else needed or so, let me know. <title>HMan</title> <body style="background:#808080;"> <br> <canvas id="canvasBg" width="800px" height="500px"style="display:block;background:#ffffff;margin:100px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasRedHouse" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasEnemy" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasEnemy2" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <canvas id="canvasMan" width="800px" height="500px" style="display:block;margin:-500px auto 0px;"></canvas> <script> var isPlaying = false; var requestAnimframe = window.requestAnimationFrame || window.webkitRequestAnimationFrame || window.mozRequestAnimationFrame || window.msRequestAnimationFrame || window.oRequestAnimationFrame; var canvasBg = document.getElementById('canvasBg'); var ctxBg = canvasBg.getContext('2d'); var canvasRedHouse = document.getElementById('canvasRedHouse'); var ctxRedHouse = canvasRedHouse.getContext('2d'); var House1; House1 = new RedHouse(); var canvasMan = document.getElementById('canvasMan'); var ctxMan = canvasMan.getContext('2d'); var Man1; Man1 = new Man(); var imgSprite = new Image(); imgSprite.src = 'SpritesI.png'; imgSprite.addEventListener('load',init,false); function init() { drawBg(); startLoop(); document.addEventListener('keydown',checkKeyDown,false); document.addEventListener('keyup',checkKeyUp,false); } function drawBg() { var SpriteSourceX = 0; var SpriteSourceY = 0; var drawManOnScreenX = 0; var drawManOnScreenY = 0; ctxBg.drawImage(imgSprite,SpriteSourceX,SpriteSourceY,800,500,drawManOnScreenX, drawManOnScreenY,800,500); } function clearctxBg() { ctxBg.clearRect(0,0,800,500); } function Man() { this.SpriteSourceX = 10; this.SpriteSourceY = 540; this.width = 40; this.height = 115; this.DrawManOnScreenX = 100; this.DrawManOnScreenY = 260; this.speed = 10; this.actualFrame = 1; this.speed = 2; this.isUpKey = false; this.isRightKey = false; this.isDownKey = false; this.isLeftKey = false; } Man.prototype.draw = function () { clearCtxMan(); this.updateCoors(); this.checkDirection(); ctxMan.drawImage(imgSprite,this.SpriteSourceX,this.SpriteSourceY+this.height* this.actualFrame, this.width,this.height,this.DrawManOnScreenX,this.DrawManOnScreenY, this.width,this.height); } Man.prototype.updateCoors = function(){ this.leftX = this.DrawManOnScreenX; this.rightX = this.DrawManOnScreenX + this.width; this.topY = this.DrawManOnScreenY; this.bottomY = this.DrawManOnScreenY + this.height; } Man.prototype.checkDirection = function () { if (this.isUpKey && this.topY > 240) { this.DrawManOnScreenY -= this.speed; } if (this.isRightKey && this.rightX < 800) { this.DrawManOnScreenX += this.speed; } if (this.isDownKey && this.bottomY < 500) { this.DrawManOnScreenY += this.speed; } if (this.isLeftKey && this.leftX > 0) { this.DrawManOnScreenX -= this.speed; } if (this.isRightKey && this.rightX < 800) { if (this.actualFrame > 0) { this.actualFrame = 0; } else { this.actualFrame++; } } if (this.isLeftKey) { if (this.actualFrame > 2) { this.actualFrame = 2; } function checkKeyDown(var keyID = e.keyCode || e.which; if (keyID === 38) { Man1.isUpKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 39 ) { Man1.isRightKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 40 ) { Man1.isDownKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 37 ) { Man1.isLeftKey = true; e.preventDefault(); } } function checkKeyUp(e) { var keyID = e.keyCode || e.which; if (keyID === 38 || keyID === 87) { Man1.isUpKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 39 || keyID === 68) { Man1.isRightKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 40 || keyID === 83) { Man1.isDownKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } if (keyID === 37 || keyID === 65) { Man1.isLeftKey = false; e.preventDefault(); } } function clearCtxMan() { ctxMan.clearRect(0,0,800,500); } function RedHouse() { this.srcX = 135; this.srcY = 525; this.width = 265; this.height = 245; this.drawX = 480; this.drawY = 85; } RedHouse.prototype.draw = function () { clearCtxRedHouse(); ctxRedHouse.drawImage(imgSprite,this.srcX,this.srcY, this.width,this.height,this.drawX,this.drawY,this.width,this.height); }; function clearCtxRedHouse() { ctxRedHouse.clearRect(0,0,800,500); } function loop() { if (isPlaying === true){ Man1.draw(); House1.draw(); requestAnimframe(loop); } } function startLoop(){ isPlaying = true; loop(); } function stopLoop(){ isPlaying = false; } </script> <style> .top{ position: absolute; top: 4px; left: 10px; color:black; } .top2{ position: absolute; top: 60px; left: 10px; color:black; } </style> <div class="top"> <p><font face="arial" color="black" size="4"><b>HGame</b><font/><p/> <p><font face="arial" color="black" size="3"> My Game Here <font/><p/> </div> <div class="top2"> <p><font face="arial" color="black" size="3"> It will start now <font/><p/> </div>

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 15, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 15, 2013Popular ReleasesMVC Forum: MVC Forum v1.0: Finally version 1.0 is here! We have been fixing a few bugs, and making sure the release is as stable as possible. We have also changed the way configuration of the application works, mostly how to add your own code or replace some of the standard code with your own. If you download and use our software, please give us some sort of feedback, good or bad!SharePoint 2013 TypeScript Definitions: Release 1.1: TypeScript 0.9 support SharePoint TypeScript Definitions are now compliant with the new version of TypeScript TypeScript generics are now used for defining collection classes (derivatives of SP.ClientCollection object) Improved coverage Added mQuery definitions (m$) Added SPClientAutoFill definitions SP.Utilities namespace is now fully covered SP.UI modal dialog definitions improved CSR definitions improved, added some missing methods and context properties, mostly related to list ...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI ??? 1.0.0: ????GoAgent GUI????，???????????.Net Framework 4.0 ???????: Windows 8 x64 Windows 8 x86 Windows 7 x64 Windows 7 x86 ???????： Windows 8.1 Preview (x86/x64) ???????： Windows XP ????： ????????GoAgent????，????????，?????????????，???????????????????，??????????，????。PiGraph: PiGraph 2.0.8.13: C?p nh?t:Các l?i dã s?a: S?a l?i không nh?p du?c s? âm. L?i tabindex trong giao di?n Thêm hàm Các l?i chua kh?c ph?c: L?i ghi chú nh?p nháy màu. L?i khung ghi chú vu?t ra kh?i biên khi luu file. Luu ý:N?u không kh?i d?ng duoc chuong trình, b?n nên c?p nh?t driver card d? h?a phiên b?n m?i nh?t: AMD Graphics Drivers NVIDIA Driver Xem yêu c?u h? th?ngD3D9Client: D3D9Client R12 for Orbiter Beta: D3D9Client release for orbiter BetaVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...Project Server 2013 Event Handler Admin Tool: PSI Event Admin Tool: Download & exract the File. Use LoggerAdmin to upload the event handlers in project server 2013. PSIEventLogger\LoggerAdmin\bin\DebugGherkin editor: Gherkin Editor Beta 2: Fix issue #7 and add some refactoring and code cleanupNew-NuGetPackage PowerShell Script: New-NuGetPackage.ps1 PowerShell Script v1.2: Show nuget gallery to push to when prompting user if they want to push their package.Site Templates By Steve: SharePoint 2010 CORE Site Theme By Steve WSP: Great Site Theme to start with from Steve. See project home page for install instructions. This is a nice centered, mega-menu, fixed width masterpage with styles. Remember to update the mega menu lists.SharePoint Solution Installer: SharePoint Solution Installer V1.2.8: setup2013.exe now supports CompatibilityLevel to target specific hive Use setup.exe for SP2007 & SP2010. Use setup2013.exe for SP2013.TBox - tool to make developer's life easier.: TBox 1.021: 1)Add console unit tests runner, to run unit tests in parallel from console. Also this new sub tool can save valid xml nunit report. It can help you in continuous integration. 2)Fix build scripts.LifeInSharepoint Modern UI Update: Version 2: Some minor improvements, including Audience Targeting support for quick launch links. Also removing all NextDocs references.Virtual Photonics: VTS MATLAB Package 1.0.13 Beta: This is the beta release of the MATLAB package with examples of using the VTS libraries within MATLAB. Changes for this release: Added two new examples to vts_solver_demo.m that: 1) generates and plots R(lambda) at a given rho, and chromophore concentrations assuming a power law for scattering, and 2) solves inverse problem for R(lambda) at given rho. This example solves for concentrations of HbO2, Hb and H20 given simulated measurements created using Nurbs scaled Monte Carlo and inverted u...Advanced Resource Tab for Blend: Advanced Resource Tab: This is the first alpha release of the advanced resource tab for Blend for Visual Studio 2012.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.96: Fix for issue #19957: EXE should output the name of the file(s) being minified. Discussion #449181: throw a Sev-2 warning when trailing commas are detected on an Array literal. Perfectly legal to do so, but the behavior ends up working differently on different browsers, so throw a cross-browser warning. Add a few more known global names for improved ES6 compatibility update Nuget package to version 2.5 and automatically add the AjaxMin.targets to your project when you update the package...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Categories and Colors: This new version has a major change in the drawing of the list items: - Using owner drawn code to format the appointments using GDI (some flickering may occur, but it looks a little bit better IMHO, with separate sections). - Added category color support (if more than one category, only one color will be shown). Here, the colors Outlook uses are slightly different than the ones available in System.Drawing, so I did a first approach matching. ;-) - Added appointment status support (to show fr...Columbus Remote Desktop: 2.0 Sapphire: Added configuration settings Added update notifications Added ability to disable GPU acceleration Fixed connection bugsLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.07: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.08: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the application throws an Unhandled Error and an HTTP Response Code of 200 when the connection to the database is lost. Security FixesNone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesNone ProvidersNoneNew Projects[.Net Intl] harroc_c;mallar_a;olouso_f: The goal of this project is to create a web crawler and a web front who allows you to search in your index. You will create a mini (or large!) search engine basButterfly Storage: Butterfly Storage is a data access technology based on object-oriented database model for Windows Store applications.KaveCompany: KaveCompleave that girl alone: a team project!MyClrProfiler: This project helps you learn about and develop your own CLR profiler.NETDeob: Deobfuscate obfuscated .NET files easilyProgram stomatologie: SummarySimple Graph Library: Simple portable class library for graphs data structures. .NET, Silverlight 4/5, Windows Phone, Windows RT, Xbox 360T6502 Emulator: T6502 is a 6502 emulator written in TypeScript using AngularJS. The goal is well-organized, readable code over performance.WP8 File Access Webserver: C# HTTP server and web application on Windows Phone 8. Implements file access, browsing and downloading.wpadk: wpadk????wp7?????? ?????????，?????、SDK、wpadk?????????????。??????????????????。??????????????????，????wpadk?????????????????????????????????????。xlmUnit: xlmUnit, Unit Testing

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• How to do a sample rate conversion in Windows (and OSX)

  - by Paperflyer

  I am about to write an audio file converter for my side job at the university. As part of this I would need sample rate conversion. However, my professor said that it would be pretty hard to write a sample rate converter that was both of good quality and fast. On my research on the subject, I found some functions in the OSX CoreAudio-framework, that could do a sample rate conversion (AudioConverter.h). After all, an OS has to have some facilities to do that for its own audio stack. Do you know a similar method for C/C++ and Windows, that are either part of the OS or open source? I am pretty sure that this function exists within DirectX Audio (XAudio2?), but I seem to be unable to find a reference to it in the MSDN library.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Comparer&lt;T&gt;.Default

  - by James Michael Hare

  I’ve been working with a wonderful team on a major release where I work, which has had the side-effect of occupying most of my spare time preparing, testing, and monitoring.  However, I do have this Little Wonder tidbit to offer today. Introduction The IComparable<T> interface is great for implementing a natural order for a data type.  It’s a very simple interface with a single method: 1: public interface IComparer<in T> 2: { 3: // Compare two instances of same type. 4: int Compare(T x, T y); 5: }  So what do we expect for the integer return value?  It’s a pseudo-relative measure of the ordering of x and y, which returns an integer value in much the same way C++ returns an integer result from the strcmp() c-style string comparison function: If x == y, returns 0. If x > y, returns > 0 (often +1, but not guaranteed) If x < y, returns < 0 (often –1, but not guaranteed) Notice that the comparison operator used to evaluate against zero should be the same comparison operator you’d use as the comparison operator between x and y.  That is, if you want to see if x > y you’d see if the result > 0. The Problem: Comparing With null Can Be Messy This gets tricky though when you have null arguments.  According to the MSDN, a null value should be considered equal to a null value, and a null value should be less than a non-null value.  So taking this into account we’d expect this instead: If x == y (or both null), return 0. If x > y (or y only is null), return > 0. If x < y (or x only is null), return < 0. But here’s the problem – if x is null, what happens when we attempt to call CompareTo() off of x? 1: // what happens if x is null? 2: x.CompareTo(y); It’s pretty obvious we’ll get a NullReferenceException here.  Now, we could guard against this before calling CompareTo(): 1: int result; 2:  3: // first check to see if lhs is null. 4: if (x == null) 5: { 6: // if lhs null, check rhs to decide on return value. 7: if (y == null) 8: { 9: result = 0; 10: } 11: else 12: { 13: result = -1; 14: } 15: } 16: else 17: { 18: // CompareTo() should handle a null y correctly and return > 0 if so. 19: result = x.CompareTo(y); 20: } Of course, we could shorten this with the ternary operator (?:), but even then it’s ugly repetitive code: 1: int result = (x == null) 2: ? ((y == null) ? 0 : -1) 3: : x.CompareTo(y); Fortunately, the null issues can be cleaned up by drafting in an external Comparer.  The Soltuion: Comparer<T>.Default You can always develop your own instance of IComparer<T> for the job of comparing two items of the same type.  The nice thing about a IComparer is its is independent of the things you are comparing, so this makes it great for comparing in an alternative order to the natural order of items, or when one or both of the items may be null. 1: public class NullableIntComparer : IComparer<int?> 2: { 3: public int Compare(int? x, int? y) 4: { 5: return (x == null) 6: ? ((y == null) ? 0 : -1) 7: : x.Value.CompareTo(y); 8: } 9: }  Now, if you want a custom sort -- especially on large-grained objects with different possible sort fields -- this is the best option you have.  But if you just want to take advantage of the natural ordering of the type, there is an easier way.  If the type you want to compare already implements IComparable<T> or if the type is System.Nullable<T> where T implements IComparable, there is a class in the System.Collections.Generic namespace called Comparer<T> which exposes a property called Default that will create a singleton that represents the default comparer for items of that type.  For example: 1: // compares integers 2: var intComparer = Comparer<int>.Default; 3:  4: // compares DateTime values 5: var dateTimeComparer = Comparer<DateTime>.Default; 6:  7: // compares nullable doubles using the null rules! 8: var nullableDoubleComparer = Comparer<double?>.Default;  This helps you avoid having to remember the messy null logic and makes it to compare objects where you don’t know if one or more of the values is null. This works especially well when creating say an IComparer<T> implementation for a large-grained class that may or may not contain a field.  For example, let’s say you want to create a sorting comparer for a stock open price, but if the market the stock is trading in hasn’t opened yet, the open price will be null.  We could handle this (assuming a reasonable Quote definition) like: 1: public class Quote 2: { 3: // the opening price of the symbol quoted 4: public double? Open { get; set; } 5:  6: // ticker symbol 7: public string Symbol { get; set; } 8:  9: // etc. 10: } 11:  12: public class OpenPriceQuoteComparer : IComparer<Quote> 13: { 14: // Compares two quotes by opening price 15: public int Compare(Quote x, Quote y) 16: { 17: return Comparer<double?>.Default.Compare(x.Open, y.Open); 18: } 19: } Summary Defining a custom comparer is often needed for non-natural ordering or defining alternative orderings, but when you just want to compare two items that are IComparable<T> and account for null behavior, you can use the Comparer<T>.Default comparer generator and you’ll never have to worry about correct null value sorting again.     Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,IComparable,Comparer

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• Looking for a component (.NET or COM/ActiveX) that can play AVI files in a WinForms app

  - by MusiGenesis

  I'm looking for something like the Windows Media Player control that can be hosted on a form. The WMP doesn't work for me because I need a control that can play a continuously-appended playlist of AVI files in sequence, so that the transition from one file to the next happens seamlessly (i.e. without any glitches or pauses in the video and audio). With WMP, there's always a delay between files of half a second or so. Does anyone know of a control (it can be either commercial or open-source) that can do this? I assume anything like this wraps DirectX, and that's OK too.

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• Per-pixel displacement mapping GLSL

  - by Chris

  Im trying to implement a per-pixel displacement shader in GLSL. I read through several papers and "tutorials" I found and ended up with trying to implement the approach NVIDIA used in their Cascade Demo (http://www.slideshare.net/icastano/cascades-demo-secrets) starting at Slide 82. At the moment I am completly stuck with following problem: When I am far away the displacement seems to work. But as more I move closer to my surface, the texture gets bent in x-axis and somehow it looks like there is a little bent in general in one direction. EDIT: I added a video: click I added some screen to illustrate the problem: Well I tried lots of things already and I am starting to get a bit frustrated as my ideas run out. I added my full VS and FS code: VS: #version 400 layout(location = 0) in vec3 IN_VS_Position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 IN_VS_Normal; layout(location = 2) in vec2 IN_VS_Texcoord; layout(location = 3) in vec3 IN_VS_Tangent; layout(location = 4) in vec3 IN_VS_BiTangent; uniform vec3 uLightPos; uniform vec3 uCameraDirection; uniform mat4 uViewProjection; uniform mat4 uModel; uniform mat4 uView; uniform mat3 uNormalMatrix; out vec2 IN_FS_Texcoord; out vec3 IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent; out vec3 IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent; void main( void ) { IN_FS_Texcoord = IN_VS_Texcoord; vec4 posObject = uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Position, 1.0); vec3 normalObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Normal, 0.0)).xyz; vec3 tangentObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Tangent, 0.0)).xyz; //vec3 binormalObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_BiTangent, 0.0)).xyz; vec3 binormalObject = normalize(cross(tangentObject, normalObject)); // uCameraDirection is the camera position, just bad named vec3 fvViewDirection = normalize( uCameraDirection - posObject.xyz); vec3 fvLightDirection = normalize( uLightPos.xyz - posObject.xyz ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.x = dot( tangentObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.y = dot( binormalObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.z = dot( normalObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.x = dot( tangentObject, fvLightDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.y = dot( binormalObject, fvLightDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.z = dot( normalObject, fvLightDirection ); gl_Position = (uViewProjection*uModel) * vec4(IN_VS_Position, 1.0); } The VS just builds the TBN matrix, from incoming normal, tangent and binormal in world space. Calculates the light and eye direction in worldspace. And finally transforms the light and eye direction into tangent space. FS: #version 400 // uniforms uniform Light { vec4 fvDiffuse; vec4 fvAmbient; vec4 fvSpecular; }; uniform Material { vec4 diffuse; vec4 ambient; vec4 specular; vec4 emissive; float fSpecularPower; float shininessStrength; }; uniform sampler2D colorSampler; uniform sampler2D normalMapSampler; uniform sampler2D heightMapSampler; in vec2 IN_FS_Texcoord; in vec3 IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent; in vec3 IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent; out vec4 color; vec2 TraceRay(in float height, in vec2 coords, in vec3 dir, in float mipmap){ vec2 NewCoords = coords; vec2 dUV = - dir.xy * height * 0.08; float SearchHeight = 1.0; float prev_hits = 0.0; float hit_h = 0.0; for(int i=0;i<10;i++){ SearchHeight -= 0.1; NewCoords += dUV; float CurrentHeight = textureLod(heightMapSampler,NewCoords.xy, mipmap).r; float first_hit = clamp((CurrentHeight - SearchHeight - prev_hits) * 499999.0,0.0,1.0); hit_h += first_hit * SearchHeight; prev_hits += first_hit; } NewCoords = coords + dUV * (1.0-hit_h) * 10.0f - dUV; vec2 Temp = NewCoords; SearchHeight = hit_h+0.1; float Start = SearchHeight; dUV *= 0.2; prev_hits = 0.0; hit_h = 0.0; for(int i=0;i<5;i++){ SearchHeight -= 0.02; NewCoords += dUV; float CurrentHeight = textureLod(heightMapSampler,NewCoords.xy, mipmap).r; float first_hit = clamp((CurrentHeight - SearchHeight - prev_hits) * 499999.0,0.0,1.0); hit_h += first_hit * SearchHeight; prev_hits += first_hit; } NewCoords = Temp + dUV * (Start - hit_h) * 50.0f; return NewCoords; } void main( void ) { vec3 fvLightDirection = normalize( IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent ); vec3 fvViewDirection = normalize( IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent ); float mipmap = 0; vec2 NewCoord = TraceRay(0.1,IN_FS_Texcoord,fvViewDirection,mipmap); //vec2 ddx = dFdx(NewCoord); //vec2 ddy = dFdy(NewCoord); vec3 BumpMapNormal = textureLod(normalMapSampler, NewCoord.xy, mipmap).xyz; BumpMapNormal = normalize(2.0 * BumpMapNormal - vec3(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)); vec3 fvNormal = BumpMapNormal; float fNDotL = dot( fvNormal, fvLightDirection ); vec3 fvReflection = normalize( ( ( 2.0 * fvNormal ) * fNDotL ) - fvLightDirection ); float fRDotV = max( 0.0, dot( fvReflection, fvViewDirection ) ); vec4 fvBaseColor = textureLod( colorSampler, NewCoord.xy,mipmap); vec4 fvTotalAmbient = fvAmbient * fvBaseColor; vec4 fvTotalDiffuse = fvDiffuse * fNDotL * fvBaseColor; vec4 fvTotalSpecular = fvSpecular * ( pow( fRDotV, fSpecularPower ) ); color = ( fvTotalAmbient + (fvTotalDiffuse + fvTotalSpecular) ); } The FS implements the displacement technique in TraceRay method, while always using mipmap level 0. Most of the code is from NVIDIA sample and another paper I found on the web, so I guess there cannot be much wrong in here. At the end it uses the modified UV coords for getting the displaced normal from the normal map and the color from the color map. I looking forward for some ideas. Thanks in advance! Edit: Here is the code loading the heightmap: glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, mWidth, mHeight, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mImageData); glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_REPEAT); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_REPEAT); Maybe something wrong in here?

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• Delivering the Integrated Portal Experience!

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Guest post by Richard Maldonado, Principal Product Manager, Oracle WebCenter Portal Organizations are still struggling to standardize on a user interaction platform which can meet the needs of all their target audiences.  This has not only resulted in inefficient and inconsistent experiences for their users, but it also creates inefficiencies (productivity and costs) for the departments that manage the applications and information systems.  Portals have historically been the unifying platform that provide IT with a common interface which can securely surface the most relevant interactions for a given user and/or group of users.  However, organizations have found that the technologies available have either not provided the flexibility necessary to address all of their use cases, or they rely too much on IT resources to manage, maintain, and evolve.  Empowering  the Business Groups The core issue that IT departments face with delivering portal experiences is having enough resources to respond and address the influx of requirements which come in from the business.  Commonly, when a business group wants a new portal site established for their group, they will submit a request to the IT dept, the IT dept then assigns a resource to an administrator and/or developer to build.  Unfortunately, this approach is not scalable, it can be a time consuming activity which requires significant interaction between the business owner and the IT resource.  A modern user interaction platforms should empower the business groups by providing them tools which they can use to build and manage the portal experiences without the need for IT's involvement.  And because business groups rarely have technical resources (developers) on staff, the tools must be easy enough that virtually any business user could use.  In addition, the tool must be powerful enough to allow them to build the experience that they need, things such as creating a whole new portal, add/manage page and page hierarchy, manage user/group access, add/modify components within the page, etc.  This balance between ease-of-use and flexibility is key to the successful adoption of tools which will ultimately reduce the burden on IT, respond to the needs of the business, and deliver high-value experiences for the users.  Ready or Not, Here They Come: Smartphones and Tablets Recently, several studies have highlighted that smartphone and tablet-style devices have overtaken PC's in both sales and usage.  This shift is further driving organizations to revaluate how they're delivering data, information, and applications to their users.  Users are expecting to get the same level of access and interaction, but in a ways which are optimized for the capabilities of the device that they are using.  Expect More With the ever growing number of new IT projects and flat/shrinking budgets, organizations are looking for comprehensive solutions which can deliver integrated web experiences that are tailored for the users and optimized for mobile devices.  Piecing together a number of point solutions is no longer an option.  A modern portal technology should not only address the traditional needs of integrating and surfacing back-end applications/information, but it should enable the business through easy-to-use tools and accelerate the delivery of mobile optimized experiences.   v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} WebCenter in Action Series: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter Featuring Qualcomm & Keste 12.00 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:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast- mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center : Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other Content

  - by LeonShaner

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides numerous ways to deploy content, such as through OS Update Profiles, or as part of an OS Provisioning plan or combinations of those and other "Install Software" capabilities of Deployment Plans.  This short "how-to" blog will highlight an alternative way to deploy content using Operational Profiles. Usually we think of Operational Profiles as a way to execute a simple "one-time" script to perform a basic system administration function, which can optionally be based on user input; however, Operational Profiles can be much more powerful than that.  There is often more to performing an action than merely running a script -- sometimes configuration files, packages, binaries, and other scripts, etc. are needed to perform the action, and sometimes the user would like to leave such content on the system for later use. For shell scripts and other content written to be generic enough to work on any flavor of UNIX, converting the same scripts and configuration files into Solaris 10 SVR4 package, Solaris 11 IPS package, and/or a Linux RPM's might be seen as three times the work, for little appreciable gain.   That is where using an Operational Profile to deploy simple scripts and other generic content can be very helpful.  The approach is so powerful, that pretty much any kind of content can be deployed using an Operational Profile, provided the files involved are not overly large, and it is not necessary to convert the content into UNIX variant-specific formats. The basic formula for deploying content with an Operational Profile is as follows: Begin with a traditional script header, which is a UNIX shell script that will be responsible for decoding and extracting content, copying files into the right places, and executing any other scripts and commands needed to install and configure that content. Include steps to make the script platform-aware, to do the right thing for a given UNIX variant, or a "sorry" message if the operator has somehow tried to run the Operational Profile on a system where the script is not designed to run.  Ops Center can constrain execution by target type, so such checks at this level are an added safeguard, but also useful with the generic target type of "Operating System" where the admin wants the script to "do the right thing," whatever the UNIX variant. Include helpful output to show script progress, and any other informational messages that can help the admin determine what has gone wrong in the case of a problem in script execution.  Such messages will be shown in the job execution log. Include necessary "clean up" steps for normal and error exit conditions Set non-zero exit codes when appropriate -- a non-zero exit code will cause an Operational Profile job to be marked failed, which is the admin's cue to look into the job details for diagnostic messages in the output from the script. That first bullet deserves some explanation.  If Operational Profiles are usually simple "one-time" scripts and binary content is not allowed, then how does the actual content, packages, binaries, and other scripts get delivered along with the script?  More specifically, how does one include such content without needing to first create some kind of traditional package?   All that is required is to simply encode the content and append it to the end of the Operational Profile.  The header portion of the Operational Profile will need to contain the commands to decode the embedded content that has been appended to the bottom of the script.  The header code can do whatever else is needed, and finally clean up any intermediate files that were created during the decoding and extraction of the content. One way to encode binary and other content for inclusion in a script is to use the "uuencode" utility to convert the content into simple base64 ASCII text -- a form that is suitable to be appended to an Operational Profile.   The behavior of the "uudecode" utility is such that it will skip over any parts of the input that do not fit the uuencoded "begin" and "end" clauses.  For that reason, your header script will be skipped over, and uudecode will find your embedded content, that you will uuencode and paste at the end of the Operational Profile.  You can have as many "begin" / "end" clauses as you need -- just separate each embedded file by an empty line between "begin" and "end" clauses. Example:  Install SUNWsneep and set the system serial number Script:  deploySUNWsneep.sh ( <- right-click / save to download) Highlights: #!/bin/sh # Required variables: OC_SERIAL="$OC_SERIAL" # The user-supplied serial number for the asset ... Above is a good practice, showing right up front what kind of input the Operational Profile will require.   The right-hand side where $OC_SERIAL appears in this example will be filled in by Ops Center based on the user input at deployment time. The script goes on to restrict the use of the program to the intended OS type (Solaris 10 or older, in this example, but other content might be suitable for Solaris 11, or Linux -- it depends on the content and the script that will handle it). A temporary working directory is created, and then we have the command that decodes the embedded content from "self" which in scripting terms is $0 (a variable that expands to the name of the currently executing script): # Pass myself through uudecode, which will extract content to the current dir uudecode $0 At that point, whatever content was appended in uuencoded form at the end of the script has been written out to the current directory.  In this example that yields a file, SUNWsneep.7.0.zip, which the rest of the script proceeds to unzip, and pkgadd, followed by running "/opt/SUNWsneep/bin/sneep -s $OC_SERIAL" which is the command that stores the system serial for future use by other programs such as Explorer.   Don't get hung up on the example having used a pkgadd command.  The content started as a zip file and it could have been a tar.gz, or any other file.  This approach simply decodes the file.  The header portion of the script has to make sense of the file and do the right thing (e.g. it's up to you). The script goes on to clean up after itself, whether or not the above was successful.  Errors are echo'd by the script and a non-zero exit code is set where appropriate. Second to last, we have: # just in case, exit explicitly, so that uuencoded content will not cause error OPCleanUP exit # The rest of the script is ignored, except by uudecode # # UUencoded content follows # # e.g. for each file needed, #  $ uuencode -m {source} {source} > {target}.uu5 # then paste the {target}.uu5 files below # they will be extracted into the workding dir at $TDIR # The commentary above also describes how to encode the content. Finally we have the uuencoded content: begin-base64 444 SUNWsneep.7.0.zip UEsDBBQAAAAIAPsRy0Di3vnukAAAAMcAAAAKABUAcmVhZG1lLnR4dFVUCQADOqnVT7up ... VXgAAFBLBQYAAAAAAgACAJEAAADTNwEAAAA= ==== That last line of "====" is the base64 uuencode equivalent of a blank line, followed by "end" and as mentioned you can have as many begin/end clauses as you need.  Just separate each embedded file by a blank line after each ==== and before each begin-base64. Deploying the example Operational Profile looks like this (where I have pasted the system serial number into the required field): The job succeeded, but here is an example of the kind of diagnostic messages that the example script produces, and how Ops Center displays them in the job details: This same general approach could be used to deploy Explorer, and other useful utilities and scripts. Please let us know what you think?  Until next time...\Leon-- Leon Shaner | Senior IT/Product ArchitectSystems Management | Ops Center Engineering @ Oracle The views expressed on this [blog; Web site] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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• TGIF: Engagement Wrap-up

  - by Michael Snow

  We've had a very busy week here at Oracle and as we build up to Oracle OpenWorld starting in less than 10 days - it doesn't look like things will be slowing down. Engagement is definitely in the air this week. Our friend, John Mancini published a great article entitled: "The World of Engagement" on his Digital Landfill blog yesterday and we hosted a great webcast with R "Ray" Wang from Constellation Research yesterday on the "9 C's of Engagement". 12.00 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} I wanted to wrap-up the week with some key takeaways from our webcast yesterday with Ray Wang. If you missed the webcast yesterday, fear not - it is now available  On-Demand. We'll leave you this week with lots of questions about how to navigate these churning waters of engagement. Stay tuned to the Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series as we fuel this dialogue. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Company Culture Does company support a culture of putting customer satisfaction ahead of profits? Does culture promote creativity and cross functional employee collaboration? Does culture accept different views of multi-generational workforce? Does culture promote employee training and skills development Does culture support upward mobility and long term retention? Does culture support work-life balance? Does the culture provide rewards for employee for outstanding customer support? Channels What are the current primary channels for customer communications? What do you think will be the primary channels in two years? Is company developing support model for emerging channels? Do all channels consistently deliver the same level of customer support? Do you know the cost per transaction across all channels? Do you engage customers proactively across multiple channels? Do all channels have access to the same customer information? Community Does company extend customer support into virtual communities of interest? Does company facilitate educating users through its virtual communities? Does company mine its customer’s experience into useful data? Does company increase the value for customers through using data to deliver new products and services? Does company support two way interactions with its customers through communities of interest? Does company actively support social CRM, online communities and social media markets? Credibility Does company market its trustworthiness through external certificates such as business licenses, BBB certificates or other validations? Does company promote trust through customer testimonials and case studies on ethical business practices? Does company promote truthful market campaigns Does company make it easy for customers to complain? Does company build its reputation for standing behind its products with guarantees for satisfaction? Does company protect its customer data with high security measures> Content What sources do you use to create customer content? Does company mine social media and blogs for customer content? How does your company sort, store and retain its customer content? How frequently does content get updated? What external sources do you use for customer content? How many responses are typically received from a knowledge management system inquiry? Does your company use customer content to design and develop new product and services? Context Does your company market to customers in clusters or individually? Does your company customize its messages and personalize them to specific needs of each individual customer? Does your company store customer data based on their past behaviors, purchases, sentiment analysis and current activities? Does your company manage customer context according to channels used? For example identify personal use channels versus business channels? What is your frequency of collecting customer activities across various touch points? How is your customer data stored and analyzed? Is contextual data used for future customer outreach? Cadence Which channels does your company measure-web site visits, phone calls, IVR, store visits, face to face, social media? Does company make effective use of cross channel marketing to promote more frequent customer engagement? Does your company rate the patterns relevant for your product or service and monitor usage against this pattern? Does your company measure the frequency of both online and offline channels? Does your company apply metrics to the frequency of customer engagements with product or services revenues? Does your company consolidate data for customer engagement across various channels for a complete view of its customer? Catalyst Does company offer coupon discounts? Does company have a customer loyalty program or a VIP membership program? Does company mine customer data to target specific groups of buyers? Do internal employees serve as ambassadors for customer programs? Does company drive loyalty through social media loyalty programs? Does company build rewards based on using loyalty data? Does company offer an employee incentive program to drive customer loyalty?

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• It was a figure of speech!

  - by Ratman21

  Yesterday I posted the following as attention getter / advertisement (as well as my feelings). In the groups, (I am in) on the social networking site, LinkedIn and boy did I get responses.    I am fighting mad about (a figure of speech, really) not having a job! Look just because I am over 55 and have gray hair. It does not mean, my brain is dead or I can no longer trouble shoot a router or circuit or LAN issue. Or that I can do “IT” work at all. And I could prove this if; some one would give me at job. Come on try me for 90 days at min. wage. I know you will end up keeping me (hope fully at normal pay) around. Is any one hearing me…come on take up the challenge!     This was the responses I got.   I hear you. We just need to retrain and get our skills up to speed is all. That is what I am doing. I have not given up. Just got to stay on top of the game. Experience is on our side if we have the credentials and we are reasonable about our salaries this should not be an issue.   Already on it, going back to school and have got three certifications (CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+. I am now studying for my CISCO CCNA certification. As to my salary, I am willing to work at very reasonable rate.   You need to re-brand yourself like a product, market and sell yourself. You need to smarten up, look and feel a million dollars, re-energize yourself, regain your confidents. Either start your own business, or re-write your CV so it stands out from the rest, get the template off the internet. Contact every recruitment agent in your town, state, country and overseas, and on the web. Apply to every job you think you could do, you may not get it but you will make a contact for your network, which may lead to a job at the end of the tunnel. Get in touch with everyone you know from past jobs. Do charity work. I maintain the IT Network, stage electrical and the Telecom equipment in my church,   Again already on it. I have email the world is seems with my resume and cover letters. So far, I have rewritten or had it rewrote, my resume and cover letters; over seven times so far. Re-energize? I never lost my energy level or my self-confidents in my work (now if could get some HR personal to see the same). I also volunteer at my church, I created and maintain the church web sit.   I share your frustration. Sucks being over 50 and looking for work. Please don't sell yourself short at min wage because the employer will think that’s your worth. Keep trying!!   I never stop trying and min wage is only for 90 days. If some one takes up the challenge. Some post asked if I am keeping up technology.   Do you keep up with the latest technology and can speak the language fluidly?   Yep to that and as to speaking it also a yep! I am a geek you know. I heard from others over the 50 year mark and younger too.   I'm with you! I keep getting told that I don't have enough experience because I just recently completed a Masters level course in Microsoft SQL Server, which gave me a project-intensive equivalent of between 2 and 3 years of experience. On top of that training, I have 19 years as an applications programmer and database administrator. I can normalize rings around experienced DBAs and churn out effective code with the best of them. But my 19 years is worthless as far as most recruiters and HR people are concerned because it is not the specific experience for which they're looking. HR AND RECRUITERS TAKE NOTE: Experience, whatever the language, translates across platforms and technology! By the way, I'm also over 55 and still have "got it"!   I never lost it and I also can work rings round younger techs.   I'm 52 and female and seem to be having the same issues. I have over 10 years experience in tech support (with a BS in CIS) and can't get hired either.   Ow, I only have an AS in computer science along with my certifications.   Keep the faith, I have been unemployed since August of 2008. I agree with you...I am willing to return to the beginning of my retail career and work myself back through the ranks, if someone will look past the grey and realize the knowledge I would bring to the table.   I also would like some one to look past the gray.   Interesting approach, volunteering to work for minimum wage for 90 days. I'm in the same situation as you, being 55 & balding w/white hair, so I know where you're coming from. I've been out of work now for a year. I'm in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is estimated to be 15% (the worst in the nation) & even though I've got 30+ years of IT experience ranging from mainframe to PC desktop support, it's difficult to even get a face-to-face interview. I had one prospective employer tell me flat out that I "didn't have the energy required for this position". Mostly I never get any feedback. All I can say is good luck & try to remain optimistic.   He said WHAT! Yes remaining optimistic is key. Along with faith in God. Then there was this (for lack of better word) jerk.   Give it up already. You were too old to work in high tech 10 years ago. Scratch that, 20 years ago! Try selling hot dogs in front of Fry's Electronics. At least you would get a chance to eat lunch with your previous colleagues....   You know funny thing on this person is that I checked out his profile. He is older than I am.

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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