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• College Courses through distance learning

  - by Matt

  I realize this isn't really a programming question, but didn't really know where to post this in the stackexchange and because I am a computer science major i thought id ask here. This is pretty unique to the programmer community since my degree is about 95% programming. I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can. So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for. Class I need: Only need one C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms C SC 445 Algorithms C SC 473 Automata Only need one C SC 452 Operating Systems C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category. Some other classes I can take are: CSC 447 - Green Computing CSC 425 - Computer Networking CSC 460 - Database Design CSC 466 - Computer Security I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need. Thanks! Descriptions Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security. Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast. Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications. Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers. Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers. Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems. Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound). Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages). Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases.

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• How to label a cuboid?

  - by usha

  Hi this is how my 3dcuboid looks, I have attached the complete code. I want to label this cuboid using different names across sides, how is this possible using opengl on android? public class MyGLRenderer implements Renderer { Context context; Cuboid rect; private float mCubeRotation; // private static float angleCube = 0; // Rotational angle in degree for cube (NEW) // private static float speedCube = -1.5f; // Rotational speed for cube (NEW) public MyGLRenderer(Context context) { rect = new Cuboid(); this.context = context; } public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset the model-view matrix gl.glTranslatef(0.2f, 0.0f, -8.0f); // Translate right and into the screen gl.glScalef(0.8f, 0.8f, 0.8f); // Scale down (NEW) gl.glRotatef(mCubeRotation, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // gl.glRotatef(angleCube, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // rotate about the axis (1,1,1) (NEW) rect.draw(gl); mCubeRotation -= 0.15f; //angleCube += speedCube; } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub if (height == 0) height = 1; // To prevent divide by zero float aspect = (float)width / height; // Set the viewport (display area) to cover the entire window gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); // Setup perspective projection, with aspect ratio matches viewport gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION); // Select projection matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset projection matrix // Use perspective projection GLU.gluPerspective(gl, 45, aspect, 0.1f, 100.f); gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_MODELVIEW); // Select model-view matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset } public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); // Set color's clear-value to black gl.glClearDepthf(1.0f); // Set depth's clear-value to farthest gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enables depth-buffer for hidden surface removal gl.glDepthFunc(GL10.GL_LEQUAL); // The type of depth testing to do gl.glHint(GL10.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL10.GL_NICEST); // nice perspective view gl.glShadeModel(GL10.GL_SMOOTH); // Enable smooth shading of color gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_DITHER); // Disable dithering for better performance }} public class Cuboid{ private FloatBuffer mVertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer mColorBuffer; private ByteBuffer mIndexBuffer; private float vertices[] = { //width,height,depth -2.5f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private float colors[] = { // R,G,B,A COLOR 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private byte indices[] = { // VERTEX 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 REPRESENTATION FOR FACES 0, 4, 5, 0, 5, 1, 1, 5, 6, 1, 6, 2, 2, 6, 7, 2, 7, 3, 3, 7, 4, 3, 4, 0, 4, 7, 6, 4, 6, 5, 3, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2 }; public Cuboid() { ByteBuffer byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mVertexBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mVertexBuffer.put(vertices); mVertexBuffer.position(0); byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(colors.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mColorBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mColorBuffer.put(colors); mColorBuffer.position(0); mIndexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); mIndexBuffer.put(indices); mIndexBuffer.position(0); } public void draw(GL10 gl) { gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mVertexBuffer); gl.glColorPointer(4, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mColorBuffer); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mIndexBuffer); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); } } public class Draw3drect extends Activity { private GLSurfaceView glView; // Use GLSurfaceView // Call back when the activity is started, to initialize the view @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); glView = new GLSurfaceView(this); // Allocate a GLSurfaceView glView.setRenderer(new MyGLRenderer(this)); // Use a custom renderer this.setContentView(glView); // This activity sets to GLSurfaceView } // Call back when the activity is going into the background @Override protected void onPause() { super.onPause(); glView.onPause(); } // Call back after onPause() @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); glView.onResume(); } }

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• Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk – Q&A and Follow-Up Conversation

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live ISACA webcast on Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk with Metrics-Driven Identity Analytics. We were really fortunate to have Don Sparks from ISACA moderate the webcast featuring Stuart Lincoln, Vice President, IT P&L Client Services, BNP Paribas, North America and Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics. Stuart’s insights given the team’s role in providing IT for P&L Client Services and his tremendous experience in identity management and establishing sustainable compliance programs were true value-add at yesterday’s webcast. And if you are a healthcare organization looking to solve your compliance and security challenges, we recommend you join us for a live webcast on Tuesday, November 29 at 10 am PT. The webcast will feature experts from Kaiser Permanente, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Oracle and the focus of the discussion will be around the compliance challenges a healthcare organization faces and best practices for tackling those. Here are the details: Healthcare IT News Webcast: Managing Risk and Enforcing Compliance in Healthcare with Identity Analytics Tuesday, November 29, 201110:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET Register Today The ISACA webcast replay is now available on-demand and the slides are also available for download. Since we didn’t have time to address all the questions we received during the live Q&A portion of the webcast, we have captured responses to the remaining questions here. Please continue to provide us your feedback and insights from your experience in deploying identity compliance solutions. Q. Can you please clarify the mechanism utilized to populate the Identity Warehouse from each individual application's access management function / files? A. Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) supports direct imports from applications. Data collection is based on Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) that eliminates the need to write connectors to different applications. Oracle Identity Analytics’ import engine supports complex entitlement feeds saved as either text files or XML. The imports can be scheduled on a periodic basis or triggered as needed. If the applications are synchronized with a user provisioning solution like Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics has a seamless integration to pull in data from Oracle Identity Manager. Q.  Can you provide a short summary of the new features in your latest release of Oracle Identity Analytics? A. Oracle recently announced availability of enhanced Oracle Identity Analytics. This release focused on easing the certification process by offering risk analytics driven certification, advanced certification screens, business centric views and significant improvement in performance including 3X faster data imports, 3X faster certification campaign generation and advanced auto-certification features, that  will allow organizations to improve user productivity by up to 80%. Closed-loop risk feedback and IT policy monitoring with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows for more accurate certification reviews. And, OIA's improved performance enables customers to scale compliance initiatives supporting millions of user entitlements across thousands of applications, whether on premise or in the cloud, without compromising speed or integrity. Q. Will ISACA grant a CPE credit for attending this ISACA-sponsored webinar today? A. From ISACA: Hello and thank you for your interest in the 2011 ISACA Webinar Program!  Unfortunately, there are no CPEs offered for this program, archived or live.  We will be looking into the feasibility of offering them in the future.  Q. Would you be able to use this to help manage licenses for software? That is to say - could it track software that is not used by a user, thus eliminating the software license? A. OIA’s integration with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows organizations to detect ghost accounts or unused accounts via account reconciliation. Based on company’s policies, this could trigger an automated workflow for account deletion or asking for further investigation. Closed-loop feedback between the two solutions would then allow visibility into the complete audit trail of when the account was detected, the action taken, by whom, when and the current status. Q. We have quarterly attestations and .xls mechanisms are not working. Once the identity data is correlated in Identity Analytics, do you then automate access certification? A. OIA’s identity warehouse analyzes and correlates identity data across various resources that allows OIA to determine a user’s risk profile, who the access review request should go to, along with all the relevant access details of the user. The access certification manager gets notification on what to review, when and the relevant data is presented in a business friendly screen. Based on the result of the access certification process, actions are triggered and results recorded and archived. Access review managers have visual risk indicators that also allow them to prioritize access certification tasks and efforts. Q. How does Oracle Identity Analytics work with Cloud Security? A. For enterprises looking to build their own cloud(s), Oracle offers a set of security services that cloud developers can leverage including Oracle Identity Analytics.  For enterprises looking to manage their compliance requirements but without hosting those in-house and instead having a hosting provider offer managed Identity Management services to the organizations, Oracle Identity Analytics can be leveraged much the same way as you’d in an on-premise (within the enterprise) environment. In fact, organizations today are leveraging Oracle Identity Analytics to manage identity compliance in both these ways. Q. Would you recommend this as a cost effective solution for a smaller organization with @ 2,500 users? A. The key return-on-investment (ROI) on Oracle Identity Analytics is derived from automating compliance processes thereby eliminating administrative overhead, minimizing errors, maintaining cost- and time-effective sustainable compliance processes and minimizing audit exposures and penalties.  Of course, there are other tangible benefits that are derived from an Oracle Identity Analytics implementation as outlined in the webcast. For a quantitative analysis of your requirements and potential ROI calculation, we recommend you refer to the Forrester Study on Total Economic Impact of Oracle Identity Analytics. For an in-person discussion, please email Richard Caldwell.

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• OpenSSL Versions in Solaris

  - by darrenm

  Those of you have have installed Solaris 11 or have read some of the blogs by my colleagues will have noticed Solaris 11 includes OpenSSL 1.0.0, this is a different version to what we have in Solaris 10.  I hope the following explains why that is and how it fits with the expectations on binary compatibility between Solaris releases. Solaris 10 was the first release where we included OpenSSL libraries and headers (part of it was actually statically linked into the SSH client/server in Solaris 9).  At time we were building and releasing Solaris 10 the current train of OpenSSL was 0.9.7.  The OpenSSL libraries at that time were known to not always be completely API and ABI (binary) compatible between releases (some times even in the lettered patch releases) though mostly if you stuck with the documented high level APIs you would be fine.   For this reason OpenSSL was classified as a 'Volatile' interface and in Solaris 10 Volatile interfaces were not part of the default library search path which is why the OpenSSL libraries live in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 10.  Okay, but what does Volatile mean ? Quoting from the attributes(5) man page description of Volatile (which was called External in older taxonomy): Volatile interfaces can change at any time and for any reason. The Volatile interface stability level allows Sun pro- ducts to quickly track a fluid, rapidly evolving specif- ication. In many cases, this is preferred to providing additional stability to the interface, as it may better meet the expectations of the consumer. The most common application of this taxonomy level is to interfaces that are controlled by a body other than Sun, but unlike specifications controlled by standards bodies or Free or Open Source Software (FOSS) communities which value interface compatibility, it can not be asserted that an incompatible change to the interface specifica- tion would be exceedingly rare. It may also be applied to FOSS controlled software where it is deemed more important to track the community with minimal latency than to provide stability to our customers. It also common to apply the Volatile classification level to interfaces in the process of being defined by trusted or widely accepted organization. These are generically referred to as draft standards. An "IETF Internet draft" is a well understood example of a specification under development. Volatile can also be applied to experimental interfaces. No assertion is made regarding either source or binary compatibility of Volatile interfaces between any two releases, including patches. Applications containing these interfaces might fail to function properly in any future release. Note that last paragraph!  OpenSSL is only one example of the many interfaces in Solaris that are classified as Volatile.  At the other end of the scale we have Committed (Stable in Solaris 10 terminology) interfaces, these include things like the POSIX APIs or Solaris specific APIs that we have no intention of changing in an incompatible way.  There are also Private interfaces and things we declare as Not-an-Interface (eg command output not intended for scripting against only to be read by humans). Even if we had declared OpenSSL as a Committed/Stable interface in Solaris 10 there are allowed exceptions, again quoting from attributes(5): 4. An interface specification which isn't controlled by Sun has been changed incompatibly and the vast majority of interface consumers expect the newer interface. 5. Not making the incompatible change would be incomprehensible to our customers. In our opinion and that of our large and small customers keeping up with the OpenSSL community is important, and certainly both of the above cases apply. Our policy for dealing with OpenSSL on Solaris 10 was to stay at 0.9.7 and add fixes for security vulnerabilities (the version string includes the CVE numbers of fixed vulnerabilities relevant to that release train).  The last release of OpenSSL 0.9.7 delivered by the upstream community was more than 4 years ago in Feb 2007. Now lets roll forward to just before the release of Solaris 11 Express in 2010. By that point in time the current OpenSSL release was 0.9.8 with the 1.0.0 release known to be coming soon.  Two significant changes to OpenSSL were made between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Express.  First in Solaris 11 Express (and Solaris 11) we removed the requirement that Volatile libraries be placed in /usr/sfw/lib, that means OpenSSL is now in /usr/lib, secondly we upgraded it to the then current version stream of OpenSSL (0.9.8) as was expected by our customers. In between Solaris 11 Express in 2010 and the release of Solaris 11 in 2011 the OpenSSL community released version 1.0.0.  This was a huge milestone for a long standing and highly respected open source project.  It would have been highly negligent of Solaris not to include OpenSSL 1.0.0e in the Solaris 11 release. It is the latest best supported and best performing version.     In fact Solaris 11 isn't 'just' OpenSSL 1.0.0 but we have added our SPARC T4 engine and the AES-NI engine to support the on chip crypto acceleration. This gives us 4.3x better AES performance than OpenSSL 0.9.8 running on AIX on an IBM POWER7. We are now working with the OpenSSL community to determine how best to integrate the SPARC T4 changes into the mainline OpenSSL.  The OpenSSL 'pkcs11' engine we delivered in Solaris 10 to support the CA-6000 card and the SPARC T1/T2/T3 hardware is still included in Solaris 11. When OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 come out we will asses what is best for Solaris customers. It might be upgrade or it might be parallel delivery of more than one version stream.  At this time Solaris 11 still classifies OpenSSL as a Volatile interface, it is our hope that we will be able at some point in a future release to give it a higher interface stability level. Happy crypting! and thank-you OpenSSL community for all the work you have done that helps Solaris.

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• The JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, stated that they were going to do things a bit differently--"rather than 20 minutes of SE, and 20 minutes of FX, and 20 minutes of EE, we're going to mix it up a little," he said. "For much of it, we're going to be showing a single application, to show off some of the great work that's been done in the last year, and how Java can scale well--from the cloud all the way down to some very small embedded devices, and how JavaFX scales right along with it."Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the JavaFX team demonstrated a JavaOne schedule builder application with impressive navigation, animation, pop-overs, and transitions. They noted that the application runs seamlessly on either Windows or Macs, running Java 7. They then ran the same application on an Ubuntu Linux machine--"it just works," said Blair.The JavaFX duo next put the recently released JavaFX Scene Builder through its paces -- dragging and dropping various image assets to build the application's UI, then fine tuning a CSS file for the finished look and feel. Among many other new features, in the past six months, JavaFX has released support for H.264 and HTTP live streaming, "so you can get all the real media playing inside your JavaFX application," said Bair. And in their developer preview builds of JavaFX 8, they've now split the rendering thread from the UI thread, to better take advantage of multi-core architectures.Next, Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explored language and library features planned for Java SE 8, including Lambda expressions and better parallel libraries. These feature changes both simplify code and free-up libraries to more effectively use parallelism. "It's currently still a lot of work to convert an application from serial to parallel," noted Goetz.Reinhold had previously boasted of Java scaling down to "small embedded devices," so Blair and Potts next ran their schedule builder application on a small embedded PandaBoard system with an OMAP4 chip set. Connected to a touch screen, the embedded board ran the same JavaFX application previously seen on the desktop systems, but now running on Java SE Embedded. (The systems can be seen and tried at four of the nearby JavaOne hotels.) Bob Vandette, Java Embedded Architect, then displayed a $25 Rasberry Pi ARM-based system running Java SE Embedded, noting the even greater need for the platform independence of Java in such highly varied embedded processor spaces. Reinhold and Vandetta discussed Project Jigsaw, the planned modularization of the Java SE platform, and its deferral from the Java 8 release to Java 9. Reinhold demonstrated the promise of Jigsaw by running a modularized demo version of the earlier schedule builder application on the resource constrained Rasberry Pi system--although the demo gods were not smiling down, and the application ultimately crashed.Reinhold urged developers to become involved in the Java 8 development process--getting the weekly builds, trying out their current code, and trying out the new features:http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/spechttp://jdk8.java.netFrom there, Arun Gupta explored Java EE. The primary themes of Java EE 7, Gupta stated, will be greater productivity, and HTML 5 functionality (WebSocket, JSON, and HTML 5 forms). Part of the planned productivity increase of the release will come from a reduction in writing boilerplate code--through the widespread use of dependency injection in the platform, along with default data sources and default connection factories. Gupta noted the inclusion of JAX-RS in the web profile, the changes and improvements found in JMS 2.0, as well as enhancements to Java EE 7 in terms of JPA 2.1 and EJB 3.2. GlassFish 4 is the reference implementation of Java EE 7, and currently includes WebSocket, JSON, JAX-RS 2.0, JMS 2.0, and more. The final release is targeted for Q2, 2013. Looking forward to Java EE 8, Gupta explored how the platform will provide multi-tenancy for applications, modularity based on Jigsaw, and cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Project Avatar is the group's incubator project for designing an end-to-end framework for building HTML 5 applications. Santiago Pericas-Geertsen joined Gupta to demonstrate their "Angry Bids" auction/live-bid/chat application using many of the enhancements of Java EE 7, along with an Avatar HTML 5 infrastructure, and running on the GlassFish reference implementation.Finally, Gupta covered Project Easel, an advanced tooling capability in NetBeans for HTML5. John Ceccarelli, NetBeans Engineering Director, joined Gupta to demonstrate creating an HTML 5 project from within NetBeans--formatting the project for both desktop and smartphone implementations. Ceccarelli noted that NetBeans 7.3 beta will be released later this week, and will include support for creating such HTML 5 project types. Gupta directed conference attendees to: http://glassfish.org/javaone2012 for everything about Java EE and GlassFish at JavaOne 2012.

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• Extending Database-as-a-Service to Provision Databases with Application Data

  - by Nilesh A

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Database as a Service (DBaaS) empowers Self Service/SSA Users to rapidly spawn databases on demand in cloud. The configuration and structure of provisioned databases depends on respective service template selected by Self Service user while requesting for database. In EM12c, the DBaaS Self Service/SSA Administrator has the option of hosting various service templates in service catalog and based on underlying DBCA templates.Many times provisioned databases require production scale data either for UAT, testing or development purpose and managing DBCA templates with data can be unwieldy. So, we need to populate the database using post deployment script option and without any additional work for the SSA Users. The SSA Administrator can automate this task in few easy steps. For details on how to setup DBaaS Self Service Portal refer to the DBaaS CookbookIn this article, I will list steps required to enable EM 12c DBaaS to provision databases with application data in two distinct ways using: 1) Data pump 2) Transportable tablespaces (TTS). The steps listed below are just examples of how to extend EM 12c DBaaS and you can even have your own method plugged in part of post deployment script option. Using Data Pump to populate databases These are the steps to be followed to implement extending DBaaS using Data Pump methodolgy: Production DBA should run data pump export on the production database and make the dump file available to all the servers participating in the database zone [sample shown in Fig.1] -- Full exportexpdp FULL=y DUMPFILE=data_pump_dir:dpfull1%U.dmp, data_pump_dir:dpfull2%U.dmp PARALLEL=4 LOGFILE=data_pump_dir:dpexpfull.log JOB_NAME=dpexpfull Figure-1:  Full export of database using data pump Create a post deployment SQL script [sample shown in Fig. 2] and this script can either be uploaded into the software library by SSA Administrator or made available on a shared location accessible from servers where databases are likely to be provisioned Normal 0 -- Full importdeclare    h1   NUMBER;begin-- Creating the directory object where source database dump is backed up.    execute immediate 'create directory DEST_LOC as''/scratch/nagrawal/OracleHomes/oradata/INITCHNG/datafile''';-- Running import    h1 := dbms_datapump.open (operation => 'IMPORT', job_mode => 'FULL', job_name => 'DB_IMPORT10');    dbms_datapump.set_parallel(handle => h1, degree => 1);    dbms_datapump.add_file(handle => h1, filename => 'IMP_GRIDDB_FULL.LOG', directory => 'DATA_PUMP_DIR', filetype => 3);    dbms_datapump.add_file(handle => h1, filename => 'EXP_GRIDDB_FULL_%U.DMP', directory => 'DEST_LOC', filetype => 1);    dbms_datapump.start_job(handle => h1);    dbms_datapump.detach(handle => h1);end;/ Figure-2: Importing using data pump pl/sql procedures Using DBCA, create a template for the production database – include all the init.ora parameters, tablespaces, datafiles & their sizes SSA Administrator should customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” and provide DBCA template created in the previous step. In “Additional Configuration Options” step of Customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” flow, provide the name of the SQL script in the Custom Script section and lock the input (shown in Fig. 3). Continue saving the deployment procedure. Figure-3: Using Custom script option for calling Import SQL Now, an SSA user can login to Self Service Portal and use the flow to provision a database that will also  populate the data using the post deployment step. Using Transportable tablespaces to populate databases Copy of all user/application tablespaces will enable this method of populating databases. These are the required steps to extend DBaaS using transportable tablespaces: Production DBA needs to create a backup of tablespaces. Datafiles may need conversion [such as from Big Endian to Little Endian or vice versa] based on the platform of production and destination where DBaaS created the test database. Here is sample backup script shows how to find out if any conversion is required, describes the steps required to convert datafiles and backup tablespace. SSA Administrator should copy the database (tablespaces) backup datafiles and export dumps to the backup location accessible from the hosts participating in the database zone(s). Create a post deployment SQL script and this script can either be uploaded into the software library by SSA Administrator or made available on a shared location accessible from servers where databases are likely to be provisioned. Here is sample post deployment SQL script using transportable tablespaces. Using DBCA, create a template for the production database – all the init.ora parameters should be included. NOTE: DO NOT choose to bring tablespace data into this template as they will be created SSA Administrator should customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” and provide DBCA template created in the previous step. In the “Additional Configuration Options” step of the flow, provide the name of the SQL script in the Custom Script section and lock the input. Continue saving the deployment procedure. Now, an SSA user can login to Self Service Portal and use the flow to provision a database that will also populate the data using the post deployment step. More Information: Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Agile Development Requires Agile Support

  - by Matt Watson

  Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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• Financial Management: Why Move to the Cloud?

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Terrance Wampler, Vice President, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle I’ve spent my career designing and developing financial management systems, most of it at Oracle. Every single day I either meet with our customers or talk to them on the phone. The time is usually spent discussing various business challenges facing CFOs and Controllers, who are running Oracle’s Financials. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about cloud computing and whether it makes sense for finance to go to the cloud. Here are some pros and cons that might help you make that decision. Let’s start with the benefits of cloud solutions. The first is savings. With cloud services, you pay only for those commodities that you use. That makes you feel like you're getting better value for your money. Plus, you can preserve your cash for your core business and you can get a better matching of expenses and revenues. So, at the top of the list is lower total cost of ownership. The second point has to do with optimization. With cloud services, you’ll need less IT infrastructure so you can optimize your IT resources for better-value, higher-end projects. This also leads to greater financial visibility, where there's a clear cost for the set of services or features replaced by cloud services. And, the last benefit is what I call acceleration. You can save money by speeding up the initialization and deployment of the project. You don't have to deal with IT infrastructure and you can start implementing right away. We did a quick survey of about 70 CFOs at the CFO Summit last month in New York City. We asked them why they were looking at cloud services, and not necessarily just for financials. The No. 1 response was perceived lower cost of ownership. But of course there are risks to consider. The first thing most people think about in the cloud is security and ownership of data. So, will your data really be safe? Can you meet your own privacy policy requirements? Do you really want your private financial data exposed? Do you trust the provider? Is what you see really your data? Do you own it or is it managed by someone else? Security is a big concern that comes with an emotional component. The next thing in the risk category is reliability. Is the provider proven? You’re taking what you have control over – for example, standards and policies and internal service level agreements – away from your IT department and giving it to someone else. Will you still be able to adapt to shifts in your business? Will the provider be able to grow with your business effectively? Reliability means having a provider that can give you the service infrastructure that you need. And then there’s performance, which has two components in terms of risk. Going forward, will the provider be able to scale the infrastructure or service level if you have new employees or new businesses? And second, will the price you negotiate and the rate you lock in cover additional costs and rising service fees? Another piece is cost. What happens if you don't get the service level you want? What if you end the service? What happens, if after a few years, you send the service out for bid and change service? Can you move your data? Can you move the applications? Do the integrations work? These are cost components people don’t always take into account. And, the final piece is the business case. The perception is that you can get started really quickly with cloud. It has a perceived lower cost of total ownership and it feels cool because it's cloud. But do you have a good business case for moving to the cloud? Your total cost of ownership is over three years; then you’ll renew it, so your TCO is six years. Have you compared that to other internal services that you’re offering? You might already have product that you can run this new business or division on. In that same survey at the CFO Summit, the execs thought the biggest perceived risks were security of data, ability to move data back, and the ability to create a business case to actually justify the risks. So that’s the list of pros and cons. Not to leave you hanging, I will do another post on how to balance these pros and cons and make the right decision for your business.

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• Polite busy-waiting with WRPAUSE on SPARC

  - by Dave

  Unbounded busy-waiting is an poor idea for user-space code, so we typically use spin-then-block strategies when, say, waiting for a lock to be released or some other event. If we're going to spin, even briefly, then we'd prefer to do so in a manner that minimizes performance degradation for other sibling logical processors ("strands") that share compute resources. We want to spin politely and refrain from impeding the progress and performance of other threads — ostensibly doing useful work and making progress — that run on the same core. On a SPARC T4, for instance, 8 strands will share a core, and that core has its own L1 cache and 2 pipelines. On x86 we have the PAUSE instruction, which, naively, can be thought of as a hardware "yield" operator which temporarily surrenders compute resources to threads on sibling strands. Of course this helps avoid intra-core performance interference. On the SPARC T2 our preferred busy-waiting idiom was "RD %CCR,%G0" which is a high-latency no-nop. The T4 provides a dedicated and extremely useful WRPAUSE instruction. The processor architecture manuals are the authoritative source, but briefly, WRPAUSE writes a cycle count into the the PAUSE register, which is ASR27. Barring interrupts, the processor then delays for the requested period. There's no need for the operating system to save the PAUSE register over context switches as it always resets to 0 on traps. Digressing briefly, if you use unbounded spinning then ultimately the kernel will preempt and deschedule your thread if there are other ready threads than are starving. But by using a spin-then-block strategy we can allow other ready threads to run without resorting to involuntary time-slicing, which operates on a long-ish time scale. Generally, that makes your application more responsive. In addition, by blocking voluntarily we give the operating system far more latitude regarding power management. Finally, I should note that while we have OS-level facilities like sched_yield() at our disposal, yielding almost never does what you'd want or naively expect. Returning to WRPAUSE, it's natural to ask how well it works. To help answer that question I wrote a very simple C/pthreads benchmark that launches 8 concurrent threads and binds those threads to processors 0..7. The processors are numbered geographically on the T4, so those threads will all be running on just one core. Unlike the SPARC T2, where logical CPUs 0,1,2 and 3 were assigned to the first pipeline, and CPUs 4,5,6 and 7 were assigned to the 2nd, there's no fixed mapping between CPUs and pipelines in the T4. And in some circumstances when the other 7 logical processors are idling quietly, it's possible for the remaining logical processor to leverage both pipelines. Some number T of the threads will iterate in a tight loop advancing a simple Marsaglia xor-shift pseudo-random number generator. T is a command-line argument. The main thread loops, reporting the aggregate number of PRNG steps performed collectively by those T threads in the last 10 second measurement interval. The other threads (there are 8-T of these) run in a loop busy-waiting concurrently with the T threads. We vary T between 1 and 8 threads, and report on various busy-waiting idioms. The values in the table are the aggregate number of PRNG steps completed by the set of T threads. The unit is millions of iterations per 10 seconds. For the "PRNG step" busy-waiting mode, the busy-waiting threads execute exactly the same code as the T worker threads. We can easily compute the average rate of progress for individual worker threads by dividing the aggregate score by the number of worker threads T. I should note that the PRNG steps are extremely cycle-heavy and access almost no memory, so arguably this microbenchmark is not as representative of "normal" code as it could be. And for the purposes of comparison I included a row in the table that reflects a waiting policy where the waiting threads call poll(NULL,0,1000) and block in the kernel. Obviously this isn't busy-waiting, but the data is interesting for reference. _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } _td { border: 1px green solid; } _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } Aggregate progress T = #worker threads Wait Mechanism for 8-T threadsT=1T=2T=3T=4T=5T=6T=7T=8 Park thread in poll() 32653347334833483348334833483348 no-op 415 831 124316482060249729303349 RD %ccr,%g0 "pause" 14262429269228623013316232553349 PRNG step 412 829 124616702092251029303348 WRPause(8000) 32443361333133483349334833483348 WRPause(4000) 32153308331533223347334833473348 WRPause(1000) 30853199322432513310334833483348 WRPause(500) 29173070315032223270330933483348 WRPause(250) 26942864294930773205338833483348 WRPause(100) 21552469262227902911321433303348

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• Short Season, Long Models - Dealing with Seasonality

  - by Michel Adar

  Accounting for seasonality presents a challenge for the accurate prediction of events. Examples of seasonality include: ·         Boxed cosmetics sets are more popular during Christmas. They sell at other times of the year, but they rise higher than other products during the holiday season. ·         Interest in a promotion rises around the time advertising on TV airs ·         Interest in the Sports section of a newspaper rises when there is a big football match There are several ways of dealing with seasonality in predictions. Time Windows If the length of the model time windows is short enough relative to the seasonality effect, then the models will see only seasonal data, and therefore will be accurate in their predictions. For example, a model with a weekly time window may be quick enough to adapt during the holiday season. In order for time windows to be useful in dealing with seasonality it is necessary that: The time window is significantly shorter than the season changes There is enough volume of data in the short time windows to produce an accurate model An additional issue to consider is that sometimes the season may have an abrupt end, for example the day after Christmas. Input Data If available, it is possible to include the seasonality effect in the input data for the model. For example the customer record may include a list of all the promotions advertised in the area of residence. A model with these inputs will have to learn the effect of the input. It is possible to learn it specific to the promotion – and by the way learn about inter-promotion cross feeding – by leaving the list of ads as it is; or it is possible to learn the general effect by having a flag that indicates if the promotion is being advertised. For inputs to properly represent the effect in the model it is necessary that: The model sees enough events with the input present. For example, by virtue of the model lifetime (or time window) being long enough to see several “seasons” or by having enough volume for the model to learn seasonality quickly. Proportional Frequency If we create a model that ignores seasonality it is possible to use that model to predict how the specific person likelihood differs from average. If we have a divergence from average then we can transfer that divergence proportionally to the observed frequency at the time of the prediction. Definitions: Ft = trailing average frequency of the event at time “t”. The average is done over a suitable period of to achieve a statistical significant estimate. F = average frequency as seen by the model. L = likelihood predicted by the model for a specific person Lt = predicted likelihood proportionally scaled for time “t”. If the model is good at predicting deviation from average, and this holds over the interesting range of seasons, then we can estimate Lt as: Lt = L * (Ft / F) Considering that: L = (L – F) + F Substituting we get: Lt = [(L – F) + F] * (Ft / F) Which simplifies to: (i)                  Lt = (L – F) * (Ft / F)  +  Ft This latest expression can be understood as “The adjusted likelihood at time t is the average likelihood at time t plus the effect from the model, which is calculated as the difference from average time the proportion of frequencies”. The formula above assumes a linear translation of the proportion. It is possible to generalize the formula using a factor which we will call “a” as follows: (ii)                Lt = (L – F) * (Ft / F) * a  +  Ft It is also possible to use a formula that does not scale the difference, like: (iii)               Lt = (L – F) * a  +  Ft While these formulas seem reasonable, they should be taken as hypothesis to be proven with empirical data. A theoretical analysis provides the following insights: The Cumulative Gains Chart (lift) should stay the same, as at any given time the order of the likelihood for different customers is preserved If F is equal to Ft then the formula reverts to “L” If (Ft = 0) then Lt in (i) and (ii) is 0 It is possible for Lt to be above 1. If it is desired to avoid going over 1, for relatively high base frequencies it is possible to use a relative interpretation of the multiplicative factor. For example, if we say that Y is twice as likely as X, then we can interpret this sentence as: If X is 3%, then Y is 6% If X is 11%, then Y is 22% If X is 70%, then Y is 85% - in this case we interpret “twice as likely” as “half as likely to not happen” Applying this reasoning to (i) for example we would get: If (L < F) or (Ft < (1 / ((L/F) + 1)) Then  Lt = L * (Ft / F) Else Lt = 1 – (F / L) + (Ft * F / L)  

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• 3 Trends for SMBs around Social, Mobile, and Sensor

  - by Socially_Aware_Enterprise

  While I often am talking to big companies or discussing enterprise solutions. There are times when individuals ask me about Small or Medium sized business trends.  Interestingly,  the Enterprise Social, Mobile, and Sensor initiatives I regularly discuss are in fact related to even the Mom and Pop storefront. The eco-system of new service players in the Social-Mobile-Sensor space generally emerge developing partnerships with enterprises as they develop and bring economy to scale to their services for the larger market. And of course Oracle has an entire division dedicated for delivering products and support to help emerging companies compete without the need to open an industrial strength credit line.. So here are some trends that we are helping large enterprises to deploy today, but small and medium businesses should be able to take advantage of by the end of this year and starting into 2015. 1) The typical small business is generally "Localized". But the ability to be "Hyper-Localized" will come as location based services become ubiquitous. Many small businesses have one or several storefronts and theirs are typically within a single regional economic footprint. While the internet provides global reach, it will be the businesses that invest in social, mobile and local that will win in the end.  Of course I am a huge SoMoLo evangelist. The SMBs' content and targeting with platforms for Geo-Fencing, Geo-Conquesting and Path-Matching to HHI are all going to be accessible to them, if not for Mobile Apps, then via Mobile messaging in Social Networks that offer it.. Expect to be able to target FaceBook messaging not by city, but by store or mall… This makes being able to be "Hyper-Local" even more important. And with new proximity services coming online more than ever before, SMBs will operate and service customers with pinpoint accuracy right down to where they stand in an aisle. Geo-Conquesting will be huge for small players to place ads when customers pass through competitors regions. Car Dealers are doing this now.. But also of course iBeacons are now very cheap and getting easier to put in retail stores. The ability for sales to happen anywhere in the store via a mobile phone or tablet is huge, as it will give the small shop the flexibility to not have to "Guard the Register" as more or most transactions will be digital. Thus, M-Commerce and T-Commerce will change the job of cashier dramatically.. 2) Intra-Brand Advocacy, the idea now is that rather than just depend on your trusty social media manager and his team, you are going to push more and more individuals with expertise inside the organization to help manage, reach-out, and utilize social channels to manage the incoming questions and answers customers need. While for years CRM was the tool of the enterprise, today CRMs enable this now "Salesforce et al" capability to trickle throughout the company. This gives greater pressure to organize roles, but also flatten out the organization. Internal collaboration around topics and customer needs is going to be the key for SMBs to finally get serious about customer experiences. Their customers are online and in social networks. This includes not just B2C SMBs but also B2B companies as well. Don't believe me? To find the players just use hashtag #SocialSelling and you will see… 3) The Visual Networks will begin to move from Content Aggregators to Content Collaboration platforms, which means Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, & others will begin to move to add more features brands want, first marketing platforms, rather than unique brand partnerships as they do today, but this will open ways for SMBs to engage with clear brand messaging and metrics. Eventually providing more "Collaboration" between Brand and Consumer.. Don't think for a minute Facebook bought Oculus Rift so you could see your timeline in 3-D. The Social Networks I advise customers to invest in are ones that are audio and visual intrinsically. Players from SoundCloud to Pinterest are deploying ways for brands to harness their interactive visual or audio based social networks to sell ad units aka brand messaging. While the Social Media revolution is going on, the emphasis was on the social, today it more and more about the media in social, that enterprises soon small and medium businesses will be connected to. 

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• Part 1 - Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Azure is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the marriage of Azure and TFS! Introduction Recently a client I worked for had 2 major business critical applications being delivered, with very little time budgeted for Performance testing, we immediately hit a bottleneck when the performance testing phase started, the in house infrastructure team could not support the hardware requirements in the short notice. It was suggested that the performance testing be performed on one of the QA environments which was a fraction of the production environment. This didn’t seem right, the team decided to turn to the cloud. The team took advantage of the elasticity offered by Azure, starting with a single test agent which was provisioned and ready for use with in 30 minutes the team scaled up to 17 test agents to perform a very comprehensive performance testing cycle. Issues were identified and resolved but the highlight was that the cost of running the ‘test rig’ proved to be less than if hosted on premise by the infrastructure team. Thank you for taking the time out to read this blog post, in the series of posts, I’ll try and cover the start to end of everything you need to know to use Azure to build your Test Rig in the cloud. But Why Azure? I have my own Data Centre… If the environment is provisioned in your own datacentre, - No matter what level of service agreement you may have with your infrastructure team there will be down time when the environment is patched - How fast can you scale up or down the environments (keeping the enterprise processes in mind) Administration, Cost, Flexibility and Scalability are the areas you would want to think around when taking the decision between your own Data Centre and Azure! How is Microsoft's Public Cloud Offering different from Amazon’s Public Cloud Offering? Microsoft's offering of the Cloud is a hybrid of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which distinguishes Microsoft's offering from other providers such as Amazon (Amazon only offers IaaS). PaaS – Platform as a Service IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service Fills the needs of those who want to build and run custom applications as services. Similar to traditional hosting, where a business will use the hosted environment as a logical extension of the on-premises datacentre. A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. The servers (physical and virtual) are rented on an as-needed basis, and the IT professionals who manage the infrastructure have full control of the software configuration. This kind of flexibility increases the complexity of the IT environment, as customer IT professionals need to maintain the servers as though they are on-premises. The maintenance activities may include patching and upgrades of the OS and the application server, load balancing, failover clustering of database servers, backup and restoration, and any other activities that mitigate the risks of hardware and software failures.   The biggest advantage with PaaS is that you do not have to worry about maintaining the environment, you can focus all your time in solving the business problems with your solution rather than worrying about maintaining the environment. If you decide to use a VM Role on Azure, you are asking for IaaS, more on this later. A nice blog post here on the difference between Saas, PaaS and IaaS. Now that we are convinced why we should be turning to the cloud and why in specific Azure, let’s discuss about the Test Rig. The Load Test Rig – Topology Now the moment of truth, Of course a big part of getting value from cloud computing is identifying the most adequate workloads to take to the cloud, so I’ve decided to try to make a Load Testing rig where the Agents are running on Windows Azure.   I’ll talk you through the above Topology, - User: User kick starts the load test run from the developer workstation on premise. This passes the request to the Test Controller. - Test Controller: The Test Controller is on premise connected to the same domain as the developer workstation. As soon as the Test Controller receives the request it makes use of the Windows Azure Connect service to orchestrate the test responsibilities to all the Test Agents. The Windows Azure Connect endpoint software must be active on all Azure instances and on the Controller machine as well. This allows IP connectivity between them and, given that the firewall is properly configured, allows the Controller to send work loads to the agents. In parallel, the Controller will collect the performance data from the agents, using the traditional WMI mechanisms. - Test Agents: The Test Agents are on the Windows Azure Public Cloud, as soon as the test controller issues instructions to the test agents, the test agents start executing the load tests. The HTTP requests are issued against the web server on premise, the results are captured by the test agents. And finally the results are passed over to the controller. - Servers: The Web Server and DB Server are hosted on premise in the datacentre, this is usually the case with business critical applications, you probably want to manage them your self. Recap and What’s next? So, in the introduction in the series of blog posts on Load Testing in the cloud I highlighted why creating a test rig in the cloud is a good idea, what advantages does Windows Azure offer and the Test Rig topology that I will be using. I would also like to mention that i stumbled upon this [Video] on Azure in a nutshell, great watch if you are new to Windows Azure. In the next post I intend to start setting up the Load Test Environment and discuss pricing with respect to test agent machine types that will be used in the test rig. Hope you enjoyed this post, If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to add to this blog post. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora.  See you in Part II.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution CUSTOMER AND PARTNER INFORMATION Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer Revenue – 73,515 Billion Euro (2011, Siemens AG total) Customer Quote – “The realization of our complex requirements within a very short amount of time was enabled through the competent implementation partner Sapient, who fully used the  very broad scope of standard functionality provided in the Oracle WebCenter Portal, and the management of customer services, who continuously supported the project setup. ” – Joerg Modlmayr, Project Manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. To ensure greater transparency, increased efficiency, higher user acceptance, and additional services, Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, replaced several existing legacy portal solutions that could not meet the company’s future needs with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Various existing portal solutions that cannot meet future demands will be successively replaced by the new central service portal, which will also allow for the efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts.  With Oracle, doctors and hospitals using Siemens medical solutions now have access to a central information portal that provides important information and services at just the push of a button.  Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer URL – www.siemens.com Customer Headquarters – Erlangen, Germany Industry – Industrial Manufacturing Employees – 360,000  Challenges – Replace disparate medical service portals to meet future demands and eliminate an  unnecessarily high level of administrative work caused by heterogeneous installations Ensure portals meet current user demands to improve user-acceptance rates and increase number of total users Enable changes and expansion through standard functionality to eliminate the need for reliance on IT and reduce administrative efforts and associated high costs Ensure efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts for all devices and systems Ensure hospitals and clinics to transparently monitor and measure services rendered for the various medical devices and systems  Increase electronic interaction and expand services to achieve a higher level of customer loyalty Solution –  Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure greater transparency, and as a result, a higher level of customer loyalty  Provided a centralized platform for doctors and hospitals using Siemens’ medical technology solutions that provides important information and services at the push of a button Reduced significantly the administrative workload by centralizing the solution in the new customer service portal Secured positive feedback from customers involved in the pilot program developed by design experts from Oracle partner Sapient. The interfaces were created with customer needs in mind. The first survey taken shortly after implementation came back with 2.4 points on a scale of 0-3 in the category “customer service portal intuitiveness level” Met all requirements including alignment with the Siemens Style Guide without extensive programming Implemented additional services via the portal such as benchmarking options to ensure the optimal use of the Customer Device Park Provided option for documentation of all services rendered in conjunction with the medical technology systems to ensure that the value of the services are transparent for the decision makers in the hospitals  Saved and stored all machine data from approximately 100,000 remote systems in the central service and information platform Provided the option to register errors online and follow the call status in real-time on the portal Made  available at the push of a button all information on the medical technology devices used in hospitals or clinics—from security checks and maintenance activities to current device statuses Provided PDF format Service Performance Reports that summarize information from periods of time ranging from previous weeks up to one year, meeting medical product law requirements  Why Oracle – Siemens AG favored Oracle for many reasons, however, the company ultimately decided to go with Oracle due to the enormous range of functionality the solutions offered for the healthcare sector.“We are not programmers; we are service providers in the medical technology segment and focus on the contents of the portal. All the functionality necessary for internet-based customer interaction is already standard in Oracle WebCenter Portal, which is a huge plus for us. Having Oracle as our technology partner ensures that the product will continually evolve, providing a strong technology platform for our customer service portal well into the future,” said Joerg Modlmayr project manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG. Partner Involvement – Siemens AG selected Oracle Partner Sapient because the company offered a service portfolio that perfectly met Siemens’ requirements and had a wealth of experience implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additionally, Sapient had designers with a very high level of expertise in usability—an aspect that Siemens considered to be of vast importance for the project.  “The Sapient team completely met all our expectations. Our tightly timed project was completed on schedule, and the positive feedback from our users proves that we set the right measures in terms of usability—all thanks to the folks at Sapient,” Modlmayr said.  Partner Name – Sapient GmbH Deutschland Partner URL – www.sapient.com

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• Silverlight Reporting Application Part 3.5 - Prism Background and WCF RIA [Series Intermission]

  Taking a step back before I dive into the details and full-on coding fun, I wanted to once again respond to a comment on my last post to clear up some things in regards to how I'm setting up my project and some of the choices I've made. Aka, thanks Ben. :) Prism Project Setup For starters, I'm not the ideal use case for a Prism application. In most cases where you've got a one-man team, Prism can be overkill as it is more intended for large teams who are geographically dispersed or in applications that have a larger scale than my Recruiting application in which you'll greatly benefit from modularity, delayed loading of xaps, etc. What Prism offers, though, is a manner for handling UI, commands, and events with the idea that, through a modular approach in which no parts really need to know about one another, I can update this application bit by bit as hiring needs change or requirements differ between offices without having to worry that changing something in the Jobs module will break something in, say, the Scheduling module. All that being said, here's a look at how our project breakdown for Recruit (MVVM/Prism implementation) looks: This could be a little misleading though, as each of those modules is actually another project in the overall Recruit solution. As far as what the projects actually are, that looks a bit like this: Recruiting Solution Recruit (Shell up there) - Main Silverlight Application .Web - Default .Web application to host the Silverlight app Infrastructure - Silverlight Class Library Project Modules - Silverlight Class Library Projects Infrastructure &Modules The Infrastructure project is probably something you'll see to some degree in any composite application. In this application, it is going to contain custom commands (you'll see the joy of these in a post or two down the road), events, helper classes, and any custom classes I need to share between different modules. Think of this as a handy little crossroad between any parts of your application. Modules on the other hand are the bread and butter of this application. Besides the shell, which holds the UI skeleton, and the infrastructure, which holds all those shared goodies, the modules are self-contained bundles of functionality to handle different concerns. In my scenario, I need a way to look up and edit Jobs, Applicants, and Schedule interviews, a Notification module to handle telling the user when different things are happening (i.e., loading from database), and a Menu to control interaction and moving between different views. All modules are going to follow the following pattern: The module class will inherit from IModule and handle initialization and loading the correct view into the correct region, whereas the Views and ViewModels folders will contain paired Silverlight user controls and ViewModel class backings. WCF RIA Services Since we've got all the projects in a single solution, we did not have to go the route of creating a WCR RIA Services Class Library. Every module has it's WCF RIA link back to the main .Web project, so the single Linq-2-SQL (yes, I said Linq-2-SQL, but I'll soon be switching to OpenAccess due to the new visual designer) context I'm using there works nicely with the scope of my project. If I were going for completely separating this project out and doing different, dynamically loaded elements, I'd probably go for the separate class library. Hope that clears that up. In the future though, I will be using that in a project that I've got in the "when I've got enough time to work on this" pipeline, so we'll get into that eventually- and hopefully when WCF RIA is in full release! Why Not use Silverlight Navigation/Business Template? The short answer- I'm a creature of habit, and having used Silverlight for a few years now, I'm used to doing lots of things manually. :) Plus, starting with a blank slate of a project I'm able to set up things exactly as I want them to be. In this case, rather than the navigation frame we would see in one of the templates, the MainRegion/ContentControl is working as our main navigation window. In many cases I will use theSilverlight navigation template to start things off, however in this case I did not need those features so I opted out of using that. Next time when I actually hit post #4, we're going to get into the modules and starting to get functionality into this application. Next week is also release week for the Q1 2010 release, so be sure to check out our annualWebinar Week (I might be biased, but Wednesday is my favorite out of the group). Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Pace Layering Comes Alive

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 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";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick hosts the IT Leaders Editorial on a monthly basis. By now, readers of this column are quite familiar with Oracle AppAdvantage, a unified framework of middleware technologies, infrastructure and applications utilizing a pace layered approach to enterprise systems platforms. 1. Standardize and Consolidate core Enterprise Applications by removing invasive customizations, costly workarounds and the complexity that multiple instances creates. 2. Move business specific processes and applications to the Differentiate Layer, thus creating greater business agility with process extensions and best of breed applications managed by cross- application process orchestration. 3. The Innovate Layer contains all the business capabilities required for engagement, collaboration and intuitive decision making. This is the layer where innovation will occur, as people engage one another in a secure yet open and informed way. 4. Simplify IT by minimizing complexity, improving performance and lowering cost with secure, reliable and managed systems across the entire Enterprise. But what hasn’t been discussed is the pace layered architecture that Oracle AppAdvantage adopts. What is it, what are its origins and why is it relevant to enterprise scale applications and technologies? It’s actually a fascinating tale that spans the past 20 years and a basic understanding of it provides a wonderful context to what is evolving as the future of enterprise systems platforms. It all begins in 1994 with a book by noted architect Stewart Brand, of ’Whole Earth Catalog’ fame. In his 1994 book How Buildings Learn, Brand popularized the term ‘Shearing Layers’, arguing that any building is actually a hierarchy of pieces, each of which inherently changes at different rates. In 1997 he produced a 6 part BBC Series adapted from the book, in which Part 6 focuses on Shearing Layers. In this segment Brand begins to introduce the concept of ‘pace’. Brand further refined this idea in his subsequent book, The Clock of the Long Now, which began to link the concept of Shearing Layers to computing and introduced the term ‘pace layering’, where he proposes that: “An imperative emerges: an adaptive [system] has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems … otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first but over time it is the opposite and destructive as well.” In 2000, IBM architects Ian Simmonds and David Ing published a paper entitled A Shearing Layers Approach to Information Systems Development, which applied the concept of Shearing Layers to systems design and development. It argued that at the time systems were still too rigid; that they constrained organizations by their inability to adapt to changes. The findings in the Conclusions section are particularly striking: “Our starting motivation was that enterprises need to become more adaptive, and that an aspect of doing that is having adaptable computer systems. The challenge is then to optimize information systems development for change (high maintenance) rather than stability (low maintenance). Our response is to make it explicit within software engineering the notion of shearing layers, and explore it as the principle that systems should be built to be adaptable in response to the qualitatively different rates of change to which they will be subjected. This allows us to separate functions that should legitimately change relatively slowly and at significant cost from that which should be changeable often, quickly and cheaply.” The problem at the time of course was that this vision of adaptable systems was simply not possible within the confines of 1st generation ERP, which were conceived, designed and developed for standardization and compliance. It wasn’t until the maturity of open, standards based integration, and the middleware innovation that followed, that pace layering became an achievable goal. And Oracle is leading the way. Oracle’s AppAdvantage framework makes pace layering come alive by taking a strategic vision 20 years in the making and transforming it to a reality. It allows enterprises to retain and even optimize their existing ERP systems, while wrapping around those ERP systems three layers of capabilities that inherently adapt as needed, at a pace that’s optimal for the enterprise.

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• How Can I Safely Destroy Sensitive Data CDs/DVDs?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  You have a pile of DVDs with sensitive information on them and you need to safely and effectively dispose of them so no data recovery is possible. What’s the most safe and efficient way to get the job done? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader HaLaBi wants to know how he can safely destroy CDs and DVDs with personal data on them: I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and may cause harm. Scratching them badly is what I always do but it takes long time and I managed to read some of the data in the scratched CDs/DVDs. What’s the way to physically destroy a CD/DVD safely? How should he approach the problem? The Answer SuperUser contributor Journeyman Geek offers a practical solution coupled with a slightly mad-scientist solution: The proper way is to get yourself a shredder that also handles cds – look online for cd shredders. This is the right option if you end up doing this routinely. I don’t do this very often – For small scale destruction I favour a pair of tin snips – they have enough force to cut through a cd, yet are blunt enough to cause small cracks along the sheer line. Kitchen shears with one serrated side work well too. You want to damage the data layer along with shearing along the plastic, and these work magnificently. Do it in a bag, cause this generates sparkly bits. There’s also the fun, and probably dangerous way – find yourself an old microwave, and microwave them. I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area of course, and not using your mother’s good microwave. There’s a lot of videos of this on YouTube – such as this (who’s done this in a kitchen… and using his mom’s microwave). This results in a very much destroyed cd in every respect. If I was an evil hacker mastermind, this is what I’d do. The other options are better for the rest of us. Another contributor, Keltari, notes that the only safe (and DoD approved) way to dispose of data is total destruction: The answer by Journeyman Geek is good enough for almost everything. But oddly, that common phrase “Good enough for government work” does not apply – depending on which part of the government. It is technically possible to recover data from shredded/broken/etc CDs and DVDs. If you have a microscope handy, put the disc in it and you can see the pits. The disc can be reassembled and the data can be reconstructed — minus the data that was physically destroyed. So why not just pulverize the disc into dust? Or burn it to a crisp? While technically, that would completely eliminate the data, it leaves no record of the disc having existed. And in some places, like DoD and other secure facilities, the data needs to be destroyed, but the disc needs to exist. If there is a security audit, the disc can be pulled to show it has been destroyed. So how can a disc exist, yet be destroyed? Well, the most common method is grinding the disc down to destroy the data, yet keep the label surface of the disc intact. Basically, it’s no different than using sandpaper on the writable side, till the data is gone. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  As more and more business is being conducted via online channels, engaging users and making them more productive and efficient though these online channels is becoming critical. These users could be customers, partners or employees and while the respective channels through which they interact might be different, these users do increasingly interact with your business through the Web, or mobile devices or now through various social mediums.  Businesses need a user engagement strategy and solution that allows them to deliver targeted and personalized content and applications to users through the various online mediums and touch points.  The customer experience today is made up of an ongoing set of interactions with organizations across many channels, online and offline.  The Direct channel (including sales reps, email and mail) is an important point of contact, as is the Contact Center.  Contact Centers rely on the phone as a means of interacting with customers, and also more now than ever, the Web as well.  However, the online organization is often managed separately from the Contact Center organization within a business. In-store is an important channel for retailers, offering Point-of-Service for human interactions, and Kiosks which enable self-service. Kiosks are a Web-enabled touch point but in-store kiosks are often managed by the head of retail operations, rather than the online organization.  And of course, the online channel, including customer interactions with an organization via digital means -- on the website, mobile websites, and social networking sites, has risen to paramount importance in recent years in the customer experience. Historically all of these channels have been managed separately. The result of all of this fragmentation is that the customer touch points with an organization are siloed.  Their interactions online are not known and respected in their dealings in-store.  Their calls to the contact center are not taken as input into what the website offers them when they arrive. Think of how many times you’ve fallen victim to this. Your experience with the company call center is different than the experience in-store. Your experience with the company website on your desktop computer is different than your experience on your iPad. I think you get the point. But the customer isn’t the only one we need to look at here, as employees and the IT organization have challenges as well when it comes to online engagement. There are many common tools and technologies that organizations have been using to try and engage users, whether it’s customers, employees or partners. Some have adopted different blog and wiki technologies (some hosted, some open source, sometimes embedded in platforms), to things like tagging, file sharing and content management, or composite applications for self-service applications and activity streams. Basically, there are so many different tools & technologies that each address different aspects of user engagement. Now, one of the challenges with this, is that if we look at each individual tool, typically just implementing for example a file sharing and basic collaboration solution, may meet the needs of the business user for one aspect of user engagement, but it may not be the best solution to engage with customers and partners, or it may not fit with IT standards such as integrating with their single sign on tools or their corporate website. Often, the scenario is that businesses are having to acquire multiple pieces and parts as well as build custom applications to meet their needs. Leaving customers and partners with a more fragmented way of interacting with the company. Every organization has some sort of enterprise balancing act between the needs of the business user and the needs and restrictions enforced by enterprise IT groups. As we’ve been discussing, we all know that the expectations for online engagement have changed since the days of the static, one-size fits all website. With these changes have come some very difficult organizational challenges as well. Today, as a business user, you want to engage with your customers, and your customers expect you to know who they are. They expect you to recall the details they’ve provided to you on your website, to your CSRs and to your sales people. They expect you to remember their purchases, their preferences and their problems. And they expect you to know who they are, equally well, across channels, including your web presence. This creates a host of challenges for today’s business users. Delivering targeted, relevant content online is now essential for converting prospects into customers and for engendering long term loyalty. Business users need the ability to leverage customer data from different sources to fuel their segmentation and targeting strategies and to easily set-up, manage and optimize online campaigns. Also critical, they need the ability to accomplish these things on-the-fly, at the speed of the marketplace, while making iterative improvements.  These changing expectations put a host of demands on the IT organization as well. The web presence must be able to scale to support the delivery of personalized and targeted content to thousands of site visitors without sacrificing performance. And integration between systems becomes more important as well, as organizations strive to obtain one view of the customer culled from WCM data, CRM data and more. So then, how do you solve these challenges and meet the growing demands of your users?  You need a solution that: Unifies every customer interaction across all channels Personalizes the products and content that interest the customer and to the device Delivers targeted promotions to the right customer Engages and improve employee productivity Provides self-service access to applications Includes embedded in-context social   So how then do you achieve this level of online engagement, complete customer experience and engage your employees? The answer: Oracle WebCenter. If you want to learn how to get there, we encourage you to attend this webcast on Thursday Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites, where we'll talk about how you are able to transform your portal experience and optimize online engagement -- making your portals more interactive and more engaging across multiple channels. Register today!

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• How is the gimbal locked problem solved using accumulative matrix transformations

  - by Luke San Antonio

  I am reading the online "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming" book by Jason L. McKesson As of now, I am up to the gimbal lock problem and how to solve it using quaternions. However right here, at the Quaternions page. Part of the problem is that we are trying to store an orientation as a series of 3 accumulated axial rotations. Orientations are orientations, not rotations. And orientations are certainly not a series of rotations. So we need to treat the orientation of the ship as an orientation, as a specific quantity. I guess this is the first spot I start to get confused, the reason is because I don't see the dramatic difference between orientations and rotations. I also don't understand why an orientation cannot be represented by a series of rotations... Also: The first thought towards this end would be to keep the orientation as a matrix. When the time comes to modify the orientation, we simply apply a transformation to this matrix, storing the result as the new current orientation. This means that every yaw, pitch, and roll applied to the current orientation will be relative to that current orientation. Which is precisely what we need. If the user applies a positive yaw, you want that yaw to rotate them relative to where they are current pointing, not relative to some fixed coordinate system. The concept, I understand, however I don't understand how if accumulating matrix transformations is a solution to this problem, how the code given in the previous page isn't just that. Here's the code: void display() { glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glClearDepth(1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glutil::MatrixStack currMatrix; currMatrix.Translate(glm::vec3(0.0f, 0.0f, -200.0f)); currMatrix.RotateX(g_angles.fAngleX); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_X_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.4f, 0.4f, 1.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateY(g_angles.fAngleY); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Y_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateZ(g_angles.fAngleZ); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Z_AXIS, glm::vec4(1.0f, 0.3f, 0.3f, 1.0f)); glUseProgram(theProgram); currMatrix.Scale(3.0, 3.0, 3.0); currMatrix.RotateX(-90); //Set the base color for this object. glUniform4f(baseColorUnif, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0); glUniformMatrix4fv(modelToCameraMatrixUnif, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(currMatrix.Top())); g_pObject->Render("tint"); glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); } To my understanding, isn't what he is doing (modifying a matrix on a stack) considered accumulating matrices, since the author combined all the individual rotation transformations into one matrix which is being stored on the top of the stack. My understanding of a matrix is that they are used to take a point which is relative to an origin (let's say... the model), and make it relative to another origin (the camera). I'm pretty sure this is a safe definition, however I feel like there is something missing which is blocking me from understanding this gimbal lock problem. One thing that doesn't make sense to me is: If a matrix determines the difference relative between two "spaces," how come a rotation around the Y axis for, let's say, roll, doesn't put the point in "roll space" which can then be transformed once again in relation to this roll... In other words shouldn't any further transformations to this point be in relation to this new "roll space" and therefore not have the rotation be relative to the previous "model space" which is causing the gimbal lock. That's why gimbal lock occurs right? It's because we are rotating the object around set X, Y, and Z axes rather than rotating the object around it's own, relative axes. Or am I wrong? Since apparently this code I linked in isn't an accumulation of matrix transformations can you please give an example of a solution using this method. So in summary: What is the difference between a rotation and an orientation? Why is the code linked in not an example of accumulation of matrix transformations? What is the real, specific purpose of a matrix, if I had it wrong? How could a solution to the gimbal lock problem be implemented using accumulation of matrix transformations? Also, as a bonus: Why are the transformations after the rotation still relative to "model space?" Another bonus: Am I wrong in the assumption that after a transformation, further transformations will occur relative to the current? Also, if it wasn't implied, I am using OpenGL, GLSL, C++, and GLM, so examples and explanations in terms of these are greatly appreciated, if not necessary. The more the detail the better! Thanks in advance...

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) is Available Now !

  - by Anand Akela

  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:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2). It is now available for download on OTN on ALL platforms. This is the first major release since the launch of Enterprise Manager 12c in October of 2011. This is the first time when Enterprise Manager release is available on all platforms simultaneously. This is primarily a stability release which incorporates many of issues and feedback reported by early adopters. In addition, this release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. New Capabilities and Features Enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds: Introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle Weblogic Server. The new capabilities include guided set up of PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out and metering and chargeback. Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server environments: Combining in-context multiple domain, patching and configuration file synchronizations. Integrated Hardware-Software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components. The latest management capabilities for business-critical applications include: Business Application Management: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application’s business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on. Enhanced User Experience Reporting: Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context. Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, bulk operations against many events, etc. New and Revised Plug-Ins: Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. Revised plug-ins contain only bug-fixes and while new plug-ins incorporate both bug fixes as well as new functionality. Plug-In Name Version Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 (revision) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud 12.1.0.4 (new) Installation and Upgrade: All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) ) Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2. Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: User can do fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory). Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. Documentation: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights"What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2. All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN Upgrade Guide Please feel free to ask questions related to the new Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) at the Oracle Enterprise Manager Forum . You could also share your feedback at twitter  using hash tag #em12c or at Facebook . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Most Innovative IDM Projects: Awards at OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

  On Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Oracle recognized the winners of Innovation Awards 2012 at a ceremony presided over by Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President at Oracle. Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards recognize customers for achieving significant business value through innovative uses of Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. This year’s Award honors customers for their cutting-edge solutions driving business innovation and IT modernization using Oracle Fusion Middleware. The program has grown over the past 6 years, receiving a record number of nominations from customers around the globe. The winners were selected by a panel of judges that ranked each nomination across multiple different scoring categories. Congratulations to both Avea and ETS for winning this year’s Innovation Award for Identity Management. Identity Management Innovation Award 2012 Winner – Avea Company: Founded in 2004, AveA is the sole GSM 1800 mobile operator of Turkey and has reached a nationwide customer base of 12.8 million as of the end of 2011 Region: Turkey (EMEA) Products: Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics, Oracle Access Management Suite Business Drivers: ·         To manage the agility and scale required for GSM Operations and enable call center efficiency by enabling agents to change their identity profiles (accounts and entitlements) rapidly based on call load. ·         Enhance user productivity and call center efficiency with self service password resets ·         Enforce compliance and audit reporting ·         Seamless identity management between AveA and parent company Turk Telecom Innovation and Results: ·         One of the first Sun2Oracle identity management migrations designed for high performance provisioning and trusted reconciliation built with connectors developed on the ICF architecture that provides custom user interfaces for  dynamic and rapid management of roles and entitlements along with entitlement level attestation using closed loop remediation between Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Identity Analytics. ·         Dramatic reduction in identity administration and call center password reset tasks leading to 20% reduction in administration costs and 95% reduction in password related calls. ·         Enhanced user productivity by up to 25% to date ·         Enforced enterprise security and reduced risk ·         Cost-effective compliance management ·         Looking to seamlessly integrate with parent and sister companies’ infrastructure securely. Identity Management Innovation Award 2012 Winner – Education Testing Service (ETS)       See last year's winners here --Company: ETS is a private nonprofit organization devoted to educational measurement and research, primarily through testing. Region: U.S.A (North America) Products: Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Identity Manager Business Drivers: ETS develops and administers more than 50 million achievement and admissions tests each year in more than 180 countries, at more than 9,000 locations worldwide.  As the business becomes more globally based, having a robust solution to security and user management issues becomes paramount. The organizations was looking for: ·         Simplified user experience for over 3000 company users and more than 6 million dynamic student and staff population ·         Infrastructure and administration cost reduction ·         Managing security risk by controlling 3rd party access to ETS systems ·         Enforce compliance and manage audit reporting ·         Automate on-boarding and decommissioning of user account to improve security, reduce administration costs and enhance user productivity ·         Improve user experience with simplified sign-on and user self service Innovation and Results: 1.    Manage Risk ·         Centralized system to control user access ·         Provided secure way of accessing service providers' application using federated SSO. ·         Provides reporting capability for auditing, governance and compliance. 2.    Improve efficiency ·         Real-Time provisioning to target systems ·         Centralized provisioning system for user management and access controls. ·         Enabling user self services. 3.    Reduce cost ·         Re-using common shared services for provisioning, SSO, Access by application reducing development cost and time. ·         Reducing infrastructure and maintenance cost by decommissioning legacy/redundant IDM services. ·         Reducing time and effort to implement security functionality in business applications (“onboard” instead of new development). ETS was able to fold in new and evolving requirement in addition to the initial stated goals realizing quick ROI and successfully meeting business objectives. Congratulations to the winners once again. We will be sure to bring you more from these Innovation Award winners over the next few months.

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• Hiring New IT Employees versus Promoting Internally for IT Positions

  Recently I was asked my opinion regarding the hiring of IT professionals in regards to the option of hiring new IT employees versus promoting internally for IT positions. After thinking a little more about this question regarding staffing, specifically pertaining to promoting internally verses new employees; I think my answer to this question is that it truly depends on the situation. However, in most cases I would side with promoting internally. The key factors in this decision should be based on a company/department’s current values, culture, attitude, and existing priorities.  For example if a company values retaining all of its hard earned business knowledge then they would tend to promote existing employees internal over hiring a new employee. Moreover, the company will have to pay to train an existing employee to learn a new technology and the learning curve for some technologies can be very steep. Conversely, if a company values new technologies and technical proficiency over business knowledge then a company would tend to hire new employees because they may already have experience with a technology that the company is planning on using. In this scenario, the company would have to take on the additional overhead of allowing a new employee to learn how the business operates prior to them being fully effective. To illustrate my points above let us look at contractor that builds in ground pools for example.  He has the option to hire employees that are very strong but use small shovels to dig, or employees weak in physical strength but use large shovels to dig. Which employee should the contractor use to dig a hole for a new in ground pool? If we compare the possible candidates for this job we will find that they are very similar to hiring someone internally verses a new hire. The first example represents the existing workers that are very strong regarding the understanding how the business operates and the reasons why in a specific manner. However this employee could be potentially weaker than an outsider pertaining to specific technologies and would need some time to build their technical prowess for a new position much like the strong worker upgrading their shovels in order to remove more dirt at once when digging. The other employee is very similar to hiring a new person that may already have the large shovel but will need to increase their strength in order to use the shovel properly and efficiently so that they can move a maximum amount of dirt in a minimal amount of time. This can be compared to new employ learning how a business operates before they can be fully functional and integrated in the company/department. Another key factor in this dilemma pertains to existing employee and their passion for their work, their ability to accept new responsibility when given, and the willingness to take on responsibilities when they see a need in the business. As much as possible should be considered in this decision down to the mood of the team, the quality of existing staff, learning cure for both technology and business, and the potential side effects of the existing staff.  In addition, there are many more consideration based on the current team/department/companies culture and mood. There are several factors that need to be considered when promoting an individual or hiring new blood for a team. They both can provide great benefits as well as create controversy to a group. Personally, staffing especially in the IT world is like building a large scale system in that all of the components and modules must fit together and preform as one cohesive system in the same way a team must come together using their individually acquired skills so that they can work as one team.  If a module is out of place or is nonexistent then the rest of the team will suffer until the all of its issues are addressed and resolved. Benefits of Promoting Internally Internal promotions give employees a reason to constantly upgrade their technology, business, and communication skills if they want to further their career Employees can control their own destiny based on personal desires Employee already knows how the business operates Companies can save money by promoting internally because the initial overhead of allowing new hires to learn how a company operates is very expensive Newly promoted employees can assist in training their replacements while transitioning to their new role within a company. Existing employees already have a proven track record in regards fitting in with the business culture; this is always an unknown with all new hires Benefits of a New Hire New employees can energize and excite existing employees New employees can bring new ideas and advancements in technology New employees can offer a different perspective on existing issues based on their past experience. As you can see the decision to promote an existing employee from within a company verses hiring a new person should be based on several factors that should ultimately place the business in the best possible situation for the immediate and long term future. How would you handle this situation? Would you hire a new employee or promote from within?

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• how to label a cuboid using open gl?

  - by usha

  hi this is how my 3dcuboid looks ,i have attached complete code , i want to label this cuboid using different name across sides how is it possible using opengl in android...plz help me out public class MyGLRenderer implements Renderer { Context context; Cuboid rect; private float mCubeRotation; // private static float angleCube = 0; // Rotational angle in degree for cube (NEW) // private static float speedCube = -1.5f; // Rotational speed for cube (NEW) public MyGLRenderer(Context context) { rect = new Cuboid(); this.context = context; } public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset the model-view matrix gl.glTranslatef(0.2f, 0.0f, -8.0f); // Translate right and into the screen gl.glScalef(0.8f, 0.8f, 0.8f); // Scale down (NEW) gl.glRotatef(mCubeRotation, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // gl.glRotatef(angleCube, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // rotate about the axis (1,1,1) (NEW) rect.draw(gl); mCubeRotation -= 0.15f; //angleCube += speedCube; } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub if (height == 0) height = 1; // To prevent divide by zero float aspect = (float)width / height; // Set the viewport (display area) to cover the entire window gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); // Setup perspective projection, with aspect ratio matches viewport gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION); // Select projection matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset projection matrix // Use perspective projection GLU.gluPerspective(gl, 45, aspect, 0.1f, 100.f); gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_MODELVIEW); // Select model-view matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset } public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); // Set color's clear-value to black gl.glClearDepthf(1.0f); // Set depth's clear-value to farthest gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enables depth-buffer for hidden surface removal gl.glDepthFunc(GL10.GL_LEQUAL); // The type of depth testing to do gl.glHint(GL10.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL10.GL_NICEST); // nice perspective view gl.glShadeModel(GL10.GL_SMOOTH); // Enable smooth shading of color gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_DITHER); // Disable dithering for better performance }} public class Cuboid{ private FloatBuffer mVertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer mColorBuffer; private ByteBuffer mIndexBuffer; private float vertices[] = { //width,height,depth -2.5f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private float colors[] = { // R,G,B,A COLOR 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private byte indices[] = { // VERTEX 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 REPRESENTATION FOR FACES 0, 4, 5, 0, 5, 1, 1, 5, 6, 1, 6, 2, 2, 6, 7, 2, 7, 3, 3, 7, 4, 3, 4, 0, 4, 7, 6, 4, 6, 5, 3, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2 }; public Cuboid() { ByteBuffer byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mVertexBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mVertexBuffer.put(vertices); mVertexBuffer.position(0); byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(colors.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mColorBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mColorBuffer.put(colors); mColorBuffer.position(0); mIndexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); mIndexBuffer.put(indices); mIndexBuffer.position(0); } public void draw(GL10 gl) { gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mVertexBuffer); gl.glColorPointer(4, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mColorBuffer); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mIndexBuffer); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); } } public class Draw3drect extends Activity { private GLSurfaceView glView; // Use GLSurfaceView // Call back when the activity is started, to initialize the view @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); glView = new GLSurfaceView(this); // Allocate a GLSurfaceView glView.setRenderer(new MyGLRenderer(this)); // Use a custom renderer this.setContentView(glView); // This activity sets to GLSurfaceView } // Call back when the activity is going into the background @Override protected void onPause() { super.onPause(); glView.onPause(); } // Call back after onPause() @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); glView.onResume(); } }

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