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• Selling Solutions, Not Products

  - by David Dorf

  When I think about next-generation retailers, the names that come to mind are Apple, Whole Foods, Lulu Lemon, and IKEA.  They may not be the biggest retailers, but they are certainly growing fast. Success is never defined by just one dimension, and these retailers execute well across many dimensions, but the one that stands out for me is customer experience.  These stores feel...approachable...part of the community...local.  Customers are not intimidated to ask questions, and staff seem to go out of their way to help. What's makes these retailers stand out in the industry?  These retailers aren't selling products -- they're selling solutions.  Think about that.  You think you're going to the Apple store to buy a phone, but you're actually buying a communications solution that handles much, much more.  If you carry an iPhone, your life has changed.  The way you do things is different.  The impacts go much beyond a simple phone. Solutions start with a problem, which is why these retailers greet customers with "what brought you in today," or "can I answer any questions for you?"  Good retailers establish a relationship, even if it lasts only a few minutes. You don't walk into Whole Foods looking for cans of soup.  You are looking for meals: healthy snacks, interesting lunches, exotic dinners.  Its a learning experience where you might discover solutions to problems you didn't know you had.  Mention what foods you like, and you'll get a list of similar items you had not considered.  I didn't know I needed a closet organizer until I visited an IKEA and learned about all the options.  They were able to customize the solution to meet my needs, and now I'm much more organized. One of the differences between selling products and selling solutions is training.  Visit any of these retailers' sites and you'll see a long list of in-store events for the benefit of customers.  You can buy exercise clothing from Lulu Lemon, and also learn new yoga techniques, meet like-minded people, and branch off to other fitness regimes via their ambassadors.  You can visit the Geek Bar at Apple, eat lunch at IKEA, and learn to cook at Whole Foods. These retailers are making an investment in a relationship with their customers.  They are showing loyalty to their customers before asking for it back.  In the long-run, this strategic approach will outlive any scan-and-bag mentality.

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• Debugging Tips for Skinning

  - by Christian David Straub

  Another guest post by Jeanne Waldman.If you are developing a skin for your Fusion Application in JDeveloper you should know these tips.   1. Firebug is your friend 2. Uncompress the css style classes 3. CHECK_FILE_MODIFICATION so that you see your skinning changes right away 4. View the generated CSS File   1. Firebug is your friend Install Firebug (http://getfirebug.com/layout) into Firefox and use it to view your rendered jspx page in the browser. You can select the HTML dom nodes on your page and you can see the css styles applied to each dom node.   2. Uncompress the css style classes By default the styleclasses that are rendered are compressed. You may see style classes like class="x10" and class="x2e". But in your skin css file you have styleclasses like: af|inputText::content or af|panelBox::header   It is easier for you to develop a skin and debug a skin with Firebug if you see the uncompressed styleclasses. To do this, a. open web.xml b. add   <context-param>     <param-name>org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.DISABLE_CONTENT_COMPRESSION</param-name>     <param-value>true</param-value>   </context-param> c. save d. restart the server and re-run your page.   3. CHECK_FILE_MODIFICATION so that you see your skinning changes right away   For performance sake the ADF Faces framework does not check if you skin .css file has changed on every render. But this is exactly what you want to happen when you are developing or debugging a skin. You want your changes to get noticed right away, without restarting the server.   To do this, a. open web.xml b. add   <context-param>     <description>If this parameter is true, there will be an automatic check of the modification date of your JSPs, and saved state will be discarded when JSP's change. It will also automatically check if your skinning css files have changed without you having to restart the server. This makes development easier, but adds overhead. For this reason this parameter should be set to false when your application is deployed.</description>     <param-name>org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.CHECK_FILE_MODIFICATION</param-name>     <param-value>false</param-value>   </context-param> c. save d. restart the server and re-run your page. e. from then on, you can change your skin's .css file, save it and refresh your page and you should see the changes right away   4. View the generated CSS File   There are different ways to view the generated CSS File which is your skin's css file merged in with all the skins it extends and processed and generated to the filesystem and linked to your generated html page. One way is to view it with Firebug. The problem with this approach is you might see something that is a little different than the actual css file because Firebug may do some extra processing. I like to view the generated css file by: Right click on your page in the browser 

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• Country selection, when country is not listed

  - by David Balažic

  While this might not 100% match the intent of this site, it was the closest match from Stackexchange sites. So, if a web site (the "entrance" page) offers a choice (a list) of countries, with the text "Chose your country", but the users country is not listed, what should he do? One example is http://www.samsung.com/countryselection.do Addition: I ask this standing in the users position. I encounter a web site and it gives me the above page. What to do? Another issue: What is "my" country? My current location? My permanent residence? The country of my citizenship? Something else?

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• OWB 11gR2 &ndash; OLAP and Simba

  - by David Allan

  Oracle Warehouse Builder was the first ETL product to provide a single integrated and complete environment for managing enterprise data warehouse solutions that also incorporate multi-dimensional schemas. The OWB 11gR2 release provides Oracle OLAP 11g deployment for multi-dimensional models (in addition to support for prior releases of OLAP). This means users can easily utilize Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (see here for details and cost) which allows you to use the powerful and popular ad hoc query and analysis capabilities of Microsoft Excel PivotTables® and PivotCharts® with your Oracle OLAP business intelligence data. The extensions to the dimensional modeling capabilities have been built on established relational concepts, with the option to seamlessly move from a relational deployment model to a multi-dimensional model at the click of a button. This now means that ETL designers can logically model a complete data warehouse solution using one single tool and control the physical implementation of a logical model at deployment time. As a result data warehouse projects that need to provide a multi-dimensional model as part of the overall solution can be designed and implemented faster and more efficiently. Wizards for dimensions and cubes let you quickly build dimensional models and realize either relationally or as an Oracle database OLAP implementation, both 10g and 11g formats are supported based on a configuration option. The wizard provides a good first cut definition and the objects can be further refined in the editor. Both wizards let you choose the implementation, to deploy to OLAP in the database select MOLAP: multidimensional storage. You will then be asked what levels and attributes are to be defined, by default the wizard creates a level bases hierarchy, parent child hierarchies can be defined in the editor. Once the dimension or cube has been designed there are special mapping operators that make it easy to load data into the objects, below we load a constant value for the total level and the other levels from a source table.   Again when the cube is defined using the wizard we can edit the cube and define a number of analytic calculations by using the 'generate calculated measures' option on the measures panel. This lets you very easily add a lot of rich analytic measures to your cube. For example one of the measures is the percentage difference from a year ago which we can see in detail below. You can also add your own custom calculations to leverage the capabilities of the Oracle OLAP option, either by selecting existing template types such as moving averages to defining true custom expressions. The 11g OLAP option now supports percentage based summarization (the amount of data to precompute and store), this is available from the option 'cost based aggregation' in the cube's configuration. Ensure all measure-dimensions level based aggregation is switched off (on the cube-dimension panel) - previously level based aggregation was the only option. The 11g generated code now uses the new unified API as you see below, to generate the code, OWB needs a valid connection to a real schema, this was not needed before 11gR2 and is a new requirement since the OLAP API which OWB uses is not an offline one. Once all of the objects are deployed and the maps executed then we get to the fun stuff! How can we analyze the data? One option which is powerful and at many users' fingertips is using Microsoft Excel PivotTables® and PivotCharts®, which can be used with your Oracle OLAP business intelligence data by utilizing Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (see Simba site for details of cost). I'll leave the exotic reporting illustrations to the experts (see Bud's demonstration here), but with Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP its very simple to easily access the analytics stored in the database (all built and loaded via the OWB 11gR2 release) and get the regular features of Excel at your fingertips such as using the conditional formatting features for example. That's a very quick run through of the OWB 11gR2 with respect to Oracle 11g OLAP integration and the reporting using Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. Not a deep-dive in any way but a quick overview to illustrate the design capabilities and integrations possible.

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• Four Emerging Payment Stories

  - by David Dorf

  The world of alternate payments has been moving fast of late.  Innovation in this area will help both consumers and retailers, but probably hurt the banks (at least that's the plan).  Here are four recent news items in this area: Dwolla, a start-up in Iowa, is trying to make credit cards obsolete.  Twelve guys in Des Moines are using $1.3M they raised to allow businesses to skip the credit card networks and avoid the fees.  Today they move about $1M a day across their network with an average transaction size of $500. Instead of charging merchants 2.9% plus $.30 per transaction, Dwolla charges a quarter -- yep, that coin featuring George Washington. Dwolla (Web + Dollar = Dwolla) avoids the credit networks and connects directly to bank accounts using the bank's ACH network.  They are signing up banks and merchants targeting both B2B and C2B as well as P2P payments.  They leverage social networks to notify people they have a money transfer, and also have a mobile app that uses GPS location. However, all is not rosy.  There have been complaints about unexpected chargebacks and with debit fees being reduced by the big banks, the need is not as pronounced.  The big banks are working on their own network called clearXchange that could provide stiff competition. VeriFone just bought European payment processor Point for around $1B.  By itself this would not have caught my attention except for the fact that VeriFone also announced the acquisition of GlobalBay earlier this month.  In addition to their core business of selling stand-beside payment terminals, with GlobalBay they get employee-operated mobile selling tools and with Point they get a very big payment processing platform. MasterCard and Intel announced a partnership around payments, starting with PayPass, MasterCard's new payment technology.  Intel will lend its expertise to add additional levels of security, which seems to be the biggest barrier for consumer adoption.  Everyone is scrambling to get their piece of cash transactions, which still represents 85% of all transactions. Apple was awarded another mobile payment patent further cementing the rumors that the iPhone 5 will support NFC payments.  As usual, Apple is upsetting the apple cart (sorry) by moving control of key data from the carriers to Apple.  With Apple's vast number of iTunes accounts, they have a ready-made customer base to use the payment infrastructure, which I bet will slowly transition people away from credit cards and toward cheaper ACH.  Gary Schwartz explains the three step process Apple is taking to become a payment processor. Below is a picture I drew representing payments in the retail industry. There's certainly a lot of innovation happening.

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• It’s On! Oracle Open World 2012 Opens Call for Papers is Open

  - by David Hope-Ross

  Oracle OpenWorld is among the world’s largest industry events for good reason. It offers a vast array of learning and networking opportunities in one of the planet’s great cities.  And one of the key reasons for its popularity among procurement and supply chain professionals is the prominence of presentations by customers.   If you’d like to deliver a presentation based on your experience, now is the time to submit your abstract for review by the selection panel. The competition is strong: roughly 18% of entries are accepted each year from more than 3,000 submissions. Review panels are made up of experts both internal and external to Oracle. Successful submissions often (but not exclusively) focus on customer successes, how-tos, or best practices. What’s in it for you? Recognition, for one thing. Accepted sessions are publicized in the content catalog, which goes live in mid-June, and sessions given by external speakers often prove the most popular. Plus, accepted speakers get a complimentary pass to Oracle OpenWorld with access to all sessions and networking events- that could save you up to $2,595!   Be sure designate your session for inclusion in the correct track by selecting  “APPLICATIONS: Supply Chain Management” or “APPLICATIONS: Sourcing and Procurement” from the Primary Track drop down menu.   We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

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• Combining multiple sprites vs separate sprites

  - by david oliver

  I have a character which can hold ten types of weapons. Should I: Create ten sets of animations for the character with each weapon Create animations for each weapon, and programmatically draw them on the character Option 1 is simpler in general, but requires more work on the artist, and results in larger game size. Option 2, to me, is a programming nightmare... Whats the better practice in general? Thanks.

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• iPhone Peripherals for Retailers

  - by David Dorf

  I saw RedLaser on the latest "Shopper" iPhone commercial on TV. Works great for consumers, but retailers will be more interested in a true barcode reader from someone like Infinite Peripherals, which also comes with a magstripe reader I previously mentioned the offerings from Square Verifone, and Mophie that allow swiping credit cards with an iPhone as well. So what's next? There's a decent list at WireLust that includes an IR dongle that turns your iPhone into a TV remote, armband monitors for use when exercising, and most recently a NFC/RFID reader. iCarte from Canadian firm Wireless Dynamics looks interesting. This device can be used for NFC payments and for reading RFID tags. The Canon printer I just bought for home has an iPhone app that lets me send iPhone pictures directly to the printer for printing. In that same vein, Seems like retailers could use bluetooth to print receipts on strategically place printers on the floor. I can't wait to see what they come up with for the iPad.

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• How do I fix “Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode?” for NVIDIA GeForce GT555M

  - by David Chen

  As title, I'm using Ubuntu 10.04, and my ubuntu kept showing the sign “Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode”. I've read another question with same topic (http://askubuntu.com/questions/10664/how-do-i-fix-ubuntu-is-running-in-low-graphics-mode ), but the other one is using ATI Radeon X1200. How can I fix the problem? I'm running Ubuntu on a 200GB partition, and the rest of my computer is Windows7. My graphic card is NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M, and my computer is ACER ASPIRE 5951G.

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• OWB 11gR2 &ndash; Degenerate Dimensions

  - by David Allan

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

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• You Can't Win on Price

  - by David Dorf

  This year I did the majority of my Christmas shopping from the comfort of my home office. There aren't many things in stores you can't find online these days. I find it easier to search, research, and compare products online rather than walking the mall anyway. But there's a segment of the population that likes to be in the store, touching the products. For those people, smartphones avail them some of the e-commerce features I mentioned right there in the aisles. First it was RedLaser, then TheFind, ShopSavvy and many others. But the one that should be scaring retailers is Amazon's PriceCheck application. It lets you scan the product barcode, take a picture of the product, or speak the product's name. Once the product is identified, it shows the online prices, with Amazon at the top of the list. Within 10 seconds you can order the item and Amazon Prime members get free 2-day shipping too. I don't think fashion and grocery retailers need to worry much, but I have to believe smartphones are helping Amazon win a little more of the brand-name hardgoods market. So what's a retailer to do? Best Buy has begun to put QR Codes on their shelf labels that are easily scanned by smartphones and take the consumer to a Best Buy Web page where they can get extended information about the product. The consumer is getting the additional information they want, and Best Buy avoids the price comparisons. Of course if a consumer chooses to use the Amazon PriceCheck app, then all bets are off. That's when Best Buy has to hope the in-store experience and customer service will save the sale. My point is that the internet makes information available to everyone, and smartphones make it available anywhere. Unless you want your store to be Amazon's local showroom, you need to be price-competitive but differentiate on other aspects of the shopping experience. With the cost of running a physical store, you can't win on price.

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• What is start_daemon?

  - by David Parks

  I'm trying to understand start_daemon in the following /etc/init.d/nagios-nrpe-server startup script: start) if [ "$INETD" = 1 ]; then exit 1 fi log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME" start_daemon -p $PIDDIR/nrpe.pid $NICENESS $DAEMON -c $CONFIG -d $DAEMON_OPTS log_end_msg $? ;; In particular, when I start this service it isn't writing a PID file as expected, thus the stop service nagios-nrpe-server command is not working (I need to manually kill the processes). I'm trying to figure out how to trouble shoot the problem, but I can't run start_daemon ... from the command line. I want to reproduce what the script is doing manually so I can work on what the problem is.

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• Stretching an ADF Faces Component to (near) 100%

  - by Christian David Straub

  In the past, many users would want their component to stretch to fill 100% of a horizontal area. However, to account for scrollbars that may or may not have been there, they would set the percentage to 98%, etc.A much better way to do this is to use the new "AFStretchWidth" style class, which will do this automatically for you.For instance, avoid this:<af:foo inlineStyle="98%" />and instead do this:<af:foo styleClass="AFStretchWidth" />You can learn more about ADF Faces layout management here.

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• How Do I Implement parameterMaps for ADF Regions and Dynamic Regions?

  - by david.giammona

  parameterMap objects defined by managed beans can help reduce the number of child <parameter> elements listed under an ADF region or dynamic region page definition task flow binding. But more importantly, the parameterMap approach also allows greater flexibility in determining what input parameters are passed to an ADF region or dynamic region. This can be especially helpful when using dynamic regions where each task flow utilized can provide an entirely different set of input parameters. The parameterMap is specified within an ADF region or dynamic region page definition task flow binding as shown below: <taskFlow id="checkoutflow1" taskFlowId="/WEB-INF/checkout-flow.xml#checkout-flow" activation="deferred" xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/controller/binding" parametersMap="#{pageFlowScope.userInfoBean.parameterMap}"/> The parameter map object must implement the java.util.Map interface. The keys it specifies match the names of input parameters defined by the task flows utilized within the task flow binding. An example parameterMap object class is shown below: import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Map; public class UserInfoBean { private Map<String, Object> parameterMap = new HashMap<String, Object>(); public Map getParameterMap() { parameterMap.put("isLoggedIn", getSecurity().isAuthenticated()); parameterMap.put("principalName", getSecurity().getPrincipalName()); return parameterMap; }

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• You Are Hiring But Do Candidate&rsquo;s Want to Work For You

  - by david.talamelli

  So here you are – it has happened, you are now interviewing for that position that you have either applied for or maybe were called about. Whether you are an “active” candidate looking for a job or a “passive” candidate who was contacted about the opportunity, it doesn’t matter now. Regardless of the circumstances of how you got to the interview stage, how you and your new potential manager connect with each other at interview will play a part in whether you are successful in landing that job. The best manager/employee relationships I think tend to be the ones where both the manager and employee have a common goal that they are both working towards and they work together in unison to achieve these goals. Candidates – when you are interviewing for a role, remember that an interview is a two way process. An interview shouldn’t be just a case of a company interviewing you to see if you are a good fit for a certain role. Don’t forget in an interview process it is equally important that you take the opportunity to similarly interview the company to see if that role/company are the right place for you to move to as the next step in your career. I think an interview should not only be a chance for a Hiring Manager to get to better know a candidate and asses his capability and cultural fit for a team/company but it should also be a chance for the candidate to similarly assess a company or manager about whether they are someone that they want to work with. Managers – I know Recruiters have been talking about the “war for talent” since before many of you were managers, but there is no denying it – it exists. You are not only competing with other companies for talented individuals but you are also competing with the existing companies that those talented individuals are working at. Companies are not going to let the people they have identified as superstars resign without a fight (this is the classic Counter Offer scenario which may be another blog post in itself). So how do we get these great people – their current employer will do all they can to keep them, everyone else wants them – does this mean all hope is lost? No, absolutely not. The same reasons that have always existed on why candidates are interested in other opportunities is still there: it could be that someone is looking for career advancement, or they want the chance to work with new technology or maybe you have an opportunity that is exactly what that person is looking to do. As a Hiring Manager don’t just conduct your interviews in question/answer mode. You should talk to that individual to work out what it is they are looking for and you can then relate how your role addresses that. It is potentially going to be the two of you working together so you two are the ones who have to be most comfortable with each other. Don’t oversell the role – set realistic expectations of what that candidate can expect working in your team – give them the good, the bad and the ugly so they can make an informed decision. Manager’s think back to when you last were looking for a job and put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. When you were looking for a job, what was it that you wanted to know about Oracle, or what was it that you wanted more information about. There are some great Business Leaders that work here at Oracle – if you are one of them it is likely that you already are doing all these things anyway. The good news for you is that you are also likely raising yourself head and shoulders above what many interviewers do – that in itself gives you a competitive advantage in this ‘war for talent’ but as a great Business Leader you already know that

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• A Look Back at 2010 Predictions

  - by David Dorf

  Now is the time of year people make their predictions for next year, but before I start thinking about 2011 it's worth a look back to see how my predictions for 2010 fared. 1. Borders and Blockbuster bite the dust. I would have never predicted a strong brand such as Circuit City could die, but now I know it can happen to anyone. Borders has lost the battle with Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster has lost to Netflix. And just to be sure, Amazon put an extra nail in each coffin. Borders received additional investment from Bennett LeBow to keep it afloat, but the stock is down around $1.25 with no profits in sight. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy back in September. 2. Every retailer finally has a page on Facebook... but very few figure out how to keep fans engaged. Retailer postings become noise, and fans start to unsubscribe. Twitter goes in the same direction. A few standout retailers will figure out how to use social media, and the rest will remain dumbfounded. Most retailers are on the Facebook bandwagon, and their fan bases seem to be increasing thanks to promotions like The Gap's logo redesign, Lowes' black Friday sneak peak, and Walmart's Crowd Savers. There are several examples of f-commerce advancements, including some interesting integrations from Amazon.3. Smartphones consolidate and grow. More and more people will step-up to smartphones, most of which will choose iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones. Other smartphones will vanish, and networks will start to strain. But retailers will finally embrace mobile as the next big channel. Retail marketing departments will build mobile apps without the help of their IT department, and eventually they will get into a bind. Android has been on a tear lately stealing market share from Blackberry. Palm and Microsoft are trending down, and Apple is holding steady. Smartphone sales are up 15% and expected to continue. Retailers understand the importance of mobile, and some innovative applications have been produced this year. 4. Google helps the little guys. Google will push its Favorite Places project to help give exposure to small retailers and restaurants. They will enable small retailers to act like big ones by providing storefronts, detailed product information, and coupons for consumers. Google will find a way to bring augmented reality to the masses. I can't say I've seen much new from Google regarding Favorite Places, but they've continued to push local product search. From the PC or smartphone, consumers can search for products and see which nearby stores have it stock. Oracle Retail even productized an integration to Google to support this effort. I suppose if Google ever buys Groupon then it will bring them even closer to local shopping. Google talked about augmented humanity, but that has nothing to do with augmented reality. 5. Steve Jobs Is Bugs Bunny and Steve Ballmer is Elmer Fudd. (OK, I stole that headline from an InformationWeek article. I couldn't resist.) Both Apple and Microsoft will continue to open new stores, but only Apple will show real growth. POSReady 2009 (formerly WEPOS) will continue to share the POS market with Linux. The iPhone and iPod will continue to capture market share, but there won't be an Apple tablet. There won't be an Apple tablet? What was I thinking? While Apple has well over 300 stores, there are less than 10 Microsoft stores. Initial impressions show that even though Microsoft is locating its store near Apple Stores, they are not converting customers, with shoppers citing a lack of assortment and high prices. 6. Consolidation of e-commerce software providers. Software vendors in the areas of search, reviews, online call-centers, payments, and e-commerce will consolidate, partly driven by the success of m-commerce and SaaS. Amazon will find someone else to buy, and eBay will continue to lose momentum. Consolidation of e-commerce providers continued with IBM acquiring Sterling Commerce and CoreMetrics, and Oracle recently announcing the acquisition of ATG. Amazon grabbed Zappos, Woot, and Diapers.com to continue its dominance of online selling. While eBay's Marketplace growth may have slowed, its PayPal division is doing quite well, fueled in part by demand for mobile payments. 7. Book publishers mirror music labels. Just as the iPod brought digital downloads to the masses, the Kindle and Nook will power the e-book revolution. Books will continue to use DRM for a few more years before following the path of music. Publishers will try to preserve the margins of hardbacks by associating e-book releases with paperbacks. Amazon has done a good job providing e-reader clients for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. Competition from Barnes & Noble has forced Amazon to support book loaning, and both companies are making it easier for people to publish ebooks (with or without DRM). Progress is slow but steady. 8. NFC makes inroads, RFID treads water. Near Field Communications start to appear in mobile phones, and retailers beta test its use for payments and loyalty programs. RFID tag costs come down a bit, but not enough to spur accelerated adoption.Nokia announced plans to offer NFC-enabled phones in 2011, and rumors are swirling about NFC in the upcoming iPhone.  I think NFC is heading in the right direction, and I've heard more interest from retailers about specialized uses for RFID.9. Digital Signage goes the way of augmented reality. People use their camera phones to leave geo-tagged notes all over cities, rating stores and restaurants, and "painting" graffiti. But people get tired of holding their phones in front of their faces, so AR glasses are offered in much the same way bluetooth headsets emerged. Retailers experiement with in-store advertising using AR. Several retailers like Pizza Hut, Benetton, and Target have experimented with AR but its still somewhat of a gimmick used by marketing.  I think this prediction is a year or two too early. 10. JDA flip-flops again. After announcing their embracing of the .Net architecture, then switching to J2EE after the Manugistics acquisition, JDA will finally decide to standardize on Apple's Objective C. Everything will be ported to the iPhone and be available on the AppStore. After all, there's not much left to try. This was, of course, a joke but the sentiment is still valid.  JDA seems more supply-chain focused than retail focused, which is a an outcrop if their i2 acquisition.  Of the 10 predictions, I'm going to say I got 6 somewhat correct.  (Don't you just love grading your own paper?)  Soon I'll post my predictions for 2011 so be on the lookout.  Until then here's one more prediction:  Va Tech beats Stanford in the Orange Bowl -- count on it!

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• Rychlejší aplikace i bez zmen dotazu - 2.díl - vliv vázaných promenných

  - by david.krch

  V minulém díle jsme si na vzorovém príkladu vkládání 100.000 záznamu ukázali jak velkou zátež muže pro databázový server znamenat zbytecne casté commitování. Dobu zpracování této operace jsme snížili ze 167 na 105 sekund, tedy o tretinu. Ke slibovanému osmdesátinásobnému zrychlení nám chybí ješte dva kroky. V záveru predchozího dílu jsme zjistili, že parsování (rozbor a optimalizace) dotazu zabralo serveru celých 74 ze zminovaných 105 sekund. Svou pozornost dnes zameríme práve na minimalizaci casu parsování.

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• OWB 11gR2 - Find and Search Metadata in Designer

  - by David Allan

  Here are some tools and techniques for finding objects, specifically in the design repository. There are ways of navigating and collating objects that are useful for day to day development and build-time usage - this includes features out of the box and utilities constructed on top. There are a variety of techniques to navigate and find objects in the repository, the first 3 are out of the box, the 4th is an expert utility. Navigating by the tree, grouping by project and module - ok if you are aware of the exact module/folder that objects reside in. The structure panel is a useful way of finding parts of an object, especially when large rather than using the canvas. In large scale projects it helps to have accelerators (either find or collections below). Advanced find to search by name - 11gR2 included a find capability specifically for large scale projects. There were improvements in both the tree search and the object editors (including highlighting in mapping for example). So you can now do regular expression based search and quickly navigate to objects within a repository. Collections - logically organize your objects into virtual folders by shortcutting the actual objects. This is useful for a range of things since all the OWB services operate on collections too (export/import, validation, deployment). See the post here for new collection functionality in 11gR2. Reports for searching by type, updated on, updated by etc. Useful for activities such as periodic incremental actions (deploy all mappings changed in the past week). The report style view is useful since I can quickly see who changed what and when. You can see all the audit details for objects within each objects property inspector, but its useful to just get all objects changed today or example, all objects changed since my last build etc. This utility combines both UI extensions via experts and the public views on the repository. In the figure to the right you see the contextual option 'Object Search' which invokes the utility, you can see I have quite a number of modules within my project. Figure out all the potential objects which have been changed is not simple. The utility is an expert which provides this kind of search capability. The utility provides a report of the objects in the design repository which satisfy some filter criteria. The type of criteria includes; objects updated in the last n days optionally filter the objects updated by user filter the user by project and by type (table/mappings etc.) The search dialog appears with these options, you can multi-select the object types, so for example you can select TABLE and MAPPING. Its also possible to search across projects if need be. If you have multiple users using the repository you can define the OWB user name in the 'Updated by' property to restrict the report to just that user also. Finally there is a search name that will be used for some of the options such as building a collection - this name is used for the collection to be built. In the example I have done, I've just searched my project for all process flows and mappings that users have updated in the last 7 days. The results of the query are returned in a table containing the object names, types, full path and audit details. The columns are sort-able, you can sort the results by name, type, path etc. One of the cool things here, is that you can then perform operations on these objects - such as edit them, export single selection or entire results to MDL, create a collection from the results (now you have a saved set of references in the repository, you could do deploy/export etc.), create a deployment script from the results...or even add in your own ideas! You see from this that you can do bulk operations on sets of objects based on search results. So for example selecting the 'Build Collection' option creates a collection with all of the objects from my search, you can subsequently deploy/generate/maintain this collection of objects. Under the hood of the expert if just basic OMB commands from the product and the use of the public views on the design repository. You can see how easy it is to build up macro-like capabilities that will help you do day-to-day as well as build like tasks on sets of objects.

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• ODI 11g – Scripting Repository Creation

  - by David Allan

  Here’s a quick post on how to create both master and work repositories in one simple dialog, its using the groovy capabilities in ODI 11g and the groovy swing builder components. So if you want more/less take the groovy script and change, its easy stuff. The groovy script odi_create_repos.groovy is here, just open it in ODI before connecting and you will be able to create both master and work repositories with ease – or check the groovy out and script your own automation – you can construct the master, work and runtime repositories, so if you are embedding ODI as your DI engine this may be very useful. When you click ‘Create Repository’ you will see the following in the log as the master repository starts to be created; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... Then the completion message followed by the work repository creation and final completion message. Master Repository Creation Completed. Work Repository Creation Started. Work Repository Creation Completed. ====================================================== Repository Creation Completed Successfully ====================================================== Script exited. If any error is hit, the script just exits and prints any error to the log. For example if I enter no passwords, I will get this error; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Repository Creation Complete in Error ====================================================== oracle.odi.setup.RepositorySetupException: oracle.odi.core.security.PasswordPolicyNotMatchedException: ODI-10189: Password policy MinPasswordLength is not matched. ====================================================== Script exited. This is another example of using the ODI 11g SDK showing how to automate the construction of your data integration environment. The main interfaces and classes used here are IMasterRepositorySetup / MasterRepositorySetupImpl and IWorkRepositorySetup / WorkRepositorySetupImpl.

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• ODI 11g – Scripting Repository Creation

  - by David Allan

  Here’s a quick post on how to create both master and work repositories in one simple dialog, its using the groovy capabilities in ODI 11g and the groovy swing builder components. So if you want more/less take the groovy script and change, its easy stuff. The groovy script odi_create_repos.groovy is here, just open it in ODI before connecting and you will be able to create both master and work repositories with ease – or check the groovy out and script your own automation – you can construct the master, work and runtime repositories, so if you are embedding ODI as your DI engine this may be very useful. When you click ‘Create Repository’ you will see the following in the log as the master repository starts to be created; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... Then the completion message followed by the work repository creation and final completion message. Master Repository Creation Completed. Work Repository Creation Started. Work Repository Creation Completed. ====================================================== Repository Creation Completed Successfully ====================================================== Script exited. If any error is hit, the script just exits and prints any error to the log. For example if I enter no passwords, I will get this error; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Repository Creation Complete in Error ====================================================== oracle.odi.setup.RepositorySetupException: oracle.odi.core.security.PasswordPolicyNotMatchedException: ODI-10189: Password policy MinPasswordLength is not matched. ====================================================== Script exited. This is another example of using the ODI 11g SDK showing how to automate the construction of your data integration environment. The main interfaces and classes used here are IMasterRepositorySetup / MasterRepositorySetupImpl and IWorkRepositorySetup / WorkRepositorySetupImpl.

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• Look for Oracle at the 2010 ISM San Diego Conference

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle is sponsoring and exhibiting at ISM's 95th Annual International Supply Management Conference and Educational Exhibit on April 25th through 28th.   Be sure to catch our presentation with Hackett that explores how procurement can use payables to boost an organization's balance and income statements. Pierre Mitchell from Hackett will be sharing groundbreaking new research that identifies explicit links between a strategic approach to supplier payments and world-class performance.   If your organization can benefit from increased margin, improved working capital, greater efficiency, and reduced risk, then you can't afford to miss this session. We'll be presenting on Monday at 5:00pm in Exhibit  Hall D.       Some of Oracle's top talent will be available to answer your questions in booth number 527. It is a great opportunity to learn about Oracle's innovations for supplier management, spend classification, invoice automation, and On Demand delivery of procurement applications.  

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• Rychlejší aplikace i bez zmen dotazu - 3.díl - vliv hromadných operací a shrnutí

  - by david.krch

  V predchozích dvou dílech jsme si ukázali, jak lze vzorový príklad vkládání 100.000 záznamu zrychlit, pokud se nám podarí minimalizovat pocet commitu a zacít používat v dotazech vázané promenné. Temito dvema zmenami jsme puvodní cas 167 sekund snížili postupne na 105 a následne na 19 sekund. Ke slibovanému osmdesátinásobnému zrychlení potrebujeme dosáhnout ješte cca desetinásobného zrychlení. Provedeme to tím, že se 100.000 jednotlivých operací pokusíme prevést na menší pocet hromadných operací.

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• Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

  - by David Hoerster

  It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy.  We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together.  I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event.  As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities.  (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.)  TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011.  Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog).  The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been.  We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups.  Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts.  Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them.  But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders.  One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer.  He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages.  He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011.  I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups.  We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people.  We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal.  As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops.  There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well).  Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting.  We also had a bit of luck, too.  But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event.  I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013.  See you there!

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• how do you document your development process?

  - by David

  My current state is a mixture of spreadsheets, wikis, documents, and dated folders for my input/configuration and output files and bzr version control for code. I am relatively new to programming that requires this level of documentation, and I would like to find a better, more coherent approach. update (for clarity): My inputs are data used to generate configuration files with parameter values and my outputs are analyses of model predictions. I would really like to have an approach that allows me to associate particular configuration(s) with particular outputs, so that I can ask questions of my documentation such as "what causes over/under estimates?" or "what causes error 'X'"?

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• eBay Leads Mobile Commerce

  - by David Dorf

  For the first time, more smartphones where shipped than PCs. This important milestone helps reinforce that retailers need a strong mobile commerce strategy. IDC reported that for the 4th quarter of 2010, manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices versus 92.1 million PCs shipped. One early adopter for the retail industry is eBay, the popular online auction and shopping site. In July 2008 they released their first mobile app and have increased investments ever since. In 2002 they bought PayPal for use with its online channel, but its becoming a force in the mobile world as well. In June 2010 they acquired RedLaser, the popular barcode scanning mobile app. Both pieces of technology enhance the mobile experience, and are available to other retailers as well. More recently, in December 2010 they acquired Critical Path Software, the developer of their eBay, StubHub, and Shopping.com mobile applications. Taking their mobile development in-house was a clear signal that mobile commerce is important to their strategy. Pop on over the eBay Inc's mobile commerce stats page to see just how well they are doing. You can use the animated map to see where people are using the app on any given day, and you can compare sales of the different categories. eBay's hottest category is Cars & Trucks, garnering 16.5% of the total $2B (yes, billion) in mobile sales in 2010. To understand why that category is so large, let's look at the top 10 most expensive cars sold on eBay mobile in 2010: $240,001 Mercedes-Benz: SLR McLaren $209,888 Lamborghini: Gallardo $208,500 Ferrari: 430 $199,900 Lamborghini: Gallardo $189,000 Lamborghini: Murcielago $185,000 Ferrari: 430 $175,000 Porsche: 911 $170,000 Ferrari: 550 $160,000 Bentley: Continental, GT $159,900 Lamborghini: Gallardo eBay claims they sell 3-4 Ferraris on their mobile app each month. Yes, mobile commerce is not limited to small items. While I would wait to get home and fire up the PC, the current generation that has grown up with mobile phones has no issue satisfying their impulses. Dave Sikora of Digby told me he's seen people buy furniture sets, mattresses, and diamonds via their mobile phones. I guess mobile commerce is rapidly becoming the norm.

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