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• Has test driven development (TDD) actually benefited a real world project?

  - by James

  I am not new to coding. I have been coding (seriously) for over 15 years now. I have always had some testing for my code. However, over the last few months I have been learning test driven design/development (TDD) using Ruby on Rails. So far, I'm not seeing the benefit. I see some benefit to writing tests for some things, but very few. And while I like the idea of writing the test first, I find I spend substantially more time trying to debug my tests to get them to say what I really mean than I do debugging actual code. This is probably because the test code is often substantially more complicated than the code it tests. I hope this is just inexperience with the available tools (RSpec in this case). I must say though, at this point, the level of frustration mixed with the disappointing lack of performance is beyond unacceptable. So far, the only value I'm seeing from TDD is a growing library of RSpec files that serve as templates for other projects/files. Which is not much more useful, maybe less useful, than the actual project code files. In reading the available literature, I notice that TDD seems to be a massive time sink up front, but pays off in the end. I'm just wondering, are there any real world examples? Does this massive frustration ever pay off in the real world? I really hope I did not miss this question somewhere else on here. I searched, but all the questions/answers are several years old at this point. It was a rare occasion when I found a developer who would say anything bad about TDD, which is why I have spent as much time on this as I have. However, I noticed that nobody seems to point to specific real-world examples. I did read one answer that said the guy debugging the code in 2011 would thank you for have a complete unit testing suite (I think that comment was made in 2008). So, I'm just wondering, after all these years, do we finally have any examples showing the payoff is real? Has anybody actually inherited or gone back to code that was designed/developed with TDD and has a complete set of unit tests and actually felt a payoff? Or did you find that you were spending so much time trying to figure out what the test was testing (and why it was important) that you just tossed out the whole mess and dug into the code?

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• Superb post - What if Visual Studio had Achievements?

  - by Eric Nelson

  This post is simple superb – What if Visual Studio had Achievements :-) Although maybe you need to a developer who also has an Xbox to fully understand how good it is. My favourites: Shotgun Debugging – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with a single character change The Architect – Created 25 Interfaces in a single project The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time Every Option Considered – Created an enum with more than 30 values Thanks to Dominic for highlighting it to me!

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• What were the typical price range for a development kit?

  - by Vaughan Hilts

  A lot of these things are usually behind NDAs and tricky to gauge. Is there any information and ranges on how much these thing costs? For example, the PS1 had the "Net Yaroze", which according to Wikipedia was: "For about $750 USD, the Net Yaroze (DTL-H300x) package would contain a special black-colored debugging PlayStation unit with documentation, software, and no regional lockout." So, what were the prices of some game development kits? P.S: This might make a good community wiki

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• Deep-protocol analysis of UNIX networks

  <b>developerWorks: </b>"Whether you are monitoring your network to identify performance issues, debugging an application, or have found an application on your network that you do not recognize, occasionally you need to look deep into the protocols being used on your UNIX network to understand what they are doing."

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• Oracle Magazine, September/October 2009

  Oracle Magazine September/October features articles on benefits of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle's database security and identity management solutions, Oracle OpenWorld preview, easily move application data with Oracle Data Integrator, scripting Oracle RMAN commands, Tom Kyte answers your questions, debugging with Oracle Application Development Framework, array binding, best PL/SQL practices, Oracle Application Express and Amazon EC2, Oracle WebCenter for integrating applications and much more.

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• New features in Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1(February 2010)

  - by kaleidoscope

  Overview Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2008 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure. To download Tool: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5664019e-6860-4c33-9843-4eb40b297ab6&displaylang=en Ram, P

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• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: Turn Ideas into Solutions

  Explore upcoming webcasts on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as we explain how the development system can help you simplify the entire development process and deliver better applications. Learn about Visual Studio Team Foundation Server code management tasks, creating rich user experiences with Microsoft Silverlight, debugging features and capabilities, and working with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010....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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• What is a good IDE for client side JavaScript development? [closed]

  - by Isuru

  I recently started learning JavaScript and am looking for a good JavaScript Editor/IDE. I found dozens of them in a Google search but I would appreciate if users who have experience with using such an IDE could recommend one. I want an IDE with syntax highlighting, possibly IntelliSense and debugging support for JavaScipt code. I'm a Windows 7 user and do just client-side JavaScript development. Any suggestions??

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• Configuring trace file size and number in WebCenter Content 11g

  - by Kyle Hatlestad

  Lately I've been doing a lot of debugging using the System Output tracing in WebCenter Content 11g.  This is built-in tracing in the content server which provides a great level of detail on what's happening under the hood.  You can access the settings as well as a view of the tracing by going to Administration -> System Audit Information.  From here, you can select the tracing sections to include.  Some of my personal favorites are searchquery,  systemdatabase, userstorage, and indexer.  Usually I'm trying to find out some information regarding a search, database query, or user information.  Besides debugging, it's also very helpful for performance tuning. One of the nice tricks with the tracing is it honors the wildcard (*) character.  So you can put in 'schema*' and gather all of the schema related tracing.  And you can notice if you select 'all' and update, it changes to just a *.   To view the tracing in real-time, you simply go to the 'View Server Output' page and the latest tracing information will be at the bottom. This works well if you're looking at something pretty discrete and the system isn't getting much activity.  But if you've got a lot of tracing going on, it would be better to go after the trace log file itself.  By default, the log files can be found in the <content server instance directory>/data/trace directory. You'll see it named 'idccs_<managed server name>_current.log.  You may also find previous trace logs that have rolled over.  In this case they will identified by a date/time stamp in the name.  By default, the server will rotate the logs after they reach 1MB in size.  And it will keep the most recent 10 logs before they roll off and get deleted.  If your server is in a cluster, then the trace file should be configured to be local to the node per the recommended configuration settings. If you're doing some extensive tracing and need to capture all of the information, there are a couple of configuration flags you can set to control the logs. #Change log size to 10MB and number of logs to 20FileSizeLimit=10485760FileCountLimit=20 This is set by going to Admin Server -> General Configuration and entering them in the Additional Configuration Variables: section.  Restart the server and it should take on the new logging settings. 

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• What do each of the TTYs do?

  - by david25

  I know that alt+ctrl+F(1-6) take me to available command lines, and that F1 command line is used for debugging, and F8 is the GUI desktop, that what i know but today i noticed there in F7 that does nothing, it only displays some sort of log in message, and there is F(9-12) that just display black screen with blinking under scroll . can anyone enlighten me what those consoles do, are they for trouble shooting maybe? i use ubuntu netbook 10.10.

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• SMTP server to deliver ALL mail to user@localhost

  - by cam8001

  I'd like to configure an SMTP MTA to accept all mail addressed to any domain and deliver it to my local user account. It would be very useful for debugging mail sent in some code I'm working on. I'll be running the server locally - no outside world interaction required. To be clear: [email protected] - delivered to - cam8001@localhost [email protected] - delivered to - cam8001@localhost [email protected] - delivered to - cam8001@localhost

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• Identifying currently running SQL queries

  This article is taken from the book SQL Server DMVs in Action. The author discusses a routine that identifies the SQL queries that are currently running, which is useful for debugging.

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• How to draw an RGB pixel with bare hands ? (no extra document just a browser)

  - by Rocket Surgeon

  In the browser tools, say in debugging (any browser will do, but IE9 preferred) how can I access things like html5 canvas and modify individual pixels by typing commands from prompt ? I know, it is possible to accomplish in miriad normal ways with preparing the markup and loading the page, but what is the shortest path ? The browser is running with some content, then I hit F12-Console- what exactly should I type to cause a canvas to change ? Thank you

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• Installation and Getting Started with Firebug

  <b>Packt:</b> "Firebug is a free, open source tool that is available as a Mozilla Firefox extension, and allows debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript."

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• Chrome Extensions for Web Development

  The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web...

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• Equivalents of Java and .NET technologies/frameworks

  - by Paul Sasik

  I work in a shop that is a mix of mostly Java and .NET technologists. When discussing new solutions and architectures we often encounter impedance in trying to compare the various technologies, frameworks, APIs etc. in use between the two camps. It seems that each camp knows little about the other and we end up comparing apples to oranges and forgetting about the bushels. While researching the topic I found this: Java -- .Net rough equivalents It's a nice list but it's not quite exhaustive and is missing the key .NET 3.0 technologies and a few other tidbits. To complete that list: what are the near/rough equivalents (or a combination of technologies) in Java to the following in .NET? WCF WPF Silverlight WF Generics Lambda expressions Linq (not Linq-to-SQL) TPL F# IronPython IronRuby ...have i missed anything else? Note that I omitted technologies that are already covered in the linked article. I would also like to hear feedback on whether the linked article is accurate. Thanks.

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• Rough/near equivalents of Java and .NET technologies/frameworks

  - by Paul Sasik

  I work in a shop that is a mix of mostly Java and .NET technologists. When discussing new solutions and architectures we often encounter impedance in trying to compare the various technologies, frameworks, APIs etc. in use between the two camps. It seems that each camp knows little about the other and we end up comparing apples to oranges and forgetting about the bushels. While researching the topic I found this: Java -- .Net rough equivalents It's a nice list but it's not quite exhaustive and is missing the key .NET 3.0 technologies and a few other tidbits. To complete that list: what are the near/rough equivalents (or a combination of technologies) in Java to the following in .NET? WCF WPF Silverlight WF Generics Lambda expressions Linq (not Linq-to-SQL) ...have i missed anything else? Note that I omitted technologies that are already covered in the linked article. I would also like to hear feedback on whether the linked article is accurate. Thanks. (Will CW if requested.)

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• How do I write to a file and print to a terminal cuncurrently in Unix?

  - by bias

  I have a little bash function to log my Macports outputs to a file (since installs often spew little tidbits that are easy to lose in terminal noise), then I just cat the file to the terminal: function porti { command sudo port install $@ >> $1.log 2>&1; cat $1.log } Is there a way to do this concurrently? I don't care about it being in Bash, that's just how I started it. BTW I pass $@ to install but only $1 for the file name so that I can do something like: porti git-gore +bash_completion and only get the file git-core.log however someone else might prefer to include variants in the file name ...

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• Generating C++ BackTraces in OS/X (10.5.7)

  - by phillipwei

  I've been utilizing backtrace and backtrace_symbols to generate programmatic stack traces for the purposes of logging/diagnosis. It seems to roughly work, however, I'm getting a little bit of mangling and there are no accompanying file/line numbers associated with each function invocation (as I'd expect within a gdb bt call or something). Here's an example: 1 leonardo 0x00006989 _ZN9ExceptionC2E13ExceptionType + 111 2 leonardo 0x00006a20 _ZN9ExceptionC1E13ExceptionType + 24 3 leonardo 0x0000ab64 _ZN5Rules11ApplyActionER16ApplicableActionR9GameState + 1060 4 leonardo 0x0000ed15 _ZN9Simulator8SimulateEv + 2179 5 leonardo 0x0000eec9 _ZN9Simulator8SimulateEi + 37 6 leonardo 0x00009729 main + 45 7 leonardo 0x000025c6 start + 54 Anything I'm missing something, doing something silly, or is this all I can expect out of backtrace on OS/X? Some other tidbits: I don't see a rdynamic link option for the g++ version (4.0.1) I'm using. -g/-g3 doesn't make any difference. abi::__cxa__demangle doesn't seem to do anything

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• Top tips for designing GUIs?

  - by oxbow_lakes

  A while back I read (before I lost it) a great book called GUI Bloopers which was full of examples of bad GUI design but also full of useful tidbits like Don't call something a Dialog one minute and a Popup the next. What top tips would you give for designing/documenting a GUI? It would be particularly useful to hear about widgets you designed to cram readable information into as little screen real-estate as possible. I'm going to roll this off with one of my own: avoid trees (e.g. Swing's JTree) unless you really can't avoid it, or have a unbounded hierarchy of stuff. I have found that users don't find them intuitive and they are hard to navigate and filter. PS. I think this question differs from this one as I'm asking for generalist tips

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• Brief Explanation of C Supersets?

  - by Ben Hooper

  I'm getting more and more confused in regards to C's supersets the further I venture into the programming world. There's just so many versions.. C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Objective-C++ and God knows what else. I only know tidbits about these languages (some are object-oriented, some are procedural, C was originally developed for UNIX, C++ started as an extension and is used primarily on the Windows OS, Objective-C is primarily used on Linux and Mac OS/iOS, etc), but I'm not even sure that what I know is correct. I would just like someone to shed some light on what I "know" - a little bit more information about which are successive versions, which platforms each are generally used on, which are the best versions to learn, etc if anyone is feeling generous. :) Thanks. :)

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• Find the best OpenWorld sessions for learning about UX highlights

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  Have you clicked through the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 catalog? It’s amazingly dense, as usual. But one thing we noticed this year is that nearly half of the sessions mention some component of user experience, which is a sea change in our world. It means that more people understand, appreciate, and desire an effective user experience, and it also means that Oracle’s investment in its next-generation applications user experience, such as Oracle Fusion Applications, is increasingly apparent and interesting to its customers. So how do you choose the user experience sessions that make the most sense for you and your organization? Read our list to find out which sessions we think offer the most value for those interested in finding out more about the Oracle Applications user experience. If you’re interested in Oracle’s strategy for its user experience: CON9438: Oracle Fusion Applications: Transforming Insight into Action10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2007 CON9467: Oracle’s Roadmap to a Simple, Modern User Experience3:30 - 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON8718: Oracle Fusion Applications: Customizing and Extending with Oracle Composers11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4; Moscone West – 2008 GEN9663: General Session: A Panel of Masterminds—Where Are Oracle Applications Headed?1:45 - 2:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone North - Hall D If you’re interested in PeopleSoft/PeopleTools: GEN8928: General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product Roadmap3:15 - 4:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON9183: PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap4:45 - 5:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON8932: New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business User5:00 - 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 3007 If you’re interested in E-Business Suite: GEN8474: General Session: Oracle E-Business Suite—Strategy, Update, and Roadmap12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 2002/2004 CON9026: Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability Enhancements1:15 - 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2016 If you’re interested in Siebel: CON9700: Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West – 2009 CON9703: User Interface Innovations with the New Siebel “Open UI”10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2009 If you’re interested in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: HOL10452: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 User Interface Changes10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; Marriott Marquis - Nob Hill AB CON9160: Showcase of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Experience1:15 - 2:15 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B CON9159: Euphoria with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Experience11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B If you’re interested in Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns: Functional design patterns that helped create the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience are now available. Learn more about these new, reusable usability solutions and best-practices at the Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF demopods during Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Or visit the OTN Lounge between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3, to talk to Ultan O'Broin from the Oracle Applications User Experience team.    Demopod location: Moscone Center, South Exhibition Hall Level 1, S-207 OTN (Oracle Technology Network) Lounge: Howard Street tent On the demogrounds: Head to the demogrounds to see new demos from the Applications User Experience team, including the new look for Fusion Applications and what we’re building for mobile platforms. Take a spin on our eye tracker, a very cool tool that we use to research the usability of a particular design. Visit the Usable Apps OpenWorld page to find out where our demopods will be located.Photo by Martin Taylor, Oracle Applications User ExperienceA tour takes place in one of the usability labs at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. At our labs, on-site and at HQ: We are also recruiting participants for our on-site lab, in which we gather feedback on new user experience designs, and taking reservations for a charter bus that will bring you to Oracle headquarters for a lab tour Thursday, Oct. 4, or Friday, Oct. 5. Tours leave at 10 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You’ll see more of our newest designs at the lab tour, and some of our research tools in action. For more information on any OpenWorld sessions, check the content catalog, also available at www.oracle.com/openworld. For information on Applications User Experience (Apps UX) sessions and activities, go to the Usable Apps OpenWorld page.

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• Common usecases and techniques when integrating a 3rd party application with Oracle Sales Cloud

  - by asantaga

  Over the last year or so I've see a lot of partners migrating and integrate their applications with Oracle Sales Cloud. Interestingly I'd say 60% of the partners use the same set of design patterns over and over again. Most of the time I see that they want to embed their application into Oracle Sales Cloud, within a tab usually, perhaps click on a link to their application (passing some piece of data + credentials) and then within their application update sales cloud again using webservices. Here are some examples of the different use-cases I've seen , and how partners are embedding their applications into Sales Cloud, NB : The following examples use the "Desktop" User Interface rather than the Newer "Simplified User Interface", I'll update the sample application soon but the integration patterns are precisely the same Use Case 1 :  Navigator "Link out" to third party application This is an example of where the developer has added a link to the global navigator and this links out to the 3rd Party Application. Typically one doesn't pass any contextual data with the exception of perhaps user credentials, or better still JWT Token. Techniques Used   Adding Link to Menu Item Using JWT Token in Sales Cloud Use Case 2 : Application Embedded within the Sales Cloud Dashboard Within the Oracle Sales Cloud application there is a tab called "Sales", within this tab its possible to embed a SubTab and embed a iFrame pointing to your application. To do this the developer simply needs to edit the page in customization mode, add the tab and then add the iFrame, simples! The developer can pass credentials/JWT Token and some other pieces of data but not object data (ie the current OpportunityID etc)  Techniques Used Adding a page to the dashboard  Using JWT Token in Sales Cloud  Use Case 3 : Embedding a Tab and Context Linking out from a Sales Cloud object to the 3rd party application In this usecase the developer embeds two components into Oracle Sales Cloud. The first is a SubTab showing summary data to the user (a quote in our case) and then secondly a hyperlink, (although it could be a button) which when clicked navigates the user to the 3rd party application. In this case the developer almost always passes context specific data (i.e. the opportunityId) and a security token (username password combo or JWT Token). The third party application usually takes the data, perhaps queries more data using the Sales Cloud SOAP/WebService interface and then displays the resulting mashup to the user for further processing. When the user has finished their work in the 3rd party application they normally navigate back to Oracle Sales Cloud using what's called a "DeepLink", ie taking them back to the object [opportunity in our case] they came from. This image visually shows a "Happy Path" a user may follow, and combines linking out to an application , webservice calls and deep linking back to Sales Cloud. Techniques Used Extending a SalesCloud application with a custom button Using JWT Token in Sales Cloud Extending Oracle Sales Cloud [Opportnity] with a custom tab exposing External Content Retrieving Data from Oracle Sales cloud using WebServices Coding some groovy script to generate the URLs required (Doc 1571200.1 on MyOracle Support) DeepLinking to specific Oracle Sales Cloud Pages (Doc 1516151.1 on My Oracle Support) Use-Case 4 :  Server Side processing/synchronization This usecase focuses on the Server Side processing of data, in this case synchronizing data. Here the 3rd party application is running on a "timer", e.g. cron or similar, and when triggered it queries data from Oracle Sales Cloud, then it queries data from the 3rd party application, determines the deltas and then inserts the data where required. Specifically here we are calling Oracle Sales Cloud using SOAP/WebServices and the 3rd party application is being communicated to using the REST API, for Oracle Sales Cloud one would use standard JAX-WS WebService calls and for REST one would use the JAX-RS api and perhap the Jackson api for managing JSON objects.. This is a very common use case and one which specifically lends itself to using the Oracle Java Cloud Service as the ideal application server where to host the mediator between the two applications.  Techniques Used Using JWT Token in Sales Cloud Integrating with the Oracle Java Cloud Service Retrieving Data from Oracle Sales cloud using WebServices General Resources The above is just a small set of techniques and use-cases which are used today. There are plenty of other sources of documentation and resources available on the internet but to get you started here are a few of my favourite places  Sales Cloud General Documentation Sales Cloud Customize Tab is useful for general customization of Sales Cloud Sales Cloud Integration Tab focuses on the 3rd party integration techniques  Official Oracle Fusion Developer Relations Blog Official Oracle Fusion Developer Relations YouTube Channel Enjoy integrating! 

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• Knowing your user is key--Part 1: Motivation

  - by erikanollwebb

  I was thinking where the best place to start in this blog would be and finally came back to a theme that I think is pretty critical--successful gamification in the enterprise comes down to knowing your user.  Lots of folks will say that gamification is about understanding that everyone is a gamer.  But at least in my org, that argument won't play for a lot of people.  Pun intentional.  It's not that I don't see the attraction to the idea--really, very few people play no games at all.  If they don't play video games, they might play solitaire on their computer.  They may play card games, or some type of sport.  Mario Herger has some great facts on how much game playing there is going on at his Enterprise-Gamification.com website. But at the end of the day, I can't sell that into my organization well.  We are Oracle.  We make big, serious software designed run your whole business.  We don't make Angry Birds out of your financial reporting tools.  So I stick with the argument that works better.  Gamification techniques are really just good principals of user experience packaged a little differently.  Feedback?  We already know feedback is important when using software.  Progress indicators?  Got that too.  Game mechanics may package things in a more explicit way but it's not really "new".  To know how to use game mechanics, and what a user experience team is important for, is totally understanding who our users are and what they are motivated by. For several years, I taught college psychology courses, including Motivation.  Motivation is generally broken down into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  There's intrinsic, which comes from within the individual.  And there's extrinsic, which comes from outside the individual.  Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from just a general sense of pleasure in the doing of something.  For example, I like to cook.  I like to cook a lot.  The kind of cooking I think is just fun makes other people--people who don't like to cook--cringe.  Like the cake I made this week--the star-spangled rhapsody from The Cake Bible: two layers of meringue, two layers of genoise flavored with a raspberry eau de vie syrup, whipped cream with berries and a mousseline buttercream, also flavored with raspberry liqueur and topped with fresh raspberries and blueberries. I love cooking--I ask for cooking tools for my birthday and Christmas, I take classes like sushi making and knife skills for fun.  I like reading about you can make an emulsion of egg yolks, melted butter and lemon, cook slowly and transform them into a sauce hollandaise (my use of all the egg yolks that didn't go into the aforementioned cake).  And while it's nice when people like what I cook, I don't do it for that.  I do it because I think it's fun.  My former boss, Ultan Ó Broin, loves to fish in the sea off the coast of Ireland.  Not because he gets prizes for it, or awards, but because it's fun.  To quote a note he sent me today when I asked if having been recently ill kept him from the beginning of mackerel season, he told me he had already been out and said "I can fish when on a deathbed" (read more of Ultan's work, see his blogs on User Assistance and Translation.). That's not the kind of intensity you get about something you don't like to do.  I'm sure you can think of something you do just because you like it. So how does that relate to gamification?  Gamification in the enterprise space is about uncovering the game within work.  Gamification is about tapping into things people already find motivating.  But to do that, you need to know what that user is motivated by. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those areas where over-the-top gamification seems to work (not to plug a competitor in this space, but you can search on what Bunchball* has done with a company just a little north of us on 101 for the CRM crowd).  Sales people are naturally competitive and thrive on that plus recognition of their sales work.  You can use lots of game mechanics like leaderboards and challenges and scorecards with this type of user and they love it.  Show my whole org I'm leading in sales for the quarter?  Bring it on!  However, take the average accountant and show how much general ledger activity they have done in the last week and expose it to their whole org on a leaderboard and I think you'd see a lot of people looking for a new job.  Why?  Because in general, accountants aren't extraverts who thrive on competition in their work.  That doesn't mean there aren't game mechanics that would work for them, but they won't be the same game mechanics that work for sales people.  It's a different type of user and they are motivated by different things. To break this up, I'll stop here and post now.  I'll pick this thread up in the next post. Thoughts? Questions? *Disclosure: To my knowledge, Oracle has no relationship with Bunchball at this point in time.

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• Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

  - by jpurdy

  A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

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