Search Results

Search found 3823 results on 153 pages for 'kim major'.

Page 129/153 | < Previous Page | 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136  | Next Page >

• DBCC CHECKDB (BatmanDb, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS) &ndash; Are you Feeling Lucky?

  - by David Totzke

  I’m currently working for a client on a PowerBuilder to WPF migration.  It’s one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” kind of clients and the quick-lime pits are currently occupied by the EMC tech…but I’ve said too much already. At approximately 3 or 4 pm that day users of the Batman[1] application here in Gotham[1] started to experience problems accessing the application.  Batman[2] is a document management system here that also integrates with the ERP system.  Very little goes on here that doesn’t involve Batman in some way.  The errors being received seemed to point to network issues (TCP protocol error, connection forcibly closed by the remote host etc…) but the real issue was much more insidious. Connecting to the database via SSMS and performing selects on certain tables underlying the application areas that were having problems started to reveal the issue.  You couldn’t do a SELECT * FROM MyTable without it bombing and giving the same error noted above.  A run of DBCC CHECKDB revealed 14 tables with corruption.  One of the tables with issues was the Document table.  Pretty central to a “document management” system.  Information was obtained from IT that a single drive in the SAN went bad in the night.  A new drive was in place and was working fine.  The partition that held the Batman database is configured for RAID Level 5 so a single drive failure shouldn’t have caused any trouble and yet, the database is corrupted.  They do hourly incremental backups here so the first thing done was to try a restore.  A restore of the most recent backup failed so they worked backwards until they hit a good point.  This successful restore was for a backup at 3AM – a full day behind.  This time also roughly corresponds with the time the SAN started to report the drive failure.  The plot thickens… I got my hands on the output from DBCC CHECKDB and noticed a pattern.  What’s sad is that nobody that should have noticed the pattern in the DBCC output did notice.  There was a rush to do things to try and recover the data before anybody really understood what was wrong with it in the first place.  Cooler heads must prevail in these circumstances and some investigation should be done and a plan of action laid out or you could end up making things worse[3].  DBCC CHECKDB also told us that: repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB Yikes.  That means that the database is so messed up that you’re definitely going to lose some stuff when you repair it to get it back to a consistent state.  All the more reason to do a little more investigation into the problem.  Rescuing this database is preferable to having to export all of the data possible from this database into a new one.  This is a fifteen year old application with about seven hundred tables.  There are TRIGGERS everywhere not to mention the referential integrity constraints to deal with.  Only fourteen of the tables have an issue.  We have a good backup that is missing the last 24 hours of business which means we could have a “do-over” of yesterday but that’s not a very palatable option either. All of the affected tables had TEXT columns and all of the errors were about LOB data types and orphaned off-row data which basically means TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT columns.  If we did a SELECT on an affected table and excluded those columns, we got all of the rows.  We exported that data into a separate database.  Things are looking up.  Working on a copy of the production database we then ran DBCC CHECKDB with REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS and that “fixed” everything up.   The allow data loss option will delete the bad rows.  This isn’t too horrible as we have all of those rows minus the text fields from out earlier export.  Now I could LEFT JOIN to the exported data to find the missing rows and INSERT them minus the TEXT column data. We had the restored data from the good 3AM backup that we could now JOIN to and, with fingers crossed, recover the missing TEXT column information.  We got lucky in that all of the affected rows were old and in the end we didn’t lose anything.  :O  All of the row counts along the way worked out and it looks like we dodged a major bullet here. We’ve heard back from EMC and it turns out the SAN firmware that they were running here is apparently buggy.  This thing is only a couple of months old.  Grrr…. They dispatched a technician that night to come and update it .  That explains why RAID didn’t save us. All-in-all this could have been a lot worse.  Given the root cause here, they basically won the lottery in not losing anything. Here are a few links to some helpful posts on the SQL Server Engine blog.  I love the title of the first one: Which part of 'REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS' isn't clear? CHECKDB (Part 8): Can repair fix everything? (in fact, read the whole series) Ta da! Emergency mode repair (we didn’t have to resort to this one thank goodness)   Dave Just because I can…   [1] Names have been changed to protect the guilty. [2] I'm Batman. [3] And if I'm the coolest head in the room, you've got even bigger problems...

  Read the article

• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

  Read the article

• Why is my external USB hard drive sometimes completely inaccessible?

  - by Eliah Kagan

  I have an external USB hard drive, consisting of an 1 TB SATA drive in a Rosewill RX35-AT-SU SLV Aluminum 3.5" Silver USB 2.0 External Enclosure, plugged into my SONY VAIO VGN-NS310F laptop. It is plugged directly into the computer (not through a hub). The drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 rpm Western Digital, but I don't remember the exact model. I can remove the drive from the enclosure (again), if people think it's necessary to know that detail. The drive is formatted ext4. I mount it dynamically with udisks on my Lubuntu 11.10 system, usually automatically via PCManFM. (I have had Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine, and experienced all this same behavior with that too.) Every once in a while--once or twice a day--it becomes inaccessible, and difficult to unmount. Attempting to unmount it with sudo umount ... gives an error message saying the drive is in use and suggesting fuser and lsof to find out what is using it. Killing processes found to be using the drive with fuser and lsof is sometimes sufficient to let me unmount it, but usually isn't. Once the drive is unmounted or the machine is rebooted, the drive will not mount. Plugging in the drive and turning it on registers nothing on the computer. dmesg is unchanged. The drive's access light usually blinks vigorously, as though the drive is being accessed constantly. Then eventually, after I keep the drive off for a while (half an hour), I am able to mount it again. While the drive doesn't work on this machine for a while, it will work immediately on another machine running the same version of Ubuntu. Sometimes bringing it back over from the other machine seems to "fix" it. Sometimes it doesn't. The drive doesn't always stop being accessible while mounted, before becoming unmountable. Sometimes it works fine, I turn off the computer, I turn the computer back on, and I cannot mount the drive. Currently this is the only drive with which I have this problem, but I've had problems that I think are the same as this, with different drives, on different Ubuntu machines. This laptop has another external USB drive plugged into it regularly, which doesn't have this problem. Unplugging that drive before plugging in the "problem" drive doesn't fix the problem. I've opened the drive up and made sure the connections were tight in the past, and that didn't seem to help (any more than waiting the same amount of time that it took to open and close the drive, before attempting to remount it). Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this, what troubleshooting steps I should perform, and/or how I could fix this problem altogether? Update: I tried replacing the USB data cable (from the enclosure to the laptop), as Merlin suggested. I should've tried that long ago, since it fits the symptoms perfectly (the drive works on another machine, which would make sense because the cable would be bent at a different angle, possibly completing a circuit of frayed wires). Unfortunately, though, this did not help--I have the same problem with the new cable. I'll try to provide additional detailed information about the drive inside the enclosure, next time I'm able to get the drive working. (At the moment I don't have another machine available to attach it.) Major Update (28 June 2012) The drive seems to have deteriorated considerably. I think this is so, because I've attached it to another machine and gotten lots of errors about invalid characters, when copying files from it. I am less interested in recovering data from the drive than I am in figuring out what is wrong with it. I specifically want to figure out if the problem is the drive or the enclosure. Now, when I plug the drive into the original machine where I was having the problems, it still doesn't appear (including with sudo fdisk -l), but it is recognized by the kernel and messages are added to dmesg. Most of the message consist of errors like this, repeated many times: [ 7.707593] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled sense code [ 7.707599] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=invalid driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 7.707606] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 7.707614] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error [ 7.707621] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 [ 7.707636] end_request: critical target error, dev sdc, sector 0 [ 7.707641] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0 Here are all the lines from dmesg starting with when the drive is recognized. Please note that: I'm back to running Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine (and perhaps that's a factor in better error messages). Now that the drive has been plugged into another machine and back into this one, and also now that this machine is back to running 12.04, the drive's access light doesn't blink as I had described. Looking at the drive, it would appear as though it is working normally, with low or no access. This behavior (the errors) occurs when rebooting the machine with the drive plugged in, and also when manually plugging in the drive. A few of the messages are about /dev/sdb. That drive is working fine. The bad drive is /dev/sdc. I just didn't want to edit anything out from the middle.

  Read the article

• Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing, and what does that have to do with ERP?

  - by user709270

  Tier One Defined By Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice President and General Manager  I recently became aware of the latest Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing tactic. Wait now, what is Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing and what does that have to do with ERP? Well if you grew up in USA during the 50’s, 60’s and maybe a bit in the early 70’s there was a unifying media of culture known as the comic book. I was a big Iron Man fan. I always liked the troubled hero aspect of Tony Start and hey he was a technologist. This is going somewhere, just hold on. Of course comic books like most media contained advertisements. Ninety pound weakling transformed by Charles Atlas in just 15 minutes per day. Baby Ruth, Juicy Fruit Gum and all assortments of Hostess goodies were on display. The best ad was for the “Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys – The real live fun-pets you grow yourself!” These ads set the standard for exaggeration and half-truth; “…they love attention…so eager to please, they can even be trained…” The cartoon picture on the ad is of a family of royal looking sea creatures – daddy, mommy, son and little sis – sea monkey? There was a disclaimer at the bottom in fine print, “Caricatures shown not intended to depict Artemia.” Ok what ten years old knows what the heck artemia is? Well you grow up fast once you’ve been separated from your buck twenty five plus postage just to discover that it is brine shrimp. Really dumb brine shrimp that don’t take commands or do tricks. Unfortunately the technology industry is full of sea monkey sales and marketing. Yes believe it or not in some cases there is subterfuge and obfuscation used to secure contracts. Hey I get it; the picture on the box might not be the actual size. Make up what you want about your product, but here is what I don’t like, could you leave out the obvious falsity when it comes to my product, especially the negative stuff. So here is the latest one – “Oracle’s JD Edwards is NOT tier one”. Really? Definition please! Well a whole host of googleable and reputable sources confirm that a tier one vendor is large, well known, and enjoys national and international recognition. Let me see large, so thousands of customers? Oh and part of the world’s largest business software and hardware corporation? Check and check JD Edwards has that and that. Well known, enjoying national and international recognition? Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is available in 21 languages and is directly localized in 33 countries that support some of the world’s largest multinationals and many midsized domestic market companies. Something on the order of half the JD Edwards customer base is outside North America. My passport is on its third insert after 2 years and not from vacations. So if you don’t mind I am going to mark national and international recognition in the got it column. So what else is there? Well let me offer a few criteria. Longevity – The JD Edwards products benefit from 35+ years of intellectual property development; through booms, busts, mergers and acquisitions, we are still here Vision & innovation – JD Edwards is the first full suite ERP to run on the iPad as just one example Proven track record of execution – Since becoming part of Oracle, JD Edwards has released to the market over 20 deliverables including major release, point releases, new apps modules, tool releases, integrations…. Solid, focused functionality with a flexible, interoperable, extensible underlying architecture – JD Edwards offers solid core ERP with specialty modules for verticals all delivered on a well defined independent tools layer that helps enable you to scale your business without an ERP reimplementation A continuation plan – Oracle’s JD Edwards offers our customers a 6 year roadmap as well as interoperability with Oracle’s next generation of applications Oh I almost forgot that the expert sources agree on one additional thing, tier one may be a preferred vendor that offers product and services to you with appealing value. You should check out the TCO studies of JD Edwards. I think you will see what the thousands of customers that rely on these products to run their businesses enjoy – that is the tier one solution with the lowest TCO. Oh and if you get an offer to buy an ERP for no license charge, remember the picture on the box might not be the actual size. 

  Read the article

• NDepend 4 – First Steps

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction Thanks to Patrick Smacchia I had the chance to test NDepend 4. I can only say: awesome! This will be the first of a series of posts on NDepend, where I will talk about my discoveries. Keep in mind that I am just starting to use it, so more experienced users may find these too basic, I just hope I don’t say anything foolish! I must say that I am in no way affiliated with NDepend and I never actually met Patrick. Installation No installation program – a curious decision, I’m not against it -, just unzip the files to a folder and run the executable. It will optionally register itself with Visual Studio 2008, 2010 and 11 as well as RedGate’s Reflector; also, it automatically looks for updates. NDepend can either be used as a stand-alone program (with or without a GUI) or from within Visual Studio or Reflector. Getting Started One thing that really pleases me is the Getting Started section of the stand-alone, with links to pages on NDepend’s web site, featuring detailed explanations, which usually include screenshots and small videos (<5 minutes). There’s also an How do I with hierarchical navigation that guides us to through the major features so that we can easily find what we want. Usage There are two basic ways to use NDepend: Analyze .NET solutions, projects or assemblies; Compare two versions of the same assembly. I have so far not used NDepend to compare assemblies, so I will first talk about the first option. After selecting a solution and some of its projects, it generates a single HTML page with an highly detailed report of the analysis it produced. This includes some metrics such as number of lines of code, IL instructions, comments, types, methods and properties, the calculation of the cyclomatic complexity, coupling and lots of others indicators, typically grouped by type, namespace and assembly. The HTML also includes some nice diagrams depicting assembly dependencies, type and method relative proportions (according to the number of IL instructions, I guess) and assembly analysis relating to abstractness and stability. Useful, I would say. Then there’s the rules; NDepend tests the target assemblies against a set of more than 120 rules, grouped in categories Code Quality, Object Oriented Design, Design, Architecture and Layering, Dead Code, Visibility, Naming Conventions, Source Files Organization and .NET Framework Usage. The full list can be configured on the application, and an explanation of each rule can be found on the web site. Rules can be validated, violated and violated in a critical manner, and the HTML will contain the violated rules, their queries – more on this later - and results. The HTML uses some nice JavaScript effects, which allow paging and sorting of tables, so its nice to use. Similar to the rules, there are some queries that display results for a number (about 200) questions grouped as Object Oriented Design, API Breaking Changes (for assembly version comparison), Code Diff Summary (also for version comparison) and Dead Code. The difference between queries and rules is that queries are not classified as passes, violated or critically violated, just present results. The queries and rules are expressed through CQLinq, which is a very powerful LINQ derivative specific to code analysis. All of the included rules and queries can be enabled or disabled and new ones can be added, with intellisense to help. Besides the HTML report file, the NDepend application can be used to explore all analysis results, compare different versions of analysis reports and to run custom queries. Comparison to Other Analysis Tools Unlike StyleCop, NDepend only works with assemblies, not source code, so you can’t expect it to be able to enforce brackets placement, for example. It is more similar to FxCop, but you don’t have the option to analyze at the IL level, that is, other that the number of IL instructions and the complexity. What’s Next In the next days I’ll continue my exploration with a real-life test case. References The NDepend web site is http://www.ndepend.com/. Patrick keeps an updated blog on http://codebetter.com/patricksmacchia/ and he regularly monitors StackOverflow for questions tagged NDepend, which you can find on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ndepend. The default list of CQLinq rules, queries and statistics can be found at http://www.ndepend.com/DefaultRules/webframe.html. The syntax itself is described at http://www.ndepend.com/Doc_CQLinq_Syntax.aspx and its features at http://www.ndepend.com/Doc_CQLinq_Features.aspx.

  Read the article

• A Semantic Model For Html: TagBuilder and HtmlTags

  - by Ryan Ohs

  In this post I look into the code smell that is HTML literals and show how we can refactor these pesky strings into a friendlier and more maintainable model.   The Problem When I started writing MVC applications, I quickly realized that I built a lot of my HTML inside HtmlHelpers. As I did this, I ended up moving quite a bit of HTML into string literals inside my helper classes. As I wanted to add more attributes (such as classes) to my tags, I needed to keep adding overloads to my helpers. A good example of this end result is the default html helpers that come with the MVC framework. Too many overloads make me crazy! The problem with all these overloads is that they quickly muck up the API and nobody can remember exactly what order the parameters go in. I've seen many presenters (including members of the ASP.NET MVC team!) stumble before realizing that their view wasn't compiling because they needed one more null parameter in the call to Html.ActionLink(). What if instead of writing Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", null, new { @class = "navigation" }) we could do Html.LinkToAction("Edit").Text("Edit").AddClass("navigation") ? Wouldn't that be much easier to remember and understand?  We can do this if we introduce a semantic model for building our HTML.   What is a Semantic Model? According to Martin Folwer, "a semantic model is an in-memory representation, usually an object model, of the same subject that the domain specific language describes." In our case, the model would be a set of classes that know how to render HTML. By using a semantic model we can free ourselves from dealing with strings and instead output the HTML (typically via ToString()) once we've added all the elements and attributes we desire to the model. There are two primary semantic models available in ASP.NET MVC: MVC 2.0's TagBuilder and FubuMVC's HtmlTags.   TagBuilder TagBuilder is the html builder that is available in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I'm not a huge fan but it gets the job done -- for simple jobs.  Here's an overview of how to use TagBuilder. See my Tips section below for a few comments on that example. The disadvantage of TagBuilder is that unless you wrap it up with our own classes, you still have to write the actual tag name over and over in your code. eg. new TagBuilder("div") instead of new DivTag(). I also think it's method names are a little too long. Why not have AddClass() instead of AddCssClass() or Text() instead of SetInnerText()? What those methods are doing should be pretty obvious even in the short form. I also don't like that it wants to generate an id attribute from your input instead of letting you set it yourself using external conventions. (See GenerateId() and IdAttributeDotReplacement)). Obviously these come from Microsoft's default approach to MVC but may not be optimal for all programmers.   HtmlTags HtmlTags is in my opinion the much better option for generating html in ASP.NET MVC. It was actually written as a part of FubuMVC but is available as a stand alone library. HtmlTags provides a much cleaner syntax for writing HTML. There are classes for most of the major tags and it's trivial to create additional ones by inheriting from HtmlTag. There are also methods on each tag for the common attributes. For instance, FormTag has an Action() method. The SelectTag class allows you to set the default option or first option independent from adding other options. With TagBuilder there isn't even an abstraction for building selects! The project is open source and always improving. I'll hopefully find time to submit some of my own enhancements soon.   Tips 1) It's best not to have insanely overloaded html helpers. Use fluent builders. 2) In html helpers, return the TagBuilder/tag itself (not a string!) so that you can continue to add attributes outside the helper; see my first sample above. 3) Create a static entry point into your builders. I created a static Tags class that gives me access all the HtmlTag classes I need. This way I don't clutter my code with "new" keywords. eg. Tags.Div returns a new DivTag instance. 4) If you find yourself doing something a lot, create an extension method for it. I created a Nest() extension method that reads much more fluently than the AddChildren() method. It also accepts a params array of tags so I can very easily nest many children.   I hope you have found this post helpful. Join me in my war against HTML literals! I’ll have some more samples of how I use HtmlTags in future posts.

  Read the article

• Top Reasons You Need A User Engagement Platform

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post by: Amit Sircar, Senior Sales Consultant, Oracle Deliver complex enterprise functionality through a simple intuitive and unified User Interface (UI) The modern enterprise contains a wide range of applications that are used to manage the business and drive competitive advantages. Organizations respond by creating a complex structure that results in a functional and management grouping of users. Each of these groups of users requires access to multiple applications and information sources in order to perform their job functions. This leads to the lack of a unified view of enterprise information, inconsistent user interfaces and disjointed security. To be effective, portals must be designed from the end-user perspective, enabling the user to accomplish as many tasks as possible while visiting the fewest number of portals. This requires rethinking the way that portals are built, moving from a functional business unit perspective to a user-focused, process-oriented point of view. Oracle WebCenter provides the Common User Experience Architecture that allows organizations to seamlessly present a unified view of enterprise information tailored to a particular user’s role and preferences. This architecture provides the best practices, design patterns and delivery mechanism for myriad services, applications, and data sources.  In order to serve as a primary system of access, Oracle WebCenter also provides access to unstructured content and to other users via integrated search, service-oriented artifacts, content management, and collaboration tools. Provide a modern and engaging experience without modifying the core business application Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums or social media sites are having a profound impact in the public internet.  These technologies can be leveraged by enterprises to add significant value to the business. Organizations need to integrate these technologies directly into their business applications while continuing to meet their security and governance needs. To deliver richer connections and become a more agile and intelligent business, WebCenter provides an enterprise portal platform that contains pre-integrated, standards-based Enterprise 2.0 services. These Enterprise 2.0 services can be easily accessed, integrated and utilized by users. By giving users the ability to use and integrate Enterprise 2.0 services such as tags, links, wikis, activities, blogs or social networking directly with their portals and applications, they are empowered to make richer connections, optimize their productivity, and ultimately increase the value of their applications. Foster a collaborative experience The organizational workplace has undergone a major change in the last decade. With increasing globalization and a distributed workforce, project teams may be physically separated by large distances. Online collaboration technologies are becoming a critical resource to enable virtual teams to share information and work together effectively. Oracle WebCenter delivers dynamic business communities with rich Services to empower teams to quickly and efficiently manage their information, applications, projects, and people without requiring IT assistance. It brings together the latest technology around Enterprise 2.0 and social computing, communities, personal productivity, and ad-hoc team interactions without any development effort. It enables the sharing and collaboration on team content, focusing an organization’s valuable resources on solving business problems, tapping into new ideas, and reducing time-to-market. Mobile Support The traditional workplace dynamics that required employees to access their work applications from their desktops have undergone a fundamental shift. Employees were used to primarily working from company offices and utilized an IT-issued computer for performing their job functions. With the introduction of flexible work hours and the growth of remote workers, more and more employees need the ability to remain productive even when they do not have access to a computer via the use of tablets and smartphones.  In addition, customers and citizens have come to expect 24x7 access to resources and websites from wherever they are located. Tablets and smartphones have empowered everyone to quickly access services they need anytime and from any place.  WebCenter provides out of the box capabilities to deliver the mobile experience in a seamless manner. Seeded device profiles and toolkits within WebCenter can be used to render the same web pages into multiple target devices such iPads, iPhones and android devices. Web designers can preview the portal using the built in simulator, make necessary updates and then deploy their UI design for the targeted device. Conclusion The competitive economy and resource constraints facing organizations today require them to find ways to make their applications, portals and Web sites more agile and intelligent and their knowledge workers more productive no matter where they are located. Organizations need to provide faster access to relevant information and resources, enhance existing applications and business processes with rich Enterprise 2.0 services, and seamlessly deliver content to mobile platforms. Oracle WebCenter successfully meets these challenges by providing the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web.

  Read the article

• College Courses through distance learning

  - by Matt

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

  Read the article

• Kendo UI Mobile with Knockout for Master-Detail Views

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Lately I’ve been playing with Kendo UI Mobile to build iPhone apps. It’s similar to jQuery Mobile in that they are both HTML5/JavaScript based frameworks for buildings mobile apps. The primary thing that drew me to investigate Kendo UI was its innate ability to adaptively render a native looking app based on detecting the device it’s currently running on. In other words, it will render to look like a native iPhone app if it’s running on an iPhone and it will render to look like a native Droid app if it’s running on a Droid. This is in contrast to jQuery Mobile which looks the same on all devices and, therefore, it can never quite look native for whatever device it’s running on. My first impressions of Kendo UI were great. Using HTML5 data-* attributes to define “roles” for UI elements is easy, the rendering looked great, and the basic navigation was simple and intuitive. However, I ran into major confusion when trying to figure out how to “correctly” build master-detail views. Since I was already very family with KnockoutJS, I set out to use that framework in conjunction with Kendo UI Mobile to build the following simple scenario: I wanted to have a simple “Task Manager” application where my first screen just showed a list of tasks like this:   Then clicking on a specific task would navigate to a detail screen that would show all details of the specific task that was selected:   Basic navigation between views in Kendo UI is simple. The href of an <a> tag just needs to specify a hash tag followed by the ID of the view to navigate to as shown in this jsFiddle (notice the href of the <a> tag matches the id of the second view):   Direct link to jsFiddle: here. That is all well and good but the problem I encountered was: how to pass data between the views? Specifically, I need the detail view to display all the details of whichever task was selected. If I was doing this with my typical technique with KnockoutJS, I know exactly what I would do. First I would create a view model that had my collection of tasks and a property for the currently selected task like this: 1: function ViewModel() { 2: var self = this; 3: self.tasks = ko.observableArray(data); 4: self.selectedTask = ko.observable(null); 5: } Then I would bind my list of tasks to the unordered list - I would attach a “click” handler to each item (each <li> in the unordered list) so that it would select the “selectedTask” for the view model. The problem I found is this approach simply wouldn’t work for Kendo UI Mobile. It completely ignored the click handlers that I was trying to attach to the <a> tags – it just wanted to look at the href (at least that’s what I observed). But if I can’t intercept this, then *how* can I pass data or any context to the next view? The only thing I was able to find in the Kendo documentation is that you can pass query string arguments on the view name you’re specifying in the href. This enabled me to do the following: Specify the task ID in each href – something like this: <a href=”#taskDetail?id=3></a> Attach an “init method” (via the “data-show” attribute on the details view) that runs whenever the view is activated Inside this “init method”, grab the task ID passed from the query string to look up the item from my view model’s list of tasks in order to set the selected task I was able to get all that working with about 20 lines of JavaScript as shown in this jsFiddle. If you click on the Results tab, you can navigate between views and see the the detail screen is correctly binding to the selected item:   Direct link to jsFiddle: here.   With all that being done, I was very happy to get it working with the behavior I wanted. However, I have no idea if that is the “correct” way to do it or if there is a “better” way to do it. I know that Kendo UI comes with its own data binding framework but my preference is to be able to use (the well-documented) KnockoutJS since I’m already familiar with that framework rather than having to learn yet another new framework. While I think my solution above is probably “acceptable”, there are still a couple of things that bug me about it. First, it seems odd that I have to loop through my items to *find* my selected item based on the ID that was passed on the query string - normally, with Knockout I can just refer directly to my selected item from where it was used. Second, it didn’t feel exactly right that I had to rely on the “data-show” method of the details view to set my context – normally with Knockout, I could just attach a click handler to the <a> tag that was actually clicked by the user in order to set the “selected item.” I’m not sure if I’m being too picky. I know there are many people that have *way* more expertise in Kendo UI compared to me – I’d be curious to know if there are better ways to achieve the same results.

  Read the article

• 7 Reasons for Abandonment in eCommerce and the need for Contextual Support by JP Saunders

  - by Tuula Fai

  Shopper confidence, or more accurately the lack thereof, is the bane of the online retailer. There are a number of questions that influence whether a shopper completes a transaction, and all of those attributes revolve around knowledge. What products are available? What products are on offer? What would be the cost of the transaction? What are my options for delivery? In general, most online businesses do a good job of answering basic questions around the products as the shopper engages in the online journey, navigating the product catalog and working through the checkout process. The needs that are harder to address for the shopper are those that are less concerned with product specifics and more concerned with deciding whether the transaction met their needs and delivered value. A recent study by the Baymard Institute [1] finds that more than 60% of ecommerce site visitors will abandon their shopping cart. The study also identifies seven reasons for abandonment out of the commerce process [2]. Most of those reasons come down to poor usability within the commerce experience. Distractions. External distractions within the shopper’s external environment (TV, Children, Pets, etc.) or distractions on the eCommerce page can drive shopper abandonment. Ideally, the selection and check-out process should be straightforward. One common distraction is to drive the shopper away from the task at hand through pop-ups or re-directs. The shopper engaging with support information in the checkout process should not be directed away from the page to consume support. Though confidence may improve, the distraction also means abandonment may increase. Poor Usability. When the experience gets more complicated, buyer’s remorse can set in. While knowledge drives confidence, a lack of understanding erodes it. Therefore it is important that the commerce process is streamlined. In some cases, the number of clicks to complete a purchase is lengthy and unavoidable. In these situations, it is vital to ensure that the complexity of your experience can be explained with contextual support to avoid abandonment. If you can illustrate the solution to a complex action while the user is engaged in that action and address customer frustrations with your checkout process before they arise, you can decrease abandonment. Fraud. The perception of potential fraud can be enough to deter a buyer. Does your site look credible? Can shoppers trust your brand? Providing answers on the security of your experience and the levels of protection applied to profile information may play as big a role in ensuring the sale, as does the support you provide on the product offerings and purchasing process. Does it fit? If it is a clothing item or oversized furniture item, another common form of abandonment is for the shopper to question whether the item can be worn by the intended user. Providing information on the sizing applied to clothing, physical dimensions, and limitations on delivery/returns of oversized items will also assist the sale. A photo alone of the item will help, as it answers some of those questions, but won’t assuage all customer concerns about sizing and fit. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want to buy. Prospective buyers might be browsing through your catalog to kill time, or just might not have the money to purchase the item! You are unlikely to provide any information in contextual support to increase the likelihood to buy if the shopper already has no intentions of doing so. The customer will still likely abandon. Ensuring that any questions are proactively answered as they browse through your site can only increase their likelihood to return and buy at a future date. Can’t Buy. Errors or complexity at checkout can be another major cause of abandonment. Good contextual support is unlikely to help with severe errors caused by technical issues on your site, but it will have a big impact on customers struggling with complexity in the checkout process and needing a question answered prior to completing the sale. Embedded support within the checkout process to patiently explain how to complete a task will help increase conversion rates. Additional Costs. Tax, shipping and other costs or duties can dramatically increase the cost of the purchase and when unexpected, can increase abandonment, particularly if they can’t be adequately explained. Again, a lack of knowledge erodes confidence in the purchase, and cost concerns in particular, erode the perception of your brand’s trustworthiness. Again, providing information on what costs are additive and why they are being levied can decrease the likelihood that the customer will abandon out of the experience. Knowledge drives confidence and confidence drives conversion. If you’d like to understand best practices in providing contextual customer support in eCommerce to provide your shoppers with confidence, download the Oracle Cloud Service and Oracle Commerce - Contextual Support in Commerce White Paper. This white paper discusses the process of adding customer support, including a suggested process for finding where knowledge has the most influence on your shoppers and practical step-by-step illustrations on how contextual self-service can be added to your online commerce experience. Resources: [1] http://baymard.com/checkout-usability [2] http://baymard.com/blog/cart-abandonment

  Read the article

• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

  Read the article

• Interview with Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Ronald Bradford,  an Oracle ACE Director has been busy working with  database consulting, book writing (EffectiveMySQL) while traveling and speaking around the world in support of MySQL. I was able to take some of his time to get an interview on this thoughts about theMySQL Connect conference. Keith Larson: What where your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to provide the community the MySQL Conference ?Ronald Bradford: Oracle has already been providing various different local community events including OTN Tech Days and  MySQL community days. These are great for local regions both in the US and abroad.  In previous years there has been an increase of content at Oracle Open World, however that benefits the Oracle community far more then the MySQL community.  It is good to see that Oracle is realizing the benefit in providing a large scale dedicated event for the MySQL community that includes speakers from the MySQL development teams, invested companies in the ecosystem and other community evangelists.I fully expect a successful event and look forward to hopefully seeing MySQL Connect at the upcoming Brazil and Japan OOW conferences and perhaps an event on the East Coast.Keith Larson: Since you are part of the content committee, what did you think of the submissions that were received during call for papers?Ronald Bradford: There was a large number of quality submissions to the number of available presentation sessions. As with the previous years as a committee member for the annual MySQL conference, there is always a large variety of common cornerstone MySQL features as well as new products and upcoming companies sharing their MySQL experiences. All of the usual major players in the ecosystem will in presenting at MySQL Connect including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Continuent, Percona, Tokutek, Sphinx and Amazon to name a few.  This is ensuring the event will have a large number of quality speakers and a difficult time in choosing what to attend. Keith Larson: What sessions do you look forwarding to attending? Ronald Bradford: As with most quality conferences you can only be in one place at one time, so with multiple tracks per session it is always difficult to decide. The continued work and success with MySQL Cluster, and with a number of sessions I am sure will be popular. The features that interest me the most are around the optimizer, where there are several sessions on new features, and on the importance of backups. There are three presentations in this area to choose from.Keith Larson: Are you going to cover any of the content in your books at your MySQL Connect sessions?Ronald Bradford: I will be giving two presentations at MySQL Connect. The first will include the techniques available for creating better indexes where I will be touching on some aspects of the first Effective MySQL book on Optimizing SQL Statements.  In my second presentation from experiences of managing 500+ AWS MySQL instances, I will be touching on areas including SQL tuning, backup and recovery and scale out with replication.   These are the key topics of the initial books in the Effective MySQL series that focus on performance, scalability and business continuity.  The books however cover a far greater amount of detail then can be presented in a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: What features of MySQL 5.6 do you look forward to the most ?Ronald Bradford: I am very impressed with the optimizer trace feature. The ability to see exposed information is invaluable not just for MySQL 5.6, but to also apply information discerned for optimizing SQL statements in earlier versions of MySQL.  Not everybody understands that it is easy to deploy a MySQL 5.6 slave into an existing topology running an older version if MySQL for evaluation of many new features.  You can use the new mysqlbinlog streaming feature for duplicating master binary logs on an older version with a MySQL 5.6 slave.  The improvements in instrumentation in the Performance Schema are exciting.   However, as with my upcoming Replication Techniques in Depth title, that will be available for sale at MySQL Connect, there are numerous replication features, some long overdue with provide significant management benefits. Crash Save Slaves, Global transaction Identifiers (GTID)  and checksums just to mention a few.Keith Larson: You have been to numerous conferences, what would you recommend for people at the conference? Ronald Bradford: Make the time to meet and introduce yourself to the speakers that cover the topics that most interest you. The MySQL ecosystem has a very strong community.  The relationships you build with presenters, developers and architects in MySQL can be invaluable, however they are created over time. Get to know these people, interact with them over time.  This is the opportunity to learn more then just the content from a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: Any additional tips to handling the long hours ? Ronald Bradford: Conferences can be hard, especially with all the post event drinking.  This is a two day event and I am sure will include additional events on Friday and Saturday night so come well prepared, and leave work behind. Take the time to learn something new.   You can always catchup on sleep later. Keith Larson: Thank you so much for taking some time to do this I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference.  Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. 

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Great Time Spent at Great Indian Developers Summit 2014

  - by Pinal Dave

  The Great Indian Developer Conference (GIDS) is one of the most popular annual event held in Bangalore. This year GIDS is scheduled on April 22, 25. I will be presented total four sessions at this event and each session is very different from each other. Here are the details of four of my sessions, which I presented there. Pluralsight Shades This event was a great event and I had fantastic fun presenting a technology over here. I was indeed very excited that along with me, I had many of my friends presenting at the event as well. I want to thank all of you to attend my session and having standing room every single time. I have already sent resources in my newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter over here. Indexing is an Art I was amazed with the crowd present in the sessions at GIDS. There was a great interest in the subject of SQL Server and Performance Tuning. Audience at GIDS I believe event like such provides a great platform to meet and share knowledge. Pinal at Pluralsight Booth Here are the abstract of the sessions which I had presented. They were recorded so at some point in time they will be available, but if you want the content of all the courses immediately, I suggest you check out my video courses on the same subject on Pluralsight. Indexes, the Unsung Hero Relevant Pluralsight Course Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Indexes are the most crucial objects of the database. They are the first stop for any DBA and Developer when it is about performance tuning. There is a good side as well evil side to indexes. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of indexes and the best practices associated with the same. We will cover various aspects of Indexing such as Duplicate Index, Redundant Index, Missing Index as well as best practices around Indexes. SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting: Ancient Problems and Modern Solutions Relevant Pluralsight Course Many believe Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting is an art which has been lost in time. However, truth is that art has evolved with time and there are more tools and techniques to overcome ancient troublesome scenarios. There are three major resources that when bottlenecked creates performance problems: CPU, IO, and Memory. In this session we will focus on High CPU scenarios detection and their resolutions. If time permits we will cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will have a clear idea as well as action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. We will discuss about performance tuning in this session with the help of Demos. Pinal Dave at GIDS MySQL Performance Tuning – Unexplored Territory Relevant Pluralsight Course Performance is one of the most essential aspects of any application. Everyone wants their server to perform optimally and at the best efficiency. However, not many people talk about MySQL and Performance Tuning as it is an extremely unexplored territory. In this session, we will talk about how we can tune MySQL Performance. We will also try and cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will not only have a clear idea, but also carry home action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. You will also witness some impressive performance tuning demos in this session. Hidden Secrets and Gems of SQL Server We Bet You Never Knew Relevant Pluralsight Course SQL Trio Session! It really amazes us every time when someone says SQL Server is an easy tool to handle and work with. Microsoft has done an amazing work in making working with complex relational database a breeze for developers and administrators alike. Though it looks like child’s play for some, the realities are far away from this notion. The basics and fundamentals though are simple and uniform across databases, the behavior and understanding the nuts and bolts of SQL Server is something we need to master over a period of time. With a collective experience of more than 30+ years amongst the speakers on databases, we will try to take a unique tour of various aspects of SQL Server and bring to you life lessons learnt from working with SQL Server. We will share some of the trade secrets of performance, configuration, new features, tuning, behaviors, T-SQL practices, common pitfalls, productivity tips on tools and more. This is a highly demo filled session for practical use if you are a SQL Server developer or an Administrator. The speakers will be able to stump you and give you answers on almost everything inside the Relational database called SQL Server. I personally attended the session of Vinod Kumar, Balmukund Lakhani, Abhishek Kumar and my favorite Govind Kanshi. Summary If you have missed this event here are two action items 1) Sign up for Resource Newsletter 2) Watch my video courses on Pluralsight Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL Tagged: GIDS

  Read the article

• Goals for 2010 Retrospective

  - by Brian Jackett

  As we approach the end of 2010 I’d like to take a  few minutes to reflect back on this past year and revisit the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the year (click here to see those goals).  I feel it is important to track your goals not only to see if you accomplished them but also to see what new directions in life you pursued.  Once we enter into 2011 I’ll follow up with a new post on goals for the new year. Professional Blog – This year I intended to write at least 2 posts a month.  Looking back I far surpassed that goal by writing 47 posts (this one being my 48th).  As with many things in life, quantity does not mean quality.  A good example is a number of my posts announcing upcoming speaking engagements and providing links to presentation slides and scripts.  That aside, I like to at least keep content relatively fresh on this blog  which I was able to accomplish.  At the same time I’ve gotten much more comfortable in my blogging style and it has become much easier to write. Speaking – I didn’t define a clear goal for speaking engagements, but had a rough idea of wanting to speak at 2-3 events.  Once again I far exceeded that number by speaking at 10 separate events and delivering 12+ presentations.  I’m very thankful for all of the opportunities that I was given and all of the wonderful people I have met as a result. Volunteering – This year I intended to help out with the COSPUG (now Buckeye SPUG) steering committee and Stir Trek conference.  I fulfilled both goals and as well as taking on lead organizer duties for the first ever SharePoint Saturday Columbus.  Each of these events and groups turned out to be successful and I was glad to be a part of them all.  I look forward to continuing to volunteer with each next year in some capacity. Android Development – My goal for getting into Android development was a late addition, but one I didn’t necessarily fulfill.  I spent a couple nights downloading the tools, configuring my environment, and going through some “simple” tutorials.  I say “simple” because in my opinion the tutorials were not laid out very well, took a long time to get running properly, and confused me more than helped.  After about a week I was frustrated with the process and didn’t think it was a good use of my time.  On a side note, I’ve dabbled in Windows Phone 7 development over the past few months and have been very excited by how easy and intuitive it was to get started and develop some proof of concepts. Personal Getting in Shape – I had intended to play on recreational sports leagues and work out on a semi-regular basis.  For the most part I fulfilled this goal by playing on various softball and volleyball leagues as well as using the gym.  At the same time I had some major setbacks.  In the spring I badly sprained my ankle and got hit in the knee with a softball which kept me inactive for almost 2 months.  More recently I broke my knuckle (click here to read about it) which I am still recovering from. Volunteering – On the volunteering front I kept my commitments at my parish’s high school youth group.  As for other volunteering opportunities I got involved with a great organization called Columbus Gives Back (website).  I’ve volunteered with them a few times and really enjoy their goal to provide opportunities to people with busy schedules.  They  offer a variety of events typically after work hours and spread out around Columbus with no set commitments on time you need to put in.  If you have the time or motivation I highly recommend them. House/Condo – I had been thinking of buying a house or condo this past summer, but decided to extend my apartment lease for another year instead.  I have begun the search for a place in the past few weeks and am excited begin the process of owning a home. Conclusion     This year I was able to set and achieve many of my goals.  For next year I’ll try to put more specific numbers to all of my goals.  If any of you readers set goals for 2011 feel free to send me a link as I’d love to see what you are aiming to accomplish.  Have a great end of 2010 and best wishes for the start of 2011!       -Frog Out

  Read the article

• CSM DX11 issues

  - by KaiserJohaan

  I got CSM to work in OpenGL, and now Im trying to do the same in directx. I'm using the same math library and all and I'm pretty much using the alghorithm straight off. I am using right-handed, column major matrices from GLM. The light is looking (-1, -1, -1). The problem I have is twofolds; For some reason, the ground floor is causing alot of (false) shadow artifacts, like the vast shadowed area you see. I confirmed this when I disabled the ground for the depth pass, but thats a hack more than anything else The shadows are inverted compared to the shadowmap. If you squint you can see the chairs shadows should be mirrored instead. This is the first cascade shadow map, in range of the alien and the chair: I can't figure out why this is. This is the depth pass: for (uint32_t cascadeIndex = 0; cascadeIndex < NUM_SHADOWMAP_CASCADES; cascadeIndex++) { mShadowmap.BindDepthView(context, cascadeIndex); CameraFrustrum cameraFrustrum = CalculateCameraFrustrum(degreesFOV, aspectRatio, nearDistArr[cascadeIndex], farDistArr[cascadeIndex], cameraViewMatrix); lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex] = CreateDirLightVPMatrix(cameraFrustrum, lightDir); mVertexTransformPass.RenderMeshes(context, renderQueue, meshes, lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex]); lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex] = gBiasMatrix * lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex]; farDistArr[cascadeIndex] = -farDistArr[cascadeIndex]; } CameraFrustrum CalculateCameraFrustrum(const float fovDegrees, const float aspectRatio, const float minDist, const float maxDist, const Mat4& cameraViewMatrix) { CameraFrustrum ret = { Vec4(1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), }; const Mat4 perspectiveMatrix = PerspectiveMatrixFov(fovDegrees, aspectRatio, minDist, maxDist); const Mat4 invMVP = glm::inverse(perspectiveMatrix * cameraViewMatrix); for (Vec4& corner : ret) { corner = invMVP * corner; corner /= corner.w; } return ret; } Mat4 CreateDirLightVPMatrix(const CameraFrustrum& cameraFrustrum, const Vec3& lightDir) { Mat4 lightViewMatrix = glm::lookAt(Vec3(0.0f), -glm::normalize(lightDir), Vec3(0.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f)); Vec4 transf = lightViewMatrix * cameraFrustrum[0]; float maxZ = transf.z, minZ = transf.z; float maxX = transf.x, minX = transf.x; float maxY = transf.y, minY = transf.y; for (uint32_t i = 1; i < 8; i++) { transf = lightViewMatrix * cameraFrustrum[i]; if (transf.z > maxZ) maxZ = transf.z; if (transf.z < minZ) minZ = transf.z; if (transf.x > maxX) maxX = transf.x; if (transf.x < minX) minX = transf.x; if (transf.y > maxY) maxY = transf.y; if (transf.y < minY) minY = transf.y; } Mat4 viewMatrix(lightViewMatrix); viewMatrix[3][0] = -(minX + maxX) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[3][1] = -(minY + maxY) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[3][2] = -(minZ + maxZ) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[0][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[1][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[2][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[3][3] = 1.0f; Vec3 halfExtents((maxX - minX) * 0.5, (maxY - minY) * 0.5, (maxZ - minZ) * 0.5); return OrthographicMatrix(-halfExtents.x, halfExtents.x, -halfExtents.y, halfExtents.y, halfExtents.z, -halfExtents.z) * viewMatrix; } And this is the pixel shader used for the lighting stage: #define DEPTH_BIAS 0.0005 #define NUM_CASCADES 4 cbuffer DirectionalLightConstants : register(CBUFFER_REGISTER_PIXEL) { float4x4 gSplitVPMatrices[NUM_CASCADES]; float4x4 gCameraViewMatrix; float4 gSplitDistances; float4 gLightColor; float4 gLightDirection; }; Texture2D gPositionTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_POSITION); Texture2D gDiffuseTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_DIFFUSE); Texture2D gNormalTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_NORMAL); Texture2DArray gShadowmap : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_DEPTH); SamplerComparisonState gShadowmapSampler : register(SAMPLER_REGISTER_DEPTH); float4 ps_main(float4 position : SV_Position) : SV_Target0 { float4 worldPos = gPositionTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 diffuse = gDiffuseTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 normal = gNormalTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 camPos = mul(gCameraViewMatrix, worldPos); uint index = 3; if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.x) index = 0; else if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.y) index = 1; else if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.z) index = 2; float3 projCoords = (float3)mul(gSplitVPMatrices[index], worldPos); float viewDepth = projCoords.z - DEPTH_BIAS; projCoords.z = float(index); float visibilty = gShadowmap.SampleCmpLevelZero(gShadowmapSampler, projCoords, viewDepth); float angleNormal = clamp(dot(normal, gLightDirection), 0, 1); return visibilty * diffuse * angleNormal * gLightColor; } As you can see I am using depth bias and a bias matrix. Any hints on why this behaves so wierdly?

  Read the article

• Xml failing to deserialise

  - by Carnotaurus

  I call a method to get my pages [see GetPages(String xmlFullFilePath)]. The FromXElement method is supposed to deserialise the LitePropertyData elements to strongly type LitePropertyData objects. Instead it fails on the following line: return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream); and gives the following error: <LitePropertyData xmlns=''> was not expected. What am I doing wrong? I have included the methods that I call and the xml data: public static T FromXElement<T>(this XElement xElement) { using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(xElement.ToString()))) { var xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)); return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream); } } public static List<LitePageData> GetPages(String xmlFullFilePath) { XDocument document = XDocument.Load(xmlFullFilePath); List<LitePageData> results = (from record in document.Descendants("row") select new LitePageData { Guid = IsValid(record, "Guid") ? record.Element("Guid").Value : null, ParentID = IsValid(record, "ParentID") ? Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ParentID").Value) : (Int32?)null, Created = Convert.ToDateTime(record.Element("Created").Value), Changed = Convert.ToDateTime(record.Element("Changed").Value), Name = record.Element("Name").Value, ID = Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ID").Value), LitePageTypeID = IsValid(record, "ParentID") ? Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ParentID").Value) : (Int32?)null, Html = record.Element("Html").Value, FriendlyName = record.Element("FriendlyName").Value, Properties = record.Element("Properties") != null ? record.Element("Properties").Element("LitePropertyData").FromXElement<List<LitePropertyData>>() : new List<LitePropertyData>() }).ToList(); return results; } Here is the xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <root> <rows> <row> <ID>1</ID> <ImageUrl></ImageUrl> <Html>Home page</Html> <Created>01-01-2012</Created> <Changed>01-01-2012</Changed> <Name>Home page</Name> <FriendlyName>home-page</FriendlyName> </row> <row xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Guid>edeaf468-f490-4271-bf4d-be145bc6a1fd</Guid> <ID>8</ID> <Name>Unused</Name> <ParentID>1</ParentID> <Created>2006-03-25T10:57:17</Created> <Changed>2012-07-17T12:24:30.0984747+01:00</Changed> <ChangedBy /> <LitePageTypeID xsi:nil="true" /> <Html> What is the purpose of this option? This option checks the current document for accessibility issues. It uses Bobby to provide details of whether the current web page conforms to W3C's WCAG criteria for web content accessibility. Issues with Bobby and Cynthia Bobby and Cynthia are free services that supposedly allow a user to expose web page accessibility barriers. It is something of a guide but perhaps a blunt instrument. I tested a few of the webpages that I have designed. Sure enough, my pages fall short and for good reason. I am not about to claim that Bobby and Cynthia are useless. Although it is useful and commendable tool, it project appears to be overly ambitious. Nevertheless, let me explain my issues with Bobby and Cynthia: First, certain W3C standards for designing web documents are often too strict and unworkable. For instance, in some versions W3C standards for HTML, certain tags should not include a particular attribute, whereas in others they are requisite if the document is to be ???well-formed???. The standard that a designer chooses is determined usually by the requirements specification document. This specifies which browsers and versions of those browsers that the web page is expected to correctly display. Forcing a hypertext document to conform strictly to a specific W3C standard for HTML is often no simple task. In the worst case, it cannot conform without losing some aesthetics or accessibility functionality. Second, the case of HTML documents is not an isolated case. Standards for XML, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, are analogous. Therefore, you might imagine the problems when you begin to combine these languages and formats in an HTML document. Third, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Bobby and Cynthia may flag those IMG tags that do not contain a TITLE attribute. There might be good reason that a web developer chooses not to include the title attribute. The title attribute has a limited numbers of characters and does not support carriage returns. This is a major defect in the design of this tag. In fact, before the TITLE attribute was supported, there was the ALT attribute. Most browsers support both, yet they both perform a similar function. However, both attributes share the same deficiencies. In practice, there are instances where neither attribute would be used. Instead, for example, the developer would write some JavaScript or VBScript to circumvent these deficiencies. The concern is that Bobby and Cynthia would not notice this because it does not ???understand??? what the JavaScript does. </Html> <FriendlyName>unused</FriendlyName> <IsDeleted>false</IsDeleted> <Properties> <LitePropertyData> <Description>Image for the page</Description> <DisplayEditUI>true</DisplayEditUI> <OwnerTab>1</OwnerTab> <DisplayName>Image Url</DisplayName> <FieldOrder>1</FieldOrder> <IsRequired>false</IsRequired> <Name>ImageUrl</Name> <IsModified>false</IsModified> <ParentPageID>3</ParentPageID> <Type>String</Type> <Value xsi:type="xsd:string">smarter.jpg</Value> </LitePropertyData> <LitePropertyData> <Description>WebItemApplicationEnum</Description> <DisplayEditUI>true</DisplayEditUI> <OwnerTab>1</OwnerTab> <DisplayName>WebItemApplicationEnum</DisplayName> <FieldOrder>1</FieldOrder> <IsRequired>false</IsRequired> <Name>WebItemApplicationEnum</Name> <IsModified>false</IsModified> <ParentPageID>3</ParentPageID> <Type>Number</Type> <Value xsi:type="xsd:string">1</Value> </LitePropertyData> </Properties> <Seo> <Author>Phil Carney</Author> <Classification /> <Copyright>Carnotaurus</Copyright> <Description> What is the purpose of this option? This option checks the current document for accessibility issues. It uses Bobby to provide details of whether the current web page conforms to W3C's WCAG criteria for web content accessibility. Issues with Bobby and Cynthia Bobby and Cynthia are free services that supposedly allow a user to expose web page accessibility barriers. It is something of a guide but perhaps a blunt instrument. I tested a few of the webpages that I have designed. Sure enough, my pages fall short and for good reason. I am not about to claim that Bobby and Cynthia are useless. Although it is useful and commendable tool, it project appears to be overly ambitious. Nevertheless, let me explain my issues with Bobby and Cynthia: First, certain W3C standards for designing web documents are often too strict and unworkable. For instance, in some versions W3C standards for HTML, certain tags should not include a particular attribute, whereas in others they are requisite if the document is to be ???well-formed???. The standard that a designer chooses is determined usually by the requirements specification document. This specifies which browsers and versions of those browsers that the web page is expected to correctly display. Forcing a hypertext document to conform strictly to a specific W3C standard for HTML is often no simple task. In the worst case, it cannot conform without losing some aesthetics or accessibility functionality. Second, the case of HTML documents is not an isolated case. Standards for XML, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, are analogous. Therefore, you might imagine the problems when you begin to combine these languages and formats in an HTML document. Third, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Bobby and Cynthia may flag those IMG tags that do not contain a TITLE attribute. There might be good reason that a web developer chooses not to include the title attribute. The title attribute has a limited numbers of characters and does not support carriage returns. This is a major defect in the design of this tag. In fact, before the TITLE attribute was supported, there was the ALT attribute. Most browsers support both, yet they both perform a similar function. However, both attributes share the same deficiencies. In practice, there are instances where neither attribute would be used. Instead, for example, the developer would write some JavaScript or VBScript to circumvent these deficiencies. The concern is that Bobby and Cynthia would not notice this because it does not ???understand??? what the JavaScript does. </Description> <Keywords>unused</Keywords> <Title>unused</Title> </Seo> </row> </rows> </root> EDIT Here are my entities: public class LitePropertyData { public virtual string Description { get; set; } public virtual bool DisplayEditUI { get; set; } public int OwnerTab { get; set; } public virtual string DisplayName { get; set; } public int FieldOrder { get; set; } public bool IsRequired { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public virtual bool IsModified { get; set; } public virtual int ParentPageID { get; set; } public LiteDataType Type { get; set; } public object Value { get; set; } } [Serializable] public class LitePageData { public String Guid { get; set; } public Int32 ID { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Int32? ParentID { get; set; } public DateTime Created { get; set; } public String CreatedBy { get; set; } public DateTime Changed { get; set; } public String ChangedBy { get; set; } public Int32? LitePageTypeID { get; set; } public String Html { get; set; } public String FriendlyName { get; set; } public Boolean IsDeleted { get; set; } public List<LitePropertyData> Properties { get; set; } public LiteSeoPageData Seo { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Saves the specified XML full file path. /// </summary> /// <param name="xmlFullFilePath">The XML full file path.</param> public void Save(String xmlFullFilePath) { XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(xmlFullFilePath); XElement demoNode = this.ToXElement<LitePageData>(); demoNode.Name = "row"; doc.Descendants("rows").Single().Add(demoNode); doc.Save(xmlFullFilePath); } }

  Read the article

• How to Save Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars on Cell Phone Service

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Cell phone contracts are bad. You get a seemingly cheap phone up front, but you more than pay for the cost of the phone over two years. Prepaid phone plans are surging in North America for a reason. Prepaid phone plans will be cheaper and more flexible than traditional contracts with big carriers for many people. However much you use your phone, there’s a good chance you can save money with a prepaid service. No More Contracts Here’s how cell phone service typically works in North America: You get a subsidized phone for “free”, $99, or $199. You sign up for a two-year contract and more than pay back the cost of that phone over the length of the contract. This is similar to leasing something or purchasing it on a credit card and paying it back over two years — you spend less up front, but you’re paying more in the long run. But this isn’t the only option. You could opt for a cheaper prepaid service that doesn’t lock you into a contract. If you don’t use your phone much, you could just pay for what you use and avoid the hefty cell phone bills. If you use your phone a lot, you could get a cheaper plan, too. Now, this certainly isn’t for everyone. If you want the latest iPhone or Galaxy smartphone every two years and require a 4G data connection, prepaid services may not be for you. On the other hand, if you don’t need the latest phone, you can save money here. You can also save a huge amount of money if you don’t use your phone much. Phone Options When you choose your prepaid or contract-free service, you’ll often be able to purchase a phone from them. You’ll generally be able to find dirt-cheap dumbphones and the cheapest, slowest Android phones for not very much money. If you are able to buy a top-of-the-line smartphone, you’ll have to pay the full, unsubsidized price. That’s $649 for either an iPhone 5S or Samsung Galaxy S4. Whatever phones the service provider offers, you could always buy a phone elsewhere — for example, you could buy an unsubsidized iPhone direct from Apple and then take it to your cell phone service of choice. Most services will allow you to get a SIM card and pop it into your existing phone rather than purchasing a phone. If you can get a hand-me-down smartphone, you can often save quite a bit of money. For example, you may have a family member upgrading from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5S. You could take their phone to a prepaid carrier and have a nicer phone on a cheap cell phone plan. If you brought an old smartphone to a big carrier like AT&T or Verizon, they wouldn’t give you a discount on your monthly plan. You’d have to pay the same amount of money every month as if you had gotten a subsidized phone. Google’s Nexus phones are also great options for people looking to buy smartphones and pay up-front. Google’s Nexus 4 offered a modern, almost top-of-the-line Android smartphone experience at $299 or $349 when it came out last year. Google will soon be releasing the Nexus 5 and it’s expected to be priced at $349. That’s certainly a lot more than a cheap phone, but it’s a fairly high-end smartphone at almost half the price of an iPhone 5S or Galaxy S4. Nexus phones can be purchased online from Google’s Play Store. Service Options When choosing a service, you need to consider what you actually use. If you’re someone who only uses your phone rarely, you can get plans that will allow you to pay as little as a few dollars per month. If you’re someone who’s usually in range of Wi-Fi, you may not need much data at all. If you want a plan with unlimited talk, texting, and data usage, you can get it for much cheaper than you’d pay on a major carrier like AT&T. The options here range from pay-as-you-go plans, like the ones offered by T-Mobile, which allow you to put a certain amount of money in and only drain that balance when you actually use minutes, texts, or data. If you only make a few calls and send a few texts per month, you’d only pay a few bucks. On the other end, Walmart’s Straight Talk service is a popular option that offers unlimited talk, texting, and data at $45 per month. Which service is right for you depends on a lot of things, including your usage and what each network’s coverage is like in your area. You’ll want to do some research of your own before choosing a service. Prepaid services also offer you even more flexibility after you choose one. If you’re not happy or a better deal comes along, you can switch — you’re not locked into your service for two years and you won’t pay an early termination fee. Image Credit: Intel Free Press on Flickr, Jon Fingas on Flickr, John Karakatsanis on Flickr, kendalkinggroup on Flickr     

  Read the article

• php remove duplicates from array..

  - by SoulieBaby

  Hi all, I was wondering if anyone could help me out, I'm trying to find a script that will check my entire array and remove any duplicates if required, then spit out the array in the same format. Here's an example of my array (as you will see there are some duplicates): Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 34 [name] => Adrianos Pizza & Pasta [imageurl] => sp_adrian.gif [clickurl] => # ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 42 [name] => Ray White Mordialloc [imageurl] => sp_raywhite.gif [clickurl] => http://www.raywhite.com/ ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 48 [name] => Beachside Osteo [imageurl] => sp_beachside.gif [clickurl] => http://www.beachsideosteo.com.au/ ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 57 [name] => Southern Suburbs Physiotherapy Centre [imageurl] => sp_sspc.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.sspc.com.au ) [4] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 52 [name] => Mordialloc Travel and Cruise [imageurl] => sp_morditravel.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.yellowpages.com.au/vic/mordialloc/mordialloc-travel-cruise-13492525-listing.html ) [5] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [6] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [1] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 55 [name] => 360South [imageurl] => sp_360.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 40 [name] => Ripponlea Mitsubishi [imageurl] => sp_mitsubishi.gif [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 57 [name] => Southern Suburbs Physiotherapy Centre [imageurl] => sp_sspc.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.sspc.com.au ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 52 [name] => Mordialloc Travel and Cruise [imageurl] => sp_morditravel.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.yellowpages.com.au/vic/mordialloc/mordialloc-travel-cruise-13492525-listing.html ) [4] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [5] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [2] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 44 [name] => Mordialloc Personal Trainers [imageurl] => sp_mordipt.gif [clickurl] => # ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 36 [name] => Big River [imageurl] => sp_bigriver.gif [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 52 [name] => Mordialloc Travel and Cruise [imageurl] => sp_morditravel.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.yellowpages.com.au/vic/mordialloc/mordialloc-travel-cruise-13492525-listing.html ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [4] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [3] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 41 [name] => Print House Graphics [imageurl] => sp_printhouse.gif [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 49 [name] => Kim Reed Conveyancing [imageurl] => sp_kimreed.jpg [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [4] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 38 [name] => Lowe Financial Group [imageurl] => sp_lowe.gif [clickurl] => http://lowefinancial.com/ ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 58 [name] => Dicount Lollie Shop [imageurl] => new dls logo.jpg [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [5] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 45 [name] => Mordialloc Sporting Club [imageurl] => msc logo.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 33 [name] => Two Brothers [imageurl] => sp_2brothers.gif [clickurl] => http://www.2brothers.com.au/ ) ) [6] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 46 [name] => Patterson Securities [imageurl] => cmyk patersons_withtag.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 56 [name] => Logical Services [imageurl] => sp_logical.jpg [clickurl] => ) ) [7] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 59 [name] => Pure Sport [imageurl] => sp_psport.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.puresport.com.au/ ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 51 [name] => Richmond and Bennison [imageurl] => sp_richmond.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.richbenn.com.au/ ) ) [8] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 39 [name] => Main Street Mordialloc [imageurl] => main street cafe.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 50 [name] => Letec [imageurl] => sp_letec.jpg [clickurl] => www.letec.biz ) ) [9] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 54 [name] => PPM Builders [imageurl] => sp_ppm.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/P-P-M-Builders ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 43 [name] => Systema [imageurl] => sp_systema.gif [clickurl] => ) ) )

  Read the article

• Closing the gap between strategy and execution with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

  - by manan.goel(at)oracle.com

  Wikipedia defines strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An example of this is General Electric's acquisitions and divestiture strategy (plan) designed to propel GE to number 1 or 2 place (goal) in every business segment that it operated in. Execution on the other hand can be defined as the actions taken to getting things done. In GE's case execution will be steps followed for mergers/acquisitions or divestiture. Business press has written extensively about the importance of both strategy and execution in achieving desired business objectives. Perhaps the quote from Thomas Edison says it best - "vision without execution is hallucination". Conversely, it can be said that "execution without vision" is well may be "wishful thinking". Research overwhelmingly point towards the wide gap between strategy and execution. According to a published study, 49% of surveyed executives perceive a gap between their organizations' ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies. Further, of these respondents, 64% don't have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap. Having established the severity and importance of the problem let's talk about the reasons for the strategy-execution gap. The common reasons include: -        Lack of clearly defined goals -        Lack of consistent measure of success -        Lack of ownership -        Lack of alignment -        Lack of communication -        Lack of proper execution -        Lack of monitoring       There are multiple approaches to solving the problem including organizational development practices, technology enablement etc. In most cases a combination of approaches is required to achieve the desired result. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll focus on technology.  Imagine an integrated closed loop technology platform that automates the entire management cycle from defining strategy to assigning ownership to communicating goals to achieving alignment to collaboration to taking actions to monitoring progress and achieving mid course corrections. Besides, for best ROI and lowest TCO such a system should also have characteristics like:  Complete -        Full functionality -        Rich end user access Open -        Any data source -        Any business application -        Any technology stack  Integrated -        Common metadata -        Common security -        Common system management From a capabilities perspective the system should provide the following capabilities: Define -        Strategy -        Objectives -        Ownership -        KPI's Communicate -        Pervasive -        Collaborative -        Role based -        Secure Execute -        Integrated -        Intuitive -        Secure -        Ubiquitous Monitor -        Multiple styles and formats -        Exception based -        Push & Pull Having talked about the business problem and outlined the blueprint for a technology solution, let's talk about how Oracle Business Intelligence 11g can help. Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive business intelligence solution for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards. Oracle's best in class BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation that provides a unified end user experience and features a Common Enterprise Information Model, with common security, query request generation and optimization, and system management. The BI platform is ·         Complete - meaning it delivers all modes and styles of BI including reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access. ·         Open - meaning the BI platform integrates with any data source, ETL tool, business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology as well as any ODBC compliant third party analytical tool. The suite accesses data from multiple heterogeneous sources--including popular relational and multidimensional data sources and major ERP and CRM applications from Oracle and SAP. ·         Integrated - meaning the BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation built on an open, standards based service oriented architecture.  The platform features a common enterprise information model, common security model and a common configuration, deployment and systems management framework. To summarize, Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive, integrated BI platform that lets you define strategy, identify objectives, assign ownership, define KPI's, collaborate, take action, monitor, report and do course corrections all form a single interface and a single system. The platform's integrated metadata model and task based design ensures that the entire workflow from defining strategy to execution to monitoring is completely integrated delivering end to end visibility, transparency and agility. Click here to learn more about Oracle BI 11g. 

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – A Conversation with an Old Friend – Sri Sridharan

  - by pinaldave

  Sri Sridharan is my old friend and we often talk on GTalk. The subject varies from Life in India/USA, movies, musics, and of course SQL. We have our differences when we talk about food or movie but we always agree when we talk about SQL. Yesterday while chatting with him we talked about SQLPASS and the conversation lasted for a long time. Here is the conversation between us on GTalk. I have removed a few of the personal talks and formatted into paragraphs as GTalk often shows stuff out of formatting. Pinal: Sri, Congrats on running for the PASS BoD again. You were so close last year. What made you decide to run again this year? Sri: Thank you Pinal for your leadership in the PASS India Community and all the things you do out there. After coming so close last year, there was no doubt in my mind that I will run again. I was truly humbled by the support I got from the community. Growing up in India for over 25 years, you are brought up in a very competitive part of the world. Right from the pressure of staying in the top of the class from kindergarten to your graduation, the relentless push from your parents about studying and getting good grades (and nothing else matters), you land up essentially living in a pressure cooker. To survive that relentless pressure, you need to have a thick skin, ability to stand up for who you really are , what you want to accomplish and in the process stay true those values. I am striving for a greater cause, to make PASS an organization that can help people with their SQL Server careers, to make PASS relevant to its chapter members, to make PASS an organization that every SQL professional in the world wants to be connected with. Just because I did not get elected or appointed last year does not mean that these causes are not worth fighting. Giving up upon failing the first time is simply not in me. If I did that, what message would I send to those who voted for me? What message would I send to my kids? Pinal: As someone who has such strong roots in India, what can the Indian PASS Community expect from you? Sri: First of all, I think fostering a regional leadership is something PASS must encourage as part of its global growth plan. For PASS global being able to understand all the issues in a region of the world and make sound decisions will be a tough thing to do on a continuous basis. I expect people like you, chapter leaders, regional mentors, MVPs of the region start playing a bigger role in shaping the next generation of PASS. That is something I said in my campaign and I still stand by it. I would like to see growth in the number of chapters in India. The current count does not truly represent the full potential of that region. I was pretty thrilled to see the Bangalore SQLSaturday happen early this year. I would like to see more of SQLSaturday events, at least in the major metro cities. I know the issues in India are very different from the rest of the world. So the formula needs to be tweaked a little for it to work better in India. Once the SQLSaturday model is vetted out, maybe there could be enough justification to have SQLRally India. PASS needs to have a premier SQL event in that region. Going to USA or Europe for that matter is incredibly hard due to VISA issues etc. So this could be a case of where PASS comes closer to where the community is. Pinal: What portfolio would take on if you are elected to the PASS Board? Sri: There are some very strong folks on the PASS Board today. The President discusses the portfolios with the group and makes the final call on the portfolios. I am also a fan of having a team associated with the portfolios. In that case, one person is the primary for a portfolio but secondary on a couple of other portfolios. This way people on the board have a direct vested interest in a few portfolios. Personally, I know I would these portfolios good justice – Chapters, Global Growth and Events (SQLSat, SQLRally). I would try to see if we can get a director to focus on Volunteers.  To me that is very critical for growth in the international regions. Pinal: This is an interesting conversation with you Sri. I know you so long time but this is indeed inspiring to many. India is a big country and we appreciate your thoughts. Sri: Thank you very much for taking time to chat with me today. Cheers. There are pretty strong candidates for SQLPASS Board of Elections this year. I know all of them in person and honestly it is going to be extremely difficult to not to vote for anybody. I am indeed in a crunch right now how to pick one over another. Though the choice is difficult, I encourage you to vote for them. I am extremely confident that the new board of directors will all have the same goal – Better SQL Server Community. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, DBA, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• InnoDB Compression Improvements in MySQL 5.6

  - by Inaam Rana

  MySQL 5.6 comes with significant improvements for the compression support inside InnoDB. The enhancements that we'll talk about in this piece are also a good example of community contributions. The work on these was conceived, implemented and contributed by the engineers at Facebook. Before we plunge into the details let us familiarize ourselves with some of the key concepts surrounding InnoDB compression. In InnoDB compressed pages are fixed size. Supported sizes are 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16K. The compressed page size is specified at table creation time. InnoDB uses zlib for compression. InnoDB buffer pool will attempt to cache compressed pages like normal pages. However, whenever a page is actively used by a transaction, we'll always have the uncompressed version of the page as well i.e.: we can have a page in the buffer pool in compressed only form or in a state where we have both the compressed page and uncompressed version but we'll never have a page in uncompressed only form. On-disk we'll always only have the compressed page. When both compressed and uncompressed images are present in the buffer pool they are always kept in sync i.e.: changes are applied to both atomically. Recompression happens when changes are made to the compressed data. In order to minimize recompressions InnoDB maintains a modification log within a compressed page. This is the extra space available in the page after compression and it is used to log modifications to the compressed data thus avoiding recompressions. DELETE (and ROLLBACK of DELETE) and purge can be performed without recompressing the page. This is because the delete-mark bit and the system fields DB_TRX_ID and DB_ROLL_PTR are stored in uncompressed format on the compressed page. A record can be purged by shuffling entries in the compressed page directory. This can also be useful for updates of indexed columns, because UPDATE of a key is mapped to INSERT+DELETE+purge. A compression failure happens when we attempt to recompress a page and it does not fit in the fixed size. In such case, we first try to reorganize the page and attempt to recompress and if that fails as well then we split the page into two and recompress both pages. Now lets talk about the three major improvements that we made in MySQL 5.6.Logging of Compressed Page Images:InnoDB used to log entire compressed data on the page to the redo logs when recompression happens. This was an extra safety measure to guard against the rare case where an attempt is made to do recovery using a different zlib version from the one that was used before the crash. Because recovery is a page level operation in InnoDB we have to be sure that all recompress attempts must succeed without causing a btree page split. However, writing entire compressed data images to the redo log files not only makes the operation heavy duty but can also adversely affect flushing activity. This happens because redo space is used in a circular fashion and when we generate much more than normal redo we fill up the space much more quickly and in order to reuse the redo space we have to flush the corresponding dirty pages from the buffer pool.Starting with MySQL 5.6 a new global configuration parameter innodb_log_compressed_pages. The default value is true which is same as the current behavior. If you are sure that you are not going to attempt to recover from a crash using a different version of zlib then you should set this parameter to false. This is a dynamic parameter.Compression Level:You can now set the compression level that zlib should choose to compress the data. The global parameter is innodb_compression_level - the default value is 6 (the zlib default) and allowed values are 1 to 9. Again the parameter is dynamic i.e.: you can change it on the fly.Dynamic Padding to Reduce Compression Failures:Compression failures are expensive in terms of CPU. We go through the hoops of recompress, failure, reorganize, recompress, failure and finally page split. At the same time, how often we encounter compression failure depends largely on the compressibility of the data. In MySQL 5.6, courtesy of Facebook engineers, we have an adaptive algorithm based on per-index statistics that we gather about compression operations. The idea is that if a certain index/table is experiencing too many compression failures then we should try to pack the 16K uncompressed version of the page less densely i.e.: we let some space in the 16K page go unused in an attempt that the recompression won't end up in a failure. In other words, we dynamically keep adding 'pad' to the 16K page till we get compression failures within an agreeable range. It works the other way as well, that is we'll keep removing the pad if failure rate is fairly low. To tune the padding effort two configuration variables are exposed. innodb_compression_failure_threshold_pct: default 5, range 0 - 100,dynamic, implies the percentage of compress ops to fail before we start using to padding. Value 0 has a special meaning of disabling the padding. innodb_compression_pad_pct_max: default 50, range 0 - 75, dynamic, the  maximum percentage of uncompressed data page that can be reserved as pad.

  Read the article

• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

  Read the article

• JavaOne 2012 Sunday Strategy Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the Sunday Strategy Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Hasan Rizvi, EVP, Middleware and Java Development, stated that the theme for this year's JavaOne is: “Make the future Java”-- meaning that Java continues in its role as the most popular, complete, productive, secure, and innovative development platform. But it also means, he qualified, the process by which we make the future Java -- an open, transparent, collaborative, and community-driven evolution. "Many of you have bet your businesses and your careers on Java, and we have bet our business on Java," he said.Rizvi detailed the three factors they consider critical to the success of Java--technology innovation, community participation, and Oracle's leadership/stewardship. He offered a scorecard in these three realms over the past year--with OS X and Linux ARM support on Java SE, open sourcing of JavaFX by the end of the year, the release of Java Embedded Suite 7.0 middleware platform, and multiple releases on the Java EE side. The JCP process continues, with new JSR activity, and JUGs show a 25% increase in participation since last year. Oracle, meanwhile, continues its commitment to both technology and community development/outreach--with four regional JavaOne conferences last year in various part of the world, as well as the release of Java Magazine, with over 120,000 current subscribers. Georges Saab, VP Development, Java SE, next reviewed features of Java SE 7--the first major revision to the platform under Oracle's stewardship, which has included near-monthly update releases offering hundreds of fixes, performance enhancements, and new features. Saab indicated that developers, ISVs, and hosting providers have all been rapid adopters of the platform. He also noted that Oracle's entire Fusion middleware stack is supported on SE 7. The supported platforms for SE 7 has also increased--from Windows, Linux, and Solaris, to OS X, Linux ARM, and the emerging ARM micro-server market. "In the last year, we've added as many new platforms for Java, as were added in the previous decade," said Saab.Saab also explored the upcoming JDK 8 release--including Project Lambda, Project Nashorn (a modern implementation of JavaScript running on the JVM), and others. He noted that Nashorn functionality had already been used internally in NetBeans 7.3, and announced that they were planning to contribute the implementation to OpenJDK. Nandini Ramani, VP Development, Java Client, ME and Card, discussed the latest news pertaining to JavaFX 2.0--releases on Windows, OS X, and Linux, release of the FX Scene Builder tool, the JavaFX WebView component in NetBeans 7.3, and an OpenJFX project in OpenJDK. Nandini announced, as of Sunday, the availability for download of JavaFX on Linux ARM (developer preview), as well as Scene Builder on Linux. She noted that for next year's JDK 8 release, JavaFX will offer 3D, as well as third-party component integration. Avinder Brar, Senior Software Engineer, Navis, and Dierk König, Canoo Fellow, next took the stage and demonstrated all that JavaFX offers, with a feature-rich, animation-rich, real-time cargo management application that employs Canoo's just open-sourced Dolphin technology.Saab also explored Java SE 9 and beyond--Jigsaw modularity, Penrose Project for interoperability with OSGi, improved multi-tenancy for Java in the cloud, and Project Sumatra. Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow, explored heterogeneous computing platforms that combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon and shared memory—a hardware technology driven by such advanced functionalities as HD video, face recognition, and cloud workloads. Project Sumatra is an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to such heterogeneous platforms--with hardware and software experts working together to modify the JVM for these advanced applications and platforms.Ramani next discussed the latest with Java in the embedded space--"the Internet of things" and M2M--declaring this to be "the next IT revolution," with Java as the ideal technology for the ecosystem. Last week, Oracle released Java ME Embedded 3.2 (for micro-contollers and low-power devices), and Java Embedded Suite 7.0 (a middleware stack based on Java SE 7). Axel Hansmann, VP Strategy and Marketing, Cinterion, explored his company's use of Java in M2M, and their new release of EHS5, the world's smallest 3G-capable M2M module, running Java ME Embedded. Hansmaan explained that Java offers them the ability to create a "simple to use, scalable, coherent, end-to-end layer" for such diverse edge devices.Marc Brule, Chief Financial Office, Royal Canadian Mint, also explored the fascinating use-case of JavaCard in his country's MintChip e-cash technology--deployable on smartphones, USB device, computer, tablet, or cloud. In parting, Ramani encouraged developers to download the latest releases of Java Embedded, and try them out.Cameron Purdy, VP, Fusion Middleware Development and Java EE, summarized the latest developments and announcements in the Enterprise space--greater developer productivity in Java EE6 (with more on the way in EE 7), portability between platforms, vendors, and even cloud-to-cloud portability. The earliest version of the Java EE 7 SDK is now available for download--in GlassFish 4--with WebSocket support, better JSON support, and more. The final release is scheduled for April of 2013. Nicole Otto, Senior Director, Consumer Digital Technology, Nike, explored her company's Java technology driven enterprise ecosystem for all things sports, including the NikeFuel accelerometer wrist band. Looking beyond Java EE 7, Purdy mentioned NoSQL database functionality for EE 8, the concurrency utilities (possibly in EE 7), some of the Avatar projects in EE 7, some in EE 8, multi-tenancy for the cloud, supporting SaaS applications, and more.Rizvi ended by introducing Dr. Robert Ballard, oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence--part of Oracle's philanthropic relationship with the National Geographic Society to fund K-12 education around ocean science and conservation. Ballard is best known for having discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. He offered a fascinating video and overview of the cutting edge technology used in such deep-sea explorations, noting that in his early days, high-bandwidth exploration meant that you’d go down in a submarine and "stick your face up against the window." Now, it's a remotely operated, technology telepresence--"I think of my Hercules vehicle as my equivalent of a Na'vi. When I go beneath the sea, I actually send my spirit." Using high bandwidth satellite links, such amazing explorations can now occur via smartphone, laptop, or whatever platform. Ballard’s team regularly offers live feeds and programming out to schools and the world, spanning 188 countries--with embedding educators as part of the expeditions. It's technology at its finest, inspiring the next-generation of scientists and explorers!

  Read the article

• Oracle Fusion Middleware gives you Choice and Portability for Public and Private Cloud

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Margaret Lee, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Computing allows customers to quickly develop and deploy applications in a shared environment.  The environment can span across hardward (IaaS), foundation layer software (PaaS), and end-user software (SaaS). Cloud Computing provides compelling benefits in terms of business agility and IT cost savings.  However, with complex, existing heterogeneous architectures, and concerns for security and manageability, enterprises are challenged to define their Cloud strategy.  For most enterprises, the solution is a hybrid of private and public cloud.  Fusion Middleware supports customers’ Cloud requirements through choice and portability. Fusion Middleware supports a variety of cloud development and deployment models:  Oracle [Public] Cloud; customer private cloud; hybrid of these two, and traditional dedicated, on-premise model Customers can develop applications in any of these models and deployed in another, providing the flexibility and portability they need Oracle Cloud is a public cloud offering.  Within Oracle Cloud, Fusion Middleware provides two key offerings include the Developer cloud service and Java cloud deployment service. Developer Cloud Service Simplify Development: Automated provisioned environment; pre-configured and integrated; web-based administration Deploy Automatically: Fully integrated with Oracle Cloud for Java deployment; workflow ensures build & test Collaborate & Manage: Fits any size team; integrated team source repository; continuous integration; task/defect tracking Integrated with all major IDEs: Oracle JDeveloper; NetBeans; Eclipse Java Cloud Service Java Cloud service provides flexible Java deployment environment for departmental applications and development, staging, QA, training, and demo environments.  It also supports customizations deployments for SaaS-based Fusion Applications customers.  Some key features of Java Cloud Service include: WebLogic Server on Exalogic, secure, highly available infrastructure Database Service & IDE Integration Open, Standard-based Deploy Web Apps, Web Services, REST Services Fully managed and supported by Oracle For more information, please visit Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud Java Service and Oracle Cloud Developer Service. If your enterprise prefers a private cloud, for reasons such as security, control, manageability, and complex integration that prevent your applications from being deployed on a public cloud, Fusion Middleware also provide you with the products and tools you need.  Sometimes called Private PaaS, private clouds have their predecessors in shared-services arrangements many large companies have been building in the past decade.  The difference, however, are in the scope of the services, and depth of their capabilities.  In terms of vertical stack depth, private clouds not only provide hardware and software infrastructure to run your applications, they also provide services such as integration and security, that your applications need.  Horizontally, private clouds provide monitoring, management, lifecycle, and charge back capabilities out-of-box that shared-services platforms did not have before. Oracle Fusion Middleware includes the complete stack of hardware and software for you to build private clouds: SOA suite and BPM suite to support systems integration and process flow between applications deployed on your private cloud and the rest of your organization Identity and Access Management suite to provide security, provisioning, and access services for applications deployed on your private cloud WebLogic Server to run your applications Enterprise Manager's Cloud Management pack to monitor, manage, upgrade applications running on your private cloud Exalogic or optimized Oracle-Sun hardware to build out your private cloud The most important key differentiator for Oracle's cloud solutions is portability, between private and public clouds.  This is unique to Oracle because portability requires the vendor to have product depth and breadth in both public cloud services and private cloud product offerings.  Most public cloud vendors cannot provide the infrastructure and tools customers need to build their own private clouds.  In reverse, traditional software tools vendors typically do not have the product and expertise breadth to build out and offer a public cloud.  Oracle can.  It is important for customers that the products and technologies  Oracle uses to build its public is the same set that it sells to customers for them to build private clouds.  Fundamentally, that enables skills reuse,  as well as application portability. For more information on Oracle PaaS offerings, please visit Oracle's product information page.    Resources Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

  Read the article

• Quicktips 1: Windows 7 Libraries; New website

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I’m working on several large posts right now. So in the interim, I’ve decided to do shorter posts that contain something I find very helpful. This is the first. I’ve been using Windows 7 since April 2010. It’s the first OS I’ve ever worked with that I actually enjoy. I’ve used many over the years (KERNAL; PC DOS; MS-DOS 3.x+; Windows 3.0, 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, Me, NT 3.51, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7; various GNU/Linux distros starting with Debian 1.2 – most recently Ubuntu 10.04; ProDOS, Mac OS 9.X, Mac OS X (through 10.4); SunOS, Solaris; AIX, z/OS; OpenVMS). Some were frustrating. Some tolerable. Some were “nice except for…”. OS X actually started out as seemingly “nice” until every single release contained a breaking change to some major API and they then decided to flip-off everyone who had bought a Mac as little as two years earlier with the release of Snow Leopard without PPC support. Windows 7 is the first one that’s just “nice” without any qualifiers. There are so many little features that add up to make it nice. Today’s Quicktip is one of them. Quicktip 1: Create a Library for your Code One thing I particularly like about Windows 7 is the Libraries feature in Explorer. Specifically the fact that you can create custom ones. I used to spend a lot of time opening new Explorer windows and navigating my various Visual Studio projects folders. Custom libraries allowed me to simplify that whole process. I now simply go to my “Code” library and there it all is. Adding a new library is easy. Open an Explorer window. If you aren’t in your Libraries when it opens, navigate to Libraries. Click the “New library” button. Give it a name. Then right click on the new library you created and go to “Properties”. Click the “Include a folder…” button. Choose the folder you want and press “Include folder”. Voilà! If you wish to add more, simply click “Include a folder…” again and repeat. It’s true that this is just a small time saver. But it’s one of those things that just adds a really nice touch. ------------------------ In a separate note, just before Christmas I finally finished and published my new website: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/ . I waited to post here about it until I found time to incorporate a few things I hadn’t had the time to do when I pushed it out for its “soft open”. Most of them are now done and so my site is now formally open. I have no plans or intentions of moving my blog ( http://blog.bobtacoindustries.com/ points here). I quite like it here, both in terms of the interface and also in terms of the concept (and realization thereof) of pooling geek bloggers to create a pool of knowledge and helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and advice. I created it simply because I felt that it was time to have a website as I venture further into my return to the land of software development. The “For Devs” section should hopefully be useful to developers, particularly the links section. It’s my curated list of sites that I regularly visit to solve problems, to help answer questions on Twitter and the AppHub forums, and to learn new things. I’ll be adding links to it periodically and will be including topic areas as I become acquainted with them enough to form a proper list. WPF will likely be the first topic area added. If there are any links you think I should add to the existing topics, let me know! I warn in advance that I’m less inclined to add blogs; there are simply too many good blogs and I do not want to have hundreds per topic area. So blogs are limited primarily, though not exclusively, to acknowledged experts in the subject area who generally blog regularly about it and who usually are part of the team that develops the product or technology in question. I’m much more amenable to including individual blogs posts in the techniques subcategory in the appropriate topic area. Ultimately, it’s a collection of things I find interesting and helpful. So please no hard feelings if I don’t add a link you think is awesome. I may well think it’s awesome too, but conclude that it doesn’t fit with my goals for the dev links area.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136  | Next Page >