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• Silverlight Cream for June 16, 2011 -- #1108

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: René Schulte, Rajat Jaiswal(-2-), Peter Kuhn, Colin Eberhardt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Beth Massi, Michael Crump, Daniel Vaughan, Chris Rouw, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jesse Liberty. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Cubelicious - Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win!" René Schulte WP7: "Binding the WP7 ProgressIndicator in XAML" Daniel Vaughan LightSwitch: "Adding Static Images and Text on a LightSwitch Screen" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Laurent Bugnion is Proposing a new RelayCommand snippet for MVVM Light V4... read about it and give him some feedback From SilverlightCream.com: Cubelicious - Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win! René Schulte has a post up about using the SLARToolkit for Silverlight 5 Beta in conjuncion with Balder and Physics ... dang this is cool, check out the video! PSD TO XAML in few easy steps using Expression Blend I'm not a Photoshop person, but apparently Rajat Jaiswal is, and he's demonstrating using Expression Blend to get your PSD file into XAML Its really great feature Silverlight realtime augment toolkit This is a fun post from Rajat Jaiswal... fun to see someone other than René Schulteposting about René's SLARToolkit :) Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599 (Part 2) Peter Kuhn has part 2 of his series up on getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam at SilverlightShow Metro In Motion Part #7 – Panorama Prettiness and Opacity Colin Eberhardt has another Metro in Motion up... this one concentrates on the opacity effect when the user slides from item-to-item in Panorama contents Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 13 - What is Tombstoning? Kunal Chowdhury has a couple of posts up... first up is this one on Tombstoning... and if you're just starting with WP7.1, it got easier Windows Phone 7 Tip: Showing and Hiding onscreen keyboard in Emulator Kunal Chowdhury's latest is a great hint if you haven't found it already... how to show/hide the onscreen keyboard in the emulator Adding Static Images and Text on a LightSwitch Screen Beth Massi's latest post is on showing how to display an image or static text such as a logo in a LightSwitch app Displaying PDF Files in Windows Phone 7 Mango Michael Crump responds to reader's questions about displaying a PDF file in WP7.1 with this post using ComponentOne's Studio for Windows Phone CTP Binding the WP7 ProgressIndicator in XAML Daniel Vaughan has a solution to the problem of having to bind the ProgressIndicator in WP7.1 in code-behind... he wrote a ProgressIndicatorProxy and shares it with us!<>/dd> Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 2 Chris Rouw has Part 2 of his Storing Files in SQL Servier using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight up... this one is on uploading and saving files to the database from Silvelright by the user dropping them onto your app. Using SqlMetal to generate Windows Phone Mango Local Database classes OK I'm not too proud to admit I'd never heard of SQLMetal... if you haven't, or even if you have, this post by WindowsPhoneGeek is a good discussion of using it to generate your WP7.1 database classes. Obtaining Email, Address or Phone Number Jesse Liberty's latest is another in his 'Mango From Scratch' series discussing the new tasks to obtain more info from the contact list. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• The busy developers guide to the Kinect SDK Beta

  - by mbcrump

  The Kinect is awesome. From day one, I’ve said this thing has got potential. After playing with several open-source Kinect projects, I am please to announce that Microsoft has released the official SDK beta on 6/16/2011. I’ve created this quick start guide to get you up to speed in no time flat. Let’s begin: What is it? The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a starter kit for applications developers that includes APIs, sample code, and drivers. This SDK enables the academic research and enthusiast communities to create rich experiences by using Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect sensor technology on computers running Windows 7. (defined by Microsoft) Links worth checking out: Download Kinect for Windows SDK beta – You can either download a 32 or 64 bit SDK depending on your OS. Readme for Kinect for Windows SDK Beta from Microsoft Research  Programming Guide: Getting Started with the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta Code Walkthroughs of the samples that ship with the Kinect for Windows SDK beta (Found in \Samples Folder) Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit – Lots of extension methods and controls for WPF and WinForms. Kinect Mouse Cursor – Use your hands to control things like a mouse created by Brian Peek. Kinect Paint – Basically MS Paint but use your hands! Kinect for Windows SDK Quickstarts Installing and Using the Kinect Sensor Getting it installed: After downloading the Kinect SDK Beta, double click the installer to get the ball rolling. Hit the next button a few times and it should complete installing. Once you have everything installed then simply plug in your Kinect device into the USB Port on your computer and hopefully you will get the following screen: Once installed, you are going to want to check out the following folders: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK – This contains the actual Kinect Sample Executables along with the documentation as a CHM file. Also check out the C:\Users\Public\Documents\Microsoft Research KinectSDK Samples directory: The main thing to note here is that these folders contain the source code to the applications where you can compile/build them yourself. Audio NUI DEMO Time Let’s get started with some demos. Navigate to the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK folder and double click on ShapeGame.exe. Next up is SkeletalViewer.exe (image taken from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/2619-microsoft-launch-kinect-sdk-beta.html as I could not get a good image using SnagIt) At this point, you will have to download Kinect Mouse Cursor – This is really cool because you can use your hands to control the mouse cursor. I actually used this to resize itself. Last up is Kinect Paint – This is very cool, just make sure you read the instructions! MS Paint on steroids! A few tips for getting started building Kinect Applications. It appears WPF is the way to go with building Kinect Applications. You must also use a version of Visual Studio 2010.  Your going to need to reference Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll when building a Kinect Application. Right click on References and then goto Browse and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK and select Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll. You are going to want to make sure your project has the Platform target set to x86. The Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit really makes things easier with extension methods and controls. Just note that this is for WinForms or WPF. Conclusion It looks like we have a lot of fun in store with the Kinect SDK. I’m very excited about the release and have already been thinking about all the applications that I can begin building. It seems that development will be easier now that we have an official SDK and the great work from Coding4Fun. Please subscribe to my blog or follow me on twitter for more information about Kinect, Silverlight and other great technology.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Brainless Backups

  - by Jesse

  I’m a software developer by trade which means to my friends and family I’m just a “computer guy”. It’s assumed that I know everything about every facet of computing from removing spyware to replacing hardware. I also can do all of this blindly over the phone or after hearing a five to ten word description of the problem over dinner ;-) In my position as CIO of my friends and families I’ve been in the unfortunate position of trying to recover music, pictures, or documents off of failed hard drives on more than one occasion. It’s not a great situation for anyone, and it’s always at these times that the importance of backups becomes so clear. Several months back a friend of mine found himself in this situation. The hard drive on his 8 year old laptop failed and took a good number of his digital photos with it. I think most folks can deal with losing some of their music and even some of their documents, but it really stings to lose pictures of past events and loved ones. After ordering a new laptop, my friend went out and bought an external hard drive so that he could start keeping a backup of his data. As fate would have it, several months later the drive in his new laptop failed and he learned the hard way that simply buying the external hard drive isn’t enough… you actually have to copy your stuff over every once in awhile! The importance of backup and recovery plans is (hopefully) well known in IT organizations. Well executed backup plans are in place, and hopefully the backup and recovery process is tested regularly. When you’re talking about users at home, however, the need for these backups is often understood far too late. Most typical users can’t be expected to remember to backup their data regularly and also don’t always have the know-how to setup automated backups. For my friends and family members in this situation I recommend tools like Dropbox, Carbonite, and Mozy. Here’s why I like them: They’re affordable: Dropbox and Mozy both have free offerings, though most people with lots of music and/or photos to backup will probably exceed the storage limitations of those free plans pretty quickly. Still, all three offer pretty affordable monthly or yearly plans. In my opinion, Carbonite’s unlimited storage plan for $50-$60 per year is the best value around. They’re easy to setup: Both Dropbox and Carbonite are very easy to get setup and start using. I’ve never used Mozy, but I imagine it’s similarly painless to get up and running. Backups are automatically “off-site”: A backup that is sitting on an external hard drive right next to your computer is great, but might not protect against flood damage, a power surge, or other disasters in that single location. These services exist “in the cloud” so to speak, helping mitigate those concerns. Granted, this kind of backup scheme requires some trust in the 3rd party to protect your data from both malicious people and disastrous events. This truly is a bit of a double edged sword, but I sleep well at night knowing that my data is being backed up and secured by a company made up of engineers that focus on the business of doing backups right. Backups are “brainless”: What I like most about services like these is that they work “automagically” in the background, watching for files to be updated and automatically backing up those changes. There’s no need to remember to plug in that external drive and copy your data over. Since starting to recommend these services to my friends and family I find myself wearing my “data recovery” hat far less often. The only way backups are effective for your standard computer user is if they’re completely automatic. Backups need to be brainless, or they just won’t work.

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• Windows Azure Mobile Services Updates Keep Coming

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Some exciting new Windows Azure Mobile Services features were delivered to production this week. The highlights include: iPhone and iPad connectivity support via a new iOS SDK Integrated Authentication so developers can configure user authentication via Microsoft Account, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. New server-side Mobile Service script modules Access to Structured Storage, Windows Azure Blob, Table, Queues, and ServiceBus Email services through partnership with SendGrid SMS & voice services through partnership with Twilio Mobile Services hosting expanded to west coast US The iOS SDK I’m excited to share that we've announced the release of an under-development iOS client SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services. The iOS SDK joins the Windows 8 SDK launched with Windows Azure Mobile Services as well as client SDKs released by Xamarin for MonoTouch and MonoDroid.  The native iOS SDK is for developers programming in Objective-C on the iPhone and iPad platforms. The SDK gives developers the same level of access to data storage using dynamic schematization that is available for Windows 8. Also, iOS applications can use the same authentication options available in Mobile Services. While full iOS support is still in development, the libraries are currently available on GitHub. There’s a great getting started tutorial to walk you through building a simple iOS “Todo List” app that stores data in Windows Azure.  These additional tutorials explore how to use the iOS client libraries to store data and authenticate users: Get Started with data in Mobile Services for iOS Get Started with authentication in Mobile Services for iOS What’s New in Authentication Available to both iOS and Windows 8 developers, Mobile Services has expanded its authentication options.  Developers can now use Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google authentication. Similar to using Microsoft accounts for authentication, developers must sign up and through Facebook, Twitter, or Google's developer portal in order to authenticate through them.  These tutorials walk through how to register your Mobile Service with an identity provider: How to register your app with Microsoft Account How to register your app with Facebook How to register your app with Twitter How to register your app with Google And these tutorials walk through authenticating against Mobile Services: Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for Windows Store (C#) Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for Windows Store (JavaScript) Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for iOS What’s New in Mobile Service Scripts Some great new functionality is now available in the Mobile Service script layer.  These server side scripts are triggered off of any CRUD operation on a Mobile Service's table and can already handle doing data and query validation, filtering, web requests and more.  Today, the Azure SDK module is now available to these scripts giving them access to blob storage, service bus, table storage.  Check out the new tutorials on the Windows Azure Node.js developer center to learn more about working with Blob, Tables, Queues and Service Bus using the azure module. In addition, SendGrid and Twilio are now available via modules that can be called from the scripts as well.  This gives developers the ability to send emails (SendGrid) or SMS text messages (Twilio) whenever a script is fired.  Windows Azure customers receive a special offer of 25,000 free emails per month from SendGrid and 1000 free text messages from Twilio. Expanded Data Center Availability In addition to Mobile Services being available in our US East data center, they can now be spun up in US West. The above features are all now live in production and are available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using Mobile Services today. The Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center has been updated with new tutorials that cover these new features in detail. And don’t forget - Windows Azure Mobile Services are still free for your first ten applications running on shared compute instances. Stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows Azure announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• Personal Technology – Excel Tip: Comparing Excel Files

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versionsfrom SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I have been writing about Excel Tips over my blog and thought it would be great to share one interesting tips here as a guest blog here. Assume a situation where you want to compare multiple excel files. Here is a typical scenario I have encountered as a common activity. Assume you are sending an Excel file with tons of data, formulae and multiple sheets. Now you are requesting your colleague to validate the file and if required change content for correctness. After receiving the file from your colleague, now you want to know what changes were made by this person to your document. Now here is a cool new addition to Excel 2013 that can help you achieve this task. To get to this option, click the INQUIRE Tab. Incase you don’t have the INQUIRE Tab, check Options using INQUIRE blog. In that post, we discuss all the other options of INQUIRE tab. Once you are on the INQUIRE Tab, select “Compare Files” button as shown in the figure above. This brings a dialog as below. If you are on Windows 8 or Windows 7 OS, search for an application called “Spreadsheet Compare 2013”. Ultimately both the options lead us to the same application. If you are using the stand alone app, once the App initializes, click the “Compare files” options from the toolbar. Make sure to give two different Excel files as shown in the figure above. After selecting the Excel Sheets, you can see the Compare tool has a number of other options to play from. We will talk about some of them later in this post. Just below our toolbar is a colorful side-by-side comparison of both our excel sheets. We can also see the various Tab’s from each file. There is a meaning for each of our color coding which will be discussed next. As you saw above, the color coding has a meaning. For example the bottom pane lists each of the color coding and most importantly each of the changes as compared side-by-side. The detailed information shown below can be exported using the “Export Results” options from the toolbar as a separate Excel Workbook or can be copied to clipboard to be used later. The final piece of the puzzle is to show a graphical view of these differences results based on each category. We cannot drill down per se, but this is a great way to know that the maximum changes seem to be based on “Cell Formats” and then few “Calculated Values” have changed. The INQUIRE option and Spreadsheet Compare 2013 tool is part of Excel 2013. So as you explore using the new version of Excel, there are many such hidden features that are worth exploring. Do let us know if you enjoyed learning a new feature today and I hope you will play around with this feature in your day-today challenges when working with Excel files. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Excel, Personal Technology

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• Edit the Windows Live Writer Custom Dictionary

  - by Matthew Guay

  Windows Live Writer is a great tool for writing and publishing posts to your blog, but its spell check unfortunately doesn’t include many common tech words.  Here’s how you can easily edit your custom dictionary and add your favorite words. Customize Live Writer’s Dictionary Adding an individual word to the Windows Live Writer dictionary works as you would expect.  Right-click on a word and select Add to dictionary. And changing the default spell check settings is easy too.  In the menu, click Tools, then Options, and select the Spelling tab in this dialog.  Here you can choose your dictionary language and turn on/off real-time spell checking and other settings. But there’s no obvious way to edit your custom dictionary.  Editing the custom dictionary directly is nice if you accidently add a misspelled word to your dictionary and want to remove it, or if you want to add a lot of words to the dictionary at once. Live Writer actually stores your custom dictionary entries in a plain text file located in your appdata folder.  It is saved as User.dic in the C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries folder.  The easiest way to open the custom dictionary is to enter the following in the Run box or the address bar of an Explorer window: %appdata%\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries\User.dic   This will open the User.dic file in your default text editor.  Add any new words to the custom dictionary on separate lines, and delete any misspelled words you accidently added to the dictionary.   Microsoft Office Word also stores its custom dictionary in a plain text file.  If you already have lots of custom words in it and want to import them into Live Writer, enter the following in the Run command or Explorer’s address bar to open Word’s custom dictionary.  Then copy the words, and past them into your Live Writer custom dictionary file. %AppData%\Microsoft\UProof\Custom.dic Don’t forget to save the changes when you’re done.  Note that the changes to the dictionary may not show up in Live Writer’s spell check until you restart the program.  If it’s currently running, save any posts you’re working on, exit, and then reopen, and all of your new words should be in the dictionary. Conclusion Whether you use Live Writer daily in your job or occasionally post an update to a personal blog, adding your own custom words to the dictionary can save you a lot of time and frustration in editing.  Plus, if you’ve accidently added a misspelled word to the dictionary, this is a great way to undo your mistake and make sure your spelling is up to par! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Backup Your Windows Live Writer SettingsTransfer or Move Your Microsoft Office Custom DictionaryFuture Date a Post in Windows Live WriterTools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress BlogInstall Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall

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• Token based Authentication for WCF HTTP/REST Services: Authentication

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  This post shows some of the implementation techniques for adding token and claims based security to HTTP/REST services written with WCF. For the theoretical background, see my previous post. Disclaimer The framework I am using/building here is not the only possible approach to tackle the problem. Based on customer feedback and requirements the code has gone through several iterations to a point where we think it is ready to handle most of the situations. Goals and requirements The framework should be able to handle typical scenarios like username/password based authentication, as well as token based authentication The framework should allow adding new supported token types Should work with WCF web programming model either self-host or IIS hosted Service code can rely on an IClaimsPrincipal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal that describes the client using claims-based identity Implementation overview In WCF the main extensibility point for this kind of security work is the ServiceAuthorizationManager. It gets invoked early enough in the pipeline, has access to the HTTP protocol details of the incoming request and can set Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The job of the SAM is simple: Check the Authorization header of the incoming HTTP request Check if a “registered” token (more on that later) is present If yes, validate the token using a security token handler, create the claims principal (including claims transformation) and set Thread.CurrentPrincipal If no, set an anonymous principal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal. By default, anonymous principals are denied access – so the request ends here with a 401 (more on that later). To wire up the custom authorization manager you need a custom service host – which in turn needs a custom service host factory. The full object model looks like this: Token handling A nice piece of existing WIF infrastructure are security token handlers. Their job is to serialize a received security token into a CLR representation, validate the token and turn the token into claims. The way this works with WS-Security based services is that WIF passes the name/namespace of the incoming token to WIF’s security token handler collection. This in turn finds out which token handler can deal with the token and returns the right instances. For HTTP based services we can do something very similar. The scheme on the Authorization header gives the service a hint how to deal with an incoming token. So the only missing link is a way to associate a token handler (or multiple token handlers) with a scheme and we are (almost) done. WIF already includes token handler for a variety of tokens like username/password or SAML 1.1/2.0. The accompanying sample has a implementation for a Simple Web Token (SWT) token handler, and as soon as JSON Web Token are ready, simply adding a corresponding token handler will add support for this token type, too. All supported schemes/token types are organized in a WebSecurityTokenHandlerCollectionManager and passed into the host factory/host/authorization manager. Adding support for basic authentication against a membership provider would e.g. look like this (in global.asax): var manager = new WebSecurityTokenHandlerCollectionManager(); manager.AddBasicAuthenticationHandler((username, password) => Membership.ValidateUser(username, password));   Adding support for Simple Web Tokens with a scheme of Bearer (the current OAuth2 scheme) requires passing in a issuer, audience and signature verification key: manager.AddSimpleWebTokenHandler(     "Bearer",     "http://identityserver.thinktecture.com/trust/initial",     "https://roadie/webservicesecurity/rest/",     "WFD7i8XRHsrUPEdwSisdHoHy08W3lM16Bk6SCT8ht6A="); In some situations, SAML token may be used as well. The following configures SAML support for a token coming from ADFS2: var registry = new ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry(); registry.AddTrustedIssuer( "d1 c5 b1 25 97 d0 36 94 65 1c e2 64 fe 48 06 01 35 f7 bd db", "ADFS"); var adfsConfig = new SecurityTokenHandlerConfiguration(); adfsConfig.AudienceRestriction.AllowedAudienceUris.Add( new Uri("https://roadie/webservicesecurity/rest/")); adfsConfig.IssuerNameRegistry = registry; adfsConfig.CertificateValidator = X509CertificateValidator.None; // token decryption (read from config) adfsConfig.ServiceTokenResolver = IdentityModelConfiguration.ServiceConfiguration.CreateAggregateTokenResolver();             manager.AddSaml11SecurityTokenHandler("SAML", adfsConfig);   Transformation The custom authorization manager will also try to invoke a configured claims authentication manager. This means that the standard WIF claims transformation logic can be used here as well. And even better, can be also shared with e.g. a “surrounding” web application. Error handling A WCF error handler takes care of turning “access denied” faults into 401 status codes and a message inspector adds the registered authentication schemes to the outgoing WWW-Authenticate header when a 401 occurs. The next post will conclude with authorization as well as the source code download.   (Wanna learn more about federation, WIF, claims, tokens etc.? Click here.)

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• Who Makes a Good Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product.  Note that I didn’t say about the product itself.  Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners.  Products only matter in relationship to their customers.  If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product. A good product owner is also a good negotiator.  They recognize that many different priorities exist inside of a corporation, but that there can be only one list that developers work from.  A good product owner recognizes that its their job to help others around them prioritize (perhaps with a Product Council), but also understand that they alone have the final say about priorities and are willing to make the tough decisions required.  Deciding the priority between two perfectly valid stories is very difficult, especially when the stories are from two different departments! A good product owner is deeply interested in helping the team be successful.  They don’t seek to control the team, but instead seek to understand what the team can do and then work with the team to get the best product possible for the Customer.  A good product owner is never denigrating to team members, ever.  They recognize that such behavior would damage the trust that needs to be present between team members and product owners and will avoid it at all costs. In general, technical people (i.e. former or current developers) make poor product owners.  In their minds, they can’t separate implementation details from user functionality, so their stories end up sounding like implementation details.  For example, “The user enters their username on the password screen” is something that a technical product owner would write.  The proper wording for that story is “A user supplies the system with their credentials.”  Because technical people think different from the rest of the population, they are generally not a good fit. A good product owner is also a good writer.  Writing good stories demands good writing.  The art of persuasion, descriptiveness and just general good grammar are all required.  A good Product Owner must also be well spoken, since most of what will be conveyed will be conveyed with the spoken word, not just written word. A good product owner is a “People Person.”  They like talking to people and are very patient.  They don’t mind having questions repeated or fielding many questions, because they want to make sure that the ideas they’re conveying are properly understood so the customer gets the best product possible.  They are happy to answer any questions a team member may have and invite feedback and criticism of designs and stories, since they want a good product.  They really have little ego that gets in the way of building a great product. All of these qualities can be hard to find, but if you look close enough, you’ll find the right person in your organization.  Product owners can be found anywhere, not just in upper management.  Some of the best product owners are those that are very close to the customer.  In fact, check your customer support staff.  I’d bet that several great product owners are lurking there. Final note about what makes a good product owner.  You’re probably NOT going to find a good product owner in a manager, especially if they consider themselves a “Manager.”  Product owners don’t manage anything but the backlog, so be especially careful if the person you’re selecting for Product Owner is a manager. Up Next, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• MySQL Cluster 7.3: On-Demand Webinar and Q&A Available

  - by Mat Keep

  The on-demand webinar for the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Release is now available. You can learn more about the design, implementation and getting started with all of the new MySQL Cluster 7.3 features from the comfort and convenience of your own device, including: - Foreign Key constraints in MySQL Cluster - Node.js NoSQL API  - Auto-installation of higher performance distributed, clusters We received some great questions over the course of the webinar, and I wanted to share those for the benefit of a broader audience. Q. What Foreign Key actions are supported: A. The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL Q. Where are Foreign Keys implemented, ie data nodes or SQL nodes? A. They are implemented in the data nodes, therefore can be enforced for both the SQL and NoSQL APIs Q. Are they compatible with the InnoDB Foreign Key implementation? A. Yes, with the following exceptions: - InnoDB doesn’t support “No Action” constraints, MySQL Cluster does - You can choose to suspend FK constraint enforcement with InnoDB using the FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS parameter; at the moment, MySQL Cluster ignores that parameter. - You cannot set up FKs between 2 tables where one is stored using MySQL Cluster and the other InnoDB. - You cannot change primary keys through the NDB API which means that the MySQL Server actually has to simulate such operations by deleting and re-adding the row. If the PK in the parent table has a FK constraint on it then this causes non-ideal behaviour. With Restrict or No Action constraints, the change will result in an error. With Cascaded constraints, you’d want the rows in the child table to be updated with the new FK value but, the implicit delete of the row from the parent table would remove the associated rows from the child table and the subsequent implicit insert into the parent wouldn’t reinstate the child rows. For this reason, an attempt to add an ON UPDATE CASCADE where the parent column is a primary key will be rejected. Q. Does adding or dropping Foreign Keys cause downtime due to a schema change? A. Nope, this is an online operation. MySQL Cluster supports a number of on-line schema changes, ie adding and dropping indexes, adding columns, etc. Q. Where can I see an example of node.js with MySQL Cluster? A. Check out the tutorial and download the code from GitHub Q. Can I use the auto-installer to support remote deployments? How about setting up MySQL Cluster 7.2? A. Yes to both! Q. Can I get a demo Check out the tutorial. You can download the code from http://labs.mysql.com/ Go to Select Build drop-down box Q. What is be minimum internet speen required for Geo distributed cluster with synchronous replication? A. if you're splitting you cluster between sites then we recommend a network latency of 20ms or less. Alternatively, use MySQL asynchronous replication where the latency of your WAN doesn't impact the latency of your reads/writes. Q. Where you can one learn more about the PayPal project with MySQL Cluster? A. Take a look at the following - you'll find press coverage, a video and slides from their keynote presentation  So, if you want to learn more, listen to the new MySQL Cluster 7.3 on-demand webinar  MySQL Cluster 7.3 is still in the development phase, so it would be great to get your feedback on these new features, and things you want to see!

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• The most challenging part of blogging about OpenWorld is…

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} ...not knowing where to start. Do I talk about the great presentations from our partners and executives in our keynote sessions; do I write about the music festival, or many great sessions we had in the Data integration track? A short blog can never do justice. For now I will stick to our data integration sessions for those who could not attend with so many other sessions running concurrently. And in the coming weeks we will be writing more about what we talked in our sessions and what we learned from our customers and partners. For today, I will give some of the key highlights from Data Integration sessions that took place on Wednesday and Thursday of last week  On Wednesday, GoldenGate was highlighted in multiple Database and Data Integration sessions. I found particularly the session about Oracle’s own use of GoldenGate for its large E-Business Suite implementation for supply chain management and service contract management very interesting. In 2011, Oracle implemented a new operational reporting system using GoldenGate real-time data replication to an operational data store that leverages data from E-Business Suite.The results are very impressive. Data freshness improved by 2,210X while report run performance improved by 60X. For more information on this implementation and its results please see the white paper: Real-Time Operational Reporting for E-Business Suite via GoldenGate Replication to an Operational Data Store Other sessions that provided very rich content were: "Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active", "Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database", "Next-Generation Data Integration on Oracle Exadata" and "Accelerate Oracle Data Integrator with Advanced Features, SOA, Groovy, SDK, and XML". Below is a slide presented by Stephan Haisley in the Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate session. If you missed them during OpenWorld, I highly recommend downloading the slides. We will continue to blog about these topics and related resources. .

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• Motorola Droid App Recommendations

  - by Brian Jackett

  Just as a disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and I’m not getting paid or compensated for anything.     Ok, so I’m one of the crazy few who went out and bought a Droid the week it was released a few months back.  The Motorola Droid was a MAJOR upgrade in phone capabilities for me as my previous phone had no GPS, no web access, limited apps, etc.  I now use my Droid for so much of my life from work to personal to community based events.  Since I’ve been using my Droid for awhile, a number of friends (@toddklindt, @spmcdonough, @jfroushiii, and many more) who later got a Droid asked me which apps I recommended.  While there are a few sites on the web listing out useful Android apps, here’s my quick list (with a few updates since first put together.) Note: * denotes a highly recommended app     Android App Recommendations for Motorola Droid (Updated after 2.1 update) RemoteDroid – install a thin client on another computer and Droid becomes mouse pad / keyboard, control computer remotely PdaNet – free version allows tethering (only to HTTP, no HTTPS) without paying extra monthly charge.  A paid version allows HTTPS access. SportsTap – keep track of about a dozen sports, favorite teams, etc *Movies – setup favorite theaters, find movie times, buy tickets, etc WeatherBug elite – paid app, but gives weather alerts, 4 day forecast, etc.  Free version also exists.  (Update: Android 2.1 offers free weather app, but I still prefer WeatherBug.) *Advanced Task Killer – manually free up memory and kill apps not needed Google Voice – have to have a Google Voice account to really use, but allows visual voice mail, sending calls to specific phones, and too many other things to list AndroZip – access your phone memory like a file system Twidroid – best Twitter client I’ve found so far, but personal preference varies.  I’m using free version and suits me just fine. Skype (beta) – I only use this to send chat messages, not sure how/if phone calls works on this. (Update: Skype Mobile app just released, but uninstalled after few days as it kept launching in background and using up memory when not wanted.) *NewsRob – RSS reader syncs to Google Reader.  I use this multiple times a day, excellent app. (Update: this app does ask for your Google username and password, so security minded folks be cautioned.) ConnectBot – don’t use often myself, but allows SSH into remote computer.  Great if you have a need for remote manage server. Speed Test – same as the online website, allows finding upload/download speeds. WiFinder – store wifi preferences and find wifi spots in area. TagReader – simple Microsoft Tag Reader, works great. *Google Listen – audible podcast catcher that allows putting items into a queue, sync with Google Reader RSS, etc. I personally love this app which has now replaced the iPod I used to use in my car, but have heard mixed reviews from others. Robo Defense – (paid app) tower defense game but with RPG elements to upgrade towers over lifetime playing. I’ve never played FieldRunners but I’m told very similar in offering. Nice distraction when in airport or have some time to burn. Phit Droid 3rd Edition – drag and drop block shapes into a rectangle box, simple game to pass the time with literally 1000s of levels. Note this game has been updated dozens of times with numerous editions so unsure exactly which are still on the market. Google Sky Map – impress your friends by holding Droid up to sky and viewing constellations using Droid screen. wootCheck Lite – check up on daily offerings on Woot.com and affiliated wine, sellout, shirt, and kids sites.   Side notes: I’ve seen that Glympse and TripIt have recently come out with Android apps.  I’ve installed but haven’t gotten to use either yet, but I hear good things.  Will try out on 2 upcoming trips in May and update with impressions.         -Frog Out   Image linked from http://images.tolmol.com/images/grpimages/200910191814100_motorola-droid.gif

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• How to Create and Manage Contact Groups in Outlook 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you find you’re sending emails to the same people all the time during the day, it’s tedious entering in their addresses individually. Today we take a look at creating Contact Groups to make the process a lot easier. Create Contact Groups Open Outlook and click on New Items \ More Items \ Contact Group. This opens the Contract Group window. Give your group a name, click on Add Members, and select the people you want to add from your Outlook Contacts, Address Book, or Create new ones. If you select from your address book you can scroll through and add the contacts you want. If you have a large amount of contacts you might want to search for them or use Advanced Find. If you want to add a new email contact to your group, you’ll just need to enter in their display name and email address then click OK. If you want the new member added to your Contacts list then make sure Add to Contacts is checked. After you have the contacts you want in the group, click Save & Close. Now when you compose a message you should be able to type in the name of the Contact Group you created… If you want to make sure you have everyone included in the group, click on the plus icon to expand the contacts. You will get a dialog box telling you the members of the group will be shown and you cannot collapse it again. Check the box not to see the message again then click OK. Then the members of the group will appear in the To field. Of course you can enter a Contact Group into the CC or Bcc fields as well. Add or Remove Members to a Contact Group After expanding the group you might notice some contacts aren’t included, or there is an old contact you don’t want to be in the group anymore. Click on the To button… Right-click on the Contact Group and select Properties. Now you can go ahead and Add Members… Or highlight a member and remove them…when finished click Save & Close. If you need to send emails to several of the same people, creating Contact Groups is a great way to save time by not entering them individually. If you work in for a large company, creating Contact Groups by department is a must! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Schedule Auto Send & Receive in Microsoft OutlookCreate An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Create an Email Template in Outlook 2003Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookGet Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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• Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2011 -- #1058

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Martin Krüger, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Karl Shifflett, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics" John Papa WP7: "Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Telerik announced a special sale on their RadControls for WP7... check it out: RadControls for Windows Phone 7 - on Sale from March 16th at a Special Promo Price! From SilverlightCream.com: Prism BootStrapper Load ModuleCatalog Ansyc Ian T. Lackey has a post up about reading the module catalog for Prism from an XML file asynchronously... fun stuff... this is how we kick-started our app... XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 6 - Input (accelerometer) Peter Kuhn has Part 6 of his XNA for Silverlight devs up at SilverlightShow. This post is on the use of the accelerometer... some great diagrams and explanations of it's use along with some code to play with... including a 'problems and pitfalls' section, and some good external links. Getting Started with Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has an introduction to Unit Testing in general, and then moves into Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7, providing 3 options with links to the materials and code demonstrating the concepts. Using DockPanel in WP7 Responding to reader's questions, WindowsPhoneGeek's next post is on the DockPanel from the Silverlight Toolkit, and using it in WP7... defined declaratively and in code. Reactive Extensions–More About Chaining Jesse Liberty has post number 10 on Rx up and is a follow-on to the last one on Chaining. This time he exercises the chaining aspect of SelectMany. Yet Another Podcast #26–Walt Ritscher In his next post, Jesse Liberty has his 26th 'Yet Another Podcast' up and is chatting with my friend Walt Ritscher. If you don't know who Walt is, check out the links Jesse has on the post... I'm sure you've crossed paths. How to: Create A half square from a regular polygon (triangle) Martin Krüger demonstrates the exact placement of a half-square (isosceles right triangle), formed with a regular polygon in Blend... this is much more involved than I've made it sound... check out his post. Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics John Papa has Silverlight TV number 65 up and it's all about the 3D graphics stuff we saw at the Firestarter. John is talking with Danny Riddel, the CEO of Archetype, the company that built the awesome 3D demo we all gushed over. Jounce Part 12: Providing History-Based Back Navigation Jeremy Likness has part 12 of his Jounce exploration up... and discussing the stack of navigated pages that Jounce retains and providing a 'go back' functionality... and provides a good example of using it all. Prism 4 Region Navigation with Silverlight Frame Navigation and Unity Karl Shifflett has a post for all us Prism afficianados... Prism, Unity, and the Silverlight Frame Navigation framework. Some great external links for 'required reading' too. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control Colin Eberhardt has an awesome tutorial up for creating a JumpList control for WP7... what a bunch of effort... this is a step-by-step description of designing the control he built and blogged about a while back... and it's still cool! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• The Value of SOA Specialization - Fujitsu

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Thanks for the nice ink The Value of Specialization In my last post  I talked about Fujitsu's achievement in obtaining SOA and other specializations, but I have heard murmurings from other partners about what just is the value? I think Oracle have to do more to advertise the benefits to customers, we need to see customers asking for specialization for it to really work, but Oracle have made great promises about only recommending those partners who are specialized. For us there was another benefit. Oracle was sponsoring the 3rd Annual SOA Symposium in Berlin and invited us as their first specialized partner to take part. There is a great blog about the symposium on the SOA community blog site. This is real commitment from Oracle and we have other marketing opportunities being worked on with Jürgen. This does generate leads so my message to other Oracle Partners is, you need to do this, it is worthwhile.   Fujitsu - First SOA Specialized Partner Globally Just before Oracle Open World I found out that Fujitsu had achieved the first SOA Specialization globally. I think most partners know what the requirements are for Specialization and that in itself is challenging but the bureaucracy around the actual submission is an exercise in tenacity. I won’t go into that now; I have had my dig at Oracle this month, but enough to say the process could be improved. As a platinum partner we needed 5 specializations and we decided to go for SOA first. The reasoning behind this is that our Oracle Practice is known for being applications centric. We have always had an excellent technical capability but no one ever talked about that, it was just part and parcel of an implementation. However today we have just as many bids that are technology lead as there is applications lead, so it seemed a good plan to work on the areas we were not known for. We appointed a capability lead to be responsible for putting the team through the training and testing and Rosemary (Kell) was excellent, she ensured that everyone was on track and that it wasn’t just getting put into the ‘to do list’. In Fujitsu everyone in the Oracle Practice has an objective to achieve the competency tests in their area, so achieving the 2 pre sales, 2 sales and 1 support was no problem at all. We actually had 22 with the support capability proficiency.  The implementation specialist exams are much harder, more like OCP in the database area. We had help from the Oracle SOA Community; Jürgen Kress who runs this in EMEA is really motivational. At the time we started SOA was a beta exam which means you do not get the results immediately but again we put forward more than we needed. Manjit Chopra, Sukhraj Sahota, Emely Patra, Ian Scorrer and Sunny Sidhu all took the exam and eventually got the results they wanted they had passed. Congratulations. Here is Jurgen expalining why specialization is important. After the tests came the submissions where you need to include deals and experience, this was my bit, and persuading Oracle we really deserved the specialization. Finally we got the news we had been awarded the specialization, and a few days later that we were first globally. I am very proud. However there is no rest for the wicked and we plodded on to make the 5 specializations needed for Platinum and now we are working on the new Diamond status and I think SOA will be one of our 5 ‘super specializations’. This is a global Fujitsu initiative and I work closely with my colleague in Germany Jessika Weiss. It was nice to be able to have a press release about this and a comment from Judson Althoff  head of Oracle Alliances. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA,SOA Community,OPN,Oracle,Fujitsu,Debra Lilley,Jürgen Kress,Specialization,SOA Specialization

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• How to rotate a set of points on z = 0 plane in 3-D, preserving pairwise distances?

  - by cagirici

  I have a set of points double n[] on the plane z = 0. And I have another set of points double[] m on the plane ax + by + cz + d = 0. Length of n is equal to length of m. Also, euclidean distance between n[i] and n[j] is equal to euclidean distance between m[i] and m[j]. I want to rotate n[] in 3-D, such that for all i, n[i] = m[i] would be true. In other words, I want to turn a plane into another plane, preserving the pairwise distances. Here's my code in java. But it does not help so much: double[] rotate(double[] point, double[] currentEquation, double[] targetEquation) { double[] currentNormal = new double[]{currentEquation[0], currentEquation[1], currentEquation[2]}; double[] targetNormal = new double[]{targetEquation[0], targetEquation[1], targetEquation[2]}; targetNormal = normalize(targetNormal); double angle = angleBetween(currentNormal, targetNormal); double[] axis = cross(targetNormal, currentNormal); double[][] R = getRotationMatrix(axis, angle); return rotated; } double[][] getRotationMatrix(double[] axis, double angle) { axis = normalize(axis); double cA = (float)Math.cos(angle); double sA = (float)Math.sin(angle); Matrix I = Matrix.identity(3, 3); Matrix a = new Matrix(axis, 3); Matrix aT = a.transpose(); Matrix a2 = a.times(aT); double[][] B = { {0, axis[2], -1*axis[1]}, {-1*axis[2], 0, axis[0]}, {axis[1], -1*axis[0], 0} }; Matrix A = new Matrix(B); Matrix R = I.minus(a2); R = R.times(cA); R = R.plus(a2); R = R.plus(A.times(sA)); return R.getArray(); } This is what I get. The point set on the right side is actually part of a point set on the left side. But they are on another plane. Here's a 2-D representation of what I try to do: There are two lines. The line on the bottom is the line I have. The line on the top is the target line. The distances are preserved (a, b and c). Edit: I have tried both methods written in answers. They both fail (I guess). Method of Martijn Courteaux public static double[][] getRotationMatrix(double[] v0, double[] v1, double[] v2, double[] u0, double[] u1, double[] u2) { RealMatrix M1 = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(new double[][]{ {1,0,0,-1*v0[0]}, {0,1,0,-1*v0[1]}, {0,0,1,0}, {0,0,0,1} }); RealMatrix M2 = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(new double[][]{ {1,0,0,-1*u0[0]}, {0,1,0,-1*u0[1]}, {0,0,1,-1*u0[2]}, {0,0,0,1} }); Vector3D imX = new Vector3D((v0[1] - v1[1])*(u2[0] - u0[0]) - (v0[1] - v2[1])*(u1[0] - u0[0]), (v0[1] - v1[1])*(u2[1] - u0[1]) - (v0[1] - v2[1])*(u1[1] - u0[1]), (v0[1] - v1[1])*(u2[2] - u0[2]) - (v0[1] - v2[1])*(u1[2] - u0[2]) ).scalarMultiply(1/((v0[0]*v1[1])-(v0[0]*v2[1])-(v1[0]*v0[1])+(v1[0]*v2[1])+(v2[0]*v0[1])-(v2[0]*v1[1]))); Vector3D imZ = new Vector3D(findEquation(u0, u1, u2)); Vector3D imY = Vector3D.crossProduct(imZ, imX); double[] imXn = imX.normalize().toArray(); double[] imYn = imY.normalize().toArray(); double[] imZn = imZ.normalize().toArray(); RealMatrix M = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(new double[][]{ {imXn[0], imXn[1], imXn[2], 0}, {imYn[0], imYn[1], imYn[2], 0}, {imZn[0], imZn[1], imZn[2], 0}, {0, 0, 0, 1} }); RealMatrix rotationMatrix = MatrixUtils.inverse(M2).multiply(M).multiply(M1); return rotationMatrix.getData(); } Method of Sam Hocevar static double[][] makeMatrix(double[] p1, double[] p2, double[] p3) { double[] v1 = normalize(difference(p2,p1)); double[] v2 = normalize(cross(difference(p3,p1), difference(p2,p1))); double[] v3 = cross(v1, v2); double[][] M = { { v1[0], v2[0], v3[0], p1[0] }, { v1[1], v2[1], v3[1], p1[1] }, { v1[2], v2[2], v3[2], p1[2] }, { 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 } }; return M; } static double[][] createTransform(double[] A, double[] B, double[] C, double[] P, double[] Q, double[] R) { RealMatrix c = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(makeMatrix(A,B,C)); RealMatrix t = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(makeMatrix(P,Q,R)); return MatrixUtils.inverse(c).multiply(t).getData(); } The blue points are the calculated points. The black lines indicate the offset from the real position.

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• IE9, HTML5 and truck load of other stuff happening around the web

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  First of all, I haven’t been updating this blog as regularly as it used to be.  Primarily, due to the fact was I was visiting a lot of cities talking about SharePoint, Web Matrix, IE9 and few other stuff.  IE9 is my new found love and I simply think we have done great work in improving the browser and browsing experiences for our users. This post would talk about IE, general things happening around the web and few misconceptions around IE (I had earlier written about IE8 and common myths When you think about the way web has transformed, its truly amazing.  Rewind back to late 90s and early 2000s, web was a luxury.  There were lot of desktop applications running around and web applications was starting to pick up.  Primarily reason was not a lot of folks were into web development and the areas of web were confined to HTML and JavaScript.  CSS was around here and there but no one took it so seriously.  XML, XSLT was fast picking up and contributed to decent web development techniques. So as a web developer all we had to worry about was, building good looking websites which worked well with IE6 and occasionally with Safari.  Firefox was  not even in the picture then and so was Chrome.  But with the various arms of W3C consortium and other bodies working actively on stuff like CSS, SVG and XHTML, few more areas came into picture when it comes to browsers supporting standards.  IE6 for sure wasn’t up to the speed and the main issue we were tackling then was privacy and piracy.  We did invest a lot of our efforts to curb piracy and one of the steps into it was that, IE7 the next version of IE would install only on genuine windows machines.  What this means, is that, people who were running pirated windows xp knowingly/unknowingly could not install IE7 and the limitations of IE6 really hurt them.  One more thing of importance is that, if you were running pirated windows, lots of chances that you didn’t get the security updates and thereby were vulnerable to run viruses/trojans on your system. Many of them actually block using IE in the first place and make it difficult to browse.  SP2 came as a big boon but again was there only for genuine windows machines. With Firefox coming as a free install and also heavily pushed by Google then, it was natural that people would try an alternative.  By then, we had started working on IE8 supporting the best standards (note HTML5, CSS 2.1 and other specs were then work in progress.  they are still) Later, Google in their infinite wisdom realized that with Firefox they were going nowhere and they released Chrome.  Now, they heavily push Chrome even for Firefox users, which is natural since its their browser. In the meanwhile, these browsers push their updates as mandatory and therefore have a very short lifecycle to add enhancements and support for stuff like CSS etc., Meanwhile, when IE8 came out, it really was the best standards supported browser and a lot of people saw our efforts in improving our browser. HTML5 is the buzz word in the industry and there is a lot of noise being made by many browsers claiming their support for it.  IE8 doesn’t have much support for HTML5.  But, with IE9 Beta, we have great support for many of HTML5 specifications.  Note that, HTML5 is still work under progress and one of the board of members working on the spec has mentioned that these specs might change and relying on them heavily is dangerous.  But, some of the advances such as video tag, etc., are indeed supported in IE9 Beta.  IE9 Beta also has full hardware acceleration support which other browsers don’t have. IE8 had advanced security features such as smartscreen filter, in-private browsing, anti-phishing and a lot of other stuff.  IE9 builds on top of these with the best in town security standards as well as support for HTML5, CSS3, Hardware acceleration, SVG and many other advancements in browser.  Read more at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/highlights/html5  To summarize, IE9 Beta is really innovative and you should try it to believe what it provides.  You can visit http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/  to install as well as read more on this. Cheers !!!

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• Oracle Cloud Hiring Event at Oracle in Redwood on November 9th

  - by user769227

  Wow, 24 hours to go until Cloud Hire 2012 at Oracle! Friday is going to be a great day for many looking to make a life and career changing move. In case you haven’t heard, Oracle is hosting Cloud Hire 2012 this Friday, November 9, at the Oracle Conference Center on our World Wide Headquarters campus in Redwood Shores. This is a one-of-a-kind event to be sure and we are still registering online! We are aggressively expanding our Cloud Development and Product Management organizations to meet to ever-growing demand for Oracle Cloud. And, from this event alone, we are hoping to hire 25+ Developers, Inbound and Outbound Product Managers, Technical Leaders and QA Engineers across several Oracle Cloud groups, including: · Data and Insight Services: Big Data as a Service/Business Directory · Cloud Infrastructure · Application Marketplace · Cloud Portal · Product Management and Marketing: Outbound/Inbound · Testing/Quality Assurance · Cloud Social Platform: Analytics, Media, Big Data, Text Analytics, High Performance Search, · Cloud Social Platform - Social Relationship Management: Mobile Development/Social Network Integrations Why attend this event? Just Google Larry Ellison’s 2012 OpenWorld keynote address and you will learn why! Oracle Cloud is growing every day and we are scaling, adding new products and revolutionizing and improving all areas of the Oracle Cloud. There is no company that can come close to the comprehensive product lineup, services, capabilities and global reach and delivery of Oracle’s Cloud. This why it is a great time to work for Oracle: where consistent, stable financial growth rules and high impact technological advances are occurring every day. If you are serious about managing an upward, expansive path in your career, while staying on the leading edge and making big career impacts, you should join Oracle. Whether you want to design and develop or manage Social, Infrastructure or Applications in the Cloud, you can do it all at Oracle. Whether you’re a Technical Leader, Developer, Architect or Product Manager/Strategist, we are hiring now! Come check us out on Friday, November 9 in-person and see why Oracle Cloud is the place to take your career! RSVP here: and Learn more about the hiring teams in attendance here. Here are just some of the big things happening on Friday, November 9: · 830-3pm: Registration/Refreshments, Oracle Conference Center, 350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA (free parking) · 9am – 3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos include: Social Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Monitoring, Insight / View, KPI Bundles, Business Directory, Virtualization, Messaging, Provisioning, Cloud Portal · 10:30am – Speaker: Gopalan Arun, Vice President, Oracle Cloud Development Bio: Arun has been with Oracle for 18 years+. He is a testament to the stability and career growth that you can achieve working for Oracle. Arun began as a Developer and ascended through several product organizations into key leadership roles. Over his 18 years at Oracle, he has built and shipped many Database and Middleware products. Arun is one of the founding members of the Oracle Cloud and currently leads the development of many of the core infrastructure and developer-facing services of the Oracle Cloud. Topic: Oracle Cloud for the Developer · 1pm – Speaker: Naresh Revanuru, Lead Architect, Oracle Cloud Bio: Naresh is currently leading Java, Storage and Compute services for Oracle Cloud. Naresh also helps drive decisions for broad based Cloud topics that affect multiple services. http://www.linkedin.com/in/nareshrevanuru Topic: Oracle Cloud Architectural Overview and Challenges to Solve · 1pm-3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos

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• Top 10 Linked Blogs of 2010

  - by Bill Graziano

  Each week I send out a SQL Server newsletter and include links to interesting blog posts.  I’ve linked to over 500 blog posts so far in 2010.  Late last year I started storing those links in a database so I could do a little reporting.  I tend to link to posts related to the OLTP engine.  I also try to link to the individual blogger in the group blogs.  Unfortunately that wasn’t possible for the SQLCAT and CSS blogs.  I also have a real weakness for posts related to PASS. These are the top 10 blogs that I linked to during the year ordered by the number of posts I linked to. Paul Randal – Paul writes extensively on the internals of the relational engine.  Lots of great posts around transactions, transaction log, disaster recovery, corruption, indexes and DBCC.  I also linked to many of his SQL Server myths posts. Glenn Berry – Glenn writes very interesting posts on how hardware affects SQL Server.  I especially like his posts on the various CPU platforms.  These aren’t necessarily topics that I’m searching for but I really enjoy reading them. The SQLCAT Team – This Microsoft team focuses on the largest and most interesting SQL Server installations.  The regularly publish white papers and best practices. SQL Server CSS Team – These are the top engineers from the Microsoft Customer Service and Support group.  These are the folks you finally talk to after your case has been escalated about 20 times.  They write about the interesting problems they find. Brent Ozar – The posts I linked to mostly focused on the relational engine: CPU, NUMA, SSD drives, performance monitoring, etc.  But Brent writes about a real variety of topics including blogging, social networking, speaking, the MCM, SQL Azure and anything else that seems to strike his fancy.  His posts are always well written and though provoking. Jeremiah Peschka – A number of Jeremiah’s posts weren’t about SQL Server.  He’s very active in the “NoSQL” area and I linked to a number of those posts.  I think it’s important for people to know what other technologies are out there. Brad McGehee – Brad writes about being a DBA including maintenance plans, DBA checklists, compression and audit. Thomas LaRock – I linked to a variety of posts from PBM to networking to 24 Hours of PASS to TDE.  Just a real variety of topics.  Tom always writes with an interesting style usually mixing in a movie theme and/or bacon. Aaron Bertrand – Many of my links this year were Denali features.  He also had a great series on bad habits to kick. Michael J. Swart – This last one surprised me.  There are some well known SQL Server bloggers below Michael on this list.  I linked to posts on indexes, hierarchies, transactions and I/O performance and a variety of other engine related posts.  All are interesting and well thought out.  Many of his non-SQL posts are also very good.  He seems to have an interest in puzzles and other brain teasers.  Michael, I won’t be surprised again!

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• Industry perspectives on managing content

  - by aahluwalia

  Earlier this week I was noodling over a topic for my first blog post. My intention for this blog is to bring a practitioner's perspective on ECM to the community; to share and collaborate on best practices and approaches that address today's business problems. Reviewing my past 14 years of experience with web technologies, I wondered what topic would serve as a good "conversation starter". During this time, I received a call from a friend who was seeking insights on how content management applies to specific industries. She approached me because she vaguely remembered that I had worked in the Health Insurance industry in the recent past. She wanted me to tell her about the specific business needs of this industry. She was in for quite a surprise as she found out that I had spent the better part of a decade managing content within the Health Insurance industry and I discovered a great topic for my first blog post! I offer some insights from Health Insurance and invite my fellow practitioners to share their insights from other industries. What does content management mean to these industries? What can solution providers be aware of when offering solutions to these industries? The United States health care system relies heavily on private health insurance, which is the primary source of coverage for approximately 58% Americans. In the late 19th century, "accident insurance" began to be available, which operated much like modern disability insurance. In the late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs. The first thing a solution provider must be aware of about the Health Insurance industry is that it tends to be transaction intensive. They are the ones who manage and administer our health plans and process our claims when we visit our health care providers. It helps to keep in mind that they are in the business of delivering health insurance and not technology. You may find the mindset conservative in comparison to the IT industry, however, the Health Insurance industry has benefited and will continue to benefit from the efficiency that technology brings to traditionally paper-driven processes. We are all aware of the impact that Healthcare reform bill has had a significant impact on the Health Insurance industry. They are under a great deal of pressure to explore ways to reduce their administrative costs and increase operational efficiency. Overall, administrative costs of health insurance include the insurer's cost to administer the health plan, the costs borne by employers, health-care providers, governments and individual consumers. Inefficiencies plague health insurance, owing largely to the absence of standardized processes across the industry. To achieve this, industry leaders have come together to establish standards and invest in initiatives to help their healthcare provider partners transition to the next generation of healthcare technology. The move to online services and paperless explanation of benefits are some manifestations of technological advancements in health insurance. Several companies have adopted Toyota's LEAN methodology or Six Sigma principles to improve quality, reduce waste and excessive costs, thereby increasing the value of their plan offerings. A growing number of health insurance companies have transformed their business systems in the past decade alone and adopted some form of content management to reduce the costs involved in administering health plans. The key strategy has been to convert paper documents and forms into electronic formats, automate the content development process and securely distribute content to various audiences via diverse marketing channels, including web and mobile. Enterprise content management solutions can enable document capture of claim forms, manage digital assets, integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, build Business Process Management (BPM) processes, define retention and disposition instructions to comply with state and federal regulations and allow eBusiness and Marketing departments to develop and deliver web content to multiple websites, mobile devices and portals. Content can be shared securely within and outside the organization using Information Rights Management.  At the end of the day, solution providers who can translate strategic goals into solutions that maximize process automation, increase ease of use and minimize IT overhead are likely to be successful in today's health insurance environment.

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• PENGUIN IS GETTING READY FOR ORACLE OPENWORLD 2012

  - by Zeynep Koch

  Are you looking for reasons to attend Oracle Openworld, how about below Oracle Linux sessions and hands-on-labs.  1. General Session: Oracle Linux Strategy and Roadmap  In this session, Oracle executives will discuss Linux strategy; the roadmap; contributions to the Linux mainline kernel; and what's in store for upcoming releases of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Don’t miss this session. 2. New Features in Oracle Linux- A Technical Deep Dive Collaborating with the Linux community, Oracle engineers contribute to advancing Linux for mission-critical deployments. In this technical session, attendees will learn about the recent developments in Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 3. Why Switch to Oracle Linux?  Oracle is the only company that provides a complete Linux solution from applications to disk, fully optimized for Oracle hardware and software, with one-stop support. In this session you will hear from two customers that have successfully implemented Oracle Linux and saved 50 to 90 percent on Linux support costs as well as the reasons to switch to Oracle Linux. 4. Debugging and Configuration Best Practices for Oracle Linux This is one of our best attended sessions and most informative. In this best practices session, learn how to save time and money while preventing headaches and hassles. Discover expert secrets to get your Linux systems up and running (and keep them running), avoid common pitfalls, prevent problems, and circumvent known issues. 5. Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments In this session, attendees will learn about how to easily deploy and install Oracle Linux systems using various technologies like Kickstart, Oracle Enterprise Manager OpsCenter, and Oracle VM Templates for applications on Linux. Additionally, the session will share useful Linux security tips and introduce utilities to help with hardening and securely operating an Oracle Linux system. We also have a great session in Oracle Develop track: 6. DTrace for Oracle Linux Initially announced at last year's Oracle Openworld, DTrace for Oracle Linux is now available for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R.2. In this session held by one of the engineers working on the DTrace for Linux port, you will learn how you can use this powerful and flexible framework in your development environment. If you prefer to really have practical experience, don’t miss our two Hands-on-Labs where we will cover: HOL-1 : Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services In this session you will be Installing and configuring Oracle VM VirtualBox, importing the Oracle Linux virtual appliance. You will then use the package management on Oracle Linux using RPM and yum. You will also be able to review Ksplice, zero downtime kernel updates that enable you to apply security updates, patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting. HOL-2: Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device Mapper In this session you will learn about storage management with LVM2, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, Btrfs, preparing block devices, creating physical and logical volumes, creating file systems on top of logical volumes, and resizing file systems dynamically. You will also practice setting up software RAID devices, configuring encrypted block devices. You will also see Oracle Linux and Kpslice in the three demopods we will feature at Exhibition demogrounds. One in MySQL Connect and two in Oracle Openworld. What more do you need to come to San Francisco? Oh, I forgot to mention we also have great weather in fall.. Check out the Content Catalog and register to attend Oracle Linux sessions.

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• Five geeky things you must do with your Android Smartphone

  - by Gopinath

  Android is the Windows of next generation. Its open, free, widely adopted and smart enough to outsmart Apple’s iOS. It’s a stolen product and cheap imitation of iOS, but Steve Job’s once quoted saying good artists copy and great artists steal. Alright, this post is not about Android vs iOS or is it really stolen or not. Android is a great OS for mobile devices and it lets you do amazing through mobiles.  In this post I want to write about the geeky things we can do with an Android Smartphone. Control your computer using mobile Assume that it is a lazy weekend and you are on a couch watching movies on a laptop which is a meter away. Now you want to adjust volume or skip a scene/song. How to control your laptop without moving out of couch? Just install Universal Remote free app on your smartphone and start control your computer using phone. Universal Remove app controls computers over Wifi or Bluetooth networks with dedicated remote controls for various media players and applications like YouTube, VLC & Spotify.  The application is very easy to use and works amazingly well in controlling computers. Few of the remote controls provided in the app are – Mouse, Keyboard, Media Controls, Power, Start, Windows Media Player, VLC Player,  YouTube. There is also paid version of this app with additional remotes, but for most of the users Free version is good enough. Stream YouTube videos playing on you mobile to computer You can stream YouTube videos playing on your mobile to computer/smart tv. This is something similar to Apple’s most popular AirPlay feature, but works only with YouTube videos. To start streaming videos install Google’s YouTube Remote on your smartphone, open youtube.com/leanback on your computer  and pair up mobile with computer. Once the pairing is done, videos played on YouTube Remote app will be streamed on to your computer. Access your mobile using any web browser – send/receive SMS, view photos/call logs, etc. Want to control your mobile phone using a computer? Install AirDroid app on your phone and start controlling your phone using computer browser – send and receive messages, view call logs, play music, upload/download files, edit contacts and many more. At times it’s lot of fun to access mobile using a big screen devices like laptops. Launch a webpage on your mobile browser using your computer With Google Chrome to Phone installed on your computer and mobile, you can send links and other information from Chrome browser to your Android device. With a click on Chrome browser, the current webpage of Chrome browser will be automatically launched on Android device. This is very handy when you want to send links, send driving direction to mobile using Google Maps and launch phone dialer with number selected on webpage. Install Apps on mobile using computer To install apps on your smartphone you really don’t need to touch it. Open any web browser, sing in to Google Play with your Google id that is associated with smartphone and start installing apps on to your phone right from the browser. As you browse apps on Google Play store, you find Install button and all you need to do is to just click Install. Google will automatically installs app on your mobile within few seconds.

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• Oracle celebrates a successful Oracle CloudWorld in Bogotá

  - by yaldahhakim

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 written by: Diana Tamayo Tovar Oracle CloudWorld Bogotá began with scattered showers, rain and strong winds, inviting Colombians to spend a whole day in the social, mobile and complete world of Oracle Cloud. The event took place on November 6th with 807 attendees, 15 media representatives and 65 partners, who gathered to share the business value of Cloud along with Oracle executives and Colombian market leaders. Line-of-business leaders in sales and marketing, customer service and support, HR and talent management, and finance and operations, shared their ideas with Colombian customers, giving them a chance to learn, discover and engage with the tools, trends and concepts of Cloud. The highlights of the event included the presence of keynote speakers such as Bob Evans, Chief Communications Officer, and a customer testimonial session with top business leaders from insurance, finances, retail, communications and health Colombian industries, who shared their innovation experiences and success stories on workforce empowerment, talent management, cloud security, social engagement and productivity, providing best case scenarios on how Oracle has helped them transform their business with technologies like cloud, social collaboration and mobile applications. The keynote session was preceded by a customer success story from one of the largest virtual network operator in the country, providing an interesting case study of mobile banking innovation and a great customer testimonial of the importance of cross industry strategies and cloud technology. The event provided five different tracks on the main trends of how companies communicate and engage with different audiences, providing a different perspective on the importance of empowering brands through their customers, trusting and investing in technology for growth, while Oracle University shared their knowledge with “Oracle Cloud Fundamentals” a training lesson regarding Java Cloud, Database Cloud and other Oracle Cloud product technologies and solutions. The rainy day scenario included sideshows of aerial acrobatics and speed painting performances to recreate the environment of modern and flexible Cloud Solutions in a colorful and creative way. Oracle CloudWorld Bogotá was a great opportunity to expose invalid cloud Myths and the main concerns of the Colombian customers towards cloud, considering IDC Latin America studies stating that 93% of Colombian business leaders are interested in cloud but only 47% understand its business value. Spending a day in the cloud with 6 demogrounds stations, conference sessions, interesting case studies and customer testimonials will surely widen the endless market opportunities for Colombian customers, leaving them amazed with how Oracle Cloud works towards integration with other environments, non oracle applications, social media and mobile devices with bulletproof security infrastructure. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2012: The Best Just Gets Better

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  For almost 30 years, Oracle OpenWorld has been the world's premier learning event for Oracle customers, developers, and partners. With more than 2,000 sessions providing best practices; demos; tips and tricks; and product insight from Oracle, customers, partners, and industry experts, Oracle OpenWorld provides more educational and networking opportunities than any other event in the world. 2011 Facts Attendees from 117 Countries Used Filtered Tap Water to Eliminate 22 Tons of Plastic Bottles Diverted Enough Trash to Fill 37 Dump Trucks 45,000+ Total Registered Attendees Oracle OpenWorld 2012: The Best Just Gets Better What's New? What's Different?  This year Oracle OpenWorld will include the Executive Edge @ OpenWorld (replacing Leaders Circle), the Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, JavaOne, MySQL Connect, and the expanded Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld. More than 50,000 customers and partners will attend OpenWorld to see Oracle's newest hardware and software products at work, and learn more about our server and storage, database, middleware, industry, and applications solutions.  New This Year: The Executive Edge @ Oracle OpenWorld (Oct 1 - 2) New at Oracle OpenWorld this year, the Executive Edge @ OpenWorld (replacing Leaders Circle) will bring together customer, partner and Oracle executives for two days of keynote presentations, summits targeted to customer industries and organizational roles, roundtable discussions, and great new networking opportunities. The Customer Experience Revolution Is Here!Customer Experience Summit @ Oracle OpenWorld (Oct 3 - 5) This dynamic new program offers more than 60 keynotes, roundtables and networking sessions exploring trends, innovations and best practices to help companies succeed with a customer experience-driven business strategy.  All Things Java -- JavaOne (Sep 30 - Oct 4) JavaOne is the world's most important event for the Java developer community. Technical sessions cover topics that span the breadth of the Java universe, with keynotes from the foremost Java visionaries and expert-led hands-on learning opportunities.  Are you innovating with Oracle Fusion Middleware?  If you are, then you need to know that the Call for Nominations for the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards is open now through July 17, 2012. Jointly sponsored by Oracle, AUSOUG, IOUG, OAUG, ODTUG, QUEST, and UKOUG, the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards honor organizations creatively using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique value to their enterprise.  Winning customers and partners will be hosted at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, where they can connect with Oracle executives, network with peers, and be featured in an upcoming edition of Oracle Magazine. Be sure to submit your WebCenter use case today! Oracle Music Festival his year, the first-ever Oracle Music Festival will debut, running from September 30 to October 4. In the tradition of great live music events like Coachella and SXSW, the streets of San Francisco—from 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. for five nights-into-days—will vibrate with the music of some of today’s hottest name acts, emerging and local bands, and scratching DJs. Outdoor venues and clubs near Moscone Center and the Zone (including 111 Minna, DNA, Mezzanine, Roe, Ruby Skye, Slim’s, the Taylor Street Café, Temple, Union Square, and Yerba Buena Gardens) will showcase acts that range from reggae to rock, punk to ska, R&B to country, indie to honky-tonk. After a full day of sessions and networking, you'll be primed for some late-night relaxation and rocking out at one or more of these sets.  Please note that with awesome acts, thousands of music devotees, and a limited number of venues each night, access to Festival events is on a first-come, first-served basis. Join us at the Oracle Music Festival--it's going to be epic! Save $500 on Registration with Early Bird Pricing Early Bird pricing ends July 13! Save up to $500 on registration fees by registering by Friday. Will you be attending Oracle OpenWorld 2012? We hope to see you there! Be sure to follow @oraclewebcenter on Twitter for more information and use hashtags #webcenter and #oow!

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• What's New in Oracle's EPM System?

  - by jmorourke

  Oracle’s EPM System R11.1.2.2  is now generally available to customers and partners on the download center.  Although the release number doesn’t sound significant, this is a major release of Oracle’s Hyperion EPM Suite with new modules as well as significant enhancements across the suite.  This release was announced back on April 4th as part of Oracle’s Business Analytics Strategy launch, so analytics is a key aspect of the release.  But the three biggest pieces of news in this release are Oracle Hyperion Planning support for the Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the new Project Financial Planning Application and the new Account Reconciliations Manager module. The Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine was announced back in October 2011, at Oracle OpenWorld.  It’s the latest installment from Oracle in a line of engineered systems that combine Oracle Sun hardware, with Oracle database and application technologies – in solutions that are designed to provide high scalability and performance for specific tasks.  Exalytics is the first engineered system specifically designed for high performance analytics.  Running in-memory versions of Oracle Essbase, as well as the Oracle TimesTen database and Oracle BI tools, Exalytics provides speed of thought response times for complex analytic processes with advanced visualizations.  Early adopter customers have achieved 5X to 100X faster interactivity and 6X to 10X faster planning cycles.  Hyperion Planning running with Oracle Exalytics will support enterprise-wide planning, budgeting and forecasting with more detailed data, with hundreds to thousands of users across an organization getting speed of thought performance. The new Hyperion Project Financial Planning application delivered with EPM 11.1.2.2 is also great news for Oracle customers.  This application follows on the heels of other special-purpose planning applications that Oracle has delivered for Workforce and Capital Asset planning.  It allows Project Managers to identify project-related expenses and revenues, plan and propose new projects, and track results over time. Finance Managers can evaluate and compare different projects, manage the funding process, monitor and report the actual financial results and impacts of projects and project portfolios. This new application is applicable to capital projects, contract projects and indirect projects like IT and HR projects across all industries.  This application is a great complement to existing Project Management applications, and helps bridge the gap between these applications, and the financial planning and budgeting process. Account reconciliations has to be one of the biggest bottlenecks and risks in the financial close and reporting process, and many organizations rely on spreadsheets and manual processes to perform this critical process.  To help address this problem, Oracle developed an Account Reconciliation Manager module that is being delivered as part of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management.   This module helps automate and streamline account reconciliations and eliminates the chances for errors, omissions and fraud.  But unlike standalone account reconciliation packages, it’s integrated with the rest of the Oracle Hyperion Financial Close suite, and can integrate balances from any source system.  This can help alleviate a major bottleneck in the financial close process, increase accuracy and reduce risk, and can complement existing investments in Hyperion Financial Management, as well as Oracle and non-Oracle transaction processing systems. Other enhancements in this release include an enhanced Web 2.0 interface for Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), configurable dimensionality in HFM, new Predictive Planning feature in Hyperion Planning, new Detailed Profitability feature in Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, new Smart View interface for Hyperion Strategic Finance, and integration of the Hyperion applications with JD Edwards Financials. For more information about Oracle EPM System R11.1.2.2 check out the links below: Press Release:  http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1575775 Product Information on O.com:  http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/business-analytics/overview/index.html Product Information on OTN:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/epm/downloads/index.html Webcast Replay:  http://www.oracle.com/us/go/index.html?Src=7317510&Act=65&pcode=WWMK11054701MPP046 Please contact me if you have any questions or need additional information – [email protected]

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• SQL – Business Intelligence: Derive Data or Information?

  - by Pinal Dave

  We all know the value of information in our lives. Whether it’s a personal decision or a business initiated one, people need it. But the question is: who is to make the distinction between data and information? We all come across a whole lot of data daily, that may be significant or not. We filter what’s required and forget about the rest. Information is filtered and distilled data. Filtering and distillation can also alter its actual meaning and natural state. Therefore, in this blog we discover some ways to ensure that we’re using business intelligence derived from the right information for making critical management decisions. Four key questions managers must ask themselves before making a decision: 1. Am I working with data or information? 2. What is it’s context? 3. How recent is it? 4. How was it derived or what is the source? The first question is probably the most important. You must know what you’re dealing with here. If you see use of adjectives and conclusions drawn, it’s information. Not raw data. You very next concern must be whether this is guised to present a particular viewpoint or perspective. It makes a lot of difference if you take a decision based on someone’s propaganda to distort real facts. Therefore, the context and the intentions of the distillation process must be clear to you. The next consideration is whether data is recent enough to hold any value. Since it has a very short shelf life, you must ensure that its context and value is not lost out of time. The last and the most important consideration is how was it derived in the first place. The observer effect is what calls the shots here. The source can change the context to a great extent if the collection methodology  and purpose is not clear. Gathering intelligence for decision making requires users to be keen observers and not take the information provided on its face value alone. These probing questions will allow you to make sure that you’re working with clean and accurate data devoid of any influence or manipulations. Only then can you be sure of deriving true business intelligence for your organization. BI technology is also a great way to ensure accuracy of reports. SQL BI Platform  provides advanced tools and techniques for all your BI needs and concerns. Koenig Solutions offers this course along with a host of other Business Intelligence and IT courses on all latest technologies available in the market today. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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