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• how to calculate the beginning of a day given milliseconds?

  - by conman

  i want to figure out the time from the beginning of the day given a days milliseconds. so say i'm given this: 1340323100024 which is like mid day of 6/21/2012. now i want the milliseconds from the beginning of the day, which would be 1340262000000 (at least i think that's what it's supposed to be.) how do i get 1340262000000 from 1340323100024? i tried doing Math.floor(1340323100024/86400000) * 86400000 but that gives me 1340236800000, which if i create a date object out of it, says its the 20th. i know i can create a date object from 1340323100024, then get the month, year, and date, to create a new object which would give me 1340262000000, but i find it ridiculous i can't figure out something so simple. any help would be appreciated. btw, i'm doing this in javascript if it makes any difference.

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• ActiveX Deployment

  - by balexandre

  We have used for 8 years an ActiveX builder in Delphi and we are now using it on Internet Explorer over the internet (and not on local machine as it was always been the process until here) As today we use this object in the HTML: <object id="ActiveX" classid="CLSID:8EC68701-329D-4567-BCB5-9EE4BA43D358" width="14" height="14"> <param name="tabName" value="AccountPlan"> </object> My question is, what are the viable methods to deploy an Active X Control over HTTP/S, what parameters should I need to append to tell where to find it (http url) and download a new one if newer is available? I got into this article from MSDN Library but refers to VB5.0 and it's dated 1997 ... Just wanna know what can I do now, as probably the tools evolved since last century All help is appreciated, Thank you.

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• Effectively implementing a game view using java

  - by kdavis8

  I am writing a 2d game in java. The game mechanics are similar to the Pokémon game boy advance series e.g. fire red, ruby, diamond and so on. I need a way to draw a huge map maybe 5000 by 5000 pixels and then load individual in game sprites to across the entirety of the map, like rendering a scene. Game sprites would be things like terrain objects, trees, rocks, bushes, also houses, castles, NPC's and so on. But i also need to implement some kind of camera view class that focuses on the player. the camera view class needs to follow the characters movements throughout the game map but it also needs to clip the rest of the map away from the user's field of view, so that the user can only see the arbitrary proximity adjacent to the player's sprite. The proximity's range could be something like 500 pixels in every direction around the player’s sprite. On top of this, i need to implement an independent resolution for the game world so that the game view will be uniform on all screen sizes and screen resolutions. I know that this does sound like a handful and may fall under the category of multiple questions, but the questions are all related and any advice would be very much appreciated. I don’t need a full source code listing but maybe some pointers to effective java API classes that could make doing what i need to do a lot simpler. Also any algorithmic/ design advice would greatly benefit me as well. example of what i am trying to do in source code form below package myPackage; /** * The Purpose of GameView is to: Render a scene using Scene class, Create a * clipping pane using CameraView class, and finally instantiate a coordinate * grid using Path class. * * Once all of these things have been done, GameView class should then be * instantiated and used jointly with its helper classes. CameraView should be * used as the main drawing image. CameraView is the the window to the game * world.Scene passes data constantly to CameraView so that the entire map flows * smoothly. Path uses the x and y coordinates from camera view to construct * cells for path finding algorithms. */ public class GameView { // Scene is a helper class to game view. it renders the entire map to memory // for the camera view. Scene scene; // Camera View is a helper class to game view. It clips the Scene into a // small image that follows the players coordinates. CameraView Camera; // Path is a helper class to game view. It observes and calculates the // coordinates of camera view and divides them into Grids/Cells for Path // finding. Path path; // this represents the player and has a getSprite() method that will return // the current frame column row combination of the passed sprite sheet. Sprite player; }

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• Learn Cloud Computing – It’s Time

  - by Ben Griswold

  Last week, I gave an in-house presentation on cloud computing.  I walked through an overview of cloud computing – characteristics (on demand, elastic, fully managed by provider), why are we interested (virtualization, distributed computing, increased access to high-speed internet, weak economy), various types (public, private, virtual private cloud) and services models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.)  Though numerous providers have emerged in the cloud computing space, the presentation focused on Amazon, Google and Microsoft offerings and provided an overview of their platforms, costs, data tier technologies, management and security.  One of the biggest talking points was why developers should consider the cloud as part of their deployment strategy: You only have to pay for what you consume You will be well-positioned for one time event provisioning You will reap the benefits of automated growth and scalable technologies For the record: having deployed dozens of applications on various platforms over the years, pricing tends to be the biggest customer concern.  Yes, scalability is a customer consideration, too, but it comes in distant second.  Boy do I hope you’re still reading… You may be thinking, “Cloud computing is well and good and it sounds catchy, but should I bother?  After all, it’s just another technology bundle which I’m supposed to ramp up on because it’s the latest thing, right?”  Well, my clients used to be 100% reliant upon me to find adequate hosting for them.  Now I find they are often aware of cloud services and some come to me with the “possibility” that deploying to the cloud is the best solution for them.  It’s like the patient who walks into the doctor’s office with their diagnosis and treatment already in mind thanks to the handful of Internet searches they performed earlier that day.  You know what?  The customer may be correct about the cloud. It may be a perfect fit for their app.  But maybe not…  I don’t think there’s a need to learn about every technical thing under the sun, but if you are responsible for identifying hosting solutions for your customers, it is time to get up to speed on cloud computing and the various offerings (if you haven’t already.)  Here are a few references to get you going: DZone Refcardz #82 Getting Started with Cloud Computing by Daniel Rubio Wikipedia Cloud Computing – What is it? Amazon Machine Images (AMI) Google App Engine SDK Azure SDK EC2 Spot Pricing Google App Engine Team Blog Amazon EC2 Team Blog Microsoft Azure Team Blog Amazon EC2 – Cost Calculator Google App Engine – Cost and Billing Resources Microsoft Azure – Cost Calculator Larry Ellison has stated that cloud computing has been defined as "everything that we currently do" and that it will have no effect except to "change the wording on some of our ads" Oracle launches worldwide cloud-computing tour NoSQL Movement  

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• SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium a super success!

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium in London was a huge success. More than 600 international attendees participated in it. Our SOA & BPM Community had a great presence there. At joint booth with the Specialized partners link consulting, eProseed and Griffiths Waite, we presented the latest product updates and had many interesting discussions with customers and speakers. Special thanks to our HQ product management team Demed, Tim, Manas for coming over right before OOW. Also a very big Thank to Matthias Ziegler from Accenture for presenting our joint presentation individually! If you missed the conference here are the key presentations links for your reference: Big Data and its impact on SOA Demed L'Her [View PDF] Building 21st Century Service-Oriented Airports Shyam Kumar [View PDF] Building Cloudy Services Anne Thomas Manes [View PDF] Community Management: The Next Wave of SOA Governance and API Management Tim E. Hall [View PDF] Elastic SOA in the Cloud Steve Millidge [View PDF] Governing Shared Services: On-Premise & In the Cloud Thomas Erl [View Video] Introducing the Cloud Computing Design Patterns Catalogue Thomas Erl and Amin Naserpour [CloudPatterns.org] Lost in Translation - Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns Mark Simpson [View PDF] Moving Applications to the Cloud: Migration Options Anne Thomas Manes [View PDF] New Paradigms for Application Architecture: From Applications to IT Services Anne Thomas Manes [View PDF] NoSQL for Data Services, Data Virtualization & Big Data Guido Schmutz [View PDF] A Pragmatic Approach to Cloud Computing Andrea Morena [View PDF] The Successful Execution of the SOA and BPM Vision Using a Business Capability Framework: Concepts and Examples Clemens Utschig and Manas Deb [View PDF] Service Modeling & BPM Business Value Patterns Matthias Ziegler [View PDF] [Podcast] SOA Adoption in the Brazilian Ministry of Health - Case Study Ricardo Puttini and Andre Toffanello [PDF Coming Soon] SOA Environments are a Big Data Problem Markus Zirn, Splunk and Maciej Barcz [View PDF] SOA Governance at EDP: A Global Energy Company Manuel Rosa [View PDF] For all presentations please visit the SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium Website SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Symposium,Thomas Erl,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Silverlight Death Trolls Dancing on XAML&rsquo;s Grave

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’m starting to see a whole bunch of tweets and blog posts on how Silverlight/WPF is dead, or how the XAML team has been disbanded at Microsoft, or how someone predicted Silverlight would die, blah blah blah. They all have a similar ring to it though: “Told ya so!” “They were stupid ideas anyway!” “Serves Microsoft right, boy are they dumb!” Let me tell you something, all those that are gleefully raving about Silverlight/WPF’s demise are nothing more than death trolls. Let’s assume that everything out there is true. Microsoft is obviously moving towards HTML 5 in a huge way (TechCrunch pointed out that SkyDrive has replaced its Silverlight based version with an HTML 5 one), and not just on the web as we’ve seen with recent announcements about how HTML 5 apps will be natively supported on Windows 8. WPF never caught on in the marketplace, regardless of its superior technology offering to Winforms. And Silverlight…well, it gave Flash a good run for its money, but plug-in based web applications are becoming passé in light of HTML 5. (It’s interesting that at a developer conference I put on just a few weeks ago, only 1 out of 60+ sessions included Silverlight. 5 focussed on HTML 5.) So what does this *death* of Silverlight/WPF/XAML mean then in the grand scheme of things (again, assuming that they truly *are* dying/dead)? Well, nothing really…at least nothing bad. Silverlight has given us some fantastic applications and experiences (Vancouver Olympics anyone?), and WP7 couldn’t have launched without Silverlight as its development platform. And WPF, although it had putrid adoption, has had some great success stories. A Canadian company that I talked to recently showed me how they re-wrote their point-of-sale application entirely in WPF, and the product is a huge success providing features their competitors aren’t. Arguably (and I say that only because I know I’m going to get WTF comments for this), VS.NET 2010 is a great example of what a WPF app can provide over previous C++ based applications. Technologies evolve. In a decade we’ve had 5 versions of the .NET framework, seen languages like J# come and go, seen F# appear, see communications layers change with WCF, seen EF go through multiple evolutions and traditional ADO.NET Datasets go extinct (from actual use anyway), and ASP.NET Webforms be replaced with ASP.NET MVC as a preferred web platform. Is Silverlight and WPF done? Maybe…probably?…thing is, it doesn’t really affect me personally in any way, or you…so why would we care if its gets replaced with something better and more robust that we can build better solutions with? Just remember the golden rule: don’t feed the trolls.

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• Indian government department have more unsecure website then others.

  - by Anirudha

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/10/26/indian-government-department-have-more-unsecure-website-then-others.aspxOne of my friend share his college experience with me. He is not related with computer science. One day he told me that Ankia Fadia come to their college. In front of many student he show how to hack BSNL website by tricks. he break the flow how BSNL site work. I have told them BSNL is one of the most unsecure website of India   If you logged-in to website maybe it’s run in few seconds but sometime it run in 58 minute. OK this is not grammar mistake 58 minute is less then 1 hour. This means open a tab and put the link to open. it will open in hours. If you are using IE8, Chrome and Firefox you will be forced to use IE7 or downgrade. I simply use Ie7 mode in IE for make it work. This happen because they use something that is called DynaTrace. This site is most unsecure. now guess how !   Suppose my username is xyz and password is abc. How I can reset the password I simply go to website and in their site when I do reset my password he told me to fill password and password will not worked here.you can use here password here to reset my password. Remember that username are different then broadband username and password. Suppose if I want to reset your password I simply need to know your broadband username and I can reset it myself. I just logged in with my username and when I open the page for reset password I can fill your bb username and password will work here. I have not tried this. the broadband username can easily guess. this is depend on same way how people’s broandband username made. IS this Safe ? Nope, There are many thing on the site which make me feel that is 1900 century website. They still lived in popup life.  These site are nothing but a crap. not work most of time and when work it’s run too slowly.

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• Silverlight Cream for June 03, 2010 -- #875

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Ben Hodson, Fons Sonnemans, SilverLaw, Mike Snow, John Papa, René Schulte, Walt Ritscher, and David Anson. Shoutouts: René Schulte announced a whole batch of new features for WriteableBitmap that are now available: Filled To The Bursting Point - WriteableBitmapEx 0.9.5.0 Check out John Papa's Sticky Seesmic Desktop Plugin ... download it, play with it... he's going to blog about building plugins later Tim Heuer reported a Silverlight 4 minor update–June 2010 Erik Mork and Crew have a new Podcast up: This Week in Silverlight: Redmond Exodus? From SilverlightCream.com: Tutorial for Configuring Silverlight 4, Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services in Separate Component Assemblies (DLL’s) Ben Hodson is a new author(to me) that submitted his post at SilverlightCream.com... this is a good-looking tutorial on configuring separate component assemblies for all your project pieces. SpiralText in Silverlight 4 Fons Sonnemans had a good time playing with the PathListBox in Blend and produced a demo of text on a Spiral... you can run it right on the post, then grab the code. How To: Starting A Storyboard Not Before The Application Has Completed Loading - Silverlight 4 SilverLaw takes a look at the problem of having a Storyboard start too early, and demonstrates code to avoid the problem. Silverlight Tip of the Day#27 – Displaying Special Characters in XAML Mike Snow's latest Tip of the day is on encoding 'special' characters for use in XAML... simple looking at it, frustrating to debug if you don't do it right. Diving into the RichTextBox (Silverlight TV #31) John Papa talks about the RichTextBox with Mark Rideout in this edition of Silverlight TV. Mark provides a great video tutorial for the control. Push and Pull - Silverlight Webcam Capturing Details Boy, René Schulte doesn't slow down does he?... his latest is (in his words from a section heading) "Silverlight Webcam 101" ... and he means it... this is one to save to OneNote or as a PDF! Looking for Silverlight BiDi or RTL? Use the FlowDirection property If you need RTL or BiDi in Silverlight and you haven't checked it out yet, Walt Ritscher has a nice intro up on using the FlowDirection property, with demos and code. How to: Show text labels on a numeric axis with Silverlight/WPF Toolkit Charting David Anson has another charting puzzle resolved on his site... putting text labels on the dependent axis. 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 Whole Enchilada — Fusion Supply Chain in the Cloud

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Tyra Crockett, Senior Manager at Oracle No other vendor can offer everything in the cloud the way Oracle can. You can get HR from Workday and CRM from Salesforce, but you can get the whole enchilada—HCM, CRM and ERP—all from Oracle on one platform. If you’re thinking about using Oracle's Cloud Services to implement the newest Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications, this post is for you. Point #1: The Oracle Cloud Applications Services portfolio includes ERP cloud services which are flexible and can adapt to fill your supply chain needs. For example, you might be opening a small distribution facility in California, but don’t have the time or IT resources to warrant a full scale supply chain implementation. You can use Oracle’s Cloud to implement the Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications you need without an increase in IT staff or hardware. Then as your business grows, you can add more features and applications to your cloud.   Point #2: Whether you’re implementing a slice of the Fusion Procurement pie, or the entire ERP portfolio, you want to be up and running fast with low upfront costs and investment risks. That’s where you can trust a world-class technology organization like Oracle. Your SaaS subscription-based deployment model will take away the headaches associated with determining your software costs. You also will be able to eliminate expensive customizations and configure your deployment as you like, saving you time and money during the initial stages and upon upgrade. Point #3: Another great benefit of operating your Oracle Fusion Supply Chain in the cloud is the opportunity to standardize your processes across your entire supply chain. You can institute processes in San Francisco and be confident they will be followed in Mexico City and Hong Kong. Point #4: If data security is a concern – and it is for most of us – Oracle-managed cloud services give you the comfort of knowing that your data will always be there when you need it. You will not have to manage the IT services associated with patching and upgrade. They will be taken care of automatically. This enables you to focus on what you do best: managing your business. Point #5: Cloud services aren’t an either/or proposition. You might have very good business reasons for choosing a hybrid model -- running some applications in the cloud and others on premise. That allows you to leverage your own IT department, when and where you need to, and shift focus when necessary. I urge you to take a hard look at the Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications running in the cloud. These solutions running alongside your existing legacy systems can solve your toughest business challenges as you move forward in the 21st century.

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• How To: Automatically Remove www from a Domain in IIS7

  I recently moved the DevMavens.com site from one server to another and needed to ensure that the www.devmavens.com domain correctly redirected to simply devmavens.com.  This is important for SEO reasons (you dont want multiple domains to refer to the same content) and its generally better to use the shorter URL (www is so 20th century) rather than wasting 4 characters for zero gain. My friend and IIS guru Scott Forsyth pointed me to his blog post on how to set up IIS URL Rewriting.  To get started, you simply install IIS Rewrite from this link using the super awesome Web Platform Installer.  You should get something like this when youre done with the install: If you already have IIS Manager open, you may need to close it and re-open it before you see the URL Rewrite module.  Once you do, you should see it listed for any given Site under the IIS section: Double click on the URL Rewrite icon, and then choose the Add Rule(s) action.  You can simply create a blank rule, and name it Redirect from www to domain.com.  Essentially were following the instructions from Scott Forsyths post, but in reverse since hes showing how to add 4 useless characters to the URL and Im interested in removing them. After adding the name, well set the Match Url sections Using dropdown to Wildcards and specify a pattern of simply * to match anything. In the Conditions section we need to add a new condition with an Input of {HTTP_HOST} such that it should match the pattern www.devmavens.com (replace this with your domain). Ignore the Server Variables section. Set the action to Redirect and the Redirect URL to http://devmavens.com/{R:0} (replace with your domain).  The {R:0} will be replaced with whatever the user had entered.  So if they were going to http://www.devmavens.com/default.aspx theyll now be going to http://devmavens.com/default.aspx. The complete Inbound Rule should look like this: Thats it!  Test it out and make sure you havent accidentally used my exact URLs and started sending all of your users to devmavens.com! :)  Be sure to read Scotts post for more information on how to use regular expressions for your rules, and how to set them up via web.config rather than IIS manager. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• The Jack LaLanne School of Sysadmins

  - by rickramsey

  Two of my childhood heroes were Tarzan and Jack LaLanne. Tarzan was an obvious choice: what boy wouldn't want to spend his days bungee jumping through the jungle with his own pack of gorillas? Jack Lalanne had a disturbing habit of wearing stretch pants, but he was so damn fit for an old guy that you couldn't help but be impressed. Especially back then, when nobody knew what a dumb bell was, much less Cross-Fit. Here's what he did to celebrate his 70th birthday. Sooner or later we all face a choice in our careers: surrender to the life of a has-been like Bruce Sprinsteen's baseball player or become an unstoppable sysadmin like Jack Lalanne. If you'd rather keep on fighting like Jack, give these resources a look. Brian Bream's blog provides specific suggestions for keeping your skills up to date. The video interviews describe the types of technologies that are challenging what you used to know. Blog: The Old School Sysadmin - A Dying Breed? by Brian Bream "The sysadmin role has been far too dependent on performing repetitive tasks and working in a reactionary mode ... the sysadmin must grow a much larger skill set to be successful. Don’t grow vertically in one technology, grow horizontally amongst many technologies." Just one of the suggestions Brian Bream provides in this excellent blog post. Video: Freeing the Sysadmin From Repetitive Tasks Interview with Marshall Choy Marshall Choy, Director of Optimized Solutions at Oracle was once a sysadmin. And a Solaris engineer. He explains what optimized solutions are, how they are developed and tested, how they handle patching, and how these vertically integrated systems impact the job and duties of a sysadmin. Video: The Oracle Database Appliance Interview with Bob Thome Bob Thome, Senior Director of Product Management, explains what makes the Database Appliance simple, reliable, and affordable, and how it could change the economies and processes of the data center. Video: Why Pinellas County Chose Oracle Exalytics Interview with Gautham Gautham (pronounced like Batman's Gotham) recently led an effort to refresh the Pinellas County hardware systems. He'll explain what they were looking for, why they chose Oracle Exalytics, how they became convinced it was the right decision, and how it changed the way they managed their data center. Video: DTrace for System Administrators Interview with Brendan Gregg This video interview will give you an idea of some of the value-add tasks you can perform when you are freed from the reactive mode that Brian Bream describes in his blog. Brendan Gregg describes the best ways for sysadmins to tune deployed applications to get more performance out of them in their particular computing environment photograph of Ford Mustang GT 500 taken at Gateway Museum copyright by Rick Ramsey -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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• Meet Peter, 80 years old today

  - by AdamRG

  You have to arrive at the office early in the morning to meet Peter. He arrives at 5am and by 8:30am he's gone. Peter has been a cleaner here for several years. He is 80 years old today. Peter was born only a couple of km from our office in Cambridge, England and was for many years an Engineer for Pye Electronics. I'm lucky enough to arrive in the office early enough to catch Peter, dressed smarter than most of us in shirt and tie, and he tells stories of how Cambridge was years ago. He says the site of our office is on land between what would have been a prisoner of war camp (camp 1025), and a few hundred metres North, a camp of American allies. In February 1944, Peter was 13 years old. One night, a Dornier Do 217 heavy bomber heading towards London was hit by anti-aircraft fire and the crew of four parachuted from the plane. The plane however, continued on autopilot for over 50km. Gradually dropping lower and lower, narrowly missing the spires of Cambridge, it eventually came to land, largely intact, in allotment gardens by Peter's house near Milton Road. He told me that he was quick to the scene, along with some other young lads, and grabbed parts of the plane as souvenirs. It's one of many tales that Peter recounts, but I happened to discover a chapter about this particular plane crash in a history book called the War Torn Skies of Great Britain by Julian Evan-Hart. It reads: 'It slid to a halt in the allotment gardens of Milton Road. The cockpit ended up crumpled against a wooden fence and several incendiary bombs that had broken loose from their containers in the ruptured bomb bay were strewn over the ground behind the Dornier.' I smiled when I read the following line: 'Many residents came to see the Dornier in the allotments. Several lads made off with souvenirs' It seems a young Peter has been captured in print! For his birthday, among other things, we gave him a copy of the book. Working for a software company and rushing headlong through the 21st century, it's easy to forget even our recent history, or what feet stood on the same ground before us. That aircraft crashed only 700 metres from where our office now stands. The disused and overgrown railway line that runs down the side of the office closed to passengers 30 years ago. The industrial estate the other side was the site of a farm, Trinity Hall Farm, as recently as 60 years ago. Roman rings and Palaeolithic handaxes have been unearthed nearby. I suppose Peter will be one of the last people I'll ever hear talking first-hand about Cambridge during the war. It's a privilege to know him. Happy birthday Peter.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 11, 2010 -- #836

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Roboblob, Laurent Bugnion, Timmy Kokke, Michael Sync(-2-), Victor Gaudioso, and Bill Reiss. Brought to you from a tiny table in my no-tell-motelTM in 'Vegas AKA "cheaper than anywhere else" and the WiFi is free and smokin'... From SilverlightCream.com: Sync your Silverlight out-of-browser application data without service but with Dropbox Rénald Nollet is in good company (Walt Ritscher) because he's demo'ing synching OOB apps with dropbox. Unit Testable WCF Web Services in MVVM and Silverlight 4 Roboblob is discussing calling WCF Web Services from a Silverlight MVVM app... something he's been avoiding up to now. Good long code and text-filled article, with the project to download. Using commands with ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in Windows Phone 7 I almost missed this post by Laurent Bugnion, on how to get around the problem of not being able to attach commands to the ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in WP7. He gets around it with (gasp) code behind :) Introducing jLight – Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery. Oh boy... if you haven't been using jQuery yet, this should get it going for you... Timmy Kokke has produced jLight which brings jQuery into Silverlight for ease of DOM interaction... and it's on CodePlex! Test-Driven Development in Windows Phone7 – Part 1: Unit Testing with Silverlight for Phone7 Michael Sync's starting a series on TDD with Silverlight on WP7. Great tutorial and all the code is available. Tip: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” Error in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Michael Sync also has a tip up for the resolution of an error we've all seen in all sorts of development, but now in WP7, and the workaround is deceptively simple. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Create Gradients Victor Gaudioso has a new video tutorial up for creating gradients in Expression Blend... don't fumble around in Blend... learn from the master! Space Rocks game step 8: Hyperspace Bill Reiss is up to episode 8 in his Silverlight game series now... this latest is on Hyperspace ... don'cha wish you could just do that? My trip to 'Vegas would have been a lot faster :) 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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• NetBeans Podcast 62

  - by TinuA

  Download mp3: 49 minutes – 39.5 MB Subscribe to the NetBeans Podcast on iTunes NetBeans Community News with Geertjan and Tinu What's NEW? Recap of a SUCCESSFUL NetBeans Community Day at JavaOne2012! Want to know what you missed? Download slides for: NetBeans Community Keynote NetBeans and JavaFX panel NetBeans and Java EE panel NetBeans Platform panel Visit the JavaOne Content Catalog for slides, and audio and video recordings of all NetBeans sessions at JavaOne 2012. (Type in keyword "NetBeans".) NetBeans Governance Board elections are done. Congratulations to Anton Epple and Hermien Pellissier, the new members of the 20th Board! How would you grade the NetBeans team on NetBeans IDE 7.2? Take the NetBeans 7.2 Satisfaction Survey. NetBeans IDE 7.3 Beta 2 is available for download. The first beta debuted at JavaOne with support for HTML5. Watch videos of HTML5 support in NetBeans and visit Geertjan's blog for a beginner's guide to HTML5 development. It's a busy Fall on the NetBeans Calendar with stops at Devoxx 2012, JavaOne Latin America, Jay Day Munich, Jay Days Sweden  JavaOne 2012 Reflections NetBeans had a fantastic showing at JavaOne 2012--from the full-day lineup of NetBeans Community Day to the numerous BOFs, Labs, and sessions at the main conference. But better to hear it in these short interviews with members of the community who attended JavaOne 2012. Veteran attendees and first-timers, panel participants and award winners, the interviewees share their experience of the conference, from highlights and insights, to new discoveries and inspiration. Listen in to why attending JavaOne is a tech pilgrimage every Java developer ought to make.   07:50   Anton Epple - Eppleton Consulting (Germany); Recipient of 2012 NetBeans Community Recognition Award 17:10   Henry Arousell and Thomas Boqvist - Bjorn Lunden Information (Sweden) 24:45   Glenn Holmer - Weyco Group, Inc. (USA); Recipient of 2012 NetBeans Community Recognition Award 33:09   Timon Veenstra - Agrosense (The Netherlands); 2012 Duke's Choice Award winner (Agrosense in the Nov/Dec '12 issue of Java Magazine.) 40:19   Rob Terplowski, - Linden, Inc. (USA) More thoughts about NetBeans Day and JavaOne can also be found in two recent NetBeans Zone articles: "Reflections on JavaOne 2012 by the NetBeans Community: Part 1 and Part 2". *Have ideas for NetBeans Podcast topics? Send them to nbpodcast at netbeans dot org. *Subscribe to the official NetBeans page on Facebook! Check us out as well on Twitter, YouTube, and Google+.

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• Summit Old, Summit New, Summit Borrowed...

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Summit is coming up, and I thought I’d post a few things. Summit Old... At the PASS Summit, you will get the chance to hear presentations by the SQL Server establishment. Just about every big name in the SQL Server world is a regular at the PASS Summit, so you will get to hear and meet people like Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen) (who just recently got awarded MVP status for the 20th year running), and from all around the world such as the UK’s Chris Webb (@technitrain) or Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) from India. Almost all the household names in SQL Server will be there, including a large contingent from Microsoft. The PASS Summit is by far the best place to meet the legends of SQL Server. And they’re not all old. Some are, but most of them are younger than you might think. ...Summit New... The hottest topics are often about the newest technologies (such as SQL Server 2012). But you will almost certainly learn new stuff about older versions too. But that’s not what I wanted to pick on for this point. There are many new speakers at every PASS Summit, and content that has not been covered in other places. This year, for example, LobsterPot’s Roger Noble (@roger_noble) is giving a presentation for the first time. He’s a regular around the Australian circuit, but this is his first time presenting to a US audience. New Zealand’s Paul White (@sql_kiwi) is attending his first PASS Summit, and will be giving over four hours of incredibly deep stuff that has never been presented anywhere in the US before (I can’t say the world, because he did present similar material in Adelaide earlier in the year). ...Summit Borrowed... No, I’m not talking about plagiarism – the talks you’ll hear are all their own work. But you will get a lot of stuff you’ll be able to take back and apply at work. The PASS Summit sessions are not full of sales-pitches, telling you about how great things could be if only you’d buy some third-party vendor product. It’s simply not that kind of conference, and PASS doesn’t allow that kind of talk to take place. Instead, you’ll be taught techniques, and be able to download scripts and slides to let you perform that magic back at work when you get home. You will definitely find plenty of ideas to borrow at the PASS Summit. ...Summit Blue Yeah – and there’s karaoke. Blue - Jason - SQL Karaoke - YouTube

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• Is my computer slow due to lack of swap

  - by Kristian Jensen

  A few months ago, I installed Ubuntu 12.04 alongside with Windows 7 on my Asus EEE-PC 1015bx. It has a tendency of freezing and when trying to investigate I found that a swap partition of only 256 MB had been created. The Asus EEE-PC 1015bx is born with 1 GByte RAM only and it is not possible to add further or exchange the existing 1 GByte with a larger card. When looking at the system monitor, it looks like all swap is being utilized along with 70-75% of the RAM, even with very few applications running. Can the lack of much swap space be the reason for my computer running slowly and at times freezing? How can I add a swap partition? Or should I add a swap file instead? At the moment, I see two partitions when viewing the system monitor: one 28.6 GByte ext4 partition which must be the one containing Ubuntu and one 100 GByte fuseblk partition which I assume is the one holding Windows. It shows that I have 18.6 GByte free space on the ext4 partition. Can I "take a bite" from the ext4 partition and convert this into a swap partition? I was thinking something like 3 GBytes for swap considering my limited RAM. I hope that someone can guide me through. Thank you. 20th Oct 2012 - Further details Thank you for below answer which I find very useful. I am certainly considering switching to one of your suggested shells as I can see from the Internet that many have posted that these require much fewer resources than ubuntu. It seems to me that lubuntu is the perfect match for my very limited computer. I will have to wait a few days, though, as I am presently limited by a very slow and restricted Internet connection via satellite. But will lubuntu install as simply another shell replacing unity or will it replace ubuntu all together? Will the software that I have installed under ubuntu still be accessible in lubuntu? And can I return to ubuntu if required? Regarding the actual question of swap: When I run gparted, it shows me that there is one ntfs partition of 100 GBytes from where it boots and the before mentioned ext4 partition of 28.6 GBytes is not mentioned. Could it be that my ubuntu installation resides inside this 100 GBytes ntfs partiotion? And if so, can I take a bite of this for my swap partition? Realising that gparted is shown in Danish, I hope that you can make out what I mean. System monitoring shows below details: Once again I sincerely hope that you can help. Thank you.

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• Game of Phones

  - by Carlos Chang

  Game  of  Phones There’s an excellent DZone article titled: 2014 Guide to Mobile Development. It’s loaded with excellent information including some results from a mobile related survey to more than 1000 IT professionals. Without giving away too much, these highlights should convince you to read the entire article.  Web and Hybrid apps are gaining tons of traction particularly in the enterprise. If you want to better understand the differences between Web, Native and Hybrid, this article has you covered. Enterprise developers are increasingly more interested in cross platform tools. Makes sense right?  I mean, unless you have infinite resources (e.g. Facebook) and can afford to write native apps to every platform, finding something that can meet your needs for iOS and Android makes sense.  And toss in the possibility of Windows Phone …and oh, just to be current, the addition of Apple’s new mobile language, Swift, to add to Objective C.. and oh boy.  Why not check out cross platform tools? BTW, don’t  forget testing on each platform, and maintenance and the next versions of the app. It’s not one and done. If you’re successful, you’re never done. Various mobile vendors are represented and many provide some great information.  Oracle's own Suhas Uliyar, VP of Mobile Strategy, represented with some great insights into the challenges of mobile back end integration (SOA, mBaaS, etc.) and moving from "mobile first" to a mobile plus world. BTW, Suhas was recently named Top 100 Wireless Technology Experts for 2014 by Today's Wireless World magazine.  And if your not yet convinced, DZone did a very nice job with their mobile infographic stylized after the insanely popular series, Game of Thrones.  Even though there were no dragons illustrated, worth the price of admission just for that.   Check it out here.

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• OpenWorld Day 1

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an OpenWorld Attendee Part I Lots of people are blogging insightfully about OpenWorld so I thought I would provide some non-insightful remarks to buck the trend! With 50,000 attendees I didn’t expect to bump into too many people I knew, boy was I wrong!  I walked into the registration area and immediately was hailed by a couple of customers I had worked with a few months ago.  Moving to the employee registration area in a different hall I bumped into a colleague from the UK who was also registering.  As soon as I got my badge I bumped into a friend from Ireland!  So maybe OpenWorld isn’t so big after all! First port of call was Larrys Keynote.  As always Larry was provocative and thought provoking.  His key points were announcing the Oracle cloud offering in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, pointing out that Fusion Apps are cloud enabled and finally announcing the 12c Database, making a big play of its new multi-tenancy features.  His contention was that multi-tenancy will simplify cloud development and provide better security by providing DB level isolation for applications and customers. Next day, Monday, was my first full day at OpenWorld.  The first session I attended was on monitoring of OSB, very interesting presentation on the benefits achieved by an Illinois area telco – US Cellular.  Great discussion of why they bought the SOA Management Packs and the benefits they are already seeing from their investment in terms of improved provisioning and time to market, as well as better performance insight and assistance with capacity planning. Craig Blitz provided a nice walkthrough of where Coherence has been and where it is going. Last night I attended the BOF on Managed File Transfer where Dave Berry replayed Oracles thoughts on providing dedicated Managed File Transfer as part of the 12c SOA release.  Dave laid out the perceived requirements and solicited feedback from the audience on what if anything was missing.  He also demoed an early version of the functionality that would simplify setting up MFT in SOA Suite and make tracking activity much easier. So much for Day 1.  I also ran into scores of old friends and colleagues and had a pleasant dinner with my friend from Ireland where I caught up on the latest news from Oracle UK.  Not bad for Day 1!

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• DOAG 2012 and Educause 2012

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Oracle understands the value of desktop virtualization and how customers have really embraced it as a top tier method to deliver access to applications and data. Just as supporting operating systems other than Windows in the enterprise desktop space started to become necessary perhaps 5-7 years ago, supporting desktop virtualization with VDI, application virtualization, thin clients, and tablet access is becoming necessary today in 2012. Any application strategy needs to have a secure mobile component, and a solution that gives you a holistic strategy across both mobile and fixed-asset (i.e., desktop PCs) devices is crucial to success. This means it's probably useful to learn about desktop virtualization, even if it's not in your typical area of responsibility. A good way to do that is at one of the many trade shows where we exhibit. Here are two examples:  DOAG 2012 Conference + Exhibition The DOAG Conference is fast approaching, starting November 20th in Nuremberg, Germany. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that we attended last year as well. This conference is fantastic for us because we get to speak directly to users of Oracle products. In many cases, those DBAs, IT managers, and other infrastructure folks are looking for ways to deal with the burgeoning BYOD model, as well as ways of streamlining their standard desktop and access technologies. We have a couple of sessions where you can learn a great deal about how Oracle can help with these points. Session Schedule (look under "Infrastruktur & Hardware") The two sessions focused on desktop virtualization are: Oracle VDI Best Practice unter Linux (Oracle VDI Best Practice Under Linux) Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Implementierungen und Praxiserfahrungen (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Implementations and Best Practices) We will also have experts on hand at the booth to answer your questions on using desktop virtualization. If you're at the show, please stop by and say hello to our team there! Educause 2012  Another good example is Educause. We've gone the last few years to show off a slough of education oriented applications and capabilities in the Oracle product portfolio. And every year, we display those applications through Oracle desktop virtualization. This means the demonstration can easily be setup ahead of time and replicated out to however many "demo pods" that we have available. There's no need for our product teams to setup individual laptops for demos -- we can display a standardized Windows desktop virtual machine with their apps all ready to go on a whole bunch of devices like your standard trade show laptop, our Sun Ray Clients, and iPad. Educause 2012 just wrapped, so we're sorry we missed you this year. But there is always next year! Until then, here are a few pictures from this year's show: You can also watch this video to see how Catholic Education Australia uses Oracle Secure Global Desktop to help cope with the ever changing ways that people access their applications.  -Chris 

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• ATI (fglrx) Dual monitor / laptop hot-plugging

  - by Brendan Piater

  I feel like I've gone back 5 years on my desktop today. I'll try not dump to much frustration here... I been running 12.04 since alpha with the ATI open source drivers and the gnome 3 desktop. I been generally very happy with them with only small issues along the way. Now of course it does not support 3D acceleration 100%, so games like my newly purchased Amnesia from the Humble bundle would not play. OK, no worries, the ATI driver is in the repos so let me have a go I thought. With all this testing that's been done with multi-monitor support, what could go wrong...? How I use my computer: It's laptop, with a HD 3670 card in it. I spend about 50% of the time working directly on the laptop (at home) and about 50% of the time working with an additional display connected (at work), multi desktop environment. What happening now: installed drivers things seemed to working, save some small other bugs (not critical) this morning I take my machine and plug the additional monitor into it, and nothing happens... ok fine. open "displays" try configure dual display, won't work open ati config "thing" (cause it is a thing, a crap thing) and set-up monitors there reboot it says (oh ffs, really.... ok) reboot, login and wow, I got a gnome 2 desktop (presume gnome 3 fall back) and no multi-monitor...great. (screenshot: http://ubuntuone.com/5tFe3QNFsTSIGvUSVLsyL7 ) after getting into a situation where I had to Ctrl + Alt + Del to get out of a frozen display, I eventually manage to set-up a single display desktop on the "main" monitor ok.. time to go home... unplug monitor... nothing happens.. oh boy here we go... try displays again, nothing, just hangs the display.. great. crash all the apps and reboot... So it's been a trying day... What I really hope is that someone else has figured out how to avoid this PAIN. Please help with a solution that: allows me run fglrx (so I can run the games I want) allows me to hot-plug a monitor to my laptop and remove it again allows me to change the display so include the hot-plugged monitor (preferable automatically like it did with the open drivers) Next best if that's not possible: switch between laptop only display and monitor only display easily (i.e. not having to reboot/logout/suspened etc) Really appreciate the time of anyone that has a solution. Thanks in advance. Regards Brendan PS: I guess I should file a bug about this too, so some direction as to the best place to file this would be appreciated too.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (11 of 25): Roseanne Barr&ndash;Peace &amp; Freedom Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Barr is an American actress, comedienne, writer, television producer, and director.  Barr began her career in stand-up comedy at clubs before gaining fame for her role in the sitcom Roseanne. The show was a hit and lasted nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997. She won both an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her work on the show. Barr had crafted a "fierce working-class domestic goddess" persona in the eight years preceding her sitcom and wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of patriarchal consumerism. The granddaughter of immigrants from Europe and Russia, Barr was the oldest of four children in a working-class Jewish Salt Lake City family; she was also active in the LDS Church. In 1974 she married Bill Pentland, with whom she had three children, before divorcing in 1990 and marrying comedian Tom Arnold for four years. Controversy arose when she sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" off-key at a 1990 nationally aired baseball game, followed by grabbing her crotch and spitting. After her sitcom ended, she launched her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, which aired from 1998 to 2000. In 2005, she returned to stand-up comedy with a world tour. In 2011, she starred in an unscripted TV show, Roseanne's Nuts that lasted from July to September of that year, about her life on a Hawaiian farm. The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) is a nationally-organized political party with affiliates in more than a dozen states, including California, Florida, Colorado and Hawaii. Its first candidates appeared on the ballot in 1966, but the Peace and Freedom Party of California was founded on June 23, 1967, after the LAPD riot in the wealthy Century City section of Los Angeles, and qualified for the ballot in January 1968.  The Peace and Freedom Party went national in 1968 as a left-wing organization opposed to the Vietnam War. From its inception, Peace and Freedom Party has been a left-wing political organization. It is a strong advocate of protecting the environment from pollution and nuclear waste. It advocates personal liberties and universal, high quality and free access to education and health care. Its understanding of socialism includes a socialist economy, where industries, financial institutions, and natural resources are owned by the people as a whole and democratically managed by the people who work in them and use them. Barr is on the Ballot in: CA, CO, FL Learn more about Roseanne Barr and Peace and Freedom Party on Wikipedia.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• How Big Data and Social Won the Election

  - by Mike Stiles

  The story of big data’s influence on the outcome of the US Presidential election is worth a good look, because a) it’s a harbinger of things to come, and b) it’s an example of similar successes available to any enterprise seriously resourcing integrated big data, modeling, and data-driven execution on all assets, including social. Obama campaign manager Jim Messina fielded a data and analytics brain trust 5 times larger than 2008. At that time, there were numerous databases from various sources, few of them talking to each other. This time, the mission was to be metrics-centered and measure everything measurable, and in context with all the other data. Big data showed them exactly what they needed to know and told them what to do about it. It showed them women 40-49 on the west coast would donate big money if they got to eat with George Clooney. Women on the east coast would pony up to hang out with Sarah Jessica Parker. Extensive daily modeling showed them what kinds of email appeals, from who, and to whom, would prove most successful in raising cash, recruiting volunteers, and getting out the vote. Swing state voters were profiled and approached with more customized targeting that at any time in history. Ads were purchased on specific shows watched by the targets, increasing efficiency 14% over traditional media buys. For all the criticism of the candidate’s focus on appearing on comedy and entertainment shows, and local radio morning shows, that’s where the data sent them to reach the voters most likely to turn out for them. And then there was social. Again, more than in any other election, Facebook was used for virtual, highly efficient door-to-door canvasing. Facebook fans got pictures of friends in swing states and were asked to encourage them to act. Using that approach, 1 in 5 peer-to-peer appeals led to the desired action. Assumptions, gut, intuition, campaign experience, all took a backseat to strategy shifts solidly backed up by data. Zeroing in on demographics likely to back the President and tracking their mood daily literally changed the voter landscape. The Romney team watched Obama voters appear seemingly out of thin air. One Obama campaign aide said, “We ran the election 66,000 times every night.” Which brings us to your organization. If you’re starting to feel like the battle-cry of “but this is the way we’ve always done it” is starting to put you in an extremely vulnerable position, you’re right. Social has become a key communication tool of the 21st century. Failing to use it, or failing to invest in a deep understanding of who your customers and prospects are so the content you post there will achieve desired actions and results, will leave you waking up one morning wondering, “What happened?”@mikestilesPhoto stock.xchng

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• Dadaism and Agility

  - by alexhildyard

  We all have our little bugbears, and something that has given me particular pause over the years is the place of Agility in the software development life cycle. While I have seen it used successfully on both small and Enterprise-level projects, I have also seen many instances in which long-standing technical debt has also originated under its watch. Ironically the problem in such cases seems to me not that the practitioners in question have failed to follow due process (Test, Develop, Refactor -- a common "what" of Agile), but basically that they have missed the point (the "why" of Agile). It's probably a sign of my age that I'm much more interested in the "why" than the "what", since I feel that the latter falls out naturally from the former, but that this is not a reciprocal relationship.Consider Dadaism, precursor to the Surrealist movement in the early part of the twentieth century. Anyone could stand up and proclaim he or she was Dada; anyone could write cut-ups, or pull words out a hat, or produce gibberish on duelling typewriters under the inspiration of Dada. And all that took place at such performances was a manifestation of Dada, and all the artefacts that resulted were also Dada. Hence one commentator's engimatic observation that 'when one speaks of Dada, then one speaks of Dada. But when one does not speak of Dada, one still speaks of Dada.'What is Dada? Literally, Dada is what you say it is. But that's also missing the point. Dada is about erecting a framework within which utterances like this are valid; Dada is about preparing a stage for itself. Dadaism exemplifies the purity of a process-driven ideology -- in fact an ideology that is almost pure process, with nothing extraneous in the way of formal method, and while perhaps Agile delivery should not embrace the liberties of Dadaism too literally, some of the similarities nevertheless are salutary.Agile -- like Dada -- is an attitude; it is about *being* agile; it is not really about doing a specific set of things that are somehow *part* of being Agile. It is an abstract base rather than an implementation, a characteristic rather than a factor. It is the pragmatic response to the need for change in the face of partial information, ephemeral requirements and a healthy dose of systematic uncertainty. In practice this will usually mean repeatedly making the smallest useful changes to a system, recognising that systems evolve, and that all change carries risk. It will usually mean that instead of investing effort in future-proofing a system against a known technology roadmap, one instead invests one's energies in the daily repetition and incremental development of processes best designed to accommodate change quickly. But though it may mean these things in practice, it isn't actually *about* either of these things; it's about the mindset, the attitude that conceives of such responses as sensible solutions given the larger and ultimately unclassifiable thing that constitutes the development lifecycle of a specific project.

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