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• SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Launch Success And Reusable Rockets Test Partially Successful

  - by Gopinath

  Elon Musk’s SpaceX is closing on the dream of developing reusable rockets and likely in an year or two space launch rockets will be reusable just like flights, ships and cars. Today SpaceX launched an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket in to space to deliver satellites as well as to test their reusable rocket launching technology. All on board satellites were released on to the orbit and the first stage of rocket partially succeeded in returning back to Earth. This is a huge leap in space technology.   Couple of years ago reusable rockets were considered as impossible. NASA, Russian Space Agency, China, India or for that matter any other space agency never even attempted to build reusable rockets. But SpaceX’s revolutionary technology partially succeeded in doing the impossible! Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of building reusable rockets and transporting humans to & from other planets like Mars. He says If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred.  A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before. That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space. Normally the first stage of a rocket falls back to Earth after burning out and is destroyed. But today SpaceX reignited first stage rocket after its separation and attempted to descend smoothly on to ocean’s surface. Though it did not fully succeed, the test was partially successful and SpaceX was able to recovers portions of first stage. Rocket booster relit twice (supersonic retro & landing), but spun up due to aero torque, so fuel centrifuged & we flamed out — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2013 With the partial success of recovering first stage, SpaceX gathered huge amount of information and experience it can use to improve Falcon 9 and build a fully reusable rocket. In post launch press conference Musk said if things go "super well", could refly a Falcon 9 1st stage by the end of next year. Falcon 9 Launch Video Next reusable first tests delayed by at least two launches SpaceX has a busy schedule for next several months with more than 50 missions scheduled using the new Falcon 9 rocket. Ten of those missions are to fly cargo to the International Space Shuttle for NASA.  SpaceX announced that they will not attempt to recover the first stage of Falcon 9 in next two missions. The next test will be conducted on  the fourth mission of Falcon 9 which is planned to carry cargo to Internation Space Station sometime next year. This will give time required for SpaceX to analyze the information gathered from today’s mission and improve first stage reentry systems. More reading Here are few interesting sources to read more about today’s SpaceX launch SpaceX post mission press conference details and discussion on Reddit Giant Leaps for Space Firms Orbital, SpaceX Hacker News community discussion on SpaceX launch SpaceX Launches Next-Generation Private Falcon 9 Rocket on Big Test Flight

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• Setting up Visual Studio 2010 to step into Microsoft .NET Source Code

  - by rajbk

  Using the Microsoft Symbol Server to obtain symbol debugging information is now much easier in VS 2010. Microsoft gives you access to their internet symbol server that contains symbol files for most of the .NET framework including the recently announced availability of MVC 2 Symbols.  SETUP In VS 2010 RTM, go to Tools –> Options –> Debugging –> General. Check “Enable .NET Framework source stepping” We get the following dialog box   This automatically disables “Enable My Code”   Go to Debugging –> Symbols and Check “Microsoft Symbol Servers”. You can selectively exclude modules if you want to.   You will get a warning dialog like so: Hitting OK will start the download process   The setup is complete. You are now ready to start debugging! DEBUGGING Add a break point to your application and run the application in debug mode (F5 shortcut for me). Go to your call stack when you hit the break point. Right click on a frame that is grayed out. Select “Load Symbols from” “Microsoft Symbol Servers”. VS will begin a one time download of that assembly. This assembly will be cached locally so you don’t have to wait for the download the next time you debug the app.   We get a one time license agreement dialog box You might see an error like the one below regarding different encoding (hopefully will be fixed).    Assemblies for which the symbols have been loaded are no longer grayed out. Double clicking on any entry in the call stack should now directly take you to the source code for that assembly. AFAIK, not all symbols are available on the MS symbol server. In cases like that you will see a tab like the one below and be given the option to “Show Disassembly”. Enjoy! Newsreel Announcer: Humiliated, Muntz vows a return to Paradise Falls and promises to capture the beast alive! Charles Muntz: [speaking to a large audience outside in the newsreel] I promise to capture the beast alive, and I will not come back until I do!

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• How do you stop OgreBullet Capsule from falling over?

  - by Nathan Baggs

  I've just started implementing bullet into my Ogre project. I followed the install instructions here: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/OgreBullet+Tutorial+1 And the rest if the tutorial here: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/OgreBullet+Tutorial+2 I got that to work fine however now I wanted to extend it to a handle a first person camera. I created a CapsuleShape and a Rigid Body (like the tutorial did for the boxes) however when I run the game the capsule falls over and rolls around on the floor, causing the camera swing wildly around. I need a way to fix the capsule to always stay upright, but I have no idea how Below is the code I'm using. (part of) Header File OgreBulletDynamics::DynamicsWorld *mWorld; // OgreBullet World OgreBulletCollisions::DebugDrawer *debugDrawer; std::deque<OgreBulletDynamics::RigidBody *> mBodies; std::deque<OgreBulletCollisions::CollisionShape *> mShapes; OgreBulletCollisions::CollisionShape *character; OgreBulletDynamics::RigidBody *characterBody; Ogre::SceneNode *charNode; Ogre::Camera* mCamera; Ogre::SceneManager* mSceneMgr; Ogre::RenderWindow* mWindow; main file bool MinimalOgre::go(void) { ... mCamera = mSceneMgr->createCamera("PlayerCam"); mCamera->setPosition(Vector3(0,0,0)); mCamera->lookAt(Vector3(0,0,300)); mCamera->setNearClipDistance(5); mCameraMan = new OgreBites::SdkCameraMan(mCamera); OgreBulletCollisions::CollisionShape *Shape; Shape = new OgreBulletCollisions::StaticPlaneCollisionShape(Vector3(0,1,0), 0); // (normal vector, distance) OgreBulletDynamics::RigidBody *defaultPlaneBody = new OgreBulletDynamics::RigidBody( "BasePlane", mWorld); defaultPlaneBody->setStaticShape(Shape, 0.1, 0.8); // (shape, restitution, friction) // push the created objects to the deques mShapes.push_back(Shape); mBodies.push_back(defaultPlaneBody); character = new OgreBulletCollisions::CapsuleCollisionShape(1.0f, 1.0f, Vector3(0, 1, 0)); charNode = mSceneMgr->getRootSceneNode()->createChildSceneNode(); charNode->attachObject(mCamera); charNode->setPosition(mCamera->getPosition()); characterBody = new OgreBulletDynamics::RigidBody("character", mWorld); characterBody->setShape( charNode, character, 0.0f, // dynamic body restitution 10.0f, // dynamic body friction 10.0f, // dynamic bodymass Vector3(0,0,0), Quaternion(0, 0, 1, 0)); mShapes.push_back(character); mBodies.push_back(characterBody); ... }

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• New security configuration flag in UCM PS3

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  While the recent Patch Set 3 (PS3) release was mostly focused on bug fixes and such, a new configuration flag was added for security. In 10gR3 and prior versions, UCM had a component called Collaboration Manager which allowed for project folders to be created and groups of users assigned as members to collaborate on documents. With this component came access control lists (ACL) for content and folders. Users could assign specific security rights on each and every document and folder within a project. And it was possible to enable these ACL's without having the Collaboration Manager component enabled. But it took some special instructions (see technote# 603148.1) and added some extraneous pieces still related to Collaboration Manager. When 11g came out, Collaboration Manager was no longer available. But the configuration settings to turn on ACLs were still there. Well, in PS3 they've been cleaned up a bit and a new configuration flag has been added to simply turn on the ACL fields and none of the other collaboration bits. To enable ACLs: UseEntitySecurity=true Along with this configuration flag to turn ACLs on, you also need to define which Security Groups will honor the ACL fields. If an ACL is applied to a content item with a Security Group outside this list, it will be ignored. SpecialAuthGroups=HumanResources,Legal,Marketing Save the settings and restart the instance. Upon restart, two new metadata fields will be created: xClbraUserList, xClbraAliasList. If you are using OracleTextSearch as the search indexer, be sure to run a Fast Rebuild on the collection. On the Check In, Search, and Update pages, values are added by simply typing in the value and getting a type-ahead list of possible values. Select the value, click Add and then set the level of access (Read, Write, Delete, or Admin). If all of the fields are blank, then it simply falls back to just Security Group and Account access. As for how they are stored in the metadata fields, each entry starts with it's identifier: ampersand (&) symbol for users, "at" (@) symbol for groups, and colon (:) for roles. Following that is the entity name. And at the end is the level of access in paranthesis. e.g. (RWDA). And each entry is separated by a comma. So if you were populating values through batch loader or an external source, the values would be defined this way. Detailed information on Access Control Lists can be found in the Oracle Fusion Middleware System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Content Server.

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• Oracle ODP.NET und Windows PowerShell

  - by cjandaus

  In der Microsoft Welt wohlbekannt, in der Oracle Welt nur ein Schulterzucken hervorrufend - die sogenannten Scripting Guys. Wie der Name bereits vermuten lässt, geht es in deren Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog um Scripting. Und damit natürlich um die Windows PowerShell. Ja, die Zeiten des DOS-Kommandofensters und Batch-Dateien ist vorbei. Die PowerShell ist eine mächtige Scripting-Umgebung unter Windows, die selbst unter Unix/Linux-Administratoren Gefallen finden sollte. Dass man damit wunderbar auch auf Oracle Datenbanken zugreifen kann, haben wir bereits vor Jahren in einer Oracle Workshop Reihe bewiesen. Damals begleitete mich Klaus Rohe von Microsoft, der mit mir dann auch gemeinsam einen Vortrag auf DOAG Konferenz hielt. Unser gemeinsames Ziel war es damals wie heute, die Oracle Anwender von der hervorragenden Integration zwischen Oracle, Windows und .NET zu überzeugen. Was lag näher, als sich dies von beiden Herstellern gemeinsam bestätigen zu lassen? Vor allem die ewigen Zweifler begrüßten dies. Seither war die PowerShell bei mir nicht mehr auf dem Radar und auch Oracle Anwender haben das Thema nicht mehr aufgeworfen. Möglicherweise auch deshalb, weil es zu neu oder zu unbekannt ist? Eher unwahrscheinlich ... Vielleicht liegt es vielmehr daran, dass man einfach mal davon ausgeht, dass PowerShell nur für Microsoft Produkte richtig nutzbar ist? Oder man bekommt erzählt, dass nur die Integration mit der Microsoft-eigenen Datenbank SQL Server möglich ist? Und das ist natürlich nicht richtig - so wie immer (ich denke dabei unter anderem an das Microsoft Active Directory - aber dazu ein andermal mehr). Umso mehr freut es mich, einen brandneuen Blog-Beitrag zu genau diesem Thema zu lesen, auf den mich Alex Keh, (Produkt Manager für Windows und .NET im Oracle Headquarter in San Francisco) aufmerksam gemacht hat. Was die Sache noch besser macht, dieser Beitrag stammt aus der Microsoft Welt und belegt damit zwischen den Zeilen, dass die Oracle Datenbank und unsere .NET Integration via dem Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) auch hier eine bedeutende Rolle spielt. In diesem Sinne: Beide Daumen hoch für die Scripting Guys! Der Beitrag nennt sich Use Oracle ODP.NET and PowerShell to Simplify Data Access und trotz ein paar weniger Ausreißer, ist der Artikel sehr zu empfehlen, um in das Thema einzusteigen. Lassen Sie es mich wissen, wie Sie zu dieser Integration stehen, ob die PowerShell für Sie in der Praxis wichtig ist oder werden könnte, und falls Sie Features vermissen, die Oracle künftig umsetzen sollte. Danke!

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• Review: Backbone.js Testing

  - by george_v_reilly

  Title: Backbone.js Testing Author: Ryan Roemer Rating: $stars(4.5) Publisher: Packt Copyright: 2013 ISBN: 178216524X Pages: 168 Keywords: programming, testing, javascript, backbone, mocha, chai, sinon Reading period: October 2013 Backbone.js Testing is a short, dense introduction to testing JavaScript applications with three testing libraries, Mocha, Chai, and Sinon.JS. Although the author uses a sample application of a personal note manager written with Backbone.js throughout the book, much of the material would apply to any JavaScript client or server framework. Mocha is a test framework that can be executed in the browser or by Node.js, which runs your tests. Chai is a framework-agnostic TDD/BDD assertion library. Sinon.JS provides standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. They complement each other and the author does a good job of explaining when and how to use each. I've written a lot of tests in Python (unittest and mock, primarily) and C# (NUnit), but my experience with JavaScript unit testing was both limited and years out of date. The JavaScript ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, with new browser frameworks and Node packages springing up everywhere. JavaScript has some particular challenges in testing—notably, asynchrony and callbacks. Mocha, Chai, and Sinon meet those challenges, though they can't take away all the pain. The author describes how to test Backbone models, views, and collections; dealing with asynchrony; provides useful testing heuristics, including isolating components to reduce dependencies; when to use stubs and mocks and fake servers; and test automation with PhantomJS. He does not, however, teach you Backbone.js itself; for that, you'll need another book. There are a few areas which I thought were dealt with too lightly. There's no real discussion of Test-driven_development or Behavior-driven_development, which provide the intellectual foundations of much of the book. Nor does he have much to say about testability and how to make legacy code more testable. The sample Notes app has plenty of testing seams (much of this falls naturally out of the architecture of Backbone); other apps are not so lucky. The chapter on automation is extremely terse—it could be expanded into a very large book!—but it does provide useful indicators to many areas for exploration. I learned a lot from this book and I have no hesitation in recommending it. Disclosure: Thanks to Ryan Roemer and Packt for a review copy of this book.

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• Stop Saying "Multi-Channel!"

  - by David Dorf

  I keep hearing the term "multi-channel" in our industry, but its time to move on. It kinda reminds me of the term "ECR" or electronic cash register. Long ago ECR was a leading-edge term, but nowadays its rarely used because its table-stakes. After all, what cash register today isn't electronic? The same logic applies to multi-channel, at least when we're talking about tier-1 and tier-2 retailers. If you're still talking about multi-channel retailing, you're in big trouble. Some have switched over to the term "cross-channel," and that's a step in the right direction but still falls short. Its kinda like saying, "I upgraded my ECR to accept debit cards!" Yawn. Who hasn't? Today's retailers need to focus on omni-channel, which I first heard from my friends over at RSR but was originally coined at IDC. First retailers added e-commerce to their store and catalog channels yielding multi-channel retailing. Consumers could use the channel that worked best for them. Then some consumers wanted to combine channels with features like buy-on-the-Web, pickup-in-the-store. Thus began the cross-channel initiatives to breakdown the silos and enable the channels to communicate with each other. But the multi-channel architecture is full of duplication that thwarts efforts of providing a consistent experience. Each has its own cart, its own pricing, and often its own CRM. This was an outcrop of trying to bring the independent channels to market quickly. Rather than reusing and rebuilding existing components to meet the new demands, silos were created that continue to exist today. Today's consumers want omni-channel retailing. They want to interact with brands in a consistent manner that is channel transparent, yet optimized for that particular interaction. The diagram below, from the soon-to-be-released NRF Mobile Blueprint v2, shows this progression. For retailers to provide an omni-channel experience, there needs to be one logical representation of products, prices, promotions, and customers across all channels. The only thing that varies is the presentation of the content based on the delivery mechanism (e.g. shelf labels, mobile phone, web site, print, etc.) and often these mechanisms can be combined in various ways. I'm looking forward to the day in which I can use my phone to scan QR-codes in a catalog to create a shopping cart of items. Then do some further research on the retailer's Web site and be told about related items that might interest me. Be able to easily solicit opinions and reviews from social sites, and finally enter the store to pickup my items, knowing that any applicable coupons have been applied. In this scenario, I the consumer are dealing with a single brand that is aware of me and my needs throughout the entire transaction. Nirvana.

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• Virtual Lab part 2&ndash;Templates, Patterns, Baselines

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Once you have a good virtualization platform chosen, whether it is a desktop, server or laptop environment, the temptation is to build “X”.  “X” may be a SharePoint lab, a Virtual Cluster, an AD test environment or some other cool project that you really need RIGHT NOW.  That would be doing it wrong. My grandfather taught woodworking and cabinetmaking for twenty-seven years at a trade school in Alabama.  He was the first instructor hired at that school and the only teacher for the first two years.  His students built tables, chairs, and workbenches so the school could start its HVAC courses.   Visiting as a child, I also noticed many extra “helper” stands, benches, holders, and gadgets all built from wood.  What does that have to do with a virtual lab, you ask?  Well, that is the same approach you should take.  Build stuff that you will use.  Not for solving a particular problem, but to let the Virtual Lab be part of your normal troubleshooting toolkit. Start with basic copies of various Operating Systems.  Load and patch server and desktop OS environments.  This also helps build your collection of ISO files, another essential element of a virtual Lab.  Once you have these “baseline” images, you can use your Virtualization software’s snapshot capability to freeze the image.  Clone the snapshot and you have a brand new fully patched machine in mere moments.  You may have to sysprep some of the Microsoft OS environments if you are going to create a domain environment or experiment with clustering.  That is still much faster than loading and patching from scratch. So once you have a stock of raw materials (baseline images in this case) where should you start.  Again, my grandfather’s workshop gives us the answer.  In the shop it was workbenches and tables to hold large workpieces that made the equipment more useful.  In a Windows environment the same role falls to the fundamental network services:  DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Routing, File Services, and Storage services.  Plan your internal network setup.  Build out an AD controller with all the features listed.  Make the actual domain an isolated domain so it will not care about where you take it.  Add the Microsoft iSCSI target.  Once you have this single system, you can leverage it for almost any network environment beyond a simple stand-alone system. Having these templates and fundamental infrastructure elements ready to run means I can build a quick lab in minutes instead of hours.  My solutions are well-tested, my processes fully documented with screenshots, and my plans validated well before I have to make any changes to client systems.  the work I put in is easily returned in increased value and client satisfaction.

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• GUI device for throwing a ball

  - by Fredrik Johansson

  The hero has a ball, which shall be thrown with accuracy in a court on iPhone/iPad. The player is seen from above, in a 2D view. In game play, the player reach is between 1/15 and 1/6 of the height of the iPhone screen. The player will run, and try to outmaneuver his opponent, and then throw the ball at a specific location, which is guarded by the opponent (which is also shown on the screen). The player is controlled by a joystick, and that works ok, but how shall I control the stick? Maybe someone can propose a third control method? I've tried the following two approaches: Joystick: Hero has a reach of 1 meter, and this reach is marked with a semi-opaque circle around the player. The ball can be moved by a joystick. When the joystick is moved south, the ball is moved south within the reach circle. There is a direct coupling with the joystick and the position of the ball. I.e. when the joystick is moved max south, the ball is max south within the player reach. At each touch update the speed is calculated, and the Box2d ball position and ball speed are updated. NB, the ball will never be moved outside the reach as long as the player push the joystick. The ball is thrown by swiping the joystick to make the ball move, and then releasing the joystick. At release, the ball will get a smoothed speed of the joystick. Joystick Problem: The throwing accuracy gets bad, because the joystick can not be that big, and a small movement results in quite a large movement of the ball. If the user does not release before the end of the joystick maximum end point, the ball will stop, and when the user releases the joystick the speed of the ball will be zero. Bad... Touch pad A force is applied to the ball by a sweep on a touchpad. The ball is released when the sweep is ended, or when the ball is moved outside the player reach. As there is no one to one mapping between the swipe and the ball position, the precision can be improved. A large swipe can result in a small ball movement. Touch Pad Problem A touchpad is less intuitive. Users do not seem to know what to do with the touch pad. Some tap the touchpad, and then the ball just falls to the ground. As there is no one-to-one mapping, the ball can be moved outside the reach, and then it will just fall to the ground. It's a bit hard to control the ball, especially if the player also moves.

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• Robust line of sight test on the inside of a polygon with tolerance

  - by David Gouveia

  Foreword This is a followup to this question and the main problem I'm trying to solve. My current solution is an hack which involves inflating the polygon, and doing most calculations on the inflated polygon instead. My goal is to remove this step completely, and correctly solve the problem with calculations only. Problem Given a concave polygon and treating all of its edges as if they were walls in a level, determine whether two points A and B are in line of sight of each other, while accounting for some degree of floating point errors. I'm currently basing my solution on a series of line-segment interection tests. In other words: If any of the end points are outside the polygon, they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B crosses any of the edges from the polygon, then they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B does not cross any of the edges from the polygon, then they are in line of sight. But the problem is dealing correctly with all the edge cases. In particular, it must be able to deal with all the situations depicted below, where red lines are examples that should be rejected, and green lines are examples that should be accepted. I probably missed a few other situations, such as when the line segment from A to B is colinear with an edge, but one of the end points is outside the polygon. One point of particular interest is the difference between 1 and 9. In both cases, both end points are vertices of the polygon, and there are no edges being intersected, but 1 should be rejected while 9 should be accepted. How to distinguish these two? I could check some middle point within the segment to see if it falls inside or not, but it's easy to come up with situations in which it would fail. Point 7 was also pretty tricky and I had to to treat it as a special case, which checks if two points are adjacent vertices of the polygon directly. But there are also other chances of line segments being col linear with the edges of the polygon, and I'm still not entirely sure how I should handle those cases. Is there any well known solution to this problem?

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• Using ASP.NET Membership Provider with an ACL

  - by geekrutherford

  Up until recently one of my applications has used the membership provider within ASP.NET exclusively. However, it has been proposed that while the currently defined roles are beneficial, security needs to be more granular to restrict both access to certain pages and functionality present within a given page.   Unfortunately, the role based security ASP.NET gives you out of the box falls down in this area. This is not due to a lack of foresight by Microsoft, but rather it was simply not designed for implementing both role based security and any inherent ACL you may define within these roles. Mind you some would say an ACL is independent of the role to which a user belongs and is assigned to the user directly.   The application mentioned here has it's own User object (which encapsulates the membership provider user object as a property) and SQL Server table to store extended information not present in the aspnet_users table. While I could have modified the aspnet membership schema to suit the applications needs, it seemed smarter to simply create a separate table with a foreign key back to the aspnet_users table.   Since I have a separate object to store extended user information, I simply created an ACL object and expose it as a property of my user object.   This is all well and good, but it does not help in regards to the SiteMapProvider and restricting access at the page level based on the users ACL.   The straightforward answer would be to develop some code within the databound event for the menu that checks the page title and has hardcoded logic that dictates a user must have certain permissions turned on. The problem with this approach is that it's HARDCODED!!! If you need to change access to a page you'd need to do a build and go through your normal deployment process....ugh!!!   An alternative method, albeit not perfect, is to utilize the resourceKey property on the SiteMapNodes in the SiteMap file with the name of the required permission to view the page. Within the databound event for your menu you iterate the SiteMapNodes in the menus SiteMapProvider looking for a match at the page level based on title. When a match is detected, you have a switch/case on the SiteMapNodes resourceKey (the name of the ACL permission required). The case for the resourceKey ensures the users ACL permission is turned on and viola!!!   This is noteably not perfect in that it is using the resourceKey in a manner other than intended.  Since the application is not localized, using it in the manner described it not an issue.   Below is a sample SiteMap file with the resourceKey used as the ACL permission identifier:     Below is the ItemDataBound event. This application uses the Telerik Menu control:

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• Less Can Be More In E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Today’s consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the products and services that interest them.  In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult. In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs. The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile have purchased. Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective. Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.

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• Less Can Be More In E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Today’s consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the products and services that interest them.  In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult. In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs. The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile have purchased. Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective. Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; 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mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-top-themecolor:accent6; border-left:none; border-bottom:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; border-right:none; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Georgia","serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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• Pretty URL in ADF Faces of JDeveloper 11.1.2.2

  - by Frank Nimphius

  Many features planned for Oracle JDeveloper 12c find their way into current releases of Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1 and JDeveloper 11g R2. One example of such a feature is "pretty URL" - or "clean URL" as the Oracle JDeveloper 11g R2 (11.1.2.2) documentation puts it. "A.2.3.24 Clean URLs Historically, ADF Faces has used URL parameters to hold information, such as window IDs and state. However, URL parameters can prevent search engines from recognizing when URLs are actually the same, and therefore interfere with analytics. URL parameters can also interfere with bookmarking. By default, ADF Faces removes URL parameters using the HTML5 History Management API. If that API is unavailable, then session cookies are used.You can also manually configure how URL parameters are removed using the context parameter oracle.adf.view.rich.prettyURL.OPTIONS. Set the parameter to off so that no parameters are removed. Set the parameter to useHistoryApi to only use the HTML5 History Management API. If a browser does not support this API, then no parameters will be removed. Set the parameter to useCookies to use session cookies to remove parameters. If the browser does not support cookies, then no parameters will be removed." See: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26098_01/web.1112/e16181/ap_config.htm#ADFUI12856 So basically, what this part in the documentation says is: In JDeveloper 11g R2 (11.1.2.2), Oracle ADF Faces automatically removes its internally used dynamic parameters from the URL You can influence the setting with the prettyURL.OPTIONS context option, which however is not recommended you to do because the default behavior is able to detect if the browser client supports HTML 5 History management or not. In the latter case it the uses a session cookie and if this doesn't work, falls back to the "old" URL parameter adding. The information that is not so explicit and clearly mentioned in the documentation is that this is only for ADF Faces parameters (such as _afrLoop, Adf-Window-Id, etc.), but not the ADF controller token (_adf.ctrl-state)! Removing the ADF controller token is an enhancement request that will be implemented in Oracle JDeveloper 12c

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• The Solution

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  So I recently attended a class about time management as well as read the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.  Both have been instrumental in helping me get my priorities aligned as well as keep me focused. The reason I bring this up is that it gave me a great idea for a small application with which to create a great technical stack solution that would be easy to demo and explain.  Therefore, the project from this point forward with be the Liekhus.TimeTracker application which will bring some the time management skills that I have acquired into a technical implementation.  The idea is rather simple, but leverages some of the basic principles of Covey along with some of the worksheets that I garnered from class.  The basics are as such: 1) a plan is a must have and 2) write it down!  A plan not written down is just an idea.  How many times have you had an idea that didn’t materialize?  Exactly.  Hence why I am writing it all down now! The worksheet consists of a few simple columns that I will outline below as well as some modifications that I made according to the Covey habits.  The worksheet looks like the following: Status Issue Area CQ Notes P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   The idea is really simple and straightforward; you write down all your tasks and keep track of them along the way.  The status stands for (P)ending, (F)inished or (L)ater.  You write a quick title for the issue and select the CQ (Covey Quadrant) with which the issue occurs.  The notes section is for things that happen while you are working through the issue.  And last, but not least, is the Area column that I added as a way to identify the Role or Area of your life that this task falls within based upon Covey’s teachings. The second part of this application is a simple phone log that allows you to track your phone conversations throughout the day.  All of this is currently done on a sheet of paper, but being involved in technology, I want it to have bells and whistles.  Therefore, this is my simple idea for a project that will allow me to test my theories about coding and implementations.  Stay tuned as the next session will be flushing out the concept and coming up with user stories to begin the SCRUM process. Thanks

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001.5 (a review of City Under The Sand)

  - by Chris Williams

  City Under The Sand - a review I'm moderately familiar with the Dark Sun setting. I've read the other Dark Sun novels, ages ago and I recently started running a D&D 4.0 campaign in the Dark Sun world, so I picked up this book to help re-familiarize myself with the setting. Overall, it did accomplish that, in a limited way. The book takes place in Nibenay and a neighboring expanse of desert that includes a formerly buried city, a small town and a bandit outpost. The book does a more interesting job of describing Nibenese politics and the court of the ruling Sorcerer King, his templars and the expected jockeying for position that occurs between the Templar Wives. There is a fair amount of combat, which was interesting and fairly well detailed. The ensemble cast is introduced and eventually brought together over the first few chapters. Not a lot of backstory on most of the characters, but you get a feel for them fairly quickly. The storyline was somewhat predictable after the first third of the book. Some of the reviews on Amazon complain about the 2-dimensional characterizations, and yes there were some... but it's easy to ignore because there is a lot going on in the book... several interwoven plotlines that all eventually converge. Where the book falls short... First, it appears to have been edited by a 4th grader who knows how to use spellcheck but lacks the attention to detail to notice the frequent occurence of incorrect words that often don't make sense or change the context of the entire sentence. It happened just enough to be distracting, and honestly I expect better from WOTC. Second, there is a lot of buildup to the end of the story... the big fight, the confrontation between good and evil, etc... which is handled in just a few pages and then the story basically just ends. Kind of a letdown, honestly. There wasn't a big finish, and it wasn't a cliffhanger, it just wraps up neatly and ends. It felt pretty rushed. Overall, aside from the very end, I enjoyed it. I really liked the insight into that region of Athas and it gave me some good ideas for fleshing out my own campaign. In that sense, the book served its purpose for me. If you're looking for a light read (got a 5-6 hour flight somewhere?) or you want to learn more about the Dark Sun setting, then I'd recommend this book.

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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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• The Softer Side of Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  It’s election season in the U.S., and you know what that means. It means I stop by the recycling bin in my garage before entering the house with the contents of my mailbox. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my usual direct mail purge when I came across a piece from The Container Store®. This piece would have gone straight to the recycling bin, but the title stopped me: Learn what WE STAND FOR! Under full disclaimer, I’m probably a “frequent flier” at The Container Store. One can never be too organized! Now, back to the direct mail piece. I opened it to discover that The Container Store has taken their customer experience beyond “a shopping experience that makes you smile” to giving customers more insight and transparency into how they feel about their employees, the vendors they partner with, and the communities they live in. The direct mail piece included several employees showcasing a skill, hobby or talent with their photo and a personal note that used one word to describe what these employees believe The Container Store stands for. I do not recall the last time I read through an entire piece of direct mail. But this time, I pored over all the comments and photos.  Summer, a salesperson, believes that one word is PASSION. Thomas in distribution center inventory systems chooses the word ACTION. The list goes on to include MATCHLESS, FUN, FAMILY, LOVE, and EMPOWERMENT. The Container Store is running a contest asking you to tell them what nonprofit organization you stand for. Anyone can submit their favorite nonprofit to win cash, products and services from The Container Store. Don’t forget about the softer side of customer experience. With many organizations working feverishly to transform their business into being more customer-centric, it’s easy to get caught up in processes and technology. Focusing on people and social responsibility often falls behind and becomes a lower priority. Keeping people and social responsibility at the forefront is crucial. Your customers will use your processes and technology, but they will see or hear your people and feel their passion. The latter is what they will remember most about your brand. I’m sure there are many other great examples of the softer side of customer experience. Please share your examples in the comments section.

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• Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

  - by Christian P

  I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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• PASS: FY10 Actuals Posted

  - by Bill Graziano

  Earlier this year we published preliminary fiscal year 2010 financials to the Governance page on the PASS web site.  Please remember that FY10 runs from July 1st, 2009 through June 30th, 2010 and includes the November 2009 Summit.  We do our fiscal year this way so that the Summit falls earlier in the fiscal year.  The financials we had posted were P&L numbers at the portfolio level.  Prior to this we had posted our detailed budget but only posted the auditors report at the end of each year.  Today we updated our published financials to include: Pre-audit actuals from FY10 at the same level as our budget.  The document has both actuals and budget for FY10 side by side.  This is over 20 pages of detailed financial information covering hundreds of line-items. A letter describing key differences between our budget and actuals.  I walked through each line item where the difference was greater than $25,000 and explained what happened and why. We updated the financial graph going back to 2003 to include FY10. This update should “close the loop” on our financials.  You can now start with the published budget and compare it to the finished financials at the same level of detail.  We also plan to publish the auditor’s report when that is completed -- as we do every year. Overall I’m very happy with how FY10 turned out.  Keep in mind that this was the November 2009 Summit so we were still facing economic challenges.  With all that we were roughly break-even showing a $15,000 profit on $3.9 million of revenue.  I didn’t find anything shocking in reviewing our actual vs. budget but there were a few things that needed explanation.  You can see those in the letter on the governance page. Please keep in mind that these are the actuals from our operating financials.  The auditor may have us make adjustments for depreciation or other financial transactions.  We may also account for certain transactions differently for tax purposes than we do for financial reporting purposes.  I feel these financial statements give you the clearest picture of how our organization spends its money. We were late publishing these this year.  We were working through some tax issues and that delayed our ability to file our final tax forms which delayed this process.  In hindsight I should have published these documents as soon as we had them and not waited for the tax issues.  We’ll do this better in the future. And on a final note, you don’t need to login to view these documents.  If you have any questions you can post them here.  If we get more than a few questions we may see about creating some forums for financial issues on the PASS web site.

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• The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Manage Phase

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by John Brunswick. Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not. This is why we thankfully have an opportunity to leverage meta data, security and other settings that have been applied or inherited in the prior parts of our governance process. In the interests of keeping this process pragmatic, there is little day to day activity that needs to happen here. Most of the activity that happens post creation will occur in the final "Retire" phase in which content may be archived or removed. The Manage Phase will focus on updating content and the meta data associated with it - specifically around ownership. Often times the largest issues with content ownership occur when a content creator leaves and organization or changes roles within an organization.   1. Update Content Ownership (as needed and on a quarterly basis) Why - Without updating content to reflect ownership changes it will be impossible to continue to meaningfully govern the content. How - Run reports against the meta data (creator and department to which the creator belongs) on content items for a particular user that may have left the organization or changed job roles. If the content is without and owner connect with the department marked as responsible. The content's ownership should be reassigned or if the content is no longer needed by that department for some reason it can be archived and or deleted. With a minimal investment it is possible to create reports that use an LDAP or Active Directory system to contrast all noted content owners versus the users that exist in the directory. The delta will indicate which content will need new ownership assigned. Impact - This implicitly keeps your repository and search collection clean. A very large percent of content that ends up no longer being useful to an organization falls into this category. This management phase (automated if possible) should be completed every quarter or as needed. The impact of actually following through with this phase is substantial and will provide end users with a better experience when browsing and searching for content.

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• What is the standard term for my role?

  - by sigil

  I'm doing work that involves writing code and managing developers in a "special projects" division of a large company. I'd like to define my role better and figure out if there's an industry standard term for what I do, so that it will be easier for me to research best practices and work on a career path What I do all day: A macro that connects an Excel sheet to an Access database is acting funny; I get called in to figure out what's happening and debug it. Someone needs data extracted from a bunch of files on Sharepoint. I figure out a client-side solution because I'm not authorized to do anything server-side and getting IT to do anything would take several months and need a business case. A manager wants a new data entry tool for their team. I interview the manager and team members to work out the functional requirements, then design/develop/test the application. Someone needs a VBA script to crunch some data for their presentation that's due in two hours. I drop everything I'm doing to hack out a quick script and run the analysis, without much in the way of testing. A developer has been hired to build a database for one of the teams, since I'm working on too many different things and don't have time to take this project on in the timeframe required. I direct his work and push him to meet certain deadlines, interview stakeholders to get more info that will help him figure out how to build the necessary forms, and modify the functional requirements of the database to fit in the timeframe. Someone wants to load a set of data into a GIS system and set up an ongoing refresh and reporting of this data set. I facilitate the conversation between the GIS developers and the owners of this data set, and design a demo application as proof of concept. It's kind of an "all-purpose programming and IT management" position, but it's not officially IT because the company has an actual IT department with a rigorously defined system of submitting requests, developing code, and managing projects. What I do, I guess, is more of a handyman job, where stuff falls to me because I'm the geekiest one in the room. Is there a standard term in the software world for what I do?

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• R glm standard error estimate differences to SAS PROC GENMOD

  - by Michelle

  I am converting a SAS PROC GENMOD example into R, using glm in R. The SAS code was: proc genmod data=data0 namelen=30; model boxcoxy=boxcoxxy ~ AGEGRP4 + AGEGRP5 + AGEGRP6 + AGEGRP7 + AGEGRP8 + RACE1 + RACE3 + WEEKEND + SEQ/dist=normal; FREQ REPLICATE_VAR; run; My R code is: parmsg2 <- glm(boxcoxxy ~ AGEGRP4 + AGEGRP5 + AGEGRP6 + AGEGRP7 + AGEGRP8 + RACE1 + RACE3 + WEEKEND + SEQ , data=data0, family=gaussian, weights = REPLICATE_VAR) When I use summary(parmsg2) I get the same coefficient estimates as in SAS, but my standard errors are wildly different. The summary output from SAS is: Name df Estimate StdErr LowerWaldCL UpperWaldCL ChiSq ProbChiSq Intercept 1 6.5007436 .00078884 6.4991975 6.5022897 67911982 0 agegrp4 1 .64607262 .00105425 .64400633 .64813891 375556.79 0 agegrp5 1 .4191395 .00089722 .41738099 .42089802 218233.76 0 agegrp6 1 -.22518765 .00083118 -.22681672 -.22355857 73401.113 0 agegrp7 1 -1.7445189 .00087569 -1.7462352 -1.7428026 3968762.2 0 agegrp8 1 -2.2908855 .00109766 -2.2930369 -2.2887342 4355849.4 0 race1 1 -.13454883 .00080672 -.13612997 -.13296769 27817.29 0 race3 1 -.20607036 .00070966 -.20746127 -.20467944 84319.131 0 weekend 1 .0327884 .00044731 .0319117 .03366511 5373.1931 0 seq2 1 -.47509583 .00047337 -.47602363 -.47416804 1007291.3 0 Scale 1 2.9328613 .00015586 2.9325559 2.9331668 -127 The summary output from R is: Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 6.50074 0.10354 62.785 < 2e-16 AGEGRP4 0.64607 0.13838 4.669 3.07e-06 AGEGRP5 0.41914 0.11776 3.559 0.000374 AGEGRP6 -0.22519 0.10910 -2.064 0.039031 AGEGRP7 -1.74452 0.11494 -15.178 < 2e-16 AGEGRP8 -2.29089 0.14407 -15.901 < 2e-16 RACE1 -0.13455 0.10589 -1.271 0.203865 RACE3 -0.20607 0.09315 -2.212 0.026967 WEEKEND 0.03279 0.05871 0.558 0.576535 SEQ -0.47510 0.06213 -7.646 2.25e-14 The importance of the difference in the standard errors is that the SAS coefficients are all statistically significant, but the RACE1 and WEEKEND coefficients in the R output are not. I have found a formula to calculate the Wald confidence intervals in R, but this is pointless given the difference in the standard errors, as I will not get the same results. Apparently SAS uses a ridge-stabilized Newton-Raphson algorithm for its estimates, which are ML. The information I read about the glm function in R is that the results should be equivalent to ML. What can I do to change my estimation procedure in R so that I get the equivalent coefficents and standard error estimates that were produced in SAS? To update, thanks to Spacedman's answer, I used weights because the data are from individuals in a dietary survey, and REPLICATE_VAR is a balanced repeated replication weight, that is an integer (and quite large, in the order of 1000s or 10000s). The website that describes the weight is here. I don't know why the FREQ rather than the WEIGHT command was used in SAS. I will now test by expanding the number of observations using REPLICATE_VAR and rerunning the analysis.

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• approximating log10[x^k0 + k1]

  - by Yale Zhang

  Greetings. I'm trying to approximate the function Log10[x^k0 + k1], where .21 < k0 < 21, 0 < k1 < ~2000, and x is integer < 2^14. k0 & k1 are constant. For practical purposes, you can assume k0 = 2.12, k1 = 2660. The desired accuracy is 5*10^-4 relative error. This function is virtually identical to Log[x], except near 0, where it differs a lot. I already have came up with a SIMD implementation that is ~1.15x faster than a simple lookup table, but would like to improve it if possible, which I think is very hard due to lack of efficient instructions. My SIMD implementation uses 16bit fixed point arithmetic to evaluate a 3rd degree polynomial (I use least squares fit). The polynomial uses different coefficients for different input ranges. There are 8 ranges, and range i spans (64)2^i to (64)2^(i + 1). The rational behind this is the derivatives of Log[x] drop rapidly with x, meaning a polynomial will fit it more accurately since polynomials are an exact fit for functions that have a derivative of 0 beyond a certain order. SIMD table lookups are done very efficiently with a single _mm_shuffle_epi8(). I use SSE's float to int conversion to get the exponent and significand used for the fixed point approximation. I also software pipelined the loop to get ~1.25x speedup, so further code optimizations are probably unlikely. What I'm asking is if there's a more efficient approximation at a higher level? For example: Can this function be decomposed into functions with a limited domain like log2((2^x) * significand) = x + log2(significand) hence eliminating the need to deal with different ranges (table lookups). The main problem I think is adding the k1 term kills all those nice log properties that we know and love, making it not possible. Or is it? Iterative method? don't think so because the Newton method for log[x] is already a complicated expression Exploiting locality of neighboring pixels? - if the range of the 8 inputs fall in the same approximation range, then I can look up a single coefficient, instead of looking up separate coefficients for each element. Thus, I can use this as a fast common case, and use a slower, general code path when it isn't. But for my data, the range needs to be ~2000 before this property hold 70% of the time, which doesn't seem to make this method competitive. Please, give me some opinion, especially if you're an applied mathematician, even if you say it can't be done. Thanks.

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