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• Minimum team development sizes

  - by MarkPearl

  Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario. Two is a partnership, three starts a team For a while I thought that a team was anything more than one and that scrum could be effective methodology with even two people. I have recently adjusted my thinking to a scrum team being a minimum of three, so what happened to two and what do you call it? For me I consider a group of two people working together a partnership - there is value in having a partnership, but some of the dynamics and value that you get from having a team is lost with a partnership. Avoidance of a one on one confrontation The first dynamic I see missing in a partnership is the team motivation to do better and how this is delivered to individuals that are not performing. Take two highly motivated individuals and put them together and you will typically see them continue to perform. Now take a situation where you have two individuals, one performing and one not and the behaviour is totally different compared to a team of three or more individuals. With two people, if one feels the other is not performing it becomes a one on one confrontation. Most people avoid confrontations and so nothing changes. Compare this to a situation where you have three people in a team, 2 performing and 1 not the dynamic is totally different, it is no longer a personal one on one confrontation but a team concern and people seem more willing to encourage the individual not performing and express their dissatisfaction as a team if they do not improve. Avoiding the effects of Tuckman’s Group Development Theory If you are not familiar with Tuckman’s group development theory give it a read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development) In a nutshell with Tuckman’s theory teams go through these stages of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. You want your team to reach and remain in the Performing stage for as long as possible - this is where you get the most value. When you have a partnership of two and you change the individuals in the partnership you basically do a hard reset on the partnership and go back to the beginning of Tuckman’s model each time. This has a major effect on the performance of a team and what they can deliver. What I have seen is that you reduce the effects of Tuckman's theory the more individuals you have in the team (until you hit the maximum team size in which other problems kick in). While you will still experience Tuckman's theory with a team of three, the impact will be greatly reduced compared to two where it is guaranteed every time a change occurs. It's not just in the numbers, it's in the people One final comment - while the actual numbers of a team do play a role, the individuals in the team are even more important - ideally you want to keep individuals working together for an extended period. That doesn't mean that you never change the individuals in a team, or that once someone joins a team they are stuck there - there is value in an individual moving from team to team and getting cross pollination, but the period of time that an individual moves should be in month's or years, not days or weeks. Why? So why is it important to know this? Why is it important to know how a team works and what motivates them? I have been asking myself this question for a while and where I am at right now is this… the aim is to achieve the stage where the sum of the total (team) is greater than the sum of the parts (team members). This is why we form teams and why understanding how they work is a challenge and also extremely stimulating.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercising Externally

  - by simonc

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Server-Sent Events using GlassFish (TOTD #179)

  - by arungupta

  Bhakti blogged about Server-Sent Events on GlassFish and I've been planning to try it out for past some days. Finally, I took some time out today to learn about it and build a simplistic example showcasing the touch points. Server-Sent Events is developed as part of HTML5 specification and provides push notifications from a server to a browser client in the form of DOM events. It is defined as a cross-browser JavaScript API called EventSource. The client creates an EventSource by requesting a particular URL and registers an onmessage event listener to receive the event notifications. This can be done as shown var url = 'http://' + document.location.host + '/glassfish-sse/simple';eventSource = new EventSource(url);eventSource.onmessage = function (event) { var theParagraph = document.createElement('p'); theParagraph.innerHTML = event.data.toString(); document.body.appendChild(theParagraph);} This code subscribes to a URL, receives the data in the event listener, adds it to a HTML paragraph element, and displays it in the document. This is where you'll parse JSON and other processing to display if some other data format is received from the URL. The URL to which the EventSource is subscribed to is updated on the server side and there are multipe ways to do that. GlassFish 4.0 provide support for Server-Sent Events and it can be achieved registering a handler as shown below: @ServerSentEvent("/simple")public class MySimpleHandler extends ServerSentEventHandler { public void sendMessage(String data) { try { connection.sendMessage(data); } catch (IOException ex) { . . . } }} And then events can be sent to this handler using a singleton session bean as shown: @Startup@Statelesspublic class SimpleEvent { @Inject @ServerSentEventContext("/simple") ServerSentEventHandlerContext<MySimpleHandler> simpleHandlers; @Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/10") public void sendDate() { for(MySimpleHandler handler : simpleHandlers.getHandlers()) { handler.sendMessage(new Date().toString()); } }} This stateless session bean injects ServerSentEventHandlers listening on "/simple" path. Note, there may be multiple handlers listening on this path. The sendDate method triggers every 10 seconds and send the current timestamp to all the handlers. The client side browser simply displays the string. The HTTP request headers look like: Accept: text/event-streamAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdchAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8Cache-Control: no-cacheConnection: keep-aliveCookie: JSESSIONID=97ff28773ea6a085e11131acf47bHost: localhost:8080Referer: http://localhost:8080/glassfish-sse/faces/index2.xhtmlUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.54 Safari/536.5 And the response headers as: Content-Type: text/event-streamDate: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 21:16:10 GMTServer: GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0Transfer-Encoding: chunkedX-Powered-By: Servlet/3.0 JSP/2.2 (GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0 Java/Apple Inc./1.6) Notice, the MIME type of the messages from server to the client is text/event-stream and that is defined by the specification. The code in Bhakti's blog can be further simplified by using the recently-introduced Twitter API for Java as shown below: @Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/10") public void sendTweets() { for(MyTwitterHandler handler : twitterHandler.getHandlers()) { String result = twitter.search("glassfish", String.class); handler.sendMessage(result); }} The complete source explained in this blog can be downloaded here and tried on GlassFish 4.0 build 34. The latest promoted build can be downloaded from here and the complete source code for the API and implementation is here. I tried this sample on Chrome Version 19.0.1084.54 on Mac OS X 10.7.3.

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• Moving abroad - Relocation advice

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  Oracle offers graduates from different European countries the opportunity to start their career abroad. Some already have experience with living abroad as they have done an exchange semester or internship in another county, for others it is the first time they will move abroad. Rui started in October 2011 as a Business Development Consultant in Dublin and moved from Portugal to Dublin, Ireland to start his career. For those planning to leave their home country and who desire to work abroad, he will share some tips and tricks in this article. When you’re faced with an opportunity like this, there are lots of things that will come to your mind. Sometimes it can be either very exciting, or even stressful. 1. First of all, try to relax. If you are certain you are moving abroad, all you need to do is some research about the country where you’re going to live, get to know its culture (gastronomy, important dates and events, its economy and effective ways to keep you in touch with your family and friends – such as mobile companies and Internet services), and start to understand the best locations (with good access) you could/should live in are. Don’t forget that initially you can be limited by transport and therefore it is important to explore the ideal places for you. During this time, Oracle provides everything you’ll need (papers, documents, etc.) to cross borders. 2. When you arrive, you understand that you are in a new country, in a new place, where all things (or most) are unknown to you. Before you panic, try to see it as a new challenge where new opportunities will come. Sometimes, it’s not easy I know, but the very best a new place has to give to you, is the opportunity to understand a new culture, get to know other people, other ways of working, and grow both as a person and professionally. So, you have nothing to lose in this kind of experiment. 3. When you arrive at Oracle, there’s a fantastic team that will help you with settling in, HR, Payroll, Relocation, IT. In my case, Oracle helped me with the relocation, they supported me to arrange everything such as helping out with all the paperwork and finding a new apartment. As you can see they will do their best to help you to be successful! 4. Engage with your new co-workers. Going to a place where you don’t know anyone can be tough sometimes but see it as an opportunity to meet people from all over the world and share experiences. Embrace it. 5. Plan ahead, try to get the most information possible and use it. Oracle is a multinational enterprise that will allow you to get to know a new labour market and give you the flexibility you need to understand your view of employment and occupation, giving you the very best opportunities to join different teams and working areas, so that you can work where you fit best. Good luck! If you’re thinking about starting a career abroad, read the following article: http://www.overseasdigest.com/movingtips.htm it can be very useful to you. Interested in starting your career at Oracle like Rui has? Please have a look at https://campus.oracle.com for all of our latest vacancies.

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• Data breakpoints to find points where data gets broken

  - by raccoon_tim

  When working with a large code base, finding reasons for bizarre bugs can often be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Finding out why an object gets corrupted without no apparent reason can be quite daunting, especially when it seems to happen randomly and totally out of context. Scenario Take the following scenario as an example. You have defined the a class that contains an array of characters that is 256 characters long. You now implement a method for filling this buffer with a string passed as an argument. At this point you mistakenly expect the buffer to be 256 characters long. At some point you notice that you require another character buffer and you add that after the previous one in the class definition. You now figure that you don’t need the 256 characters that the first member can hold and you shorten that to 128 to conserve space. At this point you should start thinking that you also have to modify the method defined above to safeguard against buffer overflow. It so happens, however, that in this not so perfect world this does not cross your mind. Buffer overflow is one of the most frequent sources for errors in a piece of software and often one of the most difficult ones to detect, especially when data is read from an outside source. Many mass copy functions provided by the C run-time provide versions that have boundary checking (defined with the _s suffix) but they can not guard against hard coded buffer lengths that at some point get changed. Finding the bug Getting back to the scenario, you’re now wondering why does the second string get modified with data that makes no sense at all. Luckily, Visual Studio provides you with a tool to help you with finding just these kinds of errors. It’s called data breakpoints. To add a data breakpoint, you first run your application in debug mode or attach to it in the usual way, and then go to Debug, select New Breakpoint and New Data Breakpoint. In the popup that opens, you can type in the memory address and the amount of bytes you wish to monitor. You can also use an expression here, but it’s often difficult to come up with an expression for data in an object allocated on the heap when not in the context of a certain stack frame. There are a couple of things to note about data breakpoints, however. First of all, Visual Studio supports a maximum of four data breakpoints at any given time. Another important thing to notice is that some C run-time functions modify memory in kernel space which does not trigger the data breakpoint. For instance, calling ReadFile on a buffer that is monitored by a data breakpoint will not trigger the breakpoint. The application will now break at the address you specified it to. Often you might immediately spot the issue but the very least this feature can do is point you in the right direction in search for the real reason why the memory gets inadvertently modified. Conclusions Data breakpoints are a great feature, especially when doing a lot of low level operations where multiple locations modify the same data. With the exception of some special cases, like kernel memory modification, you can use it whenever you need to check when memory at a certain location gets changed on purpose or inadvertently.

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• ADO and Two Way Storage Tiering

  - by Andy-Oracle

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 We get asked the following question about Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) storage tiering quite a bit. Can you tier back to the original location if the data gets hot again? The answer is yes but not with standard Automatic Data Optimization policies, at least not reliably. That's not how ADO is meant to operate. ADO is meant to mirror a traditional view of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) where data will be very volatile when first created, will become less active or cool, and then will eventually cease to be accessed at all (i.e. cold). I think the reason this question gets asked is because customers realize that many of their business processes are cyclical and the thinking goes that those segments that only get used during month end or year-end cycles could sit on lower cost storage when not being used. Unfortunately this doesn't fit very well with the ADO storage tiering model. ADO storage tiering is based on the amount of free and used space in the source tablespace. There are two parameters that control this behavior, TBS_PERCENT_USED and TBS_PERCENT_FREE. When the space in the tablespace exceeds the TBS_PERCENT_USED value then segments specified in storage tiering clause(s) can be moved until the percent of free space reaches the TBS_PERCENT_FREE value. It is worth mentioning that no checks are made for available space in the target tablespace. Now, it is certainly possible to create custom functions to control storage tiering, but this can get complicated. The biggest problem is insuring that there is enough space to move the segment back to tier 1 storage, assuming that that's the goal. This isn't as much of a problem when moving from tier 1 to tier 2 storage because there is typically more tier 2 storage available. At least that's the premise since it is supposed to be less costly, lower performing and higher capacity storage. In either case though, if there isn't enough space then the operation fails. In the case of a customized function, the question becomes do you attempt to free the space so the move can be made or do you just stop and return false so that the move cannot take place? This is really the crux of the issue. Once you cross into this territory you're really going to have to implement two-way hierarchical storage and the whole point of ADO was to provide automatic storage tiering. You're probably better off using heat map and/or business access requirements and building your own hierarchical storage management infrastructure if you really want two way storage tiering. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Obfuscation is not a panacea

  - by simonc

  So, you want to obfuscate your .NET application. My question to you is: Why? What are your aims when your obfuscate your application? To protect your IP & algorithms? Prevent crackers from breaking your licensing? Your boss says you need to? To give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside? Obfuscating code correctly can be tricky, it can break your app if applied incorrectly, it can cause problems down the line. Let me be clear - there are some very good reasons why you would want to obfuscate your .NET application. However, you shouldn't be obfuscating for the sake of obfuscating. Security through Obfuscation? Once your application has been installed on a user’s computer, you no longer control it. If they do not want to pay for your application, then nothing can stop them from cracking it, even if the time cost to them is much greater than the cost of actually paying for it. Some people will not pay for software, even if it takes them a month to crack a $30 app. And once it is cracked, there is nothing stopping them from putting the result up on the internet. There should be nothing suprising about this; there is no software protection available for general-purpose computers that cannot be cracked by a sufficiently determined attacker. Only by completely controlling the entire stack – software, hardware, and the internet connection, can you have even a chance to be uncrackable. And even then, someone somewhere will still have a go, and probably succeed. Even high-end cryptoprocessors have known vulnerabilities that can be exploited by someone with a scanning electron microscope and lots of free time. So, then, why use obfuscation? Well, the primary reason is to protect your IP. What obfuscation is very good at is hiding the overall structure of your program, so that it’s very hard to figure out what exactly the code is doing at any one time, what context it is running in, and how it fits in with the rest of the application; all of which you need to do to understand how the application operates. This is completely different to cracking an application, where you simply have to find a single toggle that determines whether the application is licensed or not, and flip it without the rest of the application noticing. However, again, there are limitations. An obfuscated application still has to run in the same way, and do the same thing, as the original unobfuscated application. This means that some of the protections applied to the obfuscated assembly have to be undone at runtime, else it would not run on the CLR and do the same thing. And, again, since we don’t control the environment the application is run on, there is nothing stopping a user from undoing those protections manually, and reversing some of the obfuscation. It’s a perpetual arms race, and it always will be. We have plenty of ideas lined about new protections, and the new protections added in SA 6.6 (method parent obfuscation and a new control flow obfuscation level) are specifically designed to be harder to reverse and reconstruct the original structure. So then, by all means, obfuscate your application if you want to protect the algorithms and what the application does. That’s what SmartAssembly is designed to do. But make sure you are clear what a .NET obfuscator can and cannot protect you against, and don’t expect your obfuscated application to be uncrackable. Someone, somewhere, will crack your application if they want to and they don’t have anything better to do with their time. The best we can do is dissuade the casual crackers and make it much more difficult for the serious ones. Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Multichannel Digital Engagement: Find Out How Your Organization Measures Up

  - by Michael Snow

  This article was originally published in the September 2013 Edition of the Oracle Information InDepth Newsletter ORACLE WEBCENTER EDITION Thanks to mobile and social technologies, interactive online experiences are now commonplace. Not only that, they give consumers more choices, influence, and control than ever before. So how can you make your organization stand out? The key building blocks for delivering exceptional cross-channel digital experiences are outlined below. Also, a new assessment tool is available to help you measure your organization's ability to deliver such experiences. A clearly defined digital strategy. The customer journey is growing increasingly complex, encompassing multiple touchpoints and channels. It used to be easy to map marketing efforts to specific offline channels; for example, a direct mail piece with an offer to visit a store for a discounted purchase. Now it is more difficult to cultivate and track such clear cause-and-effect relationships. To deliver an integrated digital experience in this more complex world, organizations need a clearly defined and comprehensive digital marketing strategy that is backed up by an integrated set of software, middleware, and hardware solutions. Strong support for business agility and speed-to-market. As both IT and marketing executives know, speed-to-market and business agility are key to competitive advantage. That means marketers need solutions to support the rapid implementation of online marketing initiatives—plus the flexibility to adapt quickly to a changing marketplace. And IT needs tools with the performance, scalability, and ease of integration to support marketing efforts. Both teams benefit when business users are empowered to implement marketing initiatives on their own, with minimal IT intervention. The ability to deliver relevant, personalized content. Delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable. Customers expect you to know who they are, including their preferences and past relationship with your brand. That means delivering the most relevant content from the moment a visitor enters your site. To make that happen, you need a powerful rules engine so that marketers and business users can easily define site visitor segments and deliver content accordingly. That includes both implicit targeting that is based on the user’s behavior, and explicit targeting that takes a user’s profile information into account. Ideally, the rules engine can also intelligently weight recommendations when multiple segments apply to a specific customer. Support for social interactivity. With the advent of Facebook and LinkedIn, visitors expect to participate in and contribute to your web presence—and share their experience on their own social networks. That requires easy incorporation of user-generated content such as comments, ratings, reviews, polls, and blogs; seamless integration with third-party social networking sites; and support for social login, which helps to remove barriers to social participation. The ability to deliver connected, multichannel experiences that include powerful, flexible mobile capabilities. By 2015, mobile usage is projected to surpass that of PCs and other wired devices. In other words, mobile is an essential element in delivering exceptional online customer experiences. This requires the creation and management of mobile experiences that are optimized for delivery to the thousands of different devices that are in use today. Just as important, organizations must be able to easily extend their traditional web presence to the mobile channel and deliver highly personalized and relevant multichannel marketing initiatives while also managing to minimize the time and effort required to manage mobile sites. Are you curious to know how your organization measures up when it comes to delivering an engaging, multichannel digital experience? If so, take this brief, 15-question online assessment and see how your organization scores in the areas of digital strategy, digital agility, relevance and personalization, social interactivity, and multichannel experience.

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• When should I use a Process Model versus a Use Case?

  - by Dave Burke

  This Blog entry is a follow on to https://blogs.oracle.com/oum/entry/oum_is_business_process_and and addresses a question I sometimes get asked…..i.e. “when I am gathering requirements on a Project, should I use a Process Modeling approach, or should I use a Use Case approach?” Not surprisingly, the short answer is “it depends”! Let’s take a scenario where you are working on a Sales Force Automation project. We’ll call the process that is being implemented “Lead-to-Order”. I would typically think of this type of project as being “Process Centric”. In other words, the focus will be on orchestrating a series of human and system related tasks that ultimately deliver value to the business in a cost effective way. Put in even simpler terms……implement an automated pre-sales system. For this type of (Process Centric) project, requirements would typically be gathered through a series of Workshops where the focal point will be on creating, or confirming, the Future-State (To-Be) business process. If pre-defined “best-practice” business process models exist, then of course they could and should be used during the Workshops, but even in their absence, the focus of the Workshops will be to define the optimum series of Tasks, their connections, sequence, and dependencies that will ultimately reflect a business process that meets the needs of the business. Now let’s take another scenario. Assume you are working on a Content Management project that involves automating the creation and management of content for User Manuals, Web Sites, Social Media publications etc. Would you call this type of project “Process Centric”?.......well you could, but it might also fall into the category of complex configuration, plus some custom extensions to a standard software application (COTS). For this type of project it would certainly be worth considering using a Use Case approach in order to 1) understand the requirements, and 2) to capture the functional requirements of the custom extensions. At this point you might be asking “why couldn’t I use a Process Modeling approach for my Content Management project?” Well, of course you could, but you just need to think about which approach is the most effective. Start by analyzing the types of Tasks that will eventually be automated by the system, for example: Best Suited To? Task Name Process Model Use Case Notes Manage outbound calls Ö A series of linked human and system tasks for calling and following up with prospects Manage content revision Ö Updating the content on a website Update User Preferences Ö Updating a users display preferences Assign Lead Ö Reviewing a lead, then assigning it to a sales person Convert Lead to Quote Ö Updating the status of a lead, and then converting it to a sales order As you can see, it’s not an exact science, and either approach is viable for the Tasks listed above. However, where you have a series of interconnected Tasks or Activities, than when combined, deliver value to the business, then that would be a good indicator to lead with a Process Modeling approach. On the other hand, when the Tasks or Activities in question are more isolated and/or do not cross traditional departmental boundaries, then a Use Case approach might be worth considering. Now let’s take one final scenario….. As you captured the To-Be Process flows for the Sales Force automation project, you discover a “Gap” in terms of what the client requires, and what the standard COTS application can provide. Let’s assume that the only way forward is to develop a Custom Extension. This would now be a perfect opportunity to document the functional requirements (behind the Gap) using a Use Case approach. After all, we will be developing some new software, and one of the most effective ways to begin the Software Development Lifecycle is to follow a Use Case approach. As always, your comments are most welcome.

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• glm matrix conversion for DirectX

  - by niktehpui

  For on of the coursework specification I need to work with DirectX, so I tried to implement a DirectX Renderer in my small cross-platform framework (to have it optionally available for Windows). Since I want to stick to my dependencies I want use glm for vector/matrix/quaternions math. The vectors seem to be fully compatible with DirectX, but the glm::mat4 is not working properly in DirectX Effects Framework. I assumed the reason is that DirectX uses row majors layouts and OpenGL column majors (although if I remember right internally in HLSL DX uses column major as well), so I transposed the matrix, but I still get no proper results compared to using XNA-Math. XNA-Version of the code (works): XMMATRIX world = XMMatrixIdentity(); XMMATRIX view = XMMatrixLookAtLH(XMVectorSet(5.0, 5.0, 5.0, 1.0f), XMVectorZero(), XMVectorSet(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f)); XMMATRIX proj = XMMatrixPerspectiveFovLH(0.25f*3.14f, 1.25f, 1.0f, 1000.0f); XMMATRIX worldViewProj = world*view*proj; m_fxWorldViewProj->SetMatrix(reinterpret_cast<float*>(&worldViewProj)); This works flawlessly and displays the expected colored cube. GLM-Version (does not work): glm::mat4 world(1.0f); glm::mat4 view = glm::lookAt(glm::vec3(5.0f, 5.0f, 5.0f), glm::vec3(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f), glm::vec3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f)); glm::mat4 proj = glm::perspective(0.25f*3.14f, 1.25f, 1.0f, 1000.0f); glm::mat4 worldViewProj = glm::transpose(world*view*proj); m_fxWorldViewProj->SetMatrix(glm::value_ptr(worldViewProj)); Displays nothing, screen stays black. I really would like to stick to glm on all platforms.

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• motion computation from video using pyglet in python

  - by kuaywai

  Hi, I am writing a simple motion detection program but i want it to be cross platform so im using python and the pyglet library since it provides a simple way to load videos in different formats (specially wmv and mpeg). So far i have the code given below which loads the movie and plays it in a window. Now i need to: 1) grab frame at time t and t-1 2) do a subtraction to see which pixels are active for motion detection. any ideas on how to grab frames and to skip over frames and is it possible to put the pixel values into a matrix in numpy or something directly from pyglet? or should look into using something other than pyglet? thanks kuaywai import pyglet import sys window = pyglet.window.Window(resizable=True) window.set_minimum_size(320,200) window.set_caption('Motion detect 1.0') video_intro = pyglet.resource.media('movie1.wmv') player = pyglet.media.Player() player.queue(video_intro) print 'calculating movie size...' if not player.source or not player.source.video_format: sys.exit myWidth = player.source.video_format.width myHeight = player.source.video_format.height if player.source.video_format.sample_aspect 1: myWidth *= player.source.video_format.sample_aspect elif player.source.video_format.sample_aspect < 1: myHeight /= player.source.video_format.sample_aspect print 'its size is %d,%d' % (myWidth,myHeight) player.play() @window.event def on_draw(): window.clear() (w,h) = window.get_size() player.get_texture().blit(0, h-myHeight, width=myWidth, height=myHeight) pyglet.app.run()

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• Stateful vs. Stateless Webservices

  - by chrsk

  Imagine a more complex CRUD application which has a three-tier-architecture and communicates over webservices. The client starts a conversation to the server and doing some wizard like stuff. To process the wizard the client needs feedback given by the server. We started a discussion about stateful or stateless webservices for this approach. I made some research combined with my own experience, which points me to the question mentioned later. Stateless webservices having the following properties (in our case): + high scalability + high availability + high speed + rapid testing - bloated contract - implementing more logic on server-side But we can cross out the first two points, our application doesn't needs high scalability and availability. So we come to the stateful webservice. I've read a bunch of blogs and forum posts and the most invented point implementing a stateful webservice was: + simplifies contract (protocol) - bad testing - runs counter to the basic architecture of http But doesn't almost all web applications have these bad points? Web applications uses cookies, query strings, session ids, and all the stuff to avoid the statelessness of http. So why is it that bad for webservices?

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• C# Can I return HttpWebResponse result to iframe - Uses Digest authentication

  - by chadsxe

  I am trying to figure out a way to display a cross-domain web page that uses Digest Authentication. My initial thought was to make a web request and return the entire page source. I currently have no issues with authenticating and getting a response but I am not sure how to properly return the needed data. // Create a request for the URL. WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://some-url/cgi/image.php?type=live"); // Set the credentials. request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password); // Get the response. HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse(); // Get the stream containing content returned by the server. Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream(); // Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access. StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream); // Read the content. string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd(); // Clean up the streams and the response. reader.Close(); dataStream.Close(); response.Close(); return responseFromServer; My problems are currently... responseFromServer is not returning the entire source of the page. I.E. missing body and head tags The data is encoded improperly in responseFromServer. I believe this has something to do with the transfer encoding being of the type chunked. Further more... I am not entirely sure if this is even possible. If it matters, this is being done in ASP.NET MVC 4 C#. Thanks, Chad

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• Visual Studio 2010 64-bit COM Interop Issue

  - by Adam Driscoll

  I am trying to add a VC6 COM DLL to our VS2010RC C# solution. The DLL was compiled with the VC6 tools to create an x86 version and was compiled with the VC7 Cross-platform tools to generate a VC7 DLL. The x86 version of the assembly works fine as long as the consuming C# project's platform is set to x86. It doesn't matter whether the x64 or the x86 version of the DLL is actually registered. It works with both. If the platform is set to 'Any CPU' I receive a BadImageFormatException on the load of the Interop.<name>.dll. As for the x64 version, I cannot even get the project to build. I receive the tlbimp error: TlbImp : error TI0000: A single valid machine type compatible with the input type library must be specified. Has anyone seen this issue? EDIT: I've done a lot more digging into this issue and think this may be a Visual Studio bug. I have a clean solution. I bring in my COM assembly with language agnostic 'Any CPU' selected. The process architecture of the resulting Interop DLL is x86 rather than MSIL. May have to make the Interop by hand for now to get this to work. If anyone has another suggestion let me know.

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• .NET Remoting Exception not handled Client-Side

  - by DanJo519

  I checked the rest of the remoting questions, and this specific case did not seem to be addressed. I have a .NET Remoting server/client set up. On the server side I have an object with a method that can throw an exception, and a client which will try to call that method. Server: public bool MyEquals(Guid myGuid, string a, string b) { if (CheckAuthentication(myGuid)) { logger.Debug("Request for \"" + a + "\".Equals(\"" + b + "\")"); return a.Equals(b); } else { throw new AuthenticationException(UserRegistryService.USER_NOT_REGISTERED_EXCEPTION_TEXT); } } Client: try { bool result = RemotedObject.MyEquals(myGuid, "cat", "dog"); } catch (Services.Exceptions.AuthenticationException e) { Console.WriteLine("You do not have permission to execute that action"); } When I call MyEquals with a Guid which causes CheckAuthentication to return false, .NET tries to throw the exception and says the AuthenticationException was unhandled. This happens server side. The exception is never marshaled over to the client-side, and I cannot figure out why. All of the questions I have looked at address the issue of an exception being handled client-side, but it isn't the custom exception but a base type. In my case, I can't even get any exception to cross the remoting boundary to the client. Here is a copy of AuthenticationException. It is in the shared library between both server and client. [Serializable] public class AuthenticationException : ApplicationException, ISerializable { public AuthenticationException(string message) : base(message) { } public AuthenticationException(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base(info, context) { } #region ISerializable Members void ISerializable.GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) { base.GetObjectData(info, context); } #endregion }

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• ajax redirect dillema, how to get redirect URL OR how to set properties for redirect request

  - by Anthony

  First, I'm working in Google Chrome, if that helps. Here is the behavior: I send an xhr request via jquery to a remote site (this is a chrome Extension, and I've set all of the cross-site settings...): $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType : "text/xml", url: some_url, data: some_xml, username: user, password: pass, success: function(data,status,xhr){ alert(data); }, error: function(xhr, status, error){ alert(xhr.status); } }); The URL that is being set returns a 302 (this is expected), and Chrome follows the redirect (also expected). The new URL returns a prompt for credentials, which are not being pulled from the original request, so Chrome shows a login dialog. If I put in the original credentials, I get back a response about invalid request sent (it's a valid HTTP request -- 200 -- the remote server just doesn't like one of the headers). When viewing the developer window in Chrome, there are two requests sent. The first is to the original URL with all settings set in the ajax request. The second is to the redirect URL, with a method of "GET", nothing from the "POST" field, and no credentials. I am at a loss as to what I can do. I either need to: Get the redirect URL so I can send a second request (xhr.getResponseHeader("Location") does NOT work), Have the new redirect request preserver the settings from the original request, or Get the final URL that the error came from so I can send another request. Ideally I don't want the user to have to put in their credentials a second time in this dialog box, but I'll take what I can get if I can just get the final URL.

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• jQuery.ajax call to Twitter succeeds but returns null for Firefox

  - by Zhami

  I've got code that makes a simple get request to Twitter (search) using jQuery's ajax method. The code works fine on Safari, but fails on Firefox (3.6.3). In the Firefox case, my jQuery.ajax parameters 'success' method is invoked, but the supplied data is null. (In Safari, I receive a boatload of JSON data). My ajax call is: $.ajax({ url: 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q='+searchTerm, dataType: 'json', async: true, beforeSend: function(request) { window.console.log('starting AJAX request to get Twitter data'); }, success: function(data, textStatus, request) { window.console.log('AJAX request to get Twitter succeeded: status=' + textStatus); callback(data); }, error: function(request, status, error) { window.console.log('AJAX request to get user data --> Error: ' + status); errback(request, status, error); } }); Firebug shows Response headers: Date Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:30:26 GMT Server hi Status 200 OK X-Served-From b021 X-Runtime 0.23841 Content-Type application/json; charset=utf-8 X-Served-By sjc1o024.prod.twitter.com X-Timeline-Cache-Hit Miss Cache-Control max-age=15, must-revalidate, max-age=300 Expires Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:35:26 GMT Vary Accept-Encoding X-Varnish 1827846877 Age 0 Via 1.1 varnish X-Cache-Svr sjc1o024.prod.twitter.com X-Cache MISS Content-Encoding gzip Content-Length 2126 Connection close The HTTP status is OK (200), the Conetnt-Type is properly application/json, and the Content-Length of 2126 (gzip'd) implies data came back. Yet Firebug shows the Response to be empty, and a test of the supplied data shows it o be 'null.' I am aware of a similar post on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1188976/jquery-get-function-succeeds-with-200-but-returns-no-content-in-firefox and from that would assume this problem is possibly related to cross-domain security, but... I know there are many JS widgets and whatnots that ajax get data from Twitter. Is there something I need to enable to allow this?

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• Binary serialization/de-serialization in C++ and C#

  - by 6pack kid

  Hello. I am working on a distributed application which has two components. One is written in standard C++ (not managed C++) and the other one is written in C#. Both are communicating via a message bus. I have a situation in which I need to pass objects from C++ to C# application and for this I need to serialize those objects in C++ and de-serialize them in C# (something like marshaling/un-marshaling in .NET). I need to perform this serialization in binary and not in XML (due to performance reasons). I have used Boost.Serialization to do this when both ends were implemented in C++ but now that I have a .NET application on one end, Boost.Serialization is not a viable solution. I am looking for a solution that allows me to perform (de)serialization across C++ and .NET boundary i.e., cross platform binary serialization. I know I can implement the (de)serialization code in a C++ dll and use P/Invoke in the .NET application, but I want to keep that as a last resort. Also, I want to know if I use some standard like gzip, will that be efficient? Are there any other alternatives to gzip? What are the pros/cons of them? Thanks

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• How to allow to allow admins to edit my app's config files without UAC elevation?

  - by Justin Grant

  My company produces a cross-platform server application which loads its configuration from user-editable configuration files. On Windows, config file ACLs are locked down by our Setup program to allow reading by all users but restrict editing to Administrators and Local System only. Unfortunately, on Windows Server 2008, even local administrators no longer have admin privileges (because of UAC) unless they're running an elevated app. This has caused complaints from users who cannot use their favorite text editor to open and save config files changes-- they can open the files (since anyone can read) but can't save. Anyone have recommendations for what we can do (if anything) in our app's Setup to make editing easier for admins on Windows Server 2008? Related questions: if a Windows Server 2008 admin wants to edit an admins-only config file, how does he normally do it? Is he forced to use a text editor which is smart enough to auto-elevate when elevation is needed, like Windows Explorer does in response to access denied errors? Does he launch the editor from an elevated command-prompt window? Something else?

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• HTML5 video (mp4 and ogv) problems in Safari and Firefox - but Chrome is all good

  - by qryss

  Hi folks, I have the following code: <video width="640" height="360" controls id="video-player" poster="/movies/poster.png"> <source src="/movies/640x360.m4v" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"'> <source src="/movies/640x360.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"'> </video> I'm using Rails (Mongrel in development and Mongrel+Apache in production). Chrome (Mac and Win) can play either file (tested by one then the other source tags) whether locally or from my production servers. Safari (Mac and Win) can play the mp4 file fine locally but not from production. Firefox 3.6 won't play the video in either OS. I just get a grey cross in the middle of the video player area. I've made sure that both Mongrel and Apache in each case have the right MIME types set. From Chrome's results I know there is nothing inherently wrong with my video files or the way the files are being asked for or delivered. Anyone got any clues? Or even a clue as to how to diagnose the problem? For Firefox I looked at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_audio_and_video_in_Firefox where it refers to an 'error' event and an 'error' attribute. It seems the 'error' event is thrown pretty well straightaway and at that time there is no error attribute. Very helpful... :( Help enormously appreciated! Thanks in advance... Chris

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• Client-Server Networking Between PHP Client and Java Server

  - by Muhammad Yasir

  Hi there, I have a university project which is already 99% completed. It consists of two parts-website (PHP) and desktop (Java). People have their accounts on the website and they wish to query different information regarding their accounts. They send an SMS which is received by desktop application which queries database of website (MySQL) and sends the reply accordingly. This part is working superbly. The problem is that some times website wishes to instruct the desktop application to send a specific SMS to a particular number. Apparently there seems no way other than putting all the load to the DB server... This is how I made it work. Website puts SMS jobs in a specific table. Java application polls this table again and again and if it finds a job, it executes it. Even this part is working correctly but unfortunately it is not acceptable by my university to poll the DB like this. :( The other approach I could think of is to use client-server one. I tried making Java server and its PHP client. So that whenever an SMS is to be sent, the website opens a socket connection to desktop application and sends two strings (cell # and SMS message). Unfortunately I am unable to do this. I was successfully to make a Java server which works fine when connected by a Java client, similarly my PHP client connects correctly to a PHP server, but when I try to cross them, they start hating each other... PHP shows no error but Java gives StreamCorruptedException when it tries to read header of input stream. Could someone please tell what I can try to make PHP client and Java server work together? Or if the said purpose can be achieved by another means, how? Regards, Yasir

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• QFileDialog filter from mime-types

  - by Mathias

  I want the filter in a QFileDialog to match all audio file types supported by Phonon on the platform in question. 1 - However I am not able to find a way in Qt to use mime types in a filter. How can I do that? 2 - Or how can I find the corresponding file extensions for the mimetypes manually? The solution should be Qt based, or at least be cross platform and supported everywhere Qt is. Following is a short code describing my problem: #include <QApplication> #include <QFileDialog> #include <QStringList> #include <phonon/backendcapabilities.h> QString mime_to_ext(QString mime) { // WHAT TO REALLY DO ?? // NEEDLESS TO SAY; THIS IS WRONG... return mime.split("/").back().split('-').back(); } int main(int argc, char **argv) { QApplication app(argc, argv); QStringList p_audio_exts; QStringList p_mime_types = Phonon::BackendCapabilities::availableMimeTypes(); for(QStringList::iterator i = p_mime_types.begin(), ie = p_mime_types.end(); i != ie; i++) { if((*i).startsWith("audio")) p_audio_exts << mime_to_ext(*i); } QString filter = QString("All Files(*)"); if(!p_audio_exts.isEmpty()) { QString p_audio_filter = QString("Audio Files (*.%1)").arg(p_audio_exts.join(" *.")); filter = QString("%1;;%2").arg(p_audio_filter).arg(filter); } QFileDialog dialog(NULL, "Open Audio File", QString::null, filter); dialog.exec(); }

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• Time flies like an arrow demo in WinForms

  - by Benjol

  Looking at the Reactive Extensions for javascript demo on Jeff Van Gogh's blog, I thought I'd give it a try in C#/Winforms, but it doesn't seem to work so well. I just threw this into the constructor of a form (with the Rx framework installed and referenced): Observable.Context = SynchronizationContext.Current; var mousemove = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var message = "Time flies like an arrow".ToCharArray(); for(int i = 0; i < message.Length; i++) { var l = new Label() { Text = message[i].ToString(), AutoSize = true, TextAlign = ContentAlignment.MiddleCenter }; int closure = i; mousemove .Delay(closure * 150) .Subscribe(e => { l.Left = e.EventArgs.X + closure * 15 + 10; l.Top = e.EventArgs.Y; //Debug.WriteLine(l.Text); }); Controls.Add(l); } When I move the mouse, the letters seem to get moved in a random order, and if I uncomment the Debug line, I see multiple events for the same letter... Any ideas? I've tried Throttle, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Am I just asking too much of WinForms to move all those labels around? (Cross posted on Rx Forum)

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• Understanding the Silverlight Dispatcher

  - by Matt

  I had a Invalid Cross Thread access issue, but a little research and I managed to fix it by using the Dispatcher. Now in my app I have objects with lazy loading. I'd make an Async call using WCF and as usual I use the Dispatcher to update my objects DataContext, however it didn't work for this scenario. I did however find a solution here. Here's what I don't understand. In my UserControl I have code to call an Toggle method on my object. The call to this method is within a Dispatcher like so. Dispatcher.BeginInvoke( () => _CurrentPin.ToggleInfoPanel() ); As I mentioned before this was not enough to satisfy Silverlight. I had to make another Dispatcher call within my object. My object is NOT a UIElement, but a simple class that handles all its own loading/saving. So the problem was fixed by calling Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke( () => dataContext.Detail = detail ); within my class. Why did I have to call the Dispatcher twice to achieve this? Shouldn't a high-level call be enough? Is there a difference between the Deployment.Current.Dispatcher and the Dispatcher in a UIElement?

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