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• Java Spotlight Episode 88: HTML 5 and JavaFX 2 with Gerrit Grunwalt

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Interview with Gerrit Grundwalt on HTML 5 and JavaFX 2. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel is Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Java FX 2.1.1 Documentation updated on the docs.oracle.com/javafx website. Lightview: JavaFX 2 real-time visualizer for Glassfish JavaFX Programmatic POJO Expression Bindings (Part 1 & 2) The Enterprise Side of JavaFX - Leverage the power of FX Markup Language to define the UI for enterprise applications Events June 26-28, Jazoon, Zurich, Switzerland Jun 27, Houston JUG July 5, Java Forum, Stuttgart, Germany Jul 13-14, IndicThreads, Delhi July 30-August 1, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Feature InterviewGerrit Grunwald is working as a software engineer at Canoo Engineering AG (Basel, Switzerland). He is responsible for visualizations of all kinds. His technical interests include Java desktop development and specifically the subareas - JavaFX, Java Swing and HTML5 controls.He's a decent frequent blogger (http://www.harmonic-code.org), founder and leader of the Java User Group in Muenster (Germany), where he's also living. He has been involved in the IT industry since 1996, when he began to study physics at the University of Applied Sciences Muenster (Germany). Mail Bag What’s Cool Tab Sweep

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• LASTDATE dates arguments and upcoming events #dax #tabular #powerpivot

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Recently I had to write a DAX formula containing a LASTDATE within the logical condition of a FILTER: I found that its behavior was not the one I expected and I further investigated. At the end, I wrote my findings in this article on SQLBI, which can be applied to any Time Intelligence function with a <dates> argument.The key point is that when you write LASTDATE( table[column] )in reality you obtain something like LASTDATE( CALCULATETABLE( VALUES( table[column] ) ) )which converts an existing row context into a filter context.Thus, if you have something like FILTER( table, table[column] = LASTDATE( table[column] ) the FILTER will return all the rows of table, whereas you probably want to use FILTER( table, table[column] = LASTDATE( VALUES( table[column] ) ) )so that the existing filter context before executing FILTER is used to get the result from VALUES( table[column] ), avoiding the automatic expansion that would include a CALCULATETABLE that would hide the existing filter context.If after reading the article you want to get more insights, read the Jeffrey Wang's post here.In these days I'm speaking at SQLRally Nordic 2012 in Copenhagen and I will be in Cologne (Germany) next week for a SSAS Tabular Workshop, whereas Alberto will teach the same workshop in Amsterdam one week later. Both workshops still have seats available and the Amsterdam's one is still in early bird discount until October 3rd!Then, in November I expect to meet many blog readers at PASS Summit 2012 in Seattle and I hope to find the time to write other article on interesting things on Tabular and PowerPivot. Stay tuned!

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• Got that Friday feeling?

  - by Rebecca Amos

  Saturday is just around the corner, and we’re all starting to wrap up for the weekend. If you’re the DBA that ‘Friday feeling’ might be as much about checking and preparing your SQL Servers for the next two days, as about looking forward to spending time with friends and family. Whether you’re double-checking your disaster recovery strategy, or know that it’s your turn to be on-call this weekend, it’s likely you’re preparing for the worst, just in case. The fact that you’re making these checks, and caring about both your servers and your users, means that you might be an exceptional DBA. You’re already putting in that extra effort to make other people’s lives easier. So why not take some time for your professional development and enter the Exceptional DBA Awards? If you’re looking for some inspiration for your entry, download our Judges’ Top Tips poster for advice on what the judges are looking for from this year’s entrants. Not only will you be boosting your professional development, but you could win full conference registration for the 2011 PASS Summit in Seattle (where the awards ceremony will take place), four nights' hotel accommodation, and a copy of Red Gate’s SQL DBA Bundle. So take some time out for yourself this weekend and get started on your entry: www.exceptionaldba.com

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• Improved Customer Experience, but at what Cost?

  - by Tony Berk

  We can all probably agree that improving your customers' experience is a good thing. But a key question many people are asking is will it help your organization and, in particular, what are the financial benefits?That's a good question, especially when companies ARE experiencing phenomenal return on investment (ROI). Of course, there are many factors that impact ROI or other measures of success, but we'd like to share some success stories as examples of customer experience in action and delivering positive results. If you would like to learn more about the economics of customer experience, see Brian Curran's presentation at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit last month. In this series of blog posts, we'll share actual customer stories. Today's example is Dell, which uses Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) and Siebel CRM as part of their customer experience portfolio to better understand their customers' needs and wants and provide consistent interactions. Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with Siebel, but RTD may be new to many of you. RTD is a complete decision management solution that delivers real-time decisions and recommendations and automatically renders decisions within a business process to create tailored messaging for every customer interaction.What does that mean? In the video below, Dell describes how customer experience is important not just for one interaction channel, but across all "vehicles." RTD is helping Dell understand customer behavior and communicate with the customer in a more relevant manner, across all communication  or interaction channels including sales and service call centers, email marketing and online. Dell continues to expand use of RTD because the benefits are showing up in sales, service and marketing results including 19% increase in close rates, faster issue resolution and 40% improvement in revenue per click in email marketing. Click here, to learn more about Oracle Customer Experience and stay tuned for more customer spotlights.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• Mohsen Agsen on C++

  - by raccoon_tim

  As I already blogged a while back, native code has been on the lips of many since TechEd 2011. Microsoft seems very committed to actually putting the language to use again after all these years of radio silence. Regarding this I urge you all guys to watch this video interview of Mohsen Agsen about C++ Today and Tomorrow http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mohsen-Agsen-C-Today-and-Tomorrow on Channel 9. What I find very inspiring about this interview is that Microsoft has a number of internal projects where they are using C++ and they really understand the value of C++ as a highly performant programming language. He also talks about combining managed code, scripted code and native code to get the most out of each of them. This is something that we are doing a lot in the game industry, since we recognize the need for performant platform code with an easy to write scripting layer on top of that. This is something I intend to blog about in the near future, so stay tuned! Another great thing that I bumped into recently is C++ AMP that was announced at this year’s AMD Fusion Developer Summit. I would recommend watching Herb Sutter’s keynote on the subject at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/AFDS-Keynote-Herb-Sutter-Heterogeneous-Computing-and-C-AMP.

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• Web Developer - How to enhance my skillset?

  - by atif089

  First of all pardon my English. I am not a native English speaker I have been a Web Developer for the past 4 years. In these 4 years I have spent my time on the internet to learn things. My current skillset comprises of HTML CSS PHP MySQL jQuery (I would not say js and rather say jQuery because I am good at using jQuery and bad with plain javascript.) The above things seemed like an easier part of my life as I quickly learned them. But now I would really like to enhance my skillset and I am pretty confused which way to move ahead considering that I have to learn things using the web and references on my own. Design My first option is towards design. Shall I get started with design and start using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Flex. Designing along with my previous skills looks like a money maker to me. As both are co-related to each other when web design is considered. And its easier to learn the first 2 and I hope I can get tutorials for the last 2 as well. Marketing A lot of my existing clients asked me if I do SEO. So this looked as a good field to me as well. I cannot estimate the scope of SEO but I assume it has a long future. Since I am business minded as well and there are a lot of tutorials around, should I start with SEO, SEM, Social Media, PPC or whatever it consists of. Software Development The complex plight and hardest thing (perhaps) but the easiest way to find a decent job in my location. If I go for software development what platform should be that I should be ideally going after? Should it be C# for windows development, or ASP.NET (once again enhances my skill set), J2EE (there are a lot of jobs for J2EE developers here) or plain C and C++. Also I think it is difficult to learn software languages right from Hello World, using internet? I have no clue how I learned PHP but I am sort of a pro now, but these other languages seems like a disaster to me? I cant figure out the reason if its because PHP is easier or there was a lot of tutorials around for PHP. Anyways is it also possible to learn software development right from Hello World using the web? Database / Server (Linux) / Network Administration Seems like a job with a decent pay but less number of jobs and a bit harder to learn online. (not sure) What should be the right track I should move ahead. P.S - Age is not a constraint for me as I am between 20-21, and I come from an IT background. I know quite little basics about C (upto structures) C++ (upto objects, I was not able to understand templates) Core Java (some basics and OOP concept) RDBMS Visual Basic 6 (used to do this long back) UNIX (a bunch of commands like who, finger, chmod, ls and a bit of #bash) Or is there anything else that I left out? I need you guys to please give me a feedback and the reason why I should select that field.

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• Seeking advice on tools and technology for my new game [closed]

  - by k.k. slider

  I'm a C# developer who has been programming a game in my spare time using XNA and Visual Studio. The game's logic is mostly done and I've completed a prototype that has most of the functionality of (what I envision to be) the final game. However, having heard about the uncertain future and (possibly) limited audience for XNA games, I'm looking to switch platforms... but I don't know what technology would best suit my needs. Below are some specifics about my game and what exactly I'm looking for, if you're interested: The game is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG (strategy game) for two players. It is a basic sprite and tile based game with animations and sound. 3D capabilities are not necessary. I'd like to allow players to compete with others online, and have a basic ranking/matchmaking system. I will probably need something that can interact with a server and a database (the game is turn-based and has no RNG, so cheating would be easy to detect even if most computation is done client-side and minimal data is sent to the server). Ideally, I would be able to release an early version of the game and have people give feedback as I develop additional features (similar to Minecraft). I'd prefer to have a way to release periodic updates to the game instead of releasing an absolute final product. To reach the widest possible audience, I'd prefer technology that allows me to release on PC, Android, iOS, and (maybe) Mac. This is a game with simple mouse inputs which can fit on a mobile touch screen. The game should be monetizable. If I find success with this game, then I may consider becoming a full-time indie game developer. I have several other game ideas and have learned quite a bit from my first attempt at game development. My first thought was an F2P/microtransaction model, but I'm open to other suggestions. Language isn't a primary concern of mine, since I have a decent amount of experience using several languages to program large projects. I'm willing to spend money (e.g. on a developer's license), but the more expensive it gets, the more hesitant I am to use it. I've looked into the following solutions... there are a LOT of tools out there... if anyone has experience with any of these and would like to recommend/reject any of them, it would be helpful. C#/.NET (XNA/MonoGame/SDL/SlimDX/Xamarin/ExEn/ANX?) HTML5/JS (AppMobi/PhoneGap/Marmalade/FlashCanvas/Cordova/libRocket?) Python (Pyglet/Pygame/Kivy?) Java (JavaFX/libGDX?) Unity/Construct 2/Cocos2D/NME/Corona/other game creation software? I'd like something that can do 2D and isn't limited by being too high-level. Other languages (Lua/LOVE? Moai?) Thanks for answering this rather long and tedious question...

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• SQL Saturday #220 Atlanta May 2013!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  If you love SQL Server training and are near the Atlanta area, or just love us so much you're willing to travel here, please come join us for: SQL SATURDAY #220! The main event is Saturday, May 18.  The event is free, with a $10.00 lunch fee.  The main page has more details here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/220/eventhome.aspx We are also offering pre-conference sessions on Friday, May 17, by 5 world-renowned presenters: Denny Cherry: SQL Server Security Register! Site Twitter Adam Machanic: Surfing the Multicore Wave: Processors, Parallelism, and Performance Register! Site Twitter Stacia Misner: Languages of BI Register! Site Twitter Bill Pearson: Practical Self-Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel Register! Site Twitter Eddie Wuerch: The DBA Skills Upgrade Toolkit Register! Site Twitter         We have an early bird registration price of $119 until noon EST Friday, March 22.  After that the price goes to $149, a STEAL when you compare it to the PASS Summit price. :) Please click on the links to register and for more information.  You can also follow the hash tag #SQLSatATL on Twitter for more news about this event. Can't wait to see you all there!

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• Mapping Your Customer Experience Journey

  - by Michael Hylton

  For those who attended today’s Oracle Customer Experience Summit keynote you heard from Brian Curran talk about the strategies and best practices to implement customer experience (CX) in your organization.  He spoke about how this evolving journey begins by understanding six steps to transform your business and put your customers front and center.  Here are those key six steps: What are the strategic business objectives in your company? What are your operational objectives and KPIs necessary to measure a CX project? Build an income statement and create “what if” scenarios and see how changes impact your business’ bottom line.  Explore what keeps you from getting to your own goals for your business. Define the business objectives and opportunities you want to meet? Understand the trends and accelerators in the market?  What factors are going on in the market affect that impact your business?  Social?  Mobile?  Cloud?  Just to name a few.  Many of these trends may signal a change in the way people think about your business. What approach will you take to solve these issues?  Understand who your customer is.  How do you need to adapt your business to build relevant, personalized customer experiences. What technologies can you implement to address CX?  Does technology help you solve your problem? A great way to begin your customer experience journey is a concept called journey mapping, one of the most powerful and deceptively simple tools for unlocking CX innovation at your organization. Here is where you can learn more about how you can bring this concept into your business to drive great customer experiences.

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• The long road to bug-free software

  - by Tony Davis

  The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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• Twitter Tuesday - Top 10 @ArchBeat Tweets - June 3-9, 2014

  - by OTN ArchBeat

  The Top 10 tweets from @OTNArchBeat for the last seven days. RT @DBAKevlar: #EM12c rel4 is out! Woohoo!! Jun 3, 2014 at 10:36 AM Top 10 Arch Community Articles for May 2014 >> props to @markrittman @kevin_mcginley @porushh et al Jun 4, 2014 at 12:52 PM Architecture of Analytics: @markrittman @kevin_mcginley >> Free OTN Virtual Tech Summit - July 9 Jun 4, 2014 at 09:13 AM My Top 10 Tweets - May 27 - June 2 #ADF #Essbase #FusionApps #Goldengate #Kscope14 #WebLogic. Jun 3, 2014 at 10:27 AM Starting and Stopping a #JavaEE Environment when using Oracle #WebLogic | Rene van Wijk #oracleace Jun 5, 2014 at 11:00 AM Video: #KScope14 Preview: @DebraLilley never stops moving, never stops learning. Jun 3, 2014 at 11:19 AM The OTNArchBeat Daily is out! Stories via @oraclebase Jun 9, 2014 at 01:47 PM Where did my MDB concurrency go? | Eric Gross #weblogic Jun 9, 2014 at 08:48 AM Exalogic Tech tips and code samples from A-Team architect Andrew Hopkinson Jun 6, 2014 at 11:47 AM The OTNArchBeat Daily is out! Stories via @KentGraziano @DBAKevlar @dbasolved Jun 3, 2014 at 01:48 PM adf, essbase,

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• Improved Customer Experience, but at what Cost? See the DELL Computer experience with RTD

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  We can all probably agree that improving your customers' experience is a good thing. But a key question many people are asking is will it help your organization and, in particular, what are the financial benefits? That's a good question, especially when companies ARE experiencing phenomenal return on investment (ROI). Of course, there are many factors that impact ROI or other measures of success, but we'd like to share some success stories as examples of customer experience in action and delivering positive results. If you would like to learn more about the economics of customer experience, see Brian Curran's presentation at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit last month. In this series of blog posts, we'll share actual customer stories. Today's example is Dell, which uses Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) and Siebel CRM as part of their customer experience portfolio to better understand their customers' needs and wants and provide consistent interactions. Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with Siebel, but RTD may be new to many of you. RTD is a complete decision management solution that delivers real-time decisions and recommendations and automatically renders decisions within a business process to create tailored messaging for every customer interaction. What does that mean? In the video below, Dell describes how customer experience is important not just for one interaction channel, but across all "vehicles." RTD is helping Dell understand customer behavior and communicate with the customer in a more relevant manner, across all communication  or interaction channels including sales and service call centers, email marketing and online. Dell continues to expand use of RTD because the benefits are showing up in sales, service and marketing results including 19% increase in close rates, faster issue resolution and 40% improvement in revenue per click in email marketing. Video link By Tony Berk on Nov 15, 2012

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• The long road to bug-free software

  - by Tony Davis

  The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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• The HTML5 doctype is not triggering standards mode in IE8

  - by El Guapo

  i work for a company where all our sites currently use the XHTML 1.0 transitional doctype (yes i know it is very old school). I want to change them all to use the HTML5 doctype seeing as it is backwards compatible. One of the reasons why i want to make the switch is because in IE8 if someone has the developer tools installed then the old XHTML doctype switches the browser into compatibility mode and renders the page as IE7. From reading up on it i was led to believe that the HTML5 doctype will set any page to render in standards mode, but this is not happening when i test it on our staging server it still flips into IE7 rendering mode. The weird thing is if i save the page with HTML5 doctype locally and open it, it is rendering in IE8 standards mode. There must be something else causing it to drop into compatibility IE7 rendering. Any ideas what this could be? Below is the head of the test page i have been looking at: <!DOCTYPE html > <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"> <head> <title>Burton - Mens Clothing - Mens Fashion - Burton Menswear</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="description" content="Burton is one of the UK's leading men's clothing &amp; fashion retailers, with a range of men's clothing designed to make you look &amp; feel good. Find formal &amp; casual clothes &amp; accessories for men online at Burton menswear"/> <meta name="keywords" content="menswear, clothes for men, clothing for men, men clothes, men's fashion, men's wear, men's clothing online, men's clothes online, men's clothes shop, burton men's, burton menswear, burton uk, burton"/> <script type="text/javascript">document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].className = 'js';</script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/wcsstore/ConsumerDirectStorefrontAssetStore/images/colors/color2/v3/css/screen.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/wcsstore/ConsumerDirectStorefrontAssetStore/images/colors/color2/v3/css/print.css" media="print"/> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/wcsstore/ConsumerDirectStorefrontAssetStore/images/colors/color2/v3/css/brand.css" /> <!--[if lt IE 8]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/wcsstore/ConsumerDirectStorefrontAssetStore/images/colors/color2/v3/css/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection"> <![endif]--> <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/favicon.ico" /> <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="burton.co.uk Search" href="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/burton-search.xml"/> <!-- Start Summit Tag --> <script type="text/javascript"> var __stormJs = "t1.stormiq.com/dcv4/jslib/3286_D92B7532_4A18_46A8_864A_5FDF1DF25844.js"; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://eu.burton-menswear.com/javascript/track.js"></script> <!-- End Summit Tag --> <!-- Start QuBit Tag --> <script src=//d3c3cq33003psk.cloudfront.net/opentag-31935-42109.js async defer></script> <!-- End QuBit Tag --> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://reviews.br.wcstage.arcadiagroup.ltd.uk/bvstaging/static/6028-en_gb/bazaarvoice.css" ></link> </head>

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• What's a good way to teach my son to program Java

  - by Software Monkey

  OK, so I've read through various posts about teaching beginner's to program, and there were some helpful things I will look at more closely. But what I want to know is whether there are any effective tools out there to teach a kid Java specifically? I want to teach him Java specifically because (a) with my strong background in C I feel that's too complex, (b) Java is the other language I know extremely well and therefore I can assist meaningfully without needing to teach myself a new but (to me) useless language, and (c) I feel that managed languages are the future, and lastly (d) Java is one of the simplest of all the languages I know well (aside from basic). I learned in basic, and I am open to teaching that first, but I am unaware of a decent free basic shell for Windows (though I haven't really searched, yet since it's not my first choice), and would anyway want to progress quickly to Java. My son is 8, so that's a couple of years earlier than I started - but he has expressed an interest in learning to program (possibly because I work from home a lot and he sees me programming all the time). If no-one can suggest a tool designed for this purpose, I will probably start him off with text/console based apps to teach the basics, and then progress to GUI building. Oh, one last thing, I am not a fan of IDE's (old school text editor type), so I would not be put off at all by a system that has him typing real code, and would likely prefer that to a toy drag/drop system. EDIT: Just to clarify; I really am specifically after ways to teach him Java; there are already a good many posts with good answers for other language alternatives - but that's not what I am looking for here. EDIT: What about Java frameworks for 2D video games - can anyone recommend any of them from personal experience? I like the idea of him starting with the mechanics in place (main game loop, scoring, etc) and adding the specifics for a game of his own imagining - that's what I did, though for me it was basic on a Commodore VIC-20 and a Sinclair ZX-81.

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• Advice for last year college graduates

  - by Tomh

  Hey guys, I know there are many "advice" questions around this site. But I wanted to to narrow mine down to last year college students, in my case my last year as Master student in computer science. So far is a list of things I've done during my time in college (which I can recommend others to do aswell): Code a lot I've written several hobby projects, had part time jobs, entered the Imagine cup from Microsoft, took programming extensive courses and did freelance gigs. Read a lot I've bought most top books from the recommended book topics here, to be honest I have not read them all. learn different languages I've tried several languages including Haskell, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Prolog, C#, PHP, JS, AS3 and possibly some more I forgot. Tried to start a blog Joel recommends to learn how to write, I tried starting a couple of blogs to improve upon this, I gave up on all instances after writing about three posts. It was just not my thing... Have a portfolio of launched projects/programs I'm busy with this, have a couple of finished, working projects I worked on to show to people. So this is my last year. Is there anything else you can recommend a last year college student to do before hitting the job market? Personally I'm tempted to spend my time on the following: Practice algorithm design Learn and memorize the usage of the low level API's of your favorite language Polish your portfolio Why? Because those first two will make sure you pass the majority of the interviews, here in Holland (I could be wrong). I rather not spend my time on those first two points, but I have to be realistic and thats just my experience on what kind of questions you'll get when you apply. The third point is my hope that I won't have to answer questions about the amount of standard types in c# for example if they can see I get projects done and launched. But I'm still graduating, so I don't know anything :), and many of you might be hiring grads on a recent base and could tell me and other interested people what you wish that the recent grads you interviewed would have done before they applied.

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• [NSLocale currentLocale] always returns "en_US" not user's current language

  - by Prairiedogg

  I'm in the processes of internationalizing an iPhone app - I need to make programmatic changes to certain views based on what the user's current locale is. I'm going nuts because no matter what the language preference on the iPhone simulator or actual hardware are, locale always evaluates to "en_US": NSString *locale = [[NSLocale currentLocale] localeIdentifier]; NSLog(@"current locale: %@", locale); The crazy thing is that the rest of the application behaves as expected. The correct strings are selected from the Localization.strings file and used in the interface, and the correct .xib files for the selected locale are used. I have also tried the following, to no avail and with the same result: NSString *locale = [[NSLocale autoupdatingCurrentLocale] localeIdentifier]; NSLog(@"current locale: %@", locale); Is there something simple I'm missing? A preference or an import perhaps? Update: As Darren's answer suggests, the preference I'm looking for is not in NSLocale, rather it is here: NSUserDefaults* defs = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]; NSArray* languages = [defs objectForKey:@"AppleLanguages"]; NSString* preferredLang = [languages objectAtIndex:0]; NSLog(@"preferredLang: %@", preferredLang);

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• How to create this MongoMapper custom data type?

  - by Kapslok

  I'm trying to create a custom MongoMapper data type in RoR 2.3.5 called Translatable: class Translatable < String def initialize(translation, culture="en") end def languages end def has_translation(culture)? end def self.to_mongo(value) end def self.from_mongo(value) end end I want to be able to use it like this: class Page include MongoMapper::Document key :title, Translatable, :required => true key :content, String end Then implement like this: p = Page.new p.title = "Hello" p.title(:fr) = "Bonjour" p.title(:es) = "Hola" p.content = "Some content here" p.save p = Page.first p.languages => [:en, :fr, :es] p.has_translation(:fr) => true en = p.title => "Hello" en = p.title(:en) => "Hello" fr = p.title(:fr) => "Bonjour" es = p.title(:es) => "Hola" In mongoDB I imagine the information would be stored like: { "_id" : ObjectId("4b98cd7803bca46ca6000002"), "title" : { "en" : "Hello", "fr" : "Bonjour", "es" : "Hola" }, "content" : "Some content here" } So Page.title is a string that defaults to English (:en) when culture is not specified. I would really appreciate any help.

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• Ruby on rails generates tests for you. Do those give a false sense of a safety net?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Disclaimer: I have not used RoR, and I have not generated tests. But, I will still dare to post this question. Quality Assurance is theoretically impossible to get 100% right in general (Undecidable problem ;), and it is hard in practice. So many developers do not understand that writing good automated tests is an art, and it is hard. When I hear that RoR generates the tests for you, I get very skeptical. It cannot be that easy. Testing is a general concept; it applies across languages. So does the concept of code contracts, it is similar for languages that support it. Code contracts do not generate themselves. The programmer must add the requirements and the promises manually, after doing some thinking about the algorithm / function. If a human gets it wrong, then the tools will propagate the error. Similarly with testing - it takes human judgement about what should happen. Tests do not write themselves, and we are far from the day when a business analyst can just have a conversation with a computer and tell it informally what the requirements are and have the computer do all the work. There is no magic ... how can RoR generate good tests for you? Please shed some light on this. Opinions are ok, for this is a community wiki. Thanks!

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• Is VB Really Case Insensitive?

  - by Otaku

  I'm not trying to start an argument here, but for whatever reason it's typically stated that VB is case insensitive and C languages aren't (and somehow that is a good thing). But here's my question: Where exactly is VB case insensitive? When I type... Dim ss As String Dim SS As String ...into the VS2008 IDE the second one has a warning of "Local variable 'SS' is already declared in the current block". In VBA VBE, it doesn't immediately kick an error, but rather just auto-corrects the case. Am I missing something here with this argument that VB is not case sensitive? (Also, if you know or care to answer, why would that be a bad thing?) EDIT: Why am I even asking this question? I've used VB in many of it's dialects for years now, sometimes as a hobbyist, sometimes for small business-related programs in a workgroup. As of the last 6 months I've been working on a big project, much bigger than I anticipated. Much of the sample source code out there is in C#. I don't have any burning desire to learn C#, but if there are things I'm missing out on that C# offers that VB doesn't (an opposite would be VB.NET offers XML Literals), then I'd like to know more about that feature. So in this case, it's often argued that C languages are case sensitive and that's good and VB is case insensitive and that is bad. I'd like to know A) how exactly is VB case insensitive because every single example in the code editor becomes case sensititive (meaning case gets corrected) whether I want it or not and B) is this compelling enough for me to consider moving to C# if VB.NET case is somehow limiting what I could do with code?

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• Why are floating point values so prolific?

  - by Kibbee

  So, title says it all. Why are floating point values so prolific in computer programming. Due to problems like rounding errors, and not being able to even accurately represent numbers such as 0.1, I really can't see how they got as far as they did. I understand that the computation is faster with floating point numbers, however, I can think of only a few cases that they actually the right data type would be using. If you sat back and think about every time you used a floating point value, how many times did you say, well, some error would be ok, as long as the result was a few microseconds faster. It really makes me think because Jeff was talking about NP completeness, and how heuristics give an answer that is kind of right. And well, computers shouldn't do that. They should give you the answer that is correct. Yet we see floating point values used in many applications where they are completely not valid. What really bugs me, isn't that floating point exists, but that in many languages, there isn't even a viable alternative, non-floating point, decimal value. A lot of programmers when doing financial applications have to fall back to storing the number of cents in an integer field. Which brings with it all kinds of other problems. Why do floats continue to be so prolific, even though they can't represent the real answer, and we expect computers to be accurate? [EDIT] Just to clarify, I was talking about Base 2 floating points, and not base 10 floating points. .Net offers the Decimal data type, which is a base 10 floating point value which offers a much better representation of the numbers we deal with on a daily basis in most computer programs. I find it hard to believe that even modern languages like Java don't support base 10 floating point values, unless you want to move into the realm of things like BigDecimal, which isn't really the right answer either in a lot of situations.

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• Python for a hobbyist programmer ( a few questions)

  - by Matt

  I'm a hobbyist programmer (only in TI-Basic before now), and after much, much, much debating with myself, I've decided to learn Python. I don't have a ton of free time to teach myself a hundred languages and all programming I do will be for personal use or for distributing to people who need them, so I decided that I needed one good, strong language to be good at. My questions: Is python powerful enough to handle most things that a typical programmer might do in his off-time? I have in mind things like complex stat generators based on user input for tabletop games, making small games, automate install processes, and build interactive websites, but probably a hundred things along those lines Does python handle networking tasks fairly well? Can python source be obscufated (mispelled I think), or is it going to be open-source by nature? The reason I ask this is because if I make something cool and distribute it, I don't want some idiot script kiddie to edit his own name in and say he wrote it And how popular is python, compared to other languages. Ideally, my language would be good and useful with help found online without extreme difficulty, but not so common that every idiot with computer knows python. I like the idea of knowing a slightly obscure language. Thanks a ton for any help you can provide.

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• Advice for Windows XP Scripting, WSH versus PowerShell

  - by Greg Graham

  After much experience scripting in the Unix/Linux open-source world, using languages such as Bourne Shell, Perl, Python, and Ruby, I now find myself needing to do some Windows XP admin scripting. It appears that the legacy environment is Windows Script Host (WSH), which can use various scripting languages, but the primary language is VBScript, and is based on COM objects. However, the future appears to be Windows PowerShell, which is based on .NET. I haven't done Basic since Applesoft in the 70s, so I'm not keen on learning VBScript, although I did learn enough to write a small script to mount network drives. If I'm going to spend time to really learn this, I'm leaning towards investing my time in the .NET PowerShell environment, if it truly is the future. I did some C# Windows Forms programming a couple of years ago, so I have some exposure to .NET, which also makes PowerShell attractive. Understanding that no one has a crystal ball to predict the future of Microsoft, I would like hear from anyone who is a PowerShell user and thinks it's worthwhile, or if there is anyone that knows of serious drawbacks to PowerShell, and recommends that I stay away from it. Update: I ended up using WSH/VBScript for a particular script that I am installing as a startup script on user's Windows XP workstations. All I have to do is copy it to their Startup folder, and I'm done. However, I only learned enough WSH to accomplish this one job. I am glad to see that PowerShell is the future, and when I have more complicated scripting tasks, I'll to turn PowerShell.

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• Django: A Result Specific Numeration for Pagination.

  - by TheLizardKing

  Simply put I want what http://www.reddit.com/ and http://news.ycombinator.com/ have to the left of every link. A numerated link starting with 1 and continuing to the next page by means of pagination. I really enjoy using generic views and their built-in pagination for Django and it seems to allow me access to these values if I was on page 3 with 2 items per page. {'MEDIA_URL': ''} {'LANGUAGES': '<<languages>>', 'LANGUAGE_BIDI': False, 'LANGUAGE_CODE': 'en-us'} {'debug': True, 'sql_queries': '<<sql_queries>>'} {'messages': [], 'perms': <django.core.context_processors.PermWrapper object at 0xadedeec>, 'user': <User: thelizardking>} {'first_on_page': 5, 'has_next': True, 'has_previous': True, 'hits': 7, 'is_paginated': True, 'last_on_page': 6, 'links_list': [<Link: Funky Town>, <Link: Apple Jax>], 'next': 4, 'page': 3, 'page_obj': <Page 3 of 4>, 'page_range': [1, 2, 3, 4], 'pages': 4, 'paginator': <django.core.paginator.Paginator object at 0xadf914c>, 'previous': 2, 'results_per_page': 2} I know there is an add filter for templates but that's as close as I think I can get and that really doesn't do what I want. Am I going to have to use a custom template filter here or is there something I am not seeing?

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