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  • MySQL forgot about automatically creating an index for a foreign key?

    - by bobo
    After running the following SQL statements, you will see that, MySQL has automatically created the non-unique index question_tag_tag_id_tag_id on the tag_id column for me after the first ALTER TABLE statement has run. But after the second ALTER TABLE statement has run, I think MySQL should also automatically create another non-unique index question_tag_question_id_question_id on the question_id column for me. But as you can see from the SHOW INDEXES statement output, it's not there. Why does MySQL forget about the second ALTER TABLE statement? By the way, since I have already created a unique index question_id_tag_id_idx used by both question_id and tag_id columns. Is creating a separate index for each of them redundant? mysql> DROP DATABASE mydatabase; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec) mysql> CREATE DATABASE mydatabase; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec) mysql> USE mydatabase; Database changed mysql> CREATE TABLE question (id BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT, html TEXT, PRIMARY KEY(id)) ENGINE = INNODB; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec) mysql> CREATE TABLE tag (id BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT, name VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, UNIQUE INDEX name_idx (name), PRIMARY KEY(id)) ENGINE = INNODB; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec) mysql> CREATE TABLE question_tag (question_id BIGINT, tag_id BIGINT, UNIQUE INDEX question_id_tag_id_idx (question_id, tag_id), PRIMARY KEY(question_id, tag_id)) ENGINE = INNODB; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql> ALTER TABLE question_tag ADD CONSTRAINT question_tag_tag_id_tag_id FOREIGN KEY (tag_id) REFERENCES tag(id); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.10 sec) Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 mysql> ALTER TABLE question_tag ADD CONSTRAINT question_tag_question_id_question_id FOREIGN KEY (question_id) REFERENCES question(id); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.13 sec) Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 mysql> SHOW INDEXES FROM question_tag; +--------------+------------+----------------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+ | Table | Non_unique | Key_name | Seq_in_index | Column_name | Collation | Cardinality | Sub_part | Packed | Null | Index_type | Comment | +--------------+------------+----------------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+ | question_tag | 0 | PRIMARY | 1 | question_id | A | 0 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | | | question_tag | 0 | PRIMARY | 2 | tag_id | A | 0 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | | | question_tag | 0 | question_id_tag_id_idx | 1 | question_id | A | 0 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | | | question_tag | 0 | question_id_tag_id_idx | 2 | tag_id | A | 0 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | | | question_tag | 1 | question_tag_tag_id_tag_id | 1 | tag_id | A | 0 | NULL | NULL | | BTREE | | +--------------+------------+----------------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+ 5 rows in set (0.01 sec) mysql>

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  • Debugging a basic OpenGL texture fail? (iphone)

    - by Ben
    Hey all, I have a very basic texture map problem in GL on iPhone, and I'm wondering what strategies there are for debugging this kind of thing. (Frankly, just staring at state machine calls and wondering if any of them is wrong or misordered is no way to live-- are there tools for this?) I have a 512x512 PNG file that I'm loading up from disk (not specially packed), creating a CGBitmapContext, then calling CGContextDrawImage to get bytes out of it. (This code is essentially stolen from an Apple sample.) I'm trying to map the texture to a "quad", with code that looks essentially like this-- all flat 2D stuff, nothing fancy: glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glTexEnvf(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_REPEAT); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_REPEAT); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); GLfloat vertices[8] = { viewRect.origin.x, viewRect.size.height, viewRect.origin.x, viewRect.origin.y, viewRect.size.width, viewRect.origin.y, viewRect.size.width, viewRect.size.height }; GLfloat texCoords[8] = { 0, 1.0, 0, 0, 1.0, 0, 1.0, 1.0 }; glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, myTextureRef); // This was previously bound to glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT , 0, vertices); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, texCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_FAN, 0, 4); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glDisable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); My supposedly textured area comes out just black. I see no debug output from the CG calls to set up the texture. glGetError reports nothing. If I simplify this code block to just draw the verts, but set up a pure color, the quad area lights up exactly as expected. If I clear the whole context immediately beforehand to red, I don't see the red-- which means something is being rendered there, but not the contents of my PNG. What could I be doing wrong? And more importantly, what are the right tools and techniques for debugging this sort of thing, because running into this kind of problem and not being able to "step through it" in a debugger in any meaningful way is a bummer. Thanks!

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  • cf3 Can't stat ... in files.copyfrom promise

    - by Xerxes
    On the client: # cf-agent -KIv ... cf3 -> Handling file existence constraints on /etc/cfengine3 cf3 -> Copy file /etc/cfengine3 from /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs check cf3 No existing connection to 172.31.69.83 is established... cf3 Set cfengine port number to 5308 = 5308 cf3 -> Connect to 172.31.69.83 = 172.31.69.83 on port 5308 cf3 LastSaw host 172.31.69.83 now cf3 Loaded /var/lib/cfengine3/ppkeys/root-172.31.69.83.pub cf3 .....................[.h.a.i.l.]................................. cf3 Strong authentication of server=172.31.69.83 connection confirmed cf3 Server returned error: Unspecified server refusal (see verbose server output) cf3 Can't stat /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs in files.copyfrom promise cf3 ?> defining promise result class Cfengine_Inputs_Updated_Failed .... cf3 ......................................................... cf3 Promise handle: cf3 Promise made by: [cf-agent.cf ] FAILED 172.31.69.83:///srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs -> localhost:///etc/cfengine3 However, on the server (172.31.69.83), there's no reason why it can't stat the directory: cyrus:/srv/cfengine/sysconf/server# ls -l /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs total 52 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2142 Sep 6 21:54 cf-agent.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 831 Sep 6 18:31 cf-execd.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4517 Sep 6 21:44 cf-serverd.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3082 Sep 6 21:44 dns.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2028 Sep 6 15:12 failsafe.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5966 Sep 6 21:44 ldap-masters.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4380 Sep 6 18:31 ldap-security.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2735 Sep 6 08:21 lib-core.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1506 Sep 6 21:45 lib-utils.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2635 Sep 6 20:27 lib-vars.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2057 Sep 3 17:46 nss.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1472 Sep 6 18:31 packages.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1257 Sep 6 18:01 pam-security.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4019 Sep 6 19:32 promises.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2808 Sep 3 17:22 site.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1670 Sep 6 18:31 sudo-security.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 831 Sep 6 18:31 sys-security.cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 890 Sep 6 18:31 sys-users.cf cyrus:/srv/cfengine/sysconf/server# I don't see anything interesting server side either when running: /usr/sbin/cf-serverd -d4 --verbose --no-fork And the following does not have any complaints: /usr/sbin/cf-promises -v Any ideas? I'm running cfengine3 on debian, v3.0.5+dfsg-1 - and the cf-agent.cf file is as follows: bundle agent Update { files: linux:: "${cf3.path[inputs]}" action => immediate, move_obstructions => "true", depth_search => Recursive, copy_from => MirrorFrom( "${cf3.host[server]}", "${cf3.path[scm-inputs]}", "true", "0400" ), classes => DefineSoftClass("Cfengine_Inputs_Updated") ; "${cf3.path[sbin]}" comment => "Setting cf3 client sbin scripts: ${cf3.path[sbin]}/", action => immediate, depth_search => Recursive, copy_from => MirrorFrom( "${cf3.host[server]}", "${cf3.path[scm-cnt-scripts]}", "false", "0555" ) ; reports: Cfengine_Inputs_Updated:: "[cf-agent.cf ] Services:CFAgent:Inputs:Updated"; Cfengine_Inputs_Updated_Failed:: "[cf-agent.cf ] FAILED ${cf3.host[server]}://${cf3.path[scm-inputs]} -> localhost://${cf3.path[inputs]}"; } I lie, there is something interesting with a little more debugging... AccessControl(/srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs) AccessControl, match(/srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs,client.com.au) encrypt request=1 Examining rule in access list (/srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs,/home/cfengine)? cf3 Host client.com.au denied access to /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs Unappending Host client.com.au denied access to /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs cf3 Access control in sync Unappending Access control in sync Transaction Send[t 59][Packed text] Attempting to send 67 bytes SendSocketStream, sent 67 cf3 From (host=client.com.au,user=root,ip=172.31.69.3) Unappending From (host=client.com.au,user=root,ip=172.31.69.3) cf3 REFUSAL of request from connecting host: (SYNCH 1283777156 STAT /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs) Unappending REFUSAL of request from connecting host: (SYNCH 1283777156 STAT /srv/cfengine/sysconf/server/inputs) RecvSocketStream(8) cf3 -> Accepting a connection I'll keep looking.

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  • mod_mono 'Service Temporarily Unavailable' issue

    - by Charlie Somerville
    I've deployed an ASP.NET web application on a Linux (Debian) server running Apache 2.2 and mod_mono 1.9 It's working well, however Mono occasionally segfaults and uses the entire CPU which causes the website to stop working and display 'Service Temporarily Unavailable' Killing mono fixes it, but obviously this isn't a good solution. I tailed the system log after this happened and I saw the following error messages from the kernel: Apr 20 01:49:37 charliesomerville kernel: [1596436.204158] mono[17909]: segfault at b645f671 ip b645f671 sp b4ffb604 error 4<6>mono[19047]: segfault at b645f66e ip b645f66e sp b4bf7604 error 4<6>mono[18017]: segfault at b645f66e ip b645f66e sp b52fe604 error 4<6>mono[19668]: segfault at b645f5e6 ip b645f5e6 sp b48f4604 error 4<6>mono[22565]: segfault at b645f674 ip b645f674 sp b45f1604 error 4<6>mono[17700]: segfault at b645f661 ip b645f661 sp b51fd604 error 4<6>mono[19596]: segfault at b645f5e6 ip b645f5e6 sp b49f5604 error 4 Apr 20 01:49:37 charliesomerville kernel: [1596436.208172] mono[23219]: segfault at b645f66e ip b645f66e sp b44f0604 error 4 At the end of Apache's error.log are the following errors: [Tue Apr 20 03:10:23 2010] [error] (70014)End of file found: read_data failed [Tue Apr 20 03:10:23 2010] [error] Command stream corrupted, last command was 1 [Tue Apr 20 03:10:23 2010] [error] Command stream corrupted, last command was 1 [Tue Apr 20 03:10:23 2010] [error] Command stream corrupted, last command was 1 System.ArgumentNullException: null key Parameter name: key at System.Collections.Hashtable.get_Item (System.Object key) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationCallbacks.GetSerializationCallbacks (System.Type t) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.ObjectManager.RaiseOnDeserializingEvent (System.Object obj) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.ReadObjectContent (System.IO.BinaryReader reader, System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.TypeMetadata metadata, Int64 objectId, System.Object& objectInstance, System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo& info) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.ReadObjectInstance (System.IO.BinaryReader reader, Boolean isRuntimeObject, Boolean hasTypeInfo, System.Int64& objectId, System.Object& value, System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo& info) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.ReadObject (BinaryElement element, System.IO.BinaryReader reader, System.Int64& objectId, System.Object& value, System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo& info) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.ReadNextObject (System.IO.BinaryReader reader) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.ReadObjectGraph (System.IO.BinaryReader reader, Boolean readHeaders, System.Object& result, System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.Header[]& headers) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.NoCheckDeserialize (System.IO.Stream serializationStream, System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.HeaderHandler handler) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Deserialize (System.IO.Stream serializationStream) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.CADSerializer.DeserializeObject (System.IO.MemoryStream mem) [0x00000] at System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingServices.GetDomainProxy (System.AppDomain domain) [0x00000] at System.AppDomain.CreateDomain (System.String friendlyName, System.Security.Policy.Evidence securityInfo, System.AppDomainSetup info) [0x00000] at System.Web.Hosting.ApplicationHost.CreateApplicationHost (System.Type hostType, System.String virtualDir, System.String physicalDir) [0x00000] at Mono.WebServer.VPathToHost.CreateHost (Mono.WebServer.ApplicationServer server, Mono.WebServer.WebSource webSource) [0x00000] at Mono.WebServer.ApplicationServer.GetApplicationForPath (System.String vhost, Int32 port, System.String path, Boolean defaultToRoot) [0x00000] at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Mono.WebServer.ApplicationServer:GetApplicationForPath (string,int,string,bool) at Mono.WebServer.ModMonoWorker.GetOrCreateApplication (System.String vhost, Int32 port, System.String filepath, System.String virt) [0x00000] at Mono.WebServer.ModMonoWorker.InnerRun (System.Object state) [0x00000] at Mono.WebServer.ModMonoWorker.Run (System.Object state) [0x00000] [Tue Apr 20 03:10:26 2010] [error] (70014)End of file found: read_data failed [Tue Apr 20 03:10:26 2010] [error] Command stream corrupted, last command was -1 Along with the above errors, Apache's error.log is packed with hundreds (if not thousands) of the following error: Maximum number (20) of concurrent mod_mono requests to /tmp/mod_mono_dashboard_default_2.lock reached. Droping request. At the moment, I'm thinking there might be something wrong with configuration here (it's basically running on out-of-the-box config)

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  • The Windows Browser Ballot Screen Offers Web Browser Choice to European Users

    - by Matthew Guay
    Since March, our friends across the pond in Europe get to decide which browser they want to install with their Windows OS. Today we thought we would take a look at the ballot choices, some are well known, and others you may not have heard of. Windows users in European countries should start seeing the so called “Browser Ballot Screen” after installing the Windows Update KB976002 (link below). The browser ballot offers a dozen different browsers, including some you’ve likely never heard of.  They each have some unique features, and are all free, and here we take a quick look at each of them. Internet Explorer 8 Internet Explorer is the world’s most used web browser, as it’s bundled with Windows. It also includes several unique features, including Accelerators that make it easy to search or find a map of a location, and InPrivate filtering to directly control what sites can get personal information.  Additionally, it offers great integration with Windows Touch and the new taskbar in Windows 7. IE 8 runs on Windows XP and newer, and is bundled with Windows 7. Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Firefox is the most popular browser other than Internet Explorer.  It is the modern descendant of Netscape, and is loved by web developers for its adherence to web standards, openness, and expandability.  It offers thousands of Add-ons and themes to let you customize it to fit your preferences. The most recent version has added Personas, which are quick, lightweight themes to let you personalize the look your browser. It’s open source, and runs on all modern versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Of course thanks to Asian Angel, our resident browser expert, you can check out several articles regarding this popular IE alternative. Google Chrome 4 Google Chrome has gained an impressive amount of market share during its short time in the market. It offers a minimalistic interface and fast speeds with intensive web applications. The address bar is also a search bar, so you can enter a search query or web address and quickly get the information you need. With version 4 you can add a growing number of extensions, personalize it with a variety of stylish themes, and automatically translate foreign websites into your own language. Opera 10.50 Although Opera has been around for over a decade, relatively few users have used it. With the new 10.50 release, Opera has many unique features packed in a sleek UI. It integrates great with Aero and the Windows 7 taskbar, and lets you preview the contents of your websites in the tab bar. It also includes Opera Unite, a small personal web server to make file sharing easy, Opera Turbo to speed up your internet when the connection is slow, and Opera Link to keep all your copies of Opera in sync. It’s a popular browser on many mobile devices, and version 10.50 has a lot of enhancements. Apple Safari 4 Safari is the default browser in Mac OS X, and starting with version 3 it has been available for Windows as well. It’s based on Webkit, the popular new rendering engine that provides great speed and standards compatibility.  Safari 4 lets you browse your browsing history in a unique Coverflow interface, and shows your Top Sites in a fancy, 3D interface.  It’s also great for viewing mobile websites for the iPhone and other mobile devices through Developer Tools. Flock 2.5 Based on the popular Firefox core, Flock brings a multitude of social features to your browsing experience. You can view the latest YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, update your favorite social network, and keep up with your webmail thanks to It’s integration with a wide variety of services. You can even post to your blog through the integrated blog editor. If your time online is mostly spent in social services, this may be a browser you want to check out. Maxthon 2.5 Maxthon is a unique browser that builds on Internet Explorer to bring more features with IE’s rendering. Formerly known as MyIE2, Maxthon was popular for bringing tabbed browsing with IE rendering during the days of IE 6.  Today Maxthon supports a wide range of plugins and skins, so you can customize it however you want. It includes mouse gestures, a web accelerator to speed up pokey internet connections, a content blocker to remove unwanted content from sites, an online account to backup your favorites, and a nice download manager. Avant Browser Another nice browser based on Internet Explorer, Avant brings a wide variety of features in a nice brushed-metal interface. It includes an integrated AutoFill for forms, mouse gestures, customizable skins, and privacy protection features. It also includes a Flash blocker that will only load flash in webpages when you select them. You can also integrate Avant with an online account to store your bookmarks, feeds, settings and passwords online. Sleipnir Sleipnir is a customizable browser meant for advance users that is quite popular in Japan. It’s built on the Trident engine and virtually every aspect of is customizable unlike Internet Explorer.   FlashPeak SlimBrowser SlimBrowser from FlashPeak incorporates a lot of features like Popup Killer, Auto Login, site filtering and more. It’s based on Internet Explorer but offers a lot more customizable options out of the box.   K-meleon This basic browser is light on system resources and based on the Gecko engine. It’s been in development for years on SourceForge, and if you like to tweak virtually any aspect of your browser, this might be a good choice for you.   GreenBrowser GreenBrowser is based on Internet Explorer and is available in several languages. It has a large amount of features out of the box and is light on system resources.   Conclusion The European Union asked for more choices in the web browser they could choose from when installing Windows, and with the Browser Ballot Screen, they certainly get a variety to choose from.  If you’ve tried out some of the lesser known browsers, or think some important ones have been left out, leave a comment and tell us about it. Learn More About the Browser Ballot Screen and Download Alternatives to IE Windows Update KB976002 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Default Browser on Ubuntu From the Command LineQuick Tip: Empty Internet Explorer 7 Cache when Browser is ClosedView Hidden Files and Folders in Ubuntu File BrowserSet the Default Browser and Email Client in UbuntuAccess Multiple Browsers from Firefox with Browser View Plus TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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  • How Mary Meeker’s Latest Findings May Make You Re-Imagine Commerce

    - by Brenna Johnson-Oracle
    0 0 1 954 5439 Endeca Technologies 45 12 6381 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Today, Mary Meeker released her highly anticipated annual “Internet Trends” presentation for 2014. All 164 slides are jam-packed with pretty much everything you need to know about the state of the Internet. And as luck would have it, Oracle is staying ahead of these trends (but we’ll talk about that later). There were a few surprises, some stats to solidify what you likely already know, and Meeker’s novel observations about where we are all going. What interested me the most is not only how people are engaging in their personal lives, but how they engage with brands. As you could probably predict, Internet usage growth is slowing while tablet user and mobile data traffic growth continue their meteoric rise around the globe, with tremendous growth in underpenetrated markets like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. Now hold those the “Internet is dead” comments. Keep in mind there’s still plenty of room to grow, and a multiscreen model is Meeker’s vision for our future. Despite 1.5x YOY growth for mobile traffic, mobile still only makes up about 23% of all traffic today. With tablet shipments easily outpacing figures for PCs even at their height (in 2007), mobile will only continue on it’s path, but won’t be everything to everyone. Mobile won’t replace every touchpoint, it’s just created our shorter attention spans and demand for simpler, more personal experiences. As Meeker points out TVs, tablets, PCs, and smartphones are used for different activities at present, but lines will blur (for example, 84% of smartphones owners use their device while watching TV). Day-to-day activities are being re-imagining through simple, beautiful user experiences. It seems like every day I discover a new way a brand/site/app made the most mundane or mounting task enjoyable and frictionless – and I’m not alone. Meeker points out the evolution of how we do everything from how we communicate, get information, use money, meet someone, get places, order a meal, and consume media is all done through new user interfaces that make day-to-day tasks simpler. This movement has caused just about everyone’s patience for a poor UX to take a nosedive. And it’s not just the digital user experience, technology is making a lot of people’s offline lives easier, and less expensive. Today 47% of online shopping utilizes free shipping— nearly half. And Meeker predicts same day local delivery will be the “next big thing” (and you can take a guess on who will own that). Content, Community and Commerce creates the “Internet Trifecta.” Meeker pointed out that when content, communities and commerce occur in a single experience it’s embraced by consumers, which translates to big dollars for brands. The magic happens when consumers can get inspired, research, and buy in a single experience. As the buying cycle has changed and touchpoints (Web, mobile, social, store) are no longer tied to “roles” or steps in the customer journey, brands must make all experiences (content and commerce) available in a single, adaptable experience. (We at Oracle Commerce have a lot to say on this topic – stay tuned!) And in what Meeker calls the “biggest re-imagination of all:” consumers enabled with smartphones and sensors are creating troves of findable and sharable data, which she says is in the early stages, by growing rapidly. She notes that transparency and patterns of consumers with this hardware (FYI - there are up to 10 sensors embedded in smartphones now) has created a Big Data treasure chest to be mined to improve business and the life of the consumer. The opportunities are endless. So what does it all mean for a company doing business online? Start thinking about how you can: Re-imagine your experience. Not your online experience and your mobile experience and your social experience – your overall experience. When consumers can research, buy, and advocate from anywhere (and their attention spans are at an all-time low) channels don’t exist. Enable simple and beautiful interactions informed by all of the online and offline data you leverage across your enterprise. Ethically leverage the endless supply of data (user generated content, clicks, purchases, in-store behavior, social activity) to make experiences more beautiful, more accurate, and more personalized (not to mention, more lucrative for you). Re-imagine content and commerce. Content and commerce must co-exist in a single destination where shoppers can get inspired, explore, research, share, and purchase in a collective experience. Think of how you can deliver an experience where all types of experiences (brand stories and commerce) adapt to every customer need. (Look for more on this topic coming soon). Re-imagine your reach. Look to Meeker’s findings to see how the global appetite for digital experiences is growing, but under-served in many places (i.e.: India, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Philippines, etc.). Growing your online business to a new geography doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch or having an entirely new team manage the new endeavor. Expand using what you’ve already built in a multisite framework, with global language support. And of course, make sure it’s optimized for mobile! Re-imagine the possible. After every Meeker report, I’m always left with the thought “we are just at the beginning.” Everyday there is more data, more possibilities, more online consumers, and more opportunities to use new latest technology to get closer to your customers and be more successful. There’s a lot going on in our Product Development and Product Innovations groups to automate innovation for our customers, so that they can continue to stay ahead of these trends, without disrupting their business. Check out a recent interview with our Innovations Team on some of these new possibilities. Staying on track despite the seemingly endless possibilities out there is the hard part. Prioritizing where you will focus based on your unique brand promise, customer and goals is what you do best. To learn how Oracle Commerce can help your business achieve your goals check out oracle.com/commerce. Check out Meeker’s entire report here.

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  • TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

    - by BuckWoody
    Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs.  So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts.  Preparing for Travel   When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need.  Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled.  For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there.  I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around.  Packing  Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the  clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take.  For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide.  For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard.  If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag.  Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water.  At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else.  I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change.  Working While Away  While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well.  I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it.  So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • JMaghreb 2012 Trip Report

    - by arungupta
    JMaghreb is the inaugural Java conference organized by Morocco JUG. It is the biggest Java conference in Maghreb (5 countries in North West Africa). Oracle was the exclusive platinum sponsor with several others. The registrations had to be closed at 1412 for the free conference and several folks were already on the waiting list. Rabat with 531 registrations and Casablanca with 426 were the top cities. Some statistics ... 850+ attendees over 2 days, 500+ every day 30 sessions were delivered by 18 speakers from 10 different countries 10 sessions in French and 20 in English 6 of the speakers spoke at JavaOne 2012 8 will be at Devoxx Attendees from 5 different countries and 57 cities in Morocco 40.9% qualified them as professional and rest as students Topics ranged from HTML5, Java EE 7, ADF, JavaFX, MySQL, JCP, Vaadin, Android, Community, JCP Java EE 6 hands-on lab was sold out within 7 minutes and JavaFX in 12 minutes I gave the keynote along with Simon Ritter which was basically a recap of the Strategy and Technical keynotes presented at JavaOne 2012. An informal survey during the keynote showed the following numbers: 25% using NetBeans, 90% on Eclipse, 3 on JDeveloper, 1 on IntelliJ About 10 subscribers to free online Java magazine. This digital magazine is a comprehensive source of information for everything Java - subscribe for free!! About 10-15% using Java SE 7. Download JDK 7 and get started today! Even JDK 8 builds have been available for a while now. My second talk explained the core concepts of WebSocket and how JSR 356 is providing a standard API to build WebSocket-driven applications in Java EE 7. TOTD #183 explains how you can easily get started with WebSocket in GlassFish 4. The complete slide deck is available: Next day started with a community keynote by Sonya Barry. Some of us live the life of JCP, JSR, EG, EC, RI, etc every day, but not every body is. To address that, Sonya prepared an excellent introductory presentation providing an explanation of these terms and how java.net infrastructure supports Java development. The registration for the lab showed there is a definite demand for these technologies in this part of the world. I delivered the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 120 attendees. Most of the attendees were able to progress and follow the lab instructions. Some of the attendees did not have a laptop but were taking extensive notes on paper notepads. Several attendees were already using Java EE 6 in their projects and typically they are the ones asking deep dive questions. Also gave out three copies of my recently released Java EE 6 Pocket Guide and new GlassFish t-shirts. Definitely feels happy to coach ~120 more Java developers learn standards-based enterprise Java programming. I also participated in a JCP BoF along with Werner, Sonya, and Badr. Adotp-a-JSR, java.net infrastructure, how to file a JSR, what is an RI, and other similar topics were discussed in a candid manner. You can follow @JMaghrebConf or check out their facebook page. java.net published a timely conversation with Badr El Houari - the fearless leader of the Morocco JUG team. Did you know that Morocco JUG stood for JCP EC elections (ADD LINK) ? Even though they did not get elected but did fairly well. Now some sample tweets from #JMaghreb ... #JMaghreb is over. Impressive for a first edition! Thanks @badrelhouari and all the @MoroccoJUG team ! Since you @speakjava : System.out.println("Thank you so much dear Tech Evangelist ! The JavaFX was pretty amazing !!! "); #JMaghreb @YounesVendetta @arungupta @JMaghrebConf Right ! hope he will be back to morocco again and again .. :) @Alji_ @arungupta @JMaghrebConf That dude is a genius ;) Put it on your wall :p @arungupta rocking Java EE 6 at @JMaghrebConf #Java #JavaEE #JMaghreb http://t.co/isl0Iq5p @sonyabarry you are an awesome speaker ;-) #JMaghreb rich more than 550 attendees in day one. Expecting more tomorrow! ongratulations @badrelhouari the organisation was great! The talks were pretty interesting, and the turnout was surprising at #JMaghreb! #JMaghreb is truly awesome... The speakers are unbelievable ! #JavaFX... Just amazing #JMaghreb Charmed by the talk about #javaFX ( nodes architecture, MVC, Lazy loading, binding... ) gotta start using it intead of SWT. #JMaghreb JavaFX is killing JFreeChart. It supports Charts a lot of kind of them ... #JMaghreb The british man is back #JMaghreb I do like him!! #JMaghreb @arungupta rocking @JMaghrebConf. pic.twitter.com/CNohA3PE @arungupta Great talk about the future of Java EE (JEE 7 & JEE 8) Thank you. #JMaghreb JEE7 more mooore power , leeess less code !! #JMaghreb They are simplifying the existing API for Java Message Service 2.0 #JMaghreb good to know , the more the code is simplified the better ! The Glassdoor guy #arungupta is doing it RIGHT ! #JMaghreb Great presentation of The Future of the Java Platform: Java EE 7, Java SE 8 & Beyond #jMaghreb @arungupta is a great Guy apparently #JMaghreb On a personal front, the hotel (Soiftel Jardin des Roses) was pretty nice and the location was perfect. There was a 1.8 mile loop dirt trail right next to it so I managed to squeeze some runs before my upcoming marathon. Also enjoyed some great Moroccan cuisine - Couscous, Tajine, mint tea, and moroccan salad. Visit to Kasbah of the Udayas, Hassan II (one of the tallest mosque in the world), and eating in a restaurant in a kasbah are some of the exciting local experiences. Now some pictures from the event (and around the city) ... And the complete album: Many thanks to Badr, Faisal, and rest of the team for organizing a great conference. They are already thinking about how to improve the content, logisitics, and flow for the next year. I'm certainly looking forward to JMaghreb 2.0 :-)

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  • Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

    Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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  • Using Table-Valued Parameters in SQL Server

    - by Jesse
    I work with stored procedures in SQL Server pretty frequently and have often found myself with a need to pass in a list of values at run-time. Quite often this list contains a set of ids on which the stored procedure needs to operate the size and contents of which are not known at design time. In the past I’ve taken the collection of ids (which are usually integers), converted them to a string representation where each value is separated by a comma and passed that string into a VARCHAR parameter of a stored procedure. The body of the stored procedure would then need to parse that string into a table variable which could be easily consumed with set-based logic within the rest of the stored procedure. This approach works pretty well but the VARCHAR variable has always felt like an un-wanted “middle man” in this scenario. Of course, I could use a BULK INSERT operation to load the list of ids into a temporary table that the stored procedure could use, but that approach seems heavy-handed in situations where the list of values is usually going to contain only a few dozen values. Fortunately SQL Server 2008 introduced the concept of table-valued parameters which effectively eliminates the need for the clumsy middle man VARCHAR parameter. Example: Customer Transaction Summary Report Let’s say we have a report that can summarize the the transactions that we’ve conducted with customers over a period of time. The report returns a pretty simple dataset containing one row per customer with some key metrics about how much business that customer has conducted over the date range for which the report is being run. Sometimes the report is run for a single customer, sometimes it’s run for all customers, and sometimes it’s run for a handful of customers (i.e. a salesman runs it for the customers that fall into his sales territory). This report can be invoked from a website on-demand, or it can be scheduled for periodic delivery to certain users via SQL Server Reporting Services. Because the report can be created from different places and the query to generate the report is complex it’s been packed into a stored procedure that accepts three parameters: @startDate – The beginning of the date range for which the report should be run. @endDate – The end of the date range for which the report should be run. @customerIds – The customer Ids for which the report should be run. Obviously, the @startDate and @endDate parameters are DATETIME variables. The @customerIds parameter, however, needs to contain a list of the identity values (primary key) from the Customers table representing the customers that were selected for this particular run of the report. In prior versions of SQL Server we might have made this parameter a VARCHAR variable, but with SQL Server 2008 we can make it into a table-valued parameter. Defining And Using The Table Type In order to use a table-valued parameter, we first need to tell SQL Server about what the table will look like. We do this by creating a user defined type. For the purposes of this stored procedure we need a very simple type to model a table variable with a single integer column. We can create a generic type called ‘IntegerListTableType’ like this: CREATE TYPE IntegerListTableType AS TABLE (Value INT NOT NULL) Once defined, we can use this new type to define the @customerIds parameter in the signature of our stored procedure. The parameter list for the stored procedure definition might look like: 1: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary 2: @starDate datetime, 3: @endDate datetime, 4: @customerIds IntegerListTableTableType READONLY   Note the ‘READONLY’ statement following the declaration of the @customerIds parameter. SQL Server requires any table-valued parameter be marked as ‘READONLY’ and no DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) statements can be performed on a table-valued parameter within the routine in which it’s used. Aside from the DML restriction, however, you can do pretty much anything with a table-valued parameter as you could with a normal TABLE variable. With the user defined type and stored procedure defined as above, we could invoke like this: 1: DECLARE @cusomterIdList IntegerListTableType 2: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (1) 3: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (2) 4: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (3) 5:  6: EXEC dbo.rpt_CustomerTransationSummary 7: @startDate = '2012-05-01', 8: @endDate = '2012-06-01' 9: @customerIds = @customerIdList   Note that we can simply declare a variable of type ‘IntegerListTableType’ just like any other normal variable and insert values into it just like a TABLE variable. We could also populate the variable with a SELECT … INTO or INSERT … SELECT statement if desired. Using The Table-Valued Parameter With ADO .NET Invoking a stored procedure with a table-valued parameter from ADO .NET is as simple as building a DataTable and passing it in as the Value of a SqlParameter. Here’s some example code for how we would construct the SqlParameter for the @customerIds parameter in our stored procedure: 1: var customerIdsParameter = new SqlParameter(); 2: customerIdParameter.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input; 3: customerIdParameter.TypeName = "IntegerListTableType"; 4: customerIdParameter.Value = selectedCustomerIds.ToIntegerListDataTable("Value");   All we’re doing here is new’ing up an instance of SqlParameter, setting the pamameters direction, specifying the name of the User Defined Type that this parameter uses, and setting its value. We’re assuming here that we have an IEnumerable<int> variable called ‘selectedCustomerIds’ containing all of the customer Ids for which the report should be run. The ‘ToIntegerListDataTable’ method is an extension method of the IEnumerable<int> type that looks like this: 1: public static DataTable ToIntegerListDataTable(this IEnumerable<int> intValues, string columnName) 2: { 3: var intergerListDataTable = new DataTable(); 4: intergerListDataTable.Columns.Add(columnName); 5: foreach(var intValue in intValues) 6: { 7: var nextRow = intergerListDataTable.NewRow(); 8: nextRow[columnName] = intValue; 9: intergerListDataTable.Rows.Add(nextRow); 10: } 11:  12: return intergerListDataTable; 13: }   Since the ‘IntegerListTableType’ has a single int column called ‘Value’, we pass that in for the ‘columnName’ parameter to the extension method. The method creates a new single-columned DataTable using the provided column name then iterates over the items in the IEnumerable<int> instance adding one row for each value. We can then use this SqlParameter instance when invoking the stored procedure just like we would use any other parameter. Advanced Functionality Using passing a list of integers into a stored procedure is a very simple usage scenario for the table-valued parameters feature, but I’ve found that it covers the majority of situations where I’ve needed to pass a collection of data for use in a query at run-time. I should note that BULK INSERT feature still makes sense for passing large amounts of data to SQL Server for processing. MSDN seems to suggest that 1000 rows of data is the tipping point where the overhead of a BULK INSERT operation can pay dividends. I should also note here that table-valued parameters can be used to deal with more complex data structures than single-columned tables of integers. A User Defined Type that backs a table-valued parameter can use things like identities and computed columns. That said, using some of these more advanced features might require the use the SqlDataRecord and SqlMetaData classes instead of a simple DataTable. Erland Sommarskog has a great article on his website that describes when and how to use these classes for table-valued parameters. What About Reporting Services? Earlier in the post I referenced the fact that our example stored procedure would be called from both a web application and a SQL Server Reporting Services report. Unfortunately, using table-valued parameters from SSRS reports can be a bit tricky and warrants its own blog post which I’ll be putting together and posting sometime in the near future.

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  • Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

    - by Roger Hart
    Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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  • Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5

    Recently, I started again to learn for various Microsoft certifications. First candidate on my way to MSCD: Web Applications is the Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. Motivation to go for a Microsoft exam I guess, this is quite personal but let me briefly describe my intentions to go that exam. First, I'm doing web development since the 1990's. Working with HTML, CSS and Javascript is happening almost daily in my workspace. And honestly, I do not only do 'pure' web development but already integrated several HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend UIs into an existing desktop application (written in Visual FoxPro) inclusive two-way communication and data exchange. Hm, might be an interesting topic for another blog article here... Second, this exam has a very interesting aspect which is listed at the bottom of the exam's details: Credit Toward Certification When you pass Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, you complete the requirements for the following certification(s): Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3: counts as credit toward the following certification(s): MCSD: Web Applications MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5 So, passing one single exam will earn you specialist certification straight-forward, and opens the path to higher levels of certifications. Preparations and learning path Well, due to a newsletter from Microsoft Learning (MSL) I caught interest in picking up the circumstances and learning materials for this particular exam. As of writing this article there is a promotional / voucher code available which enables you to register for this exam for free! Simply register yourself with or log into your existing account at Prometric, choose the exam for a testing facility near to you and enter the voucher code HTMLJMP (available through 31.03.2013 or while supplies last). Hurry up, there are restrictions... As stated above, I'm already very familiar with web development and the programming flavours involved into this. But of course, it is always good to freshen up your knowledge and reflect on yourself. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort to attract any kind of developers into the 'App Development'. Whether it is for the Windows 8 Store or the Windows Phone 8 Store, doesn't really matter. They simply need more apps. This demand for skilled developers also comes with a nice side-effect: Lots and lots of material to study. During the first couple of hours, I could easily gather high quality preparation material - again for free! Following is just a small list of starting points. If you have more resources, please drop me a message in the comment section, and I'll be glad to update this article accordingly. Developing HTML5 Apps Jump Start This is an accelerated jump start video course on development of HTML5 Apps for Windows 8. There are six modules that are split into two video sessions per module. Very informative and intense course material. This is packed stuff taken from an official preparation course for exam 70-480. Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 Jump Start Again, an accelerated preparation video course on Windows 8 Apps. There are six modules with two video sessions each which will catapult you to your exam. This is also related to preps for exam 70-481. Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Kraig Brockschmidt delves into the ups and downs of Windows 8 App development over 800+ pages. Great eBook to read, study, and to practice the samples - best of all, it's for free. codeSHOW() This is a Windows 8 HTML/JS project with the express goal of demonstrating simple development concepts for the Windows 8 platform. Code, code and more code... absolutely great stuff to study and practice. Microsoft Virtual Academy I already wrote about the MVA in a previous article. Well, if you haven't registered yourself yet, now is the time. The list is not complete for sure, but this might keep you busy for at least one or even two weeks to go through the material. Please don't hesitate to add more resources in the comment section. Right now, I'm already through all videos once, and digging my way through chapter 4 of Kraig's book. Additional material - Pluralsight Apart from those free online resources, I also following some courses from the excellent library of Pluralsight. They already have their own section for Windows 8 development, but of course, you get companion material about HTML5, CSS and Javascript in other sections, too. Introduction to Building Windows 8 Applications Building Windows 8 Applications with JavaScript and HTML Selling Windows 8 Apps HTML5 Fundamentals Using HTML5 and CSS3 HTML5 Advanced Topics CSS3 etc... Interesting to see that Michael Palermo provides his course material on multiple platforms. Fantastic! You might also pay a visit to his personal blog. Hm, it just came to my mind that Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight publishes so-called '24 hours Learning Paths' based on courses available in the course library. Would be interested to see a combination for Windows 8 App development using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript in the future. Recommended workspace environment Well, you might have guessed it but this requires Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 Express or another flavour, and a valid Developers License. Due to an MSDN subscription I working on VS 2012 Premium with some additional tools by Telerik. Honestly, the fastest way to get you up and running for Windows 8 App development is the source code archive of codeSHOW(). It does not only give you all source code in general but contains a couple of SDKs like Bing Maps, Microsoft Advertising, Live ID, and Telerik Windows 8 controls... for free! Hint: Get the Windows Phone 8 SDK as well. Don't worry, while you are studying the material for Windows 8 you will be able to leverage from this knowledge to development for the phone platform, too. It takes roughly one to two hours to get your workspace and learning environment, at least this was my time frame due to slow internet connection and an aged spare machine. ;-) Oh, before I forget to mention it, as soon as you're done, go quickly to the Windows Store and search for ClassBrowserPlus. You might not need it ad hoc for your development using HTML5, CSS and Javascript but I think that it is a great developer's utility that enables you to view the properties, methods and events (along with help text) for all Windows 8 classes. It's always good to look behind the scenes and to explore how it is made. Idea: Start/join a learning group The way you learn new things or intensify your knowledge in a certain technology is completely up to your personal preference. Back in my days at the university, we used to meet once or twice a week in a small quiet room to exchange our progress, questions and problems we ran into. In general, I recommend to any software craftsman to lift your butt and get out to exchange with other developers. Personally, I like this approach, as it gives you new points of view and an insight into others' own experience with certain techniques and how they managed to solve tricky issues. Just keep it relaxed and not too formal after all, and you might a have a good time away from your dull office desk. Give your machine a break, too.

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  • The Business of Winning Innovation: An Exclusive Blog Series

    - by Kerrie Foy
    "The Business of Winning Innovation” is a series of articles authored by Oracle Agile PLM experts on what it takes to make innovation a successful and lucrative competitive advantage. Our customers have proven Agile PLM applications to be enormously flexible and comprehensive, so we’ve launched this article series to showcase some of the most fascinating, value-packed use cases. In this article by Keith Colonna, we kick-off the series by taking a look at the science side of innovation within the Consumer Products industry and how PLM can help companies innovate faster, cheaper, smarter. This article will review how innovation has become the lifeline for growth within consumer products companies and how certain companies are “winning” by creating a competitive advantage for themselves by taking a more enterprise-wide,systematic approach to “innovation”.   Managing the Science of Innovation within the Consumer Products Industry By: Keith Colonna, Value Chain Solution Manager, Oracle The consumer products (CP) industry is very mature and competitive. Most companies within this industry have saturated North America (NA) with their products thus maximizing their NA growth potential. Future growth is expected to come from either expansion outside of North America and/or by way of new ideas and products. Innovation plays an integral role in both of these strategies, whether you’re innovating business processes or the products themselves, and may cause several challenges for the typical CP company, Becoming more innovative is both an art and a science. Most CP companies are very good at the art of coming up with new innovative ideas, but many struggle with perfecting the science aspect that involves the best practice processes that help companies quickly turn ideas into sellable products and services. Symptoms and Causes of Business Pain Struggles associated with the science of innovation show up in a variety of ways, like: · Establishing and storing innovative product ideas and data · Funneling these ideas to the chosen few · Time to market cycle time and on-time launch rates · Success rates, or how often the best idea gets chosen · Imperfect decision making (i.e. the ability to kill projects that are not projected to be winners) · Achieving financial goals · Return on R&D investment · Communicating internally and externally as more outsource partners are added globally · Knowing your new product pipeline and project status These challenges (and others) can be consolidated into three root causes: A lack of visibility Poor data with limited access The inability to truly collaborate enterprise-wide throughout your extended value chain Choose the Right Remedy Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are uniquely designed to help companies solve these types challenges and their root causes. However, PLM solutions can vary widely in terms of configurability, functionality, time-to-value, etc. Business leaders should evaluate PLM solution in terms of their own business drivers and long-term vision to determine the right fit. Many of these solutions are point solutions that can help you cure only one or two business pains in the short term. Others have been designed to serve other industries with different needs. Then there are those solutions that demo well but are owned by companies that are either unable or unwilling to continuously improve their solution to stay abreast of the ever changing needs of the CP industry to grow through innovation. What the Right PLM Solution Should Do for You Based on more than twenty years working in the CP industry, I recommend investing in a single solution that can help you solve all of the issues associated with the science of innovation in a totally integrated fashion. By integration I mean the (1) integration of the all of the processes associated with the development, maintenance and delivery of your product data, and (2) the integration, or harmonization of this product data with other downstream sources, like ERP, product catalogues and the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (or GDSN, which is now a CP industry requirement for doing business with most retailers). The right PLM solution should help you: Increase Revenue. A best practice PLM solution should help a company grow its revenues by consolidating product development cycle-time and helping companies get new and improved products to market sooner. PLM should also eliminate many of the root causes for a product being returned, refused and/or reclaimed (which takes away from top-line growth) by creating an enterprise-wide, collaborative, workflow-driven environment. Reduce Costs. A strong PLM solution should help shave many unnecessary costs that companies typically take for granted. Rationalizing SKU’s, components (ingredients and packaging) and suppliers is a major opportunity at most companies that PLM should help address. A natural outcome of this rationalization is lower direct material spend and a reduction of inventory. Another cost cutting opportunity comes with PLM when it helps companies avoid certain costs associated with process inefficiencies that lead to scrap, rework, excess and obsolete inventory, poor end of life administration, higher cost of quality and regulatory and increased expediting. Mitigate Risk. Risks are the hardest to quantify but can be the most costly to a company. Food safety, recalls, line shutdowns, customer dissatisfaction and, worst of all, the potential tarnishing of your brands are a few of the debilitating risks that CP companies deal with on a daily basis. These risks are so uniquely severe that they require an enterprise PLM solution specifically designed for the CP industry that safeguards product information and processes while still allowing the art of innovation to flourish. Many CP companies have already created a winning advantage by leveraging a single, best practice PLM solution to establish an enterprise-wide, systematic approach to innovation. Oracle’s Answer for the Consumer Products Industry Oracle is dedicated to solving the growth and innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process solution was originally developed with and for CP companies and is driven by a specialized development staff solely focused on maintaining and continuously improving the solution per the latest industry requirements. Agile PLM for Process helps CP companies handle all of the processes associated with managing the science of the innovation process, including: specification management, new product development/project and portfolio management, formulation optimization, supplier management, and quality and regulatory compliance to name a few. And as I mentioned earlier, integration is absolutely critical. Many Oracle CP customers, both with Oracle ERP systems and non-Oracle ERP systems, report benefits from Oracle’s Agile PLM for Process. In future articles we will explain in greater detail how both existing Oracle customers (like Gallo, Smuckers, Land-O-Lakes and Starbucks) and new Oracle customers (like ConAgra, Tyson, McDonalds and Heinz) have all realized the benefits of Agile PLM for Process and its integration to their ERP systems. More to Come Stay tuned for more articles in our blog series “The Business of Winning Innovation.” While we will also feature articles focused on other industries, look forward to more on how Agile PLM for Process addresses innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Additional topics include: Innovation Data Management (IDM), New Product Development (NPD), Product Quality Management (PQM), Menu Management,Private Label Management, and more! . Watch this video for more info about Agile PLM for Process

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  • Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

    - by Lori Lalonde
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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  • Are Chromebooks the New Netbooks, and What Does That Mean?

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Netbooks — small, cheap, slow laptops — were once very popular. They fell out of favor — people bought them because they seemed cheap and portable, but the actual experience was lackluster. Most netbooks now sit unused. Windows netbooks have vanished from stores today, but there’s a new super-cheap laptop — the Chromebook. Chromebook sales numbers are impressive, but their usage statistics tell a different story. Are Chromebooks just the new netbook? The Problem With Netbooks Netbooks seemed appealing, especially in an age before tablets and lightweight ultrabooks. You could buy a netbook for $200 or so and have a portable device that let you get on the Internet. The name “netbook” spelled that out — it was a portable device for getting on the ‘net. They weren’t really that great. The original netbook was a lightweight Asus Eee PC that ran Linux alone and had a small amount of fast flash storage. Netbooks eventually ran heavier Windows XP operating systems — Windows Vista was out, but it was just too bloated to run on netbooks. Manufacturers added slow magnetic hard drives, bloatware, and even DVD drives! They couldn’t run most Windows software very well. The build quality was poor and their keyboards were tiny and cramped. People liked the idea of a lightweight device that let them get on the Internet and loved the cheap price, but the actual experience wasn’t great. Chromebook Sales Chromebook sales numbers seem surprisingly high. NPD reported that Chromebooks were 21% of all notebooks sold in the US in 2013. If you combine laptop and tablet sales into a single statistic, Chromebooks were 9.6% of all those devices sold. That’s 2/3 as many Chromebooks sold as iPads in the US! Of Amazon’s best-selling laptop computers, two of the top three are Chromebooks. These definitely look like successful products. Unlike netbooks, Chromebooks are taking off in a big way in the education market. Many schools are buying Chromebooks for their students instead of more expensive Windows laptops. They’re easier to manage and lock down than Windows laptops, but — more importantly for cash-strapped schools — they’re very cheap. Netbooks never had this sort of momentum in schools. Chromebook Usage Statistics Here’s where the rosy picture of Chromebooks starts to become more realistic. StatCounter’s browser usage statistics show how widely used different operating systems are. For example, Windows 7 has the highest share with 35.71% of web activity in April, 2014. The chart doesn’t even show Chrome OS at all, although there is an “Other” number near the bottom. Click the Download Data link to download a CSV file and we can view more detailed information. Chrome OS only accounted for 0.38% of web usage in April, 2014. Desktop Linux, which people often shrug at, accounted for 1.52% in the same month. To its credit, Chrome OS usage has increased. Chromebooks were widely mocked back in November, 2013 when the sales numbers came out. After all, they only accounted for 0.11% of web usage globally in November, 2013! But Chrome OS numbers have been improving: Nov, 2013: 0.11% Dec, 2013: 0.22% Jan, 2014: 0.31% Feb, 2014: 0.35% Mar, 2014: 0.36% Apr, 2014: 0.38% Chrome OS is climbing, but it’s definitely still in the “Other” category. It isn’t as high as we’d expect to see it with those types of sales numbers. Chromebooks vs. Netbooks Chromebooks are more limited devices than traditional PCs. You can do quite a few things, but you have to do it all using Chrome or Chrome apps. Most people won’t be enabling developer mode and installing a Linux desktop. You don’t have access to the powerful desktop software available for Windows and even Mac OS X. On the other hand, these Chromebooks are less compromised than netbooks in many ways. They come with a lightweight operating system designed for portable, mobile devices. They don’t come packed with any bloatware, like the bloatware you’ll find on competing Windows PCs and the original netbooks. They’re cheaper because the manufacturer doesn’t have to pay for a Windows license. There’s no need for antivirus software weighing the operating system down. They’re larger than the original netbooks, with many of them being 11.6-inches instead of the original 8-inch bodies many older netbooks came with. They have larger, more comfortable keyboards and fast solid-state storage. Really, Chromebooks are what netbooks wanted to be. People didn’t buy netbooks to use typical Windows software — they just wanted a lightweight PC. Of course, for many people, the real successor to netbooks is tablets. If all you want is a portable device to throw in a bag so you can get online, maybe a tablet is better. Where Does This Leave Chromebooks? So, are Chromebooks the new netbooks? It’s a bit early to answer that question. Chromebooks are definitely not out of the competition — their sales look good and their usage share is increasing. On the other hand, Chrome OS is still pretty far behind. They’re not catching fire like tablets did. Maybe netbooks were just before their time and Chromebooks were what they were always meant to be. Just as Microsoft’s Windows XP tablets failed, Windows XP netbooks also failed. Tablets took off with a more refined operating system on better hardware years later. “Netbooks” — or Chromebooks — are now taking off with a more purpose-built operating system on better hardware, too. It’s hard to count Chromebooks out because they provide a much better experience than netbooks ever did. If you’re one of the people who wants to use old Windows desktop apps on your portable laptop, you may think netbooks were better — but most people don’t want that. But maybe people either want a full desktop PC experience or a full mobile tablet experience. Is there a place for a laptop with a keyboard that can only view websites? We’ll have to wait and see. Image Credit: Kevin Jarret on Flickr, Clive Darra on Flickr, Sean Freese on Flickr

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  • ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

    - by ToStringTheory
    One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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  • JavaOne Session Report: “50 Tips in 50 Minutes for GlassFish Fans”

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    At JavaOne 2012 on Monday, Oracle’s Engineer Chris Kasso, and Technology Evangelist Arun Gupta, presented a head-spinning session (CON4701) in which they offered 50 tips for GlassFish fans. Kasso and Gupta alternated back and forth with each presenting 10 tips at a time. An audience of about (appropriately) 50 attentive and appreciative developers was on hand in what has to be one of the most information-packed sessions ever at JavaOne!Aside: I experienced one of the quiet joys of JavaOne when, just before the session began, I spotted Java Champion and JavaOne Rock Star Adam Bien sitting nearby – Adam is someone I have been fortunate to know for many years.GlassFish is a freely available, commercially supported Java EE reference implementation. The session prioritized quantity of tips over depth of information and offered tips that are intended for both seasoned and new users, that are meant to increase the range of functional options available to GlassFish users. The focus was on lesser-known dimensions of GlassFish. Attendees were encouraged to pursue tips that contained new information for them. All 50 tips can be accessed here.Below are several examples of more elaborate tips and a final practical tip on how to get in touch with these folks. Tip #1: Using the login Command * To execute a remote command with asadmin you must provide the admin's user name and password.* The login command allows you to store the login credentials to be reused in subsequent commands.* Can be logged into multiple servers (distinguish by host and port). Example:     % asadmin --host ouch login     Enter admin user name [default: admin]>     Enter admin password>     Login information relevant to admin user name [admin]     for host [ouch] and admin port [4848] stored at     [/Users/ckasso/.asadminpass] successfully.     Make sure that this file remains protected.     Information stored in this file will be used by     asadmin commands to manage the associated domain.     Command login executed successfully.     % asadmin --host ouch list-clusters     c1 not running     Command list-clusters executed successfully.Tip #4: Using the AS_DEBUG Env Variable* Environment variable to control client side debug output* Exposes: command processing info URL used to access the command:                           http://localhost:4848/__asadmin/uptime Raw response from the server Example:   % export AS_DEBUG=true  % asadmin uptime  CLASSPATH= ./../glassfish/modules/admin-cli.jar  Commands: [uptime]  asadmin extension directory: /work/gf-3.1.2/glassfish3/glassfish/lib/asadm      ------- RAW RESPONSE  ---------   Signature-Version: 1.0   message: Up 7 mins 10 secs   milliseconds_value: 430194   keys: milliseconds   milliseconds_name: milliseconds   use-main-children-attribute: false   exit-code: SUCCESS  ------- RAW RESPONSE  ---------Tip #11: Using Password Aliases * Some resources require a password to access (e.g. DB, JMS, etc.).* The resource connector is defined in the domain.xml.Example:Suppose the DB resource you wish to access requires an entry like this in the domain.xml:     <property name="password" value="secretp@ssword"/>But company policies do not allow you to store the password in the clear.* Use password aliases to avoid storing the password in the domain.xml* Create a password alias:     % asadmin create-password-alias DB_pw_alias     Enter the alias password>     Enter the alias password again>     Command create-password-alias executed successfully.* The password is stored in domain's encrypted keystore.* Now update the password value in the domain.xml:     <property name="password" value="${ALIAS=DB_pw_alias}"/>Tip #21: How to Start GlassFish as a Service * Configuring a server to automatically start at boot can be tedious.* Each platform does it differently.* The create-service command makes this easy.   Windows: creates a Windows service Linux: /etc/init.d script Solaris: Service Management Facility (SMF) service * Must execute create-service with admin privileges.* Can be used for the DAS or instances* Try it first with the --dry-run option.* There is a (unsupported) _delete-serverExample:     # asadmin create-service domain1     The Service was created successfully. Here are the details:     Name of the service:application/GlassFish/domain1     Type of the service:Domain     Configuration location of the service:/work/gf-3.1.2.2/glassfish3/glassfish/domains     Manifest file location on the system:/var/svc/manifest/application/GlassFish/domain1_work_gf-3.1.2.2_glassfish3_glassfish_domains/Domain-service-smf.xml.     You have created the service but you need to start it yourself. Here are the most typical Solaris commands of interest:     * /usr/bin/svcs  -a | grep domain1  // status     * /usr/sbin/svcadm enable domain1 // start     * /usr/sbin/svcadm disable domain1 // stop     * /usr/sbin/svccfg delete domain1 // uninstallTip #34: Posting a Command via REST* Use wget/curl to execute commands on the DAS.Example:  Deploying an application   % curl -s -S \       -H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \       -H 'X-Requested-By: anyvalue' \       -F id=@/path/to/application.war \       -F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application* Use @ before a file name to tell curl to send the file's contents.* The force option tells GlassFish to force the deployment in case the application is already deployed.* Use wget/curl to execute commands on the DAS.Example:  Deploying an application   % curl -s -S \       -H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \       -H 'X-Requested-By: anyvalue' \       -F id=@/path/to/application.war \       -F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application* Use @ before a file name to tell curl to send the file's contents.* The force option tells GlassFish to force the deployment in case the application is already deployed.Tip #46: Upgrading to a Newer Version * Upgrade applications and configuration from an earlier version* Upgrade Tool: Side-by-side upgrade– GUI: asupgrade– CLI: asupgrade --c– What happens ?* Copies older source domain -> target domain directory* asadmin start-domain --upgrade* Update Tool and pkg: In-place upgrade– GUI: updatetool, install all Available Updates– CLI: pkg image-update– Upgrade the domain* asadmin start-domain --upgradeTip #50: How to reach us?* GlassFish Forum: http://www.java.net/forums/glassfish/glassfish* [email protected]* @glassfish* facebook.com/glassfish* youtube.com/GlassFishVideos* blogs.oracle.com/theaquariumArun Gupta acknowledged that their method of presentation was experimental and actively solicited feedback about the session. The best way to reach them is on the GlassFish user forum.In addition, check out Gupta’s new book Java EE 6 Pocket Guide.

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  • Your Day-by-Day Guide to Agile PLM at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Kerrie Foy
    This year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference is nearly here, and we’re all excited about what we have planned! With five days of activities and customer presenters from market leaders and top innovators like The Coca-Cola Company, Starbucks, JDSU, Facebook, GlobalFoundries, and more, this is an event you don't want to miss. I've compiled this day-by-day guide to help anyone keep track of all the “Product Lifecycle Management and Product Value Chain” sessions and activities at OpenWorld 2012, September 30 – October 4 in San Francisco, California.  Monday, October 1 There are great networking activities on Sunday September 30, but PLM specific sessions start after general conference keynotes on Monday, October 1 at 10:45 a.m. at the InterContinental Hotel in room Telegraph Hill. In fact, most of our sessions this year will be held in this room, which is still close to the conference keynotes in Moscone, but just far enough away to allow some focused networking and discussions.   This first session, 10:45 – 11:45 a.m. is a joint session with the Agile and AutoVue teams, entitled “Streamline PLM Design-to-Manufacturing Processes with AutoVue Visualization Soltuions” featuring presenters from Oracle as well as joint AutoVue and Agile PLM customer GlobalFoundries. In the following 12:15 – 1:15 p.m. slot, there are two sessions to choose from, so if you have a team of representatives attending OpenWorld, you may consider splitting up to catch both of these: a) Our General Session will be held in the InterContinental Hotel Ballroom C, which will cover our complete enterprise PLM strategy, product updates, and roadmaps. It’s our pleasure to feature a customer keynote presentation from Chris Bedi, CIO, and Rajeev Sethi, Director IT Business Engagement, of JDSU. b) A focused session on integrating PLM with Engineering and Supply Chain Systems will be held on the second floor of Moscone West (next to the InterContinental) in room 2022. Join to discover how these types of integrations help companies manage common and integrated design information across all MCAD, ECAD, and software components. After a lunch break and perhaps a visit to the Demogrounds in Moscone West, select from two product roadmap sessions in the next time slot (3:15 – 4:15 p.m.): an Agile 9.3.x session located in the InterContinental’s Ballroom C, and an Agile PLM for Process session located back in the InterContinental’s Telegraph Room. Both sessions will have strong content around each product line’s latest releases, vision, and customer examples. We are very pleased to feature Daniel Soosai of Facebook in the A9 session and Vinnie D’Agostino of The Coca-Cola Company in the PLM for Process session. Afterwards, hang in there for one last session of the day from 4:45 – 5:45 p.m.; it’s an insightful discussion on leveraging Agile PLM as the Foundation for Enterprise Quality Management, and it’s sure to be one of the best. In the Telegraph Room, this session will feature Oracle experts, partner co-presenter David Bartlett from CPG Solutions, and customer co-presenter Thomas Crowe, CIO of PL Developments. Hear their experience around implementing collaborative, integrated solutions to ensure effective knowledge transfer throughout an organization, and how to perform analysis in real time to resolve product quality issues swiftly and efficiently. On Monday evening there will be plenty of industry, product, and partner dinners, so take advantage of all the networking opportunities and catch some great tunes at the 5 day Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival! Tuesday, October 2 Tuesday starts early with a special PLM Networking Brunch, sponsored by several partners, from 8:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. at the B Restaurant that sits atop Yerba Buena Gardens. You’ll have the unique opportunity to meet with like-minded industry peers and a PLM partner to discuss a topic of your choosing while enjoying a delicious meal. Registration is required, so to inquire about attending this brunch, please email Terri.Hiskey-AT-oracle.com. After wrapping up your conversations over brunch, head over to the Marriott Marquis in the Nob Hill CD room for a chance to experience the Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics solution in a Hands-On Lab, open from 10:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Experts will be there to answer your questions. Back in the InterContinental Hotel’s Telegraph room, the session on “Ideation and Requirements Management: Capturing the Voice of the Customer” begins at 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. This may be the session for you if you’re struggling with challenges like too many repositories of customer needs, requests, and ideas; limited visibility into which ideas are being advanced by customers and field resources; or if you’re unable to leverage internal expertise to expose effort and potential risks. This session will discuss how Agile PLM can help you overcome ideation challenges to deliver the right products to their targeted markets and fulfill customer desires. Next, from 1:15 – 2:15 p.m. join us for a session on Managing Profitable Innovation with Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics. If you missed the Hands-on Lab, have more questions, or simply want to be inspired by the product’s forward-thinking vision and capabilities, this is a great opportunity to meet the progressive-minded executives behind the application. After this session, it may be a good opportunity to swing by the Demogrounds in Moscone West and visit the Agile PLM demos at exhibit booths #81 for Agile PLM for Discrete Manufacturing, #70 for Agile PLM for Process, and #82 for AutoVue and Agile PLM Enterprise Visualization. Check out the related Supply Chain Management booths close by if you’re interested - here's the map. There’s always lots to see and do around the exhibit area. But don’t forget the last session of the day from 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. in Telegraph Hill on Managing Product Innovation and Compliance in Life Science Companies, a “must-see” if you’re in this industry. Launching innovative products quickly is already a high-stakes challenge, but companies in the life sciences industry face uniquely severe consequences when new products don’t perform or comply as required. In recent years, more and more regulations have become mandatory, and new ones, such as REACH, are currently going into effect for several companies. Customer presenters from pharmaceutical leader Eli Lilly will share how they’ve leveraged Agile PLM to deliver high-quality, innovative products in a fast-paced, heavily regulated market environment. Tuesday evening unwind at the Supply Chain Management Reception from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the premier boutique Roe Nightclub and Lounge, which is located about three blocks down on Howard Street (on the other side of Moscone from the InterContinental Hotel). Registration is required. Click here for the details.   Wednesday, October 3 We have another full line-up on Wednesday, so be ready for an action-packed day. We start with a session at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. in the Telegraph Room where we have a session on “PLM for Consumer Products: Building an Engine for Quality and Innovation” with featured presenters from Starbucks and partner Kalypso. This is a rare opportunity to learn directly from Starbucks how they instill quality and innovation throughout their organization, products, and processes, leveraging PLM disciplines with strong support from their partner.  If you’re not in the consumer products industry, we recommend attending another session at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West room 3005: “Eco-Enterprise Innovation Awards and the Business Case for Sustainability” featuring Jeff Henley, Oracle’s Chairman of the Board and Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer. Oracle will honor select customers with Oracle’s Eco-Enterprise Innovation award, which recognizes customers and their respective partners who rely on Oracle products to support their green business practices to reduce their environmental impact while improving business efficiencies and reducing costs. The awards presentation is followed by a panel discussion with customers and Oracle executives, who describe how these award-winning organizations are embracing environmental initiatives as a central part of their business strategy and how information technology plays a pivotal role. Next at 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. in Telegraph Hill attend our session devoted to exploring Product Lifecycle Management’s role in Software Lifecycle Management. This is a thought leadership session with Oracle experts in the field on the importance of change management, and we’ll discuss how Oracle has for years leveraged Agile PLM to develop Agile PLM. If software lifecycle management doesn’t apply to your business or you’d rather engage in some lively one-on-one discussions, we also have a “Supply Chain Meet the Experts” session in Moscone West Room 2001A. Product experts, thought leaders and executives will be on hand to discuss your questions/topics, so come prepared. This session tends to fill up fast so try to get in early. At 1:15 – 2:15 p.m. join us back in Telegraph Hill for a session focused on leveraging the Agile Product Portfolio Management application as the Product Development Master Schedule to improve efficiencies, optimize resources, and gain visibility across projects enterprise-wide to improve portfolio profitability. Customer presenters from Broadcom will explain how they’ve leveraged the product to enable a master schedule with enterprise-level, phase-gate program and project collaboration and resource optimization. Again in Telegraph Hill from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. we have an interesting session with leading semiconductor customer LSI and partner Kalypso on how LSI leveraged Agile PLM to advance from homegrown applications to complete Product Value Chain Management. That type of transition can be challenging, and LSI details how they were able to achieve their goals and the value they gained along the journey – a fascinating account for any company interested in leveraging best practices to innovate their business processes and even end products. Lastly, we’ll wrap up in Telegraph Hill from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. with a session on “Ensuring New Product Success by Achieving Excellence in New Product Introduction.” This is a cross-industry session, guaranteed to deliver insight in the often elusive practice of creating winning products, and we’re very excited about. According to IDC Manufacturing Insights analyst Joe Barkai, “Product Failures are not necessarily a result of bad ideas…they are a result of suboptimal decisions.” We’ll show you how to wire your business processes to enhance decision-making and maximize product potential. Now, quickly hit your hotel room to freshen up and then catch one of the many complimentary shuttles to the much-anticipated Oracle Customer Appreciation Event on Treasure Island. We have a very exciting show planned – check out what’s in store here. Thursday, October 4 PLM has a light schedule on Thursday this year with just one session, but this again is one of our best sessions on managing the Product Value Chain: at 11:15 a.m – 12:15 p.m.in Telegraph Hill, it’s a customer and partner driven session with Sonoco Products and Deloitte telling their story about how to achieve integrated change control by interfacing Agile PLM with Oracle E-Business Suite. Sonoco Products, a global manufacturer of consumer and industrial packaging materials, with its systems integrator, Deloitte, is doing this by implementing prebuilt integration (Oracle Design-to-Release Integration Pack for Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process and Oracle Process) to integrate Agile with Oracle Product Hub/Oracle Product Information Management and Oracle E-Business Suite. This session presents a case study of how Sonoco is leveraging this solution to improve data quality and build a framework for stronger master data governance. Even though that ends our PLM line-up at OpenWorld, there will still be many sessions and activities at the conference, so visit the Oracle OpenWorld website to review agendas and build your schedule. And of course, download and bring this guide and the latest version of the Agile PLM Focus-On Document (available soon!). San Francisco is a wonderful city to explore, and we’re glad you’re considering joining the Agile PLM team at Oracle OpenWorld!  I hope to see you there! Follow me before the conference and on site for real-time updates about #OOW12 on Twitter @Kerrie_Foy or @AgilePLM.

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  • Ingredient Substitutes while Baking

    - by Rekha
    In our normal cooking, we substitute the vegetables for the gravies we prepare. When we start baking, we look for a good recipe. At least one or two ingredient will be missing. We do not know where to substitute what to bring same output. So we finally drop the plan of baking. Again after a month, we get the interest in baking. Again one or two lack of ingredient and that’s it. We keep on doing this for months. When I was going through the cooking blogs, I came across a site with the Ingredient Substitutes for Baking: (*) is to indicate that this substitution is ideal from personal experience. Flour Substitutes ( For 1 cup of Flour) All Purpose Flour 1/2 cup white cake flour plus 1/2 cup whole wheat flour 1 cup self-rising flour (omit using salt and baking powder if the recipe calls for it since self raising flour has it already) 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons cake flour 1/2 cup (75 grams) whole wheat flour 7/8 cup (130 grams) rice flour (starch) (do not replace all of the flour with the rice flour) 7/8 cup whole wheat Bread Flour 1 cup all purpose flour 1 cup all purpose flour plus 1 teaspoon wheat gluten (*) Cake Flour Place 2 tbsp cornstarch in 1 cup and fill the rest up with All Purpose flour (*) 1 cup all purpose flour minus 2 tablespoons Pastry flour Place 2 tbsp cornstarch in 1 cup and fill the rest up with All Purpose flour Equal parts of All purpose flour plus cake flour (*) Self-rising Flour 1½ teaspoons of baking powder plus ½ teaspoon of salt plus 1 cup of all-purpose flour. Cornstarch (1 tbsp) 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon arrowroot 4 teaspoons quick-cooking tapioca 1 tablespoon potato starch or rice starch or flour Tapioca (1 tbsp) 1 – 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour Cornmeal (stone ground) polenta OR corn flour (gives baked goods a lighter texture) if using cornmeal for breading,crush corn chips in a blender until they have the consistency of cornmeal. maize meal Corn grits Sweeteners ( for Every 1 cup ) * * (HV) denotes Healthy Version for low fat or fat free substitution in Baking Light Brown Sugar 2 tablespoons molasses plus 1 cup of white sugar Dark Brown Sugar 3 tablespoons molasses plus 1 cup of white sugar Confectioner’s/Powdered Sugar Process 1 cup sugar plus 1 tablespoon cornstarch Corn Syrup 1 cup sugar plus 1/4 cup water 1 cup Golden Syrup 1 cup honey (may be little sweeter) 1 cup molasses Golden Syrup Combine two parts light corn syrup plus one part molasses 1/2 cup honey plus 1/2 cup corn syrup 1 cup maple syrup 1 cup corn syrup Honey 1- 1/4 cups sugar plus 1/4 cup water 3/4 cup maple syrup plus 1/2 cup granulated sugar 3/4 cup corn syrup plus 1/2 cup granulated sugar 3/4 cup light molasses plus 1/2 cup granulated white sugar 1 1/4 cups granulated white or brown sugar plus 1/4 cup additional liquid in recipe plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar Maple Syrup 1 cup honey,thinned with water or fruit juice like apple 3/4 cup corn syrup plus 1/4 cup butter 1 cup Brown Rice Syrup 1 cup Brown sugar (in case of cereals) 1 cup light molasses (on pancakes, cereals etc) 1 cup granulated sugar for every 3/4 cup of maple syrup and increase liquid in the recipe by 3 tbsp for every cup of sugar.If baking soda is used, decrease the amount by 1/4 teaspoon per cup of sugar substituted, since sugar is less acidic than maple syrup Molasses 1 cup honey 1 cup dark corn syrup 1 cup maple syrup 3/4 cup brown sugar warmed and dissolved in 1/4 cup of liquid ( use this if taste of molasses is important in the baked good) Cocoa Powder (Natural, Unsweetened) 3 tablespoons (20 grams) Dutch-processed cocoa plus 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar, lemon juice or white vinegar 1 ounce (30 grams) unsweetened chocolate (reduce fat in recipe by 1 tablespoon) 3 tablespoons (20 grams) carob powder Semisweet baking chocolate (1 oz) 1 oz unsweetened baking chocolate plus 1 Tbsp sugar Unsweetened baking chocolate (1 oz ) 3 Tbsp baking cocoa plus 1 Tbsp vegetable oil or melted shortening or margarine Semisweet chocolate chips (1 cup) 6 oz semisweet baking chocolate, chopped (Alternatively) For 1 cup of Semi sweet chocolate chips you can use : 6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, 7 tablespoons sugar ,1/4 cup fat (butter or oil) Leaveners and Diary * * (HV) denotes Healthy Version for low fat or fat free substitution in Baking Compressed Yeast (1 cake) 1 envelope or 2 teaspoons active dry yeast 1 packet (1/4 ounce) Active Dry yeast 1 cake fresh compressed yeast 1 tablespoon fast-rising active yeast Baking Powder (1 tsp) 1/3 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/2 cup buttermilk or plain yogurt 1/4 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/3 cup molasses. When using the substitutions that include liquid, reduce other liquid in recipe accordingly Baking Soda(1 tsp) 3 tsp Baking Powder ( and reduce the acidic ingredients in the recipe. Ex Instead of buttermilk add milk) 1 tsp potassium bicarbonate Ideal substitution – 2 tsp Baking powder and omit salt in recipe Cream of tartar (1 tsp) 1 teaspoon white vinegar 1 tsp lemon juice Notes from What’s Cooking America – If cream of tartar is used along with baking soda in a cake or cookie recipe, omit both and use baking powder instead. If it calls for baking soda and cream of tarter, just use baking powder.Normally, when cream of tartar is used in a cookie, it is used together with baking soda. The two of them combined work like double-acting baking powder. When substituting for cream of tartar, you must also substitute for the baking soda. If your recipe calls for baking soda and cream of tarter, just use baking powder. One teaspoon baking powder is equivalent to 1/4 teaspoon baking soda plus 5/8 teaspoon cream of tartar. If there is additional baking soda that does not fit into the equation, simply add it to the batter. Buttermilk (1 cup) 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar (white or cider) plus enough milk to make 1 cup (let stand 5-10 minutes) 1 cup plain or low fat yogurt 1 cup sour cream 1 cup water plus 1/4 cup buttermilk powder 1 cup milk plus 1 1/2 – 1 3/4 teaspoons cream of tartar Plain Yogurt (1 cup) 1 cup sour cream 1 cup buttermilk 1 cup crème fraiche 1 cup heavy whipping cream (35% butterfat) plus 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice Whole Milk (1 cup) 1 cup fat free milk plus 1 tbsp unsaturated Oil like canola (HV) 1 cup low fat milk (HV) Heavy Cream (1 cup) 3/4 cup milk plus 1/3 cup melted butter.(whipping wont work) Sour Cream (1 cup) (pls refer also Substitutes for Fats in Baking below) 7/8 cup buttermilk or sour milk plus 3 tablespoons butter. 1 cup thickened yogurt plus 1 teaspoon baking soda. 3/4 cup sour milk plus 1/3 cup butter. 3/4 cup buttermilk plus 1/3 cup butter. Cooked sauces: 1 cup yogurt plus 1 tablespoon flour plus 2 teaspoons water. Cooked sauces: 1 cup evaporated milk plus 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. Let stand 5 minutes to thicken. Dips: 1 cup yogurt (drain through a cheesecloth-lined sieve for 30 minutes in the refrigerator for a thicker texture). Dips: 1 cup cottage cheese plus 1/4 cup yogurt or buttermilk, briefly whirled in a blender. Dips: 6 ounces cream cheese plus 3 tablespoons milk,briefly whirled in a blender. Lower fat: 1 cup low-fat cottage cheese plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice plus 2 tablespoons skim milk, whipped until smooth in a blender. Lower fat: 1 can chilled evaporated milk whipped with 1 teaspoon lemon juice. 1 cup plain yogurt plus 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 cup plain nonfat yogurt Substitutes for Fats in Baking * * (HV) denoted Healthy Version for low fat or fat free substitution in Baking Butter (1 cup) 1 cup trans-free vegetable shortening 3/4 cups of vegetable oil (example. Canola oil) Fruit purees (example- applesauce, pureed prunes, baby-food fruits). Add it along with some vegetable oil and reduce any other sweeteners needed in the recipe since fruit purees are already sweet. 1 cup polyunsaturated margarine (HV) 3/4 cup polyunsaturated oil like safflower oil (HV) 1 cup mild olive oil (not extra virgin)(HV) Note: Butter creates the flakiness and the richness which an oil/purees cant provide. If you don’t want to compromise that much to taste, replace half the butter with the substitutions. Shortening(1 cup) 1 cup polyunsaturated margarine like Earth Balance or Smart Balance(HV) 1 cup + 2tbsp Butter ( better tasting than shortening but more expensive and has cholesterol and a higher level of saturated fat; makes cookies less crunchy, bread crusts more crispy) 1 cup + 2 tbsp Margarine (better tasting than shortening but more expensive; makes cookies less crunchy, bread crusts tougher) 1 Cup – 2tbsp Lard (Has cholesterol and a higher level of saturated fat) Oil equal amount of apple sauce stiffly beaten egg whites into batter equal parts mashed banana equal parts yogurt prune puree grated raw zucchini or seeds removed if cooked. Works well in quick breads/muffins/coffee cakes and does not alter taste pumpkin puree (if the recipe can handle the taste change) Low fat cottage cheese (use only half of the required fat in the recipe). Can give rubbery texture to the end result Silken Tofu – (use only half of the required fat in the recipe). Can give rubbery texture to the end result Equal parts of fruit juice Note: Fruit purees can alter the taste of the final product is used in large quantities. Cream Cheese (1 cup) 4 tbsps. margarine plus 1 cup low-fat cottage cheese – blended. Add few teaspoons of fat-free milk if needed (HV) Heavy Cream (1 cup) 1 cup evaporated skim milk (or full fat milk) 1/2 cup low fat Yogurt plus 1/2 low fat Cottage Cheese (HV) 1/2 cup Yogurt plus 1/2 Cottage Cheese Sour Cream (1 cup) 1 cup plain yogurt (HV) 3/4 cup buttermilk or plain yogurt plus 1/3 cup melted butter 1 cup crème fraiche 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar plus enough whole milk to fill 1 cup (let stand 5-10 minutes) 1/2 cup low-fat cottage cheese plus 1/2 cup low-fat or nonfat yogurt (HV) 1 cup fat-free sour cream (HV) Note: How to Make Maple Syrup Substitute at home For 1 Cup Maple Syrup 1/2 cup granulated sugar 1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed 1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon butter 1 teaspoon maple extract or vanilla extract Method In a heavy saucepan, place the granulated sugar and keep stirring until it melts and turns slightly brown. Alternatively in another pan, place brown sugar and water and bring to a boil without stirring. Now mix both the sugars and simmer in low heat until they come together as one thick syrup. Remove from heat, add butter and the extract. Use this in place of maple syrup. Store it in a fridge in an air tight container. Even though this was posted in their site long back, I found it helpful. So posting it for you. via chefinyou . cc image credit: flickr/zetrules

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  • Collaborate 2010 Recap: A lot of Excitement for Oracle Content Management 11g

    - by [email protected]
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Collaborate brought me to Las Vegas last week and what a week it was.  Each day was jam packed with Oracle Content Management sessions, and almost every session I attended was full.  Across the 35+ sessions that were given by my Oracle peers, Oracle partners, and Oracle customers, the majority of the discussion and questions that were asked had to do with the release of Oracle Content Management 11g.  Just to bring everyone up-to-speed, the first wave of Oracle Content Management 11g releases happened this past January as Oracle Imaging & Process Management and Oracle Information Rights Management went GA.  The next wave, which should be released soon, includes Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle Universal Records Management. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Andy MacMillan and Roel Stalman kicked off these discussions last Monday, as they presented Oracle Content Management's product strategy and roadmap.  It seemed that the attendees liked what they heard regarding the strategy and future direction, but the question that seems to always come up after roadmap presentations is "when will the product be released"?  This is a question that none of us have the power to answer, but soon customers will be able to enjoy these new product capabilities: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Unified content repository across ECMCentralized installation, access, administration & monitoringCertified application integrations with solution templatesOpen Web Content Management Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Stay tuned for more news about the release of Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle Records Management.  There are a lot of new assets currently being built that will help get everyone up-to-speed quickly. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Outside of the sessions that were presented, there were a lot of other activities that took place at Collaborate.  The Enterprise 2.0 solutions demo pod was busy, and attendees were anxious to see demonstrations of Oracle's end-to-end document imaging solution, WebCenter Spaces, and web site creation using Oracle Universal Content Management.   I also want to thank our partners (Fishbowl Solutions, Redstone Content Solutions, Bezzotech, Team Informatics, and DTI) for their efforts in creating detailed, insightful presentations.  Also, special thanks are in order to Thomas Feldmeier and Markus Neubauer of Silbury IT-Beratung GmbH for their participation.  It seems that Thomas and Markus were doomed to be stranded in Frankfurt after the Icelandic ash storm.  They couldn't get a flight out of their native Germany, and with fear that they would miss Collaborate, they rented a car and drove to Rome - some 800 miles (1,200 kilometers).  Anyway, they made it safe and sound to Las Vegas, and although probably a bit tired, they gave 2 Oracle Content Management presentations.  Talk about commitment. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Finally, a very special thanks to Al Hoof and Dave Chaffee of the Oracle Content Management Special Interest Group (SIG).  Al and Dave did most of the heavy lifting for Collaborate, including the coordination of all the sessions.  The Independent Oracle Users Group presented Al with the Chris Wooldridge award, recognizing him as the volunteer of the year.  Here is Al with his award: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} I hope to see you next year at Collaborate as the show returns to Orlando.

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  • top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – September 2012

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/wlscommunity Oracle Exalogic? VIDEO: Oracle Public Cloud Built on Exalogic!, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGzjDloUw_s&feature=plcp … oracleopenworld #NetBeans Community Day at #JavaOne http://ow.ly/dunFL Oracle Cloud Zone Building an enterprise Cloud? Have Oracle show you the RIGHT way to plan, deploy and monitor enterprise clouds.... http://fb.me/286978S4S OTNArchBeat? Oracle Exalogic X2-2 walk-through with Brad Cameron | @jvzoggel http://pub.vitrue.com/yE7d Oracle Technet? Stash your cash. September OTN Member Offers - discounts on books, more | OTN Blog http://pub.vitrue.com/yTr9 C2B2 Consulting? C2B2 is Speaking at @UKOUG App Server Middleware SIG Meeting 'Real Life #WebLogic Performance Tuning' http://www.c2b2.co.uk/ukoug_application_server_middleware_sig_meeting … @wlscommunity JAXenter.com? From yesterday, @smeyen offers his views on the next generation #Java - do you agree? http://jaxenter.com/next-gen-java-we-don-t-need-another-revolutionary-44334.html … Markus Eisele? Awesome: professor from ITU uploads her programming lectures to #YouTube. Programming classes without having to pay! http://bit.ly/UtkJIW Adam Bien? Real World Java EE 6 Patterns--Rethinking Best Practices Reloaded: A completely rewritten, second, iteration of ... http://bit.ly/Qc3xTH Markus Eisele [blog] #PrimeFaces Push with #Atmosphere on #GlassFish 3.1.2.2 http://goo.gl/fb/jPDzA Lucas Jellema? Forms community event at Oracle Open World - Tuesday, 2nd Oct with the BIG names in Forms - see: http://oracleformsinfo.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/ask-the-product-manager-join-us-at-the-oracle-forms-community-event-at-openworld-2012/ … WebLogic Community WebLogic & Coherence & Cloud presentations for customer meetings http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kw Adam Bien? New Book: Rethinking Best Practices with Java EE 6 is out: http://realworldpatterns.com (fully rewritten, re-edited and reformatted) WebLogic Community? Want to become and WebLogic 12c expert? free WebLogic 12c partner bootcamps &ndash;new locations: Madrid Spain http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kK WebLogic Community? Promote Your WebLogic events at http://oracle.com http://wp.me/p1LMIb-ku OracleBlogs Gartner review Oracle ADF http://ow.ly/1mgkCV Simon Haslam Next #ukoug App Server & MW SIG on 10 Oct: http://www.ukoug.org/events/ukoug-application-server-and-middleware-sig-meeting8/ … Hopefully plenty of good admin stuff! Michel Schildmeijer My book "WebLogic 12c; First look" has been reviewed again..see http://www.amazon.com/review/R28L6E3CC9RPMK/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1849687188&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag= … … Markus Eisele? #Weblogic 11g Interactive Quick Reference Map: http://bit.ly/Ugsq52 #wls #oracle #reference /via @TonyvanEsch Marc? Playing with #syslog server and #weblogic. Is there a simple how-to to configure all the logging from #WLS to #syslog-ng WebLogic Community Java update http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kI WebLogic Community top tweets WebLogic Partner Community &ndash; August 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kA Andrejus Baranovskis? Oracle University Training: ADF/WebCenter 11g Development in Depth | Andrejus Baranovskis http://fb.me/253ZTS2zp OracleSupport_WLS? How neat is a free tool that allows you to inspect and debug traffic from virtually any application? http://pub.vitrue.com/vXdP WebLogic Community WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter August 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kn OTNArchBeat Integrating Coherence & Java EE 6 Applications using ActiveCache | Ricardo Ferreira http://pub.vitrue.com/rwGg Adam Bien? Thanks for attending the #javaee #techtalk "Enterprise Java 2.0" I pushed the project and slides to: http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns/sources/hg/show/hacks/techtalk2012?rev=429 … JDeveloper & ADF? How to service-enable Oracle ADF Business Components http://ht.ly/1mcfsZ OracleSupport_WLS? Do you know that #WebLogic 12.1.1.0 is certified for production with JDK 7? @ http://pub.vitrue.com/35Kn Andreas Koop? My latest upload : WebLogic Administration und Deployment mit WLST on @slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/multikoop/weblogic-administration-und-deployment-mit-wlst … OTNArchBeat? Demo for OPN: Oracle Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c http://pub.vitrue.com/reoo Markus Eisele? [blog] Java Champions at #JavaOne 2012 http://goo.gl/fb/Ibb6N #javachampion OracleBlogs Buy This Book!: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook http://ow.ly/1malM1 WebLogic Community? Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c &ndash;demo for partners http://wp.me/p1LMIb-iE Arun Gupta? Learn how Java can help Internet of Things at Java Embedded at JavaOne: http://bit.ly/POBizh WebLogic Community? Follow WebLogicCommunity on facebook http://www.facebook.com/WebLogicCommunity … #WebLogicCommunity WebLogic Community? Building Java EE in the Cloud–Webcast August 30th 2012 https://weblogiccommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/building-java-ee-in-the-cloudwebcast-august-30th-2012/ … #WebLogicCommunity #Java #oracle #opn WebLogic Community? Call for WebLogic Community newsletter content. Please send @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity OracleSupport_WLS? The #weblogic wasp: lots of tips, Q&A and examples http://pub.vitrue.com/v0bw Frank Nimphius? Free ADF Best Practices Webinar by Andrejus Baranovskis for ODTUG (18, 2012 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT) http://bit.ly/OiSWbi ADF Code Corner Webcast- Friday September 14, 8:30 AM - 9.00 AM (CET) - ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps (in English) - with Chris Muir: http://bit.ly/OiQVMb Oracle WebLogic? New blog post: Developing Custom User Principal Object http://pub.vitrue.com/ltam JAX London? Just 4days left to get in on the early bird special, don't miss out!! http://jaxlondon.com/ #JAXLondon #Java WebLogic Community Building Java EE in the Cloud&ndash;Webcast August 30th 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kE Andrejus Baranovskis? New Record Master-Detail Validation and ADF BC Groovy Use Case http://fb.me/1D2NEIl8g JAX London? Don't miss out!!! Only 6 days left to make use of our early bird offer #JAXLondon #JAVA http://jaxlondon.com/ Michel Schildmeijer Qualogy launches Proof of Concept Center for Oracle Fusion Applications http://www.qualogy.com/qualogy-launches-proof-of-concept-center-for-oracle-fusion-applications/ … via @Qualogy_news OracleSupport_WLS ?Need to troubleshoot redeployment failure in #Weblogic? Check this http://pub.vitrue.com/auhz OracleEnterpriseMgr? Blog : Managing Oracle #Exalogic Elastic #Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center http://ow.ly/dd40e #em12c ODTUG? Want free advanced technical ADF training?Join @andrejusb for an @odtug webinar! check out his blog for more info http://bit.ly/SvKJDq chriscmuir Oracle Open World 2012 and ADF EMG http://zite.to/QyusZE OTNArchBeat? Boost your infrastructure with Coherence into the Cloud | Nino Guarnacci http://pub.vitrue.com/v3aJ WebLogic Community? Presentations & Training material OFM Summer Camps & Impressions & Feedback http://wp.me/p1LMIb-ks Arun Gupta? Java EE 6 pocket guide by O'Reilly available for pre-order from Amazon: http://amzn.to/O6YyoP and B&N: http://bit.ly/NjWLk1 OTNArchBeat Joining the Existing Cluster in Coherence | A. Fuat Sungur http://pub.vitrue.com/6uLh Andrejus Baranovskis Sample Application for Switching Application Module Data Sources http://fb.me/1PSURUzch OTNArchBeat Oracle WebLogic DevCast: Building Java EE in the Cloud - August 30 - 10am PT/ 1pm ET http://pub.vitrue.com/xXg0 OTNArchBeat? GlassFish Community Event at #javaone - Sept 30 -11am – 1pm -Moscone South. Register Now! http://pub.vitrue.com/p2f5 OracleSupport_WLS? Connecting To HTTPS Site Using Simple Java Program When Using Proxy http://pub.vitrue.com/stVv Michel Schildmeijer? Before you go to #OOW take the sneak preview of WebLogic 12c with you: http://www.qualogy.com/ga-nog-niet-naar-oow-en-neem-mee-weblogic-12c/ … via @Qualogy_news Simon Haslam? Even more great ADF content at #oow2012 this year including a packed ADF EMG day on Sunday: https://blogs.oracle.com/onesizedoesntfitall/entry/the_year_after_the_year … OracleBlogs ExaLogic trainings for partners http://ow.ly/1m6a5D Robin? First presentation on DOAG conference (thanks to @Steffen2042) "Weblogic Server for Dummies". Now I´m pretty excited :) http://www.doag.org/de/events/konferenzen/doag-2012.html … Markus Eisele There is a #facebook page for the upcoming #Java Mission Control (JRockit Mission Control for #Hotspot)! ttp://on.fb.me/Q31oyA Adam Bien? The almost free #javaee workshop in Rapperswil has only 60 registrations so far: http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/enterprise_java_2_0_swiss … What's the problem? :-) WebLogic Community ExaLogic trainings for partners http://wp.me/p1LMIb-iC OracleBlogs How to install Oracle Weblogic Server using Generic Package installer? http://ow.ly/1m5ms7 OracleSupport_WLS #Weblogic Server new blog post - Developing Custom User Principal Object http://pub.vitrue.com/ltam OracleBlogs? Architects and Architecture at JavaOne 2012 http://ow.ly/1m4oS5 WebLogic Community Are you WebLogic or Application Grid Specialized? Do you get Recognized? Get your plaque https://weblogiccommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/plaques-weblogic-application-grid-specialization/ … #WebLogicCommunity #opn WebLogic Community? Plaques WebLogic & Application Grid Specialization http://wp.me/p1LMIb-iA JDeveloper & ADF? First Steps With Oracle Application Testing Suite: Recording a Test With OpenScript http://dlvr.it/222npy WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • SQL Cruise Alaska 2011

    - by Grant Fritchey
    I had the extreme good fortune to get sent on the last SQL Cruise to Alaska. I love my job. In case you don't what this is, SQL Cruise is a trip on a cruise ship during which you get to attend classes while on the boat, learning all about SQL Server and related topics as well as network with the instructors and the other Cruisers. Frankly, it's amazing. Classes ran from Monday, 5/30, to Saturday, 6/4. The networking was constant, between classes, at night on cruise ship, out on excursions in Alaskan rainforests and while snorkeling in ocean waters. Here's a run down of the experience from my point of view. Because I couldn't travel out 2 days early, I missed the BBQ that occurred the day before the cruise when many of the Cruisers received their swag bags. Some of that swag came from Red Gate. I researched what was useful on a cruise like this and purchased small flashlights and binoculars for all the Cruisers. The flashlights were because, depending on your cabin, ships can be very dark. The binoculars were so that the cruisers could watch all the beautiful landscape as it flowed by. I would have liked to have been there when the bags were opened, but I heard from several people that they appreciated the gifts. Cruisers "In" the hot tub. Pictured: Marjory Woody, Michele Grondin, Kyle Brandt, Grant Fritchey, John Halunen Sunday I went to board the ship with my wife. We had a bit of an adventure because I messed up our documents. It all worked out and we got on board to meet up at the back of the boat at one of the outdoor bars with the other Cruisers, thanks to tweets letting everyone know where to go. That was the end of electronic coordination on the trip (connectivity in Alaska was horrible for everyone except AT&T). The Cruisers were a great bunch of people and it was a real honor to meet them and get to spend time with them. After everyone settled into their cabins, our very first activity was a contest, sponsored by Red Gate. The Cruisers, in an effort to get to know each other and the ship, were required to go all over taking various photographs, some of them hilarious. The winning team of three would all win prizes. Some of the significant others helped out and I tagged along with a team that tied for first but lost the coin toss. The winning team consisted of Christina Leo (blog|twitter), Ryan Malcom (twitter), Neil Hambly (blog|twitter). They then had to do math and identify the cabin with the lowest prime number, oh, and get a picture of it and be the first to get back up to the bar where we were waiting. Christina came in first and very happily carried home an Ipad2. Ryan won a 1TB portable hard drive and Neil won a wireless mouse (picture below, note my special SQL Server Central Friday Shirt. Thanks Steve (blog|twitter)). Winners: Christina Leo, Neil Hambly, Ryan Malcolm. Just Lucky: Grant Fritchey Monday morning classes started. Buck Woody (blog|twitter) was a special guest speaker on this cruise. His theme was "Three C's on the High Seas: Career, Communication and Cloud." The first session was all on Career. I'm not going to type out all my notes from the session, but let's just say, if you get the chance to hear Buck talk about how to manage your career, I suggest you attend. I have a ton of blog posts that I'll be putting together over the next several months (yes, months) both here and over on ScaryDBA. I also have a bunch of work I'm going to be doing to get my career performance bumped up a notch or two (and let's face it, that won't be easy). Later on Monday, Tim Ford (blog|twitter) did a session on DMOs. Specifically the session was on Tim's Period Table of DMOs that he has put together, and how to use some of the more interesting DMOs in your day to day job. It was a great session, packed with good information. Next, Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) did a session on how to monitor and guide SAN configuration for the DBA that doesn't have access to the SAN. That was some seriously useful information. Tuesday morning we only had a single class. Kendra Little (blog|twitter) taught us all about "No Lock for Yes Fun".  It was all about the different transaction isolation levels and how they work. There is so often confusion in this area and Kendra does a great job in clarifying the information. Also, she tosses in her excellent drawings to liven up the presentation. Then it was excursion time in Juneau. My wife and I, along with several other Cruisers, took a hike up around the Mendenhall Glacier. It was absolutely beautiful weather and walking through the Alaskan rain forest was a treat. Our guide, Jason, was a great guy and it was a good day of hiking. Wednesday was an all day excursion in Skagway. My wife and I took the "Ghost and Good Time Girls" walking tour that ended up at a bar that used to be a brothel, the Red Onion. It was a great history of the town. We went back out and hit a few museums and exhibits. We also hiked up the side of the mountain to see the Dewey Lake and some great views of the town. Finally we hiked out to the far side of town to see the Gold Rush cemetery. Hiking done we went back to the boat and had a quiet dinner on our own. Thursday we cruised through Glacier Bay and saw at least four different glaciers including sitting next to the Marjory Glacier for  about an hour. It was amazing. Then it got better. We went into class with Buck again, this time to talk about Communication. Again, I've got pages of notes that I'm going to be referring back to for some time to come. This was an excellent opportunity to learn. Snorkelers: Nicole Bertrand, Aaron Bertrand, Grant Fritchey, Neil Hambly, Christina Leo, John Robel, Yanni Robel, Tim Ford Friday we pulled into Ketchikan. A bunch of us went snorkeling. Yes, snorkeling. Yes, in Alaska. Yes, snorkeling in the ocean in Alaska. It was fantastic. They had us put on 7mm thick wet suits (an adventure all by itself) so it was basically warm the entire time we were in the water (except for the occasional squirt of cold water down my back). Before we got in the water a bald eagle flew up and landed about 15 feet in front of us, which was just an incredible event. Then our guide pointed out about 14 other eagles in the area, hanging out in the trees. Wow! The water was pretty clear and there was a ton of things to see. That was absolutely a blast. Back on the boat I presented a session called Execution Plans: The Deep Dive (note the nautical theme). It seemed to go over well and I had several good questions come out of the session that will lead to new blog posts. After I presented, it was Aaron Bertrand's (blog|twitter) turn. He did a session on "What's New in Denali" that provided a lot of great information. He was able to incorporate new things straight out of Tech-Ed, so this was expanded beyond his usual presentation. The man really knows what he's talking about and communicates it well. Saturday we were travelling so there was time for a bunch of classes. Jeremiah Peschka (blog|twitter) did a great overview of some of the NoSQL databases and what they should be used for. The session was called "The Database is Dead" but it was really about how there are specific uses for these databases that SQL Server doesn't fill, but also that these databases can't replace SQL Server in other areas. Again, good material. Brent Ozar presented again with a session on Defensive Indexing. It was an overview of how indexes work and a deep dive into how to apply them appropriately in your databases to better support access. A good session, as you would expect. Then we pulled into Victoria, BC, in Canada and had a nice dinner with several of the Cruisers, including Denny Cherry (blog|twitter). After that it was back to Seattle on Sunday. By the way, the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle isn't a Science Fiction Museum any more. I was very disappointed to discover this. Overall, it was a great experience. I'm extremely appreciative of Red Gate for sending me and for Tim, Brent, Kendra and Jeremiah for having me. The other Cruisers were all amazing people and it was an honor & privilege to meet them and spend time with them. While this was a seriously fun time, it was also a very serious training opportunity with solid information coming from seasoned industry pros.

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  • 10 Windows Tweaking Myths Debunked

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Windows is big, complicated, and misunderstood. You’ll still stumble across bad advice from time to time when browsing the web. These Windows tweaking, performance, and system maintenance tips are mostly just useless, but some are actively harmful. Luckily, most of these myths have been stomped out on mainstream sites and forums. However, if you start searching the web, you’ll still find websites that recommend you do these things. Erase Cache Files Regularly to Speed Things Up You can free up disk space by running an application like CCleaner, another temporary-file-cleaning utility, or even the Windows Disk Cleanup tool. In some cases, you may even see an old computer speed up when you erase a large amount of useless files. However, running CCleaner or similar utilities every day to erase your browser’s cache won’t actually speed things up. It will slow down your web browsing as your web browser is forced to redownload the files all over again, and reconstruct the cache you regularly delete. If you’ve installed CCleaner or a similar program and run it every day with the default settings, you’re actually slowing down your web browsing. Consider at least preventing the program from wiping out your web browser cache. Enable ReadyBoost to Speed Up Modern PCs Windows still prompts you to enable ReadyBoost when you insert a USB stick or memory card. On modern computers, this is completely pointless — ReadyBoost won’t actually speed up your computer if you have at least 1 GB of RAM. If you have a very old computer with a tiny amount of RAM — think 512 MB — ReadyBoost may help a bit. Otherwise, don’t bother. Open the Disk Defragmenter and Manually Defragment On Windows 98, users had to manually open the defragmentation tool and run it, ensuring no other applications were using the hard drive while it did its work. Modern versions of Windows are capable of defragmenting your file system while other programs are using it, and they automatically defragment your disks for you. If you’re still opening the Disk Defragmenter every week and clicking the Defragment button, you don’t need to do this — Windows is doing it for you unless you’ve told it not to run on a schedule. Modern computers with solid-state drives don’t have to be defragmented at all. Disable Your Pagefile to Increase Performance When Windows runs out of empty space in RAM, it swaps out data from memory to a pagefile on your hard disk. If a computer doesn’t have much memory and it’s running slow, it’s probably moving data to the pagefile or reading data from it. Some Windows geeks seem to think that the pagefile is bad for system performance and disable it completely. The argument seems to be that Windows can’t be trusted to manage a pagefile and won’t use it intelligently, so the pagefile needs to be removed. As long as you have enough RAM, it’s true that you can get by without a pagefile. However, if you do have enough RAM, Windows will only use the pagefile rarely anyway. Tests have found that disabling the pagefile offers no performance benefit. Enable CPU Cores in MSConfig Some websites claim that Windows may not be using all of your CPU cores or that you can speed up your boot time by increasing the amount of cores used during boot. They direct you to the MSConfig application, where you can indeed select an option that appears to increase the amount of cores used. In reality, Windows always uses the maximum amount of processor cores your CPU has. (Technically, only one core is used at the beginning of the boot process, but the additional cores are quickly activated.) Leave this option unchecked. It’s just a debugging option that allows you to set a maximum number of cores, so it would be useful if you wanted to force Windows to only use a single core on a multi-core system — but all it can do is restrict the amount of cores used. Clean Your Prefetch To Increase Startup Speed Windows watches the programs you run and creates .pf files in its Prefetch folder for them. The Prefetch feature works as a sort of cache — when you open an application, Windows checks the Prefetch folder, looks at the application’s .pf file (if it exists), and uses that as a guide to start preloading data that the application will use. This helps your applications start faster. Some Windows geeks have misunderstood this feature. They believe that Windows loads these files at boot, so your boot time will slow down due to Windows preloading the data specified in the .pf files. They also argue you’ll build up useless files as you uninstall programs and .pf files will be left over. In reality, Windows only loads the data in these .pf files when you launch the associated application and only stores .pf files for the 128 most recently launched programs. If you were to regularly clean out the Prefetch folder, not only would programs take longer to open because they won’t be preloaded, Windows will have to waste time recreating all the .pf files. You could also modify the PrefetchParameters setting to disable Prefetch, but there’s no reason to do that. Let Windows manage Prefetch on its own. Disable QoS To Increase Network Bandwidth Quality of Service (QoS) is a feature that allows your computer to prioritize its traffic. For example, a time-critical application like Skype could choose to use QoS and prioritize its traffic over a file-downloading program so your voice conversation would work smoothly, even while you were downloading files. Some people incorrectly believe that QoS always reserves a certain amount of bandwidth and this bandwidth is unused until you disable it. This is untrue. In reality, 100% of bandwidth is normally available to all applications unless a program chooses to use QoS. Even if a program does choose to use QoS, the reserved space will be available to other programs unless the program is actively using it. No bandwidth is ever set aside and left empty. Set DisablePagingExecutive to Make Windows Faster The DisablePagingExecutive registry setting is set to 0 by default, which allows drivers and system code to be paged to the disk. When set to 1, drivers and system code will be forced to stay resident in memory. Once again, some people believe that Windows isn’t smart enough to manage the pagefile on its own and believe that changing this option will force Windows to keep important files in memory rather than stupidly paging them out. If you have more than enough memory, changing this won’t really do anything. If you have little memory, changing this setting may force Windows to push programs you’re using to the page file rather than push unused system files there — this would slow things down. This is an option that may be helpful for debugging in some situations, not a setting to change for more performance. Process Idle Tasks to Free Memory Windows does things, such as creating scheduled system restore points, when you step away from your computer. It waits until your computer is “idle” so it won’t slow your computer and waste your time while you’re using it. Running the “Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks” command forces Windows to perform all of these tasks while you’re using the computer. This is completely pointless and won’t help free memory or anything like that — all you’re doing is forcing Windows to slow your computer down while you’re using it. This command only exists so benchmarking programs can force idle tasks to run before performing benchmarks, ensuring idle tasks don’t start running and interfere with the benchmark. Delay or Disable Windows Services There’s no real reason to disable Windows services anymore. There was a time when Windows was particularly heavy and computers had little memory — think Windows Vista and those “Vista Capable” PCs Microsoft was sued over. Modern versions of Windows like Windows 7 and 8 are lighter than Windows Vista and computers have more than enough memory, so you won’t see any improvements from disabling system services included with Windows. Some people argue for not disabling services, however — they recommend setting services from “Automatic” to “Automatic (Delayed Start)”. By default, the Delayed Start option just starts services two minutes after the last “Automatic” service starts. Setting services to Delayed Start won’t really speed up your boot time, as the services will still need to start — in fact, it may lengthen the time it takes to get a usable desktop as services will still be loading two minutes after booting. Most services can load in parallel, and loading the services as early as possible will result in a better experience. The “Delayed Start” feature is primarily useful for system administrators who need to ensure a specific service starts later than another service. If you ever find a guide that recommends you set a little-known registry setting to improve performance, take a closer look — the change is probably useless. Want to actually speed up your PC? Try disabling useless startup programs that run on boot, increasing your boot time and consuming memory in the background. This is a much better tip than doing any of the above, especially considering most Windows PCs come packed to the brim with bloatware.     

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  • The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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  • The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers.

    Read the article

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