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• Friday Fun: Christmas Tree Light Up

  - by Asian Angel

  Another week has thankfully passed by, so it is time to take a break and have some fun. This week’s game tests your ability to light up the whole Christmas tree…can you figure out the correct wiring configuration? Christmas Tree Light Up The object of the game is simple…light up all of the bulbs on the Christmas tree. While the game may look quick and easy at first you will need to do some thinking and experimenting to come up with the correct wiring configuration. The instructions are very simple…just click on any of the wiring sections or bulbs to rotate them. Keep in mind that you may have to click a few times to line the wiring sections or bulbs up as desired since the rotation is always clockwise. Note: You will need use all of the wiring sections available to completely light the tree up. Each time you will be presented with a different starting setup coming from your power source. Time to hook up the lights! Note: It is recommended that you disable the sound for the game since the “rotation” sounds can be slightly irritating. A nice start but there are still a lot of bulbs to light up. Getting closer… Almost there…only two more bulbs to light up. Success! Have fun playing! Play Christmas Tree Light Up Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

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• An XML file or Database?

  - by webnoob

  I am re-writing a section of my site and am trying to decide how much of a rewrite this will be. At the moment I have a web service feed that generates an xml once per day. I then use this xml file on my website to generate the general structure. I am trying to decide if this information should be located in the database or stay in the xml file. The file can range from 4mb - 12mb. The files depth can go on and on so I have to recurse to find the data I want. I use the .NET serializer classes and store the serialized file in a global variable to avoid re-serializing it each time the page is loaded. My reasons for thinking a database would be better are: I would know exactly where I am in the file by using an internal ID so I wouldn't have to recurse the file to get information. I wouldn't have to load / serialize the XML and could just use my already open database connections. Searching for the data in the file would be quicker(?) as I would just perform an SQL query rather than re-cursing the file. Has anyone got any ideas which is better and which option uses more resources on the server or be quicker? EDIT: The file is read every time the web page is loaded (although only serialized once). It isn't written to by standard users (only by an admin task that runs in the middle of the night). This is my initial investigation before mocking up.

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• Enterprise Architecture IS (should not be) Arbitrary

  - by pat.shepherd

  I took a look at a blog entry today by Jordan Braunstein where he comments on another blog entry titled “Yes, “Enterprise Architecture is Relative BUT it is not Arbitrary.”  The blog makes some good points such as the following: Lock 10 architects in 10 separate rooms; provide them all an identical copy of the same business, technical, process, and system requirements; have them design an architecture under the same rules and perspectives; and I guarantee your result will be 10 different architectures of varying degrees. SOA Today: Enterprise Architecture IS Arbitrary Agreed, …to a degree….but less so if all 10 truly followed one of the widely accepted EA frameworks. My thinking is that EA frameworks all focus on getting the business goals/vision locked down first as the primary drivers for decisions made lower down the architecture stack.  Many people I talk to, know about frameworks such as TOGAF, FEA, etc. but seldom apply the tenants to the architecture at hand.  We all seem to want to get right into the Visio diagrams and boxes and arrows and connecting protocols and implementation details and lions and tigers and bears (Oh, my!) too early. If done properly the Business, Application and Information architectures are nailed down BEFORE any technological direction (SOA or otherwise) is set.  Those 3 layers and Governance (people and processes), IMHO, are layers that should not vary much as they have everything to do with understanding the business -- from which technological conclusions can later be drawn. I really like what he went on to say later in the post about the fact that architecture attempts to remove the amount of variance between the 10 different architect’s work.  That is the real heart of what EA is about; REMOVING THE ARBRITRARITY.

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• Learning advanced java skills

  - by moe

  I've been programming in java for a while and I really like the language, I've mostly just done game programming, but I want to get a feel for some of the more commonly used api's and frameworks and just get a generally more well-rounded grasp of the language and the common libraries in the current job market. From what I found things like spring, hibernate, and GWT are pretty in demand right now. I looked at some tutorials online and they weren't hard to follow but I really felt like I had no context for what I was learning - I had no idea how any of it would be use in a real work environment. I know nothing can rival the benefit I'd get from actual work experience but that's not an option for me right now, I need another way to learn these technologies in a way where I'll at least feel comfortable working with them and know what I'm doing beyond just understanding what code does what. I checked out a few books but they were all really old(like pre-2006, am I right to assume those books would be kind of out of date today?) or required experience with libraries that I didn't have and can't get. I hate getting stuck looking for the best resource to learn something instead of spending my time actually learning. All I really want is someone to point me to a resource(website or ebook) that is aimed at already experienced java developers and will not only teach me some interesting useful java technology(anything that is useful, I dont know much outside of graphics libraries and game related things so I was thinking some database or web programming api's) but also give me a good perspective of it and leave me feeling confident that I could actually use what I learned on a practical application. If my post makes you think I'm not yet experienced to be learning these things, which I doubted earlier today but am now starting to question, then what do you think is the next step for me? I just want to get better at java. Thanks everyone

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• Organizing an entity system with external component managers?

  - by Gustav

  I'm designing a game engine for a top-down multiplayer 2D shooter game, which I want to be reasonably reuseable for other top-down shooter games. At the moment I'm thinking about how something like an entity system in it should be designed. First I thought about this: I have a class called EntityManager. It should implement a method called Update and another one called Draw. The reason for me separating Logic and Rendering is because then I can omit the Draw method if running a standalone server. EntityManager owns a list of objects of type BaseEntity. Each entity owns a list of components such as EntityModel (the drawable representation of an entity), EntityNetworkInterface, and EntityPhysicalBody. EntityManager also owns a list of component managers like EntityRenderManager, EntityNetworkManager and EntityPhysicsManager. Each component manager keeps references to the entity components. There are various reasons for moving this code out of the entity's own class and do it collectively instead. For example, I'm using an external physics library, Box2D, for the game. In Box2D, you first add the bodies and shapes to a world (owned by the EntityPhysicsManager in this case) and add collision callbacks (which would be dispatched to the entity object itself in my system). Then you run a function which simulates everything in the system. I find it hard to find a better solution to do this than doing it in an external component manager like this. Entity creation is done like this: EntityManager implements the method RegisterEntity(entityClass, factory) which registers how to create an entity if that class. It also implements the method CreateEntity(entityClass) which would return an object of type BaseEntity. Well now comes my problem: How would the reference to a component be registered to the component managers? I have no idea how I would reference the component managers from a factory/closure.

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• Managing user privileges, best practice.

  - by Loïc N.

  I'm am new to web development. I'm creating a website where different user can have different privileges, such as creating/editing/deleting a news, or adding/editing/deleting whatever kind of content on the website. I started by creating a "user type" that would indicate the user's privileges (such as "user", "newser", "moderator", "admin", and so on), but i quickly started noticing issues that made me think that this might be a naive approach to this issue. What if i want to give a regular user the right to edit a news (for whatever reason)? Then the user would be half "user", half "newser". But the system i use can only handle one user-type. So what would be the best practice here? I was thinking of removing the concept of roles (or "user-types" such as newser) and only have the concept of "privilege", where every user could have zero to many privileges. So, to re-use the above example, if i wanted a user to have the right to edit some news, i would only have to give him a "edit news" privilege. Is this the way to go?

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• How to deal with static utility classes when designing for testability

  - by Benedikt

  We are trying to design our system to be testable and in most parts developed using TDD. Currently we are trying to solve the following problem: In various places it is necessary for us to use static helper methods like ImageIO and URLEncoder (both standard Java API) and various other libraries that consist mostly of static methods (like the Apache Commons libraries). But it is extremely difficult to test those methods that use such static helper classes. I have several ideas for solving this problem: Use a mock framework that can mock static classes (like PowerMock). This may be the simplest solution but somehow feels like giving up. Create instantiable wrapper classes around all those static utilities so they can be injected into the classes that use them. This sounds like a relatively clean solution but I fear we'll end up creating an awful lot of those wrapper classes. Extract every call to these static helper classes into a function that can be overridden and test a subclass of the class I actually want to test. But I keep thinking that this just has to be a problem that many people have to face when doing TDD - so there must already be solutions for this problem. What is the best strategy to keep classes that use these static helpers testable?

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• Converting 2D coordinates from multiple viewpoints into 3D coordinates

  - by Kirk Smith

  Here's the situation. I've got a set of 2D coordinates that specify a point on an image. These 2D coordinates relate to an event that happened in a 3D space (video game). I have 5 images with the same event point on it, so I have 5 sets of 2D coordinates for a single 3D coordinate. I've tried everything I can think to translate these 2D coordinates into 3D coordinates, but the math just escapes me. I have a good estimate of the coordinates from which each image was taken, they're not perfect but they're close. I tried simplifying this and opening up Cinema 4D, a 3D modeling application. I placed 5 cameras at the coordinates where the pictures were taken and lined up the pictures with the event points for each one and tried to find a link, but nothing was forthcoming. I know it's a math question, but like I said, I just can't get it. I took physics in high school 6 years ago, but we didn't deal with a whole lot of this sort of thing. Any help will be very much appreciated, I've been thinking on it for quite a while and I just can't come up with anything.

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• Unused Indexes Gotcha

  - by DavidWimbush

  I'm currently looking into dropping unused indexes to reduce unnecessary overhead and I came across a very good point in the excellent SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book that I haven't seen highlighted anywhere else. I was thinking it was simply a case of dropping indexes that didn't show as being used in DMV sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats (assuming a solid representative workload had been run since the last service start). But Rob Farley points out that the DMV only shows indexes whose pages have been read or updated. An index that isn't listed in the DMV might still be useful by providing metadata to the Query Optimizer and thus streamlining query plans. For example, if you have a query like this: select  au.author_name         , count(*) as books from    books b         inner join authors au on au.author_id = b.author_id group by au.author_name If you have a unique index on authors.author_name the Query Optimizer will realise that each author_id will have a different author_name so it can produce a plan that just counts the books by author_id and then adds the author name to each row in that small table. If you delete that index the query will have to join all the books with their authors and then apply the GROUP BY - a much more expensive query. So be cautious about dropping apparently unused unique indexes.

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• Call for authors for new eBook on the Windows Azure Platform

  - by Eric Nelson

  I intend to pull together a FREE eBook on the Windows Azure Platform – but I need your help to make it rock! If you have detailed experience of any aspect of the Windows Azure Platform and can spare a few hours of time to turn that into a short article (400 to 800 words) then please get in touch. This is not a big commitment but my suspicion is the end result will make for a cracking good read. I am hoping for a mix – everything from lessons learnt from early adopters to introductions to elements of the platform to getting technologies such as Ruby up and running on Azure. 10 to 20 articles sound about right – which means I am after 10 to 20 authors :) All I need from you right now is: One or two suggestions of topics you would like to cover A pointer to any example of your previous work – which could be as simple as a blog post or a work document. For simplicity, just drop me an email direct to eric.nelson A@T microsoft.com. BIG THANKS! Eric The provisional dates are: Confirm authors and topics by 3rd May Get first draft from all authors by 10th May Complete reviews by 17th May Final versions by 24th May Published by 31st May And finally, an example: To give you an idea of what I have in mind, check out the eBook we pulled together last December which has had several thousand downloads. However I’m thinking of making this one a little bit more fun/informal. More on that later. UK MSDN Flash eBook Best Technical Articles #2 - ericnel Related Links: Spread the word – 6 Weeks of FREE Azure Training UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

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• How to obtain flow while pair programming in agile development?

  - by bizso09

  Flow is is concept introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi In short, it means what most to get into the "zone". You feel immeresed in the task you are doing, you are in deep focus and concentration and the task difficulty is just right for you, but challenging at the same time. When people acquire flow their prodctivity shoots up. Programming requires great deal of mental focus and programmers need to juggle several things in their mind at once. Many like to work in a quite environment where they can direct their full attention to the task. If they are interreupted, it may take several minutes, sometimes hours to get back into flow. I understand that agile way of doing software development is called pair prograaming. This is pormoted in Extreme programming too. It means you put the whole software development team in one room so that communication is seamless. You do programming with your pair because this way you get instant code reviews and fix bugs sooner. However, I alwys had problem obtaining flow while doing pair programming because of the contant stream of interrupts. I'm thinking deep about an issue then all of sudden someone asks me a question from another pair. My train of thought is all lost. How can you obtain and keep flow while doing agile pair programming?

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• DENY select on sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats

  - by steveh99999

  Technorati Tags: security,DMV,permission,sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats I recently saw an interesting blog article by Paul Randal about the performance overhead of querying the sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats. So I was thinking, would it be possible to let non-sysadmin users query DMVs on a SQL server but stop them querying this I/O intensive DMV ? Yes it is, here’s how… 1. Create a new login for test purposes, with permissions to access AdventureWorks database only … CREATE LOGIN [test] WITH PASSWORD='xxxx', DEFAULT_DATABASE=[AdventureWorks] GO USE [AdventureWorks] GO CREATE USER [test] FOR LOGIN [test] WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA=[dbo] GO 2.login as user test and issue command SELECT  * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(DB_ID('AdventureWorks'),NULL,NULL,NULL,'DETAILED') gets error :-  Msg 297, Level 16, State 12, Line 1 The user does not have permission to perform this action. 3.As a sysadmin, issue command :- USE AdventureWorks GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE TO [test] or GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO [test] if all databases can be queried via DMV. 4. Try again as user test to issue command SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(DB_ID('AdventureWorks '),NULL,NULL,NULL,'DETAILED') -- now produces valid results from the DMV.. 5 now create the test user in master database, public role only USE master CREATE USER [test] FOR LOGIN [test] 6 issue command :- USE master DENY SELECT ON sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats TO [test] 7 Now go back to AdventureWorks using test login and try SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(DB_ID('AdventureWorks’),NULL,NULL,NULL,’DETAILED') Now gets error... Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'dm_db_index_physical_stats', database 'mssqlsystemresource', schema 'sys'. but the user is still able to query all other non-IO-intensive DMVs. If the user attempts to view the index physical stats via a builtin management studio report  – see recent blog post by Pinal Dave they get an error also

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• How to Make Sure Your Company Doesn't Go Underwater If Your Programmers Are Hit by a Bus

  - by Graviton

  I have a few programmers under me, they are all doing very great and very smart obviously. Thank you very much. But the problem is that each and every one of them is responsible for one core area, which no one else on the team have foggiest idea on what it is. This means that if anyone of them is taken out, my company as a business is dead because they aren't replaceable. I'm thinking about bringing in new programmers to cover them, just in case they are hit by a bus, or resign or whatever. But I afraid that The old programmers might actively resist the idea of knowledge transfer, fearing that a backup might reduce their value. I don't have a system to facilitate technology transfer between different developers, so even if I ask them to do it, I've no assurance that they will do it properly. My question is, How to put it to the old programmers in such they would agree What are systems that you use, in order to facilitate this kind of "backup"? I can understand that you can do code review, but is there a simple way to conduct this? I think we are not ready for a full blown, check-in by check-in code review.

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• An introductory presentation about testing with MSTest, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Thomas Weller

  While it was very quiet here on my blog during the last months, this was not at all true for the rest of my professional life. The simple story is that I was too busy to find the time for authoring blog posts (and you might see from my previous ones that they’re usually not of the ‘Hey, I’m currently reading X’ or ‘I’m currently thinking about Y’ kind…). Anyway. Among the things I did during the last months were setting up a TFS environment (2010) and introducing a development team to the MSTest framework (aka. Visual Studio Unit Testing), some additional tools (e.g. Moq, Moles, White),  how this is supported in Visual Studio, and how it integrates into the broader context of the then new TFS environment. After wiping out all the stuff which was directly related to my former customer and reviewing/extending the Speaker notes, I thought I share this presentation (via Slideshare) with the rest of the world. Hopefully it can be useful to someone else out there… Introduction to testing with MSTest, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server 2010 View more presentations from Thomas Weller. Be sure to also check out the slide notes (either by viewing the presentation directly on Slideshare or - even better - by downloading it). They contain quite some additional information, hints, and (in my opinion) best practices.

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• Issue 15: SVP Focus

  - by rituchhibber

       SVP FOCUS FOCUS -- Chris Baker SVP Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners’ business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) OPN Solutions Catalog Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Cloud Computing Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle and Java SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES "By taking part in marketing activities, our partners accelerate their sales cycles." -- Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best—building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best-in-class application platform so ISVs are free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success. How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use of our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme. How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry. What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data—a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle. What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation. Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: "I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud". The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them. Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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• What is the best way to evaluate new programmers?

  - by Rafael

  What is the best way to evaluate the best candidates to get a new job (talking merely in terms of programming skills)? In my company we have had a lot of bad experiences with people who have good grades but do not have real programming skills. Their skills are merely like code monkeys, without the ability to analyze the problems and find solutions. More things that I have to note: The education system in my country sucks--really sucks. The people that are good in this kind of job are good because they have talent for it or really try to learn on their own. The university / graduate /post-grad degree doesn't mean necessarily that you know exactly how to do the things. Certifications also mean nothing here because the people in charge of the certification course also don't have skills (or are in low paying jobs). We need really to get the good candidates that are flexible and don't have mechanical thinking (because this type of people by experience have a low performance). We are in a government institution and the people that are candidates don't necessarily come from outside, but we have the possibility to accept or not any candidates until we find the correct one. I hope I'm not sounding too aggressive in my question; and BTW I'm a programmer myself. edit: I figured out that asked something really complex here. I will un-toggle "the correct answer" only to let the discussion going fluent, without any bias.

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• Selling Android apps from Latvia? or should I just put banners?

  - by Roger Travis

  I am in Latvia ( which is not supported to sell apps at android market ), so I am thinking about the best way of monetizing my app. So far I've come up with such options: somehow imitate that I am from a supported country, get a bank account there, etc. use PayPal for in-app purchases. The player get, say, first 10 levels for free, but then is asked to pay 0.99$ for the rest of the game. downsides: player might not feel comfortable entering his paypal details into an app. also android market might not really like that. making the app free and get money from advertising... let's do some calculation here, say, I get 1m free downloads, each user during his playtime would see 10 banners, therefor 10m / 1000 * 0.3 = gives roughly 33k$ ( if we use adMob with their 0.3$ per 1000 impressions ). On the other hand, if we use paypal in app purchase, we need a 3% or more conversion rate to beat this... hmm... What do you think about all this? Thanks! edit: from what I just read all over the net, it looks like advertisers will change their eCPM price a lot without you understanding why... while using in-app paypal purchase you can at least somehow monitor the cashflow.

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• One eye on my dinner and one eye on SQL server

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: RedGate,Work Life Balance,Tips and Tricks,SQL Server This is somewhere between a Tweet and a proper blog article - would that be a Bleet? Anyway, I was at a local restaurant yesterday and after placing my order I was thinking about having to get home and log in to check some SQL Servers and then the thought came to me that as we were near civilisation there was likely to be a 3G signal that might actually make using the web browser on my phone bearable. It was surprisingly fast on my HTC Desire, it was almost as good as Wi-Fi. RedGate SQL Monitor works fine on the default HTC browser and here is the proof, me checking the servers while I am waiting for the meal to arrive. Everything checked out OK so I had the evening free from SQL Server. You can get a free 14 day full trial of a SQL Monitor from RedGate here or find out more about it at The Future of Monitoring. Disclosure: I am a friend of RedGate and as such regularly make positive comments about their products. I don't get paid for it but I do get free licenses for testing and reviewing purposes.

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• How to learn & introduce scrum in small startup?

  - by Jens Bannmann

  In a few months, a friend will establish his startup software company, and I will be the software architect with one additional developer. Though we have no real day-to-day experience with agile methods, I have read much "overview" type of material on them, and I firmly believe they are a good - if not the only - way to build software. So with this company, I want to go for iterative, agile development from day 1, preferably something light-weight. I was thinking of Scrum, but the question is: what is the best way for me and my colleagues to learn about it, to introduce it (which techniques when etc) and to evaluate whether we should keep it? Background which might be relevant: we're all experienced developers around the same age with similar professional mindset. We have worked together in the past and afterwards at several different companies, mostly with a Java/.NET focus. Some are a bit familiar with general ideas from the agile movement. In this startup, I have great power over tools, methods and process. The startup's product will be developed from scratch and could be classified as middleware. We have some "customer" contacts in the industry who could provide input as soon as we get to an alpha stage.

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• Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

  - by Randy Walker

  I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

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• Is this information about me as a programmer concise and good enough?

  - by Nick Rosencrantz

  I not only want you to review my resume but please tell me what you think Google means when they answered me: "We don't look at personal letters and we like your resume and we can recommend you internally but we need measurable experience. What is meant with "measurable" here? Do they mean like O(1) compared to O(n), selling an entire company, grades or what? This is what I sent: Curriculum vitae Nick Rosencrantz Competence: System development, web development Technical competence: Java, Javascript, HTML, XML, CSS, AJAX, PHP, SQL, Python Employments: 2012- Mobile Innovation AB System Developer IT consultant (Java programmer) 2011-2012 Bnano International Ltd System Developer Python programming in Google App Engine 2008-2009 Sweden Island AB System Developer Programming C++ and Java EE components 2003-2007 Studies Stockholm School of Economics During studies worked as network technician at Effnet AB 2000-2002 Jadestone AB System Developer System development in Java/J2EE. In 2001: KTH, Assistant. Teaching application server programming in Java Enterprise + weblogic + Informix. 1999-2000 Studies KTH 1996-1998 Spray.se System development, Researcher 1995-1995 Finance broker Backoffice work with financial instruments 1993-1994 Computer & Audio-Technical Systems AB Programming, sommer job Education/Courses: Stockholm School of Economics, Master of Science diploma, KTH, Computer Science undergraduate studies Languages Swedish, English, also some German and French Born 1973, Swedish citizen I also have a project-based CS which is several pages long but the above is about what I was aiming for in the beginning when I was looking for a job, now I have employment as an IT consultant in central Stockholm and I want to make my resume concise and also know what Google meant with their answer (It was a Swedish Google employee that via linkedin recruited from my Stockholm School of Economics groups since that is a small elite economics school where I took my M.Sc. and KTH is one of the largest universities in northern Europe so I sent her a link with my CV and she said she could promote me internally if I added "measurable experience" and I've been thinking for weeks what that may mean?

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• 2D Side Scrolling game and "walk over ground" collision detection

  - by Fire-Dragon-DoL

  The question is not hard, I'm writing a game engine for 2D side scrolling games, however I'm thinking to my 2D side scrolling game and I always come up with the problem of "how should I do collision with the ground". I think I couldn't handle the collision with ground (ground for me is "where the player walk", so something heavily used) in a per-pixel way, and I can't even do it with simple shape comparison (because the ground can be tilted), so what's the correct way? I'know what tiles are and i've read about it, but how much should be big each tile to not appear like a stairs?Are there any other approach? I watched this game and is very nice how he walks on ground: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmSAQwbbig8&feature=player_embedded If there are "platforms" in mid air, how should I handle them?I can walk over them but I can't pass "inside". Imagine a platform in mid air, it allows you to walk over it but limit you because you can't jump in the area she fits Sorry for my english, it's not my native language and this topic has a lot of keywords I don't know so I have to use workarounds Thanks for any answer Additional informations and suggestions: I'm doing a game course in this period and I asked them how to do this, they suggested me this approach (a QuadTree): -All map is divided into "big nodes" -Each bigger node has sub nodes, to find where the player is -You can find player's node with a ray on player position -When you find the node where the player is, you can do collision check through all pixels (which can be 100-200px nothing more) Here is an example, however i didn't show very well the bigger nodes because i'm not very good with photoshop :P How is this approach?

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• SQLAuthority News – Learning, Community and Book Signing at #SQLPASS 2012

  - by pinaldave

  SQLPASS event is going excellent we are having great great fun! We are having book signing events and the response is overwhelmingly positive. I am glad that all of you love our books and I totally appreciate your support. Rick and I both are feeling very motivated to write more books in future. Here is our schedule for book signing. SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros Volume1 Finally a book for the true SQL Server beginner! Whether you are brand new to databases and are thinking of getting your 70-461 certification or already a semi-pro working in the field and need some fingertip support, this is this is the book for you. Joes 2 Pros does not assume you already know anything about databases or SQL server.  This book builds on the success of the previous series and will help anyone transform themselves from a beginner “Joe” into a SQL 2012 “Pro”. Wednesday, November 7, 2012 12pm-1pm – Book Signing at Exhibit Hall Joes Pros booth#117 (FREE BOOK) Rest all the time – I will be at Exhibition Hall Joes 2 Pros Booth #117. Stop by for the goodies! This book is also available on Amazon. SQL 2012 Functions Joes 2 Pros Functions have been around for many years to make our lives easier. Because of them, thousands of lines of valuable programming can be done with one statement. When we know what functions are offered in SQL Server we can get powerful projects done very quickly. Often times, the functions you wished you had are released in the next version. Wednesday, November 7, 2012 7pm-8pm - Embarcadero Booth Book Signing (FREE BOOK) Thursday, November 8, 2012 12pm-1pm - Embarcadero Booth Book Signing (FREE BOOK) This book is also available on Amazon. If you are at SQLPASS stop by Booth #117 – I will be there and many be you can get one of my signed book! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Game Components, Game Managers and Object Properties

  - by George Duckett

  I'm trying to get my head around component based entity design. My first step was to create various components that could be added to an object. For every component type i had a manager, which would call every component's update function, passing in things like keyboard state etc. as required. The next thing i did was remove the object, and just have each component with an Id. So an object is defined by components having the same Ids. Now, i'm thinking that i don't need a manager for all my components, for example i have a SizeComponent, which just has a Size property). As a result the SizeComponent doesn't have an update method, and the manager's update method does nothing. My first thought was to have an ObjectProperty class which components could query, instead of having them as properties of components. So an object would have a number of ObjectProperty and ObjectComponent. Components would have update logic that queries the object for properties. The manager would manage calling the component's update method. This seems like over-engineering to me, but i don't think i can get rid of the components, because i need a way for the managers to know what objects need what component logic to run (otherwise i'd just remove the component completely and push its update logic into the manager). Is this (having ObjectProperty, ObjectComponent and ComponentManager classes) over-engineering? What would be a good alternative?

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• What to think about when designing a simple GUI for a quiz game

  - by PeterK

  I am coming close to finish my first iPhone game ever, as a matter of fact also my first programming experience ever, which is a quiz game. I have all the functionality i want and is currently polishing it both from a code point of view as well as looking at the GUI. My initial idea was not to use any specific graphics but rather focus on the game experience and simplicity and by that only using background color, orange, and white text as well as buttons. The design is based on that all ages, from learning to read, should be able to host and play this game. However, as i am now getting close to the finish line i am starting to think what is needed from a GUI point of view. I would like to ask for some advice what to think about when designing a GUI. Is it considered OK without any 'fancy' graphics, what is the risk without it etc.? Also, what colors goes well together if i choose to use a simple GUI. I am thinking about color blindness etc. In other words how do i design a good and effective GUI for a simple game as mine? Thanks

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