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  • WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Texas Industries, Inc.

    - by me
    Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. TXI is based in Dallas and employs around 2,000 employees. The customer had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually.  Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. TXI implemented a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging, a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition to send  the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing.  TXI significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing,  increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average. Company OverviewTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. With operating subsidiaries in six states, TXI is the largest producer of cement in Texas and a major producer in California. TXI is a major supplier of stone, sand, gravel, and expanded shale and clay products, and one of the largest producers of bagged cement and concrete  products in the Southwest. Business ChallengesTXI had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually.  Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. Their business objectives were: Increase the efficiency of core business processes, such as invoice processing, to support the organization’s desire to maintain its role as the Southwest’s leader in delivering high-quality, low-cost products to the construction industry Meet the audit and regulatory requirements for achieving Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance Streamline entry of 180,000 invoices annually to accelerate processing, reduce errors, cut invoice storage and routing costs, and increase visibility into payables liabilities Solution DeployedTXI replaced a resource-intensive, paper-based, decentralized process for invoice entry with a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g. They worked with the Oracle Partner Keste LLC to develop a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and then uses Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition and the Oracle WebCenter Imaging workflow to send the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing. Business Results Significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing through centralization and improved efficiency  Enabled the company to process invoices faster and pay bills earlier, allowing it to take advantage of additional vendor discounts Tracked to increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average Achieved a 25% reduction in paper invoice storage costs now that invoices are captured digitally, and enabled a 50% reduction in shipping costs, as the company no longer has to send paper invoices between headquarters and production facilities for approvals “Entering and manually processing more than 180,000 vendor invoices annually was time and labor intensive. With Oracle Imaging and Process Management, we have automated and centralized invoice entry and processing at our corporate office, improving productivity by 80% and reducing invoice processing cycle times by 84%—a very important efficiency gain.” Terry Marshall, Vice President of Information Services, Texas Industries, Inc. Additional Information TXI Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle WebCenter Capture Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition

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  • 256 Worker Role 3D Rendering Demo is now a Lab on my Azure Course

    - by Alan Smith
    Ever since I came up with the crazy idea of creating an Azure application that would spin up 256 worker roles (please vote if you like it ) to render a 3D animation created using the Kinect depth camera I have been trying to think of something useful to do with it. I have also been busy working on developing training materials for a Windows Azure course that I will be delivering through a training partner in Stockholm, and for customers wanting to learn Windows Azure. I hit on the idea of combining the render demo and a course lab and creating a lab where the students would create and deploy their own mini render farms, which would participate in a single render job, consisting of 2,000 frames. The architecture of the solution is shown below. As students would be creating and deploying their own applications, I thought it would be fun to introduce some competitiveness into the lab. In the 256 worker role demo I capture the rendering statistics for each role, so it was fairly simple to include the students name in these statistics. This allowed the process monitor application to capture the number of frames each student had rendered and display a high-score table. When I demoed the application I deployed one instance that started rendering a frame every few minutes, and the challenge for the students was to deploy and scale their applications, and then overtake my single role instance by the end of the lab time. I had the process monitor running on the projector during the lab so the class could see the progress of their deployments, and how they were performing against my implementation and their classmates. When I tested the lab for the first time in Oslo last week it was a great success, the students were keen to be the first to build and deploy their solution and then watch the frames appear. As the students mostly had MSDN suspicions they were able to scale to the full 20 worker role instances and before long we had over 100 worker roles working on the animation. There were, however, a few issues who the couple of issues caused by the competitive nature of the lab. The first student to scale the application to 20 instances would render the most frames and win; there was no way for others to catch up. Also, as they were competing against each other, there was no incentive to help others on the course get their application up and running. I have now re-written the lab to divide the student into teams that will compete to render the most frames. This means that if one developer on the team can deploy and scale quickly, the other team still has a chance to catch up. It also means that if a student finishes quickly and puts their team in the lead they will have an incentive to help the other developers on their team get up and running. As I was using “Sharks with Lasers” for a lot of my demos, and reserved the sharkswithfreakinlasers namespaces for some of the Azure services (well somebody had to do it), the students came up with some creative alternatives, like “Camels with Cannons” and “Honey Badgers with Homing Missiles”. That gave me the idea for the teams having to choose a creative name involving animals and weapons. The team rendering architecture diagram is shown below.   Render Challenge Rules In order to ensure fair play a number of rules are imposed on the lab. ·         The class will be divided into teams, each team choses a name. ·         The team name must consist of a ferocious animal combined with a hazardous weapon. ·         Teams can allocate as many worker roles as they can muster to the render job. ·         Frame processing statistics and rendered frames will be vigilantly monitored; any cheating, tampering, and other foul play will result in penalties. The screenshot below shows an example of the team render farm in action, Badgers with Bombs have taken a lead over Camels with Cannons, and both are  leaving the Sharks with Lasers standing. If you are interested in attending a scheduled delivery of my Windows Azure or Windows Azure Service bus courses, or would like on-site training, more details are here.

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  • AppKata - Enter the next level of programming exercises

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Doing CodeKatas is all the rage lately. That´s great since widely accepted exercises are important to further the art. They provide a means of communication across platforms and allow to compare results which is part of any deliberate practice. But CodeKatas suffer from their size. They are intentionally small, so they can be done again and again. Repetition helps to build habit and to dig deeper. Over time ever new nuances of the problem or one´s approach become visible. On the other hand, though, their small size limits the methods, techniques, technologies that can be applied. To improve your TDD skills doing CodeKatas might be enough. But what about other skills? Developing on a software in a team, designing larger pieces of software, iteratively releasing software… all this and more is kinda hard to train using the tiny CodeKata problems. That´s why I´d like to present here another kind of kata I call Application Kata (or just AppKata). AppKatas are larger programming problems. They require the development of “whole” applications, i.e. not just one class or method, but bunches of classes accessible through a user interface. Also AppKata problems always are split into iterations. To get the most out of them, just look at the requirements of one iteration at a time. This way you´re closer to reality where requirements evolve in unexpected ways. So if you´re looking for more of a challenge for your software development skills, check out these AppKatas – or invent your own. AppKatas are platform independent like CodeKatas. Use whatever programming language and IDE you like. Also use whatever approach to software development you like. Just be sensitive to how easy it is to evolve your code across iterations. Reflect on what went well and what not. Compare your solutions with others. Or – for even more challenge – go for the “Coding Carousel” (see below). CSV Viewer An application to view CSV files. Sounds easy, but watch out! Requirements sometimes drastically change if the customer is happy with what you delivered. Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Iteration 4 Iteration 5 (to come) Questionnaire If you like GUI programming, this AppKata might be for you. It´s about an app to let people fill out questionnaires. Also this problem might be interestin for you, if you´re into DDD. Iteration 1 Iteration 2 (to come) Iteration 3 (to come) Iteration 4 (to come) Tic Tac Toe For developers who like game programming. Although Tic Tac Toe is a trivial game, this AppKata poses some interesting infrastructure challenges. The GUI, however, stays simple; leave any 3D ambitions at home ;-) Iteration 1 Iteration 2 (to come) Iteration 3 (to come) Iteration 4 (to come) Iteration 5 (to come) Coding Carousel There are many ways you can do AppKatas. Work on them alone or in a team, pitch several devs against each other in an AppKata contest – or go around in a Coding Carousel. For the Coding Carousel you need at least 3 dev teams (regardless of size). All teams work on the same iteration at the same time. But here´s the trick: After each iteration the teams swap their code. Whatever they did for iteration n will be the basis for changes another team has to apply in iteration n+1. The code is going around the teams like in a carousel. I promise you, that´s gonna be fun! :-)

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  • Best of OTN - Week of Oct 21st

    - by CassandraClark-OTN
    This week's Best of OTN, for you, the best devs, dba's, sysadmins and architects out there!  In these weekly posts the OTN team will highlight the top content from each community; Architect, Database, Systems and Java.  Since we'll be publishing this on Fridays, we'll also mix in a little fun! Architect Community Top Content- The Road Ahead for WebLogic 12c | Edwin BiemondOracle ACE Edwin Biemond shares his thoughts on announced new features in Oracle WebLogic 12.1.3 & 12.1.4 and compares those upcoming releases to Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2. A Roadmap for SOA Development and Delivery | Mark NelsonDo you know the way to S-O-A? Mark Nelson does. His latest blog post, part of an ongoing series, will help to keep you from getting lost along the way. Updated ODI Statement of Direction | Robert SchweighardtHeads up Oracle Data Integrator fans! A new statement of product direction document is available, offering an overview of the strategic product plans for Oracle’s data integration products for bulk data movement and transformation, specifically Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). Bob Rhubart, Architect Community Manager Friday Funny - "Some people approach every problem with an open mouth." — Adlai E. Stevenson (October 23, 1835 – June 14, 1914) 23rd Vice President of the United States Database Community Top Content - Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox)Heard all the chatter about Oracle VirtualBox? Over 1 million downloads per week and look: pre-built virtual appliances designed specifically for developers. Video: Big Data, or BIG DATA?Oracle Ace Director Ben Prusinski explains the differences.?? Webcast Series - Developing Applications in Oracle's Public CloudTime to get started on developing and deploying cloud applications by moving to the cloud. Good friend Gene Eun from Oracle's Cloud team posted this two-part Webcast series that has an overview and demonstration of the Oracle Database Cloud Service. Check out the demos on how to migrate your data to the cloud, extend your application with interactive reporting, and create and access RESTful Web services. Registration required, but so worth it! Laura Ramsey, Database Community Manager Friday Funny - Systems Community Top Content - Video: What Kind of Scalability is Better, Horizontal or Vertical?Rick Ramsey asks the question "Is Oracle's approach to large vertically scaled servers at odds with today's trend of combining lots and lots of small, low-cost servers systems with networking to build a cloud, or is it a better approach?" Michael Palmeter, Director of Solaris Product Management, and Renato Ribeiro, Director Product Management for SPARC Servers, discuss.Video: An Engineer Takes a Minute to Explain CloudBart Smaalders, long-time Oracle Solaris core engineer, takes a minute to explain cloud from a sysadmin point of view. ?Hands-On Lab: How to Deploy and Manage a Private IaaS Cloud Soup to nuts. This lab shows you how to set up and manage a private cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c in an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model. You will first configure the IaaS cloud as the cloud administrator and then deploy guest virtual machines (VMs) as a self-service user. Rick Ramsey, Systems Community Manager Friday Funny - Video: Drunk Airline Pilot - Dean Martin - Foster Brooks Java Community Top Content - Video: NightHacking Interview with James GoslingJames Gosling, the Father of Java, discusses robotics, Java and how to keep his autonomous WaveGliders in the ocean for weeks at a time. Live from Hawaii.  Video: Raspberry Pi Developer Challenge: Remote Controller A developer who knew nothing about Java Embedded or Raspberry Pi shows how he can now control a robot with his phone. The project was built during the Java Embedded Challenge for Raspberry Pi at JavaOne 2013.Java EE 7 Certification Survey - Participants NeededHelp us define how to server your training and certification needs for Java EE 7. Tori Wieldt, Java Community Manager Friday Funny - Programmers have a strong sensitivity to Yak's pheromone. Causes irresistible desire to shave said Yak. Thanks, @rickasaurus! To follow and take part in the conversation follow/like etc. at one or all of the resources below -  OTN TechBlog The Java Source Blog The OTN Garage Blog The OTN ArchBeat Blog @oracletechnet @java @OTN_Garage @OTNArchBeat @OracleDBDev OTN I Love Java OTN Garage OTN ArchBeat Oracle DB Dev OTN Java

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 - September 16-22, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of September 16-22, 2012. The Real Architects of LA: OTN Architect Day in Los Angeles - Oct 25No gossip. No drama. No hair pulling. Just a full day of technical sessions and peer interaction focused on using Oracle technologies in today's cloud and SOA architectures. The event is free, but seating is limited, so register now. Thursday October 25, 2012. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. OIM-OAM-OAAM integration using TAP – Request Flow you must understand!! | Atul KumarAtul Kumar's post addresses "key points and request flow that you must understand" when integrating three Oracle Identity Management product Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Access Management, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | ZDNet "SOA governance tools and processes learned over the past decade are now underpinning cloud projects as they scale across enterprises," reports Joe McKendrick. But there remains a lack of understanding about SOA Governance. DevOps Basics: Track Down High CPU Thread with ps, top and the new JDK7 jcmd Tool | Frank Munz "The approach is very generic and works for WebLogic, Glassfish or any other Java application," say Frank Munz. "UNIX commands in the example are run on CentOS, so they will work without changes for Oracle Enterprise Linux or RedHat. Creating the thread dump at the end of the video is done with the jcmd tool from JDK7." Frank has captured the process in the posted video. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Hands-on Lab: "Leading Your Everyday Application Integration Projects with Enterprise SOA" Yet another session to squeeze into your already-jammed Oracle OpenWorld schedule. This hands-on lab focuses on how "Oracle Enterprise Repository, Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack, and Oracle SOA Suite work together to help you drive your enterprisewide integration projects." Loving VirtualBox 4.2… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog Is it wrong for a man to love a technology? Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall has several very good reasons for his feelings… ADF Create and CreateInsert Operations for ADF Table | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis answers the question, "What operation is best to use to insert a new row into an ADF table, Create or CreateInsert?" Fault Handling Slides and Q&A | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen shares the slides and a Q&A transcript from a presentation he and fellow ACE Director Guido Schmutz gave at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne preview event organized by AMIS Technology. Why IT is a profession in 'flux' | ZDNet I usuallly don't post two items from the same person in one day, but this post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick deals with some critical issues affecting those in IT. As McKendrick puts it: "IT professionals are under considerable pressure to deliver more value to the business, versus being good at coding and testing and deploying and integrating." Running RichFaces on WebLogic 12c | Markus Eisele "With all the JMS magic and the different provider checks in the showcase this has become some kind of a challenge to simply build and deploy it," says Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele. His detailed post will help you to meet that challenge. Thought for the Day "Less is more." — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) Source: BrainyQuote.com

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  • Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise, Part I

    - by Kathryn Perry
    A guest post by Jon Chorley, Oracle's Chief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, SCM Product Strategy During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems. In my next post, I will share examples of companies that have made that shift and talk more about the distributed orchestration process.

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  • Authenticating your windows domain users in the cloud

    - by cibrax
    Moving to the cloud can represent a big challenge for many organizations when it comes to reusing existing infrastructure. For applications that drive existing business processes in the organization, reusing IT assets like active directory represent good part of that challenge. For example, a new web mobile application that sales representatives can use for interacting with an existing CRM system in the organization. In the case of Windows Azure, the Access Control Service (ACS) already provides some integration with ADFS through WS-Federation. That means any organization can create a new trust relationship between the STS running in the ACS and the STS running in ADFS. As the following image illustrates, the ADFS running in the organization should be somehow exposed out of network boundaries to talk to the ACS. This is usually accomplish through an ADFS proxy running in a DMZ. This is the official story for authenticating existing domain users with the ACS.  Getting an ADFS up and running in the organization, which talks to a proxy and also trust the ACS could represent a painful experience. It basically requires  advance knowledge of ADSF and exhaustive testing to get everything right.  However, if you want to get an infrastructure ready for authenticating your domain users in the cloud in a matter of minutes, you will probably want to take a look at the sample I wrote for talking to an existing Active Directory using a regular WCF service through the Service Bus Relay Binding. You can use the WCF ability for self hosting the authentication service within a any program running in the domain (a Windows service typically). The service will not require opening any port as it is opening an outbound connection to the cloud through the Relay Service. In addition, the service will be protected from being invoked by any unauthorized party with the ACS, which will act as a firewall between any client and the service. In that way, we can get a very safe solution up and running almost immediately. To make the solution even more convenient, I implemented an STS in the cloud that internally invokes the service running on premises for authenticating the users. Any existing web application in the cloud can just establish a trust relationship with this STS, and authenticate the users via WS-Federation passive profile with regular http calls, which makes this very attractive for web mobile for example. This is how the WCF service running on premises looks like, [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://agilesight.com/active_directory/agent")] public class ProxyService : IAuthenticationService { IUserFinder userFinder; IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator;   public ProxyService() : this(new UserFinder(), new UserAuthenticator()) { }   public ProxyService(IUserFinder userFinder, IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator) { this.userFinder = userFinder; this.userAuthenticator = userAuthenticator; }   public AuthenticationResponse Authenticate(AuthenticationRequest request) { if (userAuthenticator.Authenticate(request.Username, request.Password)) { return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = true, Attributes = this.userFinder.GetAttributes(request.Username) }; }   return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = false }; } } Two external dependencies are used by this service for authenticating users (IUserAuthenticator) and for retrieving user attributes from the user’s directory (IUserFinder). The UserAuthenticator implementation is just a wrapper around the LogonUser Win Api. The UserFinder implementation relies on Directory Services in .NET for searching the user attributes in an existing directory service like Active Directory or the local user store. public UserAttribute[] GetAttributes(string username) { var attributes = new List<UserAttribute>();   var identity = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(new PrincipalContext(this.contextType, this.server, this.container), IdentityType.SamAccountName, username); if (identity != null) { var groups = identity.GetGroups(); foreach(var group in groups) { attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "Group", Value = group.Name }); } if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.DisplayName)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "DisplayName", Value = identity.DisplayName }); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.EmailAddress)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "EmailAddress", Value = identity.EmailAddress }); }   return attributes.ToArray(); } As you can see, the code is simple and uses all the existing infrastructure in Azure to simplify a problem that looks very complex at first glance with ADFS. All the source code for this sample is available to download (or change) in this GitHub repository, https://github.com/AgileSight/ActiveDirectoryForCloud

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  • database design help for game / user levels / progress

    - by sprugman
    Sorry this got long and all prose-y. I'm creating my first truly gamified web app and could use some help thinking about how to structure the data. The Set-up Users need to accomplish tasks in each of several categories before they can move up a level. I've got my Users, Tasks, and Categories tables, and a UserTasks table which joins the three. ("User 3 has added Task 42 in Category 8. Now they've completed it.") That's all fine and working wonderfully. The Challenge I'm not sure of the best way to track the progress in the individual categories toward each level. The "business" rules are: You have to achieve a certain number of points in each category to move up. If you get the number of points needed in Cat 8, but still have other work to do to complete the level, any new Cat 8 points count toward your overall score, but don't "roll over" into the next level. The number of Categories is small (five currently) and unlikely to change often, but by no means absolutely fixed. The number of points needed to level-up will vary per level, probably by a formula, or perhaps a lookup table. So the challenge is to track each user's progress toward the next level in each category. I've thought of a few potential approaches: Possible Solutions Add a column to the users table for each category and reset them all to zero each time a user levels-up. Have a separate UserProgress table with a row for each category for each user and the number of points they have. (Basically a Many-to-Many version of #1.) Add a userLevel column to the UserTasks table and use that to derive their progress with some kind of SUM statement. Their current level will be a simple int in the User table. Pros & Cons (1) seems like by far the most straightforward, but it's also the least flexible. Perhaps I could use a naming convention based on the category ids to help overcome some of that. (With code like "select cats; for each cat, get the value from Users.progress_{cat.id}.") It's also the one where I lose the most data -- I won't know which points counted toward leveling up. I don't have a need in mind for that, so maybe I don't care about that. (2) seems complicated: every time I add or subtract a user or a category, I have to maintain the other table. I foresee synchronization challenges. (3) Is somewhere in between -- cleaner than #2, but less intuitive than #1. In order to find out where a user is, I'd have mildly complex SQL like: SELECT categoryId, SUM(points) from UserTasks WHERE userId={user.id} & countsTowardLevel={user.level} groupBy categoryId Hmm... that doesn't seem so bad. I think I'm talking myself into #3 here, but would love any input, advice or other ideas. P.S. Sorry for the cross-post. I wrote this up on SO and then remembered that there was a game dev-focused one. Curious to see if I get different answers one place than the other....

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  • Proving What You are Worth

    - by Ted Henson
    Here is a challenge for everyone. Just about everyone has been asked to provide or calculate the Return on Investment (ROI), so I will assume everyone has a method they use. The problem with stopping once you have an ROI is that those in the C-Suite probably do not care about the ROI as much as Return on Equity (ROE). Shareholders are mostly concerned with their return on the money the invested. Warren Buffett looks at ROE when deciding whether to make a deal or not. This article will outline how you can add more meaning to your ROI and show how you can potentially enhance the ROE of the company.   First I want to start with a base definition I am using for ROI and ROE. Return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE) are ways to measure management effectiveness, parts of a system of measures that also includes profit margins for profitability, price-to-earnings ratio for valuation, and various debt-to-equity ratios for financial strength. Without a set of evaluation metrics, a company's financial performance cannot be fully examined by investors. ROI and ROE calculate the rate of return on a specific investment and the equity capital respectively, assessing how efficient financial resources have been used. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, so that will be the focus. Now that the challenge has been made and items have been defined, let’s go deeper. Most research about implementation stops short at system start-up and seldom addresses post-implementation issues. However, we know implementation is a continuous improvement effort, and continued efforts after system start-up will influence the ultimate success of a system.   Most UPK ROI’s I have seen only include the cost savings in developing the training material. Some will also include savings based on reduced Help Desk calls. Using just those values you get a good ROI. To get an ROE you need to go a little deeper. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, which is the purpose of implementing/upgrading an enterprise application. Let’s assume the new system is up and running and all users have been properly trained and are comfortable using the system. You provide senior management with your ROI that justifies the original cost. What you want to do now is develop a good base value to a measure the current efficiency. Using usage tracking you can look for various patterns. For example, you may find that users that are accessing UPK assistance are processing a procedure, such as entering an order, 5 minutes faster than those that don’t.  You do some research and discover each minute saved in processing a claim saves the company one dollar. That translates to the company saving five dollars on every transaction. Assuming 100,000 transactions are performed a year, and all users improve their performance, the company will be saving $500,000 a year. That $500,000 can be re-invested, used to reduce debt or paid to the shareholders.   With continued refinement during the life cycle, you should be able to find ways to reduce cost. These are the type of numbers and productivity gains that senior management and shareholders want to see. Being able to quantify savings and increase productivity may also help when seeking a raise or promotion.

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  • Is my class structure good enough?

    - by Rivten
    So I wanted to try out this challenge on reddit which is mostly about how you structure your data the best you can. I decided to challenge my C++ skills. Here's how I planned this. First, there's the Game class. It deals with time and is the only class main has access to. A game has a Forest. For now, this class does not have a lot of things, only a size and a Factory. Will be put in better use when it will come to SDL-stuff I guess A Factory is the thing that deals with the Game Objects (a.k.a. Trees, Lumberjack and Bears). It has a vector of all GameObjects and a queue of Events which will be managed at the end of one month. A GameObject is an abstract class which can be updated and which can notify the Event Listener The EventListener is a class which handles all the Events of a simulation. It can recieve events from a Game Object and notify the Factory if needed, the latter will manage correctly the event. So, the Tree, Lumberjack and Bear classes all inherits from GameObject. And Sapling and Elder Tree inherits from Tree. Finally, an Event is defined by an event_type enumeration (LUMBERJACK_MAWED, SAPPLING_EVOLUTION, ...) and an event_protagonists union (a GameObject or a pair of GameObject (who killed who ?)). I was quite happy at first with this because it seems quite logic and flexible. But I ended up questionning this structure. Here's why : I dislike the fact that a GameObject need to know about the Factory. Indeed, when a Bear moves somewhere, it needs to know if there's a Lumberjack ! Or it is the Factory which handles places and objects. It would be great if a GameObject could only interact with the EventListener... or maybe it's not that much of a big deal. Wouldn't it be better if I separate the Factory in three vectors ? One for each kind of GameObject. The idea would be to optimize research. If I'm looking do delete a dead lumberjack, I would only have to look in one shorter vector rather than a very long vector. Another problem arises when I want to know if there is any particular object in a given case because I have to look for all the gameObjects and see if they are at the given case. I would tend to think that the other idea would be to use a matrix but then the issue would be that I would have empty cases (and therefore unused space). I don't really know if Sapling and Elder Tree should inherit from Tree. Indeed, a Sapling is a Tree but what about its evolution ? Should I just delete the sapling and say to the factory to create a new Tree at the exact same place ? It doesn't seem natural to me to do so. How could I improve this ? Is the design of an Event quite good ? I've never used unions before in C++ but I didn't have any other ideas about what to use. Well, I hope I have been clear enough. Thank you for taking the time to help me !

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  • Code Golf: Collatz Conjecture

    - by Earlz
    Inspired by http://xkcd.com/710/ here is a code golf for it. The Challenge Given a positive integer greater than 0, print out the hailstone sequence for that number. The Hailstone Sequence See Wikipedia for more detail.. If the number is even, divide it by two. If the number is odd, triple it and add one. Repeat this with the number produced until it reaches 1. (if it continues after 1, it will go in an infinite loop of 1 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1...) Sometimes code is the best way to explain, so here is some from Wikipedia function collatz(n) show n if n > 1 if n is odd call collatz(3n + 1) else call collatz(n / 2) This code works, but I am adding on an extra challenge. The program must not be vulnerable to stack overflows. So it must either use iteration or tail recursion. Also, bonus points for if it can calculate big numbers and the language does not already have it implemented. (or if you reimplement big number support using fixed-length integers) Test case Number: 21 Results: 21 -> 64 -> 32 -> 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1 Number: 3 Results: 3 -> 10 -> 5 -> 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1 Also, the code golf must include full user input and output.

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  • Design/Architecture Advice Needed

    - by Rachel
    Summary: I have different components on homepage and each components shows some promotion to the user. I have Cart as one Component and depending upon content of the cart promotion are show. I have to track user online activities and send that information to Omniture for Report Generation. Now my components are loaded asynchronously basically are loaded when AjaxRequest is fired up and so there is not fix pattern or rather information on when components will appear on the webpages. Now in order to pass information to Omniture I need to call track function on $(document).(ready) and append information for each components(7 parameters are required by Omniture for each component). So in the init:config function of each component am calling Omniture and passing paramters but now no. of Omniture calls is directly proportional to no. of Components on the webpage but this is not acceptable as each call to Omniture is very expensive. Now I am looking for a way where in I can club the information about 7 parameters and than make one Call to Omniture wherein I pass those information. Points to note is that I do not know when the components are loaded and so there is no pre-defined time or no. of components that would be loaded. The thing is am calling track function when document is ready but components are loaded after call to Omniture has been made and so my question is Q: How can I collect the information for all the components and than just make one call to Omniture to send those information ? As mentioned, I do not know when the components are loaded as they are done on the Ajax Request. Hope I am able to explain my challenge and would appreciate if some one can provide from Design/Architect Solutions for the Challenge.

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  • how to better (inambiguaously) use the terms CAPTCHA and various types of interactions?

    - by vgv8
    I am working on survey of state-of-the-art and trends of spam prevention techniques. I observe that non-intrusive, transparent to visitor spam prevention techniques (like context-based filtering or honey traps) are frequently called non-captcha. Is it correct understanding of term CAPTCHA which is "type of challenge-response [ 2 ]test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a compute" [ 1 ] and challenge-response does not seem to imply obligatory human involvement. So, which understanding (definition) of term and classification I'd better to stick with? How would I better call CAPTCHA without direct human interaction in order to avoid ambiguity and confusion of terms understnding? How would I better (succinctly and unambiguously) coin the term for captchas requiring human interaction but without typing into textbox? How would I better (succinctly and unambiguously) coin the terms to mark the difference between human interaction with images (playing, drag&dropping, rearranging, clicking with images) vs. just recognizing them (and then typing into a textbox the answer without interaction with images)? PS. The problem is that recognition of a wiggled word in an image or typing the answer to question is also interaction and when I start to use the terms "interaction", "interactive", "captcha", "protection", "non-captcha", "non-interactive", "static", "dynamic", "visible", "hidden" the terms overlap ambiguously with which another (especailly because the definitions or their actual practice of usage are vague or contradictive). [ 1 ] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

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  • memory alignment within gcc structs

    - by Mumbles
    I am porting an application to an ARM platform in C, the application also runs on an x86 processor, and must be backward compatible. I am now having some issues with variable alignment. I have read the gcc manual for __attribute__((aligned(4),packed)) I interpret what is being said as the start of the struct is aligned to the 4 byte boundry and the inside remains untouched because of the packed statement. originally I had this but occasionally it gets placed unaligned with the 4 byte boundary. typedef struct { unsigned int code; unsigned int length; unsigned int seq; unsigned int request; unsigned char nonce[16]; unsigned short crc; } __attribute__((packed)) CHALLENGE; so I change it to this. typedef struct { unsigned int code; unsigned int length; unsigned int seq; unsigned int request; unsigned char nonce[16]; unsigned short crc; } __attribute__((aligned(4),packed)) CHALLENGE; The understand I stated earlier seems to be incorrect as both the struct is now aligned to a 4 byte boundary, and and the inside data is now aligned to a four byte boundary, but because of the endianess, the size of the struct has increased in size from 42 to 44 bytes. This size is critical as we have other applications that depend on the struct being 42 bytes. Could some describe to me how to perform the operation that I require. Any help is much appreciated.

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  • Inserting script from jQuery / Javascript

    - by Colby77
    Hi, I'm trying to insert reCaptcha code into my page from jQuery, but it doesn't work. Here is my code: $("#button").click(function() { $("#loginBox").html($.getRecaptcha()); }) When I try the following, my code doesn't even run. I think it's trying to execute instead of rendering it. $.getRecaptcha = function(){ return '<script type="text/javascript"' + 'src="http://api.recaptcha.net/challenge?' + 'k=6Ld3iAsAAAAAAGyX8QT244GagPEpCDSD-96o4gEi"></script>'; } With the following, the code runs, but when I click to #button I get an empty, full white browser window. $.getRecaptcha = function(){ var captcha = $("<script>") .attr("type", "text/javascript") .attr("src", "http://api.recaptcha.net/challenge?k=6Ld3iAsAAAAAAGyX8QT244GagPEpCDSD-96o4gEi"); return captcha; } I don't want to insert reCaptcha code into my html from the beginning, because it downloads the reCaptcha content from the reCaptcha server even if my users don't want to use it. I could set the visibility of the container that holds the reCaptcha to invisible (display: none;), but it will dowload the content irrespectively of it. I can insert the "noScript" code that reCaptcha gives us, but it doesn't work either, because it can spot that the browser allow javascript but I use noScript. Any suggestions? (I know I put my public reCaptcha key into the code, but it is just for testing purposes, and you could get it from my html or javascript code anyway)

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  • jquery png fix on hidden div and jquerybrowser question

    - by Jared
    Hello, I have some code that if Javascript is available, it will remove a GIF image and replace it with a PNG image. The PNG is display:none and the GIF is visible. Since IE6- browsers can't load PNG, I have loaded the jquery PNG fix. But it only seems to work if the image is already visible. The other issue is I am trying to get the jquery.browser function to apply to less than version 6, and I am not having much luck. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ $("#gif").hide(); jQuery.each(jQuery.browser, function(i, val) { if($.browser.msie && jQuery.browser.version <="6"){ $("#png").show(); $('.png').pngFix() }else{ $("#png").fadeIn("slow"); } }); }); </script> HTML <img class="png" id="png" src="images/main_elements/one-2-flush-it-campus-challenge.png" style="display:none;" /> <img id="gif" src="images/main_elements/one-2-flush-it-campus-challenge.gif"/>

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  • I like the way they Design/Architecture it but how do I implement this

    - by Rachel
    Summary: I have different components on homepage and each components shows some promotion to the user. I have Cart as one Component and depending upon content of the cart promotion are show. I have to track user online activities and send that information to Omniture for Report Generation. Now my components are loaded asynchronously basically are loaded when AjaxRequest is fired up and so there is not fix pattern or rather information on when components will appear on the webpages. Now in order to pass information to Omniture I need to call track function on $(document).(ready) and append information for each components(7 parameters are required by Omniture for each component). So in the init:config function of each component am calling Omniture and passing paramters but now no. of Omniture calls is directly proportional to no. of Components on the webpage but this is not acceptable as each call to Omniture is very expensive. Now I am looking for a way where in I can club the information about 7 parameters and than make one Call to Omniture wherein I pass those information. Points to note is that I do not know when the components are loaded and so there is no pre-defined time or no. of components that would be loaded. The thing is am calling track function when document is ready but components are loaded after call to Omniture has been made and so my question is Q: How can I collect the information for all the components and than just make one call to Omniture to send those information ? As mentioned, I do not know when the components are loaded as they are done on the Ajax Request. Hope I am able to explain my challenge and would appreciate if some one can provide from Design/Architect Solutions for the Challenge.

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  • Recaptcha with Ajax error

    - by Brandon
    I'm having trouble validating a recaptcha input. Heres my code: // Validate Recaptcha Input var challenge = $("#recaptcha_challenge_field").val(); var response = $("#recaptcha_response_field").val(); var dataString = 'recaptcha_challenge_field=' + challenge + '&recaptcha_response_field=' + response; var html = $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "PHP/recaptchaverify.php", data: dataString, async: true }).responseText; console.log(html); if(html == 'accept') { alert("CORRECT"); } else { alert("The reCAPTCHA wasn't entered correctly. Go back and try it again."); $("#recaptcha_response_field").focus(); Recaptcha.reload(); return false; } Now I passed my variables to recpatchaverify.php require_once('../scripts/recaptcha-php/recaptchalib.php'); $privatekey = "MYKEY"; $resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($privatekey, $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"], $_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"], $_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]); if (!$resp->is_valid) { // What happens when the CAPTCHA was entered incorrectly echo "error"; } else { // Your code here to handle a successful verification echo "accept"; } Now my problem is the html variable is displaying "accept" whenever I enter the Recaptcha correctly, but it won't work in the IF statement?

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  • Testing variable types in Python

    - by Jasper
    Hello, I'm creating an initialising function for the class 'Room', and found that the program wouldn't accept the tests I was doing on the input variables. Why is this? def __init__(self, code, name, type, size, description, objects, exits): self.code = code self.name = name self.type = type self.size = size self.description = description self.objects = objects self.exits = exits #Check for input errors: if type(self.code) != type(str()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 110' elif type(self.name) != type(str()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 111' elif type(self.type) != type(str()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 112' elif type(self.size) != type(int()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 113' elif type(self.description) != type(str()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 114' elif type(self.objects) != type(list()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 115' elif type(self.exits) != type(tuple()): print 'Error found in module rooms.py!' print 'Error number: 116' When I run this I get this error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/Jasper/Development/Programming/MyProjects/Game Making Challenge/Europa I/rooms.py", line 148, in <module> myRoom = Room(101, 'myRoom', 'Basic Room', 5, '<insert description>', myObjects, myExits) File "/Users/Jasper/Development/Programming/MyProjects/Game Making Challenge/Europa I/rooms.py", line 29, in __init__ if type(self.code) != type(str()): TypeError: 'str' object is not callable

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  • Nested modal view controller gives strange message under iOS6?

    - by user1840362
    I am presenting a modal view controller from another modal view controller, and this worked fine under all iOS versions prior to iOS6. But under iOS6 I am getting the following warning message in the emulator: Warning: Attempt to present <UINavigationController: 0x14e93680> on <UINavigationController: 0x9fc6b70> while a presentation is in progress! The modal view controller is not shown if this warning appears. Basically I am using code like this to show the modal view controller: WebAuthViewController *authController = [[WebAuthViewController alloc] initWithNibName:nil bundle:nil]; authController.challenge = challenge; authController.delegate = self; UINavigationController *aNavController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:authController]; [self presentModalViewController:aNavController animated:YES]; [aNavController release]; [authController release]; The view that is already shown is a UIWebView also shown in a modal view, like this: WebViewController *addController = [[WebViewController alloc] initWithNibName:nil bundle:nil]; addController.urlToLoad = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString]; addController.delegate = self; UINavigationController *navigationController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:addController]; navigationController.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleFlipHorizontal; [self presentModalViewController:navigationController animated:YES]; [navigationController release]; [addController release]; The apple docs still suggest that one is supposed to be able to stack navigation controllers like this, so I am at a loss to explain why this happens. Any hints?

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  • Using Javascript to call the Azure Blob Storage REST API

    - by user350829
    I'm developing a Flash app that saves files to the Azure Blob Storage API. I've learned that you should use the REST API directly rather than a go-between WCF service as this is the most efficient (using a web role is a bottleneck). The problem is that Flash can't do PUT or DELETE methods over Http and has to use external Javascript. This is not an area that I'm familiar with and need some advice/links to examples of using Javascript to work with the Storage API (I've obviously Googled this to no avail). Is this even possible? The Javascript would be hosted in a web role on the same domain. Many thanks, Ed

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  • ExternalInterface in flex calling javascript function works for mozilla/chrome but NOT IE

    - by Rees
    hello, i have a flex application that does a simple ExternalInterface.call("shareOptions"), which calls a shareOptions() javascript method and works absolutely fine with Mozilla and chrome, however when I test with IE i get the following error: Error: [object Error] at flash.external::ExternalInterface$/_toAS() at flash.external::ExternalInterface$/call() I looked at the adobe livedocs documentation but can't determine what the issue is with IE. is there something i'm missing?? if anyone knows, please let me know ASAP! thanks in advance. private function shareOptions(event:MouseEvent):void{ ExternalInterface.marshallExceptions = true; if (ExternalInterface.available){ ExternalInterface.call("shareOptions"); } } the javascript <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> function shareOptions() { myWin = window.open('http://www.mysite.shareOptions.php','yeee!','width=640,height=690,toolbar=no,location=0,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,copyhistory=no,resizable=yes,x=500,y=500'); myWin.moveTo(300,300); } </script>

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  • Pixel Shader Effect Examples

    - by Chris Nicol
    I've seen a number of pixel-shader effect examples, stuff like swirl on an image. But I'm wondering if anyone knows of any examples or tutorials for more practical uses of shader effects? I'm not saying that a swirl effect doesn't have it's uses, it's just that many of the examples I've found have the basic effect explained and don't go into how it might be used subtly with another effect or transition to produce a wonderful effect. There's a video here, that outlines all the WPF Effects Library, but I'm not sure how I would use some of them in a practical context. For example, when Flash 8 came out with effects like blur, I found a wonderful video that showed how to use the blur effect to create a cool effect with speeding text, that video inspired many ideas of what I could do with the effects in Flash 8. I'm looking for something similar with Pixel Shader Effects.

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  • How to catch all exceptions in Flex?

    - by Yaba
    When I run a Flex application in the debug flash player I get an exception pop up as soon as something unexpected happened. However when a customer uses the application he does not use the debug flash player. In this case he does not get an exception pop up, but he UI is not working. So for supportability reasons, I would like to catch any exception that can happen anywhere in the Flex UI and present an error message in a Flex internal popup. By using Java I would just encapsulate the whole UI code in a try/catch block, but with MXML applications in Flex I do not know, where I could perform such a general try/catch.

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  • sIFR 3 HTML text does not display, .sIFR-alternate causing problem

    - by Jeremy Schultz
    It seems my sIFR 3 text does not show HTML text if the Flash text is not displayed. Here's one of the pages in question: http://www.jeremyschultz.com/client/orchardplace/website/beta/volunteer/ One person has reported not seeing anything when viewing this page, and I can recreate it by removing the Flash text with Firebug. Testing with Firebug also suggests the .sIFR-alternate class is what's causing this: when I remove it, the text shows up, and it disappears again when I restore it. I copied the original CSS and also tried applying a few new CSS rules to .sIFR-alternate but nothing has solved it. What do you think? Jeremy [email protected]

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