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• Maximizing the Value of Software

  - by David Dorf

  A few years ago we decided to increase our investments in documenting retail processes and architectures.  There were several goals but the main two were to help retailers maximize the value they derive from our software and help system integrators implement our software faster.  The sale is only part of our success metric -- its actually more important that the customer realize the benefits of the software.  That's when we actually celebrate. This week many of our customers are gathered in Chicago to discuss their successes during our annual Crosstalk conference.  That provides the perfect forum to announce the release of the Oracle Retail Reference Library.  The RRL is available for free to Oracle Retail customers and partners.  It contains 1000s of hours of work and represents years of experience in the retail industry.  The Retail Reference Library is composed of three offerings: Retail Reference Model We've been sharing the RRM for several years now, with lots of accolades.  The RRM is a set of business process diagrams at varying levels of granularity. This release marks the debut of Visio documents, which should make it easier for retailers to adopt and edit the diagrams.  The processes represent an approximation of the Oracle Retail software, but at higher levels they are pretty generic and therefore usable with other software as well.  Using these processes, the business and IT are better able to communicate the expectations of the software.  They can be used to guide customization when necessary, and help identify areas for optimization in the organization. Retail Reference Architecture When embarking on a software implementation project, it can be daunting to start from a blank sheet of paper.  So we offer the RRA, a comprehensive set of documents that describe the retail enterprise in terms of logical architecture, physical deployments, and systems integration.  These documents and diagrams describe how all the systems typically found in a retailer enterprise work together.  They serve as a way to jump-start implementations using best practices we've captured over the years. Retail Semantic Glossary Have you ever seen two people argue over something because they're using misaligned terminology?  Its a huge waste and happens all the time.  The Retail Semantic Glossary is a simple application that allows retailers to define terms and metrics in a centralized database.  This initial version comes with limited content with the goal of adding more over subsequent releases.  This is the single source for defining key performance indicators, metrics, algorithms, and terms so that the retail organization speaks in a consistent language. These three offerings are downloaded from MyOracleSupport separately and linked together using the start page above.  Everything is navigated using a Web browser.  See the Oracle Retail Documentation blog for more details.

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• Many sources of movement in an entity system

  - by Sticky

  I'm fairly new to the idea of entity systems, having read a bunch of stuff (most usefully, this great blog and this answer). Though I'm having a little trouble understanding how something as simple as being able to manipualate the position of an object by an undefined number of sources. That is, I have my entity, which has a position component. I then have some event in the game which tells this entity to move a given distance, in a given time. These events can happen at any time, and will have different values for position and time. The result is that they'd be compounded together. In a traditional OO solution, I'd have some sort of MoveBy class, that contains the distance/time, and an array of those inside my game object class. Each frame, I'd iterate through all the MoveBy, and apply it to the position. If a MoveBy has reached its finish time, remove it from the array. With the entity system, I'm a little confused as how I should replicate this sort of behavior. If there were just one of these at a time, instead of being able to compound them together, it'd be fairly straightforward (I believe) and look something like this: PositionComponent containing x, y MoveByComponent containing x, y, time Entity which has both a PositionComponent and a MoveByComponent MoveBySystem that looks for an entity with both these components, and adds the value of MoveByComponent to the PositionComponent. When the time is reached, it removes the component from that entity. I'm a bit confused as to how I'd do the same thing with many move by's. My initial thoughts are that I would have: PositionComponent, MoveByComponent the same as above MoveByCollectionComponent which contains an array of MoveByComponents MoveByCollectionSystem that looks for an entity with a PositionComponent and a MoveByCollectionComponent, iterating through the MoveByComponents inside it, applying/removing as necessary. I guess this is a more general problem, of having many of the same component, and wanting a corresponding system to act on each one. My entities contain their components inside a hash of component type - component, so strictly have only 1 component of a particular type per entity. Is this the right way to be looking at this? Should an entity only ever have one component of a given type at all times?

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• S11 launched

  - by unixman

  Now that Oracle Solaris 11 is out, its time to do 2 things -- 1) Its time to see what's in it, what's new and why its important, and then assess why it might make sense to begin evaluating it for your needs and 2) Its time to acknowledge, give thanks to and congratulate all the R&D personnel, architects, engineers, designers and testers who've put in so much effort and energy into helping make Solaris 11 (and SunOS 5.11) what it has become -- starting way back circa 2004 and, more importantly, culminating in the recent years and months -- staying focused on the execution, unwavering in the face of various challenges. For #1 above, here are a few good things to get going with - Watch the product launch replay - Visit the Solaris 11 Spotlight section on oracle.com - Get comfortable through introductory videos and detailed "how-to" guides (ex: how to create and publish IPS packages), white papers on the new default root file system, ZFS, and reap the benefits brought on by the fundamental shift in easing the administration experience - Look at the next level of software lifecycle management that is enabled by technologies such as Automated Installer and Image Packaging System -- that dramatically address patch management-related challenges - Understand how we continue to innovate in areas of service intelligence, reliability and availability - Start to evaluate enhancements in virtualization capabilities -- whether influenced by the need to consolidate or motivated by the need to have increased service mobility across physical systems, leveraging hardware-level abstractions - Gain more control over your network-centric services through enhancements in network resource management, observability and I/O performance - Look beyond your existing infrastructure with confidence that you can re-host and transition to newer systems with the use of Solaris 10 zones running on top of Solaris 11 - Relish in the fact that you can do all this, get your data to be secure and encrypted and more, on both, SPARC and x86-based systems. - Stay informed by keeping an eye on relevant blogs, which we've begun turning up recently. - Go through a hands-on lab - Sign up to take a class or just opt to watch various videos to begin to raise your comfort level with these technologies For #2 above -- There are many ways to do that. One way is to just say "thanks" with an email, a post, or a simple card,  similar to this one seen at a Barnes and Noble store recently.  The front of the card is followed by what's inside... and as the saying goes, now more then ever "it's what's inside that counts" And here's the inside of the card: So, what are you waiting for ? Go download and try it out, and please let us know what you think of it!

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• How can I be prepared to join a company?

  - by Aerovistae

  There's more to it than that, but this title was the best way I could think of to sum it up. I'm a senior in a good computer science program, and I'm graduating early. About to start interviews and all whatnot. I'm not a super-experienced programmer, not one of those people who started in middle school. I'm decent at this, but I'm not among the best, not nearly. I have to do an awful lot of googling. So today I'm meeting some fellow for lunch at a campus cafe to discuss some front-end details when this tall, good-looking guy begs pardon, says he's new to campus, says he's wondering if we know where he can go to sign up for recruiting developers. Quickly evolves into long conversation: he's the CEO of a seems-to-be-doing-well start-up. Hiring passionate interns and full-times. Sounds great! I take one look at his site on my own computer later, immediately spot a major bug. No idea how to fix it, but I see it. I go over to the page code, and good god. It's the standard amount of code you would expect from a full-scale web application, a couple dozen pages of HTML and scripts. I don't even know where to start reading it. I've built sites from scratch, but obviously never on that scale, nor have I ever worked on one of that scale. I have no idea which bit might generate the bug. But that sets me thinking: How could someone like me possibly settle into an environment like that? A start-up is a very high-pressure working environment. I don't know if I can work at that pace under those constraints-- I would hate to let people down. And with only 10 employees, it's not like anyone has much time to help you get your bearings. Somewhere in there is a question. Can you see it? I'm asking for general advice here. Maybe even anecdotal advice. Is joining a start-up right out of college a scary process? Am I overestimating what it would take to figure out the mass of code behind this site? What's the likelihood a decent but only moderately-experienced coder could earn his pay at such a place? For instance, I know nothing of server-side/back-end programming. Never touched it. That scares me.

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• How to end a relationship with a client without pissing them off?

  - by thesam18888

  Here's my situation: I'm a freelancing student and I was working on a software project for a client over the summer holidays of 2010. At the time I completed the application, tested it on my machine, delivered it to the client and went back to University. However the client is not completely satisfied with the product and apparently has found a couple of bugs with it. Ever since I went back to Uni, they have been chasing me up and asking me to spend some time to fix the bugs. I have explained that this is simply not possible as I am extremely busy with my Uni work and cannot afford to spare my time for anything else. The client is getting increasingly pissed off and have been chasing me by calling during lectures at evenings and even asking me if I could go over to their place over the weekend to talk about this. This is in turn pissing me off as well because they're essentially asking me to give up my education so that I could help them out by fixing bugs. I go to Uni 5 days a week, 9-6 and feel it is unreasonable for them to call me during evenings and to ask me to work over weekends etc. I would like to end my relationship with this client but would like to do it amicably without pissing them off. How can I do this? I really wish they would just find someone else but I was charging them piss-poor rates so I think they don't want to go to anyone else because they would have to pay more. EDIT The application does not seem to work perfectly on their machine. I had tested it extensively on my machine and it seemed to work fine. I am not sure what exactly is causing it to not work. I was paid a very low amount and it was on an hourly basis. e.g. I would send an invoice saying I worked on this for x amount of hours and they would pay me for it. Apart from the work itself, I have not charged them for all the time spent sending e-mails back and forth, phone calls, visits to their place etc. I would really like to end all my dealings with this client right away.

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• Should I continue to pursue programming based on my experience?

  - by El Be

  The reason I ask this question is because I am not sure my troubles come from a lack of confidence, or something much deeper like lack of passion. I'm hoping experienced programmers and developers can help identify the cause of my troubles. To be brief my undergraduate major was in Computer Science, but in a small school and I had the highest gpa in my year in computer science. The first time I ever programmed was once in the 5th grade (using logo) and when I was a freshman in college. I enjoyed programming when I was in school. Then I did an internships where I was expected to produce image processing software and program microchips. I was unsuccessful and produced little results and I hated the job, because I had to figure out everything for myself, did not have any help, and there was a lot of pressure to produce results. Although I tried I could not figure out what to do and was stuck all the time and made me dislike the job. When the internship ended I went to a PhD program for computer science at a prestigious computer science school. I had a very hard time with the course, met people who have been programming since they were 6 and made plenty of applications in their spare time (which I never did, although I tried). I even met many sophomores who understood more than I did. The combination of this and other things have made me feel that programming is not for me, but sometimes I consider a career in programming. I still consider programming as a career because of the career potential (not only just because of money). Based on my experience do you believe my confidence has just been shaken and I should continue to prepare for a programming career, or do you see a lack of passion and it would make it tough to continue programming. thank you for reading and for your advice Thank you for everyone's advice so far! Also: I dropped out of the ph.D program for computer science and switched to a master's in computer graphics. Its more applied, but I still find it hard to be motivated (due to either lack of confidence or passion), but since programming is such a big field I am looking for that niche area that I feel good programming in.

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• Defining a service layer: the text-based adventure

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Applications these days have more options than ever for a user interface, and it’s only going to grow. A successful product might require native applications for mobile devices, a regular web implementation, or even a gaming console. These systems often will be centralized and data driven. The solution is one that’s fairly solitary, a service layer! Simply put, take what’s shared and put it behind a physical or abstract layer that defines the boundary between the specific user interface and the shared content.   I know, I know, none of this is complicated. But some times it can be difficult to discern what belongs on which side of the line. For instance, say we’re creating a service that will provide content for both an ASP.NET MVC application and a WP7 application. Although the content served to each application is the same, there are different paradigms and patterns for displaying that data in the different environments. In ASP.NET MVC, you may create a model specific to a page that combines necessary information. In the WP7 application you might require different sets of data that you will connect via MVVM with the view. The general rule of thumb is that any shared content, business rules, or data should exist separately. Any element that is specific to the current UI implementation should be included in a separate library or with the UI implementation itself. The WP7 application doesn’t need my MVC specific model classes. My MVC application doesn’t require those INotifyPropertyChanged viewmodels that the WP7 application depends on. In both cases, there should be additional processing done above the service layer to massage the data to the application’s specific needs.   Service-ocalypse: the text based adventure What helps me the most about deciding whether or not something belongs coupled to the UI implementation or in the shared implementation is thinking of the simplest implementation you could have: a console application. You might have played a game like Peasant’s Quest: The console app is the text based adventure game version of your application. If you’re service was consumed in its simplest form, you would simply have a console based API for it that issues requests. Maybe those requests aren’t SWIM TO BOAT, but they might be CREATE USER JOHN. If I issue a request, I expect that request to be issued to the service. If the service has any exceptions or issues with my input, that business logic should be encapsulated in that service, not implemented in the UI. The service layer should be your functional application in its entirety, and anything above that layer should only assist with the display of that information.

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• New Features Of WordPress 3.3 You Must Know

  - by Gopinath

  After months of beta testing, WordPress 3.3 version is going to be released at the end of this month. There are several new features packed in the new version and few of them are going to excite WordPress admins. In this post we are going to discuss about the exciting new features. 1. Drag and Drop Media Uploads One of the biggest improvements in this version of WordPress is it’s all new media uploader. Now you can upload multiple files by just dragging & dropping, instantly resize  the images and filter files by their type. The media upload sports a brand new look WordPress adopted the Pupload plugin to power its media uploader component and it’s written by the same team who created the popular TinyMCE editor plugin. 2. Improved Admin Bar(Toolbar) The admin bar or newly called toolbar has got handful of makeovers. The not so much used items like Search box and other elements are removed to make sure that the bar is not clumsy. The user menu and the related options are moved to the right like how we see in Google’s user bar. Also there are few changes to the colour of the bar to make it more eye friendly. 3. Fly out Admin Menus All the left side bar menus of WordPress admin are now sports a fly out menu style to save a click. In the previous versions if you want to access a sub menu on the left side bar, you need to first click on the category and then choose the menu item from the expanded list. Now on just mouse over you will see a flyout of menu items. 4. Adaptive Admin – Layout Auto Adjust To Fit Various Devices If you own an iPad or any other so called tablets then you are going to love this feature. The admin site of WordPress has got a lot more friendly with tablets and smartphones. WordPress now auto adjusts layout to fit the device through which you are accessing the admin site.  Accessing admin dashboard on your tablets is going to be more fun. 5. Other Features Now that we have read the most useful 4 features here is a small list of other features that may interest you Nice Tooltips are displayed where ever possible to help the newbies to understand the usage of admin site Responsive Layouts jQuery 1.7 and jQuery UI 1.8.16 are the power horses of WordPress Performance improvements This article titled,New Features Of WordPress 3.3 You Must Know, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Attaching new animations onto skeleton via props, a good idea?

  - by Cardin

  I'm thinking of coding a game with an idea of mine. I've coded 2D games before, but I'm new to 3D programming, so I'd like to ask if this idea of mine is feasible or out of my depth. I'm making a game where there are many different characters for the player to choose from (JRPG style). So to save time, I have an idea of creating many different varied characters using a completely naked body mesh and animation skeleton, standardised across all characters. For example, by placing different hair, boots, armor props on the character mesh, new characters can be formed. Kinda like playing dress-up with a barbie doll. I'm thinking this can be done by having a bone on the prop that I can programmically attach to the main mesh. Also, I plan to have some props add new animations to the base skeleton, so equipping some particular props would give it new attack, damage, idle animations. This is because I can't expect the character to have the same swinging animation if he had a big sword or an axe. I think this might be possible if the prop has its own instance of the animation skeleton with just only the new animations, and parenting the base body mesh to this new skeleton. So all the base body mesh has are just the basic animations, other animations come from the props. My concerns are, 1) the props might not attach to the mesh properly and jitter a lot, 2) since prop and body are animated differently, the props and base mesh will cause visual artefacts, like the naked thighs showing through the pants when the character walks, 3) a custom pipeline have to be developed to export skeletons without mesh, and also to attach the base body mesh to a new skeleton during runtime in the game. So my question: are these features considered 'easy' to code? Or am I trying to do something few have ever succeeded with on their own? It feels like all these can be done given enough time and I know I definitely have to do a bit of bone matrix calculations, but I really don't want to drag out the development timeline unnecessarily from coding mathematically intense things or analyzing how to parse 3D export formats. I'm currently only at the Game Design stage, so if these features aren't a good idea, I can simply change the design of the game. (Unrelated to question) I could always, as last resort, have the characters have predetermined outfit and weapon selections so as to animate everything manually.

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• Oracle Brings Java to iOS Devices (and Android too)

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  Java developer, did you ever wish that you can take your Java skills and apply them to building applications for iOS mobile devices? Well, now you can! With the new Oracle ADF Mobile solution, Oracle has created a unique technology that allows developers to use the Java language and develop applications that install and run on both iOS and Android mobile devices. The solution is based on a thin native container that installs as part of your application. The container is able to run the same application you develop unchanged on both Android and iOS devices. One part of the container is a headless lightweight JVM based on the Java ME CDC technology. This allows the execution of Java code on your mobile device. Java is used for building business logic, accessing local SQLite encrypted database, and invoking and interacting with remote services. Java concept on the UI too To further help transition Java developers to mobile developers, ADF Mobile borrows familiar concepts from the world of JSF to make the UI development experience simpler. The user interface layer of Oracle ADF Mobile is rendered with HTML5 which delivers native user experience on the devices, including animations and gesture support. Using a set of rich components, developers can create mobile pages without needing to write low level HTML5 and JavaScript code. The components cover everything from simple controls such as text fields, date pickers, buttons and links, to advanced data visualization components such as graphs, gauges and maps, and including unique mobile UI patterns such as lists, and toggle selectors. Want to see the components in action? Access this demo instance from your mobile device. Need to further customize the look and feel? You can use CSS3 to achieve this. A controller layer - similar in functionality to the JSF controller - allows developer to simplify the way they build navigation between pages. The logic behind the pages is written in managed beans with various scopes – again similar to the JSF approach. Need to interact with device features like camera, SMS, Contacts etc? Oracle conveniently packaged access to these services in a set of services that you can just drag and drop into your pages as buttons and links, or code into your managed beans Java calls to activate. Underneath the covers this layer is implemented using the open source phonegap solution. With the new Oracle ADF Mobile solution, transferring your Java skills into the Mobile world has become much easier. Check out this development experience demo. And then go and download JDeveloper and the ADF Mobile extension and try it out on your own. For more on ADF Mobile, see the ADF Mobile OTN page.

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• Our own Daily WTF

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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• Create simple jQuery plugin

  - by ybbest

  In the last post, I have shown you how to add the function to jQuery. In this post, I will show you how to create plugin to achieve this. 1. You need to wrap your code in the following construct, this is because you should not use $ directly as $ is global variable, it could have clash with some other library which also use $.Basically, you can pass in jQuery object into the function, so that $ is made available inside the function. (JavaScript use function to create scope, so you can make sure $ is referred to jQuery inside the function ) (function($){ //Your code goes here. }; })(jQuery); 2. Put your code into the construct above. (function ($) { $.getParameterByName = function (name) { name = name.replace(/[\[]/, "\\\[").replace(/[\]]/, "\\\]"); var regexS = "[\\?&]" + name + "=([^&#]*)"; var regex = new RegExp(regexS); var results = regex.exec(window.location.search); if (results == null) return ""; else return decodeURIComponent(results[1].replace(/\+/g, " ")); }; })(jQuery); 3. Now you can reference the code into you project and you can call the method in you JavaScript References: Provides scope for variables Variables are scoped at the function level in javascript. This is different to what you might be used to in a language like C# or Java where the variables are scoped to the block. What this means is if you declare a variable inside a loop or an if statement, it will be available to the entire function. If you ever find yourself needing to explicitly scope a variable inside a function you can use an anonymous function to do this. You can actually create an anonymous function and then execute it straight away and all the variables inside will be scoped to the anonymous function: (function() { var myProperty = "hello world"; alert(myProperty); })(); alert(typeof(myProperty)); // undefined How does an anonymous function in JavaScript work? Building Your First jQuery Plugin A Plugin Development Pattern

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• Rending 2D Tile World (With Player In The Middle)

  - by Mick

  What I have at the moment is a series of data structures I'm using, and I would like to render the world onto the screen (just the visible parts). I've actually already done this several times (lots of rewrites), but it's a bit buggy (rounding seems to make the screen jump ever so slightly every x tiles the player walks past). Basically I've been confusing myself heavily on what I feel should be a pretty simple problem... so here I am asking for some help! OK! So I have a 50x50 array holding the tiles of the world. I have the player position as 2 floats, x ([0, 49]) and y ([0, 49]) in that array. I have the application size exactly in pixels (x and y). I have an arbitrary TILE_SIZE static int (based on screen pixels). What I think is heavily confusing me is using a 2d orthogonal projection in opengl which maps (0,0) to the top left of the screen and (SCREEN_SIZE_X, SCREEN_SIZE_Y) to the bottom right of the screen. gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_PROJECTION); gl.glLoadIdentity(); glu.gluOrtho2D(0, getActualWidth(), getActualHeight(), 0); gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_MODELVIEW); gl.glLoadIdentity(); The map tiles are set so that the (0,0) in the array is the bottom left. And the player has to be in the middle on the screen (SCREEN_SIZE_X/2, SCREEN_SIZE_Y/2). What I've been doing so far is trying to render 1-2 tiles more all around what would be displayed on the screen so that I don't have to worry about figuring out rendering half a tile from the top left, depending where the player is. It seems like such an easy problem but after spending about 40+hours on it rewriting it many times I think I'm at a point where I just can't think clearly anymore... Any help would be appreciated. It would be great if someone can provide some very basic pseudo code on keeping the player in the middle when your projection is mapped to screen coordinates and only rendering basically the tiles that you would be any be see. Thanks!

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• Asynchronously returning a hierarchal data using .NET TPL... what should my return object "look" like?

  - by makerofthings7

  I want to use the .NET TPL to asynchronously do a DIR /S and search each subdirectory on a hard drive, and want to search for a word in each file... what should my API look like? In this scenario I know that each sub directory will have 0..10000 files or 0...10000 directories. I know the tree is unbalanced and want to return data (in relation to its position in the hierarchy) as soon as it's available. I am interested in getting data as quickly as possible, but also want to update that result if "better" data is found (better means closer to the root of c:) I may also be interested in finding all matches in relation to its position in the hierarchy. (akin to a report) Question: How should I return data to my caller? My first guess is that I think I need a shared object that will maintain the current "status" of the traversal (started | notstarted | complete ) , and might base it on the System.Collections.Concurrent. Another idea that I'm considering is the consumer/producer pattern (which ConcurrentCollections can handle) however I'm not sure what the objects "look" like. Optional Logical Constraint: The API doesn't have to address this, but in my "real world" design, if a directory has files, then only one file will ever contain the word I'm looking for.  If someone were to literally do a DIR /S as described above then they would need to account for more than one matching file per subdirectory. More information : I'm using Azure Tables to store a hierarchy of data using these TPL extension methods. A "node" is a table. Not only does each node in the hierarchy have a relation to any number of nodes, but it's possible for each node to have a reciprocal link back to any other node. This may have issues with recursion but I'm addressing that with a shared object in my recursion loop. Note that each "node" also has the ability to store local data unique to that node. It is this information that I'm searching for. In other words, I'm searching for a specific fixed RowKey in a hierarchy of nodes. When I search for the fixed RowKey in the hierarchy I'm interested in getting the results FAST (first node found) but prefer data that is "closer" to the starting point of the hierarchy. Since many nodes may have the particular RowKey I'm interested in, sometimes I may want to get a report of ALL the nodes that contain this RowKey.

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• Are You Meeting Social Customer Service Expectations?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Whether it’s B2B or B2C, one sure path to repeat business is making sure your buyer has a memorably pleasant and successful customer service experience with you. If they get that kind of treatment consistently, that’s called a relationship. And those aren’t broken easily. Social customer service, driven by integrated SRM (social relationship management) technology, is the venue that can effectively connect customers not only to the brand, but to other customers. Positive experiences, once administered, don’t just rest with the recipient. They’re published in the form of public raves and peer-to-peer recommendation, a force far more actionable than push advertising. What’s more, your customers have come to expect access to you and satisfaction from you using social. An NM Incite study shows 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect to get an answer from brands the same day they post to them on their social assets. To make sure you’re responding, you’ve got to have a tech platform that’s set up to moderate and alert so you’ll know ASAP a customer needs help. The more integrated your social enterprise is, the faster you can not only respond, but respond with the answer they’re looking for, because your system is connected to the internal resources that can surface the answer or put wheels in motion to rectify the situation in the shortest amount of time possible. But if you go to the necessary lengths to make sure your customers feel valued and important, will they really reward you? The study says 71% of consumers who got quick and effective responses from companies they contacted via social were more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and followers. So yes, sweeping people off their feet pays big dividends in terms of word-of-mouth marketing. But you should be keenly aware of the reverse side of that coin. Give people a negative experience, either in real world or virtual customer service, and that message is highly likely to get amplified through social channels faster and louder. Only 36% of the NM Incite study’s respondents reported that their problems were solved quickly and effectively. 36%? That’s hardly an impressive number. It gets worse. 10% never got so much as a response - at all. Going back to the relationship analogy, companies that are this deep in the ditch where customer service is concerned are making their girl or boyfriends really easy for a competitor to steal. Given the technology tools and data available right now for having an intimate knowledge of the customer, what products they’ve purchased, likely problems with those products, effective resolutions to those problems, and follow-up communication to gauge satisfaction, there are fewer excuses than ever for making the lifeblood of your business feel like you couldn’t care less. @mikestiles

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• Response: Agile's Second Chasm

  - by Malcolm Anderson

  William Pietri over at Agile Focus has written an interesting article entitled, "Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)" in which he talks about how agile development has fallen into a common trap where large companies are now spending a lot of money hiring agile (Scrum) consultants just so that they can say they are agile, but all the while avoiding any change that is required by Scrum.   It echoes the questions that I've been asking for a while, "Can a fortune 500 company actually do agile development?"  I'm starting to think that the answer is "usually not"   William ask 3 questions at the end of his article that I will answer here.   1) Have I seen agile development brought in and then preemptively customized (read: made into ScrummerFall)?   Yes, Scrum is hard and disruptive.  It's a spotlight on company dysfunction.  In a low trust environment like most fortune 500 companies Scrum will be subverted by anyone who has ever seen "transparency" translate into someone being laid off.   2) If I had to do it all over again, would I change anything?  No, this is a natural progression, but the agile principles are powerful enough, that the companies that don't adopt them will no longer be competitive and will start to fail.   3) Is this situation solvable?  I think it is.  I think that one of the issues is that you often see companies implementing Scrum, but avoiding the agile engineering practices.  I believe that you cannot do one without the other.  Scrum keeps the ship sailing in smooth deep waters.  The agile engineering practices keep the engine running smoothly and cleanly.  If you implement agile engineering practices without Scrum, you run the risk of ending up with a great running piece of software that is useful to no one.  On the other hand, implementing cargo-cult Scrum without the agile engineering practices and you end up (especially in a fortune 500 company) being steered in the right direction, but with your development practices coming to a dead halt because you have code that can not keep up with the changes in requirements.   If you are trying to do Scrum, make sure that you hire some agile engineering coaches, or else you may find your deveolpment engines grinding to a dead halt in the middle of the open ocean.

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• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client &ndash; Part 5

  - by Max

  In this post, we will look at implementing the following in our twitter client - displaying the profile picture in the home page after logging in. So to accomplish this, we will need to do the following steps. 1) First of all, let us create another field in our Global variable static class to hold the profile image url. So just create a static string field in that. public static string profileImage { get; set; } 2) In the Login.xaml.cs file, before the line where we redirect to the Home page if the login was successful. Create another WebClient request to fetch details from this url - .xml">http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/<TwitterUsername>.xml I am interested only in the “profile_image_url” node in this xml string returned. You can choose what ever field you need – the reference to the Twitter API Documentation is here. 3) This particular url does not require any authentication so no need of network credentials for this and also the useDefaultCredentials will be true. So this code would look like. WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp); WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = myService.UseDefaultCredentials = true; myService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(TimelineRequestCompleted_User);) myService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/" + TwitterUsername.Text + ".xml")); 4) To parse the xml file returned by this and get the value of the “profile_image_url” node, the LINQ code will look something like XDocument xdoc; xdoc = XDocument.Parse(e.Result); var answer = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("user") select status.Element("profile_image_url").Value); GlobalVariable.profileImage = answer.First().ToString(); 5) After this, we can then redirect to Home page completing our login formalities. 6) In the home page, add a image tag and give it a name, something like <Image Name="image1" Stretch="Fill" Margin="29,29,0,0" Height="73" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="73" /> 7) In the OnNavigated to event in home page, we can set the image source url as below image1.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri(GlobalVariable.profileImage, UriKind.Absolute)); Hope this helps. If you have any queries / suggestions, please feel free to comment below or contact me. Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LINQ,Twitter API,Twitter

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• Insanity&ndash;Day 1

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Some people do those posts about “Here’s what I’m going to do to change my life”. I don’t really like those. I’m a “don’t tell me what you’re going to do, tell me what you’re doing/have done” type of guy. So while I could say how I’m going to change my life and be healthier and happier and thinner in 60 days, I’m just going to tell you how I’m progressing through the Insanity workout. Insanity is a workout-in-a-box. It’s a collection of DVDs that you work out to. Nothing new here, except that the program is intense. It’s core tenet of the program is intensity – you workout at an elevated heart rate for 3 minutes with a short break in between, as opposed to traditional interval training where you go hard for a short time and recover for a few minutes. The other aspect of it is commitment. There is a timetable to follow – you workout 6 days a week with one rest day. This isn’t meant to be a “pick it up whenever you feel like it” type of program. The videos themselves are kind of…I don’t want to say low quality, but not as polished as I expected. Maybe that’s what they were going for. By that I mean they show shots of cameramen and the production equipment during the workout. Otherwise, it’s the Insanity leader Shawn T. leading a group of pretty fit folks through this gruelling workout. And ultimately, those little production nit-picks are irrelevant compared to the actual workout. Holy crap. I haven’t done an aerobics class in like…ever. And watching the video before my actual workout, I thought “That doesn’t look too hard”. Believe me, it is. No weights, no machines, just various exercises done in circuits and with increasing speed. By the end of the workout, I was drenched. So that was day one. Some stats just so I can track it: I’m 286 lbs at my last weigh-in a week ago or so. Should be interesting to see what 60 days of this does! D

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• ADF Mobile Released!!

  - by Denis T

  ADFmfAnnounce We are pleased to announce the general availability of the newest version of Oracle’s ADF Mobile framework. This new framework provides the much anticipated on-device capabilities that the latest mobile applications require.  Feature Highlights Java - Oracle brings a Java VM embedded with each application so you can develop all your business logic in the platform neutral language you know and love! (Yes, even iOS!) JDBC - Since we give you Java, we also provide JDBC along with a SQLite driver and engine that also supports encryption out of the box. Multi-Platform - Truly develop your application only once and deploy to multiple platforms. iOS and Android platforms are supported for both phone and tablet. Flexible - You can decide how to implement the UI: (a) Use existing server-based UI framework like JSF. (b) Use your own favorite HTML5 framework like JQuery. (c) Use our declarative HTML5 component set provided with the framework. ADF Mobile XML or AMX for short, provides all the normal input and layout controls you expect and we also add charts/maps/gauges along with it to provide a very comprehensive UI controls. You can also mix and match any of the three for ultimate flexibility! Device Feature Access - You can get access to device features from either Java or JavaScript to invoke features like camera, GPS, email, SMS, contacts, etc. Secure - ADF Mobile provides integrated security that works with your server back-end as well. Whether you’re using remote URLs, local HTML or AMX, you can secure any/all of your features with a single consistent login page. Since we also give you SQLite encryption, we are assured that your data is safe. Rapid - Using the same development techniques that ADF developers are already used to, you can quickly create mobile applications without ever learning another language! Architecture ADF Mobile is a “hybrid” architecture that employs a natively built “container” on each platform that hosts a number of browser windows that are used to display the application content. We add the Java VM as a natively built library to the container for business logic.   How To Get Started ADF Mobile is an extension to the recently released JDeveloper version 11.1.2.3.0. Simple get the latest JDeveloper from Oracle Technology Network and use the Check for Updates feature to get the ADF Mobile extension. Note: ADF Mobile does not require developers to learn any other languages or frameworks but to build/deploy to iOS, you must be on an Apple MacintoshTM and have Xcode installed. To build/deploy to Android™ you must have the Android SDK installed.

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• Imperative vs. component based programming [closed]

  - by AlexW

  I've been thinking about how programming and more specifically the teaching of programming is advocated amongst the community (online). Often I've heard that Ruby and RoR is an ideal platform for learning to program. I completely disagree... RoR and Ruby are based on the application of the component based paradigm, which means they are ideal for rapid application development. This is much like the MVC model in PHP and ASP.NET But, learning a proper imperative language like Java or C/C++ (or even Perl and PHP) is the only way for a new programmer to explore logic itself, and not get too bogged down in architectural concerns like the need for separation of concerns, and the preference for components. Maybe it's a personal preference thing. I rather think that the most interesting aspects to programming are the procedural bits of code I write that actually do stuff rather than the project planning, and modelling that comes about from fully object oriented engineering or simply using the MVC model. I know this may sound confused to some of you. I feel strongly though that the best way for programming to be taught is through imperative and procedural methods. Architectural (component) methods come later, if at all. After all, none of the amazing algorithms that exist were based on OOP practice! It's all procedural code when it comes to the 'magic'. OOP is useful in creating products and utilities. Algorithms are what makes things happen, and move data around, and so imperative (and/or procedural) code are what matters most. When I see programmers recommending Ruby on Rails to newbie developers, I think it's just so wrong. Just because you write less code with Ruby does not make it easier to do! It's the opposite... you have to know loads more to appreciate its succinct nature. New coders who really want to understand the nuts and bolts of coding need to go away and figure out writing methods/functions (i.e. imperative programming) and working in procedural style, in order to grasp the fundamentals, first, before looking into architectural ways of working. So, my question is: should Ruby ever be recommended as a first language? I think no (obviously)... what arguments are there for it?

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• I have a performance problem

  - by Alan

  (copied from my wordpress blog). So start 95% of the performance calls that I receive. They usually continue something like: I have gathered some *stat data for you (eg the guds tool from Document 1285485.1), can you please root cause our problem? So, do you think you could? Neither can I, based on this my answer inevitably has to be "No". Given this kind of problem statement, I have no idea about the expectations, the boundary conditions, or even the application. The answer may as well be "Performance problems? Consult your local Doctor for Viagra". It's really not a lot to go on. So, What kind of problem description is going to allow me to start work on the issue that is being seen? I don't doubt that there really is an issue, it just needs to be pinned down somewhat. What behavior exactly are you expecting to see? Be specific and use business metrics. For example "run-time", "response-time" and "throughput". This helps us define exit criterea. Now, let's look at the system that is having problems. How is what you are seeing different? Use the same type of metrics. The answers to these two questions take us a long way towards being able to work a call. Even more helpful are answers to questions like Has this system ever worked to expectation? If so, when did it start exhibiting this behavior? Is the problem always present, or does it sometimes work to expectation? If it sometimes works to expectation, when are you seeing the problem? Is there any discernible pattern? Is the impact of the problem getting better, worse, or remaining constant? What kind of differences are there between when the system was performing to expectation and when it is not? Are there other machines where we could expect to see the same issue (eg similar usage and load), but are not? Again, differences? Once we start to gather information like this we start to build up a much clearer picture of exactly what we need to investigate, and what we need to achieve so that both you and me agree that the problem has been solved. Please help get that figure of poorly defined problem statements down from it's current 95% value.

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• is a factory pattern to prevent multuple instances for same object (instance that is Equal) good design?

  - by dsollen

  I have a number of objects storing state. There are essentially two types of fields. The ones that uniquly define what the object is (what node, what edge etc), and the oens that store state describing how these things are connected (this node is connected to these edges, this edge is part of these paths) etc. My model is updating the state variables using package methdos, so these objects all act as immutable to anyone not in Model scope. All Objects extend one base type. I've toyed with the idea of a Factory approch which accepts a Builder object and construct the applicable object. However, if an instance of the object already exists (ie would return true if I created the object defined by the builder and passed it to the equal method for the existing instance) the factory returns the current object instead of creating a new instance. Because the Equal method would only compare what uniquly defines the type of object (this is node A nto node B) but won't check the dynamic state stuff (node A is currently connected to nodes C and E) this would be a way of ensuring anyone that wants my Node A automatically knows it's state connections. More importantly it would prevent aliasing nightmares of someone trying to pass an instance of node A with different state then the node A in my model has. I've never heard of this pattern before, and it's a bit odd. I would have to do some overiding of serlization methods to make it work (ensure when I read in a serilized object I add it to my facotry list of known instances, and/or return an existing factory in it's place), as well as using a weakHashMap as if it was a weakHashSet to know rather an instance exists without worrying about a quasi-memory leak occuring. I don't know if this is too confusing or prone to it's own obscure bugs. One thing I know is that plugins interface with lowest level hardware. The plugins have to be able to return state taht is different then my memory; to tell my memory when it's own state is inconsistent. I believe this is possible despit their fetching objects that exist in my memory; we allow building of objects without checking their consistency with the model until the addToModel is called anyways; and the existing plugins design was written before all this extra state existed and worked fine without ever being aware of it. Should I just be using some other design to avoid this crazyness? (I have another question to that affect I'm posting).

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• Is there a factory pattern to prevent multiple instances for same object (instance that is Equal) good design?

  - by dsollen

  I have a number of objects storing state. There are essentially two types of fields. The ones that uniquely define what the object is (what node, what edge etc), and the others that store state describing how these things are connected (this node is connected to these edges, this edge is part of these paths) etc. My model is updating the state variables using package methods, so all these objects act as immutable to anyone not in Model scope. All Objects extend one base type. I've toyed with the idea of a Factory approach which accepts a Builder object and constructs the applicable object. However, if an instance of the object already exists (ie would return true if I created the object defined by the builder and passed it to the equal method for the existing instance) the factory returns the current object instead of creating a new instance. Because the Equal method would only compare what uniquely defines the type of object (this is node A to node B) but won't check the dynamic state stuff (node A is currently connected to nodes C and E) this would be a way of ensuring anyone that wants my Node A automatically knows its state connections. More importantly it would prevent aliasing nightmares of someone trying to pass an instance of node A with different state then the node A in my model has. I've never heard of this pattern before, and it's a bit odd. I would have to do some overriding of serialization methods to make it work (ensure that when I read in a serilized object I add it to my facotry list of known instances, and/or return an existing factory in its place), as well as using a weakHashMap as if it was a weakHashSet to know whether an instance exists without worrying about a quasi-memory leak occuring. I don't know if this is too confusing or prone to its own obscure bugs. One thing I know is that plugins interface with lowest level hardware. The plugins have to be able to return state that is different than my memory; to tell my memory when its own state is inconsistent. I believe this is possible despite their fetching objects that exist in my memory; we allow building of objects without checking their consistency with the model until the addToModel is called anyways; and the existing plugins design was written before all this extra state existed and worked fine without ever being aware of it. Should I just be using some other design to avoid this crazyness? (I have another question to that affect that I'm posting).

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• Event-Driven Debugging

  - by Brian Donahue

  Most application troubleshooting involves getting an error, analyzing the error message, and at worst, attaching a debugger to work out the real cause. What is not really covered is how to troubleshoot an applicaiton that is not errant, but is having a performance issue, and more than likely, in the middle of the night when you are snug in your bed, sawing logs. What you need is an ever-vigilant cyborg who never sleeps to sit in front of your server all night, but as SkyNet is not live yet, you can settle for the next-best thing. Windows provides performance counters and alerts that can tell you when an applicaiton reaches an unacceptable threshold of naughty behavior, but although it can tattle on your brainchild, it won't be the child psychiatrist that you need to tell you why he's pulling your server's pigtails and pulling faces at the teacher. What you need is to plug a debugger into performance monitor and have it tell you what's going on with your applicaiton at the time. For this purpose, I'd used Microsoft's MDbgEngine as the basis for an applicaiton that will dump a program's stacks, I call it Application Slicer Dicer Wonder Dumper Super Cyborg, or StackOMatic for short. StackOMatic can look at a program's behavior and tell you if the stacks are not moving, but it can also work on the command-line to dump all managed methods on the stack at will. Now that there is a command you can use to dump the stacks, all you need to do is politely tell Windows to run it when you're displeased with your creation as it's trashing the CPU of your server at 3 AM. The first step is to create a scheduled task to tell StackOMatic to dump your applicaiton. Start Task Scheduler and right-click Task Scheduler Library and then Create Task. For this exercise I'm creating a task that will dump the Red Gate SQL Monitor Base Monitor Service. In the Actions tab, I enter the path to StackOMatic and use the arguments to log the stack dump to a file: /PN:RedGate.Response.Engine.Alerting.Base.Service /OUT:c:\users\administrator\MonitorLog.txt Next, I go into Windows Server 2008's Reliability and Performance Monitor and add a new Data Collector Set. This set will produce an alert on the %Processor Time for the service. When the processor time breaches 50%, it will run the StackDumpBaseService task I created. Whenever the service misbehaves, it will append to the log file. Now when I go to work in the morning, I can see what the service was doing when it overloaded the processor and take action.

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