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• Managing Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c now comes out-of-the-box  with the latest release of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud 2.0.1 software. It allows Customer to manage and monitor all components inside the Exalogic rack, including provisioning and management of physical and virtualized server. Ops Center will allow Customers to easily get started with creating and managing Private Clouds using the Exalogic components. Here is a snaphot of the Assets view showing the managable components of a Quarter Rack with 8 Compute Nodes: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A colleague has recently posted an interesting series of "Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets" which will guide you through the initial steps to get started with setting up your Exalogic environment: Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating Cloud Users https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea1 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating Networks https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea2 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Allocating Static IP Addresses https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea3 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating Accounts https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea4 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Importing Public Server Template https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea5 Have fun reading these very useful postings ! Dr. Jürgen Fleischer , Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Engineering Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Wisdom Lies in Collaborative Power and Intelligence

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  By Alakh Verma, Director, Platform Technology Solutions   In my recent blog posts, I shared insights on Predictive Analytics (Will Predictive Analytics at 'Speed of Thoughts' Help Businesses?), Real Time Decisions (How critical are Real Time decisions in business today?) and their significance in our lives in general and in businesses today. In the current business paradigm shift- with evolutionary social business, it is paramount that businesses look for wisdom in collaborative power and intelligence and equip their employees with the tools to engage with one another. There is an old time saying that 5 sticks tied together are stronger and unable to break as opposed to an individual stick. We have recently witnessed the power of ordinary people uniting together and fought collaboratively using Facebook and Twitter to topple down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya—and are threatening absolute rule in Syria. And an India one man’s (Anna Hazare) campaign against corruption went viral, bringing thousands to the streets in support. As anyone who has worked in a sizeable organization knows, there is no guarantee that the organization as a whole will perform efficiently and achieve its goals, even if each employee is individually efficient and every team has a high level of productivity. To achieve enterprise productivity, it is necessary not only for individuals and groups to “do things right” by working productively but also for the enterprise as a whole to “do the right things” - form the right teams, make the right decisions, allocate resources correctly, and effectively coordinate activities across the entire organization. Most organizations fall short of the optimal level of enterprise productivity because of one or more of these reasons, all at a great cost to the business.  They are disconnected from themselves with various parts of the organization unintentionally working at cross-purposes with each other.  Information that exists is not getting shared or reused.  Human talent is not being applied where it is most needed.  The same problems are being solved repeatedly by multiple groups. Intelligent collaboration through automated business processes has the ability to alter the course of any important business activity, with a potentially dramatic impact on the financial performance of the business. Whether it is a simple email exchange, a physical or virtual meeting, a task force, or a large-scale project, the activity is inherently collaborative.  In fact, collaboration can be defined as the work that takes place among people when a business process is not pre-determining how the work should take place. Collaboration is many things: information sharing, brainstorming, problem solving, best practice negotiation, innovation, coordination of activity, alignment of purpose, and so forth.  Collaboration is the “white space” between the business processes; it is the glue that holds an organization together, and the lubricant that allows the machinery to keep running.  Real time search and collaborative capabilities of the right people with the right content supported by defined processes will provide unparallel wisdom in the organization in the most competitive business environment today. Interestingly, technologies such as Oracle WebCenter offer these capabilities in our Web based business transactions and compliment in the overall collaborative intelligence and power to truly transform organizations to social businesses. Looking to learn more about engaging your employees to collaborate together and providing a complete user experience for your customers? You won't want to miss our webcast today! Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

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• AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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• Session Report - Java on the Raspberry Pi

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On mid-day Wednesday, the always colorful Oracle Evangelist Simon Ritter demonstrated Java on the Raspberry Pi at his session, “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?”. The Raspberry Pi consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there is a single feature that makes the Raspberry Pi significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things really makes it stand out. First, it's $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. You do have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine and Acorn RISC Machine) processor is noteworthy, because it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. When you add in the enormous community support, it offers a great platform for teaching everyone about computing.”Some 200 enthusiastic attendees were present at the session which had the feel of Simon Ritter sharing a fun toy with friends. The main point of the session was to show what Oracle was doing to support Java on the Raspberry Pi in a way that is entertaining and fun. Ritter pointed out that, in addition to being great for teaching, it’s an excellent introduction to the ARM architecture, and runs well with Java and will get better once it has official hard float support. The possibilities are vast.Ritter explained that the Raspberry Pi Project started in 2006 with the goal of devising a computer to inspire children; it drew inspiration from the BBC Micro literacy project of 1981 that produced a series of microcomputers created by the Acorn Computer company. It was officially launched on February 29, 2012, with a first production of 10,000 boards. There were 100,000 pre-orders in one day; currently about 4,000 boards are produced a day. Ritter described the specification as follows:* CPU: ARM 11 core running at 700MHz Broadcom SoC package Can now be overclocked to 1GHz (without breaking the warranty!) * Memory: 256Mb* I/O: HDMI and composite video 2 x USB ports (Model B only) Ethernet (Model B only) Header pins for GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C He took attendees through a brief history of ARM Architecture:* Acorn BBC Micro (6502 based) Not powerful enough for Acorn’s plans for a business computer * Berkeley RISC Project UNIX kernel only used 30% of instruction set of Motorola 68000 More registers, less instructions (Register windows) One chip architecture to come from this was… SPARC * Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) 32-bit data, 26-bit address space, 27 registers First machine was Acorn Archimedes * Spin off from Acorn, Advanced RISC MachinesNext he presented its features:* 32-bit RISC Architecture–  ARM accounts for 75% of embedded 32-bit CPUs today– 6.1 Billion chips sold last year (zero manufactured by ARM)* Abstract architecture and microprocessor core designs– Raspberry Pi is ARM11 using ARMv6 instruction set* Low power consumption– Good for mobile devices– Raspberry Pi can be powered from 700mA 5V only PSU– Raspberry Pi does not require heatsink or fanHe described the current ARM Technology:* ARMv6– ARM 11, ARM Cortex-M* ARMv7– ARM Cortex-A, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R* ARMv8 (Announced)– Will support 64-bit data and addressingHe next gave the Java Specifics for ARM: Floating point operations* Despite being an ARMv6 processor it does include an FPU– FPU only became standard as of ARMv7* FPU (Hard Float, or HF) is much faster than a software library* Linux distros and Oracle JVM for ARM assume no HF on ARMv6– Need special build of both– Raspbian distro build now available– Oracle JVM is in the works, release date TBDNot So RISCPerformance Improvements* DSP Enhancements* Jazelle* Thumb / Thumb2 / ThumbEE* Floating Point (VFP)* NEON* Security Enhancements (TrustZone)He spent a few minutes going over the challenges of using Java on the Raspberry Pi and covered:* Sound* Vision * Serial (TTL UART)* USB* GPIOTo implement sound with Java he pointed out:* Sound drivers are now included in new distros* Java Sound API– Remember to add audio to user’s groups– Some bits work, others not so much* Playing (the right format) WAV file works* Using MIDI hangs trying to open a synthesizer* FreeTTS text-to-speech– Should work once sound works properlyHe turned to JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi:* Currently internal builds only– Will be released as technology preview soon* Work involves optimal implementation of Prism graphics engine– X11?* Once the JavaFX implementation is completed there will be little of concern to developers-- It’s just Java (WORA). He explained the basis of the Serial Port:* UART provides TTL level signals (3.3V)* RS-232 uses 12V signals* Use MAX3232 chip to convert* Use this for access to serial consoleHe summarized his key points. The Raspberry Pi is a very cool (and cheap) computer that is great for teaching, a great introduction to ARM that works very well with Java and will work better in the future. The opportunities are limitless. For further info, check out, Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree. From there, Ritter tried out several fun demos, some of which worked better than others, but all of which were greeted with considerable enthusiasm and support and good humor (even when he ran into some glitches).  All in all, this was a fun and lively session.

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• The Evolution of Oracle Direct EMEA by John McGann

  - by user769227

  John is expanding his Dublin based team and is currently recruiting a Director with marketing and sales leadership experience: http://bit.ly/O8PyDF Should you wish to apply, please send your CV to [email protected] Hi, my name is John McGann and I am part of the Oracle Direct management team, based in Dublin.   Today I’m writing from the Oracle London City office, right in the heart of the financial district and up to very recently at the centre of a fantastic Olympic Games. The Olympics saw individuals and teams from across the globe competing to decide who is Citius, Altius, Fortius - “Faster, Higher, Stronger" There are lots of obvious parallels between the competitive world of the Olympics and the Business environments that many of us operate in, but there are also some interesting differences – especially in my area of responsibility within Oracle. We are of course constantly striving to be the best - the best solution on offer for our clients, bringing simplicity to their management, consumption and application of information technology, and the best provider when compared with our many niche competitors.   In Oracle and especially in Oracle Direct, a key aspect of how we achieve this is what sets us apart from the Olympians.  We have long ago eliminated geographic boundaries as a limitation to what we can achieve. We assemble the strongest individuals across multiple countries and bring them together in teams focussed on a single goal. One such team is the Oracle Direct Sales Programs team. In case you don’t know, Oracle Direct EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) is the inside sales division in Oracle and it is where I started my Oracle career.  I remember that my first role involved putting direct mail in envelopes.... things have moved on a bit since then – for me, for Oracle Direct and in how we interact with our customers. Today, the team of over 1000 people is located in the different Oracle Direct offices around Europe – the main ones are Malaga, Berlin, Prague and Dubai plus the headquarters in Dublin. We work in over 20 languages and are in constant contact with current and future Oracle customers, using the latest internet and telephone technologies to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other, our customers and prospects. One of my areas of responsibility within Oracle Direct is the Sales Programs team. This team of 25 people manages the planning and execution of demand generation, leading the process of finding new and incremental revenue within Oracle Direct. The Sales Programs Managers or ‘SPMs’ are embedded within each of the Oracle Direct sales teams, focussed on distinct geographies or product groups. The SPMs are virtual members of the regional sales management teams, and work closely with the sales and marketing teams to define and deliver demand generation activities. The customer contact elements of these activities are executed via the Oracle Direct Sales and Business Development/Lead Generation teams, to deliver the pipeline required to meet our revenue goals. Activities can range from pan-EMEA joint sales and marketing campaigns, to very localised niche campaigns. The campaigns might focus on particular segments of our existing customers, introducing elements of our evolving solution portfolio which customers may not be familiar with. The Sales Programs team also manages ‘Nurture’ activities to ensure that we develop potential business opportunities with contacts and organisations that do not have immediate requirements. Looking ahead, it is really important that we continue to evolve our ability to add value to our clients and reduce the physical limitations of our distance from them through the innovative application of technology. This enables us to enhance the customer buying experience and to enable the Inside Sales teams to manage ever more complex sales cycles from start to finish.  One of my expectations of my team is to actively drive innovation in how we leverage data to better understand our customers, and exploit emerging technologies to better communicate with them.   With the rate of innovation and acquisition within Oracle, we need to ensure that existing and potential customers are aware of all we have to offer that relates to their business goals.   We need to achieve this via a coherent communication and sales strategy to effectively target the right people using the most effective medium. This is another area where the Sales Programs team plays a key role.

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• Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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• The Power to Control Power

  - by speakjava

  I'm currently working on a number of projects using embedded Java on the Raspberry Pi and Beagle Board.  These are nice and small, so don't take up much room on my desk as you can see in this picture. As you can also see I have power and network connections emerging from under my desk.  One of the (admittedly very minor) drawbacks of these systems is that they have no on/off switch.  Instead you insert or remove the power connector (USB for the RasPi, a barrel connector for the Beagle).  For the Beagle Board this can potentially be an issue; with the micro-SD card located right next to the connector it has been known for people to eject the card when trying to power off the board, which can be quite serious for the hardware. The alternative is obviously to leave the boards plugged in and then disconnect the power from the outlet.  Simple enough, but a picture of underneath my desk shows that this is not the ideal situation either. This made me think that it would be great if I could have some way of controlling a mains voltage outlet using a remote switch or, even better, from software via a USB connector.  A search revealed not much that fit my requirements, and anything that was close seemed very expensive.  Obviously the only way to solve this was to build my own.Here's my solution.  I decided my system would support both control mechanisms (remote physical switch and USB computer control) and be modular in its design for optimum flexibility.  I did a bit of searching and found a company in Hong Kong that were offering solid state relays for 99p plus shipping (£2.99, but still made the total price very reasonable).  These would handle up to 380V AC on the output side so more than capable of coping with the UK 240V supply.  The other great thing was that being solid state, the input would work with a range of 3-32V and required a very low current of 7.5mA at 12V.  For the USB control an Arduino board seemed the obvious low-cost and simple choice.  Given the current requirments of the relay, the Arduino would not require the additional power supply and could be powered just from the USB.Having secured the relays I popped down to Homebase for a couple of 13A sockets, RS for a box and an Arduino and Maplin for a toggle switch.  The circuit is pretty straightforward, as shown in the diagram (only one output is shown to make it as simple as possible).  Originally I used a 2 pole toggle switch to select the remote switch or USB control by switching the negative connections of the low voltage side.  Unfortunately, the resistance between the digital pins of the Arduino board was not high enough, so when using one of the remote switches it would turn on both of the outlets.  I changed to a 4 pole switch and isolated both positive and negative connections. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to follow my design, please be aware that it requires working with mains voltages.  If you are at all concerned with your ability to do this please consult a qualified electrician to help you.It was a tight fit, especially getting the Arduino in, but in the end it all worked.  The completed box is shown in the photos. The remote switch was pretty simple just requiring the squeezing of two rocker switches and a 9V battery into the small RS supplied box.  I repurposed a standard stereo cable with phono plugs to connect the switch box to the mains outlets.  I chopped off one set of plugs and wired it to the rocker switches.  The photo shows the RasPi and the Beagle board now controllable from the switch box on the desk. I've tested the Arduino side of things and this works fine.  Next I need to write some software to provide an interface for control of the outlets.  I'm thinking a JavaFX GUI would be in keeping with the total overkill style of this project.

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• Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

  - by user739873

  The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally.  I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models."  This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list.  In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut.  Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities.  Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale."   2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task.  We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes.  In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success.  Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on.  We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise.  Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations.  It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education.  In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above.  Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in.  The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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• Pace Layering Comes Alive

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick hosts the IT Leaders Editorial on a monthly basis. By now, readers of this column are quite familiar with Oracle AppAdvantage, a unified framework of middleware technologies, infrastructure and applications utilizing a pace layered approach to enterprise systems platforms. 1. Standardize and Consolidate core Enterprise Applications by removing invasive customizations, costly workarounds and the complexity that multiple instances creates. 2. Move business specific processes and applications to the Differentiate Layer, thus creating greater business agility with process extensions and best of breed applications managed by cross- application process orchestration. 3. The Innovate Layer contains all the business capabilities required for engagement, collaboration and intuitive decision making. This is the layer where innovation will occur, as people engage one another in a secure yet open and informed way. 4. Simplify IT by minimizing complexity, improving performance and lowering cost with secure, reliable and managed systems across the entire Enterprise. But what hasn’t been discussed is the pace layered architecture that Oracle AppAdvantage adopts. What is it, what are its origins and why is it relevant to enterprise scale applications and technologies? It’s actually a fascinating tale that spans the past 20 years and a basic understanding of it provides a wonderful context to what is evolving as the future of enterprise systems platforms. It all begins in 1994 with a book by noted architect Stewart Brand, of ’Whole Earth Catalog’ fame. In his 1994 book How Buildings Learn, Brand popularized the term ‘Shearing Layers’, arguing that any building is actually a hierarchy of pieces, each of which inherently changes at different rates. In 1997 he produced a 6 part BBC Series adapted from the book, in which Part 6 focuses on Shearing Layers. In this segment Brand begins to introduce the concept of ‘pace’. Brand further refined this idea in his subsequent book, The Clock of the Long Now, which began to link the concept of Shearing Layers to computing and introduced the term ‘pace layering’, where he proposes that: “An imperative emerges: an adaptive [system] has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems … otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first but over time it is the opposite and destructive as well.” In 2000, IBM architects Ian Simmonds and David Ing published a paper entitled A Shearing Layers Approach to Information Systems Development, which applied the concept of Shearing Layers to systems design and development. It argued that at the time systems were still too rigid; that they constrained organizations by their inability to adapt to changes. The findings in the Conclusions section are particularly striking: “Our starting motivation was that enterprises need to become more adaptive, and that an aspect of doing that is having adaptable computer systems. The challenge is then to optimize information systems development for change (high maintenance) rather than stability (low maintenance). Our response is to make it explicit within software engineering the notion of shearing layers, and explore it as the principle that systems should be built to be adaptable in response to the qualitatively different rates of change to which they will be subjected. This allows us to separate functions that should legitimately change relatively slowly and at significant cost from that which should be changeable often, quickly and cheaply.” The problem at the time of course was that this vision of adaptable systems was simply not possible within the confines of 1st generation ERP, which were conceived, designed and developed for standardization and compliance. It wasn’t until the maturity of open, standards based integration, and the middleware innovation that followed, that pace layering became an achievable goal. And Oracle is leading the way. Oracle’s AppAdvantage framework makes pace layering come alive by taking a strategic vision 20 years in the making and transforming it to a reality. It allows enterprises to retain and even optimize their existing ERP systems, while wrapping around those ERP systems three layers of capabilities that inherently adapt as needed, at a pace that’s optimal for the enterprise.

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• Communication between state machines with hidden transitions

  - by slartibartfast

  The question emerged for me in embedded programming but I think it can be applied to quite a number of general networking situations e.g. when a communication partner fails. Assume we have an application logic (a program) running on a computer and a gadget connected to that computer via e.g. a serial interface like RS232. The gadget has a red/green/blue LED and a button which disables the LED. The LEDs color can be driven by software commands over the serial interface and the state (red/green/blue/off) is read back and causes a reaction in the application logic. Asynchronous behaviour of the application logic with regard to the LED color down to a certain delay (depending on the execution cycle of the application) is tolerated. What we essentially have is a resource (the LED) which can not be reserved and handled atomically by software because the (organic) user can at any time press the button to interfere/break the software attempt to switch the LED color. Stripping this example from its physical outfit I dare to say that we have two communicating state machines A (application logic) and G (gadget) where G executes state changes unbeknownst to A (and also the other way round, but this is not significant in our example) and only A can be modified at a reasonable price. A needs to see the reaction and state of G in one piece of information which may be (slightly) outdated but not inconsistent with respect to the short time window when this information was generated on the side of G. What I am looking for is a concise method to handle such a situation in embedded software (i.e. no layer/framework like CORBA etc. available). A programming technique which is able to map the complete behaviour of both participants on classical interfaces of a classical programming language (C in this case). To complicate matters (or rather, to generalize), a simple high frequency communication cycle of A to G and back (IOW: A is rapidly polling G) is out of focus because of technical restrictions (delay of serial com, A not always active, etc.). What I currently see as a general solution is: the application logic A as one thread of execution an adapter object (proxy) PG (presenting G inside the computer), together with the serial driver as another thread a communication object between the two (A and PG) which is transactionally safe to exchange The two execution contexts (threads) on the computer may be multi-core or just interrupt driven or tasks in an RTOS. The com object contains the following data: suspected state (written by A): effectively a member of the power set of states in G (in our case: red, green, blue, off, red_or_green, red_or_blue, red_or_off...etc.) command data (written by A): test_if_off, switch_to_red, switch_to_green, switch_to_blue operation status (written by PG): operation_pending, success, wrong_state, link_broken new state (written by PG): red, green, blue, off The idea of the com object is that A writes whichever (set of) state it thinks G is in, together with a command. (Example: suspected state="red_or_green", command: "switch_to_blue") Notice that the commands issued by A will not work if the user has switched off the LED and A needs to know this. PG will pick up such a com object and try to send the command to G, receive its answer (or a timeout) and set the operation status and new state accordingly. A will take back the oject once it is no longer at operation_pending and can react to the outcome. The com object could be separated of course (into two objects, one for each direction) but I think it is convenient in nearly all instances to have the command close to the result. I would like to have major flaws pointed out or hear an entirely different view on such a situation.

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• Five Key Trends in Enterprise 2.0 for 2011

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We recently sat down with Andy MacMillan, an industry veteran and vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle, to get his take on the year ahead in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). He offered us his five predictions about the ways he believes E2.0 technologies will transform business in 2011. 1. Forward-thinking organizations will achieve an unprecedented level of organizational awareness. Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. But this year we are anticipating that organizations will go to the next step and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver rich contextual "activity streams." Activity streams are a new way for enterprise users to get relevant information as quickly as it happens, by navigating to that information in context directly from their portal. We don't mean syndicating social activities limited to a single application. Instead, we believe back-office systems will be combined with social media tools to drive how users make informed business decisions in brand new ways. For example, an account manager might log into the company portal and automatically receive notification that colleagues are closing business around a certain product in his market segment. With a single click, he can reach out instantly to these colleagues via social media and learn from their successes to drive new business opportunities in his own area. 2. Online customer engagement will become a high priority for CMOs. A growing number of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have created a new direct report called "head of online"--a senior marketing executive responsible for all engagements with customers and prospects via the Web, mobile, and social media. This new field has been dubbed "Web experience management" or "online customer engagement" by firms and analyst organizations. It is likely to rapidly increase demand for a host of new business objectives and metrics from Web content management solutions. As companies interface with customers more and more over the Web, Web experience management solutions will help deliver more targeted interactions to ensure increased customer loyalty while meeting sales and business objectives. 3. Real composite applications will be widely adopted. We expect organizations to move from the concept of a single "uber-portal" that encompasses all the necessary features to a more modular, component-based concept for composite applications. This approach is now possible as IT and power users are empowered to assemble new, purpose-built composite applications quickly from existing components. 4. Records management will drive ECM consolidation. We continue to see a significant shift in the approach to records management. Several years ago initiatives were focused on overlaying records management across a set of electronic repositories and physical storage locations. We believe federated records management will continue, but we also expect to see records management driving conversations around single-platform content management consolidation. 5. Organizations will demand ECM at extreme scale. We have already seen a trend within IT organizations to provide a common, highly scalable infrastructure to consolidate and support content and information needs. But as data sizes grow exponentially, ECM at an extreme scale is likely to spread at unprecedented speeds this year. This makes sense as regulations and transparency requirements rise. The model in which ECM and lightweight CMS systems provide basic content services such as check-in, update, delete, and search has converged around a set of industry best practices and has even been coded into new industry standards such as content management interoperability services. As these services converge and the demand for them accelerates, organizations are beginning to rationalize investments into a single, highly scalable infrastructure. Is your organization ready for Enterprise 2.0 in 2011? Learn more.

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• Dell 3721 Wifi problem Ubuntu 13.04

  - by Sebastian

  I have a Dell 3721 which comes original with windows 8. I managed it to install ubuntu 12.10 on this laptop, even there was no out of the box drivers. With 12.10 I was forces to install this .deb package couple of times. After installing it, it was ok for some weeks before I have to install it again. Maybe some security updates destroy something which made in necessary to install it again... http://jas.gemnetworks.com/debian/pool/main/w/wireless-bcm43142/wireless-bcm43142-dkms_6.20.55.19-1_amd64.deb My problem is, that this package isnt working with ubuntu 13.04 anymore. So I cant use Wifi now. Also my display is almost dark, I cant change the brightness level with ubuntu 13.04. Hope you can give me some advice. Dell:~$ sudo lspci -nn 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller [8086:0154] (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09) 00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller [8086:1e31] (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:1e3a] (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 [8086:1e2d] (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1e20] (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 [8086:1e10] (rev c4) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 [8086:1e12] (rev c4) 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 [8086:1e26] (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM76 Express Chipset LPC Controller [8086:1e59] (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [8086:1e03] (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:1e22] (rev 04) 01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 05) 02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01) @Dell:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:21d7 Broadcom Corp. Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0129 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0c45:64ad Microdia @Dell:~$ lspci -nn | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09) @Dell:~$ sudo lshw -class network *-network Beschreibung: Ethernet interface Produkt: RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller Hersteller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Physische ID: 0 Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:01:00.0 Logischer Name: eth0 Version: 05 Seriennummer: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Größe: 100Mbit/s Kapazität: 100Mbit/s Breite: 64 bits Takt: 33MHz Fähigkeiten: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation Konfiguration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full firmware=rtl_nic/rtl8105e-1.fw ip=192.168.2.103 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s Ressourcen: irq:42 ioport:2000(Größe=256) memory:c0404000-c0404fff memory:c0400000-c0403fff *-network UNGEFORDERT Beschreibung: Network controller Produkt: BCM43142 802.11b/g/n Hersteller: Broadcom Corporation Physische ID: 0 Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:02:00.0 Version: 01 Breite: 64 bits Takt: 33MHz Fähigkeiten: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list Konfiguration: latency=0 Ressourcen: memory:c0500000-c0507fff

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• Artec TV18R Tuner not working :(

  - by Antillar Maximus

  Can somebody kindly help me setup my TV Tuner stick? Make and Model: Artec TV18R USB TV Tuner OS: Ubuntu 11.10 64bit Hardware: MSI MS1656-US (GX640 barebones): i5 580M, 2xIntel X25M SSDs, Radeon HD5850M,Realtek sound. Logs and messages: antillar@antillar-MS-1656:/usr/share/dvb/atsc$ [B][COLOR=Red]sudo lsusb[/COLOR][/B] Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 003: ID ffc0:001f Bus 002 Device 005: ID 05d8:8117 Ultima Electronics Corp. [/code][code]antillar@antillar-MS-1656:/usr/share/dvb/atsc$ So, it seems that the tuner is being detected, but the light on it does not turn on? Not sure what is going on? sudo lspci [sudo] password for antillar: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 05) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev 05) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Broadway PRO [Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series] 01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03) 04:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): JMicron Technology Corp. IEEE 1394 Host Controller 04:00.1 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller 04:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller 04:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller 04:00.4 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. xD Host Controller 05:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02) ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02) ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02) ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02) ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02) ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02) antillar@antillar-MS-1656:/usr/share/dvb/atsc$ I have been searching for a solution to this all weekend without any luck. I remember reading that ehci_hcd is the problem, but I'm not sure if disabling it is a good idea. I don't want my USB ports to go back to v1.1. Thank you!

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• Perm SSIS Developer Urgently Required

  - by blakmk

    Job Role To provide dedicated data services support to the company, by designing, creating, maintaining and enhancing database objects, ensuring data quality, consistency and integrity. Migrating data from various sources to central SQL 2008 data warehouse will be the primary function. Migration of data from bespoke legacy database’s to SQL 2008 data warehouse. Understand key business requirements, Liaising with various aspects of the company. Create advanced transformations of data, with focus on data cleansing, redundant data and duplication. Creating complex business rules regarding data services, migration, Integrity and support (Best Practices). Experience ·         Minimum 3 year SSIS experience, in a project or BI Development role and involvement in at least 3 full ETL project life cycles, using the following methodologies and tools o    Excellent knowledge of ETL concepts including data migration & integrity, focusing on SSIS. o    Extensive experience with SQL 2005 products, SQL 2008 desirable. o    Working knowledge of SSRS and its integration with other BI products. o    Extensive knowledge of T-SQL, stored procedures, triggers (Table/Database), views, functions in particular coding and querying. o    Data cleansing and harmonisation. o    Understanding and knowledge of indexes, statistics and table structure. o    SQL Agent – Scheduling jobs, optimisation, multiple jobs, DTS. o    Troubleshoot, diagnose and tune database and physical server performance. o    Knowledge and understanding of locking, blocks, table and index design and SQL configuration. ·         Demonstrable ability to understand and analyse business processes. ·         Experience in creating business rules on best practices for data services. ·         Experience in working with, supporting and troubleshooting MS SQL servers running enterprise applications ·         Proven ability to work well within a team and liaise with other technical support staff such as networking administrators, system administrators and support engineers. ·         Ability to create formal documentation, work procedures, and service level agreements. ·         Ability to communicate technical issues at all levels including to a non technical audience. ·         Good working knowledge of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.   Location Based in Crawley with possibility of some remote working Contact me for more info: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/blakmk/contact.aspx      

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• Handling Configuration Changes in Windows Azure Applications

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  While finalizing StarterSTS 1.5, I had a closer look at lifetime and configuration management in Windows Azure. (this is no new information – just some bits and pieces compiled at one single place – plus a bit of reality check) When dealing with lifetime management (and especially configuration changes), there are two mechanisms in Windows Azure – a RoleEntryPoint derived class and a couple of events on the RoleEnvironment class. You can find good documentation about RoleEntryPoint here. The RoleEnvironment class features two events that deal with configuration changes – Changing and Changed. Whenever a configuration change gets pushed out by the fabric controller (either changes in the settings section or the instance count of a role) the Changing event gets fired. The event handler receives an instance of the RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs type. This contains a collection of type RoleEnvironmentChange. This in turn is a base class for two other classes that detail the two types of possible configuration changes I mentioned above: RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingsChange (configuration settings) and RoleEnvironmentTopologyChange (instance count). The two respective classes contain information about which configuration setting and which role has been changed. Furthermore the Changing event can trigger a role recycle (aka reboot) by setting EventArgs.Cancel to true. So your typical job in the Changing event handler is to figure if your application can handle these configuration changes at runtime, or if you rather want a clean restart. Prior to the SDK 1.3 VS Templates – the following code was generated to reboot if any configuration settings have changed: private void RoleEnvironmentChanging(object sender, RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs e) {     // If a configuration setting is changing     if (e.Changes.Any(change => change is RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingChange))     {         // Set e.Cancel to true to restart this role instance         e.Cancel = true;     } } This is a little drastic as a default since most applications will work just fine with changed configuration – maybe that’s the reason this code has gone away in the 1.3 SDK templates (more). The Changed event gets fired after the configuration changes have been applied. Again the changes will get passed in just like in the Changing event. But from this point on RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue() will return the new values. You can still decide to recycle if some change was so drastic that you need a restart. You can use RoleEnvironment.RequestRecycle() for that (more). As a rule of thumb: When you always use GetConfigurationSettingValue to read from configuration (and there is no bigger state involved) – you typically don’t need to recycle. In the case of StarterSTS, I had to abstract away the physical configuration system and read the actual configuration (either from web.config or the Azure service configuration) at startup. I then cache the configuration settings in memory. This means I indeed need to take action when configuration changes – so in my case I simply clear the cache, and the new config values get read on the next access to my internal configuration object. No downtime – nice! Gotcha A very natural place to hook up the RoleEnvironment lifetime events is the RoleEntryPoint derived class. But with the move to the full IIS model in 1.3 – the RoleEntryPoint methods get executed in a different AppDomain (even in a different process) – see here.. You might no be able to call into your application code to e.g. clear a cache. Keep that in mind! In this case you need to handle these events from e.g. global.asax.

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• Social HCM: Is Your Team Listening?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Does integrating Social HCM into your enterprise make sense? Consider Sam and Christina. Sam is a new hire at a big company. On the job 3 weeks, a question has come up on how to properly file an expense report to get reimbursed. It was covered in the onboarding session, but shockingly enough, Sam didn’t memorize or write down every word of the session. The answer is probably in a handout, in a stack of handouts 2 inches thick. It also might be on the employee web site…somewhere. Christina is a new hire at a different big company. She has the same question. She logs into her company’s social network, goes to the “new hires” group, asks her question and gets an answer in seconds. Christina says, “Cool!” Sam says, “Grrrr.” It’s safe to say the qualified talent your company wants is accustomed to using social platforms to communicate and get quick answers. As such, Christina is comfortable at her new company, whereas Sam is wondering what he’s gotten himself into. Companies that cling to talent communication and management systems that don’t speak to talent’s needs or expectations put themselves at risk. Right from the recruiting stage, prospects can determine if a company has embraced the communications tools of the 21st century. If they don’t see it, alarm bells go off. With great talent more in demand than ever, enterprises should reconsider making “this is the way we do it, you adapt to us” their mantra. Other blogs have clearly outlined that apart from meeting top recruits’ expectations, Social HCM benefits the organization itself in terms of efficiency, talent performance & measurement. Recruiting: Jobvite shows 64% of companies hired using social. 89% of job seekers are using social in their search. Social can give employers access to relevant communities of prospects and advance the brand. Nucleus Research found general hiring software can provide over 1,000% ROI by reducing churn and improving screening. Social talent acquisition should perform at least as well. Learning & Development:Employees, learning from the company or from peers, can be kept on top of the latest needed skillsets and engage in self-paced training so as to advance within the company. Performance Management:Just as gamers are egged on by levels and achievements, talent can reach for workplace kudos, be they shout-outs from peers & managers or formally established milestones. Plus employee reviews become consistent and fair as managers have access to the cumulative feedback social offers. Workflow and Collaboration:With workforces dispersing in terms of physical location, social provides a platform that helps eliminate drawbacks that would have brought just 10 years ago. Finding and connecting with just the right colleague to get the most relevant info at any given time has never been more possible…or expected. While yes, marketing has taken the social lead inside the enterprise, HCM (with the word “human” right there in its name) is the obvious locale for the next big integration of social in business. The technology is there. At Oracle, Fusion HCM apps are deeply embedded with Social HCM…just one example of systems taking social across the enterprise. Christina’s company is communicating with her in ways she’s used to. Sam’s company may as well be trying to talk to him using signal flags. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.xchng

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• Good DBAs Do Baselines

  - by Louis Davidson

  One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; do you feel the same, better, worse? If better, then great, it was some temporal issue, perhaps caused by an allergic reaction to some suspiciously spicy chicken. If the same or worse then you go to the doctor for some health advice, but armed with some data to share, and having ruled out certain possible causes that are fixed with a bit of rest and perhaps an antacid. Whether you realize it or not, in comparing how you feel one day to the next, you have taken baseline measurements. In much the same way, a DBA uses baselines to gauge the gauge health of their database servers. Of course, while SQL Server is very willing to share data regarding its health and activities, it has almost no idea of the difference between good and bad. Over time, experienced DBAs develop “mental” baselines with which they can gauge the health of their servers almost as easily as their own body. They accumulate knowledge of the daily, natural state of each part of their database system, and so know instinctively when one of their databases “feels funny”. Equally, they know when an “issue” is just a passing tremor. They see their SQL Server with all of its four CPU cores running close 100% and don’t panic anymore. Why? It’s 5PM and every day the same thing occurs when the end-of-day reports, which are very CPU intensive, are running. Equally, they know when they need to respond in earnest when it is the first time they have heard about an issue, even if it has been happening every day. Nevertheless, no DBA can retain mental baselines for every characteristic of their systems, so we need to collect physical baselines too. In my experience, surprisingly few DBAs do this very well. Part of the problem is that SQL Server provides a lot of instrumentation. If you look, you will find an almost overwhelming amount of data regarding user activity on your SQL Server instances, and use and abuse of the available CPU, I/O and memory. It seems like a huge task even to work out which data you need to collect, let alone start collecting it on a regular basis, managing its storage over time, and performing detailed comparative analysis. However, without baselines, though, it is very difficult to pinpoint what ails a server, just by looking at a single snapshot of the data, or to spot retrospectively what caused the problem by examining aggregated data for the server, collected over many months. It isn’t as hard as you think to get started. You’ve probably already established some troubleshooting queries of the type SELECT Value FROM SomeSystemTableOrView. Capturing a set of baseline values for such a query can be as easy as changing it as follows: INSERT into BaseLine.SomeSystemTable (value, captureTime) SELECT Value, SYSDATETIME() FROM SomeSystemTableOrView; Of course, there are monitoring tools that will collect and manage this baseline data for you, automatically, and allow you to perform comparison of metrics over different periods. However, to get yourself started and to prove to yourself (or perhaps the person who writes the checks for tools) the value of baselines, stick something similar to the above query into an agent job, running every hour or so, and you are on your way with no excuses! Then, the next time you investigate a slow server, and see x open transactions, y users logged in, and z rows added per hour in the Orders table, compare to your baselines and see immediately what, if anything, has changed!

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• Feynman's inbox

  - by user12607414

  Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

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• How do you formulate the Domain Model in Domain Driven Design properly (Bounded Contexts, Domains)?

  - by lko

  Say you have a few applications which deal with a few different Core Domains. The examples are made up and it's hard to put a real example with meaningful data together (concisely). In Domain Driven Design (DDD) when you start looking at Bounded Contexts and Domains/Sub Domains, it says that a Bounded Context is a "phase" in a lifecycle. An example of Context here would be within an ecommerce system. Although you could model this as a single system, it would also warrant splitting into separate Contexts. Each of these areas within the application have their own Ubiquitous Language, their own Model, and a way to talk to other Bounded Contexts to obtain the information they need. The Core, Sub, and Generic Domains are the area of expertise and can be numerous in complex applications. Say there is a long process dealing with an Entity for example a Book in a core domain. Now looking at the Bounded Contexts there can be a number of phases in the books life-cycle. Say outline, creation, correction, publish, sale phases. Now imagine a second core domain, perhaps a store domain. The publisher has its own branch of stores to sell books. The store can have a number of Bounded Contexts (life-cycle phases) for example a "Stock" or "Inventory" context. In the first domain there is probably a Book database table with basically just an ID to track the different book Entities in the different life-cycles. Now suppose you have 10+ supporting domains e.g. Users, Catalogs, Inventory, .. (hard to think of relevant examples). For example a DomainModel for the Book Outline phase, the Creation phase, Correction phase, Publish phase, Sale phase. Then for the Store core domain it probably has a number of life-cycle phases. public class BookId : Entity { public long Id { get; set; } } In the creation phase (Bounded Context) the book could be a simple class. public class Book : BookId { public string Title { get; set; } public List<string> Chapters { get; set; } //... } Whereas in the publish phase (Bounded Context) it would have all the text, release date etc. public class Book : BookId { public DateTime ReleaseDate { get; set; } //... } The immediate benefit I can see in separating by "life-cycle phase" is that it's a great way to separate business logic so there aren't mammoth all-encompassing Entities nor Domain Services. A problem I have is figuring out how to concretely define the rules to the physical layout of the Domain Model. A. Does the Domain Model get "modeled" so there are as many bounded contexts (separate projects etc.) as there are life-cycle phases across the core domains in a complex application? Edit: Answer to A. Yes, according to the answer by Alexey Zimarev there should be an entire "Domain" for each bounded context. B. Is the Domain Model typically arranged by Bounded Contexts (or Domains, or both)? Edit: Answer to B. Each Bounded Context should have its own complete "Domain" (Service/Entities/VO's/Repositories) C. Does it mean there can easily be 10's of "segregated" Domain Models and multiple projects can use it (the Entities/Value Objects)? Edit: Answer to C. There is a complete "Domain" for each Bounded Context and the Domain Model (Entity/VO layer/project) isn't "used" by the other Bounded Contexts directly, only via chosen paths (i.e. via Domain Events). The part that I am trying to figure out is how the Domain Model is actually implemented once you start to figure out your Bounded Contexts and Core/Sub Domains, particularly in complex applications. The goal is to establish the definitions which can help to separate Entities between the Bounded Contexts and Domains.

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• How to get faster graphics in KVM? VNC is painfully slow with Haiku OS guest, Spice won't install and SDL doesn't work

  - by Don Quixote

  I've been coming up to speed on the Haiku operating system, an Open Source clone of BeOS 5 Pro. I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro as my development machine. Apple's BootCamp BIOS does not support more than four partitions on the internal hard drive. While I can set up extended and logical partitions, doing so will prevent any of the installed operating systems from booting. To run Haiku directly on the iron, I boot it off a USB stick. Using external storage is also helpful because I am perpetually out of filesystem space. While VirtualBox is documented to allow access to physical drives, I could not actually get it to work. Also VirtualBox can only use one of the host CPU's cores. While VB guests can be configured for more than one CPU, they are only emulated. A full build of the Haiku OS takes 4.5 under VB. I had the hope of reducing build times by using KVM instead, but it's not working nearly as well as VirtualBox did. The Linux Kernel Virtual Machine is broken in all manner of fundamental ways as seen from Haiku. But I'm a coder; maybe I could contribute to fixing some of those problems. The first problem I've got is that Haiku's video in virt-manager is quite painfully slow. When I drag Haiku windows around the desktop, they lag quite far behind where my mouse is. It's quite difficult to move a window to a precise position on the screen. Just imagine that the mouse was connected to the window title bar with a really stretchy spring. Also Haiku's mouse lags quite far behind where I have moved it. I found lots of Personal Package Archives that enable Spice from QEMU / KVM at the Ubuntu Personal Package Arhives. I tried a few of the PPAs but none of them worked; with one of them, the command "add-apt-repository" crashed with a traceback. There is a Wiki page about Spice, but it says that it only works on 64-bit. My Early 2006 MacBook Pro is 32-bit. Its Apple Model Identifier is MacBookPro1,1; these use Core Duos NOT Core 2 Duos. I don't mind building a source deb for 32-bit if I can expect it to work. Is there some reason that Spice should be 64-bit only? Does it need features of the x86_64 Instruction Set Architecture that x86 does not have? When I try using SDL from virt-manager, the configuration for Local SDL Window says "Xauth: /home/mike/.Xauthority". When I try to start my guest, virt-manager emits an error. When I Googled the error message, the usual solution was to make ~/.Xauthority readible. However, .Xauthorty does not exist in my home directory. Instead I have a $XAUTHORITY environment variable. There is no way to configure SDL in virt-manager to use $XAUTHORITY instead of ~/.Xauthority. Neither does it work to copy the value of $XAUTHORITY into the file. I am ready to scream, because I've been five fscking days trying to make KVM work for Haiku development. There is a whole lot more that is broken than the slow video. All I really want to do for now is speed up my full builds of Haiku by using "jam -j2" to use both cores in my CPU. I may try Xen next, but the last time I monkeyed with Xen it was far, far more broken than I am finding KVM to be. Just for now, I would be satisfied if there were some way to use my USB stick as a drive in VirtualBox. VB does allow me to configure /dev/sdb as a drive, but it always causes a fatal error when I try to launch the guest. Thank You For Any Advice You Can Give Me. -

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• Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  Today Nokia and Microsoft had an event to officially introduce the Lumia 920.  Below is a rundown of some of the things I found interesting. As a person who likes photography there was a lot to drool over.  The main feature that caught my attention was PureView with its optical stabilization.  This alone should improve the majority of you pictures.  Add to that the SmartShoot Object remover that uses multiple images to remove unwanted people or objects that move through your picture and you never have to accept reality again. For the most part the lenses concept introduced in Windows Phone 8 just makes the usability of leveraging camera better.  Of course that is Microsoft’s selling point.  One lens that caught my attention was the Bing lens.  I have to say it is about time that we can take pictures and use them to search for answers using Bing. There were a couple of features shown that involved augmented reality.  One was similar to the yapf application that is already in the market which overlays restaurants and other destination over live camera views.  The other was using the navigation directions with a live view. Then you get down to some of the physical features of the Lumia 920.  The one that got the most stage time is that it has a great 2000mah battery which can be charged wirelessly.  They also pointed out the improved glare reduction of the 4.5 in. curved glass screen.  This hardware improvement is improved further with software that detects glare conditions and adjusts the display attributes to enhance viewing ease. Adding to the wireless cool factor of the Lumia 920 is the general NFC capabilities.  This was demonstrated with NFC docking stations as well as JBL speakers and headphones. There was one more hardware feature that I applauded.  The super sensitive touch screen did away with one of my pet peeves with capacitive touch screens.  You will never have to remove you gloves to operate your phone again.  The mittens that they did the demo with looked more like boxing gloves. I was disappointed with Joe Belfiore said that they were only going to show a couple of new features of the Windows Phone 8 and would hear more at future events.  One of the things he did show is the ability to customize which buttons you preferred as defaults in IE10.  For example you could have the folders button where the refresh button normally is.  He also showed that at long last you can natively take screenshots on your phone.  Hopefully he will be back quickly to give us the rest of the features. The most disappointing part of the event was that we never found out when they would be released or how much they would cost.  Let’s hope this comes soon.  Even with these couple of items still left on my wish list I can’t wait to get my hands on a Lumia 920.  del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Nokia,Lumia,Lumia 920,Microsoft

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• LUKOIL Overseas Holding Optimizes Oil Field Development Projects with Integrated Project Management

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} LUKOIL Overseas Group is a growing oil and gas company that is an integral part of the vertically integrated oil company OAO LUKOIL. It is engaged in the exploration, acquisition, integration, and efficient development of oil and gas fields outside the Russian Federation to promote transforming LUKOIL into a transnational energy company. In 2010, the company signed a 20-year development project for the giant, West Qurna 2 oil field in Iraq. Executing 10,000 to 15,000 project activities simultaneously on 14 major construction and drilling projects in Iraq for the West Qurna-2 project meant the company needed a clear picture, in real time, of dependencies between its capital construction, geologic exploration and sinking projects—required for its building infrastructure oil field development projects in Iraq. LUKOIL Overseas Holding deployed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to generate structured project management information and optimize planning, monitoring, and analysis of all engineering and commercial activities—such as tenders, and bulk procurement of materials and equipment—related to oil field development projects. A word from LUKOIL Overseas Holding Ltd. “Previously, we created project schedules on desktop computers and uploaded them to the project server to be merged into one big file for each project participant to access. This was not scalable, as we’ve grown and now run up to 15,000 activities in numerous projects and subprojects at any time. With Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, we can now work concurrently on projects with many team members, enjoy absolute security, and issue new baselines for all projects and project participants once a week, with ease.” – Sergey Kotov, Head of IT and the Communication Office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. Oracle Primavera Solutions: · Facilitated managing dependencies between projects by enabling the general scheduler to reschedule all projects and subprojects once a week, realigning 10,000 to 15,000 project activities that the company runs at any time · Replaced Microsoft Project and a paper-based system with a complete solution that provides structured project data · Enhanced data security by establishing project management security policies that enable only authorized project members to edit their project tasks, while enabling each project participant to view all project data that are relevant to that individual’s task · Enabled the company to monitor project progress in comparison to the projected plan, based on physical project assets to determine if each project is on track to conclude within its time and budget limitations To view the full list of solutions view here. “Oracle Gold Partner Parma Telecom was key to our successful Primavera deployment, implementing the software’s basic functionalities, such as project content, timeframes management, and cost management, in addition to performing its integration with our enterprise resource planning system and intranet portal within ten months and in accordance with budgets,” said Rafik Baynazarov, head of the master planning and control office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. “ To read the full version of the customer success story, please view here.

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• Is This Your Idea of Disaster Recovery?

  - by rickramsey

  Don't just make do with less. Protect what you've got. By, for instance, deploying Oracle Solaris 10 inside a zone cluster. "Wait," you say, "what is a zone cluster?" It is a zone deployed across different physical servers. "Who would do that!" you ask in a mild panic. Why, an upstanding sysadmin citizen interested in protecting his or her employer's investment with appropriate high availability and disaster recovery. If one server gets wiped out by Hurricane Sandy along with pretty much the entire East Coast of the USA, your zone continues to run on the other server(s). Provided you set them up in Edinburgh. This white paper (pdf) explains what a zone cluster is and how to use it. If a white paper reminds you of having to read War and Peace in school, just use this Oracle RAC and Solaris Cluster Cheat Sheet, instead. "But wait!" you exclaim. "I didn't realize Solaris 10 offered zone clusters!" I didn't, either! And in an earlier version of this blog post I said that zone clusters were only available with Oracle Solaris 11. But Karoly Vegh pointed me to the documentation for Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, which explains how to manage zone clusters in Oracle Solaris 10. Bite my fist! So, the point I was trying to make is not just that you can run Oracle Solaris 10 zone clusters, but that you can run them in an Oracle Solaris 11 environment. Now let's return to our conversation and pick up where we left off ... "Oh no! Whatever shall I do?" Fear not. Remember how Oracle Solaris 11 lets you create a Solaris 10 branded zone inside a system running Oracle Solaris 11? Well, the Solaris Cluster engineers thought that was a bang-up idea, and decided to extend Oracle Solaris Cluster so that you could run your Solaris 10 applications inside the protective cocoon of an Oracle Solaris 11 zone cluster. Take advantage of the installation improvements and network virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris 11 while still running your application on Oracle Solaris 10. You Luddite, you. That capability is in the latest release of Oracle Solaris Cluster, version 4.1, which became available last Friday. "Last Friday! Is it too late to get a copy?" You can still get a free copy from our download center (see below). And, if you'd like to know what other goodies the 4.1 release of Oracle Solaris Cluster provides, see: What's New In Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 (pdf) Free download Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 (SPARC or x86) Tech Article: How to Upgrade to Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0, by Tim Read. As always, you can get the latest information about Oracle Solaris Cluster, plus technical how-to articles, documentation, and more from Oracle Solaris Cluster Resource Page for Sysadmins and Developers. And don't forget about the online launch of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, scheduled for Nov 7. "I feel so much better, now!" Think nothing of it. That's what we're here for. - Rick Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Mobile Deals: the Consumer Wants You in Their Pocket

  - by Mike Stiles

  Mobile deals offer something we talk about a lot in social marketing, relevant content. If a consumer is already predisposed to liking your product and gets a timely deal for it that’s easy and convenient to use, not only do you score on the marketing side, it clearly generates some of that precious ROI that’s being demanded of social. First, a quick gut-check on the public’s adoption of mobile. Nielsen figures have 55.5% of US mobile owners using smartphones. If young people are indeed the future, you can count on the move to mobile exploding exponentially. Teens are the fastest growing segment of smartphone users, and 58% of them have one. But the largest demographic of smartphone users is 25-34 at 74%. That tells you a focus on mobile will yield great results now, and even better results straight ahead. So we can tell both from statistics and from all the faces around you that are buried in their smartphones this is where consumers are. But are they looking at you? Do you have a valid reason why they should? Everybody likes a good deal. BIA/Kelsey says US consumers will spend $3.6 billion this year for daily deals (the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world), up 87% from 2011. The report goes on to say over 26% of small businesses are either "very likely" or "extremely likely" to offer up a deal in the next 6 months. Retail Gazette reports 58% of consumers shop with coupons, a 40% increase in 4 years. When you consider that a deal can be the impetus for a real-world transaction, a first-time visit to a store, an online purchase, entry into a loyalty program, a social referral, a new fan or follower, etc., that 26% figure shows us there’s a lot of opportunity being left on the table by brands. The existing and emerging technologies behind mobile devices make the benefits of offering deals listed above possible. Take how mobile payment systems are being tied into deal delivery and loyalty programs. If it’s really easy to use a coupon or deal, it’ll get used. If it’s complicated, it’ll be passed over as “not worth it.” When you can pay with your mobile via technologies that connects store and user, you get the deal, you get the loyalty credit, you pay, and your receipt is uploaded, all in one easy swipe. Nothing to keep track of, nothing to lose or forget about. And the store “knows” you, so future offers will be based on your tastes. Consider the endgame. A customer who’s a fan of your belt buckle store’s Facebook Page is in one of your physical retail locations. They pull up your app, because they’ve gotten used to a loyalty deal being offered when they go to your store. Voila. A 10% discount active for the next 30 minutes. Maybe the app also surfaces social references to your brand made by friends so they can check out a buckle someone’s raving about. If they aren’t a fan of your Page or don’t have your app, perhaps they’ve opted into location-based deal services so you can still get them that 10% deal while they’re in the store. Or maybe they’ve walked in with a pre-purchased Groupon or Living Social voucher. They pay with one swipe, and you’ve learned about their buying preferences, credited their loyalty account and can encourage them to share a pic of their new buckle on social. Happy customer. Happy belt buckle company. All because the brand was willing to use the tech that’s available to meet consumers where they are, incentivize them, and show them how much they’re valued through rewards.

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• Rotation of viewplatform in Java3D

  - by user29163

  I have just started with Java3D programming. I thought I had built up some basic intuition about how the scene graph works, but something that should work, does not work. I made a simple program for rotating a pyramid around the y-axis. This was done just by adding a RotationInterpolator R to the TransformGroup above the pyramid. Then I thought hey, can I now remove the RotationInterpolator from this TransformGroup, then add it to the TransformGroup above my ViewPlatform leaf. This should work if I have understood how things work. Adding the RotationInterpolator to this TransformGroup, should make the children of this TransformGroup rotate, and the ViewingPlatform is a child of the TransformGroup. Any ideas on where my reasoning is flawed? Here is the code for setting up the universe, and the view branchgroup. import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; import javax.media.j3d.*; import javax.vecmath.*; public class UniverseBuilder { // User-specified canvas Canvas3D canvas; // Scene graph elements to which the user may want access VirtualUniverse universe; Locale locale; TransformGroup vpTrans; View view; public UniverseBuilder(Canvas3D c) { this.canvas = c; // Establish a virtual universe that has a single // hi-res Locale universe = new VirtualUniverse(); locale = new Locale(universe); // Create a PhysicalBody and PhysicalEnvironment object PhysicalBody body = new PhysicalBody(); PhysicalEnvironment environment = new PhysicalEnvironment(); // Create a View and attach the Canvas3D and the physical // body and environment to the view. view = new View(); view.addCanvas3D(c); view.setPhysicalBody(body); view.setPhysicalEnvironment(environment); // Create a BranchGroup node for the view platform BranchGroup vpRoot = new BranchGroup(); // Create a ViewPlatform object, and its associated // TransformGroup object, and attach it to the root of the // subgraph. Attach the view to the view platform. Transform3D t = new Transform3D(); Transform3D s = new Transform3D(); t.set(new Vector3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 10.0f)); t.rotX(-Math.PI/4); s.set(new Vector3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 10.0f)); //forandre verdier her for å endre viewing position t.mul(s); ViewPlatform vp = new ViewPlatform(); vpTrans = new TransformGroup(t); vpTrans.setCapability(TransformGroup.ALLOW_TRANSFORM_WRITE); // Rotator stuff Transform3D yAxis = new Transform3D(); //yAxis.rotY(Math.PI/2); Alpha rotationAlpha = new Alpha( -1, Alpha.INCREASING_ENABLE, 0, 0,4000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0); RotationInterpolator rotator = new RotationInterpolator( rotationAlpha, vpTrans, yAxis, 0.0f, (float) Math.PI*2.0f); RotationInterpolator rotator2 = new RotationInterpolator( rotationAlpha, vpTrans); BoundingSphere bounds = new BoundingSphere(new Point3d(0.0,0.0,0.0), 1000.0); rotator.setSchedulingBounds(bounds); vpTrans.addChild(rotator); vpTrans.addChild(vp); vpRoot.addChild(vpTrans); view.attachViewPlatform(vp); // Attach the branch graph to the universe, via the // Locale. The scene graph is now live! locale.addBranchGraph(vpRoot); } public void addBranchGraph(BranchGroup bg) { locale.addBranchGraph(bg); } }

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