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• What's new in the RightNow November 2012 release?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  What new in the RightNow November 2012? In order to find out, please watch this tutorial with imbedded demonstration or read the November 2012 Release notes.   News Facts The November 2012 release of     Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service marks the completion of development efforts for 2012 and continues Oracle’s commitment to enhancing the Oracle RightNow offering following the acquisition. New release delivers key capabilities designed to help organizations improve customer experiences in order to increase customer acquisition and retention, while reducing total cost of ownership. Part of the Oracle Cloud, Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service now integrates Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service with Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service, helping organizations intelligently and proactively engage with customers through the right channel at the right time. Chat solutions have emerged as an important component of a cross-channel customer experience strategy. According to Forrester Research, Inc., chat adoption has risen dramatically between 2009 and 2011 from 19% to 37%, and it has the highest satisfaction level of all customer service channels at 62% satisfaction. (*) To help companies deliver enhanced customer experiences, Oracle has made significant investments in Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service throughout 2012. With the addition of rules-based engagement to existing capabilities such as co-browse, mobile chat, and cross-channel knowledge integration with the contact center, all delivered via the cloud, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is differentiated as the industry-leading chat solution. The Oracle Cloud offers a broad portfolio of software as-a-service applications, including Oracle Customer Service and Support Cloud Service, which is based on the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. New Capabilities Key Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and other cross-channel capabilities include: Chat Business Rules, with over 70 built-in rule conditions, leverage the Oracle Engagement Engine to help enable organizations capture rich visitor data and invoke complex actions and triggers. Chat Business Rules allow granular control over when to engage a customer via the chat channel based on customer behavior, customer profile information and operational information. Click-to-Call provides the option for a customer to engage with a live agent over the phone during the Web browsing experience. Chat Availability Controls provide organizations with the ability to throttle volume through the chat channel based on real-time agent availability and wait time thresholds. This ability to manage the channel more efficiently allows organizations to provide a better experience to customers using the chat channel. Strategic and Operational Chat Channel Analytics provide better insight into channel and agent productivity and utilization and effectiveness with both out-of-the-box reports and ad hoc reports. New chat channel analytics provide comprehensive metrics with full data transparency. Background Service Updates improve high availability metrics for Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service during service update periods, setting the industry leading standard for sales and service delivery to customers via the chat channel. Additional Capabilities include: Improved Web developer tools for more efficient self-service user interface design Improved administration for enhanced user sessions management Increased cross-channel community collaboration Enhanced extensibility widgets and syndication management Streamlined content management and analytics capabilities Read the full announcement here

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• Book Review (Book 10) - The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for March 2012 was: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. I was traveling at the end of last month so I’m a bit late posting this review here. Why I chose this book: My personal belief about computing is this: All computing technology is simply re-arranging data. We take data in, we manipulate it, and we send it back out. That’s computing. I had heard from some folks about this book and it’s treatment of data. I heard that it dealt with the basics of data - and the semantics of data, information and so on. It also deals with the earliest forms of history of information, which fascinates me. It’s similar I was told, to GEB which a favorite book of mine as well, so that was a bonus. Some folks I talked to liked it, some didn’t - so I thought I would check it out. What I learned: I liked the book. It was longer than I thought - took quite a while to read, even though I tend to read quickly. This is the kind of book you take your time with. It does in fact deal with the earliest forms of human interaction and the basics of data. I learned, for instance, that the genesis of the binary communication system is based in the invention of telegraph (far-writing) codes, and that the earliest forms of communication were expensive. In fact, many ciphers were invented not to hide military secrets, but to compress information. A sort of early “lol-speak” to keep the cost of transmitting data low! I think the comparison with GEB is a bit over-reaching. GEB is far more specific, fanciful and so on. In fact, this book felt more like something fro Richard Dawkins, and tended to wander around the subject quite a bit. I imagine the author doing his research and writing each chapter as a book that followed on from the last one. This is what possibly bothered those who tended not to like it, I think. Towards the middle of the book, I think the author tended to be a bit too fragmented even for me. He began to delve into memes, biology and more - I think he might have been better off breaking that off into another work. The existentialism just seemed jarring. All in all, I liked the book. I recommend it to any technical professional, specifically ones involved with data technology in specific. And isn’t that all of us? :)

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• Easy Scaling in XAML (WPF)

  - by Robert May

  Ran into a problem that needed solving that was kind of fun.  I’m not a XAML guru, and I’m sure there are better solutions, but I thought I’d share mine. The problem was this:  Our designer had, appropriately, designed the system for a 1920 x 1080 screen resolution.  This is for a full screen, touch screen device (think Kiosk), which has that resolution, but we also wanted to demo the device on a tablet (currently using the AWESOME Samsung tablet given out at Microsoft Build).  When you’d run it on that tablet, things were ugly because it was at a lower resolution than the target device. Enter scaling.  I did some research and found out that I probably just need to monkey with the LayoutTransform of some grid somewhere.  This project is using MVVM and has a navigation container that we built that lives on a single root view.  User controls are then loaded into that view as navigation occurs. In the parent grid of the root view, I added the following XAML: <Grid.LayoutTransform> <ScaleTransform ScaleX="{Binding ScaleWidth}" ScaleY="{Binding ScaleHeight}" /> </Grid.LayoutTransform> And then in the root View Model, I added the following code: /// <summary> /// The required design width /// </summary> private const double RequiredWidth = 1920; /// <summary> /// The required design height /// </summary> private const double RequiredHeight = 1080; /// <summary>Gets the ActualHeight</summary> public double ActualHeight { get { return this.View.ActualHeight; } } /// <summary>Gets the ActualWidth</summary> public double ActualWidth { get { return this.View.ActualWidth; } } /// <summary> /// Gets the scale for the height. /// </summary> public double ScaleHeight { get { return this.ActualHeight / RequiredHeight; } } /// <summary> /// Gets the scale for the width. /// </summary> public double ScaleWidth { get { return this.ActualWidth / RequiredWidth; } } Note that View.ActualWidth and View.ActualHeight are just pointing directly at FrameworkElement.ActualWidth and FrameworkElement.ActualHeight. That’s it.  Just calculate the ratio and bind the scale transform to it. Hopefully you’ll find this useful. Technorati Tags: WPF,XAML

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• JavaOne Rock Star – Adam Bien

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Among the most celebrated developers in recent years, especially in the domain of Java EE and JavaFX, is consultant Adam Bien, who, in addition to being a JavaOne Rock Star for Java EE sessions given in 2009 and 2011, is a Java Champion, the winner of Oracle Magazine’s 2011 Top Java Developer of the Year Award, and recently won a 2012 JAX Innovation Award as a top Java Ambassador. Bien will be presenting the following sessions: TUT3907 - Java EE 6/7: The Lean Parts CON3906 - Stress-Testing Java EE 6 Applications Without Stress CON3908 - Building Serious JavaFX 2 Applications CON3896 - Interactive Onstage Java EE Overengineering I spoke with Bien to get his take on Java today. He expressed excitement that the smallest companies and startups are showing increasing interest in Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” said Bien. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.” Nashorn is an upcoming JavaScript engine, developed fully in Java by Oracle, and based on the Da Vinci Machine (JSR 292) which is expected to be available for Java 8.    Bien expressed concern about a common misconception regarding Java's mediocre productivity. “The problem is not Java,” explained Bien, “but rather systems built with ancient patterns and approaches. Sometimes it really is ‘Cargo Cult Programming.’ Java SE/EE can be incredibly productive and lean without the unnecessary and hard-to-maintain bloat. The real problems are ‘Ivory Towers’ and not Java’s lack of productivity.” Bien remarked that if there is one thing he wanted Java developers to understand it is that, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Or at least of some evil. Modern JVMs and application servers are hard to optimize upfront. It is far easier to write simple code and measure the results continuously. Identify the hotspots first, then optimize.”   He advised Java EE developers to, “Rethink everything you know about Enterprise Java. Before you implement anything, ask the question: ‘Why?’ If there is no clear answer -- just don't do it. Most well known best practices are outdated. Focus your efforts on the domain problem and not the technology.” Looking ahead, Bien remarked, “I would like to see open source application servers running directly on a hypervisor. Packaging the whole runtime in a single file would significantly simplify the deployment and operations.” Check out a recent Java Magazine interview with Bien about his Java EE 6 stress monitoring tool here.

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• What Problems Are Better Solved By SOAP Over REST?

  In the battle for web service supremacy SOAP and REST have been battling for years. In my personal opinion this debate should have never existed. Yes, both forms can be used to create an interactive web service, but each form of a service was developed independent of each other to solve two different yet similar problems. Based my research and experience I would have to say that REST should be the preferred web service methodology and SOAP should only be used in specific situations. Note, I did not say that I was against SOAP, and in fact I actually like to use SOAP when it is needed. Criteria for using SOAP: Does the service need a guaranteed level of reliability and security? Did the provider and consumer of the service agreed on a standardized data exchange format? Does the service need data context and state management? If you answer yes to any of these questions, then you may want to consider SOAP as the format for the web service. Another way to look at the relationship between REST and SOAP is to look at the medical field.  For most things a general doctor or you family health care provider can acceptably treat most conditions from the case of a common cold to a broken bone. A general doctor more aligns with REST in my opinion because for most service requirements REST fulfills a projects needs, but what happens if you need more of an advanced examination, you would go to a specialist. A specialist would already have experience dealing with specific issues that you are experiencing giving them specific context to how best treat you going forward. SOAP acts more like a specialist doctor giving that they understand the context of an issue and can treat it based on the state of other patients they have already treated. An example of where I would use SOAP over REST in real life would be a single sign-on application. I n these cases I need to check validate a username and password for authentication and authorization of a web page request. This service would need to maintain state while it authenticated a user and while it validated access to a web page on a subsequent request. This service must process every request for access and not allow caching to ensure that every request is processed and the appropriate users are allowed to view selected web pages. References: Rozlog, M. (2010). REST and SOAP: When Should I Use Each (or Both)? Retrieved 11 20, 2011, from Infoq.com: http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-soap-when-to-use-each

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• Data validation best practices: how can I better construct user feedback?

  - by Cory Larson

  Data validation, whether it be domain object, form, or any other type of input validation, could theoretically be part of any development effort, no matter its size or complexity. I sometimes find myself writing informational or error messages that might seem harsh or demanding to unsuspecting users, and frankly I feel like there must be a better way to describe the validation problem to the user. I know that this topic is subjective and argumentative. StackOverflow might not be the proper channel for diving into this subject, but like I've mentioned, we all run into this at some point or another. There are so many StackExchange sites now; if there is a better one, feel free to share! Basically, I'm looking for good resources on data validation and user feedback that results from it at a theoretical level. Topics and questions I'm interested in are: Content Should I be describing what the user did correctly or incorrectly, or simply what was expected? How much detail can the user read before they get annoyed? (e.g. Is "Username cannot exceed 20 characters." enough, or should it be described more fully, such as "The username cannot be empty, and must be at least 6 characters but cannot exceed 30 characters."?) Grammar How do I decide between phrases like "must not," "may not," or "cannot"? Delivery This can depend on the project, but how should the information be delivered to the user? Should it be obtrusive (e.g. JavaScript alerts) or friendly? Should they be displayed prominently? Immediately (i.e. without confirmation steps, etc.)? Logging Do you bother logging validation errors? Internationalization Some cultures prefer or better understand directness over subtlety and vice-versa (e.g. "Don't do that!" vs. "Please check what you've done."). How do I cater to the majority of users? I may edit this list as I think more about the topic, but I'm genuinely interest in proper user feedback techniques. I'm looking for things like research results, poll results, etc. I've developed and refined my own techniques over the years that users seem to be okay with, but I work in an environment where the users prefer to adapt to what you give them over speaking up about things they don't like. I'm interested in hearing your experiences in addition to any resources to which you may be able to point me.

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• Advice for moving from custom domain hosted on blogspot to new custom domain on hosting provider [closed]

  - by Chan

  Need some advice :) a) Facts: 1. Currently, we have a blog www.thebigbigsky.net hosted on blogspot.com. The site has been up for around a year and google had cached some of the posts. 2. The idea for setting up the blog was to promote/share articles/write-up about personal development and self-growth, and also to offer counseling services related to them. 3. There is another subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net hosting similar blog posts but in Chinese. This is hosted on blogspot as well. b) What we want to do: 1. We did some research on the internet and understood that, to make a website more popular, it is better to have a domain name that is related to the content of the site. Hence, in our case, a domain name containing "personal development" would be more ideal and easier for people to remember. 2. Hence, we are thinking to move away from blogspot to a meaningful new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) and move all contents there. The new domain will be hosted on a hosting provider e.g. hostgator.com c) Here are the steps we have in mind: 1. Register the new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) 2. Get a hosting provider hostgator.com 3. Setup a new site based on Wordpress, import all contents from existing blog to this new site - personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com. 4. Switch current blog back to thebigbigsky.blogspot.com 5. Switch DNS of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to the new site on hostgator.com 6. On hostgator.com, setup permanent redirect 301 of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to personaldevelopmetnwithxyz.com by following the tutorial mentioned here - http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/ Questions: 1. Will it have major impact on the current google pagerank or SEO of thebigbigsky.net? As the site is not that popular, we assumed that the impact would not be a major one. 2. Is the domain personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com considered too long? (For SEO etc) 3. Steps c.4 and c.5 above - Will this work for our case? 4. How about the subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net? We would like keep it as separate blog with the domain e.g. chinese.personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com 5. We added "facebook comments" to the existing post on www.thebigtbigsky.net and would not want to lose it. Will the comments still be there after we moved to the new domain? 6. Any better idea to do it? :) Thank you very much! regards, -chan

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• A Complete Customer Experience Solution (3 of 3 in 'No Customer Left Behind' Series)

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development In my previous post, I talked about taking three concrete steps to improve your customers' overall experiences: 1) understand your customer, 2) empower your ecosystem, and 3) adapt your business. To do these effectively and efficiently, it's important to find the right technology that can bridge the gaps across your channels, interactions, departments, and repositories. Oracle has spent the past three years and more than six billion dollars acquiring and developing some of the world's best-of-breed applications. The result is the most comprehensive customer experience (CX) portfolio offering in the World - bar none: ATG Best in Class Selling Experiences Fatwire Best in Class Marketing Experiences Inquira Best in Class Support Experiences Endecca Best in Class Search Experiences RightNow Best in Class Service Experiences Vitrue & Involver Best in Class Social Marketing Collective Intellect Best In Class Social Listening We don't expect organizations to eat the CX elephant in one bite, nor should they try to. There are key strategic initiatives within each of the four main pillars of our customer experience offering for which we deliver solutions: 1. Customer Experience for Marketing Social Listening and Engagement Social Marketing Marketing Websites Demand Generation and Lead Management Marketing and Loyalty Management 2. Customer Experience for Commerce Search, Navigation & Content Delivery Cross-Channel Commerce Targeting & Product Recommendations Social Commerce Order Management & Fulfillment Retail Store Operations 3. Customer Experience for Sales Sales Force Automation Social Selling Territory & Quota Management Revenue Forecasting Partner Relationship Management Quote to Cash Incentive Compensation 4. Customer Experience for Service Cross-Channel Customer Service Knowledge Management Social Customer Service Eligibility Management Contracts, Assets, and Entitlements Industry-Specific Solutions eBilling Oracle's customer experience portfolio is socially infused at each layer of our pillars rather than simply bolted on as a side process. This combines with the power of the Cloud to run the parts of the solution that need the access, efficiency, and agility from a managed infrastructure. You can get the compliance control from on-premise backbone infrastructure systems that run your business and don't change that often. Please take advantage of our teams of Oracle customer experience professionals and our key agency and technology partner ecosystem. They can help you develop strategic solution roadmaps that build and deliver customer experience and that are tailored to your business needs and objectives. No one has built a better customer service portfolio to manage the entire customer journey than Oracle. It is backed by CX thought leadership programs, a commitment from our executives, and a worldview that your technology decisions must be driven by your customer experiences to succeed. If you’d like to follow up on this conversation, please leave a comment or contact me at [email protected]. You can get more information on Oracle’s complete customer experience solution here.

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• Beginning with first project on game development [closed]

  - by Tsvetan

  Today is the day I am going to start my first real game project. It will be a Universe simulator. Basically, you can build anything from tiny meteor to quazars and universes. It is going to be my project for an olympiad in IT in my country and I really want to make it perfect(at least a bronze medal). So, I would like to ask some questions about organization and development methodologies. Firstly, my plan is to make a time schedule. In it I would write my plans for the next month or two(because that is the time I have). With this exact plan I hope to make my organisation at its best. Of course, if I am doing sth faster than the schedule I would involve more features for the game and/or continue with the tempo I have. Also, for the organisation I would make a basic pseudocode(maybe) and just rewrite it so it is compilable. Like a basic skeleton of everything. The last is an idea I tought of in the moment, but if it is good I will use it. Secondly, for the development methodologies, obviously, I think of making object-oriented code and make everything perfect(a lot of testing, good code, documentation etc.). Also, I am going to make my own menu system(I read that OpenGL hasn't got very good one). Maybe I would implement it with an xml file, holding the info about position of buttons, text boxes, images and everything. Maybe I would do a specific CSS for it and so on. I think that is very good way of doing the menu system, because it makes the presentation layer separate of the logic. But, if there is a better way, I would do it the better way. For the logic, well, I don't have much to say. OO code, testing, debuging, good and fast algorithms and so on. Also, a good documentation must be written and this is the area I need to make some research in. I think that is for now. I hope I have been enough descriptive. If more questions come on my mind, I will ask them. Edit: I think of blogging every part of the project, or at least writing down everything in a file or something like that. My question is: Is my plan of how to do everything around the project good? And if not, what is necessary to be improved and what other things I can involve for making the project good.

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• Workaround: XNA 4 importing only part of 3d model from FBX

  - by Vitus

  Recently I found a problem with importing 3D models from FBX files: it sometimes imported partly. That is when you draw a 3D model, loaded from FBX file, processed by content pipeline, you got only part of meshes. “Sometimes” means that you got this error only for some files. Results of my research below. For example, I have 10Mb binary FBX file with a model, looks like: And when I load it, result Model instance contains only part of meshes and looks like: Because models from other files imported normally, I think that it’s a “bad format” file. When you add FBX file to your XNA Content project and build it, imported file processing by XNA Fbx Importer & Processor. On MSDN I found that FbxImporter designed to work with 2006.11 version of FBX format. My file is FBX 2012 format. Ok, I need to convert it to 2006 format. It can be done by using Autodesk FBX Converter 2012.1. I tried to convert it to other versions of FBX formats, but without success. And I also tried to import my FBX file to 3D MAX, and it imported correctly. Then I export model using 3D MAX, and it generate me other FBX, which I add to my XNA project. After that I got full model, that rendered well! So, internal data structure of FBX file is more important for right XNA import, than it version! Unfortunately, Autodesk FBX is not an open file format. If you want to work with FBX, you should use Autodesk FBX SDK. This way you can manually read content of FBX file, and use it everyway. Then I tried to convert my source FBX file to DAE Collada, and result DAE file back to FBX, using FBX Converter (FBX –> DAE –> FBX). The result FBX file can be imported normally.   Conclusion: XNA FbxImporter correct work doesn't depend on version (2006, 2011, etc) and form (binary, ascii) of FBX file. Internal FBX data structure much more important. To make FBX "readable" for XNA Importer you can use double conversion like FBX -> Collada -> FBX You also can use FBX SDK to manually load data from FBX P.S. Autodesk FBX Converter 2012 is more, than simple converter. It provide you tools like: FBX Explorer, which show you structure of FBX file; FBX Viewer, which render content of FBX and provide basic intercation like model move and zoom; FBX Take Manager, which allow to work with embedded animations

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• Hierarchy flattening of interfaces in WCF

  - by nmarun

  Alright, so say I have my service contract interface as below: 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface ILearnWcfService 3: { 4: [OperationContract(Name = "AddInt")] 5: int Add(int arg1, int arg2); 6: } Say I decided to add another interface with a similar add “feature”. 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface ILearnWcfServiceExtend : ILearnWcfService 3: { 4: [OperationContract(Name = "AddDouble")] 5: double Add(double arg1, double arg2); 6: } My class implementing the ILearnWcfServiceExtend ends up as: 1: public class LearnWcfService : ILearnWcfServiceExtend 2: { 3: public int Add(int arg1, int arg2) 4: { 5: return arg1 + arg2; 6: } 7:  8: public double Add(double arg1, double arg2) 9: { 10: return arg1 + arg2; 11: } 12: } Now when I consume this service and look at the proxy that gets generated, here’s what I see: 1: public interface ILearnWcfServiceExtend 2: { 3: [System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action="http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfService/AddInt", ReplyAction="http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfService/AddIntResponse")] 4: int AddInt(int arg1, int arg2); 5: 6: [System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action="http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfServiceExtend/AddDouble", ReplyAction="http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfServiceExtend/AddDoubleResponse")] 7: double AddDouble(double arg1, double arg2); 8: } Only the ILearnWcfServiceExtend gets ‘listed’ in the proxy class and not the (base interface) ILearnWcfService interface. But then to uniquely identify the operations that the service exposes, the Action and ReplyAction properties are set. So in the above example, the AddInt operation has the Action property set to ‘http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfService/AddInt’ and the AddDouble operation has the Action property of ‘http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfServiceExtend/AddDouble’. Similarly the ReplyAction properties are set corresponding to the namespace that they’re declared in. The ‘http://tempuri.org’ is chosen as the default namespace, since the Namespace property on the ServiceContract is not defined. The other thing is the service contract itself – the Add() method. You’ll see that in both interfaces, the method names are the same. As you might know, this is not allowed in WSDL-based environments, even though the arguments are of different types. This is allowed only if the Name attribute of the ServiceContract is set (as done above). This causes a change in the name of the service contract itself in the proxy class. See that their names are changed to AddInt / AddDouble respectively. Lesson learned: The interface hierarchy gets ‘flattened’ when the WCF service proxy class gets generated.

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• Projected Results: Sound project management practices, combined with a complete technology platform, have an immediate and lasting impact on an organization’s bottom line.

  - 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-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;} Article By: Alan Joch, is a business and technology writer who specializes in enterprise applications, cloud computing, mobile computing, and the Web. It’s no secret that complex, large-scale projects need close management controls to ensure that they’re delivered on time and on budget. But now there’s growing evidence that failing to meet these goals can have far-reaching consequences, not only for the reputations and value of individual organizations but also for the tenure of their top executives. Government watchdogs forced one large contractor to suspend a multibillion-dollar defense program—and delay payment receipts—until a better management system was launched to more accurately track spending, project milestones, and other fundamental metrics. Significant delays in the opening of the £4.3 billion Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport impaired an airline’s operations and contributed to a drop in its share prices. These real-world examples are noteworthy because of the huge financial risks they created. They’re also far from being isolated cases. Research by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that only 11 percent of companies claimed they delivered expected ROI on major capital projects 90 percent of the time or more. In addition, 12 percent of respondents said they achieved planned ROI less than half the time. According to Phil Thornton, lead consultant at the analyst firm Clarity Economics, the numbers demonstrate obvious challenges related to managing risks, accurately predicting ROI, and consistently delivering bottom-line growth for major capital investments “Portfolio management is a path to improve your organization’s competitive advantage. It helps make sure your organization is investing in the right things and not spending its time on things that are not delivering the intended results for the firm.” Read the full article here

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryInstituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial (IMPI) is a decentralized  federal agency with the goals of protecting and ensuring awareness of industrial property rights in Mexico. IMPI  business objectives were to increase efficiency, improve client service, accelerate services to the public and reduce paper use by digitizing management of necessary documentation for patent and trademark submissions and approvals. IMPI  implemented  Oracle WebCenter Content to develop electronic inquiry service by digitizing and managing documents and a public Web site making patent-related information easily available online. With the implemented solution IMPI increased the number of monthly inquires from 200 in person consultations to 80,000 electronic consultations and the number of trademark record inquiries from 30,000 to 300,000. Company OverviewInstituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial (IMPI) is a decentralized federal agency with the goals of protecting and ensuring awareness of industrial property rights in Mexico. IMPI is responsible for registering and publicizing inventions, distinctive signs, trademarks, and patents. In addition to its Mexico City headquarters, IMPI has five regional offices.  Business Challenges IMPI  business objectives were to increase efficiency by automating internal operations and patent and trademark-related procedures and services, improve client service by simplifying patent and trademark procedures, accelerate services to the public and reduce paper use by digitizing management of necessary documentation for patent and trademark submissions and approvals. Solution DeployedIMPI worked with Oracle Consulting to implement Oracle WebCenter Content to develop electronic inquiry service - services that were previously provided in person only - by digitizing and managing documents. They use Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Edition to manage data for all mission-critical systems, automating patent and trademark transactions, providing consistent, readily available, and accurate data. IMPI developed a Web site to support newly digitized information with simple and flexible interfaces, making patent-related information easily available online to the public. Business ResultsWith the implemented solution IMPI increased the number of monthly inquires  from 200 in person consultations to 80,000 electronic consultations and the number of trademark record inquiries from 30,000 to 300,000. “Oracle WebCenter Content structure is unique. It lets us separately manage communication with other applications and databases, and performs content management itself. It’s a stable tool, at an appropriate cost, that lets us develop and provide reliable electronic services.” Eugenio Ponce de León, Divisional Director of Systems and Technology, Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial Additional Information Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content

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• MySQL and Hadoop Integration - Unlocking New Insight

  - by Mat Keep

  “Big Data” offers the potential for organizations to revolutionize their operations. With the volume of business data doubling every 1.2 years, analysts and business users are discovering very real benefits when integrating and analyzing data from multiple sources, enabling deeper insight into their customers, partners, and business processes. As the world’s most popular open source database, and the most deployed database in the web and cloud, MySQL is a key component of many big data platforms, with Hadoop vendors estimating 80% of deployments are integrated with MySQL. The new Guide to MySQL and Hadoop presents the tools enabling integration between the two data platforms, supporting the data lifecycle from acquisition and organisation to analysis and visualisation / decision, as shown in the figure below The Guide details each of these stages and the technologies supporting them: Acquire: Through new NoSQL APIs, MySQL is able to ingest high volume, high velocity data, without sacrificing ACID guarantees, thereby ensuring data quality. Real-time analytics can also be run against newly acquired data, enabling immediate business insight, before data is loaded into Hadoop. In addition, sensitive data can be pre-processed, for example healthcare or financial services records can be anonymized, before transfer to Hadoop. Organize: Data is transferred from MySQL tables to Hadoop using Apache Sqoop. With the MySQL Binlog (Binary Log) API, users can also invoke real-time change data capture processes to stream updates to HDFS. Analyze: Multi-structured data ingested from multiple sources is consolidated and processed within the Hadoop platform. Decide: The results of the analysis are loaded back to MySQL via Apache Sqoop where they inform real-time operational processes or provide source data for BI analytics tools. So how are companies taking advantage of this today? As an example, on-line retailers can use big data from their web properties to better understand site visitors’ activities, such as paths through the site, pages viewed, and comments posted. This knowledge can be combined with user profiles and purchasing history to gain a better understanding of customers, and the delivery of highly targeted offers. Of course, it is not just in the web that big data can make a difference. Every business activity can benefit, with other common use cases including: - Sentiment analysis; - Marketing campaign analysis; - Customer churn modeling; - Fraud detection; - Research and Development; - Risk Modeling; - And more. As the guide discusses, Big Data is promising a significant transformation of the way organizations leverage data to run their businesses. MySQL can be seamlessly integrated within a Big Data lifecycle, enabling the unification of multi-structured data into common data platforms, taking advantage of all new data sources and yielding more insight than was ever previously imaginable. Download the guide to MySQL and Hadoop integration to learn more. I'd also be interested in hearing about how you are integrating MySQL with Hadoop today, and your requirements for the future, so please use the comments on this blog to share your insights.

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• links for 2011-02-18

  - by Bob Rhubart

  VirtualBox: Pre-Built Developer VMs "Learning your way around a new software stack is challenging enough without having to spend multiple cycles on the install process. Instead, we have packaged such stacks into pre-built Oracle VM VirtualBox appliances that you can download, install, and experience as a single unit." (tags: oracle virtualization virtualbox) Java Space on Parleys (The Java Source) "'Oracle partnered with Stephan Janssen, founder of Parleys to make this happen. Parleys website offers a user friendly experience to view online content. You can download some of the talks to your desktop or watch them on the go on mobile devices." (tags: oracle java parleys) Why ADF Developers Should Attend ODTUG This Year (Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog) Shay says: "A new track called the "Fusion Middleware" track has been formed and it has lots of sessions for any level of ADF developer. The track is run by several Oracle ACEs who are also involved in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group." (tags: oracle otn odtug fusionmiddleware) Wrapping up an Exciting Mobile World Congress (The Java Source) "One of the more popular topics in our booth was the use of Java in the Smart Grid. In our booth we were showing off some of the work of the Hydra Consortium whose goal it is to leverage the emerging smart grid infrastructure to securely enable the delivery of personal health data..." (tags: oracle java smartgrid) How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access? (Oracle BI Publisher Blog) "Do you know who is accessing to which report at what time at your reporting environment ? As you delivered the BI Publisher reports to the production environment and your users start using them as part of their daily business operations you might wonder such questions." (tags: oracle otn businessintelligence) Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0.4 Released! (Oracle's Virtualization Blog) Fat Bloke says: "Oracle made a maintenance update release of Oracle VM VirtualBox version 4.0.4 today. You can Download it now, or read about the changes in the ChangeLog." (tags: oracle otn virtualization virtualbox) Obama says Cloud and Data Center Consolidation Will Help Curb IT Costs | WHIR Web Hosting Industry News "In the report, he estimated that the federal government could reallocate some $20 billion of IT spending to cloud computing technologies and reduce 'data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30 percent' through cloud computing." (tags: cloud obama datacenter) Chris Muir: ADF BC: Creating an "EXISTS" View Criteria Oracle ACE Director Chris Muir shares some ADF tips. (tags: oracle otn oracleace adf) Translation and Multiple Languages with Oracle UCM | Bex Huff Bex says: "Last year, I gave a presentation at Oracle Open World about Creating and Maintaining an Internationalized Web Site. Well, I'm happy to announce that one of the several add-ons to UCM is now available for purchase!" (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 ecm oracleace) ORACLENERD: Design Documentation Oracle ACE Chet "ORACLENERD" Justice makes a pledge. (tags: oracle otn oracleace database)

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• SQL Contests – Solution – Identify the Database Celebrity

  - by Pinal Dave

  Last week we were running contest Identify the Database Celebrity and we had received a fantastic response to the contest. Thank you to the kind folks at NuoDB as they had offered two USD 100 Amazon Gift Cards to the winners of the contest. We had also additional contest that users have to download and install NuoDB and identified the sample database. You can read about the contest over here. Here is the answer to the questions which we had asked earlier in the contest. Part 1: Identify Database Celebrity Personality 1 – Edgar Frank “Ted” Codd (August 19, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned achievement. (Wki) Personality 2 – James Nicholas “Jim” Gray (born January 12, 1944; lost at sea January 28, 2007; declared deceased May 16, 2012) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 “for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.” (Wiki) Personality 3 – Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949 in Illinois) is a database architect responsible for developing InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning, the blob column type, type event alerts, arrays and triggers. Starkey is the founder of several companies, including the web application development and database tool company Netfrastructure and NuoDB. (Wiki) Part 2: Identify NuoDB Samples Database Names In this part of the contest one has to Download NuoDB and install the sample database Hockey. Hockey is sample database and contains few tables. Users have to install sample database and inform the name of the sample databases. Here is the valid answer. HOCKEY PLAYERS SCORING TEAM Once again, it was indeed fun to run this contest. I have received great feedback about it and lots of people wants me to run similar contest in future. I promise to run similar interesting contests in the near future. Winners Within next two days, we will let winners send emails. Winners will have to confirm their email address and NuoDB team will send them directly Amazon Cards. Once again it was indeed fun to run this contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Best Platform/Engine for turn based Client/Server Android game

  - by Paradine

  I'm currently designing a turn based game for tablets. Initially for Android with porting to iOS later considered in design. I'm having trouble narrowing down the available technologies to even know where to spend my research time. I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to achieve someone may be able to suggest a platform and/or engine. I've looked into some of the open source Engines ( http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers ) and some appear to handle much of what I might require - although with a higher focus on graphics than i need. Mages looks interesting although development appears to have ceased. If I could somehow leverage GoogleApps that would be excellent. Here is what I am trying to achieve: PvP turn based strategy game over internet - minimal animation and bandwidth required Players match up online using MetaGame system MatchID created on Resolution Server and Game starts Clients have 30 second countdown to select MoveString Clients sends small secure timestamped and MatchIDed MoveString to Resolution server Resolution server looks up Move String for each player, Resolves and Updates Players status in MatchID on Server Resolution server updates Client Views Repeat until victory conditions met - MatchID Closed, Rewards earned in MetaGame There will also need to be a full social and account system and metagame backend - but this could be running on separate system(s) Tablet in Offline mode would be catalog browsing and perhaps single player AI - bum I'm focusing on the Resolution Server at this point I'm not even certain if I would be looking at an Android App or a WebApp at this stage! I want a custom GUI so I guess an app - but maybe as I have little animation a WebApp might also work. Probably some combination of both. There will be very small overhead in data between client server - essentially a small text string every 30 seconds sent to the Resolution server which looks up the Effect and applies it to the Opponents string and determines some results to apply to the match. The client view is updated minimally with the results (only 5 in game Integers tracked) - perhaps triggering small animations/popups on the client to show the end result. e.g Explosion. If you have suggestions for a good technology or platform to best achieving the Resolution Server I'd love to hear. Also if you have experience with open source Engines - and could narrow down which (if any ) might be most suitable that would be a big help. Thanks in advance

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• Real-time Big Data Analytics is a reality for StubHub with Oracle Advanced Analytics

  - by Mark Hornick

  What can you use for a comprehensive platform for real-time analytics? How can you process big data volumes for near-real-time recommendations and dramatically reduce fraud? Learn in this video what Stubhub achieved with Oracle R Enterprise from the Oracle Advanced Analytics option to Oracle Database, and read more on their story here. Advanced analytics solutions that impact the bottom line of a business are challenging due to the range of skills and individuals involved in realizing such solutions. While we hear a lot about the role of the data scientist, that role is but one piece of the puzzle. Advanced analytics solutions also have an operationalization aspect that also requires close proximity to where the transactional activity occurs. The data scientist needs access to the right data with which to model the business problem. This involves IT for data collection, management, and administration, as well as ensuring zero downtime (a website needs to be up 24x7). This also involves working with the data scientist to keep predictive models refreshed with the latest scripts. Integrating advanced analytics solutions into enterprise apps involves not just generating predictions, but supporting the whole life-cycle from data collection, to model building, model assessment, and then outcome assessment and feedback to the model building process again. Application and web interface designers need to take into account how end users will see and use the advanced analytics results, e.g., supporting operations staff that need to handle the potentially fraudulent transactions. As just described, advanced analytics projects can be "complicated" from just a human perspective. The extent to which software can simplify the interactions among users and systems will increase the likelihood of project success. The ability to quickly operationalize advanced analytics projects and demonstrate measurable value, means the difference between a successful project and just a nice research report. By standardizing on Oracle Database and SQL invocation of R, along with in-database modeling as found in Oracle Advanced Analytics, expedient model deployment and zero downtime for refreshing models becomes a reality. Meanwhile, data scientists are also able to explore leading edge techniques available in open source. The Oracle solution propels the entire organization forward to realize the value of advanced analytics.

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• Advice on designing a robust program to handle a large library of meta-information & programs

  - by Sam Bryant

  So this might be overly vague, but here it is anyway I'm not really looking for a specific answer, but rather general design principles or direction towards resources that deal with problems like this. It's one of my first large-scale applications, and I would like to do it right. Brief Explanation My basic problem is that I have to write an application that handles a large library of meta-data, can easily modify the meta-data on-the-fly, is robust with respect to crashing, and is very efficient. (Sorta like the design parameters of iTunes, although sometimes iTunes performs more poorly than I would like). If you don't want to read the details, you can skip the rest Long Explanation Specifically I am writing a program that creates a library of image files and meta-data about these files. There is a list of tags that may or may not apply to each image. The program needs to be able to add new images, new tags, assign tags to images, and detect duplicate images, all while operating. The program contains an image Viewer which has tagging operations. The idea is that if a given image A is viewed while the library has tags T1, T2, and T3, then that image will have boolean flags for each of those tags (depending on whether the user tagged that image while it was open in the Viewer). However, prior to being viewed in the Viewer, image A would have no value for tags T1, T2, and T3. Instead it would have a "dirty" flag indicating that it is unknown whether or not A has these tags or not. The program can introduce new tags at any time (which would automatically set all images to "dirty" with respect to this new tag) This program must be fast. It must be easily able to pull up a list of images with or without a certain tag as well as images which are "dirty" with respect to a tag. It has to be crash-safe, in that if it suddenly crashes, all of the tagging information done in that session is not lost (though perhaps it's okay to loose some of it) Finally, it has to work with a lot of images (10,000) I am a fairly experienced programmer, but I have never tried to write a program with such demanding needs and I have never worked with databases. With respect to the meta-data storage, there seem to be a few design choices: Choice 1: Invidual meta-data vs centralized meta-data Individual Meta-Data: have a separate meta-data file for each image. This way, as soon as you change the meta-data for an image, it can be written to the hard disk, without having to rewrite the information for all of the other images. Centralized Meta-Data: Have a single file to hold the meta-data for every file. This would probably require meta-data writes in intervals as opposed to after every change. The benefit here is that you could keep a centralized list of all images with a given tag, ect, making the task of pulling up all images with a given tag very efficient

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• links for 2011-02-16

  - by Bob Rhubart

  On the Software Architect Trail Software architect is the #1 job, according to a 2010 CNN-Money poll. In this article in Oracle Magazine, several members of the OTN architect community talk about the career paths that led them to this lucrative role.  (tags: oracle oraclemagazine softwarearchitect) Oracle Technology Network Architect Day: Denver Registration opens soon for this event to be held in Denver on March 23, 2011.  (tags: oracle otn entarch) How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker "It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with." - Adam Gopnik (tags: internet progress technology innovation) The Insider Threat: Understand and Mitigate Your Risks: CSO Webcast February 23, 2011 at 1:00 PM EST/ 10:00 AM PST .  Speakers: Randy Trzeciak, lead for the CERT Insider Threat research team, and  Roxana Bradescu, Director of Database Security at Oracle. (tags: oracle CERT security) The Tom Kyte Blog: An Interesting Read... Tom looks at "an internet security firm brought down by not following the most *basic* of security principals." (tags: security oracle) Jason Williamson: Oracle as a Service in the Cloud "It is not trivial to migrate large amounts of pre-relational or 'devolved' relational data. To do this, we again must revert back to a tight roadmap to migration and leverage the growing tools and services that we have." - Jason Williamson (tags: oracle cloud soa) Edwin Biemond: Java / Oracle SOA blog: Building an asynchronous web service with JAX-WS "Building an asynchronous web service can be complex especially when you are used to synchronous Web services where you can wait for the response in your favorite tool." - Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond (tags: oracle oracleace java soa) Shared Database Servers (The SaaS Report) "Outside the virtualization world, there are capabilities of Oracle Database which can be used to prevent resource contention and guarantee SLA." - Shivanshu Upadhyay (tags: oracle database cloud SaaS) White Paper: Experiencing the New Social Enterprise "Increasingly organizations recognize the mandate to create a modern user experience that transforms existing business processes and increases business efficiency and agility." (tags: e20 enterprise2.0 socialcomputing oracle) Clusterware 11gR2 - Setting up an Active/Passive failover configuration Gilles Haro illustrates the steps necessary to achieve "a fully operational 11gR2 database protected by automatic failover capabilities." (tags: oracle clusterware) Oracle ERP: How to overcome local hurdles in a global implementation "The corporate world becomes a global village as many companies expand their business and offices around different countries and even continents. And this number keeps increasing. This globalization raises interesting questions..." - Jan Verhallen (tags: oracle capgemini entarch erp) Webcast: Successful Strategies for Optimizing Your Data Warehouse. March 3. 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Thursday, March 3, 2011. 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. Speakers: Mala Narasimharajan (Senior Product Marketing Manager, Oracle Data Integration) and Denis Gray (Principal Product Manager, Oracle Data Integration) (tags: oracle dataintegration datawarehousing)

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• Economic modelling - Resources for valuing goods

  - by Rushyo

  tl;dr: What economic/computer science books would you suggest for learning about economic valuation of goods and simulations thereof? I'm looking to create an economic model for a game based on goods created procedurally. Every natural resource and produced good would be procedurally generated, with certain goods being assigned certain uses. Fakesium might be used for the production of Weapon A and produced from Fakesium factories which use Dilithium and Widgets as reagents, where Widgets are also the product of Foo and Bar The problem is not creating the resources and their various production utlities - but getting the game's AI empires and merchants to correctly value the goods according to their scarcity, utility and production costs. I need to create a simulation of goods which allows the various game factions to assign a common value denominator (credits) to each resource, depending on how much its worth to that empire. I see the simulation being something like: "I have a high requirement for Weapon A. Since I don't have much of Fakesium, which is needed for Weapon A - I must have a high demand for Fakesium. If I can acquire Fakesium, devalue it. If not, increase its value - and also increase demand for Dilithium and Widgets too." This is very naive - because it may be much much cheaper for the empire to simply purchase Dilithium and Widgets directly rather than purchasing Fakesium, for example. Another example is two resources might allow the creation of Weapon A (Fakesium and Lieron), so we'd need to consider that. I've been scratching my head over the problem and it keeps growing. By the time the player joins the world, I'd expect enough iterations of this process to have occurred that prices would have largely normalised - and would then only trigger rarely to compensate for major changes (eg. if the player blows up the world's only Foo mine!) Could anyone suggest resources (books, largely) which outline this style of modelling, preferably in the context of simulations? Since this problem would never occur outside fantasy worlds, I figured this is probably the most likely place to find people who have encountered similar problems and I'm sure there's people who know of good places for Games Developers to start looking at less specific economic theory too. Additionally, does anyone know of any developers with blogs whose games or research applications perform similar modelling?

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• In the Cloud, Everything Costs Money

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been teaching my daughter about budgeting. I’ve explained that most of the time the money coming in is from only one or two sources – and you can only change that from time to time. The money going out, however, is to many locations, and it changes all the time. She’s made a simple debits and credits spreadsheet, and I’m having her research each part of the budget. Her eyes grow wide when she finds out everything has a cost – the house, gas for the lawnmower, dishes, water for showers, food, electricity to run the fridge, a new fridge when that one breaks, everything has a cost. She asked me “how do you pay for all this?” It’s a sentiment many adults have looking at their own budgets – and one reason that some folks don’t even make a budget. It’s hard to face up to the realities of how much it costs to do what we want to do. When we design a computing solution, it’s interesting to set up a similar budget, because we don’t always consider all of the costs associated with it. I’ve seen design sessions where the new software or servers are considered, but the “sunk” costs of personnel, networking, maintenance, increased storage, new sizes for backups and offsite storage and so on are not added in. They are already on premises, so they are assumed to be paid for already. When you move to a distributed architecture, you'll see more costs directly reflected. Store something, pay for that storage. If the system is deployed and no one is using it, you’re still paying for it. As you watch those costs rise, you might be tempted to think that a distributed architecture costs more than an on-premises one. And you might be right – for some solutions. I’ve worked with a few clients where moving to a distributed architecture doesn’t make financial sense – so we didn’t implement it. I still designed the system in a distributed fashion, however, so that when it does make sense there isn’t much re-architecting to do. In other cases, however, if you consider all of the on-premises costs and compare those accurately to operating a system in the cloud, the distributed system is much cheaper. Again, I never recommend that you take a “here-or-there-only” mentality – I think a hybrid distributed system is usually best – but each solution is different. There simply is no “one size fits all” to architecting a solution. As you design your solution, cost out each element. You might find that using a hybrid approach saves you money in one design and not in another. It’s a brave new world indeed. So yes, in the cloud, everything costs money. But an on-premises solution also costs money – it’s just that “dad” (the company) is paying for it and we don’t always see it. When we go out on our own in the cloud, we need to ensure that we consider all of the costs.

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• Merge Join component sorted outputs [SSIS]

  - by jamiet

  One question that I have been asked a few times of late in regard to performance tuning SSIS data flows is this: Why isn’t the Merge Join output sorted (i.e.IsSorted=True)? This is a fair question. After all both of the Merge Join inputs are sorted, hence why wouldn’t the output be sorted as well? Well here’s a little secret, the Merge Join output IS sorted! There’s a caveat though – it is only under certain circumstances and SSIS itself doesn’t do a good job of informing you of it. Let’s take a look at an example. Here we have a dataflow that consumes data from the [AdventureWorks2008].[Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] & [AdventureWorks2008].[Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] tables then joins them using a Merge Join component: Let’s take a look inside the editor of the Merge Join: We are joining on the [SalesOrderId] field (which is what the two inputs just happen to be sorted upon). We are also putting [SalesOrderHeader].[SalesOrderId] into the output. Believe it or not the output from this Merge Join component is sorted (i.e. has IsSorted=True) but unfortunately the Merge Join component does not have an Advanced Editor hence it is hidden away from us. There are a couple of ways to prove to you that is the case; I could open up the package XML inside the .dtsx file and show you the metadata but there is an easier way than that – I can attach a Sort component to the output. Take a look: Notice that the Sort component is attempting to sort on the [SalesOrderId] column. This gives us the following warning: Validation warning. DFT Get raw data: {992B7C9A-35AD-47B9-A0B0-637F7DDF93EB}: The data is already sorted as specified so the transform can be removed. The warning proves that the output from the Merge Join is sorted! It must be noted that the Merge Join output will only have IsSorted=True if at least one of the join columns is included in the output. So there you go, the Merge Join component can indeed produce a sorted output and that’s very useful in order to avoid unnecessary expensive Sort operations downstream. Hope this is useful to someone out there! @Jamiet  P.S. Thank you to Bob Bojanic on the SSIS product team who pointed this out to me!

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• Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration. Then it was thought that marketers should focus their efforts on a relative few super-influencers that would then sway the masses. History shows a few successes with this approach but lacked any consistency or predictability. After all, if super-influencers were easy to find, most campaigns would easily go viral. Alas, research shows that most wide-spread trends were the result of several fortunate events, including some luck. So do people exert influence over each other when it comes to purchase decisions? Of course they do, all the time. But that influence is usually limited to a small set of friends and specific specialization. For instance, although I have 165 friends on Facebook, I am only able to influence my close friends and family on PC purchases, and I have no sway at all for fashion purchases. People trust my knowledge on technology, but nobody asks my advice on shoes. How then should retailers leverage social networks in order to reinforce brand image and push promotions? Two obvious ways are Like and Share. Online advertisements or wall-postings receive more clicks when the viewer sees that friends have "liked" the posting. That's our modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. Statistics show that endorsements from friends make it more likely a person will engage. If my friends and I liked it, then I might also "share" (or "retweet" in the case of Twitter) it with other friends. In that case the retailer has paid for X showings of the advertisement, but sharing has pushed it to an additional Y people at no cost. And further, the implicit endorsement by the sharer makes it more likely the recipient will engage. So a good first step is to find people active in social networks that will Like and Share in order to exert influence. Its still tough to go viral, but doubling engagement is still a big step in the right direction. More complex social graph analysis would be a second step, but I'll leave that topic for another day. If you're interested in the academic side of social dynamics, I suggest reading Duncan Watts' work.

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• OpenGL - Calculating camera view matrix

  - by Karle

  Problem I am calculating the model, view and projection matrices independently to be used in my shader as follows: gl_Position = projection * view * model * vec4(in_Position, 1.0); When I try to calculate my camera's view matrix the Z axis is flipped and my camera seems like it is looking backwards. My program is written in C# using the OpenTK library. Translation (Working) I've created a test scene as follows: From my understanding of the OpenGL coordinate system they are positioned correctly. The model matrix is created using: Matrix4 translation = Matrix4.CreateTranslation(modelPosition); Matrix4 model = translation; The view matrix is created using: Matrix4 translation = Matrix4.CreateTranslation(-cameraPosition); Matrix4 view = translation; Rotation (Not-Working) I now want to create the camera's rotation matrix. To do this I use the camera's right, up and forward vectors: // Hard coded example orientation: // Normally calculated from up and forward // Similar to look-at camera. Vector3 r = Vector.UnitX; Vector3 u = Vector3.UnitY; Vector3 f = -Vector3.UnitZ; Matrix4 rot = new Matrix4( r.X, r.Y, r.Z, 0, u.X, u.Y, u.Z, 0, f.X, f.Y, f.Z, 0, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); This results in the following matrix being created: I know that multiplying by the identity matrix would produce no rotation. This is clearly not the identity matrix and therefore will apply some rotation. I thought that because this is aligned with the OpenGL coordinate system is should produce no rotation. Is this the wrong way to calculate the rotation matrix? I then create my view matrix as: // OpenTK is row-major so the order of operations is reversed: Matrix4 view = translation * rot; Rotation almost works now but the -Z/+Z axis has been flipped, with the green cube now appearing closer to the camera. It seems like the camera is looking backwards, especially if I move it around. My goal is to store the position and orientation of all objects (including the camera) as: Vector3 position; Vector3 up; Vector3 forward; Apologies for writing such a long question and thank you in advance. I've tried following tutorials/guides from many sites but I keep ending up with something wrong. Edit: Projection Matrix Set-up Matrix4 projection = Matrix4.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView( (float)(0.5 * Math.PI), (float)display.Width / display.Height, 0.1f, 1000.0f);

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