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• SSAS Tabular Workshop online and other upcoming dates (and updates!) #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  After many conferences and travels, this summer I had some time to write and prepare new sessions for the next wave of conferences. In reality I am just doing that, even if I already restarted traveling for consulting and training. So expect new content about DAX and Tabular coming in the next months! Starting to see real customer adopting Tabular is showing many new challenges and there is still a lot to learn and to create. If you still didn’t started working on Tabular, well, you should. As I always say, as a BI developer you should be able to choose between Tabular and Multidimensional, and in order to do that you should know both of them! One thing that I don’t like very much about marketing is that “Tabular is simpler”, because it’s often translated in “Tabular is for simple projects” when this last statement is not true. Actually, I see a lot of good reasons to adopt Tabular in complex data models, especially in non-traditional scenarios. I know, this is because I love to understand what are the actual limits of a technology, and I’m learning that there is simple a lot of space of improvement also for Tabular. It’s already fast, but it could be faster! How can you start? Well, first of all, by reading our book. Then, by attending to our SSAS Tabular workshop. There is an online edition of the workshop on September 3-4, 2012 (hurry up if you want to register), and there are already several dates planned for the next months (and others will be added soon!). And, of course, by installing SQL Server 2012 and trying to create models over your databases. If you are too lazy, just start with PowerPivot. As soon as you start working with Tabular or PowerPivot, you will see that there is one important skill you need: learning DAX. In the next few days I should publish an article that I’m finishing these days about best practices using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS. If only someone published this article one year ago, I would have saved many hours of my life. But, you know, flight manuals are written in blood… and someone has to write! Stay tuned.

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• Closing the Gap: 2012 IOUG Enterprise Data Security Survey

  - by Troy Kitch

  The new survey from the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) titled "Closing the Security Gap: 2012 IOUG Enterprise Data Security Survey," uncovers some interesting trends in IT security among IOUG members and offers recommendations for securing data stored in enterprise databases. "Despite growing threats and enterprise data security risks, organizations that implement appropriate detective, preventive, and administrative safeguards are seeing significant results," finds the report's author, Joseph McKendrick, analyst, Unisphere Research. Produced by Unisphere Research and underwritten by Oracle, the report is based on responses from 350 IOUG members representing a variety of job roles, organization sizes, and industry verticals. Key findings include Corporate budgets increase, but trailing. Though corporate data security budgets are increasing this year, they still have room to grow to reach the previous year’s spending. Additionally, more than half of respondents say their organizations still do not have, or are unaware of, data security plans to help address contingencies as they arise. Danger of unauthorized access. Less than a third of respondents encrypt data that is either stored or in motion, and at the same time, more than three-fifths say they send actual copies of enterprise production data to other sites inside and outside the enterprise. Privileged user misuse. Only about a third of respondents say they are able to prevent privileged users from abusing data, and most do not have, or are not aware of, ways to prevent access to sensitive data using spreadsheets or other ad hoc tools. Lack of consistent auditing. A majority of respondents actively collect native database audits, but there has not been an appreciable increase in the implementation of automated tools for comprehensive auditing and reporting across databases in the enterprise. IOUG RecommendationsThe report's author finds that securing data requires not just the ability to monitor and detect suspicious activity, but also to prevent the activity in the first place. To achieve this comprehensive approach, the report recommends the following. Apply an enterprise-wide security strategy. Database security requires multiple layers of defense that include a combination of preventive, detective, and administrative data security controls. Get business buy-in and support. Data security only works if it is backed through executive support. The business needs to help determine what protection levels should be attached to data stored in enterprise databases. Provide training and education. Often, business users are not familiar with the risks associated with data security. Beyond IT solutions, what is needed is a well-engaged and knowledgeable organization to help make security a reality. Read the IOUG Data Security Survey Now.

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• Box2D Bicycle Wheels Motor Problem - Flash 2.1a

  - by Craig

  I have made a bicycle with Box2D using several polygons for the frame at different angles connected using weld joints, and I have revolute joints on the wheels with a motor. I have made some basic terrain (straight ground and a small ramp) and added keyboard input to control the bicycle with torque to balance it. All of this is done in with Box2D's Debug Draw. When the bicycle is on its back wheel but diagonally forward (kinda like this position - /) the motors just cause it go spinning backwards over when in reality it should either stay on its back wheel or go down onto both wheels. Here's my code the revolute joints: //Front Wheel Joint var frontWheelJointDef:b2RevoluteJointDef = new b2RevoluteJointDef(); frontWheelJointDef.Initialize(frontWheelBody, secondFrameBody, frontWheelBody.GetWorldCenter()); frontWheelJointDef.enableMotor=true; frontWheelJointDef.maxMotorTorque=10000; frontWheelJoint = _world.CreateJoint(frontWheelJointDef) as b2RevoluteJoint; //Rear Wheel Joint var rearWheelJointDef:b2RevoluteJointDef = new b2RevoluteJointDef(); rearWheelJointDef.Initialize(rearWheelBody, firstFrameBody, rearWheelBody.GetWorldCenter()); rearWheelJointDef.enableMotor=true; rearWheelJointDef.maxMotorTorque=10000; rearWheelJoint = _world.CreateJoint(rearWheelJointDef) as b2RevoluteJoint; And here's the relevant part of my update function: // up and down control wheels motor if (up) { motorSpeed-=0.5; } if (down) { motorSpeed += 0.5; } // left and right control cart torque if (left) { middleCentreFrameBody.ApplyTorque( -3); gearBody.ApplyTorque( -3); firstFrameBody.ApplyTorque( -3); secondFrameBody.ApplyTorque( -3); rearWheelToChainBody.ApplyTorque( -3); chainToFrontFrameBody.ApplyTorque( -3); topMiddleFrameBody.ApplyTorque( -3); } if (right) { middleCentreFrameBody.ApplyTorque( 3); gearBody.ApplyTorque( 3); firstFrameBody.ApplyTorque( 3); secondFrameBody.ApplyTorque( 3); rearWheelToChainBody.ApplyTorque( 3); chainToFrontFrameBody.ApplyTorque( 3); topMiddleFrameBody.ApplyTorque( 3); } // motor friction motorSpeed*=0.99; // motor max speed if (motorSpeed>100) { motorSpeed=100; } rearWheelJoint.SetMotorSpeed(motorSpeed); frontWheelJoint.SetMotorSpeed(motorSpeed); Any ideas what might be causing this? Thanks

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• Running OpenStack Icehouse with ZFS Storage Appliance

  - by Ronen Kofman

  Couple of months ago Oracle announced the support for OpenStack Cinder plugin with ZFS Storage Appliance (aka ZFSSA).  With our recent release of the Icehouse tech preview I thought it is a good opportunity to demonstrate the ZFSSA plugin working with Icehouse. One thing that helps a lot to get started with ZFSSA is that it has a VirtualBox simulator. This simulator allows users to try out the appliance’s features before getting to a real box. Users can test the functionality and design an environment even before they have a real appliance which makes the deployment process much more efficient. With OpenStack this is especially nice because having a simulator on the other end allows us to test the complete set of the Cinder plugin and check the entire integration on a single server or even a laptop. Let’s see how this works Installing and Configuring the Simulator To get started we first need to download the simulator, the simulator is available here, unzip it and it is ready to be imported to VirtualBox. If you do not already have VirtualBox installed you can download it from here according to your platform of choice. To import the simulator go to VirtualBox console File -> Import Appliance , navigate to the location of the simulator and import the virtual machine. When opening the virtual machine you will need to make the following changes: - Network – by default the network is “Host Only” , the user needs to change that to “Bridged” so the VM can connect to the network and be accessible. - Memory (optional) – the VM comes with a default of 2560MB which may be fine but if you have more memory that could not hurt, in my case I decided to give it 8192 - vCPU (optional) – the default the VM comes with 1 vCPU, I decided to change it to two, you are welcome to do so too. And here is how the VM looks like: Start the VM, when the boot process completes we will need to change the root password and the simulator is running and ready to go. Now that the simulator is up and running we can access simulated appliance using the URL https://<IP or DNS name>:215/, the IP is showing on the virtual machine console. At this stage we will need to configure the appliance, in my case I did not change any of the default (in other words pressed ‘commit’ several times) and the simulated appliance was configured and ready to go. We will need to enable REST access otherwise Cinder will not be able to call the appliance we do that in Configuration->Services and at the end of the page there is ‘REST’ button, enable it. If you are a more advanced user you can set additional features in the appliance but for the purpose of this demo this is sufficient. One final step will be to create a pool, go to Configuration -> Storage and add a pool as shown below the pool is named “default”: The simulator is now running, configured and ready for action. Configuring Cinder Back to OpenStack, I have a multi node deployment which we created according to the “Getting Started with Oracle VM, Oracle Linux and OpenStack” guide using Icehouse tech preview release. Now we need to install and configure the ZFSSA Cinder plugin using the README file. In short the steps are as follows: 1. Copy the file from here to the control node and place them at: /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/cinder/volume/drivers/zfssa 2. Configure the plugin, editing /etc/cinder/cinder.conf # Driver to use for volume creation (string value) #volume_driver=cinder.volume.drivers.lvm.LVMISCSIDriver volume_driver=cinder.volume.drivers.zfssa.zfssaiscsi.ZFSSAISCSIDriver zfssa_host = <HOST IP> zfssa_auth_user = root zfssa_auth_password = <ROOT PASSWORD> zfssa_pool = default zfssa_target_portal = <HOST IP>:3260 zfssa_project = test zfssa_initiator_group = default zfssa_target_interfaces = e1000g0 3. Restart the cinder-volume service: service openstack-cinder-volume restart 4. Look into the log file, this will tell us if everything works well so far. If you see any errors fix them before continuing. 5. Install iscsi-initiator-utils package, this is important since the plugin uses iscsi commands from this package: yum install -y iscsi-initiator-utils The installation and configuration are very simple, we do not need to have a “project” in the ZFSSA but we do need to define a pool. Creating and Using Volumes in OpenStack We are now ready to work, to get started lets create a volume in OpenStack and see it showing up on the simulator: #  cinder create 2 --display-name my-volume-1 +---------------------+--------------------------------------+ |       Property      |                Value                 | +---------------------+--------------------------------------+ |     attachments     |                  []                  | |  availability_zone  |                 nova                 | |       bootable      |                false                 | |      created_at     |      2014-08-12T04:24:37.806752      | | display_description |                 None                 | |     display_name    |             my-volume-1              | |      encrypted      |                False                 | |          id         | df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee | |       metadata      |                  {}                  | |         size        |                  2                   | |     snapshot_id     |                 None                 | |     source_volid    |                 None                 | |        status       |               creating               | |     volume_type     |                 None                 | +---------------------+--------------------------------------+ In the simulator: Extending the volume to 5G: # cinder extend df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee 5 In the simulator: Creating templates using Cinder Volumes By default OpenStack supports ephemeral storage where an image is copied into the run area during instance launch and deleted when the instance is terminated. With Cinder we can create persistent storage and launch instances from a Cinder volume. Booting from volume has several advantages, one of the main advantages of booting from volumes is speed. No matter how large the volume is the launch operation is immediate there is no copying of an image to a run areas, an operation which can take a long time when using ephemeral storage (depending on image size). In this deployment we have a Glance image of Oracle Linux 6.5, I would like to make it into a volume which I can boot from. When creating a volume from an image we actually “download” the image into the volume and making the volume bootable, this process can take some time depending on the image size, during the download we will see the following status: # cinder create --image-id 487a0731-599a-499e-b0e2-5d9b20201f0f --display-name ol65 2 # cinder list +--------------------------------------+-------------+--------------+------+-------------+ |                  ID                  |    Status   | Display Name | Size | Volume Type | … +--------------------------------------+-------------+--------------+------+------------- | df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee |  available  | my-volume-1  |  5   |     None    | … | f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 | downloading |     ol65     |  2   |     None    | … +--------------------------------------+-------------+--------------+------+-------------+ After the download is complete we will see that the volume status changed to “available” and that the bootable state is “true”. We can use this new volume to boot an instance from or we can use it as a template. Cinder can create a volume from another volume and ZFSSA can replicate volumes instantly in the back end. The result is an efficient template model where users can spawn an instance from a “template” instantly even if the template is very large in size. Let’s try replicating the bootable volume with the Oracle Linux 6.5 on it creating additional 3 bootable volumes: # cinder create 2 --source-volid f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 --display-name ol65-bootable-1 # cinder create 2 --source-volid f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 --display-name ol65-bootable-2 # cinder create 2 --source-volid f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 --display-name ol65-bootable-3 # cinder list +--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+------+-------------+----------+-------------+ |                  ID                  |   Status  |   Display Name  | Size | Volume Type | Bootable | Attached to | +--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+------+-------------+----------+-------------+ | 9bfe0deb-b9c7-4d97-8522-1354fc533c26 | available | ol65-bootable-2 |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | | a311a855-6fb8-472d-b091-4d9703ef6b9a | available | ol65-bootable-1 |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | | df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee | available |   my-volume-1   |  5   |     None    |  false   |             | | e7fbd2eb-e726-452b-9a88-b5eee0736175 | available | ol65-bootable-3 |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | | f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 | available |       ol65      |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | +--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+------+-------------+----------+-------------+ Note that the creation of those 3 volume was almost immediate, no need to download or copy, ZFSSA takes care of the volume copy for us. Start 3 instances: # nova boot --boot-volume a311a855-6fb8-472d-b091-4d9703ef6b9a --flavor m1.tiny ol65-instance-1 --nic net-id=25b19746-3aea-4236-8193-4c6284e76eca # nova boot --boot-volume 9bfe0deb-b9c7-4d97-8522-1354fc533c26 --flavor m1.tiny ol65-instance-2 --nic net-id=25b19746-3aea-4236-8193-4c6284e76eca # nova boot --boot-volume e7fbd2eb-e726-452b-9a88-b5eee0736175 --flavor m1.tiny ol65-instance-3 --nic net-id=25b19746-3aea-4236-8193-4c6284e76eca Instantly replicating volumes is a very powerful feature, especially for large templates. The ZFSSA Cinder plugin allows us to take advantage of this feature of ZFSSA. By offloading some of the operations to the array OpenStack create a highly efficient environment where persistent volume can be instantly created from a template. That’s all for now, with this environment you can continue to test ZFSSA with OpenStack and when you are ready for the real appliance the operations will look the same. @RonenKofman

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• ray collision with rectangle and floating point accuracy

  - by phq

  I'm trying to solve a problem with a ray bouncing on a box. Actually it is a sphere but for simplicity the box dimensions are expanded by the sphere radius when doing the collision test making the sphere a single ray. It is done by projecting the ray onto all faces of the box and pick the one that is closest. However because I'm using floating point variables I fear that the projected point onto the surface might be interpreted as being below in the next iteration, also I will later allow the sphere to move which might make that scenario more likely. Also the bounce coefficient might be as low as zero, making the sphere continue along the surface. So my naive solution is to project not only forwards but backwards to catch those cases. That is where I got into problems shown in the figure: In the first iteration the first black arrow is calculated and we end up at a point on the surface of the box. In the second iteration the "back projection" hits the other surface making the second black arrow bounce on the wrong surface. If there are several boxes close to each other this has further consequences making the sphere fall through them all. So my main question is how to handle possible floating point accuracy when placing the sphere on the box surface so it does not fall through. In writing this question I got the idea to have a threshold to only accept back projections a certain amount much smaller than the box but larger than the possible accuracy limitation, this would only cause the "false" back projection when the sphere hit the box on an edge which would appear naturally. To clarify my original approach, the arrows shown in the image is not only the path the sphere travels but is also representing a single time step in the simulation. In reality the time step is much smaller about 0.05 of the box size. The path traveled is projected onto possible sides to avoid traveling past a thinner object at higher speeds. In normal situations the floating point accuracy is not an issue but there are two situations where I have the concern. When the new position at the end of the time step is located very close to the surface, very unlikely though. When using a bounce factor of 0, here it happens every time the sphere hit a box. To add some loss of accuracy, the motivation for my concern, is that the sphere and box are in different coordinate systems and thus the sphere location is transformed for every test. This last one is why I'm not willing to stand on luck that one floating point value lying on top of the box always will be interpreted the same. I did not know voronoi regions by name, but looking at it I'm not sure how it would be used in a projection scenario that I'm using here.

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• What if you could work on anything you wanted?

  - by red@work

  This week we've downed our tools and organised ourselves into small project teams or struck out alone. We're working on whatever we like, with whoever we like, wherever we like. We've called it Down Tools week and so far it's a blast. It all started a few months ago with an idea from Neil, our CEO. Neil wanted to capture the excitement, innovation, and productivity of Coding by the Sea and extend this to all Red Gaters working in Product Development. A brainstorm is always a good place to start for an "anything goes" project. Half of Red Gate piled into our largest meeting room (it's pretty big) armed with flip charts, post its and a heightened sense of possibility. An hour or so later our SQL Servery walls were covered in project ideas. So what would you do, if you could work on anything you wanted? Many projects are related to tools we already make, others are for internal product development use and some are, well, just something completely different. Someone suggested we point a web cam at the SQL Servery lunch queue so we can check it before heading to lunch. That one couldn't wait for Down Tools Week. It was up and running within a few days and even better, it captures the table tennis table too. Thursday is the Show and Tell - I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has come up with. Some of the projects will turn into new products or features so this probably isn't the time or place to go into detail of what is being worked on. Rest assured, you'll hear all about it! We're making a video as we go along too which will be up on our website as soon. In the meantime, all meetings are cancelled, we've got plenty of food in and people are being very creative with the £500 expenses budget (Richard, do you really need an iPad?). It's brilliant to see it all coming together from the idea stage to reality. Catch up with our progress by following #downtoolsweek on Twitter. Who knows, maybe a future Red Gate flagship tool is coming to life right now? By the way, it's business as usual for our customer facing and internal operations teams. Hmm, maybe we can all down tools for a week and ask Product Development to hold the fort? Post by: Alice Chapman

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 18, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 18, 2011Popular ReleasesCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor v1.0.0.0 Beta: Game Files Open - Map Editor beta v1.0.0.0Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Document.Editor: 2011.5: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.5: New export to email New export to image New document background color Improved Tooltips Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsTerminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...New ProjectsAbstractSpoon: Development Code by AbstractSpoonBetchRenamer: ????????ChromeTabControl: I want to create wpf tab control. It will have same behavior that chrome.CLASonline: CS 307 Software Engineering - Purdue University A web based social and collaborative learning system.ElearningProject: ELearning TutorialEPICS .NET - Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System for .NET: EPICS .NET is the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System for .NET Framework 4.0 and above. Written in C#, this control toolkit consists of three sub projects: * EPICS .NET Library, * Virtual Accelerator: Demonstrates full capabilities of the library, * EPICS SimulatorException Manager: Having trouble with unhandled exceptions? Exception Manager will catch these exceptions for you and log them, and then continue running the program. You can choose whether or not to display a dialog box. Only invoked when *not* running from the debugger (Run without Debugging)FileTransferTool: The program is a file transfer client, it monitor one or several local directories, verify,ftp and backup files found to the directory or ftp server you assign. the program is developed by c# + .framework 2.0(to support previous windows version). Hope it can help.httpdSharp: Simple multi-threaded console http server written in C# and .NET 2.0. Simple configuration of wwwroot folder, port and mime-types served. Useful for serving static content when you are in a hurry.Image.Viewer: Basic Ribbon based image viewer for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.Imtihan: Imtihan is an online assessment system (OAS).Iphone: Project about I-PhotoKunalPishewsccsemb: KunalPishewsccsembMAT04 Integrationsprojekt - Stadt- und Sehenswürdigkeitenführer Bern: Für die Stadt Bern soll ein "Stadt- und Sehenswürdigkeitenführer" für Smartphones implementiert werden. Touristen und Besuchern sollen die Sehenswürdigkeiten von Bern näher gebracht, sowie das Zurechtfinden in der Altstadt erleichtert werden.MediaBrowser Silverlight: MediaBrowser Silverlight is a small application designed with Silverlight in an educational purpose. This application allows you to consult a series of media (Movies, Albums, Images, Books) and to administer them.MovieCalc: A small tool to calc the bitrate of a movie with given audio bitrate and destination size of the movie (divx, xvid)MPC Pattern for Microsoft Silverlight 4.0: If you have struggled with MVVM in Silverlight line of business applications and you want a good framework for building an application, MPC is for you. MPC is a Model, ViewModel, Presenter and Controller pattern enhanced with XAML defined States, Actions, and Async WCF.News Man: Rss feed News readerOpenQuestions: OpenQuestions is the leading open source source for exam simulators. Main features: * All type of questions supported (single choice, multiple choice, open answers, matching, fill the gaps, etc) * Customisable appearance (look and feel) with themes. * Multi-lingual support.Ordered images loading: Ordered image loading controls enables you to load images on pages in order you specify. It is nice for sites with lot of images where you want to control which images should be loaded first. It is developed using ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and jQuery.Over the fence: Share your gardening tips. This is a community site for gardeners to share their experiences. Discuss your successes and failures. Swap tips. Which plants grow well in your soil? Where is the best place to source plants? What are your favourites?Phoenix iBooking: Phoenix iBooking is an appointment management system. For salons, sports centers etc. It was originally written in VB .NET as a salon booking and till system. This project will see the conversion to C# .NET 4 and removal of the till functionality.PointlessBends: Simply move the four points around the white area and waste time! Yes, that’s right, its pointless!PRISMvvM: MvvM guidance and framework built on top of the PRISM framework. Makes it easier for developers to properly utilize PRISM to achieve best practices in creating a Silverlight project with MVVM. Sponsored and written by: http://www.architectinginnovation.comrsvp: Projectwork on the IT University in Copenhagen, building a survey system.SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part JavaScript Bridge: This is a project template containing a number of base classes and JavaScript which allows SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web parts to communicate with each other inside the browser. It provides Silverlight web parts with the functionality normal web parts get from interfaces.StatlightTeamBuild: StatlightTeamBuild is a build activity plugin for TFS build 2010. The unittest results, generated by statlight, are processed and publish to TFS. After which, the results are shown in your build summary. TFS to TeamCity Build Notification Plugin: Have you ever wanted to turn VCS polling off? TFS to TeamCity Build Notification Plugin is a tool that will initiate a build request when your source code is checked in. The only configuration includes deploying the notification website and supplying your VCS roots to notify .tipolog: tipologTower Defense 3D with C# and XNA: A classical Tower Defense but in 3D. Developped in C# and using XNA, this game is aimed to be released on both Windows and Xbox 360. This project is a part of a course for the 1st y of IT MASTER in Besancon, France.Utility4Net: some base class such as xml,string,data,secerity,web... etc.. under Microsoft.NET Framework 4.0Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java: This starter kit was designed to work as a simple command line build tool or in the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to help Java developers deploy their applications to the Windows Azure cloud.WSCCSemesterB: Web Scripting Semester BXaml Physics: Xaml Physics makes it possible to make a physics simulation with only xaml code. It is a wrapper around the Farseer Physics Engine.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-28

  - by Bob Rhubart

  You may be tempted by IaaS, but you should PaaS on that or your database cloud journey will be a short one "The better option [to IaaS] is to rationalize the deployment stack so that VMs are needed only for exceptional cases," says B. R. Clouse. "By settling on a standard operating system and patch level, you create an infrastructure that potentially all of your databases can share. Now, the building block will be database instances or possibly schemas within databases. These components are the platforms on which you will deploy workloads, hence this is known as Platform as a Service (PaaS)." 'Shadow IT' can be the cloud's best friend | David Linthicum "I do not advocate that IT give up control and allow business units to adopt any old technology they want," says Infoworld cloud computing blogger David Linthicum. "However, IT needs to face reality: For the past three decades or so, corporate IT has been slow on the uptake around the use of productive new technologies." Do you agree? 9 ways cloud will impact IT employment | ZDNet ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick condenses information from a recent report on how cloud computing will impact IT jobs. Number one on the list: New categories of jobs arising from cloud computing, which include "private cloud developers and administrators, departmental liaisons, integration specialists, cloud architects, and compliance specialists." Yeah, that's right, cloud architects. For more on cloud architects, including what you need to up your game to thrive in the cloud, check out "The Role of the Cloud Architect" on the OTN ArchBeat Podcast. Decisions, Decisions: The art, science, and politics of technology selection "When the time comes for a solution architect to make the final decision about the technologies, standards, and other elements that are to be incorporated into a particular project, what factors weigh most heavily on that decision? It comes as no surprise that among the architects I contacted, business needs top the list." Managing Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Anand Akela's byline is on this post, but "Dr. Jürgen Fleischer, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Engineering" appears at the end of the post, so it's anybody's guess as to who wrote this thing. But the content includes a complete listing of the Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets series written by a member of the Exalogic team who goes by the name "The Old Toxophilist." So maybe the best thing to do here is ignore the names and focus on the very useful conent. Boost your infrastructure with Coherence into the Cloud | Nino Guarnacci Nino Guarnacci describes a use case that involved managing a variety of data caches that process complex queries and parallel computational operations, in order to maintain the caches in a consistent state on different server instances. Thought for the Day "No one hates software more than software developers." — Jeff Atwood Source: SoftwareQuotes

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• Getting Started with Kinect for Windows.

  - by Vishal

  Hello folks,      Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day.   Minority Report Movie clip.           Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and recently on Feb 1st 2012, Microsoft released the official Kinect for Windows SDK. That’s just 10 years from the movie release. Although, the product is in it early stages but with developer creativity and continuously improving hardware, those features shown in the movie are not very far away from becoming a reality. Soon after releasing the SDK, Microsoft again announced in March the release of its new Kinect for Windows SDK version 1.5 which is coming out in sometime May. More history about Kinect. Anyways, so for a newbie with Kinect, where would you start. Here is what I would suggest you can do. Watch the Kinect for Windows Quick start Series by Den Fernandez. Download the Kinect for Windows SDK and start playing around with the demos in it. It also comes with some basic Kinect documentation. Coding4Fun Kinect Projects | Lot many more videos and open sources projects information. Kinect for Windows Session at Techdays NL demo by Jesus Rodriguez. Book: Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK.  | I did go through few of the chapters in this book and based on that, it does talk deeply about core Kinect concepts but in very easy to understand way. I would definitely suggest this book for any Kinect developers. I liked the way it explained the Gestures recognition in Chapter 6. Buy your Kinect device from either Amazon or NewEgg. You will get it cheaper then buying it from Microsoft Store. Personally, I love Newegg.com as I never had any order related or shipping issues with them. I always hate developing UI application but well, you would need to get your hands dirty with WPF too in order to work with Kinect. So get started with WPF concepts too. I will keep adding stuff to the list once I come across them but so far the above list would definitely get you started building your first Kinect apps. Till then Happy Kinecting…!!!!! Thanks, Vishal Mody

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• Outlying DBAs

  - by steveh99999

  Read an interesting book recently, ‘Outliers – the story of success’ by Malcolm Gladwell. There’s a good synopsis of the book here on wikipedia. I don’t want to write in detailed review of the book, but it’s well worth a read. There were a couple of sections which I thought were possibly relevant to IT professionals and DBAs in particular. Firstly, ‘the 10,000 hour rule’, in this section Gladwell asserts that to be a real ‘elite performer’ takes 10,000 hours of practice. ‘Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good, it’s the thing you do that makes you good’.  He gives many interesting examples – the Beatles, Bill Gates etc – but I was wondering could this be applied to DBAs ? If it takes 10,000 hours to be a really elite DBA – how long does that really take ? 8 hours a day makes 1250 days. If we assume that most DBAs work around 230 days a year – then it takes around 5 and a half years to become an elite DBA.   But how much time per day does a DBA spend actually doing DBA work ? Certainly it’s my experience that the more experienced I get as a DBA, the less time I seem to spend actually doing DBA work – ie meetings, change-control meetings, project planning, liasing with other teams, appraisals etc.  Is it more accurate to assume that a DBA spends half their time actually doing ‘real’ DBA work – or is that just my bad luck ?   So, in reality, I’d argue it can take at least 5 1/2 and more likely closer to 10 years to become an elite DBA. Why do I keep receiving CVs for senior DBAs with 2-4 years actual DBA experience ? In the second section I found particularly interesting, Gladwell writes about analysis of plane crashes and the importance of in-cockpit communications. He describes a couple of crashes involving Korean Airlines – where co-pilots were often deferrential to pilots, and unwilling to openly criticise their more senior colleagues or point out errors when things were going badly wrong… There’s a better summary of Gladwell’s concepts on mitigation  here – but to apply this to a DBA role… If you are a DBA and you do not agree with  a decision of one of your superiors, then it’s your duty as a DBA to say what you think is wrong, before it’s too late…  Obviously there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and moaning, but a good senior DBA or manager should be able to take well-researched criticism\debate from a more junior DBA.   Is this really possible ?

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• My Graduate Experience at Oracle by Mayuri Khinvasara

  - by david.talamelli

  My experience at Oracle. I still vividly remember the day, when my name was announced in the campus hiring list of Oracle at my college. I was proud of myself but at the same time, I was getting goose bumps!!! A new world had arrived before me and the anxiousness of whether I could survive it or not had gripped me. Nervous about moving into an unknown city, I came to visit Hyderabad with my father. One look at the Oracle Campus and I felt some kind of magnetism pulling me towards it. And then, I joined Oracle in June 2009, with a lot of apprehensions in my mind. The HR Rep made us really comfortable in the first week itself. I met so many new people, managers, HR folks and most importantly 20 other Campus Hires like me. Then we had our team bonding sessions, team parties etc. I didn’t realize when the transition from campus to corporate happened. And I had started loving it. The confidence the HR Reps gave us and the bonding our managers imbibed in us, made us all ready for the new life ahead. Then started the rigorous training sessions, the excitement about our new work, new cubicles, new desktops, our first business cards, our first conference call and so on. I made new friends which were now my extended family, the freedom and courage of living alone. I was enjoying all that. As I was getting totally immersed into my regular work schedule I started getting to know the innumerable Oracle products, their functionalities, implementations and realizing the brand that Oracle is. Work pressure started increasing and so did the challenges to understand and deliver. I Didn’t realize how days and soon months passed by. Then came a golden chance to visit the Oracle Headquarters in US for 45 days training in November 2009. Once again, the excitement was enormous about the counter team-mates in HQ, the trainings ahead, the US work culture and my stay there. I felt so privileged for the company I was working. Boarding an international flight for the first time and visiting famous US cities which I had just seen in movies, was now a reality. It was a totally amazing experience. Work pressure kept me really busy, with learning new things every day, the immense satisfaction of delivering something, the nightmares of debugging a mistake, only to realize how silly it was.  I was enjoying the process. Soon a year passed by. I had transformed into this corporate software professional, I couldn’t believe I could be. Today, I complete 1 year and 8 months at Oracle and continue to look forward to the enriching experience I will have here. Truly one of the Top Companies in the World. Mayuri Khinvasara

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• iTorque for a simple arcade game

  - by Herfus

  I have a basic understanding of programming, but I am no programmer. I've had a couple of a semesters with java programming, so we're talking pretty basic here. I have some scripting experience with game editors where I've created a few (simple) encounters, boss AI, abilities, events and so on. I've mostly done level design with UDK, Source and several other toolsets for a few years now, but I'd like to divert some of the focus to iphone-development. I've participated in a few development projects (source, udk, daot) where I've had a variety of roles (yet never beyond simple scripting). I have just finished prototyping an Iphone game (using game maker) and begun a bit more precise planning on what I'll have to do for the real version. The game is fairly simple, perhaps the best comparison in scope and complexity would be Doodlejump for iPhone. The reason I created the prototype was not just to answer a few questions about the gameplay, but to get some insight into what kind of problems I might face when trying to develop the real thing. I've been looking for engines that I can use for this. iTorque looks, so far, like the best option with a scripting language and WYSIWYG-editor. However the price is fairly steep and I'd like to prepare myself as much as possible before jumping into this, which is why I'm going to ask a few questions here. What kind of difficulties do you think I might run into, considering what you've read so far? Not just with torque, but development in general. I'm making this question mostly to have someone to reality check me. I usually achieve to do what I'm trying to do with scripting, but something tells me there's a very big difference between scripting an AI or an event and creating game logic. Will it be too much of a leap? Just how simple is it to use the Torque scripting language? Obviously I don't expect to be prepared, I expect it to be a learning process. However, I'd still like to be at least a bit confident on the time I'll have to dedicate to this first.

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• Need help with a complex 3d scene (using Ogre and bullet)

  - by Matthias

  In my setup there is a box with a hole on one side, and a freely movable "stick" (or bar, tube). This stick can be inserted/moved through the hole into the box. This hole is exactly as wide as the diameter of the stick. In reality, when you would now hold the end of the stick in your hand and move the hand left/right or up/down, the other end of the stick, which is inside the box, would move into the opposite direction of your hand movement (because the stick is affixed at the pivot point where it is entering the box through the hole). (I hope you understand what I mean so far.) Now I need to simulate such a setup in a 3d program. I have already successfully developed an Ogre3d framework for this application, including bullet. But what I don't know is how I can implement in my program what I have described above. This application must include two more features: The scene camera is attached to the end of the stick that is inserted into the box. So when the user would move the mouse (to control "his" end of the stick outside the box), then the camera attached to the stick would move in the opposite direction, as described above. The stick has some length, and the user can push it further into the box, or pull it closer to him again. That means of course that the max. radius on which the end of the stick inside the box can move depends on how far the stick is pushed into the box. Thus, the more the stick is pushed into the box, the larger the max. radius of this end of the stick with the camera will be. I understand this is maybe quite a complex thing, so I don't expect any real source code here. I already have the Ogre and bullet part as said up and running, as well as a camera attached to the stick. This works fine. What I don't know though is how I can simulate the setup described above. Especially the requirement that the stick is affixed at the position of the hole on the box, where it is inserted into the box. Any ideas how I could approach to implement the described setup?

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• Will HTML5 make Silverlight redundant?

  - by Laila

  One of the great features of Adobe AIR v2 that was launched this month was its support for some of the 2008 draft of HTML5. The HTML5 specification was started in 2004, but the full spec will probably not be approved by W3C until around 2022. One might have thought that it would take years yet from now to reach the point where any browsers were remotely HTML5-compliant, but enough of HTML5 is published and agreed to make a lot of it possible, and Safari and Adobe have got there thanks to Apple's open-source WebKit. The race for HTML 5 has been fuelled by the demand by Apple and Google for advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without having to rely on third party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Silverlight. There is good reason for this haste: Flash doesn't support touch-devices and has been slow in supporting hardware video decoders such as H.264. There is a strong requirement to do all that Flash can do in an open-standards way. Those with proprietary solutions remain sniffy. In AIR 2, Adobe pointedly disables the HTML5 and tags that allow basic playing of media content, saying that the specification is not final and there is still no standard for the supported formats, and adding that Safari implements a 'disjoint set' of codecs. Microsoft also has little interest in HTML 5 as it has so much invested in Silverlight. Google stands to gain by the Adobe AIR for Android as it will allow a lot of applications to be migrated easily to the platform, so sees Apple's war on Flash as a way of gaining market share. Why do we care? It is because HTML5/CSS3 provides facilities much far beyond HTML4, bring the reality of browser-based applications a lot closer. Probably most generally useful is the advanced typography: Safari and AIR already both support a way of reflowing text in a container across an arbitrary number of columns; Page-specific fonts can also be specified. Then there is 2D drawing, video, transitions, local storage, AJAX navigation and mutable DOM prototypes. HTML5 is likely to provide base functionality that is required but it is too early to be certain that it will render Flash, Silverlight or JavaFX obsolete. In the meantime, Adobe Air provides the best vehicle for developing HTML5/CSS3 applications without a twinge of worry about browser incompatibilities. Cheers, Laila

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• Cheating on Technical Debt

  - by Tony Davis

  One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code debt, is a convenient term to cover all the compromises between the ideal solution and the actual solution, reflecting the reality of the pressures of commercial coding. The one time you’re guaranteed to hear one developer, or DBA, pass judgment on another is when he or she inherits their project, and is surprised by the amount of technical debt left lying around in the form of inelegant architecture, incomplete tests, confusing interface design, no documentation, and so on. It is often expedient for a Project Manager to ignore the build-up of technical debt, the cut corners, not-quite-finished features and rushed designs that mean progress is satisfyingly rapid in the short term. It’s far less satisfying for the poor person who inherits the code. Nothing sends a colder chill down the spine than the dawning realization that you’ve inherited a system crippled with performance and functional issues that will take months of pain to fix before you can even begin to make progress on any of the planned new features. It’s often hard to justify this ‘debt paying’ time to the project owners and managers. It just looks as if you are making no progress, in marked contrast to your predecessor. There can be many good reasons for allowing technical debt to build up, at least in the short term. Often, rapid prototyping is essential, there is a temporary shortfall in test resources, or the domain knowledge is incomplete. It may be necessary to hit a specific deadline with a prototype, or proof-of-concept, to explore a possible market opportunity, with planned iterations and refactoring to follow later. However, it is a crime for a developer to build up technical debt without making this clear to the project participants. He or she needs to record it explicitly. A design compromise made in to order to hit a deadline, be it an outright hack, or a decision made without time for rigorous investigation and testing, needs to be documented with the same rigor that one tracks a bug. What’s the best way to do this? Ideally, we’d have some kind of objective assessment of the level of technical debt in a software project, although that smacks of Science Fiction even as I write it. I’d be interested of hear of any methods you’ve used, but I’m sure most teams have to rely simply on the integrity of their colleagues and the clear perceptions of the project manager… Cheers, Tony.

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Harnessing Business Events for Predictive Decision Making - part 1 / 3

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Businesses have long relied on data mining to elicit patterns and forecast future demand and supply trends. Improvements in computing hardware, specifically storage and compute capacity, have significantly enhanced the ability to store and analyze mountains of data in ever shrinking time-frames. Nevertheless, the reality is that data growth is outpacing storage capacity by a factor of two and computing power is still very much bounded by Moore's Law, doubling only every 18 months.Faced with this data explosion, businesses are exploring means to develop human brain-like capabilities in their decision systems (including BI and Analytics) to make sense of the data storm, in other words business events, in real-time and respond pro-actively rather than re-actively. It is more like having a little bit of the right information just a little bit before hand than having all of the right information after the fact. To appreciate this thought better let's first understand the workings of the human brain.Neuroscience research has revealed that the human brain is predictive in nature and that talent is nothing more than exceptional predictive ability. The cerebral-cortex, part of the human brain responsible for cognition, thought, language etc., comprises of five layers. The lowest layer in the hierarchy is responsible for sensory perception i.e. discrete, detail-oriented tasks whereas each of the above layers increasingly focused on assembling higher-order conceptual models. Information flows both up and down the layered memory hierarchy. This allows the conceptual mental-models to be refined over-time through experience and repetition. Secondly, and more importantly, the top-layers are able to prime the lower layers to anticipate certain events based on the existing mental-models thereby giving the brain a predictive ability. In a way the human brain develops a "memory of the future", some sort of an anticipatory thinking which let's it predict based on occurrence of events in real-time. A higher order of predictive ability stems from being able to recognize the lack of certain events. For instance, it is one thing to recognize the beats in a music track and another to detect beats that were missed, which involves a higher order predictive ability.Existing decision systems analyze historical data to identify patterns and use statistical forecasting techniques to drive planning. They are similar to the human-brain in that they employ business rules very much like mental-models to chunk and classify information. However unlike the human brain existing decision systems are unable to evolve these rules automatically (AI still best suited for highly specific tasks) and  predict the future based on real-time business events. Mistake me not,  existing decision systems remain vital to driving long-term and broader business planning. For instance, a telco will still rely on BI and Analytics software to plan promotions and optimize inventory but tap into business events enabled predictive insight to identify specifically which customers are likely to churn and engage with them pro-actively. In the next post, i will depict the technology components that enable businesses to harness real-time events and drive predictive decision making.

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• What kind of position matches my skills, experience and interests? [closed]

  - by Ryan

  I work in a large firm and my current job covers a variety of different duties. Due to several factors I am seriously considering finding a new job (hours, pay-cut, limited career growth). I have worked for the company nearly 4 years and almost 2 years ago I transitioned into more of a business analyst role (previously I was working in a client facing role for our audit group). In this role I have overseen all aspects of the development of a large scale re-platforming of our firm's key tool in analyzing investment portfolios. I gathered requirements, wrote specs, designed the UI and functionality, worked closely with developers (onshore and offshore) to see to it the implementation was correct, managed schedules and was the lead tester. This is a large scale system used by thousands of people around the world. I've also written Excel macros, reports in SQL, given trainings, written technical manuals, interfaced with senior managers and partners, etc. I've been on a couple interviews sporadically, most of which were for positions aimed at higher management consulting type positions, dealing with strategy, overall process management, project management, etc. What really interests me is the technical stuff and overseeing a project from beginning to end (although I would rather not have to do so many of the tasks on my own). I genuinely like a lot of what I do, but the company culture and attitude towards overworking people combined with my recent pay-cut (my overtime was cut due to a promotion to a higher level) has lead me to want to seek work elsewhere. The problem is - what type of work could I realistically do? I feel like traditional business analysis is too much business and not enough tech stuff, and I've really taken a shine lately to beefing up my programming abilities and creating small programs to automate things around work. I also feel that because my actual years of experience as a business analyst (figure 1.5 years realistically) puts me at a junior level doing a lot of grunt requirements gathering, when the work that I have been doing with my current company is more in line with what a Program Manager does (depending on your definition I guess). So in reality, when I'm job hunting I get a bit perplexed because I feel like the traditional BA stuff wouldn't really suit me, and even if it did it's usually something along the lines of 5-10 years experience for the type of work that is similar to what I've done (and I've also found most BA jobs to be contract only which at the moment I'm not too keen on). Program Manager is something that interests me, but again I feel like the experience is lacking because that's a much more senior position. Am I in some kind of career no-man's land? Any idea what would best suit me given my experience and abilities, as well as my interests? I plan to keep learning programming on the side, but don't expect to get a job being a straight programmer given my relative inexperience with programming.

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• Interesting Topics in Comp. Sci. for New Students?

  - by SoulBeaver

  I hope this is the right forum to ask this question. Last friday I was in a discussion with my professors about the students' lack of motivation and interest in the field of Computer Science. All of the students are enrolled, but through questionnaires and other questions that my professor posed it was revealed that over 90% of all enrolled students are just in it for the reward of getting a job sometime in the future (since it's a growing field with high job potential) I asked my professor for the permission to take over the first couple of lectures and try and motivate, interest and inspire students for the field of Computer Science and programming in particular (this is the Intro to Programming course). This request was granted and I now have a week to come up with a lecture topic for my professor's five groups. My main goal isn't to teach, I just want to get students to be as interested in the field as I am. I want to show them what's possible, what awesome magical things have been done in the field, the future we are heading towards using programming and Comp. Sci. Therefore, I would like to pose this question: I have a few topics, materials and sample projects that I would like to talk about: -- Grace Hopper (It is my hope to interest the female programmers in the class. There are never more than two or three per group and they, more than males, are prone to jumping ship and abandoning Comp. Sci.) -- The Singularity Institute -- Alan Turing -- Robotics -- Programming not as a chore or a must, but the idea that we are, at our core, the nexus to which anything anybody does in the digital world is connected to. We are the problem solvers; we assemble all the parts together and we are the ones that, essentially, make the vision a reality. -- Give them an idea for a programming project which, through the help of the professor, could be significant to every student (I want students to not only feel interested in the topic, but they should feel important, that what they do here makes a difference) Do you have interesting topics worthy of discussion, something I can tell the students which they can get interested about? How would you approach the lecture? If you had 90 minutes worth of time to try and get students interested in the project, what would you do?

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• Facial Recognition for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  My son decided to do his science project on how the brain recognizes faces.  Faces are so complicated and important that the brain has a dedicated area for just that purpose.  During our research, we came across some emerging uses for facial recognition in the retail industry. If you believe the movies, recognizing faces as they walk by a camera is easy for computers but that's not the reality.  Huge investments are being made by the U.S. government in this area, with a focus on airport security.  Now, companies like Eye See are leveraging that research for marketing purposes.  They do things like track eyes while viewing newspaper ads to see which ads get more "eye time."  This can help marketers make better placement and color decisions. But what caught my eye (that was too easy) was their new mannequins that watch shoppers.  These mannequins, being tested at European retailers like Benetton, watch shoppers that walk by and identify their gender, race, and age.  This helps the retailer better understand the types of customers being attracted to the outfit on the mannequin.  Of course to be most accurate, the software has pictures of the employees so they can be filtered out.  Since the mannequins are closer to the shoppers and at eye-level, they are more accurate than traditional in-ceiling LP cameras. Marketing agency RedPepper is offering retailers the ability to recognize loyalty shoppers at their doors using Facedeal.  For customers that have opted into the program, when they enter the store their face is recognized and they are checked in.  Then, as a reward, they are sent an offer on their smartphone. It won't be long before retailers begin to listen to shoppers are they walk the aisles, then keywords can be collected and aggregated to give the retailer an idea of what people are saying about their stores and products.  Sentiment analysis based on what's said or even facial expressions can't be far off. Clearly retailers need to be cautions and respect customer privacy.  That's why these technologies are emerging slowly.  But since the next generation of shoppers are less concerned about privacy, I expect these technologies to appear sporadically in the next five years then go mainstream.  Time will tell.

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• prism and multiple screens

  - by Avi

  OK - I am studying Prism a little because of a "free weekend" offer on Pluralsight. As this is proving too complex for me, I went to the Prism book and looked at the forward, and this is what it said: What comes after “Hello, World?” WPF and Silverlight developers are blessed with an abundance of excellent books... There’s no lack of tutorials on Model-View-ViewModel ... But they stop short of the guidance you need to deliver a non-trivial application in full. Your first screen goes well. You add a second screen and a third. Because you started your solution with the built-in “Navigation Application Template,” adding new screens feels like hanging shirts on a closet rod. You are on a roll. Until the harsh reality of real application requirements sets in. As it happens, your application has 30 screens not three. There’s no room on that closet rod for 30 screens. Some screens are modal pop-ups; you don’t navigate to a pop-up. Screens become interdependent such that user activity in one screen triggers changes that propagate throughout the UI. Some screens are optional; others are visible only to authorized users. Some screens are permanent, while other screens can be opened and closed at will. You discover that navigating back to a previously displayed screen creates a new instance. That’s not what you expected and, to your horror, the prior instance is gone along with the user’s unsaved changes. Now the issue is, I don't relate to this description. I've never been a UI programmer, but same as everyone else I'm using Windows apps such as MS-Office, and web sites such as Amazon, Facebook and StackExchange. And I look at these and I don't see many "so many screens" issues! Indeed, the only applications having many windows I can think of is Visual Studio. Maybe also Visio, a little. But take Word - You have a ribbon and a main window. Or take Facebook: You have those lists on the left (Favorites, Lists, Groups etc.), the status middle, the adds and then the Contacts sidebar. But it's only one page. Of course, I understand that in enterprise scenarios there are dashboad applications where multiple segments of the screen are updated from multiple non-related services. This I dig. But other scenarios? So - What am I missing? What is the "multiple screens" monster Pirsm is supposed to be the silver bullet solution for? Shoud I invest in studying Prism in addition to learning WPF or ASP.NET MVC?

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• Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion Spotlight - Part II

  - by Ted Davis

  As we draw closer to the first day of Oracle OpenWorld, starting in less than a week, we continue to showcase some of our premier partners exhibiting in the Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion ( Booth #1033). We have Independent Hardware Vendors, Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators that show the breadth of support in the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM ecosystem. In today's post we highlight three additional Oracle Linux / Oracle VM Partners from the pavilion. Micro Focus delivers mainframe solutions software and software delivery tools with its Borland products. These tools are grouped under the following solutions: Analysis and testing tools for JDeveloper Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer is key to the success of application overhaul and modernization strategies by ensuring that they are based on a solid knowledge foundation. It reveals the reality of enterprise application portfolios and the detailed constructs of business applications. COBOL for Oracle Database, Oracle Linux, and Tuxedo Micro Focus Visual COBOL delivers the next generation of COBOL development and deployment. Itbrings the productivity of the Eclipse IDE to COBOL, and provides the ability to deploy key business critical COBOL applications to Oracle Linux both natively and under a JVM. Migration and Modernization tooling for mainframes Enterprise application knowledge, development, test and workload re-hosting tools significantly improves the efficiency of business application delivery, enabling CIOs and IT leaders to modernize application portfolios and target platforms such as Oracle Linux. When it comes to Oracle Linux database environments, supporting high transaction rates with minimal response times is no longer just a goal. It’s a strategic imperative. The “data deluge” is impacting the ability of databases and other strategic applications to access data and provide real-time analytics and reporting. As such, customer demand for accelerated application performance is increasing. Visit LSI at the Oracle Linux Pavilion, #733, to find out how LSI Nytro Application Acceleration products are designed from the ground up for database acceleration. Our intelligent solid-state storage solutions help to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, increase throughput and enable Oracle customers achieve the highest levels of DB performance. Accelerate Your Exadata Success With Teleran. Teleran’s software solutions for Oracle Exadata and Oracle Database reduce the cost, time and effort of migrating and consolidating applications on Exadata. In addition Teleran delivers visibility and control solutions for BI/data warehouse performance and user management that ensure service levels and cost efficiency.Teleran will demonstrate these solutions at the Oracle Open World Linux Pavilion: Consolidation Accelerator - Reduces the cost, time and risk ofof migrating and consolidation applications on Exadata. Application Readiness – Identifies legacy application performance enhancements needed to take advantage of Exadata performance features Workload Accelerator – Identifies and clusters workloads for faster performance on Exadata Application Visibility and Control - Improves performance, user productivity, and alignment to business objectives while reducing support and resource costs. Thanks for reading today's Partner Spotlight. Three more partners will be highlighted tomorrow. If you missed our first Partner Spotlight check it out here.

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• How do you take into account usability and user requirements for your application?

  - by voroninp

  Our team supports BackOffice application: a mix of WinForm and WPF windows. (about 80 including dialogs). Really a kind of a Swiss Army Knife. It is used by developers, tech writers, security developers, testers. The requirements for new features come quite often and sometimes we play Wizard of Oz to decide which GUI our users like the most. And it usually happens (I admit it can be just my subjective interpretation of the reality) that one tiny detail giving the flavor of good usability to our app requires a lot of time. This time is being spent on 'fighting' with GUI framework making it act like we need. And it very difficult to make estimations for this type of tasks (at least for me and most members of our team). Scrum poker is not a help either. Management often considers this usability perfectionism to be a waste of time. On the other hand an accumulated affect of features where each has some little usability flaw frustrates users. But the same users want frequent releases and instant bug fixes. Hence, no way to get the positive feedback: there is always somebody who is snuffy. I constantly feel myself as competing with ourselves: more features - more bugs/tasks/architecture. We are trying to outrun the cart we are pushing. New technologies arrive and some of them can potentially help to improve the design or decrease task implementation time but these technologies require learning, prototyping and so on. Well, that was a story. And now is the question: How do you balance between time pressure, product quality, users and management satisfaction? When and how do you decide to leave the problem with not a perfect but to some extent acceptable solution, how often do you make these decisions? How do you do with your own satisfaction? What are your priorities? P.S. Please keep in mind, we are a BackOffice team, we have neither dedicated technical writer nor GUI designer. The tester have joined us recently. We've much work to do and much freedom concerning 'how'. I like it because it fosters creativity but I don't want to become too nerdy perfectionist.

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• I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I don't feel like I know how to program.

  - by wp123

  I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I see websites like Stack Overflow and search engines like Google and don't know where I'd even begin to write something like that. During one summer I did have the opportunity to work as a iPhone developer, but I felt like I was mostly gluing together libraries that other people had written with little understanding of the mechanics happening beneath the hood. I'm trying to improve my knowledge by studying algorithms, but it is a long and painful process. I find algorithms difficult and at the rate I am learning a decade will have passed before I will master the material in the book. Given my current situation, I've spent a month looking for work but my skills (C, Python, Objective-C) are relatively shallow and are not so desirable in the local market, where C#, Java, and web development are much higher in demand. That is not to say that C and Python opportunities do not exist but they tend to demand 3+ years of experience I do not have. My GPA is OK (3.0) but it's not high enough to apply to the large companies like IBM or return for graduate studies. Basically I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I don't feel like I've learned how to program. I thought that joining a company and programming full-time would give me a chance to develop my skills and learn from those more experienced than myself, but I'm struggling to find work and am starting to get really frustrated. I am going to cast my net wider and look beyond the city I've grown up in, but what have other people in similar situation tried to do? I've worked hard but don't have the confidence to go out on my own and write my own app. (That is, become an indie developer in the iPhone app market.) If nothing turns up I will need to consider upgrading and learning more popular skills or try something marginally related like IT, but given all the effort I've put in that feels like copping out. EDIT: Thank you for all the advice. I think I was premature because of unrealistic expectations but the comments have given me a dose of reality. I will persevere and continue to code. I have a project in mind, although well beyond my current capabilities it will challenge me to hone my craft and prove my worth to myself (and potential employers). Had I known there was a career overflow I would have posted there instead. Thanks again!

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• Let&rsquo;s keep informed with &ldquo;Data Explorer&rdquo;

  - by Luca Zavarella

  At Pass Summit 2011 a new project was announced. It’s a Microsoft SQL Azure Lab and its codename is Microsoft “Data Explorer”. According to the official blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dataexplorer/), this new tool provides an innovative way to acquire new knowledge from the data that interest you. In a nutshell, Data Explorer allows you to combine data from multiple sources, to publish and share the result. In addition, you can generate data streams in the RESTful open format (Open Data Protocol), and they can then be used by other applications. Nonetheless we can still use Excel or PowerPivot to analyze the results. Sources can be varied: Excel spreadsheets, text files, databases, Windows Azure Marketplace, etc.. For those who are not familiar with this resource, I strongly suggest you to keep an eye on the data services available to the Marketplace: https://datamarket.azure.com/browse/Data To tell the truth, as I read the above blog post, I was tempted to think of the Data Explorer as a "SSIS on Azure" addressed to the Power User. In fact, reading the response from Tim Mallalieu (Group Program Manager of Data Explorer) to the comment made to his post, I had a positive response to my first impression: “…we originally thinking of ourselves as Self-Service ETL. As we talked to more folks and started partnering with other teams we realized that would be an area that we can add value but that there were more opportunities emerging.” The typical operations of the ETL phase ( processing and organization of data in different formats) can be obtained thanks to Data Explorer Mashup. This is an image of the tool: The flexibility in the manipulation of information is given by Data Explorer Formula Language. This is a formula-based Excel-style specific language: Anyone wishing to know more can check the project page in addition to aforementioned blog: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/labs/dataexplorer.aspx In light of this new project, there is no doubt about the intention of Microsoft to get closer and closer to the Power User, providing him flexible and very easy to use tools for data analysis. The prime example of this is PowerPivot. The question that remains is always the same: having in a company more Power User will implicitly mean having different data models representing the same reality. But this would inevitably lead to anarchical data management... What do you think about that?

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