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• Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

  - by John Murphy

  Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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• How far is too far?

  - by David Dorf

  Previously I've talked about Safeway's personalized pricing as well as Target's use of analytics to learn about customers.  Then last week I read about Orbitz tailoring their hotel offers based on the browser used.  (Orbitz claims that Mac users are 40% more likely than PC users to book four- or five-star hotels.)  So just how far is too far when tailoring the retail experience? When most consumers read about these types of tactics, they tend to feel violated, as if someone was reading their personal diary.  Nobody wants to be tricked into buying things.  Walking into a grocery store and seeing crates of apples stacked high looks enticing, but the crates are just for display and the apples may be over a year old.  Even though its much cheaper to print markdown tags, many retailers manually write the price tags because consumers think they deal is better if the price is hand-written. The technology already exists to personalize prices and experiences for consumers.  People get upset thinking they paid more for something than a neighbor, but it already happens all the time with cars, flights, and the use of loyalty programs and coupons. There are many variables at play for any purchase.  They only difference is that the customer segments are getting smaller, sometimes reaching a size of one. There's two ways to look at this.  Retailers have always manipulated the environment to get consumers to buy more -- or -- Retailers are getting better at tuning the shopping experience for consumers.  I choose the latter, and so do most consumers by spending their money in the stores they like.  Consumers like to see fresh flowers at the entrance to the grocery store, and they like to see specials scrawled on chalkboards. The key is making sure that consumers benefit from the experience as well.  I'm willing to give up some personal information in exchange for discounts and more relevant marketing, and the next-generation of shoppers are even less concerned about privacy.  Retailers need to use all the tools available to differentiate their offers and connect with their customers. So if Orbitz wants to put three-star hotels at the top of the list for me because I'm using a PC, that's fine by me.

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution Summary Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest public utility company in the United States with over 1.6 million customers. LADWP provides water and power for millions of residential & commercial customers in Southern California. The goal of the project was to implement a newly designed web portal to increase customer self-service while reducing transactions via IVR and automate many of the paper based processes to web based workflows for their 1.6 million customers. LADWP implemented a Self Service Portal using Oracle WebCenter Portal & Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle SOA Suite for the integration of their complex back-end systems infrastructure. The new portal has received extremely positive feedback from not only the customers and users of the portal, but also other utilities. At Oracle OpenWorld 2012, LADWP won the prestigious WebCenter innovation award for their innovative solution. Company OverviewLos Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest public utility company in the United States with over 1.6 million customers. LADWP provides water and power for millions of residential & commercial customers in Southern California. LADWP also bills most of these customers for sanitation services provided by another department in the city of Los Angeles.  Business ChallengesThe goal of the project was to implement a newly designed web portal that is easy to navigate from a web browser and mobile devices, as well as be the platform for surfacing internet and intranet applications at LADWP. The primary objective of the new portal was to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR and walk-up and to automate many of the paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account (Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History, Usage analysis, Service Request Management) Financial Assistance Programs Customer Rebate Programs Turn Off/Turn On/Transfer of Services Outage Reporting eNotification (SMS, email) Solution DeployedLADWP implemented a Self Service Portal using Oracle WebCenter Portal & Oracle WebCenter Content. Using Oracle SOA Suite they integrated various back-end systems including Oracle Siebel CRM IBM Mainframe based CIS FILENET for document management EBP Eletronic Bill Payment System HP Imprint System for BillXML data Other systems including outage reporting systems, SMS service, etc. The new portal’s features include: Complete Graphical redesign based on best practices in UI Design for high usability Customer Self Service implemented through MyAccount (Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History, Usage Analysis, Service Request Management) Financial Assistance Programs (CRM, WebCenter) Customer Rebate Programs (CRM, WebCenter) Turn On/Off/Transfer of services (Commercial & Residential) Outage Reporting eNotification (SMS, email) Multilingual (English & Spanish) – using WebCenter multi-language support Section 508 (ADA) Compliant Search – Using WebCenter SES (Secured Enterprise Search) Distributed Authorship in WebCenter Content Mobile Access (any Mobile Browser) Business ResultsThe new portal has received extremely positive feedback from not only customers and users of the portal, but also other utilities. At Oracle OpenWorld 2012, LADWP won the prestigious WebCenter innovation award for their innovative solution. Additional Information LADWP OpenWorld presentation Oracle WebCenter Portal Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle SOA Suite

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• Tap into MySQL's Amazing Performance Results with the Performance Tuning Course

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  Want to leverage the high-speed load utilities, distinctive memory caches, full text indexes, and other performance-enhancing mechanisms that MySQL offers to fuel today's critical business systems. The authentic MySQL Performance Tuning course, in 4 days, teaches you to evaluate the MySQL architecture, learn to use the tools, configure the database for performance, tune application and SQL code, tune the server, examine the storage engines, assess the application architecture, and learn general tuning concepts. You can take this course in one the following three ways: Training-on-Demand: Access the streaming video, instructor delivery of this course from your own desk, at your own pace. Book time for hands-on practice when it suits you. Live-Virtual Class: Take this instructor-led class live from your own desk. With 700 events on the schedule you are sure to find a time and date to suit you! In-Class: Travel to a classroom to take this class. A sample of events on the schedule are as follows.  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Hamburg, Germany  22 October 2012  German  Prague, Czech Republic  1 October 2012  Czech  Warsaw, Poland  3 December 2012  Polish  London, England  19 November 2012  English  Rome, Italy  23 October 2012  Italian Lisbon, Portugal  6 November 2012  European Portugese  Aix en Provence, France  4 September 2012   French  Strasbourg, France 16 October 2012   French  Nieuwegein, Netherlands 26 November 2012   Dutch  Madrid, Spain 17 December 2012   Spanish  Mechelen, Belgium  1 October 2012  English  Riga, Latvia  10 December 2012  Latvian  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  10 September 2012 English   Edmonton, Canada 10 December 2012   English  Vancouver, Canada 10 December 2012   English  Ottawa, Canada 26 November 2012   English  Toronto, Canada 26 November 2012   English  Montreal, Canada 26 November 2012   English  Mexico City, Mexico 10 September 2012   Spanish  Sao Paolo, Brazil 26 November 2012  Brazilian Portugese   Tokyo, Japan 19 November 2012   Japanese  Tokyo, Japan  19 November 2012  Japanese For further information on this class, or to register your interest in additional events, go to the Oracle University Portal: http://oracle.com/education/mysql

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• A Slice of Raspberry Pi

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest editorial for the ITPro/SysAdmin newsletter The Raspberry Pi Foundation has done a superb design job on their new $35 network-enabled Linux computer. This tiny machine, incorporating an ARM processor on a Broadcom BCM2835 multimedia chip, aims to put the fun back into learning computing. The public response has been overwhelmingly positive.Note that aim: "…to put the fun back". Education in Information Technology is in dire straits. It always has been, but seems to have deteriorated further still, even in the face of improved provision of equipment.In many countries, the government controls the curriculum. It predicted a shortage in office-based IT skills, and so geared the ICT curriculum toward mind-numbing training in word-processing and spreadsheet skills. Instead, the shortage has turned out to be in people with an engineering-mindset, who can solve problems with whatever technologies are available and learn new techniques quickly, in a rapidly-changing field.In retrospect, the assumption that specific training was required rather than an education was an idiotic response to the arrival of mainstream information technology. As a result, ICT became a disaster area, which discouraged a generation of youngsters from a career in IT, and thereby led directly to the shortage of people with the skills that are required to exploit the potential of Information Technology..Raspberry Pi aims to reverse the trend. This is a rig that is geared to fast graphics in high resolution. It is no toy. It should be a superb games machine. However, the use of Fedora, Debian, or Arch Linux ARM shows the more serious educational intent behind the Foundation's work. It looks like it will even do some office work too!So, get hold of any power supply that provides a 5VDC source at the required 700mA; an old Blackberry charger will do or, alternatively, it will run off four AA cells. You'll need a USB hub to support the mouse and keyboard, and maybe a hard drive. You'll want a DVI monitor (with audio out) or TV (sound and video). You'll also need to be able to cope with wired Ethernet 10/100, if you want networking.With this lot assembled, stick the paraphernalia on the back of the HDTV with Blu Tack, get a nice keyboard, and you have a classy Linux-based home computer. The major cost is in the T.V and the keyboard. If you're not already writing software for this platform, then maybe, at a time when some countries are talking of orders in the millions, you should consider it.

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• Should I be an algorithm developer, or java web frameworks type developer?

  - by Derek

  So - as I see it, there are really two kinds of developers. Those that do frameworks, web services, pretty-making front ends, etc etc. Then there are developers that write the algorithms that solve the problem. That is, unless the problem is "display this raw data in some meaningful way." In that case, the framework/web developer guy might be doing both jobs. So my basic problem is this. I have been an algorithms kind of software developer for a few years now. I double majored in Math and Computer science, and I have a master's in systems engineering. I have never done any web-dev work, with the exception of a couple minor jobs, and some hobby level stuff. I have been job interviewing lately, and this is what happens: Job is listed as "programmer- 5 years of experience with the following: C/C++, Java,Perl, Ruby, ant, blah blah blah" Recruiter calls me, says they want me to come in for interview In the interview, find out they have some webservices development, blah blah blah When asked in the interview, talk about my experience doing algorithms, optimization, blah blah..but very willing to learn new languages, frameworks, etc Get a call back saying "we didn't think you were a fit for the job you interviewed wtih, but our algorithm team got wind of you and wants to bring you on" This has happened to me a couple times now - see a vague-ish job description looking for a "programmer" Go in, find out they are doing some sort of web-based tool, maybe with some hardcore algorithms running in the background. interview with people for the web-based tool, but get an offer from the algorithms people. So the question is - which job is the better job? I basically just want to get a wide berth of experience at this level of my career, but are algorithm developers so much in demand? Even more so than all these supposed hot in demand web developer guys? Will I be ok in the long run if I go into the niche of math based algorithm development, and just little to no, or hobby level web-dev experience? I basically just don't want to pigeon hole myself this early. My salary is already starting to get pretty high - and I can see a company later on saying "we really need a web developer, but we'll hire this 50k/year college guy, instead of this 100k/year experience algorithm guy" Cliffs notes: I have been doing algorithm development. I consider myself to be a "good programmer." I would have no problem picking up web technologies and those sorts of frameworks. During job interviews, I keep getting "we think you've got a good skillset - talk to our algorithm team" instead of wanting me to learn new skills on the job to do their web services or whhatever other new technology they are doing. Edit: Whenever I am talking about algorithm development here - I am talking about the code that produces the answer. Typically I think of more math-based algorithms: solving a financial problem, solving a finite element method, image processing, etc

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• What are the software design essentials? [closed]

  - by Craig Schwarze

  I've decided to create a 1 page "cheat sheet" of essential software design principles for my programmers. It doesn't explain the principles in any great depth, but is simply there as a reference and a reminder. Here's what I've come up with - I would welcome your comments. What have I left out? What have I explained poorly? What is there that shouldn't be? Basic Design Principles The Principle of Least Surprise – your solution should be obvious, predictable and consistent. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) - the simplest solution is usually the best one. You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI) - create a solution for the current problem rather than what might happen in the future. Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) - rigorously remove duplication from your design and code. Advanced Design Principles Program to an interface, not an implementation – Don’t declare variables to be of a particular concrete class. Rather, declare them to an interface, and instantiate them using a creational pattern. Favour composition over inheritance – Don’t overuse inheritance. In most cases, rich behaviour is best added by instantiating objects, rather than inheriting from classes. Strive for loosely coupled designs – Minimise the interdependencies between objects. They should be able to interact with minimal knowledge of each other via small, tightly defined interfaces. Principle of Least Knowledge – Also called the “Law of Demeter”, and is colloquially summarised as “Only talk to your friends”. Specifically, a method in an object should only invoke methods on the object itself, objects passed as a parameter to the method, any object the method creates, any components of the object. SOLID Design Principles Single Responsibility Principle – Each class should have one well defined purpose, and only one reason to change. This reduces the fragility of your code, and makes it much more maintainable. Open/Close Principle – A class should be open to extension, but closed to modification. In practice, this means extracting the code that is most likely to change to another class, and then injecting it as required via an appropriate pattern. Liskov Substitution Principle – Subtypes must be substitutable for their base types. Essentially, get your inheritance right. In the classic example, type square should not inherit from type rectangle, as they have different properties (you can independently set the sides of a rectangle). Instead, both should inherit from type shape. Interface Segregation Principle – Clients should not be forced to depend upon methods they do not use. Don’t have fat interfaces, rather split them up into smaller, behaviour centric interfaces. Dependency Inversion Principle – There are two parts to this principle: High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions. Abstractions should not depend on details. Details should depend on abstractions. In modern development, this is often handled by an IoC (Inversion of Control) container.

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• A big flat text file or a HTML site for language documentation?

  - by Bad Sector

  A project of mine is a small embeddable Tcl-like scripting language, LIL. While i'm mostly making it for my own use, i think it is interesting enough for others to use, so i want it to have a nice (but not very "wordy") documentation. So far i'm using a single flat readme.txt file. It explains the language's syntax, features, standard functions, how to use the C API, etc. Also it is easy to scan and read in almost every environment out there, from basic text-only terminals to full-fledged high-end graphical desktop environments. However, while i tried to keep things nicely formatted (as much as this is possible in plain text), i still think that being a big (and growing) wall of text, it isn't as easy on the eyes as it could be. Also i feel that sometimes i'm not writing as much as i want in order to avoid expanding the text too much. So i thought i could use another project of mine, QuHelp, which is basically a help site generator for sites like this one with a sidebar that provides a tree of topics/subtopics and offline full text search. With this i can use HTML to format the documentation and if i use QuHelp for some other project that uses LIL, i can import LIL's documentation as part of the other project's documentation. However converting the existing documentation to QuHelp/HTML isn't a small task, especially when it comes to functions (i'll need to put more detail on them than what currently exists in the readme.txt file). Also it loses the wide range of availability that it currently has (even if QuHelp's generated code degrades gracefully down to console-only web browsers, plain text is readable from everywhere, including from popular editors such as Vim and Emacs - i had someone once telling me that he likes LIL's documentation because it is readable without leaving his editor). So, my question is simply this: should i keep the documentation as it is now in the form of a single readme.txt file or should i convert it to something like the site i mentioned above? There is also the option to do both, but i'm not sure if i'll be able to always keep them in sync or if it is worth the effort. After asking around in IRC i've got mixed answers: some liked the wide availability of the single text file, others said that it is looks as bad as a man page (personally i don't mind that - i can read man pages just fine - but other people might have issues reading them). What do you think?

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Big Data

  - by Clint Edmonson

  As the name implies, what we’re talking about here is the explosion of electronic data that comes from huge volumes of transactions, devices, and sensors being captured by businesses today. This data often comes in unstructured formats and/or too fast for us to effectively process in real time. Collectively, we call these the 4 big data V’s: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Variability. These qualities make this type of data best managed by NoSQL systems like Hadoop, rather than by conventional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). We know that there are patterns hidden inside this data that might provide competitive insight into market trends.  The key is knowing when and how to leverage these “No SQL” tools combined with traditional business such as SQL-based relational databases and warehouses and other business intelligence tools. Drivers Petabyte scale data collection and storage Business intelligence and insight Solution The sketch below shows one of many big data solutions using Hadoop’s unique highly scalable storage and parallel processing capabilities combined with Microsoft Office’s Business Intelligence Components to access the data in the cluster. Ingredients Hadoop – this big data industry heavyweight provides both large scale data storage infrastructure and a highly parallelized map-reduce processing engine to crunch through the data efficiently. Here are the key pieces of the environment: Pig - a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. Mahout - a machine learning library with algorithms for clustering, classification and batch based collaborative filtering that are implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm. Hive - data warehouse software built on top of Apache Hadoop that facilitates querying and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage. Directly accessible to Microsoft Office and other consumers via add-ins and the Hive ODBC data driver. Pegasus - a Peta-scale graph mining system that runs in parallel, distributed manner on top of Hadoop and that provides algorithms for important graph mining tasks such as Degree, PageRank, Random Walk with Restart (RWR), Radius, and Connected Components. Sqoop - a tool designed for efficiently transferring bulk data between Apache Hadoop and structured data stores such as relational databases. Flume - a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large log data amounts to HDFS. Database – directly accessible to Hadoop via the Sqoop based Microsoft SQL Server Connector for Apache Hadoop, data can be efficiently transferred to traditional relational data stores for replication, reporting, or other needs. Reporting – provides easily consumable reporting when combined with a database being fed from the Hadoop environment. Training These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. Hadoop Learning Resources (20+ tutorials and labs) Huge collection of resources for learning about all aspects of Apache Hadoop-based development on Windows Azure and the Hadoop and Windows Azure Ecosystems SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Friday Fun: Snowball

  - by Asian Angel

  It is Christmas Eve and hopefully you are enjoying the start of an early weekend away from work. This week we have a snowball throwing game for you to try out, so bundle up and get ready to let those snowballs fly! Snowball The object of the game is to use your snowball ammo to harass the drunk businessman and send him flying along distance-wise as far as you can. Simply use your mouse to aim and click the left button to throw snowballs. You can monitor your stats on the silver bar towards the top of the window. The sound can also be disabled if the music is bothering you, but keep in mind that all sound will be disabled if you use the option. Time to get those snowballs flying through the air!! Keep hitting the businessman with your snowballs as you chase after him. Make certain that your aim is good or you will quickly run out of snowballs! You can really get him moving along at a good rate and he can even go high enough in the air to disappear off the screen for a few moments. There is a also chance that your aim will be so wicked with the snowballs that you will literally knock the drunk businessman’s head off! Weird but possible… The game ends when one of these two events occur: 1.) you run out of snowballs or 2.) the businessman literally bounces back at and then drops behind you as seen in the screenshot here. The moment either happens your score will pop up and then you have the opportunity to try again. Have fun! Note: The bounce back event can happen when encountering cars. Play Snowball Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video] Sunset in a Tropical Paradise Wallpaper Natural Wood Grain Icons for Your Desktop and App Launcher Docks My Blackberry Is Not Working! The Apple Too?! [Funny Video] Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster

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• Windows Desktop Virtualization Gets Easier

  - by andrewbrust

  This past Thursday, Microsoft announced that Windows (7) Virtual PC (WVPC) and its XP Mode feature would no longer require hardware assisted virtualization (HAV).  That means any PC running Windows 7 Pro, or higher, can now run this software.  And that’s a great thing because, as I noted in a post almost five month ago, determining whether a given PC you might be planning to buy actually offers HAV can be extremely difficult.  That meant even dedicated, sophisticated PC users, with a budget for new hardware, might be blocked from using this technology.  And that was just plain silly. One of the features offered by WVPC, and utilized heavily by XP Mode, is the concept of virtual applications: apps within a guest VM that can actually run within the host’s desktop environment.  I find this feature so powerful that my February Redmond Review column entertained the notion of a future version of Windows that runs all applications in this manner. The elimination of the HAV requirement for XP Mode and WVPC was just one of many virtualization-related announcements Microsoft made on Thursday.  And, interestingly, most of the others were also desktop-related, rather than server-related.  This is a welcome change from the multi-year period in which Microsoft enhanced its server virtualization lineup (in Hyper-V) and let the desktop platform fester.  Microsoft now seems to understand desktop virtualization is in high-demand and strengthens the Windows franchise.  As I explained in the column, even cloud computing can have a desktop spin if desktop virtualization is part of the equation. One company that knows this well is Citrix, and a closer alliance between Microsoft and Citrix was one of the many announcements from Thursday.  In fact, there’s a whole Web site dedicated to the alliance at http://www.citrixandmicrosoft.com/. I’d love to see virtual applications and entire virtual desktops offered as Azure-branded services.  This could allow me to run, for example, the full Office client on a variety of desktops I might use, and for large organizations it could easily reduce the expense, burden and duration of the deployment cycle for new versions of Office.  Business Intelligence providers, including my own firm, twentysix New York, would find great relief in enabling their customers to run the newest version of Excel, with the latest BI capabilities, instead of having to wait the requisite two to three years it takes for many Fortune 500 customers to upgrade. Microsoft should do more, and faster.  WVPC still does not support 64-bit guest images, even on 64-bit hosts.  That needs to be fixed.  File access from the guest to the host needs to be improved (right now, it’s done through Terminal Services/Remote Desktop file sharing, and it’s slow) and VM load times need to be significantly reduced before virtualized apps can become the norm.  (I suppose the advance of solid state drive technology will help there.) I do think these improvements will come, because Microsoft is focused on the virtual desktop now.  And that’s a smart focus to have.

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• Removing hard-coded values and defensive design vs YAGNI

  - by Ben Scott

  First a bit of background. I'm coding a lookup from Age - Rate. There are 7 age brackets so the lookup table is 3 columns (From|To|Rate) with 7 rows. The values rarely change - they are legislated rates (first and third columns) that have stayed the same for 3 years. I figured that the easiest way to store this table without hard-coding it is in the database in a global configuration table, as a single text value containing a CSV (so "65,69,0.05,70,74,0.06" is how the 65-69 and 70-74 tiers would be stored). Relatively easy to parse then use. Then I realised that to implement this I would have to create a new table, a repository to wrap around it, data layer tests for the repo, unit tests around the code that unflattens the CSV into the table, and tests around the lookup itself. The only benefit of all this work is avoiding hard-coding the lookup table. When talking to the users (who currently use the lookup table directly - by looking at a hard copy) the opinion is pretty much that "the rates never change." Obviously that isn't actually correct - the rates were only created three years ago and in the past things that "never change" have had a habit of changing - so for me to defensively program this I definitely shouldn't store the lookup table in the application. Except when I think YAGNI. The feature I am implementing doesn't specify that the rates will change. If the rates do change, they will still change so rarely that maintenance isn't even a consideration, and the feature isn't actually critical enough that anything would be affected if there was a delay between the rate change and the updated application. I've pretty much decided that nothing of value will be lost if I hard-code the lookup, and I'm not too concerned about my approach to this particular feature. My question is, as a professional have I properly justified that decision? Hard-coding values is bad design, but going to the trouble of removing the values from the application seems to violate the YAGNI principle. EDIT To clarify the question, I'm not concerned about the actual implementation. I'm concerned that I can either do a quick, bad thing, and justify it by saying YAGNI, or I can take a more defensive, high-effort approach, that even in the best case ultimately has low benefits. As a professional programmer does my decision to implement a design that I know is flawed simply come down to a cost/benefit analysis?

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• New hidden parameters in Oracle 11.2

  - by Mike Dietrich

  We really welcome every external review of our slides. And also recommendations from customers visiting our workshops. So it happened to me more than a week ago that Marco Patzwahl, the owner of MuniqSoft GmbH, had a very lengthy train ride in Germany (as the engine drivers go on strike this week it could have become even worse) and nothing better to do then reviewing our slide set. And he had plenty of recommendations. Besides that he pointed us to something at least I was not aware of and added it to the slides: In patch set 11.2.0.2 a new behaviour for datafile write errors has been implemented. With this release ANY write error to a datafile will cause the instance to abort. Before 11.2.0.2 those errors usually led to an offline datafile if the database operates in archivelog mode (your production database do, don’t they?!) and the datafile does not belong to the SYSTEM tablespace. Internal discussion found this behaviour not up-to-date and alligned with RAC systems and modern storages. Therefore it has been changed and a new underscore parameter got introduced. _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE=TRUE This is the default setting´and the new behaviour beginning with Oracle 11.2.0.2 If you would like to revert to the pre-11.2.0.2 behaviour you’ll have to set in your init.ora/spfile this parameter to false. But keep in mind that there’s a reason why this has been changed. You’ll find more info in MOS Note: 7691270.8 and this topic in the current version of the slides on slide 255. Thanks to Marco for the review!!   And then I received an email from Kurt Van Meerbeeck today. Kurt is pretty well known in the Oracle community. And he’s the owner of jDUL/DUDE, a database unloading tool which bypasses the Oracle database engine and access data direclty from the blocks. Kurt visited the upgrade workshop two weeks ago in Belgium and did highlight to me that since Oracle 11.2.0.1 even though you haven’t set neither SGA_TARGET nor MEMORY_TARGET the database might still do resize operations. Reason why this behaviour has been changed: Prevention of ORA-4031 errors. But on databases with extremly high loads this can cause trouble. Further information can be found in MOS Note:1269139.1 . And the parameter set to TRUE by default is called _MEMORY_IMM_MODE_WITHOUT_AUTOSGA=TRUE This can be found now in the slide set as well on slide number 240. And thanks to Kurt for this information!!

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• Interview with Koen Aben, Supply Chain Director of WE Fashion

  - by user801960

  We recently spoke to Koen Aben, the Supply Chain Director of WE Fashion, who gave us some insight into how Oracle supported the international fashion retailer through the completion of a large scale integration project across its 340 European stores. Koen explains the reasoning behind the project which was to create a common retail foundation and to integrate and align working processes to drive insight and enable continued growth. It is always good to hear from someone of Koen’s experience who can articulate the benefits of partnering with the right company for such an extensive project as this. Koen explains that a crucial element of such a project is to unify business applications into a common platform, adding that for successful growth, retailers really need to achieve enterprise-wide alignment. At the start of the three year project, WE Fashion’s application platform was fragmented impacting the company’s ability to support sustained growth. In light of this, WE Fashion invested in its processes, systems, teams and partnerships to build the needed retail foundation. Now after successfully completing the project, the basis is in place to ensure that growth is unimpeded. In the video, Koen Aben highlights some of the factors necessary for the success of the project as: Having an understanding that the process of creating a growth platform for a company is a long journey Accepting that during a lengthy project such as this, there will be high and low points experienced within the project team and the business, but that the relationship with your partners is crucial to the success of the project. Having the correct team in place will prove to be the “lynch –pin” of any successful project Oracle supported Koen and his team in implementing this project, and is recognised for the role it played during this development in partnership with the company. On his experience with working with the Oracle team, Koen points out that in the critical situations, Oracle was there to ensure that the right people were in place whenever needed and this was key to ensuring the project’s success. Since Oracle is one of the few providers that can offer an enterprise-wide retail platform, our best practice approach is key to connecting interactions throughout the business to enable insight and optimise operations. This is a great example of a large scale international retail project, where the true success of its completion is reflected in how proud the company is about what has been achieved, and the fact that results are already being seen.

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• Brightness Crash and Fan issues in 12.04.1

  - by S.A. McIntosh

  I would just like to state beforehand that I am a total novice in using Ubuntu when it comes to the more complex issues. So I thought it would be best to finally come here and ask for help before being re-directed or closed out for a solution. I have already looked high and low on this board for one but nothing came up for my particular case, so I might as well take a shot asking for the first time here. This is what I have at the moment: -Dell Insprion 1764 w/ 64-bit Intel i5 Core -Dual Boot: Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04.1 32-bit (from 12.04 install) -Unity shell -Linux kernel: 3.2.0-32 generic-pae ...and this is my fglrxinfo: OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series OpenGL version string: 4.2.11627 Compatibility Profile Context The one issue I have with using Ubuntu is brightness. With the driver in every time I use the slider in the brightness and lock settings or use the keyboard function, it freezes, goes black and comes up with a scrambled colors page like this in the video. So I have looked all over this board and the web for answers looking for a solution that might have an answer. This is what I have done so far to fix this: -First Solution: Looking around, I found this small fix using terminal: sudo gedit /etc/rc.local followed by adding this into "rc.local" echo # > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness This works rarely with the graphics driver still in and I often get lucky say during restart but reboot would only snap back the brightness at max. -Second Solution Simply remove the graphics driver while leaving the solution of first behind. This solves the issue but results in having the monitor flicker and flash at startup which in itself is not a problem to me but maybe not so good for monitor health. Also it causes the fan to speed up throughout the session and render any program that needs the driver useless. -Third Solution This is the most obvious. Just simply use the brightness on AMD Catalyst Control Center software that came with the driver, and I can say that it's form of brightness is HORRIBLE compared to the actual settings. Which leads up to where I am now, back to the driver to stop the fan speed-up and seems that the only solution to the brightness crash is to use the keyboard-controlled brightness at the login screen NOT the desktop if I want the issued effect but will just snap at max bright again if I restart. Fan speed problem is dealt with but now run the risk of crashing my computer if I so much touch the brightness settings. Speaking of which I found this on launchpad and it seems that the issue has been going far since June of 2012. Any help, redirect link or reference would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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• Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Next Meeting July 21, 2011

  - by csoto

  Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET (note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm) Where: Oracle Office, 475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map We will be providing snacks and beverages. Register! - Registration is required for building security. Presentation Line Up:? 5:10pm - Batch Processing Using Coherence in Oracle Group Policy Administration - Paul Cleary, Oracle Oracle Insurance Policy Administration (OIPA) is a flexible, rules-based policy administration solution that provides full record keeping for all policy lifecycle transactions. One component of OIPA is Cycle processing, which is the batch processing of pending insurance transactions. This presentation introduces OIPA and Cycle processing, describing the unique challenges of processing a high volume of transactions within strict time windows. It then reviews how OIPA uses Oracle Coherence and the Processing Pattern to meet these challenges, describing implementation specifics that highlight the simplicity and robustness of the Processing Pattern. 6:10pm - Secure, Optimize, and Load Balance Coherence with F5 - Chris Akker, F5 F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. Recently, F5 and Oracle partnered to deliver a novel solution that integrates Oracle Coherence 3.7 with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). This session will introduce F5 and how you can leverage BIG-IP LTM to secure, optimize, and load balance application traffic generated from Coherence*Extend clients across any number of servers in a cluster and to hardware-accelerate CPU-intensive SSL encryption. 7:10pm - Using Oracle Coherence to Enable Database Partitioning and DC Level Fault Tolerance - Alexei Ragozin, Independent Consultant and Brian Oliver, Oracle Partitioning is a very powerful technique for scaling database centric applications. One tricky part of partitioned architecture is routing of requests to the right database. The routing layer (routing table) should know the right database instance for each attribute which may be used for routing (e.g. account id, login, email, etc): it should be fast, it should fault tolerant and it should scale. All the above makes Oracle Coherence a natural choice for implementing such routing tables in partitioned architectures. This presentation will cover synchronization of the grid with multiple databases, conflict resolution, cross cluster replication and other aspects related to implementing robust partitioned architecture. Additional Info:?? - Download Past Presentations: The presentations from the previous meetings of the BACSIG are available for download here. Click on the presentation titles to download the PDF files. - Join the Coherence online community on our Oracle Coherence Users Group on LinkedIn. - Contact BACSIG with any comments, questions, presentation proposals and content suggestions.

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• June IOUG events

  - by Mandy Ho

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events: June 11-12, 2012 – Broomfield, CO 2-Day Seminar- “ High Performance PL/SQL & Oracle Database 11g New Features” Steven Feuerstein, generally considered the world’s leading PL/SQL expert, will be presenting his all-new, 2-day, “Higher Performance PL/SQL and Oracle 11g PL/SQL New Features” seminar on June 11 & 12 at Level 3 Communications in Broomfield, Colorado.  This will be Steven’s first Denver seminar in almost 4  years.  Who knows when he will offer another? http://www.rmoug.org/ June 14, 2012 – Ottawa, Ontario Pythian’s Gwen Shapira puts on 3 great presentations focused on NoSQL, making OLTP run fast and Big Data. http://www.oug-ottawa.org/pls/htmldb/f?p=327:27:1317735724699447::NO June 21, 2012 – Calgary, Alberta Big Data and Extreme Analytics Summit http://coug.ab.ca/ June 22, 2012 – Westborough, MA 10 Things You Probably Did Not Know? With Tom Kyte PL/SQL turns 23 years old this year. It was first introduced in 1988 with Oracle6 Database. This session looks at five technical things about PL/SQL you probably did not know: under-the-covers features that make PL/SQL quite simply the most efficient language with which to process data in the database. http://noug.com/  June 28/29, 2012 – Plano, Texas Jonathan Lewis Oracle Performance Seminars The DOUG (DALLAS ORACLE USERS GROUP) has invited SpeakTech to return to Dallas, and they’re bringing Jonathan Lewis! Topics are Beating the Oracle Optimizer – June 28, 2012, Trouble Shooting & Tuning – June 29, 2012 http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3082448687

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• Devoxx 2011: Java EE 6 Hands-on Lab Delivered

  - by arungupta

  I, along with Alexis's help, delivered a Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 40+ attendees at Devoxx 2011. The lab was derived from the OTN Developer Days 2012 version but added lot more content to showcase several Java EE 6 technologies. The problem statement from the lab document states: This hands-on lab builds a typical 3-tier Java EE 6 Web application that retrieves customer information from a database and displays it in a Web page. The application also allows new customers to be added to the database as well. The string-based and type-safe queries are used to query and add rows to the database. Each row in the database table is published as a RESTful resource and is then accessed programmatically. Typical design patterns required by a Web application like validation, caching, observer, partial page rendering, and cross-cutting concerns like logging are explained and implemented using different Java EE 6 technologies. The lab covered Java Persistence API 2, Servlet 3, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, JavaServer Faces 2, Java API for RESTful Web Services 1.1, Contexts and Dependency Injection 1.0, and Bean Validation 1.0 over 47 pages of detailed self-paced instructions. Here is the complete Table of Contents: The lab can be downloaded from here and requires only NetBeans IDE "All" or "Java EE" version, which includes GlassFish anyway. All the feedback received from the lab has been incorporated in the instructions and bugs filed (Updated 49559, 205232, 205248, 205256). 80% of the attendees could easily complete the lab and some even completed in much less than 3 hours. That indicates that either more content needs to be added to the lab or the intellectual level of the attendees at the conference was pretty high. I think the lab has enough content for 3 hours but we moved at a much more faster pace so I conclude on the latter. Truly a joy to conduct a lab to 40 Devoxxians! Another related lab that might be handy for folks is "Develop, Deploy, and Monitor your Java EE 6 applications using GlassFish 3.1 Cluster". It explains how: Create a 2-instance GlassFish cluster Front-end with a Web server and a load balancer Demonstrate session replication and fail over Monitor the application using JavaScript The complete lab instructions and source code are available and you can try them. I plan to continue evolving the contents for the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to cover more technologies and features and will announce them on this blog. Let me know on what else would you like to see in the future versions.

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• Devoxx 2011: Java EE 6 Hands-on Lab Delivered

  - by arungupta

  I, along with Alexis's help, delivered a Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 40+ attendees at Devoxx 2011. The lab was derived from the OTN Developer Days 2012 version but added lot more content to showcase several Java EE 6 technologies. The problem statement from the lab document states: This hands-on lab builds a typical 3-tier Java EE 6 Web application that retrieves customer information from a database and displays it in a Web page. The application also allows new customers to be added to the database as well. The string-based and type-safe queries are used to query and add rows to the database. Each row in the database table is published as a RESTful resource and is then accessed programmatically. Typical design patterns required by a Web application like validation, caching, observer, partial page rendering, and cross-cutting concerns like logging are explained and implemented using different Java EE 6 technologies. The lab covered Java Persistence API 2, Servlet 3, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, JavaServer Faces 2, Java API for RESTful Web Services 1.1, Contexts and Dependency Injection 1.0, and Bean Validation 1.0 over 47 pages of detailed self-paced instructions. Here is the complete Table of Contents: The lab can be downloaded from here and requires only NetBeans IDE "All" or "Java EE" version, which includes GlassFish anyway. All the feedback received from the lab has been incorporated in the instructions and bugs filed (Updated 49559, 205232, 205248, 205256). 80% of the attendees could easily complete the lab and some even completed in much less than 3 hours. That indicates that either more content needs to be added to the lab or the intellectual level of the attendees at the conference was pretty high. I think the lab has enough content for 3 hours but we moved at a much more faster pace so I conclude on the latter. Truly a joy to conduct a lab to 40 Devoxxians! Another related lab that might be handy for folks is "Develop, Deploy, and Monitor your Java EE 6 applications using GlassFish 3.1 Cluster". It explains how: Create a 2-instance GlassFish cluster Front-end with a Web server and a load balancer Demonstrate session replication and fail over Monitor the application using JavaScript The complete lab instructions and source code are available and you can try them. I plan to continue evolving the contents for the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to cover more technologies and features and will announce them on this blog. Let me know on what else would you like to see in the future versions.

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• Does Your Customer Engagement Create an Ah Feeling?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  An (Oracle CX Blog) article by Christina McKeon Companies that successfully engage customers all have one thing in common. They make it seem easy for the customer to get what they need. No one would argue that brands don’t want to leave customers with this “ah” feeling. Since 94% of customers who have a low-effort service experience will buy from that company again, it makes financial sense for brands.1 Some brands are thinking differently about how they engage their customers to create ah feelings. How do they do it? Toyota is a great example of using smart assistance technology to understand customer intent and answer questions before customers hit the submit button online. What is unique in this situation is that Toyota captures intent while customers are filling out email forms. Toyota analyzes the data in the form and suggests responses before the customer sends the email. The customer gets the right answer, and the email never makes it to your contact center — which makes you and the customer happy. Most brands are fully aware of chat as a service channel, but some brands take chat to a whole new level. Beauty.com, part of the drugstore.com and Walgreens family of brands, uses live chat to replicate the personal experience that one would find at high-end department store cosmetic counters. Trained beauty advisors, all with esthetician or beauty counter experience, engage in live chat sessions with online shoppers to share immediate advice on the best products for their personal needs. Agents can watch customer activity online and determine the right time to reach out and offer help, just as help would be offered in a brick-and-mortar store. And, agents can co-browse along with the customer helping customers with online check-out. These personal chat discussions also give Beauty.com the opportunity to present products, advertise promotions, and resolve customer issues when they arise. Beauty.com converts approximately 25% of chat sessions into product orders. Photobox, the European market leader in online photo services, wanted to deliver personal and responsive service to its 24 million members. It ensures customer inquiries on personalized photo products are routed based on agent knowledge so customers get what they need from the company experts. By using a queuing system to ensure that the agent with the most appropriate knowledge handles the query, agent productivity increased while response times to 1,500 customer queries per day decreased. A real-time dashboard prevents agents from being overloaded with queries. This approach has produced financial results with a 15% increase in sales to existing customers and a 45% increase in orders from newly referred customers.

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• Unit testing in Django

  - by acjohnson55

  I'm really struggling to write effective unit tests for a large Django project. I have reasonably good test coverage, but I've come to realize that the tests I've been writing are definitely integration/acceptance tests, not unit tests at all, and I have critical portions of my application that are not being tested effectively. I want to fix this ASAP. Here's my problem. My schema is deeply relational, and heavily time-oriented, giving my model object high internal coupling and lots of state. Many of my model methods query based on time intervals, and I've got a lot of auto_now_add going on in timestamped fields. So take a method that looks like this for example: def summary(self, startTime=None, endTime=None): # ... logic to assign a proper start and end time # if none was provided, probably using datetime.now() objects = self.related_model_set.manager_method.filter(...) return sum(object.key_method(startTime, endTime) for object in objects) How does one approach testing something like this? Here's where I am so far. It occurs to me that the unit testing objective should be given some mocked behavior by key_method on its arguments, is summary correctly filtering/aggregating to produce a correct result? Mocking datetime.now() is straightforward enough, but how can I mock out the rest of the behavior? I could use fixtures, but I've heard pros and cons of using fixtures for building my data (poor maintainability being a con that hits home for me). I could also setup my data through the ORM, but that can be limiting, because then I have to create related objects as well. And the ORM doesn't let you mess with auto_now_add fields manually. Mocking the ORM is another option, but not only is it tricky to mock deeply nested ORM methods, but the logic in the ORM code gets mocked out of the test, and mocking seems to make the test really dependent on the internals and dependencies of the function-under-test. The toughest nuts to crack seem to be the functions like this, that sit on a few layers of models and lower-level functions and are very dependent on the time, even though these functions may not be super complicated. My overall problem is that no matter how I seem to slice it, my tests are looking way more complex than the functions they are testing.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 8, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Webcast: Meeting Customer Expectations in the New Age of Retail Keep your eye on this live webcast as Sanjeev Sharma (Principal Product Director, Oracle Exalogic), Kelly Goetsch (Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Commerce), and Dan Conway (Senior Product Manager, Oracle Retail) offer real-world examples of business value derived by running customer-facing applications on Oracle Engineered Systems. Live, Thursday Nov 8, 10am PT/ 1pm ET. Solving Big Problems in Our 21st Century Information Society | Irving Wladawsky-Berger "I believe that the kind of extensive collaboration between the private sector, academia and government represented by the Internet revolution will be the way we will generally tackle big problems in the 21st century. Just as with the Internet, governments have a major role to play as the catalyst for many of the big projects that the private sector will then take forward and exploit. The need for high bandwidth, robust national broadband infrastructures is but one such example." — Irving Wladawsky-Berger SOA Still Not Dead: Ratification of Governance Standard Highlights SOA’s Continued Relevance So just about the time I dig into Google Trends to learn that the conversation about governance peaked in 2004, along comes all this InfoQ article by Richard Seroter. And of course you've already listened to the OTN Archbeat Podcast about governance, right? Right? Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for Oracle E-Business Suite Users | Steven Chan The short version is: "Nothing will change for EBS users after February 2013." According to Steven Chan, "EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6." You'll find additional information on Steven's blog. ADF Mobile Custom Javascript – iFrame Injection | John Brunswick The ADF Mobile Framework provides a range of out of the box components to add within your AMX pages, according to John Brunswick. But what happens when "an out of the box component does not directly fulfill your development need? What options are available to extend your application interface?" John has an answer. How Data and BPM are married to get the right information to the right people at the right time | Leon Smiers "Business Process Management…supports a large group of stakeholders within an organization, all with different needs," says Oracle ACE Leon Smiers. "End-to-end processes typically run across departments, stakeholders and applications, and can often have a long life-span. So how do organizations provide all stakeholders with the information they need?" Leon provides answers in this post. Thought for the Day "(When) asking skilled architects…what they do when confronted with highly complex problems…(they) would most likely answer, 'Just use Common Sense.' (A) better expression than 'common sense' is 'contextual sense' — a knowledge of what is reasonable within a given content. Practicing architects through eduction, experience and examples accumulate a considerable body of contextual sense by the time they're entrusted with solving a system-level problem…" — Eberhardt Rechtin (January 16, 1926 – April 14, 2006) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Oracle at ASMC PDI 2012

  - by jeffrey.waterman

  Recently, I had the pleasure of representing Oracle at the American Society of Military Comptrollers National Professional Development Institute (PDI).  The PDI is the premier training event for resource managers in the Department of Defense and US Coast Guard.  Each year they assemble top presenters and key note speakers to convey their experiences and share the upcoming goals and vision for the Defense Department's financial and resource management community.  This year, the common themes were centered around 'auditability' and 'efficiency'.   What is auditability?  There were many definitions/themes tossed around, but to summarize my notes, it boiled down to:- the proper tracking of funds- audit readiness- proper controls- proper documentation There were sessions regarding entire programs focused on the need for auditability.  For example, FIAR: Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (http://comptroller.defense.gov/fiar/index.html)   The FIAR stresses the "...improve(ment of) the Department's financial processes, controls and information." The entire conference, one set of solutions kept popping into my head around, "how can Oracle's solutions assist the Department of Defense", or any other Federal Agency, improve their financial processes and controls?   One answer came to mind:  Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management. Commonly referred to as "GRC". Let me summarize the main components around Oracle's GRC solution: GRC Manager: This solution is the central repository for documenting business processes, policies, and established controls.  All identified risks and issues are documented within the repository as well as action plans necessary for mitigation. GRC Controls:  This solution consists of a set of tools which are embedded with your ERP (financial, human resource, supply chain, etc.) applications to detect, prevent, and/or enforce the policies and procedures established by your Agency.  Components of the solution include:- Application Access Control Governor: a robust tool for managing application roles and responsibilities; simplify segregation of duty maintenance- Configuration Controls Governor: complete audit trail for changes made to configurations- Transactions Control Governor: track violations of internal controls; alert management to suspicious activities; be warned when high dollar transactions are occurring on an irregular basis; - Preventative Controls Governor: prevent sensitive information from being viewed by unauthorized parties; enforce field, block, and form change control If you are in the financial or resource management community and are concerned about auditability within your organization I suggest you follow up this post by reading about Oracle's GRC solutions.  www.oracle.com/grc Please feel free to follow up with thought and questions in the comments section below.  Also, if you have a topic you would like addressed in this blog, just drop me a note at [email protected]  or leave the suggestion in the comment section as well. Thank you for reading.

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• asus n550jv audio problem: no sound from notebook' speakers

  - by skywalker

  Ubuntu 13.10. The problem is: the internal speakers don't work. I have no problem when I'm using the headphones. There is no hardware issue since in windows 8 everything works perfectly(external subwoofer included). I'm trying to modify /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf but I can't find the correct model to put into: options snd-hda-intel model= The file HD-Audio-Models.txt doesn't contain the model for ALC668. Some info: :~sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC668 Analog [ALC668 Analog] Subdevices: 0/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 :~$ sudo lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 2010 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 52 Memory at f7a14000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [60] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit- Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00 Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel -- 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 11cd Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 53 Memory at f7a10000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [60] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel PS info :~$ amixer -c 0 Simple mixer control 'IEC958',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [on] Simple mixer control 'IEC958',1 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [on] Simple mixer control 'IEC958',2 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [on] :~$ pacmd dump-volumes Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. Sink 0: reference = 0: 76% 1: 76%, real = 0: 76% 1: 76%, soft = 0: 100% 1: 100%, current_hw = 0: 76% 1: 76%, save = yes Input 8: volume = 0: 100% 1: 100%, reference_ratio = 0: 100% 1: 100%, real_ratio = 0: 100% 1: 100%, soft = 0: 100% 1: 100%, volume_factor = 0: 100% 1: 100%, volume_factor_sink = 0: 100% 1: 100%, save = no Source 0: reference = 0: 100% 1: 100%, real = 0: 100% 1: 100%, soft = 0: 100% 1: 100%, current_hw = 0: 100% 1: 100%, save = no Source 1: reference = 0: 16% 1: 16%, real = 0: 16% 1: 16%, soft = 0: 100% 1: 100%, current_hw = 0: 16% 1: 16%, save = yes

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• Time passage arithmetic explanation

  - by Cyber Axe

  I ported this from http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5 some time ago. However i'm now wanting to modify it for the purpose of changing it from floating point to fixed point maths for enhanced efficiency (for those who are going to talk about premature optimization and what not, i want to have my entire engine in fixed point both as a learning process for me and so i can port code more easily to systems in the future that dont have native floating points such as arm cpus) My initial conversion to fixed points just resulted in the cycling stuck on either the first or last frame of cycling. Plus it would be nice to understand better how it works so i can add more options and so forth in the future, my maths however sucks and the comments are limited so i don't really know how the maths work for determining the frame it shoud use (cycleAmount) I was also a beginner when i ported it as i had no idea between floating points and integers and what not. So in summary my question is, can anyone give an explination of the arithmatic used for determining the cycleAmount (which determings the "frame" of the cycle) This is the working floating point maths version of the code: public final void cycle(Colour[] sourceColours, double timeNow, double speedAdjust) { // Cycle all animated colour ranges in palette based on timestamp. sourceColours = sourceColours.clone(); int cycleSize; double cycleRate; double cycleAmount; Cycle cycle; for (int i = 0, len = cycles.length; i < len; ++i) { cycle = cycles[i]; cycleSize = (cycle.HIGH - cycle.LOW) + 1; cycleRate = cycle.RATE / (int) (CYCLE_SPEED / speedAdjust); cycleAmount = 0; if (cycle.REVERSE < 3) { // Standard Cycle cycleAmount = DFLOAT_MOD((timeNow / (1000 / cycleRate)), cycleSize); if (cycle.REVERSE < 1) { cycleAmount = cycleSize - cycleAmount; // If below 1 make sure its not reversed. } } else if (cycle.REVERSE == 3) { // Ping-Pong cycleAmount = DFLOAT_MOD((timeNow / (1000 / cycleRate)), cycleSize << 1); if (cycleAmount >= cycleSize) { cycleAmount = (cycleSize * 2) - cycleAmount; } } else if (cycle.REVERSE < 6) { // Sine Wave cycleAmount = DFLOAT_MOD((timeNow / (1000 / cycleRate)), cycleSize); cycleAmount = Math.sin((cycleAmount * 3.1415926 * 2) / cycleSize) + 1; if (cycle.REVERSE == 4) { cycleAmount *= (cycleSize / 4); } else if (cycle.REVERSE == 5) { cycleAmount *= (cycleSize >> 1); } } if (cycle.REVERSE == 2) { reverseColours(sourceColours, cycle); } if (USE_BLEND_SHIFT) { blendShiftColours(sourceColours, cycle, cycleAmount); } else { shiftColours(sourceColours, cycle, cycleAmount); } if (cycle.REVERSE == 2) { reverseColours(sourceColours, cycle); } } colours = sourceColours; } // This utility function allows for variable precision floating point modulus. private double DFLOAT_MOD(final double d, final double b) { return (Math.floor(d * PRECISION) % Math.floor(b * PRECISION)) / PRECISION; }

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