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• October in Review

  - by Richard Bingham

  With OpenWorld over October was time to get back to serious work for everyone, including the Fusion Applications Developer Relations team. Don't forget the OpenWorld content is still available, including presentation downloads, for a limited period of time so be sure to grab anything you found useful or take another scan for anything you might have missed. Of all the announcements, the continued evolution of the Oracle Cloud services for extending and integrating with Fusion Applications is increasing in popularity, and certainly the Cloud Marketplace is something we're becoming involved in. More details to follow. Fusion Concepts Last week Vik from our team started the new "Fusion Concepts" series of articles, providing those new to Fusion Applications an explanation of the architectural basics, with the aim to reduce the learning curve and lay the platform for more efficient and effective development. The series begun with an insightful first post on the different schemas that exist in the Fusion Applications database. Look out for upcoming posts on multi-lingual entities, profile options, look-ups and more. New Learning Resources Our YouTube channel continued to expand with more 'how to' videos on using page composer, extending the Simplified UI (aka FUSE), and integrating BI reports and analytics. Also the Oracle Learning Library is now well established as a central resource for knowledge, now with thousands of tutorials, videos, and documents. Of particular note are the great new extensibility-related videos added by the CRM Product Management team, including more on the ever-expanding capabilities of Application Composer. To see some examples of these search using keyword 'customization' or the product 'Sales Cloud'. Finally on learning resources, as Oliver mentioned the Oracle Press book on Fusion Application Customization and Extensibility is now available for pre-order on Amazon (due out 1st Jan). Out And About October also saw us attend the annual Apps Conference held by the UK Oracle User Group in London. Interestingly there was an Applications Transformation stream of sessions and content that included Fusion Applications with all the latest in the Oracle Applications evolution, as always focused around the three tenets of social, mobile, and cloud. Read more in Richard's post-event write up. Other teams around Oracle have also been busy. Angelo from the Platform Technical Services group has done quite a bit of work using web services with Fusion SaaS and has published many interesting findings on his blog. It's definitely recommended reading if you are working on any related integration projects. The middleware-for-applications group has built a new tool called "AppAdvantage" offering an online assessment of your use of Fusion Middleware technologies with Oracle Applications. As the popularity of integrating cloud applications with on-premises systems continued to grow, leveraging existing middleware technologies (and licenses) to support the integration solution is likely to be of paramount importance. Similarly the "Build Enterprise Application Extensions with Ease" section of the related webpage has AppsUX director Killan Evers speaking about customization using the composer tools. Both are useful resources for those just getting started with a move to Fusion Applications. The Oracle A-Team, specialists in middleware technical architecture, always publish superb content via their 'chronicles' site, now with a substantial amount specifically related to Fusion Applications. Click on the Fusion Applications menu on the top right of their homepage to see more. Last month of particular note was an article on customizing the timeout pop-up message that shows to inactive users, providing design-time insight and easy-to-follow steps. Finally if you're looking at using Oracle Middleware and Cloud to tailor and extend your applications then you may also be interested in this new blog post on the roadmap for Oracle SOA and the latest on-demand Cloud Development webcast.

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• Making AI jump on a spot effectively

  - by Pasquale Sada

  How to calculate, in 3D environment, the closest point, from which an AI character can jump onto a platform? Setup I have an initial velocity V(Vx,Vy,VZ) and a spot where the character stands still at S(Sx,Sy,Sz). What I'm trying to achieve is a successful jump on a spot E(Ex,Ey,Ez) where you have clicked on(only lower or higher spot, because I've in place a simple steering behavior for even terrains). There are no obstacles around. I've implemented a formula that can make him jump in a precise way on a spot but you need to declare an angle: the problem arise when the selected spot is straight above your head. It' pretty lame that the char hang there and can reach a thing that is 1cm above is head. I'll share the code I'm using: Vector3 dir = target - transform.position; // get target direction float h = dir.y; // get height difference dir.y = 0; // retain only the horizontal direction float dist = dir.magnitude ; // get horizontal distance float a = angle * Mathf.Deg2Rad; // convert angle to radians dir.y = dist * Mathf.Tan(a); // set dir to the elevation angle dist += h / Mathf.Tan(a); // correct for small height differences // calculate the velocity magnitude float vel = Mathf.Sqrt(dist * Physics.gravity.magnitude / Mathf.Sin(2 *a)); return vel * dir.normalized; Ended up using the lowest angle (20 degree) and checking for collision on the trajectory. If found any increase the angle. Here some code (to improve the code maybe must stop the check at the highest point of the curve): Vector3 BallisticVel(Vector3 target, float angle) { Vector3 dir = target - transform.position; // get target direction float h = dir.y; // get height difference dir.y = 0; // retain only the horizontal direction float dist = dir.magnitude ; // get horizontal distance float a = angle * Mathf.Deg2Rad; // convert angle to radians dir.y = dist * Mathf.Tan(a); // set dir to the elevation angle dist += h / Mathf.Tan(a); // correct for small height differences // calculate the velocity magnitude float vel = Mathf.Sqrt(dist * Physics.gravity.magnitude / Mathf.Sin(2 * a)); return vel * dir.normalized; } Vector3 TrajectoryPoint(Vector3 startingPosition, Vector3 startingVelocity, float n ) { float t = 1/60 ; // seconds per time step Vector3 stepVelocity = t * startingVelocity; // m/s Vector3 stepGravity = t * t * Physics.gravity; // m/s/s return startingPosition + n * stepVelocity + 0.5f * (n*n+n) * stepGravity; } bool CheckTrajectory(Vector3 startingPosition,Vector3 target, float angle_jump) { Debug.Log("checking"); if(angle_jump < 80f) { Debug.Log("if"); Vector3 startingVelocity = BallisticVel(target, angle_jump); for (int i = 0; i < 180; i++) { //Debug.Log(i); Vector3 trajectoryPosition = TrajectoryPoint( startingPosition, startingVelocity, i ); if(Physics.Raycast(trajectoryPosition,Vector3.forward,safeDistance)) { angle_jump += 10; break; // restart loop with the new angle } else continue; } return true; JumpVelocity = BallisticVel(target, angle_jump); } return false; }

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• In hindsight, is basing XAML on XML a mistake or a good approach?

  - by romkyns

  XAML is essentially a subset of XML. One of the main benefits of basing XAML on XML is said to be that it can be parsed with existing tools. And it can, to a large degree, although the (syntactically non-trivial) attribute values will stay in text form and require further parsing. There are two major alternatives to describing a GUI in an XML-derived language. One is to do what WinForms did, and describe it in real code. There are numerous problems with this, though it’s not completely advantage-free (a question to compare XAML to this approach). The other major alternative is to design a completely new syntax specifically tailored for the task at hand. This is generally known as a domain-specific language. So, in hindsight, and as a lesson for the future generations, was it a good idea to base XAML on XML, or would it have been better as a custom-designed domain-specific language? If we were designing an even better UI framework, should we pick XML or a custom DSL? Since it’s much easier to think positively about the status quo, especially one that is quite liked by the community, I’ll give some example reasons for why building on top of XML might be considered a mistake. Basing a language off XML has one thing going for it: it’s much easier to parse (the core parser is already available), requires much, much less design work, and alternative parsers are also much easier to write for 3rd party developers. But the resulting language can be unsatisfying in various ways. It is rather verbose. If you change the type of something, you need to change it in the closing tag. It has very poor support for comments; it’s impossible to comment out an attribute. There are limitations placed on the content of attributes by XML. The markup extensions have to be built "on top" of the XML syntax, not integrated deeply and nicely into it. And, my personal favourite, if you set something via an attribute, you use completely different syntax than if you set the exact same thing as a content property. It’s also said that since everyone knows XML, XAML requires less learning. Strictly speaking this is true, but learning the syntax is a tiny fraction of the time spent learning a new UI framework; it’s the framework’s concepts that make the curve steep. Besides, the idiosyncracies of an XML-based language might actually add to the "needs learning" basket. Are these disadvantages outweighted by the ease of parsing? Should the next cool framework continue the tradition, or invest the time to design an awesome DSL that can’t be parsed by existing tools and whose syntax needs to be learned by everyone? P.S. Not everyone confuses XAML and WPF, but some do. XAML is the XML-like thing. WPF is the framework with support for bindings, theming, hardware acceleration and a whole lot of other cool stuff.

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• Cloud Adoption Challenges

  - by Herve Roggero

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/hroggero/archive/2013/11/07/cloud-adoption-challenges.aspxWhile cloud computing makes sense for most organizations and countless projects, I have seen customers significantly struggle with cloud adoption challenges. This blog post is not an attempt to provide a generic assessment of cloud adoption; rather it is an account of personal experiences in the field, some of which may or may not apply to your organization. Cloud First, Burst? In the rush to cloud adoption some companies have made the decision to redesign their core system with a cloud first approach. However a cloud first approach means that the system may not work anymore on-premises after it has been redesigned, specifically if the system depends on Platform as a Service (PaaS) components (such as Azure Tables). While PaaS makes sense when your company is in a position to adopt the cloud exclusively, it can be difficult to leverage with systems that need to work in different clouds or on-premises. As a result, some companies are starting to rethink their cloud strategy by designing for on-premises first, and modify only the necessary components to burst when needed in the cloud. This generally means that the components need to work equally well in any environment, which requires leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or additional investments for PaaS applications, or both.  What’s the Problem? Although most companies can benefit from cloud computing, not all of them can clearly identify a business reason for doing so other than in very generic terms. I heard many companies claim “it’s cheaper”, or “it allows us to scale”, without any specific metric or clear strategy behind the adoption decision. Other companies have a very clear strategy behind cloud adoption and can precisely articulate business benefits, such as “we have a 500% increase in traffic twice a year, so we need to burst in the cloud to avoid doubling our network and server capacity”. Understanding the problem being solved through by adopting cloud computing can significantly help organizations determine the optimum path and timeline to adoption. Performance or Scalability? I stopped counting the number of times I heard “the cloud doesn’t scale; our database runs faster on a laptop”.  While performance and scalability are related concepts, they are nonetheless different in nature. Performance is a measure of response time under a given load (meaning with a specific number of users), while scalability is the performance curve over various loads. For example one system could see great performance with 100 users, but timeout with 1,000 users, in which case the system wouldn’t scale. However another system could have average performance with 100 users, but display the exact same performance with 1,000,000 users, in which case the system would scale. Understanding that cloud computing does not usually provide high performance, but instead provides the tools necessary to build a scalable system (usually using PaaS services such as queuing and data federation), is fundamental to proper cloud adoption. Uptime? Last but not least, you may want to read the Service Level Agreement of your cloud provider in detail if you haven’t done so. If you are expecting 99.99% uptime annually you may be in for a surprise. Depending on the component being used, there may be no associated SLA at all! Other components may be restarted at any time, or services may experience failover conditions weekly ( or more) based on current overall conditions of the cloud service provider, most of which are outside of your control. As a result, for PaaS cloud environments (and to a certain extent some IaaS systems), applications need to assume failure and gracefully retry to be successful in the cloud in order to provide service continuity to end users. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (http://www.bluesyntax.net). Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" and “PRO SQL Server 2012 Practices” from Apress, a PluralSight author, and runs the Azure Florida Association.

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• Ideal backup appliance for backup software like Bacula?

  - by Ricket

  I'm at a small company and we (the IT department of two) manage <100 client computers and a handful of servers. Currently we're using a company's appliance to handle backup; it does a small backup every night and a full backup every weekend, and a guy comes on Wednesday to take an offsite backup drive (and gives back last week's drive to swap with it). The backup is done only on the servers' hard drives, because our client computers and employees make sure not to store anything worthwhile on their own computers. So it's a pretty simple situation. Lately this system, mainly the appliance, has been having problems, so we are looking for an alternative. I'm researching other companies but also looking into what we might expect from trying to do this ourselves. There will undoubtedly be a large learning curve, but hey, that's what serverfault is for, right? :) So anyway I was looking at Bacula. Feature list sounds great, documentation is plentiful, but it's only software. So my question is, what is the ideal backup server to run the Bacula server software on? And not only the server but other related appliances. Our current backup appliance uses only hard drives, not tape drives. It has several plugged into it at one time, in hotswap bays on the front of the machine. I couldn't help but notice though, it's hardly more than Windows XP with hard drive bays, a PCI eSATA card (which connects to another appliance extension piece with 2 more bays), and their software. Since the company will take back their appliance if/when we cancel with them, where can I go to configure a server with these kinds of things? And should I consider switching to tape drives? What other concerns should I be thinking about when I pick out hardware for a backup server? Maybe I'm being naive, I'm sure Dell (and any other computer company) sells them in the small business section of their website, but I wanted to make sure that there's not some other more recommended place that other companies are getting their hardware from, and that I don't need anything special for Bacula.

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• Sendmail - Multiple Domains, One Box - Blocking One Or Two Domains

  - by TangoOversway

  I have a number of domains hosted at a web hosting service. They use sendmail to handle incoming email. I have six domains on this service (which we can call aaa.com, bbb.com and so on). Each email account has the same name and one email box. In other words, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and all the others go into one box, /var/spool/mail/tango, where my email program on my desktop picks it up. I have done very little work in sendmail. I haven't had to, and I've been warned it's a steep learning curve. But now I'm running into an issue. I was in a business situation where, for years, my email address was on the website for aaa.com. (We won't go into why this was necessary - it wasn't my preference and it's in the past.) Now I'm using [email protected] instead of [email protected]. I was getting about 1,000 or more pieces of spam a day, but SpamAssassin and my own email program caught about 75% of that. (Which still left stuff to delete.) Now, after checking, I see that 90% or more goes to [email protected], the one that was on the web for years. I'd like to deactivate [email protected] and possibly [email protected] and [email protected], but want to keep using [email protected]. Remember, email to tango at any of these domains will go into one email box. I've had people tell me that sendmail can be configured so I can deactivate [email protected] (and other domains) and still use [email protected] (and others, if I want to). In other words, I can configure sendmail to use this account on some domains and not others. One of the people who was teling me this was in tech support at the hosting service. But I wrote to tech support with a work order to do this and now I'm told it can't be done. I can modify config files myself on this account if needed, but I was hoping to just let them do it. (I love delegation -- it means I spend more time doing my stuff.) Is it possible to keep an email account active on one domain and not others with sendmail, when all domains are hosted on the same server? Is there a name for this process or setting? Any information would be helpful - either pointers to instructions so I can do it, or enough info so I can tell tech support, "This is where to look, and it can be done, so please pass my request on to someone who works with sendmail and knows how to do it." Is this something sendmail can do?

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• Starting/Stopping Custom PHP Chat Server Linux Service (CentOS)

  - by chad

  I have been trying all night to get this service working properly. I created this script from a template and am very new to bash coding. I wrote a fully functioning chat server in php which runs endlessly, but now want to make it a dedicated service. I want to do this so that it starts on server boot and boots back up if possible when there are any down-times with the server. The issue is that I need this thing to run in a detached screen so that I can monitor packet data or send server commands via SSH when need-be. The main problem that i'm having is that it needs to have its own PID when it starts so that I can stop/restart it when needed. I am the type who grinds on coding until I figure it out, but this is so new to me that it seems the learning curve here is very steep and frustrating. Below is my code if anybody can please help me with this one, i've gotten so tired I can't even concentrate any more :( #!/bin/sh # # chatserver # # chkconfig: 345 20 90 # description: chatServer Linux Service Daemon \ # for general server handling ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: chatserver # Required-Start: $local_fs $network $named $syslog # Required-Stop: $local_fs $syslog # Default-Start: 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6 # Short-Description: This service maintains the chatServer # Description: chatServer Linux Service Daemon # for general server handling ### END INIT INFO # Source function library. . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions exec="screen php -q /var/www/html/chatServer.php" prog="chatserver" config="/etc/sysconfig/$prog" pidfile="/var/run/chatserver.pid" [ -e /etc/sysconfig/$prog ] && . /etc/sysconfig/$prog lockfile=/var/lock/subsys/$prog start() { #$exec || exit 5 echo -n $"Starting $prog: " daemon $exec --name=$exec --pidfile=$pidfile retval=$? echo [ $retval -eq 0 ] && touch $lockfile return $retval } stop() { echo -n $"Stopping $prog: " killproc -p $pidfile rm -f $pidfile retval=$? echo [ $retval -eq 0 ] && rm -f $lockfile return $retval } restart() { stop start } reload() { restart } force_reload() { restart } rh_status() { # run checks to determine if the service is running or use generic status status $prog } rh_status_q() { rh_status >/dev/null 2>&1 } case "$1" in start) rh_status_q && exit 0 $1 ;; stop) rh_status_q || exit 0 $1 ;; restart) $1 ;; reload) rh_status_q || exit 7 $1 ;; force-reload) force_reload ;; status) rh_status ;; condrestart|try-restart) rh_status_q || exit 0 restart ;; *) echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart|condrestart|try-restart|reload|force-reload}" exit 2 esac exit $?

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• How should I set up my Hyper-V server and network topology?

  - by Daniel Waechter

  This is my first time setting up either Hyper-V or Windows 2008, so please bear with me. I am setting up a pretty decent server running Windows Server 2008 R2 to be a remote (colocated) Hyper-V host. It will be hosting Linux and Windows VMs, initially for developers to use but eventually also to do some web hosting and other tasks. Currently I have two VMs, one Windows and one Ubuntu Linux, running pretty well, and I plan to clone them for future use. Right now I'm considering the best ways to configure developer and administrator access to the server once it is moved into the colocation facility, and I'm seeking advice on that. My thought is to set up a VPN for access to certain features of the VMs on the server, but I have a few different options for going about this: Connect the server to an existing hardware firewall (an old-ish Netscreen 5-GT) that can create a VPN and map external IPs to the VMs, which will have their own IPs exposed through the virtual interface. One problem with this choice is that I'm the only one trained on the Netscreen, and its interface is a bit baroque, so others may have difficulty maintaining it. Advantage is that I already know how to do it, and I know it will do what I need. Connect the server directly to the network and configure the Windows 2008 firewall to restrict access to the VMs and set up a VPN. I haven't done this before, so it will have a learning curve, but I'm willing to learn if this option is better long-term than the Netscreen. Another advantage is that I won't have to train anyone on the Netscreen interface. Still, I'm not certain if the capabilities of the Windows software firewall as far as creating VPNs, setting up rules for external access to certain ports on the IPs of Hyper-V servers, etc. Will it be sufficient for my needs and easy enough to set up / maintain? Anything else? What are the limitations of my approaches? What are the best practices / what has worked well for you? Remember that I need to set up developer access as well as consumer access to some services. Is a VPN even the right choice?

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• How to Configure Source NAT (Private IP => Public IP Outbound)

  - by DavidScherer

  I'm running VMWare ESXi Free and have Zentyal SBS 3.2 running as a Gateway. I have 5 Public IPS (CIDR/29, let's call them 69.1.1.1 - 69.1.1.5) and currently Zentyal is bound to 69.1.1.1 as the Gateway, with the other 4 Public IPs set as Virtual Interfaces in Zentyal (wan2-wan5) I have machines sitting on the Private Network (10.34.251.x) that, when going Outbound (to Google for instance) should be seen by the Internet as an IP other than the Gateway (69.1.1.1), this is because our machines need to be able to communicate with 3rd party APIs that expect these requests to come from a specific IP. From what I could find, SNAT (Source NAT) in Zentyal is used to achieve this, but I'm not sure how to configure it and cannot find a specific piece of Documentation for it at Zentyal. I've tried setting this up a couple different ways, with no results and at this point I have no idea if I'm going about this completely wrong, or my lack of experience with networking and the associated terminology is preventing me from placing the correct values in the correct fields. I get the following form to set up "SNAT" rules in Zentyal: Perhaps someone can offer some guidance and definitions for the fields above? SNAT Address Is this the Public IP I want to masquerade? Outgoing Interface Should this by my External NIC (one connected to Public 'Net), or is it the "Private" interface? It sounds as though this should be the External interface as I want the traffic from the internal network sent Out over this Interface (using a different IP than normal, anyway) Source Is the the Source on the internal network (one of the private IPs?), a public IP I want to masquerade as, or something else entirely? Destination Is this a place on the Internet (eg, "Only do this for the Site Google.com"/IP) or am I allowing myself to become confused again? Service I'm assuming this allows me to restrict which services this rule will apply to, but is it for a service on the internal network or a service being accessed on the external network? If I can offer any further details or information to make what I'm trying to do more clear, I will happily do so. Honestly any kind of help here would be very appreciated. I'm not a NetOps or anything even close, I spend most of my day writing code and my entire "team" at this company consists of "me, myself, and I" so while I try to broaden my KB at every possible opportunity, I can only learn so much, so fast and I feel like with networking especially there's just so much, coupled with a learning curve for each solution that likes to (from my limited perspective) use slightly different terminology that what I'm used to (and I don't exactly have the necessary experience to cross reference this stuff with the stuff I already know in context).

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• Linux Best Practices

  - by Zac

  I'm a life-long Windows developer switching over to Linux for the first time, and I'm starting off with Ubuntu to ease the learning curve. My new laptop will primarily be a development machine: 6GB RAM, 320 GB HD. I'd like there to be 2 non-root users: (a) Development, which will always be me, and (b) Guest, for anyone else. I assume the root user is added by default, like System Administrator in Windows. (1) I'd like to mount /home to its own partition, but how does this work if I have two user accounts (Development and Guest)? Are there 2 separate /home directories, or do they get shared? Is it possible to allocate more space for Development and only a tiny bit of space for Guest in GRUB2? How?!?! (2) I'm assuming that its okay that all of my development tools (Eclipse & plugins, SVN, JUnit, ant, etc.) and Java will end up getting installed in non-/home directories such as /usr and /opt, but that my Eclipse/SVN workspace will live under my /home directory on a separate partition... any problems, issues, concerns with that? (3) As far as partitioning schemes, nothing too complicated, but not plain Jane either: Boot Partition, 512 MB, in case I want to install other OSes Ubuntu & non-/home file system, 187.5 GB Swap Partition, 12 GB = RAM x 2 /home Partition, 120 GB I don't have any bulky media data (I don't have music or video libraries, this is a lean and mean dev machine) so having 320 GB is like winning the lottery and not knowing what to do with all this space. I figured I'd give a little extra space to the OS/FS partition since I'll be running JEE containers locally and doing a lot of file IO, logging and other memory-instensive operations. Any issues, problems, concerns, suggestions? (4) I was thinking about using ext4; seems to have good filestamping without any space ceiling for me to hit. Any other suggestions for a dev machine? (5) I read somewhere that you need to be careful when you install software as the root user, but I can't remember why. What general caveats do I need to be aware of when doing things (installing packages, making system configurations, etc.) as root vs "Development" user? Thanks!

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• How To Configure Remote Desktop To Hyper-V Guest Virtual Machines

  - by Brian Jackett

  Configuring Remote Desktop (RDP) from a host Hyper-V machine to a guest virtual machine can be tricky, so this post is dedicated to the issues and resolution steps I went through to allow RDP.  Cutting to the point, below are the things to look for followed by some explanation about my scenario if you care to read.  This is not an exhaustive list of what is required, just the items that were causing problems for my particular scenario. Requirements Allow Remote Desktop Connections in guest OS. The network adapter type must allow communication with host machine (e.g. use an “Internal” virtual adapter.) If running Server 2008 R2 on guest, network discovery mode must be turned on. If running Server 2008 R2 on guest, the services supporting network discovery mode must be running: - DNS Client - Function Discovery Resource Publication - SSDP Discovery - UPnP Device Host My Environment     A quick word about my environment.  I am running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper V on my laptop and numerous guest VMs running Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  I run a domain controller VM and then 1 or 2 SharePoint servers depending on my work needs.  I’ve found this setup to work well except when it comes to the display window for my VMs. The Issue     Ever since I began running Hyper-V I haven’t been able to RDP to my guest VMs which means the resolution for my connection windows ha been limited to what the native Hyper-V connections allow.  During personal use I can put the resolution up to 1152 x 864, but during presentations I am usually limited to a measly 800 x 600.  That is until today when I decided to fully investigate why I couldn’t connect via RDP.     First a thank you to John Ross (@johnrossjr), Christina Wheeler (@cwheeler76) and Clayton Cobb (@warrtalon) for various suggestions while I was researching tonight.  As it turns out I had not 1, not 2, but 3 items preventing me from using RDP.  Let’s dig into the requirements above. Allow RDP Connection     This item I had previously taken care of, but it bears repeating because by default Windows Server 2008 R2 does not allow RDP connections.  Change the setting from “Don’t allow…” to whichever “Allow connections…” setting suits your needs.  I chose the less secure option as this is just my dev laptop. Network Adapter Type     When I originally configured my VMs I configured each to use 2 network adapters: one using the physical ethernet adapter for internet use and a virtual private adapter for communication between the VMs.  The connection for the ethernet adapter is an "”External” adapter and thus doesn’t connect between the host and guest.  The virtual private adapter allowed communication ONLY between the VMs and not to my host.  There is a third option “Internal” which allows communication between VMs as well as to the host.  After finding out this distinction I promptly created an Internal network adapter and assigned that to my VMs. Turn On Network Discovery     Seems like a pretty common sense thing, but in order to allow remote desktop connections the target computer must able to be found by the source computer (explained here.)  One of the settings that controls if a computer can be found on the network is aptly named Network Discovery.  By default Windows Server 2008 R2 turns Network Discovery off for security purposes.  To enable it open up the Network and Sharing Center.  Click “Change Advanced Sharing Settings” on the left.  On the following screen select “Turn on network discovery” for the currently used profile and click Save Settings.  You may notice though that your selection to turn on network discovery doesn’t save.  If this is the case then you most likely don’t have the supporting services running (as was my case.) Network Discovery Supporting Services     There are a total of 4 services (listed again below) that need to be running before you can turn on network discovery (explained here.)  The below images highlight these services.  In my guest VM I found that I had DNS Client already running while the other 3 were disabled.  I set them all to enabled and started the ones that were stopped.  After this change I returned to the Sharing settings screen and found that Network Discovery was turned on.  I’m not sure whether this was picking up my attempt to turn it on previously or if starting those services turned it on.  Either way the end result was a success. - DNS Client - Function Discovery Resource Publication - SSDP Discovery - UPnP Device Host Before and After Results     The first image is the smaller square shaped viewing window used by the Hyper-V native connection.  The second is the full-screen RDP connection in all its widescreen glory. Conclusion     Over the past few months I’ve found Hyper-V to be very useful for virtualizing my development environments, but I’ve also had a steep learning curve to get various items configured just right.  Allowing RDP connections to guest VMs was one area that I hadn’t been able to get right for the longest time.  Now that I resolved these issues I hope that others can avoid the pitfalls that I ran into.  If you know of any other items I left off feel free to let me know.        -Frog Out   Links Turning on Network Discovery http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2009/08/15/remote-desktop-connection-on-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx Services required for Network Discovery http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/2e1fea01-3f2b-4c46-a631-a8db34ed4f84

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• Adobe Photoshop Vs Lightroom Vs Aperture

  - by Aditi

  Adobe Photoshop is the standard choice for photographers, graphic artists and Web designers. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom  & Apple’s Aperture are also in the same league but the usage is vastly different. Although Photoshop is most popular & widely used by photographers, but in many ways it’s less relevant to photographers than ever before. As Lightroom & Aperture is aimed squarely at photographers for photo-processing. With this write up we are going to help you choose what is right for you and why. Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is the most liked tool for the detailed photo editing & designing work. Photoshop provides great features for rollover and Image slicing. Adobe Photoshop includes comprehensive optimization features for producing the highest quality Web graphics with the smallest possible file sizes. You can also create startling animations with it. Designers & Editors know how important precise masking is, PhotoShop lets you do that with various detailing tools. Art history brush, contact sheets, and history palette are some of the smart features, which add to its viability. Download Whether you’re producing printed pages or moving images, you can work more efficiently and produce better results because of its smooth integration across other adobe applications. Buy supporting layer effects, it allows you to quickly add drop shadows, inner and outer glows, bevels, and embossing to layers. It also provides Seamless Web Graphics Workflow. Photoshop is hands-down the BEST for editing. Photoshop Cons: • Slower, less precise editing features in Bridge • Processing lots of images requires actions and can be slower than exporting images from Lightroom • Much slower with editing and processing a large number of images Aperture Apple Aperture is aimed at the professional photographer who shoots predominantly raw files. It helps them to manage their workflow and perform their initial Raw conversion in a better way. Aperture provides adjustment tools such as Histogram to modify color and white balance, but most of the editing of photos is left for Photoshop. It gives users the option of seeing their photographs laid out like slides or negatives on a light table. It boasts of – stars, color-coding and easy techniques for filtering and picking images. Aperture has moved forward few steps than Photoshop, but most of the editing work has been left for Photoshop as it features seamless Photoshop integration. Aperture Pros: Aperture is a step up from the iPhoto software that comes with every Mac, and fairly easy to learn. Adjustments are made in a logical order from top to bottom of the menu. You can store the images in a library or any folder you choose. Aperture also works really well with direct Canon files. It is just $79 if you buy it through Apple’s App Store Moving forward, it will run on the iPad, and possibly the iPhone – Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop may never offer these options It is much nicer and simpler user interface. Lightroom Lightroom does a smashing job of basic fixing and editing. It is more advanced tool for photographers. They can use it to have a startling photography effect. Light room has many advanced features, which makes it one of the best tools for photographers and far ahead of the other two. They are Nondestructive editing. Nothing is actually changed in an image until the photo is exported. Better controls over organizing your photos. Lightroom helps to gather a group of photos to use in a slideshow. Lightroom has larger Compare and Survey views of images. Quickly customizable interface. Simple keystrokes allow you to perform different All Lightroom controls are kept available in panels right next to the photos. Always-available History palette, it doesn’t go when you close lightroom. You gain more colors to work with compared to Photoshop and with more precise control. Local control, or adjusting small parts of a photo without affecting anything else, has long been an important part of photography. In Lightroom 2, you can darken, lighten, and affect color and change sharpness and other aspects of specific areas in the photo simply by brushing your cursor across the areas. Photoshop has far more power in its Cloning and Healing Brush tools than Lightroom, but Lightroom offers simple cloning and healing that’s nondestructive. Lightroom supports the RAW formats of more cameras than Aperture. Lightroom provides the option of storing images outside the application in the file system. It costs less than photoshop. Download Why PhotoShop is advanced than Lightroom? There are countless image processing plug-ins on the market for doing specialized processing in Photoshop. For example, if your image needs sophisticated noise reduction, you can use the Noiseware plug-in with Photoshop to do a much better job or noise removal than Lightroom can do. Lightroom’s advantages over Aperture 3 Will always have better integration with Photoshop. Lightroom is backed by bigger and more active user community (So abundant availability for tutorials, etc.) Better noise reduction tool. Especially for photographers the Lens-distortion correction tool  is perfect Lightroom Cons: • Have to Import images to work on them • Slows down with over 10,000 images in the catalog • For processing just one or two images this is a slower workflow Photoshop Pros: • ACR has the same RAW processing controls as Lightroom • ACR Histogram is specialized to the chosen color space (Lightroom is locked into ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve) • Don’t have to Import images to open in Bridge or ACR • Ability to customize processing of RAW images with Photoshop Actions Pricing and Availability Get LightRoomGet PhotoShop Latest version Of Photoshop can be purchased from Adobe store and Adobe authorized reseller and it costs US$999. Latest version of Aperture can be bought for US$199 from Apple Online store or Mac App Store. You can buy latest version of LightRoom from Adobe Store or Adobe Authorized reseller for US$299. Related posts:Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended Web based Alternatives to Photoshop 10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software

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• How to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you new to the ribbon interface in Office 2010?  Here’s how you can get up to speed and learn where everything is quickly and easily. Microsoft has made an interactive guide to Office 2010’s new interface to help users learn their way around the new version.  If you’ve already used Office 2007, then Office 2010 will be very easy to transition to, but if you’re still using Office 2003 you may find the learning curve more steep.  With this interactive guide, upgrading your Office skills doesn’t have to be hard. Learn Your Way Around the Office Ribbon Open the Office 2010 interactive guides site (link below) in your browser, and select the Office app you want to explore. The guides are powered by Silverlight, so if you don’t already have it installed you will be prompted to do so. Once the guide has loaded, click Start to begin. Select any menu or toolbar item in the Office 2003 mockup.  A tooltip will appear to show you how to find this option in Word 2010. If you click the item, the interface will switch to an Office 2010 mockup and will interactively show you how to access this feature.  The Thumbnails view isn’t available by default in Word 2010, so it shows us how to add it to the ribbon.  When you’ve figured this command out, click anywhere to go back to the Office 2003 mockup and find another item. Currently the guides are available for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the site says that guides for the other Office apps will be available soon.  Here’s the PowerPoint guide showing where the Rehearse Timings option is in PowerPoint 2010. Install the Interactive Guides to Your Computer You can also install the guides to your computer so you can easily access them even if you’re not online.  Open the guide you want to install, and click the Install button in the top right corner of the guide. Choose where you want the shortcuts, and click Ok. Here’s the Interactive Word 2010 guide installed on our computer.  The downloaded version seemed to work faster in our tests, likely because all the content was already saved to the computer.  If you decide you don’t need it any more, click Uninstall in the top right corner. Download Office Cheat Sheets If you’d like a cheat-sheet of Office commands that have changed or are new in Office 2010, Microsoft’s got that for you, too.  You can download Office reference workbooks (link below) that show how to access each item that was in Office 2003’s menus.  Here’s the Word guide showing where each of Word 2003’s commands from the help menu are in Word 2010. Learn Your Way Around Office 2007, Too! Microsoft offers similar interactive guides for learning the ribbon in Office 2007, so if you’re still using Office 2007 but can’t find a command, feel free to check it out as well (link below).  Guides are available for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook 2007.  You can also download cheat sheets for Office 2007 at this site as well.  Here’s the tutorial showing us where the font options are in PowerPoint 2007. Conclusion We have found the ribbon interface to be a great addition to Office, but if you’ve got years of Office 2003 experience under your belt you may find it difficult to locate your favorite commands.  These tutorials can help you use your old Office knowledge to learn Office 2010 or 2007 in a quick and easy way! Links Office 2010 interactive guide Download Office 2010 reference workbooks Office 2007 interactive guide Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Find Commands and Functions in Office 2007 the Easy WayMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatMake Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 FormatAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteCreate a Customized Tab on the Office 2010 Ribbon TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird

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• Commercial Drupal Modules & Themes

  - by Ravish

  A discussion at Drupal.org forums prompted me to give my input about commercial ecosystem around Open Source Content Management Systems. WordPress and Joomla have been growing rapidly since past few years. But, growth rate of Drupal seems to be almost flat. Despite being the most powerful CMS around, Drupal is still not being adopted by masses. Many people will argue that Drupal is not targeted towards masses, but developers. I agree, Drupal is more of a development platform than a consumer CMS. Drupal is ‘many things to many people’, and I can build almost any type of website with it. Drupal is being used for building blogs, corporate websites, Intranet portals, social networking and even a project management system. Looking at the wide array of Drupal implementations, it deserves to be the most widely adopted CMS. I believe there are few challenges that Drupal community needs to overcome. To understand these challenges, I surveyed some webmasters who use Joomla or WordPress but not Drupal. I asked them why they don’t want to use Drupal, following are the responses I got from them: Drupal is too complicated, takes time to learn. Drupal is great, but its admin panel is overwhelming. I couldn’t find any nice themes for Drupal. There is no WYSIWYG editor in Drupal. Most Drupal modules do not work out of the box. There aren’t enough modules like Ubercart which provides any out of the box functionality. I tried modules like CCK, Views and Panels. After wasting several hours struggling with them, I decided to give up on Drupal. I don’t use Drupal because of pushbutton and Garland theme. I had hard time trying to customize Garland and it messed up the whole layout. There are no premium modules and themes for Drupal. Joomla has tons of awesome themes and modules. I don’t want a million hacks like CCK, Views, Tokens, Pathauto, ImageCache and CTools just to run a simple website. Most of the complaints from users are related to the learning and development curve involved with Drupal, and the lack of ecosystem. While most of the problems will be gone in Drupal 7, ecosystem is something that needs to be built by the Drupal community. Drupal distributions are a great step forward. There are few awesome Drupal distributions available like Open Publish, Open Atrium and Drupal Commons. I predict, there will be a wave of many powerful Drupal distributions after Drupal 7 release. Many of them will be user-friendly and commercial supported. Following is my post at Drupal.org forums: Quote from: http://drupal.org/node/863776#comment-3313836 Brian Gardner (StudioPress) and Woo Themes launched premium WordPress themes in 2007, the developer community did not accept it at first. Moreover, they were not even GPL licensed. There was an outcry in WordPress community against them. Following that, most premium theme providers switched to GPL licensing. Despite controversies, users voted for premium theme and plugins by buying them. Inspired by their success, hundreds of other developers started to sell premium themes and plugins. It is now the acceptable and in fact most popular business model among WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg once told me, they would not support premium themes. If he supported, developers would no more give out free GPL themes & plugins. He pointed me towards Joomla, there were hardly any nice free themes & modules available. Now two years forward, premium products are not just accepted but embraced by the WordPress community – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/ The quality and number of themes & modules has increased, even the free ones. This also helped to boost the adoption and ecosystem of WordPress. Today, state of Drupal is like WordPress was in 2007. There are hardly any out of the box solutions available for Drupal. Ubercart, Open Publish and Open Atrium are the only ones I can think of. Many of the popular Drupal modules are patches and hole-fillers. Thankfully, these hole-filler modules are going to be in Drupal 7 core. Drupal 7 and distributions will spawn a new array of solutions built upon Drupal. Soon, we will have more like Ubercarts and Open Atriums. If commercial solutions can help fuel this ecosystem and growth, Drupal community will accept them eventually. This debate will not stop your customers from buying your product. If your product is awesome, they will vote for you by buying your product.

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• RK4 Bouncing a Ball

  - by Jonathan Dickinson

  I am trying to wrap my head around RK4. I decided to do the most basic 'ball with gravity that bounces' simulation. I have implemented the following integrator given Glenn Fiedler's tutorial: /// <summary> /// Represents physics state. /// </summary> public struct State { // Also used internally as derivative. // S: Position // D: Velocity. /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the Position. /// </summary> public Vector2 X; // S: Position // D: Acceleration. /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the Velocity. /// </summary> public Vector2 V; } /// <summary> /// Calculates the force given the specified state. /// </summary> /// <param name="state">The state.</param> /// <param name="t">The time.</param> /// <param name="acceleration">The value that should be updated with the acceleration.</param> public delegate void EulerIntegrator(ref State state, float t, ref Vector2 acceleration); /// <summary> /// Represents the RK4 Integrator. /// </summary> public static class RK4 { private const float OneSixth = 1.0f / 6.0f; private static void Evaluate(EulerIntegrator integrator, ref State initial, float t, float dt, ref State derivative, ref State output) { var state = new State(); // These are a premature optimization. I like premature optimization. // So let's not concentrate on that. state.X.X = initial.X.X + derivative.X.X * dt; state.X.Y = initial.X.Y + derivative.X.Y * dt; state.V.X = initial.V.X + derivative.V.X * dt; state.V.Y = initial.V.Y + derivative.V.Y * dt; output = new State(); output.X.X = state.V.X; output.X.Y = state.V.Y; integrator(ref state, t + dt, ref output.V); } /// <summary> /// Performs RK4 integration over the specified state. /// </summary> /// <param name="eulerIntegrator">The euler integrator.</param> /// <param name="state">The state.</param> /// <param name="t">The t.</param> /// <param name="dt">The dt.</param> public static void Integrate(EulerIntegrator eulerIntegrator, ref State state, float t, float dt) { var a = new State(); var b = new State(); var c = new State(); var d = new State(); Evaluate(eulerIntegrator, ref state, t, 0.0f, ref a, ref a); Evaluate(eulerIntegrator, ref state, t + dt * 0.5f, dt * 0.5f, ref a, ref b); Evaluate(eulerIntegrator, ref state, t + dt * 0.5f, dt * 0.5f, ref b, ref c); Evaluate(eulerIntegrator, ref state, t + dt, dt, ref c, ref d); a.X.X = OneSixth * (a.X.X + 2.0f * (b.X.X + c.X.X) + d.X.X); a.X.Y = OneSixth * (a.X.Y + 2.0f * (b.X.Y + c.X.Y) + d.X.Y); a.V.X = OneSixth * (a.V.X + 2.0f * (b.V.X + c.V.X) + d.V.X); a.V.Y = OneSixth * (a.V.Y + 2.0f * (b.V.Y + c.V.Y) + d.V.Y); state.X.X = state.X.X + a.X.X * dt; state.X.Y = state.X.Y + a.X.Y * dt; state.V.X = state.V.X + a.V.X * dt; state.V.Y = state.V.Y + a.V.Y * dt; } } After reading over the tutorial I noticed a few things that just seemed 'out' to me. Notably how the entire simulation revolves around t at 0 and state at 0 - considering that we are working out a curve over the duration it seems logical that RK4 wouldn't be able to handle this simple scenario. Never-the-less I forged on and wrote a very simple Euler integrator: static void Integrator(ref State state, float t, ref Vector2 acceleration) { if (state.X.Y > 100 && state.V.Y > 0) { // Bounce vertically. acceleration.Y = -state.V.Y * t; } else { acceleration.Y = 9.8f; } } I then ran the code against a simple fixed-time step loop and this is what I got: 0.05 0.20 0.44 0.78 1.23 1.76 ... 74.53 78.40 82.37 86.44 90.60 94.86 99.23 103.05 105.45 106.94 107.86 108.42 108.76 108.96 109.08 109.15 109.19 109.21 109.23 109.23 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 109.24 ... As I said, I was expecting it to break - however I am unsure of how to fix it. I am currently looking into keeping the previous state and time, and working from that - although at the same time I assume that will defeat the purpose of RK4. How would I get this simulation to print the expected results?

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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• Auto DOP and Concurrency

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  After spending some time in the cloud, I figured it is time to come down to earth and start discussing some of the new Auto DOP features some more. As Database Machines (the v2 machine runs Oracle Database 11.2) are effectively selling like hotcakes, it makes some sense to talk about the new parallel features in more detail. For basic understanding make sure you have read the initial post. The focus there is on Auto DOP and queuing, which is to some extend the focus here. But now I want to discuss the concurrency a little and explain some of the relevant parameters and their impact, specifically in a situation with concurrency on the system. The goal of Auto DOP The idea behind calculating the Automatic Degree of Parallelism is to find the highest possible DOP (ideal DOP) that still scales. In other words, if we were to increase the DOP even more  above a certain DOP we would see a tailing off of the performance curve and the resource cost / performance would become less optimal. Therefore the ideal DOP is the best resource/performance point for that statement. The goal of Queuing On a normal production system we should see statements running concurrently. On a Database Machine we typically see high concurrency rates, so we need to find a way to deal with both high DOP’s and high concurrency. Queuing is intended to make sure we Don’t throttle down a DOP because other statements are running on the system Stay within the physical limits of a system’s processing power Instead of making statements go at a lower DOP we queue them to make sure they will get all the resources they want to run efficiently without trashing the system. The theory – and hopefully – practice is that by giving a statement the optimal DOP the sum of all statements runs faster with queuing than without queuing. Increasing the Number of Potential Parallel Statements To determine how many statements we will consider running in parallel a single parameter should be looked at. That parameter is called PARALLEL_MIN_TIME_THRESHOLD. The default value is set to 10 seconds. So far there is nothing new here…, but do realize that anything serial (e.g. that stays under the threshold) goes straight into processing as is not considered in the rest of this post. Now, if you have a system where you have two groups of queries, serial short running and potentially parallel long running ones, you may want to worry only about the long running ones with this parallel statement threshold. As an example, lets assume the short running stuff runs on average between 1 and 15 seconds in serial (and the business is quite happy with that). The long running stuff is in the realm of 1 – 5 minutes. It might be a good choice to set the threshold to somewhere north of 30 seconds. That way the short running queries all run serial as they do today (if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it) and allows the long running ones to be evaluated for (higher degrees of) parallelism. This makes sense because the longer running ones are (at least in theory) more interesting to unleash a parallel processing model on and the benefits of running these in parallel are much more significant (again, that is mostly the case). Setting a Maximum DOP for a Statement Now that you know how to control how many of your statements are considered to run in parallel, lets talk about the specific degree of any given statement that will be evaluated. As the initial post describes this is controlled by PARALLEL_DEGREE_LIMIT. This parameter controls the degree on the entire cluster and by default it is CPU (meaning it equals Default DOP). For the sake of an example, let’s say our Default DOP is 32. Looking at our 5 minute queries from the previous paragraph, the limit to 32 means that none of the statements that are evaluated for Auto DOP ever runs at more than DOP of 32. Concurrently Running a High DOP A basic assumption about running high DOP statements at high concurrency is that you at some point in time (and this is true on any parallel processing platform!) will run into a resource limitation. And yes, you can then buy more hardware (e.g. expand the Database Machine in Oracle’s case), but that is not the point of this post… The goal is to find a balance between the highest possible DOP for each statement and the number of statements running concurrently, but with an emphasis on running each statement at that highest efficiency DOP. The PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET parameter is the all important concurrency slider here. Setting this parameter to a higher number means more statements get to run at their maximum parallel degree before queuing kicks in.  PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET is set per instance (so needs to be set to the same value on all 8 nodes in a full rack Database Machine). Just as a side note, this parameter is set in processes, not in DOP, which equates to 4* Default DOP (2 processes for a DOP, default value is 2 * Default DOP, hence a default of 4 * Default DOP). Let’s say we have PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET set to 128. With our limit set to 32 (the default) we are able to run 4 statements concurrently at the highest DOP possible on this system before we start queuing. If these 4 statements are running, any next statement will be queued. To run a system at high concurrency the PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET should be raised from its default to be much closer (start with 60% or so) to PARALLEL_MAX_SERVERS. By using both PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET and PARALLEL_DEGREE_LIMIT you can control easily how many statements run concurrently at good DOPs without excessive queuing. Because each workload is a little different, it makes sense to plan ahead and look at these parameters and set these based on your requirements.

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• Big Data – Evolution of Big Data – Day 3 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we answered what is the Big Data. Today we will understand why and how the evolution of Big Data has happened. Though the answer is very simple, I would like to tell it in the form of a history lesson. Data in Flat File In earlier days data was stored in the flat file and there was no structure in the flat file.  If any data has to be retrieved from the flat file it was a project by itself. There was no possibility of retrieving the data efficiently and data integrity has been just a term discussed without any modeling or structure around. Database residing in the flat file had more issues than we would like to discuss in today’s world. It was more like a nightmare when there was any data processing involved in the application. Though, applications developed at that time were also not that advanced the need of the data was always there and there was always need of proper data management. Edgar F Codd and 12 Rules Edgar Frank Codd was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He presented 12 rules for the Relational Database and suddenly the chaotic world of the database seems to see discipline in the rules. Relational Database was a promising land for all the unstructured database users. Relational Database brought into the relationship between data as well improved the performance of the data retrieval. Database world had immediately seen a major transformation and every single vendors and database users suddenly started to adopt the relational database models. Relational Database Management Systems Since Edgar F Codd proposed 12 rules for the RBDMS there were many different vendors who started them to build applications and tools to support the relationship between database. This was indeed a learning curve for many of the developer who had never worked before with the modeling of the database. However, as time passed by pretty much everybody accepted the relationship of the database and started to evolve product which performs its best with the boundaries of the RDBMS concepts. This was the best era for the databases and it gave the world extreme experts as well as some of the best products. The Entity Relationship model was also evolved at the same time. In software engineering, an Entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing a database in an abstract way. Enormous Data Growth Well, everything was going fine with the RDBMS in the database world. As there were no major challenges the adoption of the RDBMS applications and tools was pretty much universal. There was a race at times to make the developer’s life much easier with the RDBMS management tools. Due to the extreme popularity and easy to use system pretty much every data was stored in the RDBMS system. New age applications were built and social media took the world by the storm. Every organizations was feeling pressure to provide the best experience for their users based the data they had with them. While this was all going on at the same time data was growing pretty much every organization and application. Data Warehousing The enormous data growth now presented a big challenge for the organizations who wanted to build intelligent systems based on the data and provide near real time superior user experience to their customers. Various organizations immediately start building data warehousing solutions where the data was stored and processed. The trend of the business intelligence becomes the need of everyday. Data was received from the transaction system and overnight was processed to build intelligent reports from it. Though this is a great solution it has its own set of challenges. The relational database model and data warehousing concepts are all built with keeping traditional relational database modeling in the mind and it still has many challenges when unstructured data was present. Interesting Challenge Every organization had expertise to manage structured data but the world had already changed to unstructured data. There was intelligence in the videos, photos, SMS, text, social media messages and various other data sources. All of these needed to now bring to a single platform and build a uniform system which does what businesses need. The way we do business has also been changed. There was a time when user only got the features what technology supported, however, now users ask for the feature and technology is built to support the same. The need of the real time intelligence from the fast paced data flow is now becoming a necessity. Large amount (Volume) of difference (Variety) of high speed data (Velocity) is the properties of the data. The traditional database system has limits to resolve the challenges this new kind of the data presents. Hence the need of the Big Data Science. We need innovation in how we handle and manage data. We need creative ways to capture data and present to users. Big Data is Reality! Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Basics of Big Data Architecture. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Windows 8 Live Accounts and the actual Windows Account

  - by Rick Strahl

  As if Windows Security wasn't confusing enough, in Windows 8 we get thrown yet another curve ball with Windows Live accounts to logon. When I set up my Windows 8 machine I originally set it up with a 'real', non-live account that I always use on my Windows machines. I did this mainly so I have a matching account for resources around my home and intranet network so I could log on to network resources properly. At some point later I decided to set up Windows Live security just to see how changes things. Windows wants you to use Windows Live Windows 8 logins are required in order for the Windows RT account info to work. Not that I care - since installing Windows 8 I've maybe spent 10 minutes with Windows RT because - well it's pretty freaking sucky on the desktop. From shitty apps to mis-managed screen real estate I can't say that there's anything compelling there to date, but then I haven't looked that hard either. Anyway… I set up the Windows Live account to see if that changes things. It does - I do get all my live logins to work from Live Account so that Twitter and Facebook posts and pictures and calendars all show up on live tiles on the start screen and in the actual apps. That's nice-ish, but hardly that exciting given that all of the apps tied to those live tiles are average at best. And it would have been nice if all of this could be done without being forced into running with a Windows Live User Account - this all feels like strong-arming you into moving into Microsofts walled garden… and that's probably what it's meant to do. Who am I? The real problem to me though is that these Windows Live and raw Windows User accounts are a bit unpredictable especially when it comes to developer information about the account and which credentials to use. So for example Windows reports folder security like this: Notice it's showing my Windows Live account. Now if I go to Edit and try to add my Windows user account (rstrahl) it'll just automatically show up as the live account. On the other hand though the underlying system sees everything as my real Windows account. After I switched to a Windows Live login account and I have to login to Windows with my Live account, what do you suppose this returns?Console.WriteLine(Environment.UserName); It returns my raw Windows user account (rstrahl). All my permissions, all my actual settings and the desktop console altogether run under that account. If I look in TaskManager (or Process Explorer for me) I see: Everything running on the desktop shell with my login running under my Windows user account. I suppose it makes sense, but where is that association happening? When I switched to a Windows Live account, nowhere did I associate my real account with the Live account - it just happened. And looking through the account configuration dialogs I can't find any reference to the raw Windows account. Other than switching back I see no mention anywhere of the raw Windows account - everything refers to the Live account. Right then, clear as potato soup! So this is who you really are! The problem is that in some situations this schizophrenic account behavior gets a bit weird. Today I was running a local Web application in IIS that uses Windows Authentication - I tried to log-in with my real Windows account login because that's what I'm used to using with WINDOWS freaking Authentication through IIS. But… it failed. I checked my IIS settings, my apps login settings and I just could not for the life of me get into the site with my Windows username. That is until I finally realized that I should try using my Windows Live credentials instead. And that worked. So now in this Windows Authentication dialog I had to type in my Live ID and password, which is - just weird. Then in IIS if I look at a Trace page (or in my case my app's Status page) I see that the logged on account is - my Windows user account. What's really annoying about this is that in some places it uses the live account in other places it uses my Windows account. If I remote desktop into my Web server online - I have to use the local authentication dialog but I have to put in my real Windows credentials not the Live account. Oh yes, it's all so terribly intuitive and logical… So in summary, when you log on with a Live account you are actually mapped to an underlying Windows user. In any application if you check the user name it'll be the underlying user account (not sure what happens in a Windows RT app or even what mechanism is used there to get the user name info).  When logging on to local machine resource with user name and password you have to use your Live IDs even if the permissions on the resources are mapped to your underlying Windows account. Easy enough I suppose, but still not exactly intuitive behavior…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Session Report - Modern Software Development Anti-Patterns

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  In this standing-room-only session, building upon his 2011 JavaOne Rock Star “Diabolical Developer” session, Martijn Verburg, this time along with Ben Evans, identified and explored common “anti-patterns” – ways of doing things that keep developers from doing their best work. They emphasized the importance of social interaction and team communication, along with identifying certain psychological pitfalls that lead developers astray. Their emphasis was less on technical coding errors and more how to function well and to keep one’s focus on what really matters. They are the authors of the highly regarded The Well-Grounded Java Developer and are both movers and shakers in the London JUG community and on the Java Community Process. The large room was packed as they gave a fast-moving, witty presentation with lots of laughs and personal anecdotes. Below are a few of the anti-patterns they discussed.Anti-Pattern One: Conference-Driven DeliveryThe theme here is the belief that “Real pros hack code and write their slides minutes before their talks.” Their response to this anti-pattern is an expression popular in the military – PPPPPP, which stands for, “Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”“Communication is very important – probably more important than the code you write,” claimed Verburg. “The more you speak in front of large groups of people the easier it gets, but it’s always important to do dry runs, to present to smaller groups. And important to be members of user groups where you can give presentations. It’s a great place to practice speaking skills; to gain new skills; get new contacts, to network.”They encouraged attendees to record themselves and listen to themselves giving a presentation. They advised them to start with a spouse or friends if need be. Learning to communicate to a group, they argued, is essential to being a successful developer. The emphasis here is that software development is a team activity and good, clear, accessible communication is essential to the functioning of software teams. Anti-Pattern Two: Mortgage-Driven Development The main theme here was that, in a period of worldwide recession and economic stagnation, people are concerned about keeping their jobs. So there is a tendency for developers to treat knowledge as power and not share what they know about their systems with their colleagues, so when it comes time to fix a problem in production, they will be the only one who knows how to fix it – and will have made themselves an indispensable cog in a machine so you cannot be fired. So developers avoid documentation at all costs, or if documentation is required, put it on a USB chip and lock it in a lock box. As in the first anti-pattern, the idea here is that communicating well with your colleagues is essential and documentation is a key part of this. Social interactions are essential. Both Verburg and Evans insisted that increasingly, year by year, successful software development is more about communication than the technical aspects of the craft. Developers who understand this are the ones who will have the most success. Anti-Pattern Three: Distracted by Shiny – Always Use the Latest Technology to Stay AheadThe temptation here is to pick out some obscure framework, try a bit of Scala, HTML5, and Clojure, and always use the latest technology and upgrade to the latest point release of everything. Don’t worry if something works poorly because you are ahead of the curve. Verburg and Evans insisted that there need to be sound reasons for everything a developer does. Developers should not bring in something simply because for some reason they just feel like it or because it’s new. They recommended a site run by a developer named Matt Raible with excellent comparison spread sheets regarding Web frameworks and other apps. They praised it as a useful tool to help developers in their decision-making processes. They pointed out that good developers sometimes make bad choices out of boredom, to add shiny things to their CV, out of frustration with existing processes, or just from a lack of understanding. They pointed out that some code may stay in a business system for 15 or 20 years, but not all code is created equal and some may change after 3 or 6 months. Developers need to know where the code they are contributing fits in. What is its likely lifespan? Anti-Pattern Four: Design-Driven Design The anti-pattern: If you want to impress your colleagues and bosses, use design patents left, right, and center – MVC, Session Facades, SOA, etc. Or the UML modeling suite from IBM, back in the day… Generate super fast code. And the more jargon you can talk when in the vicinity of the manager the better.Verburg shared a true story about a time when he was interviewing a guy for a job and asked him what his previous work was. The interviewee said that he essentially took patterns and uses an approved book of Enterprise Architecture Patterns and applied them. Verburg was dumbstruck that someone could have a job in which they took patterns from a book and applied them. He pointed out that the idea that design is a separate activity is simply wrong. He repeated a saying that he uses, “You should pay your junior developers for the lines of code they write and the things they add; you should pay your senior developers for what they take away.”He explained that by encouraging people to take things away, the code base gets simpler and reflects the actual business use cases developers are trying to solve, as opposed to the framework that is being imposed. He told another true story about a project to decommission a very long system. 98% of the code was decommissioned and people got a nice bonus. But the 2% remained on the mainframe so the 98% reduction in code resulted in zero reduction in costs, because the entire mainframe was needed to run the 2% that was left. There is an incentive to get rid of source code and subsystems when they are no longer needed. The session continued with several more anti-patterns that were equally insightful.

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• Hiring New IT Employees versus Promoting Internally for IT Positions

  Recently I was asked my opinion regarding the hiring of IT professionals in regards to the option of hiring new IT employees versus promoting internally for IT positions. After thinking a little more about this question regarding staffing, specifically pertaining to promoting internally verses new employees; I think my answer to this question is that it truly depends on the situation. However, in most cases I would side with promoting internally. The key factors in this decision should be based on a company/department’s current values, culture, attitude, and existing priorities.  For example if a company values retaining all of its hard earned business knowledge then they would tend to promote existing employees internal over hiring a new employee. Moreover, the company will have to pay to train an existing employee to learn a new technology and the learning curve for some technologies can be very steep. Conversely, if a company values new technologies and technical proficiency over business knowledge then a company would tend to hire new employees because they may already have experience with a technology that the company is planning on using. In this scenario, the company would have to take on the additional overhead of allowing a new employee to learn how the business operates prior to them being fully effective. To illustrate my points above let us look at contractor that builds in ground pools for example.  He has the option to hire employees that are very strong but use small shovels to dig, or employees weak in physical strength but use large shovels to dig. Which employee should the contractor use to dig a hole for a new in ground pool? If we compare the possible candidates for this job we will find that they are very similar to hiring someone internally verses a new hire. The first example represents the existing workers that are very strong regarding the understanding how the business operates and the reasons why in a specific manner. However this employee could be potentially weaker than an outsider pertaining to specific technologies and would need some time to build their technical prowess for a new position much like the strong worker upgrading their shovels in order to remove more dirt at once when digging. The other employee is very similar to hiring a new person that may already have the large shovel but will need to increase their strength in order to use the shovel properly and efficiently so that they can move a maximum amount of dirt in a minimal amount of time. This can be compared to new employ learning how a business operates before they can be fully functional and integrated in the company/department. Another key factor in this dilemma pertains to existing employee and their passion for their work, their ability to accept new responsibility when given, and the willingness to take on responsibilities when they see a need in the business. As much as possible should be considered in this decision down to the mood of the team, the quality of existing staff, learning cure for both technology and business, and the potential side effects of the existing staff.  In addition, there are many more consideration based on the current team/department/companies culture and mood. There are several factors that need to be considered when promoting an individual or hiring new blood for a team. They both can provide great benefits as well as create controversy to a group. Personally, staffing especially in the IT world is like building a large scale system in that all of the components and modules must fit together and preform as one cohesive system in the same way a team must come together using their individually acquired skills so that they can work as one team.  If a module is out of place or is nonexistent then the rest of the team will suffer until the all of its issues are addressed and resolved. Benefits of Promoting Internally Internal promotions give employees a reason to constantly upgrade their technology, business, and communication skills if they want to further their career Employees can control their own destiny based on personal desires Employee already knows how the business operates Companies can save money by promoting internally because the initial overhead of allowing new hires to learn how a company operates is very expensive Newly promoted employees can assist in training their replacements while transitioning to their new role within a company. Existing employees already have a proven track record in regards fitting in with the business culture; this is always an unknown with all new hires Benefits of a New Hire New employees can energize and excite existing employees New employees can bring new ideas and advancements in technology New employees can offer a different perspective on existing issues based on their past experience. As you can see the decision to promote an existing employee from within a company verses hiring a new person should be based on several factors that should ultimately place the business in the best possible situation for the immediate and long term future. How would you handle this situation? Would you hire a new employee or promote from within?

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

  - by Jeff

  This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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• The Best BPM Journey: More Exciting Destinations with Process Accelerators

  - by Cesare Rotundo

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Open World (OOW) earlier this month has been a great occasion to discuss with our BPM customers. It was interesting to hear definite patterns emerging from those conversations: “BPM is a journey”, “experiences to share”, “our organization now understands what BPM is”, and my favorite (with some caveats): “BPM is like wine tasting, once you start, you want to try more”. These customers have started their journey, climbed up the learning curve, and reached a vantage point that allows them to see their next BPM destination. They see the next few processes they are going to tackle and improve with BPM. These processes/destinations target both horizontal processes where BPM replaces or coordinates manual activities, and critical industry processes that the company needs to improve to compete and deliver increasing value. Each new destination generates value, allowing the organization to reduce the cost of manual processes that were not supported by apps/custom development, and increase efficiency of end-to-end processes partially covered by apps/custom dev. The question we wanted to answer is how to help organizations experience deeper success with BPM, by increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and equipping them with the right tools. We decided that we needed to identify destinations, and plot routes to show the fastest path to those destinations. In the end we want to enable customers to reach “Process Excellence”: continuously set new targets and consistently and efficiently reach them. The result is Oracle Process Accelerators (PA), solutions built using the rich functionality in Oracle BPM Suite. PAs offers a rapidly expanding list of exciting destinations. Our launch of the latest installment of Process Accelerators at Oracle Open World includes new Industry-focused solutions such as Public Sector Incident Reporting and Financial Services Loan Origination, and improved other horizontal PAs, including Travel Request Management, Document Routing and Approval, and Internal Service Requests. Just before OOW we had extended the Oracle deployment of Travel Request Management, riding the enthusiastic response from early adopters among travelers (employees), management and support (approvers). “Getting there first” means being among the first to extract value from the PA approach, while acquiring deeper insights into the customers’ perspective. This is especially noteworthy when it comes to PAs, a set of solutions designed to be quickly deployed and iteratively improved by customers. The OOW launch has generated immediate feedback from customers, non-customers, analysts, and partners. They all confirmed that both Business and IT at organizations benefit from PAs when it comes to exploring the potential for BPM to improve their business processes. PAs help customers visualize what can be done with BPM, and PAs are made to be extended: you can see your destination, change the path to fit your needs, and deploy. We're discovering new destinations/processes that the market wants us to support, generic enough across industries and within industries. We'll keep on building sets of requirements, deliver functional design, construct solutions using Oracle BPM, and test them not only functionally but for performance, scalability, clustering, making them robust, product-quality. Delivering BPM solutions with product-grade quality is the equivalent of following a tried-and-tested path on a map. Do you know of existing destinations in your industry? If yes, we can draw a path to innovative processes together.

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• drawing thick, textured lines in OpenGL

  - by NateS

  I need to draw thick textured line segments in OpenGL. Actually I need curves made out of short line segments. Here is what I have: In the upper left is an example of two connected line segments. The second image shows once the lines are given width, they overlap. If I apply a texture that uses translucency, the overlap looks terrible. The third image shows that both lines are shortened by half the amount necessary to make the thick line corners just touch. This way I can fill the space between the lines with a triangle. On the right you can see this works well (ignore the horizontal line when the crappy texture repeats). But it doesn't always work well. In the bottom left the curve is made of many short line segments. Note the incorrect texture application. My program is written in Java, making use of the LWJGL OpenGL binding (and minor use of Slick, a 2D helper framework). I've made a zip file that contains an executable JAR so you can easily see the problem. It also has the Java code (there is only one source file) and an Eclipse project, so you can instantly run it through Eclipse and hack at it if you like. Here she is: http://n4te.com/temp/lines.zip To run, execute "java -jar lines.jar". You may need "-Djava.library.path=." before -jar if you are not on Windows. Press space to toggle texture/wireframe. The wireframe only shows the line segments, the triangle between them isn't drawn. I don't need to draw arbitrary lines, just bezier curves similar to what you see in the program. Sorry the code is a bit messy, once I have a solution I will refactor. I have investigated using GLUtessellator. It greatly simplified construction of the line, but I found that applying the texture was perfect. It worked most of the time (top image below), but long vertical curves would have severe texture distortion (bottom image below): This turned out to be much easier to code, but in the end worse than my approach. I believe what I'm trying to do is called "line tessellation" or "stroke tessellation". I assume this has been solved already? Is there standard code I can leverage? Otherwise, how can I fix my code so that the texture does not freak out on short, vertical curves?

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