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• JFall 2012

  - by Geertjan

  JFall 2012 was over far too soon! Seven tracks going on simultaneously in a great location, with many artifacts reminding me of JavaOne, and nice snacks and drinks afterwards. The day started, as such things always do, with a keynote. Thanks to @royvanrijn for the photo below, I didn't take any myself and without a picture this report might have been too dry: What you see above is Steve Chin riding into the keynote hall on his NightHacking bike. The keynote was interesting, I can't be too complimentary about it, since I was part of it myself. Bert Ertman introduced the day and then Steve Chin took over, together with Sharat Chander, Tom Eugelink, Timon Veenstra, and myself. We had a strict choreography for the keynote, one that would ensure a lot of variation and some unexpected surprises, such as Steve being thrown off the stage a few times by Bert because of mentioning JavaOne too many times, rather than the clearly much cooler JFall. Steve talked about JavaOne and the direction Java is headed in, Sharat talked about JavaME and embedded devices, Steve and Tom did a demo involving JavaFX, I did a Project Easel demo, and Timon from Ordina talked about his Duke's Choice Award winning AgroSense project. I think the Project Easel demo (which I repeated later in a screencast for Parleys arranged by Eugene Boogaart) came across well and several people I spoke to especially like the roundtrip/bi-directional work that can be done, from browser to IDE and back again, very simply and intuitively. (In a long conversation on the drive back home afterwards, the scenario of a designer laying out the UI in HTML and then handing the HTML to a developer for back-end work, a developer who would then find it convenient to open the HTML in a browser and quickly navigate from the browser to the resources within the IDE, was discussed and considered to be extremely interesting and worth considering adopting NetBeans for, for no other reason than that.) Later I attended a session by David Delabassee on Java EE 7, Hans Dockter on Gradle, and Sander Mak on cross-build injection attacks. I was sorry to have missed Martijn Verburg's session, which sounded like it was really fantastic, among others, such as Gerrit Grunwald. I did a session too, entitled "Unlocking the Java EE 6 Platform", which was very well attended, pretty much a full room, and the demo went very smoothly. I talked to many people, e.g., a long time with Hans Dockter about how cool Gradle is and how great the Gradle/NetBeans plugin is turning out to be. I also had a long conversation (and did a demo) with Chris Chedgey, from Structure101, after his session, which was incredibly well attended; very interesting how popular modularity is. I met several people for the first time, as well as some colleagues from past places I've worked at. All in all, it was a great conference, unfortunately too short, which was very well attended (clearly over 1000) people, with several international speakers, as well as international attendees such as Mattias Karlsson, Sweden JUG leader. And, unsurprisingly, I came across NetBeans Platform applications again, none of which I had ever heard of before. In each case, "our fat client application" was mentioned in passing, never as a main application, and never in a context where there are plans for the application to be migrated to the web or mobile, simply because doing so makes no business sense at all. Great times at JFall, looking forward to meeting with some of the people I met again soon.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Backward-compatible vs. forward-compatible: a tale of two clouds | William Vambenepe "There is the Cloud that provides value by requiring as few changes as possible. And there is the Cloud that provides value by raising the abstraction and operation level," says William Vambenepe. "The backward-compatible Cloud versus the forward-compatible Cloud." Vambenepe was a panelist on the recent ArchBeat podcast Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds. Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog: ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis investigates "how you can customize a standard BPM Task Flow through MDS Seeded customization." Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Music Festival If, after a day spent in sessions at Oracle Openworld, you want nothing more than to head back to your hotel for a quiet evening spent responding to email, please ignore the rest of this message. Because every night from Sept 30 to Oct 4 the streets of San Francisco will pulsate with music from a vast array of bands representing more musical styles than a single human brain an comprehend. It's the first ever Oracle Music Festival, baby, 7:00pm to 1:00am every night. Are those emails that important...? Resource Kit: Oracle Exadata - includes demos, videos, product datasheets, and technical white papers. This free resource kit includes several customer case study videos, two 3D product demos, several product datasheets, and three technical architecture white papers. Registration is required for the who don't already have a free Oracle.com membership account. Some execs contemplate making 'Bring Your Own Device' mandatory | ZDNet "Companies and agencies are recognizing that individual employees are doing a better job of handling and managing their devices than their harried and overworked IT departments – who need to focus on bigger priorities, such as analytics and cloud," says ZDNet SOA blogger Joe McKendrick. Podcast Show Notes: Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds All three parts of this discussion are now available. Featuring a panel of leading Oracle cloud computing experts, including Dr. James Baty, Mark T. Nelson, Ajay Srivastava, and William Vambenepe, the discussion covers an overview of the various flavors of cloud computing, the importance of standards, Why cloud computing is a paradigm shift—and why it isn't, and advice on what architects need to know to take advantage of the cloud. And for those who prefer reading to listening, a complete transcript is also available. Amazon AMIs and Oracle VM templates (Cloud Migrations) Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski shares an objective comparison of these two resources. IOUC : Blogs : Read the latest news on the global user group community - June 2012! The June 2012 edition of "Are You a Member Yet?"—the quarterly newsletter about Oracle user group communities around the world. Webcast: Introducing Identity Management 11g R2 - July 19 Date: Thursday, July 19, 2012 Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET Please join Oracle and customer executives for the launch of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2, the breakthrough technology that dramatically expands the reach of identity management to cloud and mobile environments. Thought for the Day "The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." — Bjarne Stroustrup Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Five Key Trends in Enterprise 2.0 for 2011

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

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

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• Social Search: Looking for Love

  - by Mike Stiles

  For marketers and enterprise executives who have placed a higher priority on and allocated bigger budgets to search over social, it might be time to notice yet another shift that’s well underway. Social is search. Search marketing was always more of an internal slam-dunk than other digital initiatives. Even a C-suite that understood little about the new technology world knew it’s a good thing when people are able to find you. Google was the new Yellow Pages. Only with Google, you could get your listing first without naming yourself “AAAA Plumbing.” There were wizards out there who could give your business prominence in front of people who were specifically looking for what you offered. Other search giants like Bing also came along to offer such ideal matchmaking possibilities. But what if the consumer isn’t using a search engine to find what they’re looking for? And what if the search engines started altering their algorithms so that search placement manipulation was more difficult? Both of those things have started to happen. Experian Hitwise’s numbers show that visits to the major search engines in the UK dropped 100 million through August. Search engines are far from dead, or even challenged. But more and more, the public is discovering the sites and brands they need through advice they get via social, not search. You’ll find the worlds of social and search increasingly co-mingling as well. Search behemoths Google and Bing are including Facebook and Google+ into their engines. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have done some integration of global web search into their platforms. So what makes social such a worthwhile search entity for brands? First and foremost, the consumer has demonstrated a behavior of acting on recommendations from social connections. A cry in the wilderness like, “Anybody know any good catering companies?” will usually yield a link (and an endorsement) from a friend such as “Yeah, check out Just-Cheese-Balls Catering.” There’s no such human-driven force/influence behind the big search engines. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others call it “Friend Mining.” It is, in essence, searching for answers from friends’ experiences as opposed to faceless code. And Facebook has all of those friends’ experiences already stored as data. eMarketer says search in an $18 billion business, and investors are really into it. So no shock Facebook’s ready to leverage their social graph into relevant search. What do you do about all this as a brand? For one thing, it’s going to lead to some interesting paid marketing opportunities around the corner, including Sponsored Stories bought against certain queries, inserting deals into search results, capitalizing on social search results on mobile, etc. Apart from that, it might be time to stop mentally separating social and search in your strategic planning and budgeting. Courting your fans on social will cumulatively add up to more valuable, personally endorsed recommendations for your company when a consumer conducts a search on social. Fail to foster those relationships, fail to engage, fail to provide knock-em-dead customer service, fail to wow them with your actual products and services…and you’ll wind up with the visibility you deserve in social search results.

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• Personal Financial Management – The need for resuscitation

  - by Salil Ravindran

  Until a year or so ago, PFM (Personal Financial Management) was the blue eyed boy of every channel banking head. In an age when bank account portability is still fiction, PFM was expected to incentivise customers to switch banks. It still is, in some emerging economies, but if the state of PFM in matured markets is anything to go by, it is in a state of coma and badly requires resuscitation. Studies conducted around the year show an alarming decline and stagnation in PFM usage in mature markets. A Sept 2012 report by Aite Group – Strategies for PFM Success shows that 72% of users hadn’t used PFM and worse, 58% of them were not kicked about using it. Of the rest who had used it, only half did on a bank site. While there are multiple reasons for this lack of adoption, some are glaringly obvious. While pretty graphs and pie charts are important to provide a visual representation of my income and expense, it is simply not enough to encourage me to return. Static representation of data without any insightful analysis does not help me. Budgeting and Cash Flow is important but when I have an operative account, a couple of savings accounts, a mortgage loan and a couple of credit cards help me with what my affordability is in specific contexts rather than telling me I just busted my budget. Help me with relative importance of each budget category so that I know it is fine to go over budget on books for my daughter as against going over budget on eating out. Budget over runs and spend analysis are post facto and I am informed of my sins only when I return to online banking. That too, only if I decide to come to the PFM area. Fundamentally, PFM should be a part of my banking engagement rather than an analysis tool. It should be contextual so that I can make insight based decisions. So what can be done to resuscitate PFM? Amalgamation with banking activities – In most cases, PFM tools are integrated into online banking pages and they are like chapter 37 of a long story. PFM needs to be a way of banking rather than a tool. Available balances should shift to Spendable Balances. Budget and goal related insights should be integrated with transaction sessions to drive pre-event financial decisions. Personal Financial Guidance - Banks need to think ground level and see if their PFM offering is really helping customers achieve self actualisation. Banks need to recognise that most customers out there are non-proficient about making the best value of their money. Customers return when they know that they are being guided rather than being just informed on their finance. Integrating contextual financial offers and financial planning into PFM is one way ahead. Yet another way is to help customers tag unwanted spending thereby encouraging sound savings habits. Mobile PFM – Most banks have left all those numbers on online banking. With access mostly having moved to devices and the success of apps, moving PFM on to devices will give it a much needed shot in the arm. This is not only about presenting the same wine in a new bottle but also about leveraging the power of the device in pushing real time notifications to make pre-purchase decisions. The pursuit should be to analyse spend, budgets and financial goals real time and push them pre-event on to the device. So next time, I should know that I have over run my eating out budget before walking into that burger joint and not after. Increase participation and collaboration – Peer group experiences and comments are valued above those offered by the bank. Integrating social media into PFM engagement will let customers share and solicit their financial management experiences with their peer group. Peer comparisons help benchmark one’s savings and spending habits with those of the peer group and increases stickiness. While mature markets have gone through this learning in some way over the last one year, banks in maturing digital banking economies increasingly seem to be falling into this trap. Best practices lie in profiling and segmenting customers, being where they are and contextually guiding them to identify and achieve their financial goals. Banks could look at the likes of Simple and Movenbank to draw inpiration from.

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• Installing .NET Framework 4 Client Profile breaks Windows Update

  - by Richard

  I have a Samsung NC-10 netbook with a fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit (it only had 2GB). If Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile is installed on it, Windows Update will always return error code 8024402F ("Windows Update encountered an unknown error"). As soon as I uninstall it, Windows Update works just fine again. Out of the four computers in this house, only this netbook has the problem. My question is: How can I get the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile installed on my netbook and continue to have a functioning Windows Update? ----- More information ----- The hard-drive recently died on my netbook so I replaced it with a nice new SSD and did a fresh installation of Windows 7 Home Premium (SP1) - along with all the updates. At some point I found that, when I ran Windows Update, I was greeted with error code 8024402F ("Windows Update encountered an unknown error"). Looking in C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log, I saw the following issue: WARNING: ECP: Failed to validate cab file digest downloaded from http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/software/dflt/2012/02/4913552_4a5c9563d1f58c77f30d0d5c9999e4b8bff3ab21.cab with error 0x80091007 WARNING: ECP: This roundtrip contained some optimized updates which failed. New Update count = 0, Old Count = 3 FATAL: ProcessCoreMetadata did not return any update to be committed WARNING: Sync of Updates: 0x8024402f WARNING: SyncServerUpdatesInternal failed: 0x8024402f When I downloaded the CAB from the URL listed and opened it, it contained a file called 4913552.txt. A search on Google suggested that it's related to Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Other people had reported problems with it breaking Windows Update, but they were running Windows XP. I tried the steps outlined on the Microsoft site for this error code, but it reported that there was nothing wrong. I also found this superuser question, I tried all the answers listed but none of them made any difference. My router doesn't block ActiveX, changing my internet settings in IE made no difference, assuming it was a corrupted update repository didn't do anything (except wipe my update history), my date and time was correct, switching to Google's DNS didn't work and neither did disabling IPv6. Figuring that this update was corrupted, I repaired it and nothing changed. In desperation I un-installed it and Windows Update started working again! Brilliant! I then downloaded the full version from the Microsoft website, installed it and, thankfully, Windows Update continued to work just fine. A week later I turn on my netbook and Windows Update is broken again with exactly the same error message and log entries as before. Repairing .NET Framework 4 Client Profile did nothing, removing it entirely solved the problem again. Thinking this might be some odd Windows installation issue, I formatted the hard-drive and re-installed Windows. Same problem as before - as soon as .NET Framework 4 Client Profile ended up on the netbook, Windows Update stopped working and reported error 8024402F. As soon as it was un-installed, everything worked just fine again. There are three other machines in this house and all of them have working Windows Update and this Client Profile. Does anyone know why it causes this netbook to break and, more importantly, how I can fix it?

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• Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

  - by Phil Factor

  For several years, I was responsible for the smooth running of a large number of enterprise database servers. We ran a network monitoring tool that was primitive by today’s standards but which performed the useful function of polling every system, including all the Servers in my charge. It ran a configurable script for each service that you needed to monitor that was merely required to return one of a number of integer values. These integer values represented the pain level of the service, from 10 (“hurtin’ real bad”) to 1 (“Things is great”). Not only could you program the visual appearance of each server on the network diagram according to the value of the integer, but you could even opt to run a sound file. Very soon, we had a large TFT Screen, high on the wall of the server room, with every server represented by an icon, and a speaker next to it that would give out a series of grunts, groans, snores, shrieks and funeral marches, depending on the problem. One glance at the display, and you could dive in with iSQL/QA/SSMS and check what was going on with your favourite diagnostic tools. If you saw a server icon burst into flames on the screen or droop like a jelly, you dropped your mug of coffee to do it.  It was real fun, but I remember it more for the huge difference it made to have that real-time visibility into how your servers are performing. The management soon stopped making jokes about the real reason we wanted the TFT screen. (It rendered DVDs beautifully they said; particularly flesh-tints). If you are instantly alerted when things start to go wrong, then there was a good chance you could fix it before being alerted to the problem by the users of the system.  There is a world of difference between this sort of tool, one that gives whoever is ‘on watch’ in the server room the first warning of a potential problem on one of any number of servers, and the breed of tool that attempts to provide some sort of prosthetic DBA Brain. I like to get the early warning, to get the right information to help to diagnose a problem: No auto-fix, but just the information. I prefer to leave the task of ascertaining the exact cause of a problem to my own routines, custom code, intuition and forensic instincts. A simulated aircraft cockpit doesn’t do anything for me, especially before I know where I should be flying.  Time has moved on, and that TFT screen is now, with SQL Monitor, an iPad or any other mobile or static device that can support a browser. Rather than trying to reproduce the conceptual topology of the servers, it lists them in their groups so as to give a display that scales with the increasing number of databases you monitor.  It gives the history of the major events and trends for the servers. It gives the icons and colours that you can spot out of the corner of your eye, but goes on to give you just enough information in drill-down to give you a much clearer idea of where to look with your DBA tools and routines. It doesn't swamp you with information.  Whereas a few server and database-level problems are pretty easily fixed, others depend on judgement and experience to sort out.  Although the idea of an application that automates the bulk of a DBA’s skills is attractive to many, I can’t see it happening soon. SQL Server’s complexity increases faster than the panaceas can be created. In the meantime, I believe that the best way of helping  DBAs  is to make the monitoring process as simple and effective as possible,  and provide the right sort of detail and ‘evidence’ to allow them to decide on the fix. In the end, it is still down to the skill of the DBA.

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• It happens only at Devoxx ...

  - by arungupta

  After attending several Java conferences world wide, this was my very first time at Devoxx. Here are some items I found that happens only at Devoxx ... Pioneers of theater-style seating - This not only provides comfortable seating for each attendee but the screens are very clearly visible to everybody in the room. Intellectual level of attendees is very high - Read more explanation on the Java EE 6 lab blog. In short, a lab, 1/3 of the content delivered at Devoxx 2011, could not be completed at other developer days in more than 1/3 the time. Snack box for lunches - Even though this suits well to the healthy lifestyle of multiple-snacks-during-a-day style but leaves attendees hungry sooner in the day. The longer breaks before the next snack in the evening does not help at all. Fortunately, Azure cupcakes and Android ice creams turned out to be handy. I finally carried my own apple :-) Wrist band instead of lanyard - The good part about this is that once tied to your hand then you are less likely to forget in your room. But OTOH you are a pretty much a branded conference attendee all through out the city. It was cost effective as it costed 20c as opposed to 1 euro for the lanyard. Live streaming from theater #8 (the biggest room) on parleys.com All talks recorded and released on parleys.com over next year. This allows attendees to not to miss any session and watch replay at their own leisure. Stephan promised to start sharing the sessions by mid December this year. No need to pre-register for a session - This is true for most of the conferences but bigger rooms (+ overflow room for key sessions) provide sufficient space for all those who want to attend the session. And of course all sessions are available on parleys.com anyway! Community votes on whiteboard - Devoxx attendees gets a chance to vote on topics ranging from their favorite non-Java language, operating system, or love from Oracle. Captured pictures at the end of Day 2 are shown below. Movie on the last but one night - This year it was The Adventures of Tintin and was lots of fun. Fries with mayo - This is a typical Belgian thing. Guys going in ladies room to avoid the long queues ... wow! Tweet wall everywhere and I mean literally everywhere, in rooms, hallways, front desk, and other places. The tweet picking algorithm was not very clear as I never saw my tweet appear on the wall ;-) You can also watch it at wall.devoxx.com. Cozy speaker dinner with great food and wine List of parallel and upcoming sessions displayed on the screen - This makes the information more explicit with the attendees. REST API with multiple mobile clients - This API is also used by some other conferences as well. And there always is iphone.devoxx.com. Steering committee members were recognized multiple times. The committee members were clearly identifiable wearing red hoodies. The wireless SSID was intuitive "Devoxx" but hidden to avoid some crap from Microsoft Windows. All of 9000 addresses were used up most of the times with each attendee having multiple devices. A 1 GB fibre optic cable was stretched to Metropolis to support the required network bandwidth. Stephan is already planning to upgrade the equipment and have a better infrastructure next year. Free water, soda, juice in a cooler Kinect connected to TV screens so that attendees can use their hands to browse through the list of sesssions. #devoxxblog, #devoxxwomen, #devoxxfrance, #devoxxgreat, #devoxxsuggestions And Devoxx attendees are called Devoxxians ... how cool is that ? :-) What other things do you think happen only at Devoxx ? And now the pictures from the community whiteboard: And a more complete album (including bigger pics of community votes) is available below:

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• Call for Papers for both Devoxx UK and France now open!

  - by Yolande

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The two conferences are taking place the last week of March 2013 with London on March 26th and 27 and Paris on March 28th and 29th. Oracle fully supports "Devoxx UK" and "Devoxx France" as a European Platinum Partner. Submit proposals and participate in both conferences since they are a two-hour train ride away from one another. The Devoxx conferences are designed “for developers by developers.” The conference committees are looking for speakers who are passionate developers unafraid to share their knowledge of Java, mobile, web and beyond. The sessions are about frameworks, tools and development with in-depth conference sessions, short practical quickies, and bird-of-a-feather discussions. Those different formats allow speakers to choose the best way to present their topics and can be mentioned during the submission process Devoxx has proven its success under Stephan Janssen, organizer of Devoxx in Belgium for the past 11 years. Devoxx has been the biggest Java conference in Europe for many years. To organize those local conferences, Stephan has enrolled the top community leaders in the UK and France. Ben Evans and Martijn Verberg are the leaders of London Java User Group (JUG) and are also known internationally for starting the Adopt-a-JSR program. Antonio Goncalves is the leader of the Paris JUG. He organized last year’s Devoxx France, which was a big success with twice the size first expected. The organizers made sure to add the local character to the conferences. "The community energy has to feel right," said Ben Evans and for that he picked an "old Victoria hall" for the venue. Those leaders are part of very dynamic Java communities in France and in the UK. France has 22 JUGs; the Paris JUG alone has 2,000 members. The UK has over 50,000 developers working in London and its surroundings; a lot of them are Java developers working in the financial industry. The conference fee is kept as low as possible to encourage those developers to attend. Devoxx promises to be crowded and sold out in advance. Make sure to submit your talks to both Devoxx UK and France before January 31st, 2013. 

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• HTG Explains: Should You Buy Extended Warranties?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Buy something at an electronics store and you’ll be confronted by a pushy salesperson who insists you need an extended warranty. You’ll also see extended warranties pushed hard when shopping online. But are they worth it? There’s a reason stores push extended warranties so hard. They’re almost always pure profit for the store involved. An electronics store may live on razor-thin product margins and make big profits on extended warranties and overpriced HDMI cables. You’re Already Getting Multiple Warranties First, back up. The product you’re buying already includes a warranty. In fact, you’re probably getting several different types of warranties. Store Return and Exchange: Most electronics stores allow you to return a malfunctioning product within the first 15 or 30 days and they’ll provide you with a new one. The exact period of time will vary from store to store. If you walk out of the store with a defective product and have to swap it for a new one within the first few weeks, this should be easy. Manufacturer Warranty: A device’s manufacturer — whether the device is a laptop, a television, or a graphics card — offers their own warranty period. The manufacturer warranty covers you after the store refuses to take the product back and exchange it. The length of this warranty depends on the type of product. For example, a cheap laptop may only offer a one-year manufacturer warranty, while a more expensive laptop may offer a two-year warranty. Credit Card Warranty Extension: Many credit cards offer free extended warranties on products you buy with that credit card. Credit card companies will often give you an additional year of warranty. For example, if you buy a laptop with a two year warranty and it fails in the third year, you could then contact your credit card company and they’d cover the cost of fixing or replacing it. Check your credit card’s benefits and fine print for more information. Why Extended Warranties Are Bad You’re already getting a fairly long warranty period, especially if you have a credit card that offers you a free extended warranty — these are fairly common. If the product you get is a “lemon” and has a manufacturing error, it will likely fail pretty soon — well within your warranty period. The extended warranty matters after all your other warranties are exhausted. In the case of a laptop with a two-year warranty that you purchase with a credit card giving you a one-year warranty extension, your extended warranty will kick in three years after you purchase the laptop. In that many years, your current laptop will likely feel pretty old and laptops that are as good — or better — will likely be pretty cheap. If it’s a television, better television displays will be available at a lower price point. You’ll either want to upgrade to a newer model or you’ll be able to buy a new, just-as-good product for very cheap. You’ll only have to pay out-of-pocket if your device fails after the normal warranty period — in over two or three years for typical laptops purchased with a decent credit card. Save the money you would have spent on the warranty and put it towards a future upgrade. How Much Do Extended Warranties Cost? Let’s look at an example from a typical pushy retail outlet, Best Buy. We went to Best Buy’s website and found a pretty standard $600 Samsung laptop. This laptop comes with a one-year warranty period. If purchased with a fairly common credit card, you can easily get a two-year warranty period on this laptop without spending an additional penny. (Yes, such credit cards are available with no yearly fees.) During the check-out process, Best Buy tries to sell you a Geek Squad “Accidental Protection Plan.” To get an additional year of Best Buy’s extended warranty, you’d have to pay $324.98 for a “3-Year Accidental Protection Plan”. You’d basically be paying more than half the price of your laptop for an additional year of warranty — remember, the standard warranties would cover you anyway for the first two years. If this laptop did break sometime between two and three years from now, we wouldn’t be surprised if you could purchase a comparable laptop for about $325 anyway. And, if you don’t need to replace it, you’ve saved that money. Best Buy would object that this isn’t a standard extended warranty. It’s a supercharged warranty plan that will also provide coverage if you spill something on your laptop or drop it and break it. You just have to ask yourself a question. What are the odds that you’ll drop your laptop or spill something on it? They’re probably pretty low if you’re a typical human being. Is it worth spending more than half the price of the laptop just in case you’ll make an uncommon mistake? Probably not. There may be occasional exceptions to this — some Apple users swear by Apple’s AppleCare, for example — but you should generally avoid buying these things. There’s a reason stores are so pushy about extended warranties, and it’s not because they want to help protect you. It’s because they’re making lots of profit from these plans, and they’re making so much profit because they’re not a good deal for customers. Image Credit: Philip Taylor on Flickr     

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• Using different SSDs types (not only SATA based) as system drive

  - by Hubert Kario

  Currently I have a Thinkpad X61s and want to make it both a bit faster and a bit more power efficient. For that reason I thought that adding SSD drive would make most sense. Unfortunately, because of financial reasons, buying SSD of over 200GB capacity is out of reach for me (not only it would be worth more than the rest of the laptop, but also I currently have a 500GB drive in it, so even such a drive would be kind of a downgrade for me). During preliminary testing with a cheap Transcend 4GB Class 6 (14MiB/s streaming, 9MiB/s random read) card I experienced boot times to be reduced by half so putting the OS only on it would already would be an improvement. Unfortunately, my system now is about 11GiB in size so anything less than 16GB would be constraining. In this laptop I can connect additional drives on at least 5 different ways: using SATA-ATA converter caddy in the X6 Ultrabase using internal mini PCIe slot using integrated SDHC slot using CardBus (a.k.a PCMCIA or PC Card) slot using USB Thankfully, because I use only Linux on this PC the bootability of them is irrelevant as I can put the /boot partition on internal HDD and / on any of the above mentioned Flash memories (as I already did for the SDHC test). From what I was able to research and from my own experience those options come with rather big downsides or other problems: SATA-ATA caddy It has three downsides: I have to carry the Ultrabse with me at all times (it's not really inconvenient, but those grams do add) and couldn't disconnect it when I want to disconnect the battery It makes the bay unusable for the optical drive and occasional quick access to other hard drives the only caddies I could buy have rather flaky controllers in them so putting my OS on it would hamper its stability Internal mini PCIe slot This would be an ideal solution, if only I could find real PCIe SSDs, not only devices that could talk only SATA or ATA over PCIe mechanical connection (the ones used in Dell Mini or Asus EEE). Theoretically Samsung did release such devices but I couldn't find them in retail anywhere. Integrated SDHC slot It's a nice solution with a single drawback: the fastest 16GB SDHC card on the market can only do around 35MiB/s read and 15MiB/s write while still costing like a normal 40GB SATA SSD that's 10 times faster. Not really cost-effective. CardBus (a.k.a PCMCIA or PC Card) slot Those cards are much faster than the SDHC option (there are ones that can do well over 50MiB/s read in benchmarks) and from what I could find the PCMCIA controller in my laptop does support UDMA so it should be able to deliver comparable speeds. They still cost similarly to SD cards but at least they provide streaming performance comparable to my current HDD. USB That's the worst option. Not only is it limited to 20-30MiB/s by the interface itself the drive would stick out of the laptop so it's a big no no. The question As such I think that going the "CF in a CardBus adapter" route will be the best option. My question is: did anyone try using CF cards in CardBus adapters as system drives with Linux on Thinkpad laptops? Laptops in general? What was the real-world performance? I don't have any CF cards so I can't check how well does it work with suspend/resume, or whatever it's easy to make it work in initramfs (I'm using ArchLinux and SD card was trivial — add 3 modules in single config line and rebuilding initramfs) so any tips/gotchas on this are welcome as well.

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• RAID controller dropping the wrong drive

  - by bramp

  I've been having an issue with 3ware 9500S-8 RAID 10, and I have contracted their tech support, but I wanted to hear the serverfault community's recommendations. Firstly, all my data is backuped and secure, so I don't mind blowing my RAID away if I have to. But let me describe the problem I've been seeing. A month ago, disk 6 dropped out of the RAID. It is mirrored with disk 7, so I wasn't that bothered. I went to the data centre and replaced it. When I got back to the office, I noticed that disk 6 will still not in the RAID, and in fact the controller was show the name of the old drive still. A week later I went back and replace the drive again, thinking I might have swapped in a bad drive. Still the same problem. I decided to reboot the machine, to see if that would "force" the controller into seeing the new drive. It did, and a rebuild started to happen (from disk 7). Eventually both drives were showing as good. A week later, the MySQL database has flagged the database is corrupt, and is unable to repair it. I don't know what has gone wrong, but I suspected this 6-7 pair. At this point I noticed that the RAID had constantly been verifying itself, over and over. Regardless of this I began to rebuild the database, which took about 19 hours. It's a big database. Near the end of the repair, the RAID controller told me it had dropped disk 7, and that some data was most likely corrupted. I contacted LSI tech support, and they very promptly started to help me. I mentioned that drive 7 had been dropped. They suspect that drive 7 was always at fault, and drive 6 had always been good. I want to know how often a RAID controller would drop the wrong drive (in this case dropping drive 6 a month ago, instead of 7). I foolishly didn't run smartctl on the drives before I started swapping them out. I just assumed the RAID controller knew what it was talking about. I think my plan of action is to replace drive 7, rebuild the array from scratch, double check smartctl on ALL the disks, and then start restoring my data again. I would appreciate anyone's input on what the correct procedure for swapping drives is, and how often failures like this happen. If anyone would like more information then I'd be happy to provide it. thanks in advance. Oh some more information. I'm running CentOS 5.3, with two RAID arrays, a simple RAID 1 for the OS, and RAID 10 for the database. Both arrays are on different controllers. The RAID 10 is made of 10 identical ST3640323AS drives, until I swapped in a SAMSUNG HD103SJ last month.

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• Advice on refactoring PHP Project

  - by b0x

  I have a small SAS ERP that was written some years ago using PHP. At that time, it didn't use any framework, but the code isn't a mess. Nowadays, the project grows and I’m now working with 3 more programmers. Often, they ask to me why we don’t migrate to a framework such as Laravel. Although I'd love trying Laravel, I’m a small business and I don't have time nor money to stop and spend a whole year building everything from scratch. I need to live and pay the bills. So, I've read a lot about this matter, and I decided that doing a refactoring is the best way to do it. Also, I'm not so sure that a framework will make things easy. Business goals are: Make the code easier to new hired programmers Separate the "view", in order to: release different versions of this product (using the same code), but under different brands and websites at the minimum cost (just changing view) release different versions to fit mobile/tablet. Make different types of this product, selling packages as if they were plugins. Develop custom packages for some costumers (like plugins/addon's that they can buy to put on the main application). Code goals: Introduce best pratices, standards for everyone Try to build my own MVC structure Improve validation of data/forms (today they are mixed in both ajax and classes) Create automated testing routines for quality assurance. My current structure project: class\ extra\ hd\ logs\ public_html\ public_html\includes\ public_html\css|js|images\ class\ There are three types of classes. They are all “autoloaded” with something similar with PSR-0, but I don’t use namespaces. 1. class.Something.php Connects to Database using specific methods. I.e: Costumer-list(); It uses “class.Db.php”, that it’s an abstraction of mysql on every method. 2. class.SomethingProc.php Do things that “join” things that come from “class.Something.php”. Like IF/ELSE, math operations. 3. class.SomethingHTML.php The classes with “HTML” suffix implements only static methods and HTML code only. A real life example: All the programmers need to use $cSomething ($c to class) and $arrSomething (to array). Costumer.php (view) <?php $cCosumter = new Costumer(); $arrCostumer = $cCostumer->list(); echo CostumerHTML::table($arrCostumer); ?> Extra\ Store 3rdparty projects/classes from others, such MPDF, PHPMailer, etc. Hd\ Store user’s files outsite wwwroot dir. Logs\ Store phplogs and the system itself logs (We have a static Log::error() method, that we put in every method of every class) Public_html\ Stores the files that people use. Public_html\includes\ Store the main “config.php” file and all files that do “ajax things” ajax.Costumer.php, for example. Help is needed ;) So, as you can see we have some standards, and also for database things. But I want to write a manual of our rules. Something that I can give to any new programmer at my company and he can go on. This is not totally a mess, but it could be better seeing the new practices. What could I do to separate this as MVC, to have multiple views. Could you give me some tips considering my goals? Keep im mind the different products/custom things for specific costumers without breaking the main application. URL for tutorials, books, etc, would be nice.

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• Refactoring existing PHP Project. I need some advices

  - by b0x

  i have a small SAS ERP that was written some years ago using PHP. At that time, it didn't used any framework, but the code isn't a mess as i will explain more detailed in the following lines. Nowadays, the project grow and I’m now working with 3 more programmers. Often, they ask to me why we don’t migrate to a framework such Laravel. Although I'd love trying Laravel, I’m a small business and i don't have time/money to stop and spend a whole year building everything from scratch. I need to live and pay the bills. So, I've read a lot about this matter, and I decided that doing a refactoring is the best way to do it. Also, I'm not so sure that a framework will make things easy. Business goals are: Make the code easier to new hired programmers I must separate the "view", because: I want to release different versions of this product (using the same code), but under different brands and websites at the minimum cost (just changing view) Release different versions to fit mobile/tablet. Make different types of this product, seeling packages as if it were plugins. Develop custom packages for some costumers (like plugins/addon's that they can buy to put on the main application). Code goals: Introduce best pratices, standards for everyone Try to build my own MVC structure Improve validation of data/forms (today they are mixed in both ajax and classes) Create automated testing rotines, to quality assurance. My actual structure project: class\ extra\ hd\ logs\ public_html\ public_html\includes\ public_html\css|js|images\ class\ There are three types of classes. They are all “autoloaded” with something similar with PSR-0, but I don’t use namespaces. 1. class.Something.php Connects to Database using specific methods. I.e: Costumer-list(); It uses “class.Db.php”, that it’s an abstraction of mysqli on every method. 2. class.SomethingProc.php Do things that “join” things that come from “class.Something.php”. Like IF/ELSE, math operations. 3. class.SomethingHTML.php The classes with “HTML” suffix implements only static methods and HTML code only. A real life example: All the programmers need to use $cSomething ($c to class) and $arrSomething (to array). Costumer.php (view) <?php $cCosumter = new Costumer(); $arrCostumer = $cCostumer->list(); echo CostumerHTML::table($arrCostumer); ?> Extra\ Store 3rdparty projects/classes from others, such MPDF, PHPMailer, etc. Hd\ Store user’s fies outsite wwwroot dir. Logs\ Store phplogs and the system itself logs (We have a static Log::error() method, that we put in every method of every class) Public_html\ Stores the files that people use. Public_html\includes\ Store the main “config.php” file and all files that do “ajax things” ajax.Costumer.php, for example. Help is needed ;) So, as you can see we have some standards, and also for database things. But i want to write a manual of our rules. Something that i can give to any new programmer at my companie and he can go on. This is not totally a mess, but It could be better seeing the new practices. What could I do to separate this as MVC, to have multiple VIEW’s. Could you gimme some tips considering my goals? Keep im mind the different products/custom things for specific costumers without breaking the main application. URL for tutorials, books, etc. It would be nice. Thanks!

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• Certify September Updates

  - by Sadia2

  We have added some release and platform certifications to MOS Certify. Applications: Oracle Demantra 12.2.2, 7.3.1.5, 7.3.1.4, 7.3.0.2.0, 7.3.0.0.0 Collaboration Technologies: Oracle Beehive 2.0.1.8.0 Database: Oracle Database Client 12.1.0.1.0, Oracle Clusterware 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Database 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Real Application Clusters 11.2.0.4.0 E-Business Suite: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.2, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.0.6, 11.5.10.2 Edge Applications: Oracle AutoVue 20.2.2, 20.2.1, 20.2.0 Enterprise Manager: Enterprise Manager Base Platform - OMS 12.1.0.3.0, Oracle Real User Experience Insight 12.1.0.4.0, 12.1.0.3.0, 12.1.0.1, 11.1 FSGBU Insurance Group: Oracle Health Insurance Claims 2.13.3.0.0 Fusion Middleware: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 11.1.1.7.1, 7.9.6.4.0, Oracle Discoverer 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Administrator 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Desktop 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle JDK 1.7.0_40, 1.7.0_25", Oracle JRE 1.7.0_40, 1.7.0_25, Oracle JRockit 6u45 R28.2.7+, Oracle WebCenter Sites 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: Community-Gadgets 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: CIP for File Systems and MS SharePoint 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: CIP for EMC Documentum 11.1.1.8.0 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Business Services Server 9.1.3.0, 9.1.2.0, 9.1.0.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Mobile Applications 9.1.2.0 Oracle Fusion Applications: Oracle Fusion Applications 11.1.7.0.0 Primavera GBU: Primavera Unifier 9.13.0.0 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;} Siebel Enterprise: Siebel Application Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Database Server 8.2.2.3.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Remote Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Tools Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel SSO Integration 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0

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• Seeking advice on tools and technology for my new game [closed]

  - by k.k. slider

  I'm a C# developer who has been programming a game in my spare time using XNA and Visual Studio. The game's logic is mostly done and I've completed a prototype that has most of the functionality of (what I envision to be) the final game. However, having heard about the uncertain future and (possibly) limited audience for XNA games, I'm looking to switch platforms... but I don't know what technology would best suit my needs. Below are some specifics about my game and what exactly I'm looking for, if you're interested: The game is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG (strategy game) for two players. It is a basic sprite and tile based game with animations and sound. 3D capabilities are not necessary. I'd like to allow players to compete with others online, and have a basic ranking/matchmaking system. I will probably need something that can interact with a server and a database (the game is turn-based and has no RNG, so cheating would be easy to detect even if most computation is done client-side and minimal data is sent to the server). Ideally, I would be able to release an early version of the game and have people give feedback as I develop additional features (similar to Minecraft). I'd prefer to have a way to release periodic updates to the game instead of releasing an absolute final product. To reach the widest possible audience, I'd prefer technology that allows me to release on PC, Android, iOS, and (maybe) Mac. This is a game with simple mouse inputs which can fit on a mobile touch screen. The game should be monetizable. If I find success with this game, then I may consider becoming a full-time indie game developer. I have several other game ideas and have learned quite a bit from my first attempt at game development. My first thought was an F2P/microtransaction model, but I'm open to other suggestions. Language isn't a primary concern of mine, since I have a decent amount of experience using several languages to program large projects. I'm willing to spend money (e.g. on a developer's license), but the more expensive it gets, the more hesitant I am to use it. I've looked into the following solutions... there are a LOT of tools out there... if anyone has experience with any of these and would like to recommend/reject any of them, it would be helpful. C#/.NET (XNA/MonoGame/SDL/SlimDX/Xamarin/ExEn/ANX?) HTML5/JS (AppMobi/PhoneGap/Marmalade/FlashCanvas/Cordova/libRocket?) Python (Pyglet/Pygame/Kivy?) Java (JavaFX/libGDX?) Unity/Construct 2/Cocos2D/NME/Corona/other game creation software? I'd like something that can do 2D and isn't limited by being too high-level. Other languages (Lua/LOVE? Moai?) Thanks for answering this rather long and tedious question...

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• Move over DFS and Robocopy, here is SyncToy!

  - by andywe

  Ever since Windows 2000, I have always had the need to replicate data to multiple endpoints with the same content. Until DFS was introduced, the method of thinking was to either manually copy the data location by location, or to batch script it with xcopy and schedule a task. Even though this worked (and still does today), it was cumbersome, and intensive on the network, especially when dealing with larger amounts of data. Then along came robocopy, as an internal tool written by an enterprising programmer at Microsoft. We used it quite a bit, especially when we could not use DFS in the early days. It was received so well, it made it into the public realm. At least now we could have the ability to determine what files had changed and only replicate those. Well, over time there has been evolution of this ideal. DFS is obviously the Windows enterprise class service to do this, along with BrancheCache..however you don’t always need or want the power of DFS, especially when it comes to small datacenter installations, or remote offices. I have specific data sets that are on closed or restricted networks, that either have a security need for this, or are in remote countries where bandwidth is a premium. FOr this, I use the latest evolution for one off replication names Synctoy. Synctoy is from Microsoft, seemingly released in 2009, that wraps a nice GUI around setting up a paired set of folders (remember the mobile briefcase from Windows 98?), and allowing you the choice of synchronization methods. 1 way, or 2 way. Simply create a paired set of folders on the source and destination, choose your options for content, exclude any file types you don’t want to replicate, and click run. Scheduling is even easier. MS has included a wrapper for doing just this so all you enter in your task schedule in the SynToyCMD.exe, a –R as an argument, and the time schedule. No more complicated command lines or scripts.   I find this especially useful when I use MS backup to back up a system volume, but only want subsets of backup information of a data share and ONLY when that dataset has changed. Not relying on full backups and incremental. An example of this is my application installation master share. I back this up with SyncToy because I do not need multiple backup copies..one copy elsewhere suffices to back it up. At home, very useful for your pictures, videos, music, ect..the backup is online and ready to access, not waiting for you to restore a backup file, and no need to institute a domain simply to have DFS.'   Do note there is a risk..if you accidently delete a file and do not catch this before the next sync, then depending on your SyncToy settings, you can indeed lose that file as the destination updates..so due diligence applies. I make it a rule to sync manly one way…I use my master share for making changes, and allow the schedule to follow suit. Any real important file I lock down as read only through file permissions so it cannot be deleted unless I intervene.   Check out the tool and have some fun! http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&id=15155

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• Please Help - PHP Form, when no text is entered [migrated]

  - by Joe Turner

  I'm creating a mobile landing page and I have also created a form that allows me to create more, by duplicating a folder that's host to a template file. The script then takes you to a page where you input the company details one by one and press submit. Then the page is created. My problem is, when a field is left out (YouTube for instance), the button is created and is blank. I would like there to be a default text for when there is no text. I've tried a few things and have been struggling to make this work for DAYS! <?php $company = $_POST["company"]; $phone = $_POST["phone"]; $colour = $_POST["colour"]; $email = $_POST["email"]; $website = $_POST["website"]; $video = $_POST["video"]; ?> <div id="contact-area"> <form method="post" action="generate.php"><br> <input type="text" name="company" placeholder="Company Name" /><br> <input type="text" name="slogan" placeholder="Slogan" /><br> <input class="color {required:false}" name="colour" placeholder="Company Colour"><br> <input type="text" name="phone" placeholder="Phone Number" /><br> <input type="text" name="email" placeholder="Email Address" /><br> <input type="text" name="website" placeholder="Full Website - Include http://" /><br> <input type="text" name="video" placeholder="Video URL" /><br> <input type="submit" value="Generate QuickLinks" style="background:url(images/submit.png) repeat-x; color:#FFF"/> </form> That's the form. It takes the variables and post's them to the file below. <?php $File = "includes/details.php"; $Handle = fopen($File, 'w'); ?> <?php $File = "includes/details.php"; $Handle = fopen($File, 'w'); $Data = "<div id='logo'> <h1 style='color:#$_POST[colour]'>$_POST[company]</h1> <h2>$_POST[slogan]</h2> </div> <ul data-role='listview' data-inset='true' data-theme='b'> <li style='background-color:#$_POST[colour]'><a href='tel:$_POST[phone]'>Phone Us</a></li> <li style='background-color:#$_POST[colour]'><a href='mailto:$_POST[email]'>Email Us</a></li> <li style='background-color:#$_POST[colour]'><a href='$_POST[website]'>View Full Website</a></li> <li style='background-color:#$_POST[colour]'><a href='$_POST[video]'>Watch Us</a></li> </ul> \n"; fwrite($Handle, $Data); fclose($Handle); ?> and there is what the form turns into. I need there to be a default link put in incase the field is left blank, witch it is sometimes. Thanks in advance guys.

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• Oracle at ARM TechCon

  - by Tori Wieldt

  ARM TechCon is a technical conference for hardware and software engineers, Oct. 30-Nov 1 in Santa Clara, California. Days two and three of the conference will be geared towards systems designers and software developers, those interested in building ARM processor-based modules, boards, and systems. It will cover all of the hardware and software, tools, ranging from low-power design, networking and connectivity, open source software, and security. Oracle is a sponsor of ARM TechCon, and will present three Java sessions and a hands-on-lab:  "Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi" - The Raspberry Pi, an ARM-powered single board computer running a full Linux distro off an SD card has caused a huge wave of interest among developers. This session looks at how Java can be used on a device such as this. Using Java SE for embedded devices and a port of JavaFX, the presentation includes a variety of demonstrations of what the Raspberry Pi is capable of. The Raspberry Pi also provides GPIO line access, and the session covers how this can be used from Java applications. Prepare to be amazed at what this tiny board can do. (Angela Caicedo, Java Evangelist) "Modernizing the Explosion of Advanced Microcontrollers with Embedded Java" - This session explains why Oracle Java ME Embedded is the right choice for building small, connected, and intelligent embedded solutions, such as industrial control applications, smart sensing, wireless connectivity, e-health, or general machine-to-machine (M2M) functionality---extending your business to new areas, driving efficiency, and reducing cost. The new Oracle Java ME Embedded product brings the benefits of Java technology to microcontroller platforms. It is a full-featured, complete, compliant software runtime with value-add features targeted to the embedded space and has the ability to interface with additional hardware components, remote manageability, and over-the-air software updates. It is accompanied by a feature-rich set of tools free of charge. (Fareed Suliman, Java Product Manager) "Embedded Java in Smart Energy and Healthcare" - This session covers embedded Java products and technologies that enable smart and connect devices in the Smart Energy and Healthcare/Medical industries. (speaker Kevin Lee) "Java SE Embedded Development on ARM Made Easy" - This Hands-on Lab aims to show that developers already familiar with the Java develop/debug/deploy lifecycle can apply those same skills to develop Java applications, using Java SE Embedded, on embedded devices. (speaker Jim Connors) In the Oracle booth #603, you can see the following demos: Industry Solutions with JavaThis exhibit consists of a number of industry solutions and how they can be powered by Java technology deployed on embedded systems.  Examples in consumer devices, home gateways, mobile health, smart energy, industrial control, and tablets all powered by applications running on the Java platform are shown.  Some of the solutions demonstrate the ability of Java to connect intelligent devices at the edge of the network to the datacenter or the cloud as a total end-to-end platform.Java in M2M with QualcommThis station will exhibit a new M2M solutions platform co-developed by Oracle and Qualcomm that enables wireless communications for embedded smart devices powered by Java, and share the types of industry solutions that are possible.  In addition, a new platform for wearable devices based on the ARM Cortex M3 platform is exhibited.Why Java for Embedded?Demonstration platforms will show how traditional development environments, tools, and Java programming skills can be used to create applications for embedded devices.  The advantages that Java provides because of  the runtime's abstraction of software from hardware, modularity and scalability, security, and application portability and manageability are shared with attendees. Drop by and see why Java is an optimal applications platform for embedded systems.

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• Web Safe Area (optimal resolution) for web app design?

  - by M.A.X

  I'm in the process of designing a new web app and I'm wondering for what 'Web Safe Area' should I optimize the app layout and design. By Web Safe Area I mean the actual area available to display the website in the browser (which is influenced by monitor resolution as well as the space taken up by the browser and OS) I did some investigation and thinking on my own but wanted to share this to see what the general opinion is. Here is what I found: Optimal Display Resolution: w3schools web stats seems to be the most referenced source (however they state that these are results from their site and is biased towards tech savvy users) http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php (aggregate data from something like 15,000 different sites that use their tracking services) StatCounter Global Stats Display Resolution (Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites) NetMarketShare Screen Resolutions (marketshare.hitslink.com) (a web analytics consulting firm, they get data from browsers of site visitors to their on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month) Display Resolution Summary: There is a bit of variation between the above sources but in general as of Jan 2011 looks like 1024x768 is about 20%, while ~85% have a higher resolution of at least 1280x768 (1280x800 is the most common of these with 15-20% of total web, depending on the source; 1280x1024 and 1366x768 follow behind with 9-14% of the share). My guess would be that the higher resolution values will be even more common if we filter on North America, and even higher if we filter on N.American corporate users (unfortunately I couldn't find any free geographically filtered statistics). Another point to note is that the 1024x768 desktop user population is likely lower than the aforementioned 20%, seeing as the iPad (1024x768 native display) is likely propping up those number (the app I'm designing is flash based, Apple mobile devices don't support flash so iPad support isn't a concern). My recommendation would be to optimize around the 1280x768 constraint (*note: 1280x768 is actually a relatively rare resolution, but I think it's a valid constraint range considering that 1366x768 is relatively common and 1280 is the most common horizontal resolution). Browser + OS Constraints: To further add to the constraints we have to subtract the space taken up by the browser (assuming IE, which is the most space consuming) and the OS (assuming WinXP-Win7): Win7 has the biggest taskbar footprint at a height of 40px (XP's and Vista's is 30px) The default IE8 view uses up 25px at the bottom of the screen with the status bar and a further 120px at the top of the screen with the windows title bar and the browser UI (assuming the default 'favorites' toolbar is present, it would instead be 91px without the favorites toolbar). Assuming no scrollbar, we also loose a total of 4px horizontally for the window outline. This means that we are left with 583px of vertical space and 1276px of horizontal. In other words, a Web Safe Area of 1276 x 583 Is this a correct line of thinking? I'm really surprised that I couldn't find this type of investigation anywhere on the web. Lots of websites talk about designing for 1024x768, but that's only half the equation! There is no mention of browser/OS influences on the actual area you have to display the site/app. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks. EDIT Another caveat to my line of thinking above is that different browsers actually take up different amounts of pixels based on the OS they're running on. For example, under WinXP IE8 takes up 142px on top of the screen (instead the aforementioned 120px for Win7) because the file menu shows up by default on XP while in Win7 the file menu is hidden by default. So it looks like on WinXP + IE8 the Web Safe Area would be a mere 572px (768px-142-30-24=572)

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists

  - by Argenis

    Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company - and your employer trusts you with keeping them safe. Probably one of the most important of these assets are passwords. As you well know, the can be used anywhere: for service accounts, credentials, proxies, linked servers, DTS/SSIS packages, symmetrical keys, private keys, etc., etc. Have you given some thought to what you're doing to keep these passwords safe? Are you backing them up somewhere? Who else besides you can access them? Good-Ol’ Post-It Notes Under Your Keyboard If you have a password-protected Excel sheet for your passwords, I have bad news for you: Excel's level of encryption is good for your grandma's budget spreadsheet, not for a list of enterprise passwords. I will try to summarize the main point of this best practice in one sentence: You should keep your passwords on an encrypted, access and version-controlled, backed-up, well-known shared location that every DBA on your team is aware of, and maintain copies of this password "database" on your DBA's workstations. Now I have to break down that statement to you: - Encrypted: what’s the point of saving your passwords on a file that any Windows admin with enough privileges can read? - Access controlled: This one is pretty much self-explanatory. - Version controlled: Passwords change (and I’m really hoping you do change them) and version control would allow you to track what a previous password was if the utility you’ve chosen doesn’t handle that for you. - Backed-up: You want a safe copy of the password list to be kept offline, preferably in long term storage, with relative ease of restoring. - Well-known shared location: This is critical for teams: what good is a password list if only one person in the team knows where it is? I have seen multiple examples of this that work well. They all start with an encrypted database. Certainly you could leverage SQL Server's native encryption solutions like cell encryption for this. I have found such implementations to be impractical, for the most part. Enter The World Of Utilities There are a myriad of open source/free software solutions to help you here. One of my favorites is KeePass, which creates encrypted files that can be saved to a network share, Sharepoint, etc. KeePass has UIs for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Other solutions I've used before worth mentioning include PasswordSafe and 1Password, with the latter one being a paid solution – but wildly popular in mobile devices. There are, of course, even more "enterprise-level" solutions available from 3rd party vendors. The truth is that most of the customers that I work with don't need that level of protection of their digital assets, and something like a KeePass database on Sharepoint suits them very well. What are you doing to safeguard your passwords? Leave a comment below, and join the discussion! Cheers, -Argenis

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• Creating a Corporate Data Hub

  - by BuckWoody

  The Windows Azure Marketplace has a rich assortment of data and software offerings for you to use – a type of Software as a Service (SaaS) for IT workers, not necessarily for end-users. Among those offerings is the “Data Hub” – a  codename for a project that ironically actually does what the codename says. In many of our organizations, we have multiple data quality issues. Finding data is one problem, but finding it just once is often a bigger problem. Lots of departments and even individuals have stored the same data more than once, and in some cases, made changes to one of the copies. It’s difficult to know which location or version of the data is authoritative. Then there’s the problem of accessing the data. It’s fairly straightforward to publish a database, share or other location internally to store the data. But then you have to figure out who owns it, how it is controlled, and pass out the various connection strings to those who want to use it. And then you need to figure out how to let folks access the internal data externally – bringing up all kinds of security issues. Finally, in many cases our user community wants us to combine data from the internally sources with external data, bringing up the security, strings, and exploration features up all over again. Enter the Data Hub. This is an online offering, where you assign an administrator and data stewards. You import the data into the service, and it’s available to you - and only you and your organization if you wish. The basic steps for this service are to set up the portal for your company, assign administrators and permissions, and then you assign data areas and import data into them. From there you make them discoverable, and then you have multiple options that you or your users can access that data. You’re then able, if you wish, to combine that data with other data in one location. So how does all that work? What about security? Is it really that easy? And can you really move the data definition off to the Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) that know the particular data stack better than the IT team does? Well, nothing good is easy – but using the Data Hub is actually pretty simple. I’ll give you a link in a moment where you can sign up and try this yourself. Once you sign up, you assign an administrator. From there you’ll create data areas, and then use a simple interface to bring the data in. All of this is done in a portal interface – nothing to install, configure, update or manage. After the data is entered in, and you’ve assigned meta-data to describe it, your users have multiple options to access it. They can simply use the portal – which actually has powerful visualizations you can use on any platform, even mobile phones or tablets.     Your users can also hit the data with Excel – which gives them ultimate flexibility for display, all while using an authoritative, single reference for the data. Since the service is online, they can do this wherever they are – given the proper authentication and permissions. You can also hit the service with simple API calls, like this one from C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921924  You can make HTTP calls instead of code, and the data can even be exposed as an OData Feed. As you can see, there are a lot of options. You can check out the offering here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/labs/data-hub.aspx and you can read the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921938

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• BI&EPM in Focus November 2012

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Customers ·       San Diego Unified School District Harnesses Attendance, Procurement, and Operational Data with Oracle Exalytics, Generating $4.4 Million in Savings ·       NilsonGroup chooses Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine as their solution to access critical data to keep its stores competitive with real-time Mobile BI:  Video ·       Nykredit, in the Danish Financial Sector, describes their experiences from testing the Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine: Video  ·       Sodexo chose Oracle Exalytics as their business analytics platform:  Video ·       AstraZeneca (US, Canada, MedImmune) Improves Insight, Analytics, and Reporting, Enterprisewide with Unified Planning on a Single Platform ·       Experian Consolidates Reporting Systems for One, Global View of Financial Data and Improves Planning for Continued Growth ·       Munchkin Gives its Line of Children’s Products Plenty of Room to Grow in an Upgraded Enterprise Application Environment ·       Top 20 EPM Customer Snapshots, in One Handy Booklet (link) ·       Customer and Partner Successes: Link to Complete Archive Enterprise Performance Management ·       Nov 15: Is Hope and Email the Core of your Reconciliation Process? (link) ·       Replay: Integrated Business Planning, Featuring Leggett & Platt (link) ·       Whitepaper: The New Competitive Advantage - Strategic CIO's Embrace the Cloud (link) ·       Press: Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Driving Significant Improvements in Budget Management and Reporting for Public Sector Organizations (link) ·       Enterprise Performance Management Video Feature Overviews, Now Available on YouTube (link) ·       NEW Solution Brief - Oracle Hyperion Planning on the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine (link) ·       For Insurance sector: Datasheet for new release V2.0 - Oracle Quantitative Management and Reporting for Solvency II (link) ·       Whitepaper FSN 2012: Managing Risk and Uncertainty, an Executive's Guide to Integrated Business Planning (link) ·       NEW Datasheet for Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (link) ·       Blog: Planning in the Cloud - For Real Business Intelligence ·       Press: Latest Release of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine Software Enables Customers to View and Analyze Data at the Speed of Business (link) ·       Press: New Release (11.1.1.6.2BP1) of Oracle Business Intelligence Enables Users to Quickly Access and Analyze Key Business Information, Anytime, Anywhere (link) ·       Mark Hurd Interviewed on USA Today about Big Data & Analytics (link) ·       Whitepaper: Mastering Big Data - CFO Strategies to Transform Insight into Opportunity (link) ·       Nov 15: Improve Asset Utilization. Achieve Greater Profitability: Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics (link) ·       Replay: Oracle Enterprise Asset Mgmt Analytics and Oracle Manufacturing Analytics (link) ·       Overload to Impact: An Industry Scorecard on Big Data Business Challenges (link) ·       Webcast Replay: Overview of Oracle Endeca Informational Discovery (link) ·       OBIEE 11g: Required and Recommended Patches and Patch Sets (link)

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• Wireless device bug on 13.10. BCM4313 registers as eth1 instead of wlan0 and no internet access

  - by user205691

  My Hotel wiFi requires me to login with a username & password after connecting to the hotspot. So, my browser would open a page with username & passwrd fields to login and then connect to internet. But unfortunately, firefox & chromium dont seem to work. i dont think it is browser related but a setting for the wifi router or driver which is creating this issue. using Broadcom 801.11 STA wireless driver (proprietary). tried open source as well but same result !! The image linked below shows my wifi connection setting & Chromium. The login page itself comes up after a long time and after entering the credentials, it keeps loading for ever !! it is the same case for every other browser.. so i dont think its browser issue but something to do with wifi setting or network manager stuff.. interestingly, i am able to connect to WiFi networks with WPA key without any issue. Adhoc hotspot is a problem and that is my regular home network :( .. I hope i can get some help solving this issue ! I have tried repeating the same hotspot after login from my android, by creating a virtual repeater with WPA key and it works. I can browse on ubuntu using this method.. but cant be doing this regularly ! I tried loading the same login page of the hotel wifi while browsing through my repeater wifi created on mobile and screen shot attached below. the page loads up quick and easy.. so this means something is wrong with the way network manager handles adhoc connectivity & login ?? i installed wicd0 but it crashes on startup and not helpful at all ! Screenshot of Chromium page Login page with repeated hotspot ifconfig in my terminal results: krishna@krishna-HP-ENVY-4-Notebook-PC:~$ ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 28:92:4a:1d:54:fa UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr e0:06:e6:89:fa:49 inet addr:10.24.1.71 Bcast:10.24.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::e206:e6ff:fe89:fa49/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:10940 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:348431 TX packets:6611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:7669631 (7.6 MB) TX bytes:864195 (864.1 KB) Interrupt:17 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:2146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:166120 (166.1 KB) TX bytes:166120 (166.1 KB) I wonder why is the wireless configured under eth1 ? I think this is a bug with earlier ubuntu versions, but is this normal in 13.10 or is there a wrong configuration here ? The wireless device in my pc is BCM4313 and i have installed the bcmwl-kernel-sources, wireless-tools to support the device. i also reinstalled the bcmwl-kernel as suggested on broadcom website, via synaptic package manager. Nothing has changed this situation ! I tried booting into liveUSB and then ifconfig results show wireless under wlan0. But then the wireless connects and loads the login page. So is the problem with the device configuration now ? i really want to get this fixed before i start configuring the other stuff like ATI graphics and such on the laptop for overheating.. lack of internet access is too bad a bug for me :P any help is appreciated!

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• Windows Phone 7 and WS-Trust

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  A question that I often hear these days is: “Can I connect a Windows Phone 7 device to my existing enterprise services?”. Well – since most of my services are typically issued token based, this requires support for WS-Trust and WS-Security on the client. Let’s see what’s necessary to write a WP7 client for this scenario. First I converted the Silverlight library that comes with the Identity Training Kit to WP7. Some things are not supported in WP7 WCF (like message inspectors and some client runtime hooks) – but besides that this was a simple copy+paste job. Very nice! Next I used the WSTrustClient to request tokens from my STS: private WSTrustClient GetWSTrustClient() {     var client = new WSTrustClient(         new WSTrustBindingUsernameMixed(),         new EndpointAddress("https://identity.thinktecture.com/…/issue.svc/mixed/username"),         new UsernameCredentials(_txtUserName.Text, _txtPassword.Password));     return client; } private void _btnLogin_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     _client = GetWSTrustClient();       var rst = new RequestSecurityToken(WSTrust13Constants.KeyTypes.Bearer)     {         AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress("https://identity.thinktecture.com/rp/")     };       _client.IssueCompleted += client_IssueCompleted;     _client.IssueAsync(rst); } I then used the returned RSTR to talk to the WCF service. Due to a bug in the combination of the Silverlight library and the WP7 runtime – symmetric key tokens seem to have issues currently. Bearer tokens work fine. So I created the following binding for the WCF endpoint specifically for WP7. <customBinding>   <binding name="mixedNoSessionBearerBinary">     <security authenticationMode="IssuedTokenOverTransport"               messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity11 WSTrust13 WSSecureConversation13 WSSecurityPolicy12 BasicSecurityProfile10">       <issuedTokenParameters keyType="BearerKey" />     </security>     <binaryMessageEncoding />     <httpsTransport/>   </binding> </customBinding> The binary encoding is not necessary, but will speed things up a little for mobile devices. I then call the service with the following code: private void _btnCallService_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     var binding = new CustomBinding(         new BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement(),         new HttpsTransportBindingElement());       _proxy = new StarterServiceContractClient(         binding,         new EndpointAddress("…"));     using (var scope = new OperationContextScope(_proxy.InnerChannel))     {         OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageHeaders.Add(new IssuedTokenHeader(Globals.RSTR));         _proxy.GetClaimsAsync();     } } works. download

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