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• New Slides - and a discussion about Dictionary Statistics

  - by Mike Dietrich

  First of all we have just upoaded a new version of the Upgrade and Migration Workshop slides with some added information. So please feel free to download them from here.The slides have one new interesting information which lead to a discussion I've had in the past days with a very large customer regarding their upgrades - and internally on the mailing list targeting an EBS database upgrade from Oracle 10.2 to Oracle 11.2. Why are we creating dictionary statistics during upgrade? I'd believe this forced dictionary statistics creation got introduced with the desupport of the Rule Based Optimizer in Oracle 10g. The goal: as RBO is not supported anymore we have to make sure that the data dictionary has fresh and non-stale statistics. Actually that would have led in Oracle 9i to strange behaviour in some databases - so in Oracle 9i this was strongly disrecommended. The upgrade scripts got hardcoded to create these stats. But during tests we had the following findings: It's important to create dictionary statistics the night before the upgrade. Not two weeks before, not 60 minutes before your downtime begins. But very close to the upgrade. From Oracle 10g onwards you'd just say: $ execute DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS; This is important to make sure you have fresh dictionary statistics during upgrade for performance reasons. Tests have shown that running an upgrade without valid dictionary statistics might slow down the whole upgrade by factors of 2x-3x. And it would be also a great idea post upgrade to create again fresh dictionary statistics when you've did suppress the stats creation during the upgrade process. Suppress? Yes, you could set this underscore parameter in the init.ora: _optim_dict_stats_at_db_cr_upg=FALSE to suppress the forced dictionary statistics collection during an upgrade. We believe strongly that (a) people using the default statistics creation process which will create dictionary statistics by default and (b) create fresh stats before upgrade on the dictionary. Therefore we find it save once you have followed our advice to use the underscore during upgrade. And we've taken out that forced statistics collection during upgrade in the next release of the database. Please note: If you are using the DBUA for the upgrade it will remove underscore parameters for the upgrade run to improve performance - which is generally a good idea. So you'll have to start the DBUA with that call: $ dbua -initParam "_optim_dict_stats_at_cb_cr_upg"=FALSE -Mike

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• Using machine learning to aim mirrors in a solar array?

  - by Buttons840

  I've been thinking about solar collectors where several independent mirrors to focus the light on a solar collector, similar to the following design from Energy Innovations. Because there will be flaws in the assembly of this solar array, I am proceeding with the following assumptions (or lack thereof): The software knows the "position" of each mirror, but doesn't know how this position relates to the real world or to other mirrors. This will account for poor mirror calibration or other environmental factors which may effect one mirror but not the others. If a mirror moves 10 units in one direction, and then 10 units in the opposite direction, it will end up where it originally started. I would like to use machine learning to position the mirrors correctly and focus the light on the collector. I expect I would approach this as an optimization problem, optimizing the mirror positions to maximize the heat inside the collector and the power output. The problem is finding a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space (considering each mirror has 2 axis of rotation). Some of the problems I anticipate are: cloudy days, even if you stumble upon the perfect mirror alignment, it might be cloudy at the time noisy sensor data the sun is a moving target, it moves along a path, and follows a different path every day - although you could calculate the exact position of the sun at any time, you wouldn't know how that position relates to your mirrors My question isn't about the solar array, but possible machine learning techniques that would help in this "small target in a noisy high dimensional-space" problem. I mentioned the solar array because it was the catalyst for this question and a good example. What machine learning techniques can find such a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space? EDIT: A few additional thoughts: Yes, you can calculate the suns position in the real world, but you don't know how the mirrors position is related to the real world (unless you've learned it somehow). You might know the suns azimuth is 220 degrees, and the suns elevation is 60 degrees, and you might know a mirror is at position (-20, 42); now tell me, is that mirror correctly aligned with the sun? You don't know. Lets assume you have some very sophisticated heat measurements, and you know "with this heat level, there must be 2 mirrors correctly aligned". Now the question is, which two mirrors (out of 25 or more) are correctly aligned? One solution I considered was to approximate the correct "alignment function" using a neural network which would take the suns azimuth and elevation as input and output a large array with 2 values for each mirror which correspond to the 2 axis of each mirror. I'm not sure what the best training method is though.

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• Cloud service and IM protocol advice, for a backend to group chat mobile app

  - by Jonathan

  Overview I’m going to develop an app on Android and iOS. It will allow users to set up group ‘chat rooms’ and talk on chat rooms set up by other users. The service needs to be highly scalable, such that it could accommodate a massive increase in users overnight (we can only dream). Chat requirements The chat protocol used should be flexible: it should allow me to determine who can view/post on ‘chat rooms’ based on certain other factors, as determined by the first poster/creator of the particular ‘chat room’. It should also allow for users to simply install the app and begin using the service, after only providing a simple nickname (which could be changed later). Chat protocol plans Having looked around I think the XMPP protocol is the best candidate. In particular the Multi-user chat extension looks like what I’ll need. Would this be most suited to my requirements, or do you know another potential solution? Cloud service I have been deciding between Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Windows Azure. I’m coming to the conclusion that Azure will be best, as it is easier to manage than AWS (ease of scalability will be a key factor in the design), I think it may be less restricted than GAE, plus Azure will soon have toolkits to allow easy interfacing with both Android and iOS phones. Is this the decision you would have made, or would you recommend/look into other cloud services? General project philosophy I have only recently started looking into this project’s feasibility, and am no expert on any of its aspects. So wherever possible I will leave the actual implementations to experts, i.e. choosing a higher-level cloud service, using a well-documented plugin of a, proven reliable, group chat protocol etc. My background I have some programming knowledge from a computer science degree. Main languages I’ve used have been Java and Python, but I don’t want this to affect design decisions for the project. The most appropriate languages for the task should be used, i.e. I don’t mind learning a lot of new skills (my current programming levels are relatively basic anyway). Thank you Thanks for reading, and any advice you have about any aspect would be greatly appreciated :-)

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• SharePoint Thoughts

  - by Tim Murphy

  I was listening to .NET Rocks episode #713 and it got me thinking about a number of SharePoint related topics. I have been working with SharePoint since the 2001 product came out and have watched it evolve over the years.  Today SharePoint is one of the most powerful and flexible products in the market.  Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement (a lot of improvement in fact) and with much power comes much responsibility. My main gripe these days is that you have to develop on a server instance.  This adds a real barrier to entry for developers.  You either have to run VMWare or Hyper-V on your developer machine or actually develop on your dev server for most tasks.  Yes, there is a way to setup a Windows 7 machine with the SharePoint components but it is very hackish. Beyond that the tools in VS2010 are a great leap forward from past generations.  Not requiring a separate package creation tool is not the least of the improvements.  Better workflow and web part development have also eased the burden of many developers. The other thing the show brought up in my thoughts was more around usage.  Users want to be able to self server everything without regard to what affect that has on leveraging their data from a corporate perspective.  My coworkers who work on Lotus Notes ask why the user can’t just do what ever they want? Part of the reason is that those features have not been built, but the other part is that giving them those features is often like giving an infant a loaded hand gun.  You can do it but it doesn’t make it the smart thing to do. As with any tool that is going to be used in the enterprise it should be subject to governance.  If controls are not in place as they said in the episode of DNR the document libraries and I believe SharePoint in general starts to look as disarrayed and unusable as a shared drive.  Consider these factors before giving into every whim of the users.  You should be able to explain to them the tradeoffs of giving them full control versus being able to leverage the information they collect to the benefit of the organization. These are just a couple of the thoughts that were triggered by the show.  I’m sure there are more discussions that can be had.  Feel free to leave your comments about the pros and cons of SharePoint. del.icio.us Tags: .NET Rocks,SharePoint,software development

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• Why would more CPU cores on virtual machine slow compile times?

  - by Sid

  [edit#2] If anyone from VMWare can hit me up with a copy of VMWare Fusion, I'd be more than happy to do the same as a VirtualBox vs VMWare comparison. Somehow I suspect the VMWare hypervisor will be better tuned for hyperthreading (see my answer too) I'm seeing something curious. As I increase the number of cores on my Windows 7 x64 virtual machine, the overall compile time increases instead of decreasing. Compiling is usually very well suited for parallel processing as in the middle part (post dependency mapping) you can simply call a compiler instance on each of your .c/.cpp/.cs/whatever file to build partial objects for the linker to take over. So I would have imagined that compiling would actually scale very well with # of cores. But what I'm seeing is: 8 cores: 1.89 sec 4 cores: 1.33 sec 2 cores: 1.24 sec 1 core: 1.15 sec Is this simply a design artifact due to a particular vendor's hypervisor implementation (type2:virtualbox in my case) or something more pervasive across more VMs to make hypervisor implementations more simpler? With so many factors, I seem to be able to make arguments both for and against this behavior - so if someone knows more about this than me, I'd be curious to read your answer. Thanks Sid [edit:addressing comments] @MartinBeckett: Cold compiles were discarded. @MonsterTruck: Couldn't find an opensource project to compile directly. Would be great but can't screwup my dev env right now. @Mr Lister, @philosodad: Have 8 hw threads, using VirtualBox, so should be 1:1 mapping without emulation @Thorbjorn: I have 6.5GB for the VM and a smallish VS2012 project - it's quite unlikely that I'm swapping in/out trashing the page file. @All: If someone can point to an open source VS2010/VS2012 project, that might be a better community reference than my (proprietary) VS2012 project. Orchard and DNN seem to need environment tweaking to compile in VS2012. I really would like to see if someone with VMWare Fusion also sees this (for VMWare vs VirtualBox compartmentalization) Test details: Hardware: Macbook Pro Retina CPU : Core i7 @ 2.3Ghz (quad core, hyper threaded = 8 cores in windows task manager) Memory : 16 GB Disk : 256GB SSD Host OS: Mac OS X 10.8 VM type: VirtualBox 4.1.18 (type 2 hypervisor) Guest OS: Windows 7 x64 SP1 Compiler: VS2012 compiling a solution with 3 C# Azure projects Compile times measure by VS2012 plugin called 'VSCommands' All tests run 5 times, first 2 runs discarded, last 3 averaged

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• Training v. Teaching

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/28/training-v.-teaching.aspxAs some of you may know, I recently accepted a position to teach an undergraduate course at my alma mater. Yesterday, I had my first day in an academic classroom. I immediately noticed a difference with the interactions between the students. They don't act like students in a professional training or conference talk. I wanted to use this opportunity to enumerate some of those differences. The immediate thing I noticed was the lack of open environment. This is not to say the class was hostile towards me. I am used to entering the room, bantering with audience, loosening everyone a bit, and flowing into the discussion. A purely academic audience does not banter. At least, they do not banter on day one. I think I can attribute this to two factors. This first is a greater perception of authority. In a training or conference environment, I am an equal with the audience. This is true even if I am being a subject matter expert. We're all professionals. We're all there to learn from each other, share our stories, and enjoy the journey. In the academic classroom, there was a distinct class difference. I had forgotten about this distinction; I had the professional familiarity with the staff by the time I completed my masters. This leads to the other distinction. These was an expectation of performance. At conference and professional training, there is generally no (immediate) grading. This may be a preparation for a certification exam, but I'm not the one responsible for delivering the exam. This was not the case in the academic classroom. These students are battling for points, and I am the sole arbiter. These students are less likely to let the material wash over them, applying the material to their past experiences. They were down taking notes. I don't want to leave the impression that there was no interact in the classroom. I spent a good deal of time doing problems with the class on the whiteboard. I tried to get the class to help me work out the steps. This opened up a few of them. After every conference or training class, I always get a few people that will email me afterward to continue the conversation. I am very curious to see if anybody comes to my office hours tomorrow. However, that is a curiosity that will have to wait until tomorrow.

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

  - by Ryan

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

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• Software Tuned to Humanity

  - by Phil Factor

  I learned a great deal from a cynical old programmer who once told me that the ideal length of time for a compiler to do its work was the same time it took to roll a cigarette. For development work, this is oh so true. After intently looking at the editing window for an hour or so, it was a relief to look up, stretch, focus the eyes on something else, and roll the possibly-metaphorical cigarette. This was software tuned to humanity. Likewise, a user’s perception of the “ideal” time that an application will take to move from frame to frame, to retrieve information, or to process their input has remained remarkably static for about thirty years, at around 200 ms. Anything else appears, and always has, to be either fast or slow. This could explain why commercial applications, unlike games, simulations and communications, aren’t noticeably faster now than they were when I started programming in the Seventies. Sure, they do a great deal more, but the SLAs that I negotiated in the 1980s for application performance are very similar to what they are nowadays. To prove to myself that this wasn’t just some rose-tinted misperception on my part, I cranked up a Z80-based Jonos CP/M machine (1985) in the roof-space. Within 20 seconds from cold, it had loaded Wordstar and I was ready to write. OK, I got it wrong: some things were faster 30 years ago. Sure, I’d now have had all sorts of animations, wizzy graphics, and other comforting features, but it seems a pity that we have used all that extra CPU and memory to increase the scope of what we develop, and the graphical prettiness, but not to speed the processes needed to complete a business procedure. Never mind the weight, the response time’s great! To achieve 200 ms response times on a Z80, or similar, performance considerations influenced everything one did as a developer. If it meant writing an entire application in assembly code, applying every smart algorithm, and shortcut imaginable to get the application to perform to spec, then so be it. As a result, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool performance freak and find it difficult to change my habits. Conversely, many developers now seem to feel quite differently. While all will acknowledge that performance is important, it’s no longer the virtue is once was, and other factors such as user-experience now take precedence. Am I wrong? If not, then perhaps we need a new school of development technique to rival Agile, dedicated once again to producing applications that smoke the rear wheels rather than pootle elegantly to the shops; that forgo skeuomorphism, cute animation, or architectural elegance in favor of the smell of hot rubber. I struggle to name an application I use that is truly notable for its blistering performance, and would dearly love one to do my everyday work – just as long as it doesn’t go faster than my brain.

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• Independent Research on 1500 Companies Reveals Challenges in Performance Visibility – Part 1

  - by ndwyouell

  At the end of May I was joined by Professor Andy Neely of Cambridge University on a webinar, with an audience of over 700, to discuss the results of this extensive study which covered 13 countries and nearly every commercial and industrial sector.  What stunned both of us was not so much the number listening but the 100 questions they asked in just 1 hour.  This certainly represents a record in my experience and for those that organized the webinar. So what was all the fuss about?  Well, to begin with this was a pretty big sample and it represented organizations with over $100m sales across the USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It also delivered some pretty interesting results across a wide range of EPM subjects such as profitability, planning and reporting.  Let’s look at some of those findings. We kicked off with profitability, one of the key factors in driving performance, or that is what you would think, but in fact 82% of our respondents said they did not have complete visibility into the profitability of their organization. 91% of these went further to say that, not surprisingly, this lack of knowledge into the profitability has implications with over half citing 3 or more implications.  Implications cited included misallocated resources, revenue opportunities not maximized, erroneous decisions made and impaired financial performance.  Quite a list of implications, especially given the difficult economic circumstances many organizations are operating in at this time. So why is this?  Well other results in the study point to some of the potential reasons.  Firstly 59% of respondents that use spreadsheets use them for monitoring profitability and 93% of all managers responding to the study use spreadsheets to gather and analyze information.  This is an enormous proportion given the problems with using spreadsheets based performance management systems that have been widely talked about for many years.  For profitability analysis this is particularly important when you consider the typical requirement will be to allocate cost and revenue across 6+ dimensions based on many different allocation methods.  Not something that can be done easily in spreadsheets plus it gets to be a nightmare once you want to change allocations, run different scenarios and then change the basis of your planning and budgeting! It is no wonder so many organizations have challenges in performance visibility. My next blog will look at the fragmented nature of many organizations’ planning.  In the meantime if you want to read the complete report on the research go to: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/ns/dlgwelcome.jsp?p_ext=Y&p_dlg_id=10077790&src=7038701&Act=29

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• How is fundamental mathematics efficiently evaluated by programming languages?

  - by Korvin Szanto

  As I get more and more involved with the theory behind programming, I find myself fascinated and dumbfounded by seemingly simple things.. I realize that my understanding of the majority of fundamental processes is justified through circular logic Q: How does this work? A: Because it does! I hate this realization! I love knowledge, and on top of that I love learning, which leads me to my question (albeit it's a broad one). Question: How are fundamental mathematical operators assessed with programming languages? How have current methods been improved? Example var = 5 * 5; My interpretation: $num1 = 5; $num2 = 5; $num3 = 0; while ($num2 > 0) { $num3 = $num3 + $num1; $num2 = $num2 - 1; } echo $num3; This seems to be highly inefficient. With Higher factors, this method is very slow while the standard built in method is instantanious. How would you simulate multiplication without iterating addition? var = 5 / 5; How is this even done? I can't think of a way to literally split it 5 into 5 equal parts. var = 5 ^ 5; Iterations of iterations of addition? My interpretation: $base = 5; $mod = 5; $num1 = $base; while ($mod > 1) { $num2 = 5; $num3 = 0; while ($num2 > 0) { $num3 = $num3 + $num1; $num2 = $num2 - 1; } $num1 = $num3; $mod -=1; } echo $num3; Again, this is EXTREMELY inefficient, yet I can't think of another way to do this. This same question extends to all mathematical related functions that are handled automagically.

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• In Technology, Ignorance is NOT Bliss

  - by Tanu Sood

  Author: Debra Lilley, ACE Director, UK Proof I’m not technical -  I’ve just finished a Latin America tour with OTN and a funny thing happened that I want to share with you; because it is quite a good analogy for how many of us use technology today and you know how I love analogies. In Costa Rica we had a really long journey up through the mountains to where our conference was to be. The road was windy and narrow and once it got dark there was no scenery to see, boredom set in. At one stage I looked at my watch to see the time, but in the dark I couldn’t make it out, so I thought I would be clever and use the torch in my smartphone! Even though as soon as I switched on the phone it showed the time, I ignored it and used the torch to read my watch. That’s us when we pay maintenance on software, ask for enhancements, and either chose not to upgrade or as I have seen so many times, upgrade but don’t use the new features. I know there are always other factors not least the upgrade costs themselves but in the later releases of all the Oracle family of applications Oracle have done a lot to make the interoperability of them with Oracle Fusion Middleware more successful and in many cases for the first time. My heritage is Oracle E Business Suite (EBS) and the availability of Oracle Weblogic for EBS is fantastic for an Oracle powered organisation that can move away from supporting multiple flavours of application server. The same release made available  - the no downtime patching that Oracle Database 11g introduced with Edition Based Redefinition. I am not saying you must use these features but you must be aware of what each release of your application brings and make a business based decision as to whether it is for you or not. I like to have a simple spreadsheet of features with no-value, nice-to-have, must-have ratings, but make the spreadsheet cumulative so that when you do upgrade you have all the features listed you previously didn’t take up. That way you can avoid the ‘using your phone to read your watch’ scenario. About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Lilley has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Lead and Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts  

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• What OpenGL version(s) to learn and/or use?

  - by zuko

  So, I'm new to OpenGL... I have general knowledge of game programming but little practical experience. I've been looking into various articles and books and trying to dive into OpenGL, but I've found the various versions and old vs new way of doing things confusing. I guess my first questions is does anyone know some figures about percentages of gamers that can run each version of OpenGL. What's the market share like? 2.x, 3.x, 4.x... I looked into the requirements for Half Life 2 since I know Valve updated it with OpenGL to run on Mac and I know they usually try to hit a very wide user-base, and they say a minimum of GeForce 8 Series. I looked at the 8800 GT on Nvidia's website and it listed support for OpenGL 2.1. Which, maybe I'm wrong, sounds ancient to me since there's already 4.x. I looked up a driver for 8800GT and it says it supports 4.2! A bit of a discrepancy there, lol. I've also read things like XP only supports up to a certain version, or OS X only supports 3.2, or all kinds of other things. Overall, I'm just confused as to how much support there is for various versions and what version to learn/use. I'm also looking for learning resources. My search results thus far have pointed me to the OpenGL SuperBible. The 4th edition has great reviews on Amazon, but it teaches 2.1. The 5th edition teaches 3.3 and there are a couple things in the reviews that mention the 4th edition is better and that the 5th edition doesn't properly teach the new features or something? Basically, even within learning material I'm seeing discrepancies and I just don't even know where to start. From what I understand, 3.x started a whole new way of doing things and I've read from various articles and reviews that you want to "stay away from deprecated features like glBegin(), glEnd()" yet a lot of books and tutorials I've seen use that method. I've seen people saying that, basically, the new way of doing stuff is more complicated yet the old way is bad . Just a side note, personally, I know I still have a lot to learn beforehand, but I'm interested in tessellation; so I guess that factors into it as well, because, as far as I understand that's only in 4.x? [just btw, my desktop supports 4.2]

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 3: Key Concerns

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 3 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Keys Concerns Of Smartphones In The Enterprise These are the factors that you need to be aware of and address in order to build successful enterprise smartphone applications.  Most of them have nothing to do with the application itself as you will see here. Managing Devices Managing devices is a factor that is going to effect how much your company will have to spend outside of developing the applications.  How will you track the devices within the corporation?  How often will you have to replace phones and as a consequence have to upgrade your applications to support new phones?  The devices can represent a significant investment of capital.  If these questions are not addressed you will find a number of hidden costs throughout the life of your solution. Purchase or BYOD We have seen the trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) lately within the enterprise.  How many meetings have you been in where someone is on their personal iPad, iPhone, Android phone or Windows Phone?  The issue is if you can afford to support everyone's choice in device? That is a lot to take on even if you only support the current release of each platform. Do you go with the most popular device or do you pick a platform that best matches your current ecosystem and distribute company owned devices?  There is no easy answer here, but you should be able give some dollar value to both hardware and development costs related to platform coverage. Asset Tracking/Insurance Smartphones are devices that are easier to lose or have stolen than laptops and desktops. Not only do you have your normal asset management concerns but also assignment of financial responsibility. You also will need to insure them against damage and theft and add legal documents that spell out the responsibilities of the employees that use these devices. Personal vs. Corporate Data What happens when you terminate an employee?  How do you recover the device?  What happens when they have put personal data on the device?  These are all situation that can cause possible loss of corporate intellectual property or legal repercussions of reclaiming a device with personal data on it.  Policies need to be put in place that protect the company from being exposed to type of loss.  This can mean significant legal and procedural cost that you need to consider. Coming Up In the last installment of this series I will cover application development considerations. del.icio.us Tags: Smartphones,Enterprise Smartphone Apps,Architecture

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• Redesigning an Information System - Part 1

  - by dbradley

  Through the next few weeks or months I'd like to run a small series of articles sharing my experiences from the largest of the project I've worked on and explore some of the real-world problems I've come across and how we went about solving them. I'm afraid I can't give too many specifics on the project right now as it's not yet complete so you'll have to forgive me for being a little abstract in places! To start with I'm going to run through a little of the background of the problem and the motivations to re-design from scratch. Then I'll work through the approaches taken to understanding the requirements, designing, implementing, testing and migrating to the new system. Motivations for Re-designing a Large Information System The system is one that's been in place for a number of years and was originally designed to do a significantly different one to what it's now being used for. This is mainly due to the product maturing as well as client requirements changing. As with most information systems this one can be defined in four main areas of functionality: Input – adding information to the system Storage – persisting information in an efficient, searchable structure Output – delivering the information to the client Control – management of the process There can be a variety of reasons to re-design an existing system; a few of our own turned out to be factors such as: Overall system reliability System response time Failure isolation and recovery Maintainability of code and information General extensibility to solve future problem Separation of business and product concerns New or improved features The factor that started the thought process was the desire to improve the way in which information was entered into the system. However, this alone was not the entire reason for deciding to redesign. Business Drivers Typically all software engineers would always prefer to do a project from scratch themselves. It generally means you don't have to deal with problems created by predecessors and you can create your own absolutely perfect solution. However, the reality of working within a business is that the bottom line comes down to return on investment. For a medium sized business such as mine there must be actual value able to be delivered within a reasonable timeframe for any work to be started. As a result, any long term project will generally take a lot of effort and consideration to be approved by those in charge and therefore it might be better to break down the project into more manageable chunks which allow more frequent deliverables and also value within a shorter timeframe. As the only thing of concern was the methods for inputting information, this is where we started with requirements gathering and design. However knowing that there might be more to the problem and not limiting your design decisions before the requirements is key to finding the best solutions.

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• Performance variation

  - by Ree

  During my time spent working with multiple machines, I have noticed that performance of the same machine doing the same tasks in the same order differs and sometimes the difference is big enough to be noticeable. This applies to all the machines I've owned and/or maintained (old and modern). Some examples (many of them you may have noticed yourself) that sometimes are completed in different time frames: POST OS installation Hardware tests and operations (usually executed within a customized OS such as one of the many DOS variants), HDD tests and "low level" formats Software installation or other tasks (such as benchmarks) within a general purpose OS (Windows, Linux, etc) I can imagine this is caused by the fact that a machine is built with many components having to communicate as a whole and since the mechanical and electronic parts aren't perfect the overhead occurs. In the last example, I assume the OS complexity and concurrently running multiple processes has some additional effect as well. However, I'm wondering if this hardware imperfection and overhead is indeed that high to be humanly noticeable? Maybe there are other factors that are influencial as much or even more? So, in short - why? To emphasize: the difference is noticeable on the same machine performing the same tasks and this applies to ANY machine in my experience. I'm not comparing machine to machine performance.

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• Is there a way to tell what the download speed is from a site/server

  - by Memor-X

  i'm looking into which ISP i should go with at the place i'm moving into, one ISP which i have been told good things about has data limits (which when breached will drop your speed to dial-up speed) but multiple memberships which, apart from the cheapest membership, have the same data limits (the cheapest has a 10GB data limit) in their fine print, they say that each different membership has different port speeds, one particular part jumps out at me These speeds are the NBN (National Broadband Network) port speed and not the actual Internet data speed which will vary based on numerous factors including destination you are reaching, your network equipment, network congestion etc. i plan to use the net to download DLC and patch updates for games (particular the insanely large update for the Wii U) and games from Steam (if i find any good one other than this one JRPG) and downloading development resources from free sites like Deposit Files and Mediafire since one membership with a 1000GB data limit is $145 with the port speed being 12Mbps/1Mbps (cheapest) while another with the same limit is $190 with the port speed of 100Mbps/40Mbps (expensive) i am wondering how i can tell what the speed coming from site is since i don't want to be wasting money on speed that makes no difference (unlike memory which i rather have to spare) NOTE: the speeds are for a fiber optic network which where my new place is can only connect via fixed wireless which i may not be able to get with this ISP but if i can get this network then good NOTE 2: most of the resources i get from Deposit Files are always about 200 MB or less, if a resource pack is greater then it's split into multiple archives (like .7z.part) while Mediafire i have to see one bigger than 150MB NOTE 3: one update patch for a PS3 game is close to 4 GB (Disgaea 4) which i need to get access to the DLC and on the weekend i downloaded 5 GB for the Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta for the PS3 which took almost 5 hours

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• Performance of Virtual machines on very low end machines

  - by TheLQ

  I am managing a few cheap servers as my user base isn't large enough to get much more powerful servers. I also don't have the money lying around to invest in a server to prepare for the larger user base. So I'm stuck with the old hardware I have. I am toying with the idea of virtualizing all the current OS's with most likely VMware vSphere Hypervisor (AKA ESXi) Xen (ESXi has too strict of an HCL, and my hardware is too old). Big reasons for doing so: Ability to upgrade and scale hardware rapidly - This is most likely what I'll be doing as I distribute services, get a bigger server, centralize (electricity bills are horrible), distribute, get a bigger server, etc... Manually doing this by reinstalling the entire OS would be a big pain Safety from me - I've made many rookie mistakes, like doing lots of risky work on a vital production server. With a VM I can just backup the state, work on my machine, test, and revert if necessary. No worries, and no OS reinstallation Safety from other factors - As I scale servers might go down, and a backup VM can instantly be started. Various other reasons. However the limiting factor here is hardware. And I mean very depressing hardware. The current server's run off of a Pentium 3 and 4, and have 512 MB and 768 MB RAM respectively (RAM can be upgraded soon however). Is the Virtualization layer small enough to run itself and a Linux OS effectively? Will performance be acceptable (50% CPU overhead for every operation isn't acceptable)? Does it leave enough RAM for the Linux OS? Is this even feasible?

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• Why would Windows use slower network interface despite route metrics?

  - by tim11g

  On my previous notebook, the Dell/Broadcom wireless adapter had an option to automatically disable wireless when a wired network is connected, so I never dealt with multiple active interfaces. My current system has an Intel wireless adapter, and they apparently haven't figured out how to turn it off when there is a wired connection. Unless I explicitly remember to disable wireless when docked, the connection is active. That shouldn't be a problem (in theory), since the route metric will cause traffic to go over the fastest network (as indicated by the lowest metric in the routing table). Apparently not - I'm running a backup and seeing the throughput at 25Mbps or so (which is consistent with 802.11g) when a perfectly good Gigabit Ethernet interface is also connected. IPv4 Route Table =========================================================================== Active Routes: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.254 192.168.1.104 10 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.254 192.168.1.109 25 127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 Windows has correctly identified the Ethernet interface (.104) and assigned it the lower (preferred) metric. So the Ethernet interface should be used exclusively, right? Why is the Ethernet connection not being used? What other factors are involved? (This is with Windows 7 if it makes a difference)

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• How expensive to run PC 24/7 or how to figure out how to determine it?

  - by jasondavis

  I realize this question is difficult to answer as it would be different based on users location, what there PC is doing and what hardware it consist of, along with other factors but I am hoping someone could give me a very rough estimate. I have always ran many PC's in my home 24/7 and I am just now looking at it from a money/cost of electric point of view. 1) I live in Central Florida. Can anyone guesstomate/estimate the avaerage monthly or daily cost of running your average PC? Intel quad core processor, 1 SSD drive for OS and programs and 4-5 1-2 TB hard drives in a RAID setup for data. 750watt PSU. What would your guess be? 2) Also is there an accurate way to figure this out (non-super technical and confusing to a non-math person please) Also I have seen those kill-a-watt devices, do they figure this kind of stuff out for you? 3) Does a larger PSU make your PC consume more power? Thanks for any help, you can most likely tell I am somewhat lost about this!

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• SQL Server 2008 R2 mirroring failing

  - by andriusn

  I have two Windows 2008 R2 (Amazon EC2) instances running SQL Server 2008 R2. I use 9TB striped disks (9x1TB EBS volumes) for storage. One server is running as principal and second one as mirror. Both started from the same image, database and tlog files located on striped disk. Mirror server failed 3 times in last 2 months with errors: EventID 823 The operating system returned error 2(The system cannot find the file specified.) to SQL Server during a write at offset 0x00000048058a00 in file 'D:\TLogs***_log.ldf'. Additional messages in the SQL Server error log and system event log may provide more detail. This is a severe system-level error condition that threatens database integrity and must be corrected immediately. Complete a full database consistency check (DBCC CHECKDB). This error can be caused by many factors; for more information, see SQL Server Books Online. and EventID 1454 Database mirroring will be suspended. Server instance 'xxxxxxxxxx' encountered error 823, state 6, severity 24 when it was acting as a mirroring partner for database '***'. The database mirroring partners might try to recover automatically from the error and resume the mirroring session. For more information, view the error log for additional error messages. followed by EventID 19019 The MSSQLSERVER service terminated unexpectedly. After this rebooting instance is necessary to restore mirroring. First two times I thought it was hardware related (striped disk failure) and relaunched instance on new hardware. But the issue is back after few weeks again. It only affects mirror instances. Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks.

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• Slow performance on VMWare Linux server after Tomcat install

  - by Loftx

  We have a VMWare ESXi 4.1 server hosting a number of Linux and Windows guests. Recently a new Linux guest was added to this server and seemed to be performing well. Tomcat and some other applications on this server were then installed which seem to have caused the server to run really slowly without any obvious resource issues. Slow performance include: The time taken to bring up the password prompt over ssh takes a few seconds when it was previously instantaneous. The time taken to unzip a zip file which was previously a few seconds now takes around 30 seconds The time taken to compile vmware tools has increased by similar factors Both the VMWare console and monitoring commands don't report any issues with high CPU or memory usage but something is obviously slowing the server down somehow. Does anyone have any ideas what may be causing this issue and how it can be resolved? Thanks, Tom Edit As per your questions I’ve looked at some of the performance indicators on both the VM host and VM guest indicated. Firstly I tried reserving the full amount of memory (3gb) for this VM – no other machines on this server have any memory reservation. The swap in rate and swap out rate for the VM host and guest are now both zero. Balloon memory on the guest is zero and on the host is 3.5gb (total memory on the host is 12gb) The swap rate for the guest is also zero. Swap used by the host is 200mb on average. Compression and decompression rates for the host and guest are zero. Command aborts for the host are zero. Read latency is very low – maximum 10ms average 0.8ms. Write latency is higher – a few spikes to 170ms but mostly around 25ms – is this bad? Queue command latency is zero . Physical disk read latency averages 5ms but often 10ms Physical disk write latency averages 15ms but is often 20ms I hope this helps - let me know if you need any more information.

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• Value of Itanium over x86_64 for Oracle Deployment

  - by Antitribu

  We are looking at a new environment to run our Oracle Database running on SUSE (potentially migrating to RedHat). Our database is approximately 100GB and performs adequately on our current hardware (x86_64) with approximately 6GB of ram allocated to it. We are growing quickly however and will require more performance shortly. Given the cost of Oracle licenses we would like to maximize the value from each license by choosing the most appropriate CPU to run the software on. The questions are: Are there substantial benefits to looking at Itanium hardware, are there any drawbacks? Is there a point where Itanium starts to scale out better? What are the long term support options for Itanium? Given the dominance of x86 would it be safer long term to stick with x86? On average what would be the performance benefit of implementing an Oracle database on Itanium over x86_64? Is this an issue at all or will other factors (IO/RAM) cap out first? If anyone can point me towards some solid documentation on comparisons between the two platforms that provides good case analysis of when to choose which I'm more than happy to accept that as an answer.

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• Optimal Networking Setup for a 2-Story unit?

  - by user29336

  I am moving into a 4 bedroom two-story unit. It’s roughly 2,200 sq ft. I want absolute max throughput possible to be achieved in all focal points. We’re all in internet related industries. Between gaming and web-development latency and throughput are major factors for us. Here’s our main focal points: 1) Garage (office). downstairs 2) Each bedroom x4. upstairs 3) Living room. downstairs The fastest line we can get is Comcast 50mbdown/5up (Wideband). I am looking for the best way to achieve wireless and wired performance for our setup. Our gaming computers may be in our bedroom, and we also may bring it down to the office every now and then for “LAN” sessions. Most wireless will be happening downstairs with our laptops, but since we may do LAN sessions then hard wired latency may be important there too. My concerns: If we do only wireless there would be too much latency for gaming. I don’t know if placing one D-link DGL 4500 on the top floor would be enough; which I currently own. (http://dlink.com/us/en/home-solutions/support/product/dgl-4500-xtreme-n-gaming-router) As far as I’m aware wireless signals transfer best top down. Would this wireless router be enough on top floor and that’s it? My second strategy was a combination of wiring and wireless but I’m not sure what’s easiest way to do this? This is a place we’re renting, so I’m not sure how much leeway we have with wiring, but we’re all pretty competent... if we can’t drill through a wall we can probably “stitch” them across the edges wherever needed. Thoughts on the optimal way to do this?

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• ADSL to T1, Is it worth it for us?

  - by Jack Hickerson

  The company I work for has roughly 45-55 simultaneous users (local and remote/VPN) logged in at a given time. We currently subscribe to an ADSL connection but we have been experiencing slower upload/download speeds as our number of users increase. So, I have a few questions with regards to upgrading our connection to a t1 line. I am aware that the number of channels on a t1 line are much greater then that of our current ADSL connection, but I have heard that the number of active users on a t1 line should be no greater than ~30 for optimal performance. I would think this statement is dependent on what each user was using the connection for and could change depending on this variable. That being said, I have tried to break down how the line would be used in our organization based on our major departments: Sales (~60% of total users) - Everyday surfing, email, research, occasional streaming media Marketing (~15% of total users) - Heavy reliance on uploading/downloading, streaming media, file sharing Other (~25% of total users) - email, rare use of any connection intensive activities. I have considered keeping the ADSL for our local users and dedicating the t1 to our remote users (or vice versa) but the cost is significantly higher then what we had hoped for. All factors being equal (# of users, frequency of downloads/uploads from our current activities) Would you suspect a significant performance increase in making the transition to a t1 line from our current ADSL line? What are your thoughts or recommendations?

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• Expanding to dual video cards

  - by Anthony Greco

  I know a lot of factors can go into play here, so I will list my current hardware and setup: MOBO: GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128441] Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103849] Ram: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) [https://secure.newegg.com/NewMyAccount/OrderHistory.aspx?RandomID=4933910872745320111128011418] Current video card: EVGA 01G-P3-1366-TR GeForce GTX 460 SE [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130591] OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Currently I can run 2 monitors just fine in my setup. However, I want to upgrade this to 4 monitors. My question is, what is the best way to do this? I remember in the past reading I need the same type of video card, however would any GeForce GTX work, or do i need that very specific model (EVGA 01G-P3-1366-TR GeForce GTX 460 SE)? Are there any issues I should be aware of before I order 2 new monitors and a video card? Are there video cards better setup for this? I know NVidia offers SLI, however I do not know if my mobo is compliant. My mobo also offers CrossFireX configuration, though from what it says only Radeon are compliant. Any suggestions / feedbacks on my best route with my current setup is appreciated. Even if you suggest buying 2 new identical video cards, as long as you can mention which and why that is better I really appreciate it. Note: I really do not do any gaming. I sometimes do some 3D work in Unity and very rarely in Maya. Besides that I mostly do all my computer work in Visual Studios and Photoshop. I however need the 2 extra monitors because I monitor sometimes 5 remote desktops at once and switching on only 2 is becoming a very big pain. Also seeing 3 side by side while I work on the 4th will be very helpful. Again, I appreciate any feedback, as I have googled a bunch and just want to make sure what I buy will work.

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