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I have Oracle SQL Developer Installed, Now What?

- by thatjeffsmith

If you’re here because you downloaded a copy of Oracle SQL Developer and now you need help connecting to a database, then you’re in the right place. I’ll show you what you need to get up and going so you can finish your homework, teach yourself Oracle database, or get ready for that job interview. You’ll need about 30 minutes to set everything up…and about 5 years to become proficient with Oracle Oracle Database come with SQL Developer but SQL Developer doesn’t include a database If you install Oracle database, it includes a copy of SQL Developer. If you’re running that copy of SQL Developer, please take a second to upgrade now, as it is WAY out of date. But I’m here to talk to the folks that have downloaded SQL Developer and want to know what to do next. You’ve got it running. You see this ‘Connection’ dialog, and… Where am I connecting to, and who as? You NEED a database Installing SQL Developer does not give you a database. So you’re going to need to install Oracle and create a database, or connect to a database that is already up and running somewhere. Basically you need to know the following: where is this database, what’s it called, and what port is the listener running on? The Default Connection properties in SQL Developer These default settings CAN work, but ONLY if you have installed Oracle Database Express Edition (XE). Localhost is a network alias for 127.0.0.1 which is an IP address that maps to the ‘local’ machine, or the machine you are reading this blog post on. The listener is a service that runs on the server and handles connections for the databases on that machine. You can run a database without a listener and you can run a listener without a database, but you can’t connect to a database on a different server unless both that database and listener are up and running. Each listener ‘listens’ on one or more ports, you need to know the port number for each connection. The default port is 1521, but 1522 is often pretty common. I know all of this sounds very complicated Oracle is a very sophisticated piece of software. It’s not analogous to downloading a mobile phone app and and using it 10 seconds later. It’s not like installing Office/Access either – it requires services, environment setup, kernel tweaks, etc. However. Normally an administrator will setup and install Oracle, create the database, and configure the listener for everyone else to use. They’ll often also setup the connection details for everyone via a ‘TNSNAMES.ORA’ file. This file contains a list of database connection details for folks to browse – kind of like an Oracle database phoneboook. If someone has given you a TNSNAMES.ORA file, or setup your machine to have access to a TNSNAMES file, then you can just switch to the ‘TNS’ connection type, and use the dropdown to select the database you want to connect to. Then you don’t have to worry about the server names, database names, and the port numbers. ORCL – that sounds promising! ORCL is the default SID when creating a new database with the Database Creation Assistant (DBCA). It’s just me, and I need help! No administrator, no database, no nothing. What do you do? You have a few options: Buy a copy of Oracle and download, install, and create a database Download and install XE (FREE!) Download, import, and run our Developer Days Hands-on-Lab (FREE!) If you’re a student (or anyone else) with little to no experience with Oracle, then I recommend the third option. Oracle Technology Network Developer Day: Hands-on Database Application Development Lab The OTN lab runs on a A Virtual Box image which contains: 11gR2 Enterprise Edition copy of Oracle a database and listener running for you to connect to lots of demo data for you to play with SQL Developer installed and ready to connect Some browser based labs you can step through to learn Oracle You download the image, you download and install Virtual Box (also FREE!), then you IMPORT the image you previously downloaded. You then ‘Start’ the image. It will boot a copy of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), start your database, and all that jazz. You can then start up and run SQL Developer inside the image OR you can connect to the database running on the image using the copy of SQL Developer you installed on your host machine. Setup Port Forwarding to Make It Easy to Connect From Your Host When you start the image, it will be assigned an IP address. Depending on what network adapter you select in the image preferences, you may get something that can get out to the internet from your image, something your host machine can see and connect to, or something that kind of just lives out there in a vacuum. You want to avoid the ‘vacuum’ option – unless you’re OK with running SQL Developer inside the Linux image. Open the Virtual Box image properties and go to the Networking options. We’re going to setup port forwarding. This will tell your machine that anything that happens on port 1521 (the default Oracle Listener port), should just go to the image’s port 1521. So I can connect to ‘localhost’ and it will magically get transferred to the image that is running. Oracle Virtual Box Port Forwarding 1521 listener database Now You Just Need a Username and Password The default passwords on this image are all ‘oracle’ – so you can connect as SYS, HR, or whatever – just use ‘oracle’ as the password. The Linux passowrds are all ‘oracle’ too, so you can login as ‘root’ or as ‘oracle’ in the Linux desktop. Connect! Connect as HR to your Oracle database running on the OTN Developer Days Virtual Box image If you’re connecting to someone else’s database, you need to ask the person that manages that environment to create for you an account. Don’t try to ‘guess’ or ‘figure out’ what the username and password is. Introduce yourself, explain your situation, and ask kindly for access. This is your first test – can you connect? I know it’s hard to get started with Oracle. There are however many things we offer to make this easier. You’ll need to do a bit of RTM first though. Once you know what’s required, you will be much more likely to succeed. Of course, if you need help, you know where to find me

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Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

- by Robert May

For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all. It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005. I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it. I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t. I still didn’t understand the concept of a team. I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done. I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team. The first few months were really rough. We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it. I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project. His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile. Where are the stand-ups? Where are the stories?” He was dead on, and I finally woke up. I finally realized that I was the problem! I wasn’t trusting the team. I wasn’t helping the team. I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum. Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either. This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.” Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else. Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum. This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum. I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here. My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more. If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum. There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain. Scrum is not Advil. It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it. Let me explain that analogy a bit more. Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right). That caused him a great deal of pain. We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location. It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with. They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones. Within minutes, he was feeling much better. Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint. Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top. Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm. However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was. Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor. He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end. He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story. Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective. However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless. Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful. They won’t! Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface. It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE. Many people don’t like this exposure. Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain. The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil). Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company. Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it. Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules. Get a few good releases under your belt. Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team. Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching. Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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Building services with the .NET framework Cont’d

- by Allan Rwakatungu

In my previous blog I wrote an introductory post on services and how you can build services using the .NET frameworks Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) In this post I will show how to develop a real world application using WCF The problem During the last meeting we realized developers in Uganda are not so cool – they don’t use twitter so may not get the latest news and updates from the technology world. We also noticed they mostly use kabiriti phones (jokes). With their kabiriti phones they are unable to access the twitter web client or alternative twitter mobile clients like tweetdeck , twirl or tweetie. However, the kabiriti phones support SMS (Yeeeeeeei). So what we going to do to make these developers cool and keep them updated is by enabling them to receive tweets via SMS. We shall also enable them to develop their own applications that can extend this functionality Analysis Thanks to services and open API’s solving our problem is going to be easy. 1. To get tweets we can use the twitter service for FREE 2. To send SMS we shall use www.clickatell.com/ as they can send SMS to any country in the world. Besides we could not find any local service that offers API's for sending SMS :(. 3. To enable developers to integrate with our application so that they can extend it and build even cooler applications we use WCF. In addittion , because connectivity might be an issue we decided to use WCF because if has a inbuilt queing features. We also choose WCF because this is a post about .NET and WCF :). The Code Accessing the tweets To consume twitters REST API we shall use the WCF REST starter kit. Like it name indicates , the REST starter kit is a set of .NET framework classes that enable developers to create and access REST style services ( like the twitter service). Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Http; using System.Net; using System.Xml.Linq; namespace UG.Demo { public class TwitterService { public IList<TwitterStatus> SomeMethodName() { //Connect to the twitter service (HttpClient is part of the REST startkit classes) HttpClient cl = new HttpClient("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml"); //Supply your basic authentication credentials cl.TransportSettings.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("ourusername", "ourpassword"); //issue an http HttpResponseMessage resp = cl.Get(); //ensure we got reponse 200 resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful(); //use XLinq to parse the REST XML var statuses = from r in resp.Content.ReadAsXElement().Descendants("status") select new TwitterStatus { User = r.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value, Status = r.Element("text").Value }; return statuses.ToList(); } } public class TwitterStatus { public string User { get; set; } public string Status { get; set; } } } Sending SMS Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} public class SMSService { public void Send(string phone, string message) { HttpClient cl1 = new HttpClient(); //the clickatell XML format for sending SMS string xml = String.Format("<clickAPI><sendMsg><api_id>3239621</api_id><user>ourusername</user><password>ourpassword</password><to>{0}</to><text>{1}</text></sendMsg></clickAPI>",phone,message); //Post form data HttpUrlEncodedForm form = new HttpUrlEncodedForm(); form.Add("data", xml); System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false; string uri = @"http://api.clickatell.com/xml/xml"; HttpResponseMessage resp = cl1.Post(uri, form.CreateHttpContent()); resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful(); } }

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The Incremental Architect´s Napkin - #1 - It´s about the money, stupid

- by Ralf Westphal

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

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The Partner Perspective from Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - IDC’s Darren Bibby report

- by Richard Lefebvre

Below is IDC’s Darren Bibby report on ‘The Partner Perspective from Oracle OpenWorld 2012’. If you missed the 2012 edition, I trust this will give you the willingness to attend next year one! October 26, 2012 I attended my fourth Oracle OpenWorld earlier in October. I always go in with the lens of, "What's in it for partners this year?" Although it's primarily thought of as a customer event - and yes, the bulk of the almost 50,000 attendees are customers - this year's conference was clearly the largest and most important partner event Oracle has ever run. Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Exchange There were more partner attendees than ever, with Oracle citing somewhere around 5000. But the format for partners this year was different. And it was better. Traditionally, Oracle hosts a one-day only Partner Forum on the Sunday before the customer-focused conference begins. This year, the partner content still began on the Sunday, but the worldwide alliances and channels group created an exclusive track throughout the week, just for partners. It featured content specifically targeted towards partners, and was anchored at a nearby hotel. This was a great move for Oracle. The Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) team has been in a tricky position for years in that they have enough partners that they need a landmark event in the year, but perhaps not enough to justify a separate, worldwide, large, partner-only event. Coinciding a four day event with Oracle OpenWorld, where anybody who's anybody in the Oracle world attends anyway, is a good solution. The channels leadership team can build from this success for an even better conference next year. It's expected that they will follow a similar strategy. Cloud Announcements for Partners As for the content, it was primarily about the Cloud. For customers, for VARs, for ISVs, for everyone. There were five key Cloud related announcements for partners at the event: Cloud Builder Specialization. This is one of the first broader Specializations that isn't focused on one unique product. It is a designation for partners that offer design and implementation services for private cloud solutions. As such, it will surely be something that nearly every partner will consider, and many will pursue. New Specializations for Cloud Services. Unlike the broad, almost "strategy-level" Specialization above, there are a group of new product-based "merit badges" for many of the new Cloud offerings. Think about a Specialization for the Cloud version of HCM, for instance. Each of these particular specializations will also have Rapid Start implementation methodologies that allow a partner to offer a fixed scope and fixed price bid to customers. Based on the learnings from Oracle Consulting, this means a partner might be able to deliver Cloud HCM in six weeks for a fixed price. In the end, this means more consistent experiences for Oracle customers. Cloud Resale Program. For those partners who achieve one of these Cloud Specializations, it will mean they can actually resell the subscription-based Cloud product. This is important because it has been somewhat of a rarity in the emerging Cloud channel for partners to be able to "take the paper", take the revenue, do the billing, be first line of support etc. This is an important step for Oracle and one the partners will be happy to see. Cloud Referral Program. For those partners who are not as engaged with these specific Cloud products that the Specializations revolve around, there is a new referral program that provides an incentive to recommend Oracle Cloud products. This one-two punch of referral and resale programs is similar in many ways to other vendors who allow more committed partners to resell, while more casual partners can collect fees. It's the model that seems to work. The key to allow a company to resell a subscription product - something that is inherently delivered directly between the vendor and customer - is trust. Achieving a specialization is a good bar to have to meet. Platform as a Service for ISVs. Leveraging some of the overall announcements made by CEO Larry Ellison around a cloud version of its famous database, Oracle also outlined a new ability for ISVs to build cloud services on its new PaaS offering. Details were less available for this announcement, though it's an expected and fitting play for ISVs comfortable with Oracle technology who can now more easily build out cloud applications. There wasn't much talk of an app store to go along with this, but surely it's in the works. Specializations And "The Gap" Coming back to Specializations, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) has 4600 partners worldwide that hold 20,000 Specializations. These are impressive numbers just three years into the new OPN framework. The actual number of Specializations has also grown significantly, up to 111 today and soon around 125 or so with the new Cloud designations. Oracle may need to look at grouping some of these and creating higher level, broader designations that partners could achieve by earning several Specializations in that group. At 125 and growing, this is a lot. On the top of the pyramid, Hitachi Ltd. successfully became the eleventh partner to make it to the highly prestigious Diamond level. Partner programs partially exist in order to recognize capable partners. And it's more than abundantly clear that the Diamond level does this. But I think Oracle has a gap. Specializations show capability in a very specific product area, and all sizes of partners can achieve these. The next level at which to show a level of expertise is the Advanced Specialization. However, this is a massive step up from the regular Specialization. The advanced level requires 50 people to have certification in that particular product area. Most other industry programs have similar higher level statuses, but none are even close to that number. Whereas a customer who sees an Oracle partner with an advanced specialization can be very sure of capability, there is a gap in that there are hundreds or even thousands of 20-50 person solution providers who are top notch in their area of expertise. They will never get to Advanced due to numbers alone. These boutique partners don't really have a way of showing off their talents in the current program. Advanced may not need to be so high to really show that a company has deep expertise. Overall it was a very successful Oracle OpenWorld for Oracle partners of all sizes. There was progress made on making it a bigger and more relevant event. And also on catching up and maybe even leading in some cases with cloud opportunities for partners.

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Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

- by Roger Hart

In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech 11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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SharePoint – The Most Important Feature

- by Bil Simser

Watching twitter and doing a search for SharePoint and you see a lot (almost one every few minutes) of tweets about the top 10 new features in SharePoint. What answer do you get when you ask the question, “What’s the most important feature in SharePoint?”. Chances are the answer will vary. Some will say it’s the collaboration aspect, others might say it’s the new ribbon interface, multi-item editing, external content types, faceted search, large list support, document versioning, Silverlight, etc. The list goes on. However I think most people might be missing the most important feature that’s sitting right under their noses all this time. The most important feature of SharePoint? It’s called User Empowerment. Huh? What? Is that something I find in the Site Actions menu? Nope. It’s something that’s always been there in SharePoint, you just need to get the word out and support it. How many times have you had a team ask you for a team site (assuming you had SharePoint up and running). Or to create them a contact list. Or how long have you employed that guy in the corner who’s been copying and pasting content from Corporate Communications into the web from a Word document. Let’s stop the insanity. It doesn’t have to be this way. SharePoint’s strongest feature isn’t anything you can find in the Site Settings screen or Central Admin. It’s all about empowering your users and letting them take control of their content. After all, SharePoint really is a bunch of tools to allow users to collaborate on content isn’t it? So why are you stepping in as IT and helping the user every moment along the way. It’s like having to ask users to fill out a help desk ticket or call up the Windows team to create a folder on their desktop or rearrange their Start menu. This isn’t something IT should be spending their time doing nor is it something the users should be burdened with having to wait until their friendly neighborhood tech-guy (or gal) shows up to help them sort the icons on their desktop. SharePoint IS all about empowerment. Site owners can create whatever lists and libraries they need for their team, and if the template isn’t there they can always turn to my friend and yours, the Custom List. From that can spew forth approval tracking systems, new hire checklists, and server inventory. You’re only limited by your imagination and needs. Users should be able to create new sites as they need. Want a blog to let everyone know what your team is up to? Go create one, here’s how. What’s a blog you ask? Here’s what it is and why you would use one. SharePoint is the shift in the balance of power and you need, and an IT group, let go of certain responsibilities and let your users run with the tools. A power user who knows how to create sites and what features are available to them can help a team go from the forming stage to the storming stage overnight. Again, this all hinges on you as an IT organization and what you can and empower your users with as far as features go. Running with tools is great if you know how to use them, running with scissors not recommended unless you enjoy trips to the hospital. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility so don’t go out on Monday and send out a memo to the organization saying “This Bil guy says you peeps can do anything so here it is, knock yourself out” (for one, they’ll have *no* idea who this Bil guy is). This advice comes with the task of getting your users ready for empowerment. Whether it’s through some kind of internal training sessions, in-house documentation; videos; blog posts; on how to accomplish things in SharePoint, or full blown one-on-one sit downs with teams or individuals to help them through their problems. The work is up to you. Helping them along also should be part of your governance (you do have one don’t you?). Just because you have InfoPath client deployed with your Office suite, doesn’t mean users should just start publishing forms all over your SharePoint farm. There should be some governance behind that in what you’ll support and what is possible. The other caveat to all this is that SharePoint is not everything for everyone. It can’t cook you breakfast and impregnate your cat or solve world hunger. It also isn’t suited for every IT solution out there. It’s a horrible source control system (even though some people try to use it as such) and really can’t do financials worth a darn. Again, governance is key here and part of that governance and your responsibility in setting up and unleashing SharePoint into your organization is to provide users guidance on what should be in SharePoint and (more importantly) what should not be in SharePoint. There are boundaries you have to set where you don’t want your end users going as they might be treading into trouble. Again, this is up to you to set these constraints and help users understand why these pylons are there. If someone understands why they can’t do something they might have a better understanding and respect for those that put them there in the first place. Of course you’ll always have the power-users who want to go skiing down dead mans curve so this doesn’t work for everyone, but you can catch the majority of the newbs who don’t wander aimlessly off the beaten path. At the end of the day when all things are going swimmingly your end users should be empowered to solve the needs they have on a day to day basis and not having to keep bugging the IT department to help them create a view to show only approved documents. I wouldn’t go as far as business users building out full blown solutions and handing the keys to SharePoint Designer or (worse) Visual Studio to power-users might not be a path you want to go down but you also don’t have to lock up the SharePoint system in a tight box where users can’t use what’s there. So stop focusing on the shiny things in SharePoint and maybe consider making a shift to what’s really important. Making your day job easier and letting users get the most our of your technology investment.

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Preserving Permalinks

- by Daniel Moth

One of the things that gets me on a rant is websites that break permalinks. If you have posted something somewhere and there is a public URL pointing to it, that URL should never ever return a 404. You are breaking all websites that ever linked to you and you are breaking all search engine links to your content (that others will try and follow). It is a pet peeve of mine. So when I had to move my blog, obviously I would preserve the root URL (www.danielmoth.com/Blog/), but I also wanted to preserve every URL my blog has generated over the years. To be clear, our focus here is on the URL formatting, not the content migration which I'll talk about in my next post. In this post, I'll describe my solution first and then what it solves. 1. The IIS7 Rewrite Module and web.config There are a few ways you can map an old URL to a new one (so when requests to the old URL come in, they get redirected to the new one). The new blog engine I use (dasBlog) has built-in functionality to do that (Scott refers to it here). Instead, the way I chose to address the issue was to use the IIS7 rewrite module. The IIS7 rewrite module allows redirecting URLs based on pattern matching, regular expressions and, of course, hardcoded full URLs for things that don't fall into any pattern. You can configure it visually from IIS Manager using a handy dialog that allows testing patterns against input URLs. Here is what mine looked like after configuring a few rules: To learn more about this technology check out this video, the reference page and this overview blog post; all 3 pages have a collection of related resources at the bottom worth checking out too. All the visual configuration ends up in a web.config file at the root folder of your website. If you are on a shared hosting service, probably the only way you can use the Rewrite Module is by directly editing the web.config file. Next, I'll describe the URLs I had to map and how that manifested itself in the web.config file. What I did was create the rules locally using the GUI, and then took the generated web.config file and uploaded it to my live site. You can view my web.config here. 2. Monthly Archives Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004_07_01_mothblog_archive.html dasBlog: /Blog/default,month,2004-07.aspx In my web.config file, the rule that deals with this is the one named "monthlyarchive_redirect". 3. Categories Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/labels/Personal.html dasBlog: /Blog/CategoryView,category,Personal.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "category_redirect". 4. Posts Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004/07/hello-world.html dasBlog: /Blog/Hello-World.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "post_redirect". Note: The decision is taken to use dasBlog URLs that do not include the date info (see the description of my Appearance settings). If we included the date info then it would have to include the day part, which blogger did not generate. This makes it impossible to redirect correctly and to have a single permalink for blog posts moving forward. An implication of this decision, is that no two blog posts can have the same title. The tool I will describe in my next post (inelegantly) deals with duplicates, but not with triplicates or higher. 5. Unhandled by a generic rule Unfortunately, the two blog engines use different rules for generating URLs for blog posts. Most of the time the conversion is as simple as the example of the previous section where a post titled "Hello World" generates a URL with the words separated by a hyphen. Some times that is not the case, for example: /Blog/2006/05/medc-wrap-up.html /Blog/MEDC-Wrapup.aspx or /Blog/2005/01/best-of-moth-2004.html /Blog/Best-Of-The-Moth-2004.aspx or /Blog/2004/11/more-windows-mobile-2005-details.html /Blog/More-Windows-Mobile-2005-Details-Emerge.aspx In short, blogger does not add words to the title beyond ~39 characters, it drops some words from the title generation (e.g. a, an, on, the), and it preserve hyphens that appear in the title. For this reason, we need to detect these and explicitly list them for redirects (no regular expression can help here because the full set of rules is not listed anywhere). In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "Redirect rule1 for FullRedirects" combined with the rewriteMap named "StaticRedirects". Note: The tool I describe in my next post will detect all the URLs that need to be explicitly redirected and will list them in a file ready for you to copy them to your web.config rewriteMap. 6. C# code doing the same as the web.config I wrote some naive code that does the same thing as the web.config: given a string it will return a new string converted according to the 3 rules above. It does not take into account the 4th case where an explicit hard-coded conversion is needed (the tool I present in the next post does take that into account). static string REGEX_post_redirect = "[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([0-9a-z-]+).html"; static string REGEX_category_redirect = "labels/([_0-9a-z-% ]+).html"; static string REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect = "([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2})_[0-9]{2}_mothblog_archive.html"; static string Redirect(string oldUrl) { GroupCollection g; if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_post_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat(g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_category_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat("CategoryView,category,", g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect, 3, out g)) return string.Concat("default,month,", g[1].Value, "-", g[2], ".aspx"); return string.Empty; } static bool RunRegExOnIt(string toRegEx, string pattern, int groupCount, out GroupCollection g) { if (pattern.Length == 0) { g = null; return false; } g = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled).Match(toRegEx).Groups; return (g.Count == groupCount); } Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet, Manning Publications Co. Book Review

- by Compudicted

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/10/24/c-in-depth-third-edition-by-jon-skeet-manning-publications.aspx I started reading this ebook on September 28, 2013, the same day it was sent my way by Manning Publications Co. for review while it still being fresh off the press. So 1st thing – thanks to Manning for this opportunity and a free copy of this must have on every C# developer’s desk book! Several hours ago I finished reading this book (well, except a for a large portion of its quite lengthy appendix). I jumped writing this review right away while still being full of emotions and impressions from reading it thoroughly and running code examples. Before I go any further I would like say that I used to program on various platforms using various languages starting with the Mainframe and ending on Windows, and I gradually shifted toward dealing with databases more than anything, however it happened with me to program in C# 1 a lot when it was first released and then some C# 2 with a big leap in between to C# 5. So my perception and experience reading this book may differ from yours. Also what I want to tell is somewhat funny that back then, knowing some Java and seeing C# 1 released, initially made me drawing a parallel that it is a copycat language, how wrong was I… Interestingly, Jon programs in Java full time, but how little it was mentioned in the book! So more on the book: Be informed, this is not a typical “Recipes”, “Cookbook” or any set of ready solutions, it is rather targeting mature, advanced developers who do not only know how to use a number of features, but are willing to understand how the language is operating “under the hood”. I must state immediately, at the same time I am glad the author did not go into the murky depths of the MSIL, so this is a very welcome decision on covering a modern language as C# for me, thank you Jon! Frankly, not all was that rosy regarding the tone and structure of the book, especially the the first half or so filled me with several negative and positive emotions overpowering each other. To expand more on that, some statements in the book appeared to be bias to me, or filled with pre-justice, it started to look like it had some PR-sole in it, but thankfully this was all gone toward the end of the 1st third of the book. Specifically, the mention on the C# language popularity, Java is the #1 language as per https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language (many other sources put C at the top which I highly doubt), also many interesting functional languages as Clojure and Groovy appeared and gained huge traction which run on top of Java/JVM whereas C# does not enjoy such a situation. If we want to discuss the popularity in general and say how fast a developer can find a new job that pays well it would be indeed the very Java, C++ or PHP, never C#. Or that phrase on language preference as a personal issue? We choose where to work or we are chosen because of a technology used at a given software shop, not vice versa. The book though it technically very accurate with valid code, concise examples, but I wish the author would give more concrete, real-life examples on where each feature should be used, not how. Another point to realize before you get the book is that it is almost a live book which started to be written when even C# 3 wasn’t around so a lot of ground is covered (nearly half of the book) on the pre-C# 3 feature releases so if you already have a solid background in the previous releases and do not plan to upgrade, perhaps half of the book can be skipped, otherwise this book is surely highly recommended. Alas, for me it was a hard read, most of it. It was not boring (well, only may be two times), it was just hard to grasp some concepts, but do not get me wrong, it did made me pause, on several occasions, and made me read and re-read a page or two. At times I even wondered if I have any IQ at all (LOL). Be prepared to read A LOT on generics, not that they are widely used in the field (I happen to work as a consultant and went thru a lot of code at many places) I can tell my impression is the developers today in best case program using examples found at OpenStack.com. Also unlike the Java world where having the most recent version is nearly mandated by the OSS most companies on the Microsoft platform almost never tempted to upgrade the .Net version very soon and very often. As a side note, I was glad to see code recently that included a nullable variable (myvariable? notation) and this made me smile, besides, I recommended that person this book to expand her knowledge. The good things about this book is that Jon maintains an active forum, prepared code snippets and even a small program (Snippy) that is happy to run the sample code saving you from writing any plumbing code. A tad now on the C# language itself – it sure enjoyed a wonderful road toward perfection and a very high adoption, especially for ASP development. But to me all the recent features that made this statically typed language more dynamic look strange. Don’t we have F#? Which supposed to be the dynamic language? Why do we need to have a hybrid language? Now the developers live their lives in dualism of the static and dynamic variables! And LINQ to SQL, it is covered in depth, but wasn’t it supposed to be dropped? Also it seems that very little is being added, and at a slower pace, e.g. Roslyn will come in late 2014 perhaps, and will be probably the only main feature. Again, it is quite hard to read this book as various chapters, C# versions mentioned every so often only if I only could remember what was covered exactly where! So the fact it has so many jumps/links back and forth I recommend the ebook format to make the navigations easier to perform and I do recommend using software that allows bookmarking, also make sure you have access to plenty of coffee and pizza (hey, you probably know this joke – who a programmer is) ! In terms of closing, if you stuck at C# 1 or 2 level, it is time to embrace the power of C# 5! Finally, to compliment Manning, this book unlike from any other publisher so far, was the only one as well readable (put it formatted) on my tablet as in Adobe Reader on a laptop.

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Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad

- by Maiko Rocha

One of my WebCenter Portal customers was asking about adaptive design with ADF/WebCenter Portal and how they could go about creating an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application. They were looking not only for the out-of-the-box support for mobile Safari which is certified against PS5+ (11.1.1.6) for ADF/WebCenter - but also to create a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad. Seems like they wanted something in the lines of Yahoo! Mail provides for the iPad - so the example I will use is shamelessly inspired by Y! Mail's iPad UI. But first, let's quickly understand how can we bake in some adaptive goodness into ADF Faces. First thing we need to understand is, yes, there are a couple of constraints that we will need to work around, namely, the use or layout managers and skins. Please also keep in mind that I'm not and I don't pretend to be a web designer, much less an UX specialist, so feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments section. Now, back to the limitations. Layout Managers ADF Faces layout managers create an abstraction on top of the generated HTML code for a page so a developer doesn't need to be worried about how to size and dimension the UI layout (eg, af:panelStretchLayout). Although layout managers are very helpful, in this specific situation we will need to know a little bit more of how the final HTML is being rendered so we can apply the CSS class accordingly and create transition containers where the media queries will be applied - now, if you're using 11gR2 (11.1.2.2.3) there's the new component af:panelGridLayout (here and here) that will greatly improve creating responsive templates and pages because it is based on the grid/fluid systems and will generate straight out to DIVs on your final page. For now, I'm limited to PS5 and the af:panelStretchLayout component as a starting point because that's the release my customer is on. Skins You won't be able to use media queries, or use anything with "@" notation on the skin CSS file - the skin pre-processor will remove all extraneous "@" from the CSS file. The solution is to split your CSS in two separate files: a skin CSS file and plain CSS where you will add the media queries. The issue here is that you won't be able to use media queries for any faces components. We can, though, still apply the media queries for the components like af:panelGroupLayout and af:panelBorderLayout through their styleClass property to enable these components to be responsive to to the iPad orientation, by changing its dimensions, font sizes, hide/show areas, etc. Difference between responsive and adaptive design The best definition of adaptive vs responsive web design I could find is this: “Responsive web design,” as coined by Ethan Marcotte, means “fluid grids, fluid images/media & media queries.” “Adaptive web design,” as I use it, is about creating interfaces that adapt to the user’s capabilities (in terms of both form and function). To me, “adaptive web design” is just another term for “progressive enhancement” of which responsive web design can (an often should) be an integral part, but is a more holistic approach to web design in that it also takes into account varying levels of markup, CSS, JavaScript and assistive technology support. Responsive/adapative web design is much more than slapping an HTML template with CSS around your content or application. The content and application themselves are part of your web design - in other words, a responsive template is just an afterthought if it is not originating from a responsive design the involves the whole web application/s. Tips on responsive / adapative design with ADF/WebCenter Some of the tips listed below were already mentioned in multiple blog posts about ADF layout and skinning, but it is still worth remembering: a simple guideline for ADF/WebCenter apps would be to first create a high-level group of devices, for example: smartphones, tablets, and desktop. For each of these large groups, create the basic structure to provide responsiveness: a page template, a skin, and an external CSS: pagetemplate_smartphone.jspx, smartphone_skin.css, smartphone-responsive.css pagetemplate_tablet.jspx, tablet_skin.css, tablet-responsive.css pagetemplate_desktop.jspx, desktop_skin.css, desktop-responsive.css These three assets can be changed on the fly through an user-agent check on the server side, delivering the right UI to the right device. Within each of the assets, you can make fine adjustments for each subgroup of devices with media queries - for example, smart phones with different screen dimensions and pixel density. Having these three groups and the corresponding assets per group seem to be a good compromise between trying to put everything on a single set of assets - specially considering the constraints above - and going to the other side of the spectrum to create assets per discrete device (iPhone4, iPhone5, Nexus, S3, etc.). Keep in mind that these are my rules and are not in any shape or form a best practice - this is how it fits best for the scenarios I've been working with. If you need to use HTML tags on your page, surround them with af:group to protect the DOM structure For stretchable/fluid layouts: Use non-stretching containers: panelGroupLayout, panelBorderLayout, … panelBorderLayout can be used to approximate HTML table component To avoid multiple scroll bars, do not nest scrolling PanelGroupLayout components. Consider layout="vertical" For stretchable/fluid layouts: Most stretchable ADF components also work in flowing context with dimensionsFrom="auto" To stretch a component horizontally, use styleClass="AFStretchWidth" instead of "width:100%" Skinning Don't use CSS3 @media, @import, animations, etc. on skin css files. They will be removed. CSS3 properties within a class (box-shadow, transition, etc.) work just fine. Consider resetting some skin classes to better control their rendering: body {color: inherit;font: inherit;} af|document {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|commandLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|goLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|inputText::content {font: inherit;} Specific meta tags and CSS properties: Use <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0"/> to avoid zooming (if you want) Use -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch to enable native momentum scrolling within overflown areas (here) Use text-rendering: optmizeLegibility to improve readability. (here) User text-overflow: ellipsis to gracefully crop overflown text. (here) The meta-tags are included in each and every page in the metaContainer facet of af:document tag. You can also use a javascript to inject the meta-tags from the template. For the purpose of the example, I wanted to use as few workarounds as possible. The iPad template and sample application This sample application has been built as a WebCenter Portal application, but you will also be able to reuse the template and techniques on your vanilla ADF application. Keep in mind that I'm neither a designer nor a CSS specialist, so please don't bash me too much on the messy CSS file you'll find on the application. I've extended the provided PreferencesBean class that comes with WebCenter Portal and added code to dinamically change the template and skin on the fly. This is the sample application in landscape orientation: This is the sample application in portrait orientation - the left side menu hides automatically based on a CSS media query: Another screenshot with a skinned popup opened: This is a sample application for you to play with - ideally you shouldn't use it as a starting point. On the left side bar you will find links rendered from a WebCenter Portal navigation model - the link triggers a full request through an af:goLink, while the light blue PPR button triggers a PPR navigation. The dark blue toolbar buttons at the top don't have any function,while the Approve and Reject buttons show a skinned popup. The search box of course doesn't have any behavior attahed to it either. There's a known issue right now with some PPR calls that are randomly generating a 403 error redirecting to the login page - I didn't have time to investigate if this is iOS6 specific or not - if you have any insights please let me know your findings. You can download the sample here.

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WebSocket and Java EE 7 - Getting Ready for JSR 356 (TOTD #181)

- by arungupta

WebSocket is developed as part of HTML 5 specification and provides a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP socket. It provides dramatic improvement over the traditional approaches of Polling, Long-Polling, and Streaming for two-way communication. There is no latency from establishing new TCP connections for each HTTP message. There is a WebSocket API and the WebSocket Protocol. The Protocol defines "handshake" and "framing". The handshake defines how a normal HTTP connection can be upgraded to a WebSocket connection. The framing defines wire format of the message. The design philosophy is to keep the framing minimum to avoid the overhead. Both text and binary data can be sent using the API. WebSocket may look like a competing technology to Server-Sent Events (SSE), but they are not. Here are the key differences: WebSocket can send and receive data from a client. A typical example of WebSocket is a two-player game or a chat application. Server-Sent Events can only push data data to the client. A typical example of SSE is stock ticker or news feed. With SSE, XMLHttpRequest can be used to send data to the server. For server-only updates, WebSockets has an extra overhead and programming can be unecessarily complex. SSE provides a simple and easy-to-use model that is much better suited. SSEs are sent over traditional HTTP and so no modification is required on the server-side. WebSocket require servers that understand the protocol. SSE have several features that are missing from WebSocket such as automatic reconnection, event IDs, and the ability to send arbitrary events. The client automatically tries to reconnect if the connection is closed. The default wait before trying to reconnect is 3 seconds and can be configured by including "retry: XXXX\n" header where XXXX is the milliseconds to wait before trying to reconnect. Event stream can include a unique event identifier. This allows the server to determine which events need to be fired to each client in case the connection is dropped in between. The data can span multiple lines and can be of any text format as long as EventSource message handler can process it. WebSockets provide true real-time updates, SSE can be configured to provide close to real-time by setting appropriate timeouts. OK, so all excited about WebSocket ? Want to convert your POJOs into WebSockets endpoint ? websocket-sdk and GlassFish 4.0 is here to help! The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. On the server-side, the WebSocket SDK converts a POJO into a WebSocket endpoint using simple annotations. Here is how a WebSocket endpoint will look like: @WebSocket(path="/echo")public class EchoBean { @WebSocketMessage public String echo(String message) { return message + " (from your server)"; }} In this code "@WebSocket" is a class-level annotation that declares a POJO to accept WebSocket messages. The path at which the messages are accepted is specified in this annotation. "@WebSocketMessage" indicates the Java method that is invoked when the endpoint receives a message. This method implementation echoes the received message concatenated with an additional string. The client-side HTML page looks like <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action=""> <input onclick="send_echo()" value="Press me" type="button"> <input id="textID" name="message" value="Hello WebSocket!" type="text"><br> </form></div><div id="output"></div> WebSocket allows a full-duplex communication. So the client, a browser in this case, can send a message to a server, a WebSocket endpoint in this case. And the server can send a message to the client at the same time. This is unlike HTTP which follows a "request" followed by a "response". In this code, the "send_echo" method in the JavaScript is invoked on the button click. There is also a <div> placeholder to display the response from the WebSocket endpoint. The JavaScript looks like: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo"; var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri); websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) }; websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) }; websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) }; function init() { output = document.getElementById("output"); } function send_echo() { websocket.send(textID.value); writeToScreen("SENT: " + textID.value); } function onOpen(evt) { writeToScreen("CONNECTED"); } function onMessage(evt) { writeToScreen("RECEIVED: " + evt.data); } function onError(evt) { writeToScreen('<span style="color: red;">ERROR:</span> ' + evt.data); } function writeToScreen(message) { var pre = document.createElement("p"); pre.style.wordWrap = "break-word"; pre.innerHTML = message; output.appendChild(pre); } window.addEventListener("load", init, false);</script> In this code The URI to connect to on the server side is of the format ws://<HOST>:<PORT>/websockets/<PATH> "ws" is a new URI scheme introduced by the WebSocket protocol. <PATH> is the path on the endpoint where the WebSocket messages are accepted. In our case, it is ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo WEBSOCKET_SDK-1 will ensure that context root is included in the URI as well. WebSocket is created as a global object so that the connection is created only once. This object establishes a connection with the given host, port and the path at which the endpoint is listening. The WebSocket API defines several callbacks that can be registered on specific events. The "onopen", "onmessage", and "onerror" callbacks are registered in this case. The callbacks print a message on the browser indicating which one is called and additionally also prints the data sent/received. On the button click, the WebSocket object is used to transmit text data to the endpoint. Binary data can be sent as one blob or using buffering. The HTTP request headers sent for the WebSocket call are: GET ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo HTTP/1.1Origin: http://localhost:8080Connection: UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Extensions: x-webkit-deflate-frameHost: localhost:8080Sec-WebSocket-Key: mDbnYkAUi0b5Rnal9/cMvQ==Upgrade: websocketSec-WebSocket-Version: 13 And the response headers received are Connection:UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Accept:q4nmgFl/lEtU2ocyKZ64dtQvx10=Upgrade:websocket(Challenge Response):00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 The headers are shown in Chrome as shown below: The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. The builds from websocket-sdk are integrated in GlassFish 4.0 builds. Would you like to live on the bleeding edge ? Then follow the instructions below to check out the workspace and install the latest SDK: Check out the source code svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/websocket-sdk~source-code-repository Build and install the trunk in your local repository as: mvn install Copy "./bundles/websocket-osgi/target/websocket-osgi-0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar" to "glassfish3/glassfish/modules/websocket-osgi.jar" in your GlassFish 4 latest promoted build. Notice, you need to overwrite the JAR file. Anybody interested in building a cool application using WebSocket and get it running on GlassFish ? :-) This work will also feed into JSR 356 - Java API for WebSocket. On a lighter side, there seems to be less agreement on the name. Here are some of the options that are prevalent: WebSocket (W3C API, the URL is www.w3.org/TR/websockets though) Web Socket (HTML5 Demos - html5demos.com/web-socket) Websocket (Jenkins Plugin - wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Websocket%2BPlugin) WebSockets (Used by Mozilla - developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets, but use WebSocket as well) Web sockets (HTML5 Working Group - www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/network.html) Web Sockets (Chrome Blog - blog.chromium.org/2009/12/web-sockets-now-available-in-google.html) I prefer "WebSocket" as that seems to be most common usage and used by the W3C API as well. What do you use ?

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So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

- by Edith Mireles-Oracle

By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm. The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8 Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8. In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business. Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.” In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture. In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content. From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs. When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.” I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient." Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas. We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site. You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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Making Money from your SQL Server Blog

- by Bill Graziano

My SQL Server blog reading list is around one hundred blogs. Many people are writing great content and generating lots of page views. I see some of them running Google AdSense and trying to make a little money off their traffic. If you want to earn some some extra money from what you’ve written there are a couple of options. And one new option that I’m announcing here. Background Internet advertising is sold based on a few different pricing schemes. Flat Fee. You offer either all your impressions (page views) or some percentage of your impressions in exchange for a flat monthly fee. CPM or cost per thousand impressions. If the quoted price is $2 CPM you’ll get $2 for every 1,000 times the ad is displayed. While you might think the “M” means millions, the “M” in CPM is the roman numeral for 1,000. CPC or cost per click. This is also called PPC or pay per click. In this method you get paid based on how many clicks there are on the ad. CPA or cost per action. In this method you get paid based on an action that occurs on the advertisers site after they click on the ad. This is typically some type of sign up form. This is how most affiliate programs work. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has been writing about blogging and making money off blogs for years. He has a good introduction to making money on your blog in his “Making Money” section. If you’re interested in learning more he has a post up titled How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year that links to many of his best posts on the subject. Google AdSense This is the most common method for people earning money from their blogging. It’s easy to setup and administer. You tell AdSense what size ads you’d like to run and it gives you a little piece of JavaScript to put on your site. AdSense quickly learns the topics you write about and displays ads that are appropriate for your site. I typically see ads for hosting, SQL Server tools and developer tools running in AdSense slots. AdSense pays on a CPC model. If you translate that back to CPM pricing you’ll see rates from $0.50 to $1.00 CPM. Amazon While you might not make much money writing books it’s now possible to make even less helping Amazon sell them. You can sign up for an Amazon affiliate program. Each time you send Amazon a link and someone buys the book you get a cut of that sale. This is the CPA model from above. Amazon can help you build some pretty nice “stores”. Here’s the SQL Server bookstore I built for SQLTeam.com. If you’re just putting in a page with books like I’ve done on SQLTeam you should keep your expectations low. If you’re writing book reviews of suggesting books on your blog it really does make sense to setup an Amazon affiliate link. People are much more likely to buy a book based on a review from a trusted source. I always try to buy through a referral link if there is one. Amazon pays about 4% of the price as a referral fee. You also get credit for anything else they buy while on the site. I recently had someone buy an iPod nano with their SQL Server book making me an extra $5.60 richer! Estimating how much you can make is difficult though. How much attention you draw to the links and book reviews can dramatically affect the earnings. Private Ad Sales This is the hardest but potentially most lucrative option. You sell advertising directly to companies that want to sell things to your readers. Typically this would be SQL Server tool vendors, hosting companies or anyone else that wants to make money off database administrators. This is also the most difficult to do. You’ll need the contacts at the companies and enough page views to make it worth their while. You’ll also need software to track the page views and clicks, geo-target your ads and smooth out the impressions. Your earnings are based on whatever you can negotiate with the companies. SQL Server Ad Network For the last couple of years I’ve run any extra ads that I sold on the SQLTeam Weblogs. You can see an example of that on Mladen’s blog. The ad in the upper right corner is one that I’m running for him. (Note: Many of the ads I’m running are geo-targeted to only appear in English speaking countries. You may see a different set of ads outside the US, Canada and the UK. You can also see he has a couple of Google ads on his blog.) When I run ads on his blog I split the advertising revenue with him. They make a little and I make a little. I recently started to expand this and sell advertising specifically to run on SQL Server-related blogs. I’m also starting to run ads on non-SQLTeam blogs. The only way I can sell more advertising is to have more blogs to run it on. And that’s where you come in. I’ve created a SQL Server advertising network. I handle all the ad sales and provide the technology to serve the ads. I handle collections and payments back to you. You get paid at the end of each month regardless of when (or if) the advertiser actually pays. All you need to do is add a small piece of JavaScript to your site to display the ads. If you’re writing about SQL Server and interested in earning a little money for your site I’d like to talk to you. You can use the Contact Us page on SQLTeam.com to reach me. Running advertising on your blog isn’t for everyone. If you’re concerned about what advertisers might think about certain posts then you might not be a good fit. For the most part this isn’t an issue. You’ll also need to have a PayPal account to receive payments. You probably won’t get rich doing this. But you can earn extra cash on the side for doing what you would do anyway. I do know that people have earned enough to buy themselves a nice laptop doing this. My initial target is blogs with more than 10,000 page views per month. I expect to pay two to three times what Google pays. If you have less than 10,000 page views per month but are still interested I’d still like to hear from you. I may not be able to sign up smaller blogs right away but we’ll get the process started. If you’re unsure about your traffic Google Analytics is a free tool that provides great reporting on traffic, popular posts and how people find your blog. If you have any questions or are just curious drop me a line and I’ll try to answer your questions.

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Community Conversation

- by ultan o'broin

Applications User Experience members (Erika Webb, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison (left) with Anne Gentle at the User Assistance Europe Conference In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: * Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help * The Microsoft Development Network Community Center * ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. * Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches * The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes are reaching out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaft auf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s

- by Manuel Hossfeld

Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaftauf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s Wenn man sich mit dem Virtualisierungsprodukt Oracle VM in der aktuellen Version 3.x näher befassen möchte, bietet es sich natürlich an, eine eigene Umgebung zu Lern- und Testzwecken zu installieren. Doch leichter gesagt als getan: Bei näherer Betrachtung der Architektur wird man schnell feststellen, dass mehrere Rechner benötigt werden, um überhaupt alle Komponenten abbilden zu können: Zum einen gilt es, den oder die OVM Server selbst zu installieren. Das ist recht leicht und schnell erledigt, aber da Oracle VM ein „Typ 1 Hypervisor ist“ - also direkt auf dem Rechner („bare metal“) installiert wird – ist der eigenen Arbeits-PC oder Laptop dafür recht ungeeignet. (Eine Dual-Boot Umgebung wäre zwar denkbar, aber recht unpraktisch.) Zum anderen wird auch ein Rechner benötigt, auf dem der OVM Manager installiert wird. Im Gegensatz zum OVM Server erfolgt dessen Installation nicht „bare metal“, sondern auf einem bestehenden Oracle Linux. Aber was tun, wenn man gerade keinen Linux-Server griffbereit hat und auch keine extra Hardware dafür opfern will? Möchte man alle Funktionen von Oracle VM austesten, so sollte man zusätzlich über einen Shared Storag everüfugen. Dieser kann wahlweise über NFS oder über ein SAN (per iSCSI oder FibreChannel) angebunden werden. Zwar braucht man zum Testen nicht zwingend entsprechende „echte“ Storage-Hardware, aber auch die „Simulation“ entsprechender Komponenten erfordert zusätzliche Hardware mit entsprechendem freien Plattenplatz.(Alternativ können auch fertige „Software Storage Appliances“ wie z.B. OpenFiler oder FreeNAS verwendet werden). Angenommen, es stehen tatsächlich keine „echte“ Server- und Storage Hardware zur Verfügung, so benötigt man für die oben genannten drei Punkte drei bzw. vier Rechner (PCs, Laptops...) - je nachdem ob man einen oder zwei OVM Server starten möchte. Erfreulicherweise geht es aber auch mit deutlich weniger Aufwand: Wie bereits kurz im Blogpost anlässlich des letzten OVM-Releases 3.1.1 beschrieben, ist die aktuelle Version in der Lage, selbst vollständig innerhalb von VirtualBox als Gast zu laufen. Wer bei dieser „doppelten Virtualisierung“ nun an das Prinzip der russischen Matroschka-Puppen denkt, liegt genau richtig. Oracle VM VirtualBox stellt dabei gewissermaßen die äußere Hülle dar – und da es sich bei VirtualBox im Gegensatz zu Oracle VM Server um einen „Typ 2 Hypervisor“ handelt, funktioniert dieser Ansatz auch auf einem „normalen“ Arbeits-PC bzw. Laptop, ohne dessen eigentliche Betriebsystem komplett zu überschreiben. Doch das beste dabei ist: Die Installation der jeweiligen VirtualBox VMs muss man nicht selber durchführen. Der OVM Manager als auch der OVM Server stehen bereits als vorgefertigte „VirtualBox Appliances“ im Oracle Technology Network zum Download zur Verfügung und müssen im Grunde nur noch importiert und konfiguriert werden. Das folgende Schaubild verdeutlicht das Prinzip: Die dunkelgrünen Bereiche stellen jeweils Instanzen der eben erwähnten VirtualBox Appliances für OVM Server und OVM Manager dar. (Hier im Bild sind zwei OVM Server zu sehen, als Minimum würde natürlich auch einer genügen. Dann können aber viele Features wie z.B. OVM HA nicht ausprobieren werden.) Als cleveren Trick zur Einsparung einer weiteren VM für Storage-Zwecke hat Wim Coekaerts (Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering bei Oracle), der „Erbauer“ der VirtualBox Appliances, die OVM Manager Appliance bereits so vorbereitet, dass diese gleichzeitig als NFS-Share (oder ggf. sogar als iSCSI Target) dienen kann. Dies beschreibt er auch kurz auf seinem Blog. Die hellgrünen Ovale stellen die VMs dar, welche dann innerhalb einer der virtualisierten OVM Server laufen können. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass durch diese „doppelte Virtualisierung“ die Fähigkeit zur Hardware-Virtualisierung verloren geht, können diese „Nutz-VMs“ demzufolge nur paravirtualisiert sein (PVM). Die hier in blau eingezeichneten Netzwerk-Schnittstellen sind virtuelle Interfaces, welche beliebig innerhalb von VirtualBox eingerichtet werden können. Wer die verschiedenen Netzwerk-Rollen innerhalb von Oracle VM im Detail ausprobieren will, kann hier natürlich auch mehr als zwei dieser Interfaces konfigurieren. Die Vorteile dieser Lösung für Test- und Demozwecke liegen auf der Hand: Mit lediglich einem PC bzw. Laptop auf dem VirtualBox installiert ist, können alle oben genannten Komponenten installiert und genutzt werden – genügend RAM vorausgesetzt. Als Minimum darf hier 8GB gelten. Soll auf der „Host-Umgebung“ (also dem PC auf dem VirtualBox läuft) nebenbei noch gearbeiten werden und/oder mehrere „Nutz-VMs“ in dieser simulierten OVM-Server-Umgebung laufen, empfehlen sich natürlich eher 16GB oder mehr. Da die nötigen Schritte zum Installieren und initialen Konfigurieren der Umgebung ausführlich in einem entsprechenden Paper beschrieben sind, möchte ich im Rest dieses Artikels noch einige zusätzliche Tipps und Details erwähnen, welche einem das Leben etwas leichter machen können: Um möglichst entstpannt und mit zusätzlichen „Sicherheitsnetz“ an die Konfiguration der Umgebung herangehen zu können, empfiehlt es sich, ausgiebigen Gebrauch von der in VirtualBox eingebauten Funktionalität der VM Snapshots zu machen. Dies ermöglicht nicht nur ein Zurücksetzen falls einmal etwas schiefgehen sollte, sondern auch ein beliebiges Wiederholen von bereits absolvierten Teilschritten (z.B. um eine andere Idee oder Variante der Umgebung auszuprobieren). Sowohl bei den gerade erwähnten Snapshots als auch bei den VMs selbst sollte man aussagekräftige Namen verwenden. So ist sichergestellt, dass man nicht durcheinander kommt und auch nach ein paar Wochen noch weiß, welche Umgebung man da eigentlich vor sich hat. Dies beinhaltet auch die genaue Versions- und Buildnr. des jeweiligen OVM-Releases. (Siehe dazu auch folgenden Screenshot.) Weitere Informationen und Details zum aktuellen Zustand sowie Zweck der jeweiligen VMs kann in dem oft übersehenen Beschreibungsfeld hinterlegt werden. Es empfiehlt sich, bereits VOR der Installation einen Notizzettel (oder eine Textdatei) mit den geplanten IP-Adressen und Namen für die VMs zu erstellen. (Nicht vergessen: Auch der Server Pool benötigt eine eigene IP.) Dabei sollte man auch nochmal die tatsächlichen Netzwerke der zu verwendenden Virtualbox-Interfaces prüfen und notieren. Achtung: Es gibt im Rahmen der Installation einige Passworte, die vom Nutzer gesetzt werden können – und solche, die zunächst fest eingestellt sind. Zu letzterem gehört das Passwort für den ovs-agent sowie den root-User auf den OVM Servern, welche beide per Default „ovsroot“ lauten. (Alle weiteren Passwort-Informationen sind in dem „Read me first“ Dokument zu finden, welches auf dem Desktop der OVM Manager VM liegt.) Aufpassen muss man ggf. auch in der initialen „Interview-Phase“ welche die VirtualBox VMs durchlaufen, nachdem sie das erste mal gebootet werden. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt ist nämlich auf jeden Fall noch die amerikanische Tastaturbelegung aktiv, so dass man z.B. besser kein „y“ und „z“ in seinem selbst gewählten Passwort verwendet. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass wie oben erwähnt der OVM Manager auch gleichzeitig den Shared Storage bereitstellt, sollte darauf geachtet werden, dass dessen VM vor den OVM Server VMs gestartet wird. (Andernfalls „findet“ der dem OVM Server Pool zugrundeliegende Cluster sein sog. „Server Pool File System“ nicht.)

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LLBLGen Pro v3.1 released!

- by FransBouma

Yesterday we released LLBLGen Pro v3.1! Version 3.1 comes with new features and enhancements, which I'll describe briefly below. v3.1 is a free upgrade for v3.x licensees. What's new / changed? Designer Extensible Import system. An extensible import system has been added to the designer to import project data from external sources. Importers are plug-ins which import project meta-data (like entity definitions, mappings and relational model data) from an external source into the loaded project. In v3.1, an importer plug-in for importing project elements from existing LLBLGen Pro v3.x project files has been included. You can use this importer to create source projects from which you import parts of models to build your actual project with. Model-only relationships. In v3.1, relationships of the type 1:1, m:1 and 1:n can be marked as model-only. A model-only relationship isn't required to have a backing foreign key constraint in the relational model data. They're ideal for projects which have to work with relational databases where changes can't always be made or some relationships can't be added to (e.g. the ones which are important for the entity model, but are not allowed to be added to the relational model for some reason). Custom field ordering. Although fields in an entity definition don't really have an ordering, it can be important for some situations to have the entity fields in a given order, e.g. when you use compound primary keys. Field ordering can be defined using a pop-up dialog which can be opened through various ways, e.g. inside the project explorer, model view and entity editor. It can also be set automatically during refreshes based on new settings. Command line relational model data refresher tool, CliRefresher.exe. The command line refresh tool shipped with v2.6 is now available for v3.1 as well Navigation enhancements in various designer elements. It's now easier to find elements like entities, typed views etc. in the project explorer from editors, to navigate to related entities in the project explorer by right clicking a relationship, navigate to the super-type in the project explorer when right-clicking an entity and navigate to the sub-type in the project explorer when right-clicking a sub-type node in the project explorer. Minor visual enhancements / tweaks LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework Entity creation is now up to 30% faster and takes 5% less memory. Creating an entity object has been optimized further by tweaks inside the framework to make instantiating an entity object up to 30% faster. It now also takes up to 5% less memory than in v3.0 Prefetch Path node merging is now up to 20-25% faster. Setting entity references required the creation of a new relationship object. As this relationship object is always used internally it could be cached (as it's used for syncing only). This increases performance by 20-25% in the merging functionality. Entity fetches are now up to 20% faster. A large number of tweaks have been applied to make entity fetches up to 20% faster than in v3.0. Full WCF RIA support. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF RIA application using the VS.NET tools for WCF RIA services. WCF RIA services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 and typically used within silverlight applications. SQL Server DQE compatibility level is now per instance. (Usable in Adapter). It's now possible to set the compatibility level of the SQL Server Dynamic Query Engine (DQE) per instance of the DQE instead of the global setting it was before. The global setting is still available and is used as the default value for the compatibility level per-instance. You can use this to switch between CE Desktop and normal SQL Server compatibility per DataAccessAdapter instance. Support for COUNT_BIG aggregate function (SQL Server specific). The aggregate function COUNT_BIG has been added to the list of available aggregate functions to be used in the framework. Minor changes / tweaks I'm especially pleased with the import system, as that makes working with entity models a lot easier. The import system lets you import from another LLBLGen Pro v3 project any entity definition, mapping and / or meta-data like table definitions. This way you can build repository projects where you store model fragments, e.g. the building blocks for a customer-order system, a user credential model etc., any model you can think of. In most projects, you'll recognize that some parts of your new model look familiar. In these cases it would have been easier if you would have been able to import these parts from projects you had pre-created. With LLBLGen Pro v3.1 you can. For example, say you have an Oracle schema called CRM which contains the bread 'n' butter customer-order-product kind of model. You create an entity model from that schema and save it in a project file. Now you start working on another project for another customer and you have to use SQL Server. You also start using model-first development, so develop the entity model from scratch as there's no existing database. As this customer also requires some CRM like entity model, you import the entities from your saved Oracle project into this new SQL Server targeting project. Because you don't work with Oracle this time, you don't import the relational meta-data, just the entities, their relationships and possibly their inheritance hierarchies, if any. As they're now entities in your project you can change them a bit to match the new customer's requirements. This can save you a lot of time, because you can re-use pre-fab model fragments for new projects. In the example above there are no tables yet (as you work model first) so using the forward mapping capabilities of LLBLGen Pro v3 creates the tables, PK constraints, Unique Constraints and FK constraints for you. This way you can build a nice repository of model fragments which you can re-use in new projects.

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Is Berkeley DB a NoSQL solution?

- by Gregory Burd

Berkeley DB is a library. To use it to store data you must link the library into your application. You can use most programming languages to access the API, the calls across these APIs generally mimic the Berkeley DB C-API which makes perfect sense because Berkeley DB is written in C. The inspiration for Berkeley DB was the DBM library, a part of the earliest versions of UNIX written by AT&T's Ken Thompson in 1979. DBM was a simple key/value hashtable-based storage library. In the early 1990s as BSD UNIX was transitioning from version 4.3 to 4.4 and retrofitting commercial code owned by AT&T with unencumbered code, it was the future founders of Sleepycat Software who wrote libdb (aka Berkeley DB) as the replacement for DBM. The problem it addressed was fast, reliable local key/value storage. At that time databases almost always lived on a single node, even the most sophisticated databases only had simple fail-over two node solutions. If you had a lot of data to store you would choose between the few commercial RDBMS solutions or to write your own custom solution. Berkeley DB took the headache out of the custom approach. These basic market forces inspired other DBM implementations. There was the "New DBM" (ndbm) and the "GNU DBM" (GDBM) and a few others, but the theme was the same. Even today TokyoCabinet calls itself "a modern implementation of DBM" mimicking, and improving on, something first created over thirty years ago. In the mid-1990s, DBM was the name for what you needed if you were looking for fast, reliable local storage. Fast forward to today. What's changed? Systems are connected over fast, very reliable networks. Disks are cheep, fast, and capable of storing huge amounts of data. CPUs continued to follow Moore's Law, processing power that filled a room in 1990 now fits in your pocket. PCs, servers, and other computers proliferated both in business and the personal markets. In addition to the new hardware entire markets, social systems, and new modes of interpersonal communication moved onto the web and started evolving rapidly. These changes cause a massive explosion of data and a need to analyze and understand that data. Taken together this resulted in an entirely different landscape for database storage, new solutions were needed. A number of novel solutions stepped up and eventually a category called NoSQL emerged. The new market forces inspired the CAP theorem and the heated debate of BASE vs. ACID. But in essence this was simply the market looking at what to trade off to meet these new demands. These new database systems shared many qualities in common. There were designed to address massive amounts of data, millions of requests per second, and scale out across multiple systems. The first large-scale and successful solution was Dynamo, Amazon's distributed key/value database. Dynamo essentially took the next logical step and added a twist. Dynamo was to be the database of record, it would be distributed, data would be partitioned across many nodes, and it would tolerate failure by avoiding single points of failure. Amazon did this because they recognized that the majority of the dynamic content they provided to customers visiting their web store front didn't require the services of an RDBMS. The queries were simple, key/value look-ups or simple range queries with only a few queries that required more complex joins. They set about to use relational technology only in places where it was the best solution for the task, places like accounting and order fulfillment, but not in the myriad of other situations. The success of Dynamo, and it's design, inspired the next generation of Non-SQL, distributed database solutions including Cassandra, Riak and Voldemort. The problem their designers set out to solve was, "reliability at massive scale" so the first focal point was distributed database algorithms. Underneath Dynamo there is a local transactional database; either Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB Java Edition, MySQL or an in-memory key/value data structure. Dynamo was an evolution of local key/value storage onto networks. Cassandra, Riak, and Voldemort all faced similar design decisions and one, Voldemort, choose Berkeley DB Java Edition for it's node-local storage. Riak at first was entirely in-memory, but has recently added write-once, append-only log-based on-disk storage similar type of storage as Berkeley DB except that it is based on a hash table which must reside entirely in-memory rather than a btree which can live in-memory or on disk. Berkeley DB evolved too, we added high availability (HA) and a replication manager that makes it easy to setup replica groups. Berkeley DB's replication doesn't partitioned the data, every node keeps an entire copy of the database. For consistency, there is a single node where writes are committed first - a master - then those changes are delivered to the replica nodes as log records. Applications can choose to wait until all nodes are consistent, or fire and forget allowing Berkeley DB to eventually become consistent. Berkeley DB's HA scales-out quite well for read-intensive applications and also effectively eliminates the central point of failure by allowing replica nodes to be elected (using a PAXOS algorithm) to mastership if the master should fail. This implementation covers a wide variety of use cases. MemcacheDB is a server that implements the Memcache network protocol but uses Berkeley DB for storage and HA to replicate the cache state across all the nodes in the cache group. Google Accounts, the user authentication layer for all Google properties, was until recently running Berkeley DB HA. That scaled to a globally distributed system. That said, most NoSQL solutions try to partition (shard) data across nodes in the replication group and some allow writes as well as reads at any node, Berkeley DB HA does not. So, is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution? Not really, but it certainly is a component of many of the existing NoSQL solutions out there. Forgetting all the noise about how NoSQL solutions are complex distributed databases when you boil them down to a single node you still have to store the data to some form of stable local storage. DBMs solved that problem a long time ago. NoSQL has more to do with the layers on top of the DBM; the distributed, sometimes-consistent, partitioned, scale-out storage that manage key/value or document sets and generally have some form of simple HTTP/REST-style network API. Does Berkeley DB do that? Not really. Is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution today? Nope, but it's the most robust solution on which to build such a system. Re-inventing the node-local data storage isn't easy. A lot of people are starting to come to appreciate the sophisticated features found in Berkeley DB, even mimic them in some cases. Could Berkeley DB grow into a NoSQL solution? Absolutely. Our key/value API could be extended over the net using any of a number of existing network protocols such as memcache or HTTP/REST. We could adapt our node-local data partitioning out over replicated nodes. We even have a nice query language and cost-based query optimizer in our BDB XML product that we could reuse were we to build out a document-based NoSQL-style product. XML and JSON are not so different that we couldn't adapt one to work with the other interchangeably. Without too much effort we could add what's missing, we could jump into this No SQL market withing a single product development cycle. Why isn't Berkeley DB already a NoSQL solution? Why aren't we working on it? Why indeed...

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010New Projects.radiko: エアログラス採用のシンプルなradiko(http://radiko.jp/)クライアントです。タスクトレイのアイコンからラジオ局の切り替えができます。7Scale: EmptyB2C MVC Plattform: The B2C MVC Plattform aims to be pluggable site framework to help small busisness accomplish basic tasks between business and customers.ElValWeb: The goal of the project to create full featured implementation of ModelValidatorProvider for Enterprise Library Application Validation Block, wich ...esatis yazilimi: asp.net yazılımı ile satış magazasi websitesi kur.IEnumerable.It sample code: IEnumerable.It sample codejQuery MicroAjax for ASP.NET: MicroAjax is a set of jQuery plugins and .NET components designed to provide simple, powerful and efficient Ajax centric web application design pat...Karbon VOS: Karbon VOS is an advanced Virtual Operating System Template for Visual Basic Express. It's developed in Visual Basic. Karbon VOS hopes to one day b...LINQ Mapper: LINQ Mapper translates simple LINQ queries between different sources. It allows you to write queries against your domain model, but have them run ...Meccano Silverlight Framework: Meccano is a new generation of frameworks for creation of LOB Silverlight applications based on MEF, RX, WCF, ADO.NET Data Services etc. It is inte...Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: This project is an open source library for the Multiuse Model View (MMV) pattern for building robust WPF and ASP.Net applications. Visit my blog ht...Process Affinity Control: Process Affinity Control allows to set the affinity masks of processes based on rules.SilverSpatial: This project helps bridge the gap between Silverlight and Geo-Spatial data type (such as SQL Spatial). It implements the Well-Known-Binary (WKB) fo...StageAssets: Application for storing data about "things" and people in theatre. For example equipment, actors and so on.Stratosphere: Mono compatible library with set of primitives to work with scalable table, queue and block containers with corresponding implementations for Amazo...TRX Web-Viewer: A simple web-based application to upload and view VSTS 2008 and VSTS 2010 test result files with some basic lookup and feature-wise management of r...WDT2: WDT 2 is the school project to begin learning .NET enviroment, The main focus is on learning the use of almost all the componenets.WPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library is a set of additional actions for WPF that allow you to add extra behaviors to a control quickly and easily. Currently the on...YouTubeEmbeddedVideo WebControl for ASP.NET: A Control to embed YouTube videos in ASP.NET pages. Works in C# and VB.NETNew Releases.radiko: beta: 東京局のみ対応あとは手抜きActiveWorlds Managed .NET SDK: AwManaged Technology Preview - WIN32 (Alpha): This WIN32 release contains the Server Console Application. The Setup executable should be run as administrator on O.S. using UAC (Vista/Win7)AJAX Control Framework: v1.0.1.0: v1.0.1.0 - Contains a Bing Maps sample project, a number of bug fixes and a few performance improvements. - AJAX enable ANY custom control that der...App_Code (and Usercontrol) Editor (ACE): v1.0.0 alpha: The first alpha release of the AppCode Editor for Umbraco 4.0.3 is now available to download! Tested to work with usercontrols - pre-compilation wi...ElValWeb: ElValWeb 0.0.1.0: Version 0.0.1.0 contains client validation support forAndCompositeValidator ContainsCharactersValidator DomainValidator NotNullValidator Or...esatis yazilimi: magaza: magazanın yazılımları ve veri tabanının yazılımlarıGrunty OS: Grunty OS USB: Download Grunty OS for USBGrunty OS: Grunty OS.ISO: Grunty OS ISOKarbon VOS: Milestone 1 (Kaptua): Milestone 1...Live Meeting API Wrapper: LiveMeetingAPIWrapperV1.2: Added get meeting and update meeting.Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: v0.3: first alpha release. Medium amount of functionality and some use cases tested.MVC Foolproof Validation: Beta 0.9.3774: Adds resource provided error messages, regular expression operators and a new RegularExpressionIf attribute.Process Affinity Control: Version 1.0.0: This is the first release. Planned features for the next release: No administrative privileges needed to run the manager Select the active scena...SharePoint 2010 Service Manager: SharePoint 2010 Service Manager 1.1: Added support to run under UAC with automatic security elevationSharePoint Event Handler Manager: Event Handler Manager 2.0: Please download the application here: http://www.ackermantech.com/registerevents.aspxSkyDrive Synchronizer: SkyDrive Sync Beta 0.1: Beta release includes: Upload and download Synchronize updated files Delete files on web/locally if not in source Split larger files into sma...Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.0.0: Initial beta releaseSuggested Resources for .NET Developers: 0.8.0.0 VS2010 - focus on displaying content: This is the first release of Suggested Resources that can be downloaded from the internet. While there is still a lot of work to be done this rele...TRX Web-Viewer: TRX Web-Viewer V1.0: First working versionVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30502.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.04.00: !Whats New New Tag Mode: Search Referrers (Shows Search Tags From Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and the Dnn Site Search) Taxonomy Tags now contains L...Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 Beta 2e: Fully featured beta version of Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Applicaiton Development FrameworkWPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library 0.1 Release: First alpha release of the WPF Behavior Library. It should be stable but doesn't have all of the features it will have in the future and the API ma...xvanneste: Sharepoint Social Network Client: Client permettant d'avoir accés au social network de sharepoint a l'exterieur du navigateur.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerAJAX Control Frameworkpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceTinyProjectBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleDambach Linear Algebra Framework

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A quiz with results

- by Keon Davies

I'm currently working on programming a quiz withe results. I've tried this: <html> <body> <h1></h1> <form> <ol> <li> How much are you willing to spend on a phone per month?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_1"> £5-£10.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_2"> £10-£15.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_3"> £15-£20.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_4"> £20-£25.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_5"> £25-£30.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_6"> £30-£35.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q1" id="q1_7"> £35-£40.</input></li> </ul> <li> Are you good with technology</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q2" id="q2_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q2" id="q2_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> Are you looking for an easy to use phone</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q3" id="q3_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q3" id="q3_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> Are you looking for a modern type of phone?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q4" id="q4_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q4" id="q4_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> How big do you want the phone to be?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q5" id="q5_1"> Big.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q5" id="q5_2"> Medium.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q5" id="q5_3"> Small.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q5" id="q5_4"> I don't really mind.</input></li> </ul> <li> Do you care about the colour of the phone?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q6" id="q6_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q6" id="q6_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> Have you ever owned a phone before?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q7" id="q7_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q7" id="q7_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> Do you want to be able to use the phone to get out of awkward social situations?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q8" id="q8_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q8" id="q8_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> Do you want to be able to access the app store and download apps using your phone?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q9" id="q9_1"> Yes.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q9" id="q9_2"> No.</input></li> </ul> <li> What happened to the last phone you owned?</li> <ul> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q10" id="q10_1"> I got bored of it.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q10" id="q10_2"> It broke.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q10" id="q10_3"> The contract ran out.</input></li> <li><input type = "radio" name = "q10" id="q10_4"> Other.</input></li> </ul> </ol> <input type = "button" value = "Submit" onclick="getResults()"> <input type = "reset" value = "Clear"></input> <textarea id="result">The right phone for you will be displayed here.</textarea> </html> <script> function getResults() { if (document.getElementById('q1_1').checked && document.getElementById('q2_1').checked && document.getElementById('q3_1').checked && document.getElementById('q4_1').checked && document.getElementById('q5_1').checked && document.getElementById('q6_1').checked && document.getElementById('q7_1').checked && document.getElementById('q8_1').checked && document.getElementById('q9_1').checked && document.getElementById('q10_1').checked ) { document.getElementById('result').innerHTML = 'Unfortunately, the iPhone is the right phone for you.'; } } </script> </body> But it's just too long winded. Is there any other ways I can design a quiz like this but without having to write a block of code for each radio button?

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Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

- by sathya

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics : Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL) People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600 as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70 co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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Chock-full of Identity Customers at Oracle OpenWorld

- by Tanu Sood

Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2012 kicks off this coming Sunday. Oracle OpenWorld is known to bring in Oracle customers, organizations big and small, from all over the world. And, Identity Management is no exception. If you are looking to catch up with Oracle Identity Management customers, hear first-hand about their implementation experiences and discuss industry trends, business drivers, solutions and more at OOW, here are some sessions we recommend you attend: Monday, October 1, 2012 CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Snior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. Tuesday, October 2, 2012 CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 With more than 5 billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to encourage more and more user self service, business users are now primary end users for identity management installations. Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? How do you externalize such entitlements to allow dynamic changes without having to touch the application code? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption. Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience. This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. Thursday, October 4, 2012 CON9662: Securing Oracle Applications with the Oracle Enterprise Identity Management Platform 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Oracle Enterprise identity Management solutions are designed to secure access and simplify compliance to Oracle Applications. Whether you are an EBS customer looking to upgrade from Oracle Single Sign-on or a Fusion Application customer seeking to leverage the Identity instance as an enterprise security platform, this session with Qualcomm and Oracle will help you understand how to get the most out of your investment. And here’s the complete listing of all the Identity Management sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

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bluetooth not working on Ubuntu 13.10

- by iacopo

I upgrated ubuntu from 13.4 to 13.10 and my bluetooth stopped working. When I open bluetooth I'm able to put it ON but the visibility doesn't show anything and didn't detect any device. when I: dmesg | grep Blue [ 2.046249] usb 3-1: Product: Bluetooth V2.0 Dongle [ 2.046252] usb 3-1: Manufacturer: Bluetooth v2.0 [ 15.255710] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.16 [ 15.255748] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized [ 15.255759] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized [ 15.255765] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized [ 15.255776] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized [ 20.110379] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3 [ 20.110386] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast [ 20.110400] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized [ 20.120635] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized [ 20.120656] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized [ 20.120660] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11 when I digit: lsusb Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bc2:2300 Seagate RSS LLC Expansion Portable Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0e6a:6001 Megawin Technology Co., Ltd GEMBIRD Flexible keyboard KB-109F-B-DE Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 005 Device 002: ID 13ee:0001 MosArt Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode) Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub when I: hciconfig -a hci0: Type: BR/EDR Bus: USB BD Address: 00:1B:10:00:2A:EC ACL MTU: 1017:8 SCO MTU: 64:0 DOWN RX bytes:457 acl:0 sco:0 events:16 errors:0 TX bytes:68 acl:0 sco:0 commands:16 errors:0 Features: 0xff 0xff 0x8d 0xfe 0x9b 0xf9 0x00 0x80 Packet type: DM1 DM3 DM5 DH1 DH3 DH5 HV1 HV2 HV3 Link policy: Link mode: SLAVE ACCEPT when I digit: rfkill list 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 1: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no when I digit: sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf [General] # List of plugins that should not be loaded on bluetoothd startup #DisablePlugins = network,input # Default adaper name # %h - substituted for hostname # %d - substituted for adapter id Name = %h-%d # Default device class. Only the major and minor device class bits are # considered. Class = 0x000100 # How long to stay in discoverable mode before going back to non-discoverable # The value is in seconds. Default is 180, i.e. 3 minutes. # 0 = disable timer, i.e. stay discoverable forever DiscoverableTimeout = 0 # How long to stay in pairable mode before going back to non-discoverable # The value is in seconds. Default is 0. # 0 = disable timer, i.e. stay pairable forever PairableTimeout = 0 # Use some other page timeout than the controller default one # which is 16384 (10 seconds). PageTimeout = 8192 # Automatic connection for bonded devices driven by platform/user events. # If a platform plugin uses this mechanism, automatic connections will be # enabled during the interval defined below. Initially, this feature # intends to be used to establish connections to ATT channels. AutoConnectTimeout = 60 # What value should be assumed for the adapter Powered property when # SetProperty(Powered, ...) hasn't been called yet. Defaults to true InitiallyPowered = true # Remember the previously stored Powered state when initializing adapters RememberPowered = false # Use vendor id source (assigner), vendor, product and version information for # DID profile support. The values are separated by ":" and assigner, VID, PID # and version. # Possible vendor id source values: bluetooth, usb (defaults to usb) #DeviceID = bluetooth:1234:5678:abcd # Do reverse service discovery for previously unknown devices that connect to # us. This option is really only needed for qualification since the BITE tester # doesn't like us doing reverse SDP for some test cases (though there could in # theory be other useful purposes for this too). Defaults to true. ReverseServiceDiscovery = true # Enable name resolving after inquiry. Set it to 'false' if you don't need # remote devices name and want shorter discovery cycle. Defaults to 'true'. NameResolving = true # Enable runtime persistency of debug link keys. Default is false which # makes debug link keys valid only for the duration of the connection # that they were created for. DebugKeys = false # Enable the GATT functionality. Default is false EnableGatt = false when I digit: dmesg | grep Bluetooth [ 2.013041] usb 3-1: Product: Bluetooth V2.0 Dongle [ 2.013049] usb 3-1: Manufacturer: Bluetooth v2.0 [ 13.798293] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.16 [ 13.798338] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized [ 13.798352] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized [ 13.798357] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized [ 13.798368] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized [ 20.184162] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3 [ 20.184173] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast [ 20.184197] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized [ 20.238947] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized [ 20.238983] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized [ 20.239018] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11 When I digit: uname -a Linux casa-desktop 3.11.0-13-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 23 07:38:26 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux When I digit: lsmod Module Size Used by parport_pc 32701 0 rfcomm 69070 4 bnep 19564 2 ppdev 17671 0 ip6t_REJECT 12910 1 xt_hl 12521 6 ip6t_rt 13507 3 nf_conntrack_ipv6 18938 9 nf_defrag_ipv6 34616 1 nf_conntrack_ipv6 ipt_REJECT 12541 1 xt_LOG 17718 8 xt_limit 12711 11 xt_tcpudp 12884 32 xt_addrtype 12635 4 nf_conntrack_ipv4 15012 9 nf_defrag_ipv4 12729 1 nf_conntrack_ipv4 xt_conntrack 12760 18 ip6table_filter 12815 1 ip6_tables 27025 1 ip6table_filter nf_conntrack_netbios_ns 12665 0 nf_conntrack_broadcast 12589 1 nf_conntrack_netbios_ns nf_nat_ftp 12741 0 nf_nat 26653 1 nf_nat_ftp kvm_amd 59958 0 nf_conntrack_ftp 18608 1 nf_nat_ftp kvm 431315 1 kvm_amd nf_conntrack 91736 8 nf_nat_ftp,nf_conntrack_netbios_ns,nf_nat,xt_conntrack,nf_conntrack_broadcast,nf_conntrack_ftp,nf_conntrack_ipv4,nf_conntrack_ipv6 iptable_filter 12810 1 crct10dif_pclmul 14289 0 crc32_pclmul 13113 0 ip_tables 27239 1 iptable_filter snd_hda_codec_realtek 55704 1 ghash_clmulni_intel 13259 0 aesni_intel 55624 0 aes_x86_64 17131 1 aesni_intel snd_hda_codec_hdmi 41117 1 x_tables 34059 13 ip6table_filter,xt_hl,ip_tables,xt_tcpudp,xt_limit,xt_conntrack,xt_LOG,iptable_filter,ip6t_rt,ipt_REJECT,ip6_tables,xt_addrtype,ip6t_REJECT lrw 13257 1 aesni_intel snd_hda_intel 48171 5 gf128mul 14951 1 lrw glue_helper 13990 1 aesni_intel ablk_helper 13597 1 aesni_intel joydev 17377 0 cryptd 20329 3 ghash_clmulni_intel,aesni_intel,ablk_helper snd_hda_codec 188738 3 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel arc4 12608 2 snd_hwdep 13602 1 snd_hda_codec rt2800pci 18690 0 snd_pcm 102033 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel radeon 1402449 3 rt2800lib 79963 1 rt2800pci btusb 28267 0 rt2x00pci 13287 1 rt2800pci rt2x00mmio 13603 1 rt2800pci snd_page_alloc 18710 2 snd_pcm,snd_hda_intel rt2x00lib 55238 4 rt2x00pci,rt2800lib,rt2800pci,rt2x00mmio snd_seq_midi 13324 0 mac80211 596969 3 rt2x00lib,rt2x00pci,rt2800lib snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi ttm 83995 1 radeon snd_rawmidi 30095 1 snd_seq_midi cfg80211 479757 2 mac80211,rt2x00lib drm_kms_helper 52651 1 radeon snd_seq 61560 2 snd_seq_midi_event,snd_seq_midi bluetooth 371880 12 bnep,btusb,rfcomm microcode 23518 0 eeprom_93cx6 13344 1 rt2800pci snd_seq_device 14497 3 snd_seq,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_midi crc_ccitt 12707 1 rt2800lib snd_timer 29433 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd 69141 21 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_rawmidi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_device,snd_seq_midi psmouse 97626 0 drm 296739 5 ttm,drm_kms_helper,radeon k10temp 13126 0 soundcore 12680 1 snd serio_raw 13413 0 i2c_algo_bit 13413 1 radeon i2c_piix4 22106 0 video 19318 0 mac_hid 13205 0 lp 17759 0 parport 42299 3 lp,ppdev,parport_pc hid_generic 12548 0 usbhid 53014 0 hid 105818 2 hid_generic,usbhid pata_acpi 13038 0 usb_storage 62062 1 r8169 67341 0 sdhci_pci 18985 0 sdhci 42630 1 sdhci_pci mii 13934 1 r8169 pata_atiixp 13242 0 ohci_pci 13561 0 ahci 25819 2 libahci 31898 1 ahci Someone can help me?

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Code Camp 2011 – Summary

- by hajan

Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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User Experience Highlights in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools: Direct from Jeff Robbins

- by mvaughan

By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on the user experience (UX) highlights in various Oracle product families. The last posted interview was with Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy on upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite user experience highlights. You’ll see themes around productivity and efficiency, and get an early look at the latest mobile offerings coming through these product lines. Today’s post is on the user experience in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools. To learn more about what’s ahead, attend PeopleSoft or PeopleTools OpenWorld presentations.This interview is with Jeff Robbins, Senior Director, PeopleSoft Development. Jeff Robbins Q: How would you describe the vision you have for the user experience of PeopleSoft?A: Intuitive – Specifically, customers use PeopleSoft to help their employees do their day-to-day work, and the UI (user interface) has been helpful and assistive in that effort. If it’s not obvious what they need to do a task, then the UI isn’t working. So the application needs to make it simple for users to find information they need, complete a task, do all the things they are responsible for, and it really helps when the UI just makes sense. Productive – PeopleSoft is a tool used to support people to do their work, and a lot of users are measured by how much work they’re able to get done per hour, per day, etc. The UI needs to help them be as productive as possible, and can’t make them waste time or energy. The UI needs to reflect the type of work necessary for a task -- if it's data entry, the UI needs to assist the user to get information into the system. For analysts, the UI needs help users assess or analyze information in a particular way. Innovative – The concept of the UI being innovative is something we’ve been working on for years. It’s not just that we want to be seen as innovative, the fact is that companies are asking their employees to do more than they’ve ever asked before. More often companies want to roll out processes as employee or manager self-service, where an employee is responsible to review and maintain their own data. So we’ve had to reinvent, and ask, “How can we modify the ways an employee interacts with our applications so that they can be more productive and efficient – even with tasks that are entirely unfamiliar?” Our focus on innovation has forced us to design new ways for users to interact with the entire application.Q: How are the UX features you have delivered so far resonating with customers? A: Resonating very well. We’re hearing tremendous responses from users, managers, decision-makers -- who are very happy with the improved user experience. Many of the individual features resonate well. Some have really hit home, others are better than they used to be but show us that there’s still room for improvement.A couple innovations really stand out; features that have a significant effect on how users interact with PeopleSoft.First, the deployment of PeopleSoft in a way that’s more like a consumer website with the PeopleSoft Home page and Dashboards. This new approach is very web-centric, where users feel they’re coming to a website rather than logging into an enterprise application. There’s lots of information from all around the organization collected in a way that feels very familiar to users. In order to do your job, you can come to this web site rather than having to learn how to log into an application and figure out a complicated menu. Companies can host these really rich web sites for employees that are home pages for accessing critical tasks and information. The UI elements of incorporating search into the whole navigation process is another hit. Rather than having to log in and choose a task from a menu, users come to the web site and begin a task by simply searching for data: themselves, another employee, a customer record, whatever. The search results include the data along with a set of actions the user might take, completely eliminating the need to hunt through a complicated system menu. Search-centric navigation is really sitting well with customers who are trying to deploy an intuitive set of systems. Q: Are any UX highlights more popular than you expected them to be? A: We introduced a feature called Pivot Grid in the last release, which is a combination of an interactive grid, like an Excel Pivot Table, along with a dynamic visual chart that automatically graphs the data. I wasn’t certain at first how extensively this would be used. It looked like an innovative tool, but it wasn’t clear how it would be incorporated in business process applications. The fact is that everyone who sees Pivot Grids is thrilled with that kind of interactivity. It reflects the amount of analytical thinking customers are asking employees to do. Employees can’t just enter data any more. They must interact with it, analyze it, and make decisions. Pivot Grids fit into this way of working. Q: What can you tell us about PeopleSoft’s mobile offerings?A: A lot of customers are finding that mobile is the chief priority in their organization. They tell us they want their employees to be able to access company information from their mobile devices. Of course, not everyone has the same requirements, so we’re working to make sure we can help our customers accomplish what they’re trying to do. We’ve already delivered a number of mobile features. For instance, PeopleSoft home pages, dashboards and workcenters all work well on an iPad, straight out of the box. We’ve delivered a number of key functions and tasks for mobile workers – those who are responsible for using a mobile device to manage inventory, for example. Customers tell us they also need a holistic strategy, one that allows their employees to access nearly every task from a mobile device. While we don’t expect users to do extensive data entry from their smartphone, it makes sense that they have access to company information and systems while away from their desk. That’s where our strategy is going now. We plan to unveil a number of new mobile offerings at OpenWorld. Some will be available then, some shortly after. Q: What else are you working on now that you think is going to be exciting to customers at Oracle OpenWorld?A: Our next release -- the big thing is PeopleSoft 9.2, and we’ll be talking about the huge amount of work that’s gone into the next versions. A new toolset, 8.53, will be coming, and there’s a lot to talk about there, and the next generation of PeopleSoft 9.2. We have a ton of new stuff coming.Q: What do you want PeopleSoft customers to know? A: We have been focusing on the user experience in PeopleSoft as a very high priority for the last 4 years, and it’s had interesting effects. One thing is that the application is better, more usable. We’ve made visible improvements. Another aspect is that in customers’ minds, the PeopleSoft brand is being reinvigorated. Customers invested in PeopleSoft years ago, and then they weren’t sure where PeopleSoft was going. This investment in the UI and overall user experience keeps PeopleSoft current, innovative and fresh. Customers are able to take advantage of a lot of new features, even on the older applications, simply by upgrading their PeopleTools. The interest in that ability has been tremendous. Knowing they have a lot of these features available -- right now, that’s pretty huge. There’s been a tremendous amount of positive response, just on the fact that we’re focusing on the user experience. Editor’s note: For more on PeopleSoft and PeopleTools user experience highlights, visit the Usable Apps web site.To find out more about these enhancements at Openworld, be sure to check out these sessions: GEN8928 General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product RoadmapCON9183 PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap CON8932 New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business UserCON9196 PeopleSoft PeopleTools Roadmap: Mobile ApplicationsCON9186 Case Study: Delivering a Groundbreaking User Interface with PeopleSoft PeopleTools

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